A green frog leaps into the water with a squeak. I notice a box turtle on the bank, with its head determinedly locked in this time. Its markings, on an almost black shell, are dashes of yellow, and a rich reddish orange that reminds me of a Blackburnian warbler. Response to color is response to energy, the radiance and the reflection of light. I close my eyes after looking across the sun and see red, the color of warmth and desire. Around the eye of Berry’s Hole is the red of blood and the yellow of the sun. _The Last Day in October_ The night, after a deceptively bright and soothing day, seems suddenly withdrawn. The wind has a hard feel to it, as if a northern authority had come to stay. Heavy rolls of cumulus clouds hang in the sky when morning breaks, and the Cape begins to look like my winter image of it, dank and cold, with inert, slate-colored seas investing its shores. The oak leaves have turned a darker, more lifeless red, or they are light brown. I notice that the leaves of the white oaks are among the first to die, beginning to curl up like stiff, ancient hands, with an ashy pallor on them. The scarlet oaks are the last to lose their color. As a result of their definite adjustment, insisting on certain rules of change before many of the rest of us are quite ready, the oak woods seem to have a dark, plenipotentiary look. The trees stand in self-saved, stiff company, although the animals that visit them are lively enough. I watch a gray squirrel burying acorns in loose dirt at the edge of the road. He has that continually twitching, starting and stopping, restless being of his rodent relatives the red squirrels and the chipmunks. He runs back and forth over the sandy earth burying the acorns, and then, as if unsatisfied with the places he put them, bringing them out again. The squirrel’s gray, fur-clad body flows with suppleness. The big gray tail is sudden too in its motion, stretching out behind, or up, with curled tip when the animal stops to sit. He quits his activity, and with a long bound and dive he is up a tree. Along with its slapdash motion, but provident method, the gray squirrel may also have a touch of foolhardiness in its nature, though even the most practiced make their slips. I have never seen it happen myself, but a friend tells me that he has seen gray squirrels miss their leap occasionally in high trees near his house and fall to their death. The leaf litter still fairly jumps with mice and shrews. A little blind shrew with dark gray pelt and pink nose slips out of a bank of leaves where I walk. It swerves with astonishing speed and squeaks angrily at me before it dives out of sight into the leaves. This, in contrast to other members of the mouse family, is a fighter.