We have had light frosts, but by the end of the month no consistent, freezing weather has been reached. Then on the thirtieth the temperature drops to 20 degrees. I notice a flower, Queen Anne’s lace, still blooming, all by itself in a field of matted grass. During the night the surface of the ground is frozen hard ... a cap of reality at last, with no more lingering. There is a genuine glittering clarity of cold, in cloud, and branch and stone. Out on the bay the low waves look as if they had a harder push and pull to make, imbued with new heaviness. A boy shows me the frozen body of a red-legged grasshopper, perfectly preserved for a little while by a power to which its only adaptation is death. What still stands above ground now faces poverty, and primitive recalcitrance. There is a kind of ice sludge being nudged in by the tides along the shore and through rippling purple waters of tidal inlets. There are ice circlets around the marsh grass. Thin ice sheets form at the rim of fresh-water ponds. The inland world seems either subdued or facing survival’s icy stare, and even self-sufficient human society looks ready to draw in and hole up for the winter. But since Cape Cod is surrounded by the sea, it has another depth, another range, where other populations roam while the rest of us wait and shiver. Above water, the more visible migrants are those wintering sea birds--auks, scoters, black ducks, eiders, old squaws, brant and Canada geese--that feed along the shore, in sheltered inlets, or in waters farther out, depending on their habit. In my locality Canada geese and black ducks are swimming through peat-rooted grasses off Paine’s Creek where the terns were fishing two months ago. A line of white-winged scoters flies low over the heaving waters of the bay. I watch two black ducks in the sky, approaching from the north. They are coming over at high speed downwind with wings beating hard. Then more ducks fly up across inlet and marsh, taking off to windward. They swing back for a short stretch, then up again, as if to hold position, like travelers reconnoitering, then fly on and out of sight. Two miles or more from shore I see points of spray going up from the surface of the water, and above them many large white birds continually turning and diving, from a considerable height. These are the gannets, that appear off Cape waters in the autumn after they have nested on their island territories in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The immature, first-year birds, which can also be seen diving for fish, are almost totally black. They are usually not with us for long, since they pass to winter feeding grounds, which may be as far south as the Caribbean.