So it is an enduring kind of fertility that shines here, as the gray sea waters rock in the distance. And when I turn over a log, or take up a handful of spongy oak leaf humus, half thawed in the sunlight, there is visible evidence of the life now arrested in the frozen soil. I find a millipede, curled up like the shell of a chambered nautilus. I hold it in my hand and keep breathing on it, until it comes to life and starts moving around, stretching out, its myriad legs moving with fantastic synchronization, ready to be busy again, traveling seriously with the given purpose of eating bits of leaves, breaking down organic matter in the earth. It is suggested that the millipede may have been one of the earliest animals to leave the ocean, where all life presumably began, and take to the land--one of those statements, of course, that leaves millions of years in the balance of human guesses, but gives me another approach to ageless tenacity in this ocean-bordered wood. There is another ancient animal, the pill bug, damp bug, or armadillo, which I find in semihibernation in the middle of a rotten log. Pill bug because it can roll up into a perfect little ball; damp bug for its choice of environment; wood louse for its habitat and general appearance, although it is no louse but a crustacean, not an insect but related to brine shrimp, water fleas, lobsters and crabs. It is one of the few members of this family that have become adapted to life on land, but it retains a set of gills, or at least respiratory tubes with some functional equivalence to gills. It also retains an organic affinity for wetness, needing constant moisture in order to breathe, and will invariably direct itself to the dampest environment it can find. One dry summer day I uncovered a bunch of wood lice way out in the middle of a dusty patch of ground that looked like a miniature desert. They had taken advantage of the only shelter available, an old fragment of a board that held some shade and moisture under it. In terms of millions of years the development of millipede, or pill bug, becomes extremely complex and partly unknown. When did the pill bug leave the sea? How did its special breathing apparatus evolve? How, in other words, did it gradually adapt itself to life as a land animal? The problems of science are manifold. For an observer the very sense of a link between primal sea and primal earth embodied in this half-bug, half-marine crustacean, gives it great stature. There is thunder and depth in the pill bug. I suddenly feel lost in a wood which does not speak of calendar days or the month of February, but endless projection and development. Not lost too long--because the cold deepens and bites in the late afternoon and gray clouds begin to spread and darken, as a raw wind rises and shoves at the trees. I am caught again in the immediate. It feels like snow. _Need_