During winter days when the northwest wind blows with fury along the exposed shores of the Cape, it may be too uncomfortable to stay in the dunes for any length of time. You gasp in the polar air and hide your face from the stinging sand. Each sand grain is lifted and sent with the speed of a projectile along the surface of the dunes. Given a little shelter from which to watch you could see the dunes change shape in an afternoon, or an hour. It is on days like this that they migrate like waves, with long slopes on their upwind sides, steep ones on their lee. On their bright and stable days, the long dune shoulders at the top of each rise tilt you up, body and vision, into the dizzy heights of a sky graded from cobalt to indigo, the way the scale of things in the landscape goes from sand grains to rocking seas without distraction. The dunes almost seem to ask for a long-distance running from both men and clouds. They are a place of flying, falling, and tumbling, shaping the motion of what comes to them, asking for an approach that soars. Also, they have their secrets, their ground-level associations. In October the beach-grass heads are loaded with yellow seeds. Where the plants are clumped together, providing protection from the wind, nests of seed gather on the leeward side, visited by birds that leave many little tracks and sometimes a feather or two. Mice also leave their dimpled trails, circling around the beach grass, traveling across bare sand for short distances before they disappear. There is a special delicacy in the visits of birds and mice. I had the fancy, following these small trails, of watching mice under the moon, with all their scuttling, nibbling, and investigating, so that some of their excitement, their fidgety life dance might be translated for me. I even thought it might help bring me down from a world too heavy with size to a neater reality. Startled by a little crash of twigs and leaves, I saw a rabbit darting up a dune slope. It bobbed to the top and stayed motionless for a few seconds in a bayberry thicket until I followed it to find what might be the meeting place of a whole tribe of rabbits, if I could judge by the amount of tracks and pellets of dung there were, all on the rim of a small bowl held together by the bayberries with a small scrub oak coming up from its base. These semiprotected hollows are quite typical of the dunes. There are also small woods of pitch pines, thickly carpeted with needles, where the tree roots can get some moisture at the bottom of a valley between the dunes. Scrub-sized oak, pine, sometimes bayberry, beach plum, or wild cherry, hold down many hollows, with the help of beach grass on the shoulders around them.