After their green summer and early golden fall, the marsh plants and grasses darken. In November the marshes are still russet, umber, and yellow green, but by January they are dark brown with reddish tawny tones in matted grasses having the coarse texture of a deer’s coat. The saltwort plants, so fresh and green and full of salt juices in the summer, have turned dry and white, curled over at their tips so that they have the look of singed wool. When you walk behind the sandspit the marsh flats seem to stretch far off toward the shore and the channels between them are partly hidden. Nauset from the landward side, on the other hand, looks as if it were mostly composed of water, especially at high tide. It is both a good country for low-grass lovers like sparrows and those that ride its watery lanes and lakes like ducks and geese. Low-flying, drab little seaside sparrows fly up off the grass for short distances and then disappear again. Occasionally I have flushed a meadowlark that planed up over the marsh. Horned larks peck in the dunes, tripping forward with a stamping motion of their legs, and then stop, to stand with a backward slant to their bodies. They fly up suddenly with shrill lisping cries; and all the while the deep quacking of black ducks sounds from far out in the middle of the marsh. There are always gulls, far or near, with their slow gliders’ fall and rise on the wind. The great blackbacks fly heavily overhead, sometimes wheeling in circles over the inlet with a muted baying, or hoarse, guttural calls; and with their necks and heads stretched way out and their wide-spread wings they might be mistaken for gannets. Red-breasted mergansers come in from the sea with their thin heads and bills straight forward so that in flight they become throbbing arrows sent from a bow. One evening I stood in the hummocks of the spit facing the marsh while flock after flock of Canada geese flew in overhead, bugling as they came, close enough so that I could hear the fine high whistling of their wings, and even a rattle and rasp of air through their feathers. Low-flying planes often start them up as they feed in the marsh, along with the wary black ducks, whose cloudlike flocks stray back and forth for a while before they settle down again. A black duck’s wings show white underneath and they seem to spin as it flies up high and fast and changes direction, like a weathervane.