Another Sunday Morning

What I walked down to the highway for, through the summer dawn, was the Sunday funnies, or so I thought— but what I remember reading there in the shadowless light among meadowlarks singing was tracks in the deep warm dust of the lane, where it parted with its beige dryness the meadow’s dew— the sleek trail where a snake had crossed and slid into tall grass; the stippled parallels with marks between them where a black blister-beetle had dragged its bulbous belly across in search of weeds more green; the labyrinth of lacelike dimples left by a speed-freak tiger-beetles’s sprints that ended where it took wing with a little blur of dust-grains; and stepping through the beetle-trails, the wedge-heels and sharp-clawed hands of skunk-track crossing unhurried and walking along the ditch to find an easy place for climbing; not far past that, a line of cat-prints running straight down the lane and ending with deep marks where it leaped across the ditch to the meadow for birds asleep or wandering baby rabbits: and freshly placed this morning, the slender runes of bob-whites running, scuffles of dustbaths taken— and there ahead crouched low at the lane-edge under purple pokeweed-berries four quail had seen me, and when I walked slowly on toward them, instead of flying they ran with a fluid scuttling on down the lane and stopped frozen till I came too close —then quietly when I expected an explosion of wings they took off low and whispering and sailed, rocking and tilting out over the meadow’s tall bluestem, dropped down and were gone until I heard them whistling, down by the little pond, and whistled back so sharply that when I got back to the  house they still were answering and one flew into the elm and whistled from its shadows up over the porch where I sat reading the funnies while the kittens played with the headlines till when the first gold sunlight tipped the elm’s leaves he flew back out to the meadow and sank down into the sun-brilliant dew on curving wings, and my brothers and sisters waked by the whistling came pouring out onto the porch and claimed their share of the Sunday funnies— and I went on to read the headlines of World War Two, with maps of the struggling armies leaving tank-tracks over the dunes of Libya and the navies churning their wakes of phosphorescence in the Coral Sea where the ships went down on fire and the waves bobbed and flamed with the maimed survivors , screaming in Japanese or English until their gasoline-blistered heads sank down to the tiger sharks and the war was lost or won for children sitting in sunlight, believing their cause was just and knowing it would prevail, as the dew vanished away.