While leafing through the Fish and Game Department’s current issue of Wildlife Journal, I came upon a full-page art layout that somehow looked familiar. The theme was “They go below the snow,” and it highlighted some of the creatures that live under the snowpack.

Sure enough, there was artist Marc Sutherland’s name atop the layout.

Long ago Marc, a Lancaster kid and a student at White Mountains Regional High School, exhibited a talent for drawing and a sense of humor to go with it, and thus could draw and write well too, a rare combination. The son of Colin and Lisette Sutherland, he did drawings for various advertisers when I owned the Coos County Democrat, and went on to publish a book or two. He now lives in Dover, where he works for FedEx, does landscaping and pursues his art work for magazines and the like while working on another book.

Marc’s below-snow scenario included meadow voles, which eat insects, worms and occasionally the bark of trees; short-tailed shrews, which can consume twice their weight in worms and insects each day; and white-footed mice, whose little bubble is saying “There are lots of us. Moms produce up to 11 pups nearly every 4 weeks.” Tucked down in a corner is a star-nosed mole, which I often dig up in my flower beds, and Marc even managed to include a snow flea, millions of which migrate from the forest floor in the spring sunshine (or even a sunny day in winter) and appear atop the snow like so many billions of pepper dumped by a passing plane.

I still get sly looks, by the way, from ill-informed people who think I’m trying to pull a fast one and make them look foolish and gullible when I mention snow fleas. Poor unfortunates, I invariably think to myself, they’ve never been out in the woods on snowshoes or skis on a bright day and noticed the snow fleas. Some people, I guess, never look down, or left or right, always just straight ahead, thus missing more than words could ever tell.

More than once, because I’m always glancing down, I’ve spotted snow spiders moving very slowly and stiffly, and got down on hands and knees to observe them. They are transparent and you have to look sharp to spot them. Upon close observation you can see fluid pulsing through their bodies, so in there somewhere is a tiny little heart, pumping away.

Now and then I see where a partridge, during a winter storm, rocketed into a snowbank to wait things out sub-surface until things calmed down, and then rocketed out.

John Lanier and I were rabbit hunting one day when one of these gone-into-hiding grouse burst up through the surface of the snow, like a missile, at the tip of Lanier’s snowshoes.

“Oh my claws and paws!” Lanier exclaimed, feigning a heart attack and falling over backwards into the snow.

John Harrigan’s column appears weekly. His address is Box 39, Colebrook 03576. Email him at hooligan@ncia.net.