The magic of eagles in the fog

It is a wonderfully strange, foggy day. After midweek temperatures edging down near to minus 30, we are almost 70 degrees warmer. Ice and slush and ice covered puddles are everywhere, and the world is positively steaming. We look out our high in the sky apartment windows and before us the world disappears into the distance; moody street scenes, then vague shapes, then nothingness. Let's go into nothingness. It awaits us.

My wife and I go sliding dangerously along the city sidewalks and venture out over a bridge on the Mississippi River. It looks wild below us, the ice is cracked, translucent, and full of inscrutable designs. An eagle appears suddenly from out of the fog like a magic trick. Maybe we were the magic trick to him. He rears up in the air. He wheels around, gathering the mist about his shoulders, and he circles off to the riverbank to take a roost in a tree. If I hadn't been watching him land I'd never spot him. The riverbank is mottled gray-black and white in the broken snow, and so, in the end, with his charcoal body and white head and tail, is he.

Then, as I gazed upon him, marveling over a camouflage I'd never known about, he, without warning, took an enormous, squirting shit, a gout of globby, viscous white bursting unmistakably out of him. 

But I won't tell you about that. I don't want to ruin the magic.