Even in the depths of winter, unique signs of life abound. From the corner of the concrete bridge that spans my home water of Lake Ashtabula north of Valley City, I watched amazed through the lens of my brother’s camera phone in my text feed as a river otter tended to its coat in the chill of last week on the shoreline ice. Unphased by the temperatures hovering around zero, the unusual critter glanced nonchalantly back at him for a brief moment and returned to its personal care routine before the video cut off. I watched the file again and again, excited at the confirmation of the expansion of aquatic fauna in the Sheyenne River system that I swore we had seen together a few months prior.

My brother and I were certain that last spring, on a chilly early April day as we plied the same eastern North Dakota river for prespawn walleyes, that we had also seen an otter, but as we had never observed one before in our more than two decades of fishing on the flow, we could hardly believe our eyes. With my chilly hands too slow to open the camera on my phone in the moment, we watched the animal’s head slip from just being just a few inches above water down into the depths below, its slight vee-shaped wake disappearing with it, like when Jaws first appears in the shark’s eponymous movie, leaving only a trail of mystery — and our Occam’s razor session about what it could have been — behind it.

Those unique sightings have now become a major facet of what keeps me coming back into the outdoors, having caught my share of fish and harvested more than my share of game over the last 25 years. Unless the angling is red hot, it’s the world around us and the things which live there — beyond the walleyes we seek or the deer we wait hours for – that occupy the mind in the slower times and provide those rushes of excitement and amazing moments that happen nowhere else but outside. That feeling of being part of something special and bigger than us comes in those one-of-a-kind things we observe in the early morning hours when we’re the first visitors to a summer fishing spot like an eagle leaving its roost in a shoreline tree to skim the surface and snatch a bluegill for breakfast. They happen too at dusk during a mid-winter walk on a trail near the outskirts of town where strained eyes catch the silvery gray flutter of an owl’s wings against the white glow of last streetlight on the edge of civilization. Sometimes it’s something as simple as a brilliant orange sunrise flanked by the radiant towers of sundogs coming up with it in the morning cold, or one as relaxing as a sultry August evening as that big red ball sinks into the black treeline on the western shore of a lake. All of them, from the regular to the rare, are the moments which frame those perfect casts, heavy-ended hooksets, animals responding to our manufactured calls, and the main events of excitement we pursue when we hunt or fish.

They are what fill the man-made memories at the ends of our hunting and angling efforts with the ones that only nature can provide and certainly, beyond the roll of a video or the snap of a camera lens, cannot be contained, grasped or held onto with much more than the mind’s eye. They are the awe and beauty of the times in between that nonetheless celebrate the life and the world around us, and are as worthy of remembrance, celebration and protection as any fish or bird raised high to the camera lens would be … in our outdoors.