So I did; it’s now ranked about seven feet high, eight feet long, and four feet deep in the alcove next to the furnace. This place is pretty easy to heat, so it’ll last the winter and then some, most likely. The cellar is fragrant with the sweet smell of freshly split popple – not my favorite aroma – and there’s still about a third of a cord to come in, once I figure out where to put it.

But I’m somewhat loath to bring in that last bit from the yard, because I discovered as I split my way through the original pile and tossed the pieces into a second, that I was destroying important habitat for a whole bunch of critters that we don’t see much, down near the other end of the food chain. I call them cryptobytes, for their apparent desire to live hidden lives. They migrated with the pile when it moved; and if I bring in the rest of it, I don’t know what they’re going to do, with the cold weather coming on.

The first to appear as the original pile shrank were the snakes who’d been living in there. Actually, it was their skins I first spotted – long, gray, translucent, articulated sleeves lying quietly among the unsplit bolts. Emily Dickinson is right: You can’t spot one without coming to attention for a few moments, anyway. Shortly afterward, the snakes themselves began deserting the shelter as they felt it shifting around them. I wished them well, but I had to do this.

I’m often amused by the revulsion and fear that harmless snakes inspire in perfectly healthy and strong men who think nothing of, for example, running around on construction staging several stories in the air. Two husky characters who worked on my garage roof recently were almost panicked by the thought of picking up bundles of shingles that had lain covered for a couple of years and were laced with dried snake skins. Makes me wonder how well the fabled 2nd Vermont Brigade would have done at Gettysburg if the Rebs had come running at them waving snakes.

When I worked in the Texas hills many years ago, there were snakes everywhere, and every living thing seemed to have a bite, sting, or thorn. The snakes, until proven innocent, were assumed to be rattlers. As a result, many harmless ones died. I still have at least one set of rattles in the miscellaneous treasures box in my dresser. We had a resident snake named Oscar. I can’t find him in any books, but my boss called him a chicken snake. He lived in the barn and kept returning every time we caught him and took him several miles away in a burlap sack. Over six feet long and originally beneficial because of his diet of mice and rats in the grain room, he moved on to eating eggs and, finally, chickens. If I spotted him in forbidden territory, I was careful not to grab him without backup. He was a constrictor, he had a very large mouth, and he absolutely hated to be picked up. So garter snakes don’t bother me much. I like having them around.

I also have a soft spot in my heart for daddy longlegs, who fled the woodpile by the dozen. Like snakes, they get a bad rap because people think they’re spiders. But they’re not; they have eight legs like spiders, but belong to a different order. I always help them to safety because I owe them a debt: As a kid, I used to pull off a leg or two just to watch them keep twitching.

Spiders kept leaving the pile, as well. Garfield and his admirers may find it funny to squash them whenever they appear, but ever since reading Charlotte’s Web many years ago, I’ve seen them as mother figures. If I’d read the story before living in Texas, I’d have been deeply conflicted. Like everything else there, the spiders stung. Black, shiny ones as large in diameter as a softball – the Mexicans called them tarantulas – occasionally walked slowly across the dirt yard. The dog circled them, barking furiously, but never got closer than eight feet. They could really jump! Other times, if I carelessly opened a barn or shed door that hadn’t been opened for a while, I ran into a web spun across the crack, with a big, fat black widow sagging downward and looking for the creature that had disturbed her. Nothing like that around here yet. If I spot an active web here, I sometimes flick a recently deceased fly into it just to watch what happens next.

There were glistening night crawlers under most of the firewood that had lain long on the ground. They left and disappeared amazingly fast. A tiny red eft, suddenly exposed, froze in place as if he sported camouflage. Black crickets hopped toward the nearby grass. I resolved to sneak out onto the porch some night this week and check to see how accurate they were in broadcasting the temperature: number of chirps in 15 seconds plus 37 is supposed to be the temperature. Trouble is, if you switch on your flashlight to see your watch, they spot it and stop chirping.

The climax of the exodus of the cryptobytes came as I picked up an especially heavy chunk of ash. A tiny gray body scuttled out between my feet. I set the wood down on the chopping block and followed the little guy across the yard. Should I pick him up for a look? Was it a mole? No, wrong nose. Vole? Mmm, maybe. Very short tail and pointed nose. I bet it’s a short-tailed shrew! One of the very few poisonous mammals. Can’t kill people, but they say it really smarts. Should I give it a try? I reached down for it, but just in time my sense of duty (the wood pile) overcame my thirst for empirical knowledge. I bade him godspeed and instead picked up my maul.