The night was strange with wild winds swirling and twirling.

I stood out there with rain falling on me.

There was still more than three feet of snow on the ground.

From behind the ghost-like clouds that were gliding around the heavens, I could see the shine of the moon trying to break through, to shimmer, to be seen.

Seemingly, if the moon could only show its pock-marked face, the falling and wind-swept rain — the obvious unseasonable interloper here — would stop.

If only.

The paper birch trees seemed like they were melting, retracting with the cold rain spattering down on their bare branches and ivory trunks.

The wind moaned as it rushed through the trees, creaking trees, spreading the descending chill throughout the forest.

There was something out there that didn’t feel right to me.

I couldn’t figure out what it was.

Nature seemed to be unhappy, signaling that there was something amiss, like existence itself had an upset stomach or a bad headache.

Perhaps it was a petulant reaction from that old, green-cheese man in the moon.

He might have been frustrated, like the rest of us, discovering that he once again could not stop the rain.

However, if his gravitational pull could affect the ocean tides on Earth, perhaps his moods were strong enough to be sensed by the likes of a shaggy door mouse like me, standing with my collar up against the sky.

Throughout history, there’s been no shortage of things people think, or have thought, about the moon’s influence on humans and animals.

From barking at the moon, insanity and sleepwalking to suicide, the commission of violent acts and turning into a werewolf, these things humans have associated with the moon belie its more romanticized reputation as a “lover’s lantern,” “silver muse” or “night’s whisper.”

In fantasy, myths and folklore, the moon is often cast as a protagonist in stories recalled from ancient times.

In this fashion, the moon has been referred to as a “sorcerer’s disc,” “witch’s mirror” or “Komorkis,” an Athabaskan name referring to the wife of the sun god and mother of the stars.

Past peoples with an eye on the sky believed that the moon could control fertility.

There have also been plenty of rumors, including that the Nazi’s had a top-secret base on the moon where Hitler lived out his final days, that alien “lunarians” had built buildings and roads there visible from Earth or that the moon’s reflection on water was mistaken by a dullard for a round block of cheese.

In the Cree tradition, there was at first only the sun, which was fired by a caretaker helper of the creator. This caretaker, who was very old, had a son and a daughter. They were to keep the fire of the sun burning after the caretaker died.

If they failed to do this, the people and the animals of the earth would die.

When the time came, instead of tending the fire, the children argued about who would get to do the work. The son asserted that he should be given the privilege because he was the man, and the daughter argued that she was older.

The people on earth worried and wondered why the sun was so late in rising.

Wesakechak, a culture hero in the tribe’s legends, went to see what was wrong and found the two children arguing. Angry, he ordered the boy to tend to the sun and the girl to maintain a separate fire in another place at night.

He named her Tipiskawpisim, the moon.

Because they argued, Wesakechak set their punishment at seeing each other from across the sky for all time.

I don’t mind the rain. I love the rain, but in winter it does seem strange – strange enough to make a person wonder what is going on.

Maybe the moon was crying.

Perhaps he knew that over the course of a handful of nights, he would first move across the night sky through a chilly and unnerving fog, then shudder with an icy ring around his face, next, appear aloof and mysteriously cloudy, and finally, his countenance would turn blood red for people on the earth to gawk at.

With celestial bodies in motion, the earth would be positioned to block sunlight from the moon, leaving it in shadow. With the earth’s atmosphere scattering blue light, red light would pass through creating the moon’s scarlet blush.

This full lunar eclipse would certainly be discussed, written and read about, photographed and shared across the galaxy.

Imagine his embarrassment.

It’s enough to make any moon lose his grin, even Mac Tonight.

Maybe this weird feeling I had was caused merely by the rain and the snow both existing together in this same moment that was sparking resistance in the natural world, like magnets opposing each other.

It might also be something harder to detect, like the earth trying to spin forward and backward simultaneously in response to human indifference, greed, hate and idiocy, leaving it standing still in the middle of dead, dark space.

I stood with one foot in a puddle and the other in the snow, like standing on a fault line between winter and spring.

This type of scene is inherently March, lambs, lions and all that.

It’s November’s bookend.

The month can be frequently present interchanging moods: restless and temperamental, blue and despondent, sunny and shining brightly, sometimes, within a single day.

Since I’ve been a kid, it’s been easy for me to imagine a grand struggle occurring between the four seasons as they each successively fight for prominence, one temporarily taking center stage while the other three stand begrudgingly waiting in the wings for their moment.

As the seasons change then, they do so in a generally orderly fashion, but not without argument, squabble, pushing and shoving and a little worse for the wear at both ends.

A gust of wind circled my head and then disappeared.

The rain seemed to get harder, but I shrugged it off.

Whatever was happening out there, was a pronounced unsettling, a restlessness of disposition, a general odd sense like something was off somehow.

But it wasn’t by any means clear.

I had been using my mind and my senses to no satisfying result.

I began slowly to realize that I wasn’t likely going to figure this out.

I shone my flashlight and saw a couple of pale and still red worms, dead on the floor of the puddle, next to my boot. They came out of the ground to avoid drowning only to succumb submerged in cold puddle water at a depth of no more than an inch or so.

More strangeness.

Miles away, there was a contented baby sleeping in a crib somewhere, unaware of any of these concerns, while in another house, an old woman sat rocking in her chair, worrying what happened to her house key.

Farther away still, there were soldiers wounded on battlefields afraid for their lives.

Criminals with big dreams and tiny brains tried to find new ways to steal a poor boy’s lunch money. A cat smelled opportunity, and a mouse quivered.

Brute force and malignancy remained uninvited but somehow ended up at the party.

A suave man in a dinner jacket sat in a fashionable lounge twirling a toothpick with an olive on it between his fingers, waiting for a woman who didn’t care, again.

A canary in a cage in a small apartment, sang exuberantly as though it were free.

All these thoughts ran through my brain while the rain kept falling, the moon had disappeared, and the wind was still blowing, impolitely.

An ice-cold raindrop hit my cheek and rolled down the side of my neck into my shirt. I got an immediate chill.

No wonder the animals were laying low, sleeping, roosting or otherwise trying to keep themselves dry and warm. I moved my shoulder up to my cheek to dry off what was left of the cold raindrop.

Seeing deer tracks from a day or so in the snow, enlarged now by two or three times their size with the snow melt, I decided I had experienced enough for the night.

The unresolved feeling of weirdness followed me home, into the house and right to my chair. When I awoke a couple hours later, it was gone.

Maybe nightmares dragged it off into the darkness somewhere, and it died.

Wherever it went, I bid it swifts travels.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.