Nature continues to amaze

Some new natural wonders, or at least things I have not seen before. The other night I hit what I am pretty sure was a muskrat on the road. The next day driving to work I saw several others in the same area dead in the road. It was like a whole migration wiped out overnight. Then I got to wondering what caused so many on the road at one time. Two causes come to mind. One is that the river was very high from all the rain this summer and thinking perhaps their bank dens were flooded and forced them out. The only other thing I could think of was maybe it was this summer's litter chased out to fend for themselves. At any rate it was a strange occurrence. Perhaps if my imagination were working better these days, there was a grand adventure in progress with the muskrat army on its way to Redwall to help the defenders defeat the weasels and foxes.

Then last night I noticed an organization of stars I have never seen before. It was four stars in almost a vertical line rising from close to the eastern horizon. At first I thought it was lights on some kind of tower, but they seemed to rise higher than any tower around here. They were there all the way home, but at home I couldn't see them with all the trees around. No easy answer in my iPad star finder either. And a bigger question, things don't change that much in the sky, how come I never noticed this before? And, again, with some imagination applied, could this vertical line be illuminating the stairway to heaven? Can you hear Led Zeppelin in the background?