The poem begins with a small scene of violence read from the snow. A squirrel's tracks stop at a smudge of blood and a tuft of fur, and beside them runs the furrow of its dangling tail, with a fox's footprints close by. We never see the kill. We piece it together from what it left behind, which makes it feel quiet and almost ordinary.
Then the poem widens out. A bulldozer sits alone in the field, lowering its blade to what the poem calls a "white and heavy harvest," meaning the snow. The word "harvest" sets the machine's work beside the fox's hunt, as if both are just ways of gathering what the season offers.
The speaker never says what they feel. The tone is calm and observant, and the mood is cold and stark. The title, "Pastoral," adds an ironic edge, since the usual gentle countryside is replaced by predation and machinery. Nature and human work both look efficient, and neither seems to pause for the squirrel.