It’s not a natural place to seek solitude—this confusion of spruce thickets and meadows drained by winding streams. The wild animals are not the problem, it being the heat of the day. Silent now in sleep, the otters, weasels, and mice make their tracks at night. It’s the road that brought us here.  More, it’s the telephone wires that cut across the place’s heart. I can almost hear the buzz of conversation they carry.

Away from the wires, there is enough quiet, between passing caravans, to allow contemplation of shapes made by the Halloween shadows of naked alders cast on mounded snow or by those same branches lifting up their children to the sun.