I returned to the woods without fanfare, arriving in the middle of the night. I knew that I was due, and past due, for it; still, the impact of it on me was unexpected. I needed to go stand in it.

After giving the place time to settle again from the unavoidable stampede of my carload unloading, I slipped out to commune with it as quietly as I could. Barefoot, I moved up the hill to my favorite lookout spot. These woods were never mine save by adoption, but I find that time has taught me to know them well. In silence, I appreciated the changes that have come to it, and all the things that will always remain the same.

The air was filled with that haze that blurs the line between mere humidity and actual fog - the day not hot enough to dry, the night not cool enough for dew. What breeze there was moved oddly, as if unable to shift the weight of the atmospheric indecision. Upon arriving from the city in the night, I always note the soundlessness: that air seemed the perfect packing material in which to wrap this night's consignment.

Given time to adjust, the waxing gibbous moon provided sufficient light even for my weary eyes. It outlined every motion of that air, and the way it wound around each one of the trees. A palm against a shagbark hickory found coolness and a hint of damp, and I felt an urge to see if the birches had different feel - in this, rough and smooth might not be, in the end, the same. I resisted only because I'd found the place I'd sought, and it seemed like no good night to move out of place.

I rarely achieve motionlessness anymore, for want of perfect places to make a stand, but I tried it there in that night. I wanted to absorb some of the eternal renewal of the place, from the rot beneath my feet feeding the branches thrusting to the sky. I wanted the peculiar light and air to wrap me just the same as all other things it touched, and to find in that a oneness I'd been seeking with myself.

A sound rang out around me, directionless yet not distant: a bellow of something large in the night. I froze the more, and tasted it: confusion and frustration, the sound of territory unduly trod upon, a hint of outrage at finding some unexpected scent carried on that sluggish breeze. The breeze itself seemed stilled, for it was the kind of noise that portends the shooting of the messenger.

It seemed distant enough, as I stood frozen, and so I made, from the wait for a reply, a moment to wonder at the things we mammals share. Before I understood what creature was complaining, I understood the nature of its complaint, and instinct told me what urgency it placed on me to act. How many generations of my forebears must have survived but barely, to nourish that sensitivity into the reflexes of their children... for there is no doubt that I understood, in the way my great-grandfather would have understood, in his woods no more than an hour's walk from where I stood. I nodded as the sound rang out again, with my mind now sufficiently ready to note trivia such as direction and species, along with distance and intent.

To me it sounded like she needed milking, but my great-grandfather could no doubt have told you precisely what trouble had startled the cow, on the farm that was two hills over.