Such thoughts led to no firm conclusion, but, over long days and nights of brooding, he came to understand that he ought to form about himself a shape and to clothe that shape in a boundary such that on one side of it was him and on the other side was not-him. Somewhat as the trees were covered in bark. He began to make this so, but with no fixed idea at first as to what its form ought to be. He could adopt the form of a tree, but sensed that this was not correct. Trees were what he looked at, not what he was.

One night he was gazing up at the stars. Some time ago these had, partly of their own accord and partly through his idle musings, adopted forms that were not like those of trees but whose nature he could not quite understand. It came to him then that they were a kind of message. In their shapes were suggestions as to how he might pattern his own form. He tried various shapes: one long and sinuous, one squat with several legs, and one that stood upright, with a head at the top where the looking and the hearing took place, and appendages below that which could be put to various uses. This one he sensed was correct. He worked with it through all of the days that the leaves were falling. He saw now that this shape had always been implicit in the way that he had moved about and experienced things. What was a street but a place where he could walk? For that, legs were needed. His long habit of gazing at fallen leaves suggested that he was looking at things from a place that was above the ground but below the height of the branches from which the leaves fell. This, he now understood, matched up well with having a head perched some modest distance above his legs. Leaves could be snatched out of the air and held up for inspection by separate limbs, mounted just below the head. At the ends of those limbs were platforms for supporting leaves. Sprouting from the edges of those platforms were smaller, finer appendages, suitable for poking at snowflakes. He could make them curl inward just as the projecting armlets of a leaf did as it dried out. But unlike a dry leaf these did not shrivel and die once so curled, but could be restraightened at will.