In 1900, Julip Road was graded for the loggers and the forest leveled. Loggers dragged the giant white pine and hemlock from where the orchard now sits and ran them down the Black or took them by road. Sometimes, they used railroad. The old track lay two miles south of the shack in the valley, long since faded into the stunted forest. The railroad company pulled most of the track for the iron after decommission.

The rivers were dead for years.

Haze filled the sky for decades as fires up to a million acres in size scorched the land.

What was dark, foreboding, and ancient had become bright, open, and light. An invasive species has found this land, not all that different from the white-tailed deer taking over for the caribou. Matt had no idea where it came from. The Being saw something about this place it liked.

But is it really an invasive species? he asked the land. Could this be something from Earth? Maybe man had poked the forest too many times, too deep. Maybe the Being was a defense mechanism, something that sprang forth when certain boundaries were breached, a last protector of the ecosystem. Maybe they were the intruders and this thing was sent to beat back the human horde.

Oh how the woods had burned. How the insides of the giant trees lay splayed open, revealing the raw, yellow flesh to the sun. The wounds were deep, the pain ceaseless. Millions of animals died in the fires. The white eyes and mental smiles of the sooty-skinned men, the black skies and stumps. The sound of gunfire everywhere, the cadence of running animals, deep red flames roaring behind them, nostrils dilating, surviving the blaze only to run into the camps of men with rifles pointed. The last breath of the caribou, the last breath of the mountain lion and wolverine rising into the ashen, burning skies. Men danced around the campfires with hats of fur, animal heads displayed in the growing sprawl of cabins and cottages.

When the fires died down and the men went back to the cities, stillness engulfed the land—a stillness only mother nature could understand. This stillness triggered alarms and reactions— mechanisms man could not grasp at this juncture in the species evolution. Every landscape makes a unique sound. Humans cannot hear this sound. They were never designed to, and Matt understood this now. It is the sound of forever, of ancient woodlands, granite outcroppings, and the echoes of river canyons. Somehow, something heard these alarms and responded, a common understanding shared. The white-tailed deer smells something in the air, telling it to move north to unoccupied habitat that had recently become suitable for its needs. Perhaps the thing that now occupied the orchard responded the same way.