Bear scat lies steaming on the trail. Reality. Fresh reality, warm to the touch, full of berry seeds. The mess resembles red caviar. Almost whimpering in the ecstasy of her excitement, Ellie dives into the brush. I call her back. Reluctantly, or maybe not so reluctantly, she returns. Part Labrador, part German shepherd, two years old, she whines, growls, shivers all over as she strives for speech, trying to tell me something of urgent importance. I pause to stroke and quiet her. I know, I tell her, I know, I know….

We go on, downward into the gloom. The setting sun flickers through the treetops, through the oak and fir and yellow pine. We pass beneath the vultures’ roost, where they gather each evening, and I am startled as always when the stillness is shattered by the sudden violent beating of ponderous wings. Once aloft they circle in silence until we’ve passed on. They never learn. But neither do I.

From a certain distance, from just beyond the zone of cautious silence that always surrounds a human walking through nature, comes the call of the hermit thrush. A silvery music, a flute song, simple and sweet and piercing to the heart. A twilight music, painful in its beauty. If there is a Heaven, an ideal realm beyond space and time, it must contain the hermit thrush. Otherwise, what good is it? And there must be trees too, of course. And mountains. And a sun that sets each evening and rises each morning. And winding through the woods, a trail with pine needles, stones, oak leaves, fresh bear shit. Naturally.

A mirror image of the earth we know, is that the best that I can imagine? This little planetary world, with its torture, cruelty, insult, degradation, greed, stupidity, spiraling without significance other than itself toward some black hole in the singularity of Einstein’s universe? The mind strains toward an understanding, toward some idea of ultimate, absolute perfection—or of absolute horror. Either will do. But can no more grasp it, can no more define and communicate this thing than can Ellie my dog make explicit her emotions to me.

Forget it. We diverge onto an older, dimmer path, one that leads slightly uphill toward a small brown stagnant pond I know. When we get there I sit down on a log, keeping Ellie at my feet, and wait, watch, listen.

A cloud of gnats, like the molecules of a gas confined within an invisible retort, dances in place at one side of the pond. A few dragonflies, some red, some blue—four-winged, ornate, glittering, Victorian creatures—skim above the water. Water striders walk upon it, making the most delicate of ripples. My dog loves to slosh into the water, pursue those insouciant insects, snap them up and gulp them down. But this time I restrain her, waiting for something more interesting. For what? I don’t know, yet.

The sun goes down. The song of the hermit thrush becomes distant, hesitant, fading into evening.

The twilight condenses. But the new moon will light our way out of here. Or I can always feel my way. It’s straight uphill back to the lookout tower. Cannot get lost. Far off, an owl hoots, once, twice, echoed by another at an equally vague location. Then all becomes quiet. We wait.