I was about to head back near sunset when I heard rustling to my right and turned to see the white deer above me on the rise, her pink nose raised in greeting. She kept more distance this time, about twenty yards, though she didn’t look afraid. I stood perfectly still, not wanting to spook her. Her ears twitched and swiveled, scanning the woods for sounds. She kept looking over her shoulder, and I understood the presence of her companion, though I saw or heard no other sign of him.
Once again an owl hooted insistently from the trees. The deer turned slightly in the call’s direction. When the owl hooted a second time, and louder and more urgently a third, the deer looked back at me as if to apologize, then reluctantly cantered off into the trees toward the mournful sound.
I wasn’t fool enough to try to catch her this time, but I hurried on in that direction and kept her in sight as long as I could. A half-mile or so on, something silver glinted from behind a stand of trees. As I got closer, I saw an old trailer shaped like a big silver bullet. I knocked, but nobody answered, so I peered inside. It was filthy and full of old spider webs, pine needles, and dry leaves, but otherwise it was completely empty; not a dish on the dusty kitchen counters or shelves, no cushions in the seats in what passed for a living room, no curtains in the windows, and not so much as a pencil on the dinette to the right of the door. I saw no road or path outside, and thought the trailer must have been towed here, through a leaner forest years before. But nobody had lived in it for a long time.
I squinted past the trailer. A break of slender pines formed a kind of screen, and beyond that was the roofline of a house. When I came around the trees to look, I found a log cabin. The walls were made of big notched logs, the roof of silver-gray shingles. At one end of the cabin was a stone chimney, and across the front was a porch just big enough for two broken chairs and a rusty motorcycle missing a back tire.
The frame of the cabin looked old, but other parts seemed newer and built in unusual ways. The window frames were made of odd pieces of different kinds of wood, whittled and joined like a puzzle. The window dividers were all sizes and shapes, custom-carved to fit the frames, and broken pieces of clear and colored glass made up the panes. These pieces had been glued or taped together, and set into the frames like a see-through mosaic.
Out front was a covered stone well with a roped bucket for drawing water. To one side, a couple of pumpkins rotted in an old fenced-in garden, and to the other I saw a woodpile and an ax rusting in an old stump.
It didn’t look like anyone lived there now. The front door stood ajar, and I invited myself inside.
If people had lived here, they’d lived hard. The single, good-sized room was covered in dust, cobwebs, tracked-in dirt, and leaves. The seat cushions from the trailer made up the mattress of a corner pallet bed heaped with old blankets, brown-stained pillows without cases, and faded quilts that sent up a cloud of dust when I sat down. In the center of the room, a table made from an old door with two tree stumps for legs was covered with broken strands of fishing line, jaybird feathers for lures, and pebbles for sinkers. A pair of plain stools stood beside it, one tall and one kid-sized. Two dusty oil lamps sat on the wide mantel above the hearth, and in the fireplace an old oven rack spanned red bricks stacked four high on either side. The ashes were clumped and cold. On the back wall to the right were some open shelves holding a few dented pots and utensils, and below that was a stone sink with no tap. Whoever had lived here had hauled water from the well to drink and wash.
Along the walls, crude shelves overflowed with natural treasures, things a kid might keep. Crow, bluebird, and cardinal feathers and a single peacock plume lay alongside other feathers I didn’t know on one shelf. Another was crowded with large and small birds’ nests and eggs that hadn’t hatched—blue, green, pink, and speckled—next to a much larger collection of broken shells. Other shelves held the gray-striped papery makings from a wasp’s nest, animal bones, and small skulls bleached white by the sun, like little versions of those in Ms. O’Keeffe’s pictures. Pinecones the size of pineapples sat next to a dozen tiny ones no bigger than thimbles. There were twigs overgrown with gray, blue, and green lichens, and dozens of rocks, stones, and pebbles polished smooth.
I took down a few of the treasures from the shelves and sat on the bed to study them: a big turtle shell, a coppery striped snakeskin, a perfect arrowhead, and a tiny bird’s nest no bigger than a plum half with the pit gone. Underneath the quilts, at the head of the bed, I felt something four-cornered and hard. I pulled back the covers and found an old cigar box. I lifted the lid. On top was a worn black-and-white photograph of a homely-looking woman. She seemed surprised by the camera. Her hair was tied up in bun, with wispy strands escaping every which way. Her dark eyes seemed sad. On the back, a child’s hand had scrawled one word: Mama.
I lifted her picture to see what lay underneath. A miniature wooden menagerie stared up at me. Half a dozen small animals, carved in wood, were nestled in a bed of dry leaves. A squirrel no bigger than my thumb stood
