Right now, the marmots are whistling high and clear among the scree.
Right now, the tamarack needles at the lake’s edge are going yellow-soft.
Right now, the place where you slept among granite and pine dirt is empty. Is still. If you do not make a sound outside of breathing—if you hold your animal voice—it is a stillness that can go on for a long while.
Right now, the autumn sun is clear and thin at 7,000 feet, reflecting on the lake, but you can imagine the hour when it will sink behind the peak, how the light will go dim and soft and how the whole place will seem to hold it, the last glow, until it doesn’t.
Right now, cutthroat trout are wavering with the water, the glimmer-scales of them threading the shadows beneath a log.
Right now, a piece of scree rolls from the ridgeline. Even when you are there you cannot explain it, cannot spot the animal that has dislodged it, but you listen to the way the rock skips and echos as it gains momentum during the fall. Roll that sound around in your mouth like a stone with uneven edges.
Right now, it’s cold. This week the city houses had their first frost, rooflines gone white when you peered out the window, so in the mountains, it’s cold. There’s a comfort in that kind of cold, the cold that stings your cheeks, steals the nimbleness from your fingers. A cold that sharpens, a cold that dulls.
Right now, the deer are toeing over root, moss and bramble to the water’s edge. They’ve shed their velvet for the season. Have winnowed down to bone. They pause, drink, pause again. Leave like an exhale.
Right now, a wind stirs and gusts through the pines. It’s the best sound, an old and deep sound, an ancestor sound, and you can summon it to you, if you can be still enough to remember.
Right now, a camp robber calls from its feathered place in the treeline. Are you there? Are you there? And a camp robber across the lake answers. Yes, I am here. Yes. I’m here.
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