Naked trees glowing before Pole Mountain on an autumn afternoon.
The world around us begins to fade and color mutes to shades of brown and grey. It is softer now, subtle, sensuous, plain and transparent. The flash and dash of summer have passed. This is what I was longing for.
The pencil drawing of our mountain in winter light begins to take shape. Lines and contours and curves and distance, all blending into one under the cloak of the leafless hillside. Long shadows even midday in the orangey light of late autumn.
The mountain has not quite settled in for the season. It is still slightly abuzz, though one must stop to listen for it now, with the last of the hunters and a couple of tourists remaining, the summer homes abandoned again.
A solitary robin we saw yesterday while out riding, under a spruce tree in a tucked away south facing drainage. I had not seen one in weeks. They too, in their numbers, have left. We wondered if this one was perhaps injured, but we left him, turned our horses down the trail and rode on. I thought of him after we were long gone. Was there anything I could have done, or are we right to leave the wild in the wilderness, and let their fate be decided by the mountain?