For nine straight miles, the hot-rolled steel rails cut a path through the woods, a metal chain thrown into soft mud. Discarded, rotting railroad ties littered the tracksides, the stench of creosote saturating the forest air until birds no longer frequented the trees. It was wholly quiet, cathedral still, waiting. The waiting never ended.

She came to the woods to mourn—to the island, for it was here she spent her childhood. The island called her back to bury the mother she no longer recognized. The father she was estranged from did not come, had never come, would never come. He was like the birds and the creosote-soaked air, incompatible.

The ground took the casket well enough, swallowing it away into the dark. It did not feel like a lump in her throat, or anything in particular. A relief, she’d hoped, but not even that in the end. Just a quietness she had never known. Once the neighbors had gone, and the casseroles had gone, and the flowers dead too, it was just the stillness, just the waiting for the return of normalcy. Whatever that was.

She wandered the farmhouse, but it was not normalcy; she had been away eighteen years, and the house felt as much of a stranger as her mother did. They both sometimes made a complaining creak, but these sounds were unfamiliar after living in a city for so long. Every animal, her mother said, has a sound it makes. The house did not purr or bark at her, though the screen door did snap and the gas stove whispered when she heated water for tea.

Her mother’s teapot, her mother’s cups. The nurse had used them more in the end, handles and rims showing chips here and there. She set the worst of them into the trash, tied the bag, and carried it out to the bin. It was all hers now, even the dented plastic trash bin. The men came on Wednesdays to collect, Mrs. Steele had told her, but she couldn’t recall what day it was now.

The end of the day, in any case, the sky going bruised with the departure of the midwinter sun. She closed the bin and wondered if raccoons had made the deep grooves on the lid in an effort to lift it, but a tremor at the edge of the tree line scattered rodent concerns. White spruce, eastern hemlock, a sprinkling of bare yellow birch, and something moving smoothly between the pale trunks and into the dark boughs.

She waited. No bird called, and nothing else moved, until far across the neighboring yard, a yellowed porch light came on. She drew in a breath, pulled her coat around her, and went inside, closing the door firmly behind.

The house was as still as the world outside, but for the ticking of one clock in the den. Unable to stand it, she took the clock down from the wall, turned it flat on the desk, and removed the battery. The ticking ceased and her breathing slowed.

Tomorrow, she resolved; tomorrow she would go into the woods.

But tomorrow arrived and with it Mr. Butler, who had missed the funeral, but needed to spend an hour or two reminiscing about the woman they’d both lost. She did not feel the loss, not yet, not even when she poured tea for them both and Mr. Butler said her mother had loved honey, not sugar, in hers, and did she have any now. She drew the honey from the cupboard, a beautiful blue glass jar, but when they managed to unscrew the stubborn lid, it was to find the honey had gone to sugar after all. Mr. Butler chipped out a chunk of the sweetness to let it dissolve into his tea.

When he had gone, she set the cups in the sink and stared out the kitchen window at the tree line where the midafternoon light slanted low through the branches. The light was no longer ideal—but what was ideal anymore anywhere? There were four hours until sunset at least, time enough to look, so she gathered her jacket and her camera bag, and left the house. She took no care to lock the house—it felt like it belonged to a dead woman, not her, and she laughed at the idea of being careless with her mother’s things. The loud clock, the sugared honey.

She wasn’t usually like that, but it didn’t make sense, that her mother was gone. It felt like a fairy tale, something happening to someone else. Needles and leaves crunched under her boots and that felt like her own experience, something she was an active participant in. She crossed the wide, brown lawn, and the neighbors on their far porch waved at her despite the distance. She supposed it was good that someone knew where she was going, in her apple red jacket. She stepped into the trees, she felt the world change as it always had there, the crossing of a boundary from one discrete space into another.

The light changed, filtered through the pine boughs. Almost like light cutting through water, everything dappled and undulating. She breathed, comforted by the sharp pine, the vague soft rot beneath her feet, but the silence was always unnerving. The lack of birds, the lack of song. Beyond her mother’s death, it was why she had come (work, always work, Jake-Joe-Isabelle-Tom complained, and she could not argue, she loved her work more than she loved them).

They would start here, she’d suggested to her boss, to begin undoing all the damage that had been done—centuries’ worth, and he’d laughed at her, but she didn’t care. The railroad stood abandoned, the logging mills were silent. They could heal the island, they could give it back to nature and stop destroying it. It was this that interested her in the house that was now hers, it was this that gave her hope, that she could live here and chronicle the world as it was, and the world that it would come to be.

The Mi’kmaq had called the island home until the French colonized it, until the French ceded it to the British. How careless white men had been with it, as with all things, not considering who had been here first, who had done the hardest things in the stewardship of the land. The land cradled in the waves, they called it, until the white men gave it a prince’s name, and claimed it forevermore.

But the trees had been here longer than any of the men, and the trees closed around her now, keeping the snow from her shoulders as it began to spit from the leaden sky. She drew her Canon F-1 from its bag and began to shoot casually as she walked: the first snowflakes caught on the boughs, the darkening red soil, as everything grew wetter, a skunk footprint crossing a patch of mud through the undergrowth.

There were no longer any moose or caribou here, but she glimpsed antlers through the trees, and followed them. Perhaps they were only branches after all, but they moved as if attached to something living. Her breath caught in her throat as she pursued it, snapping a frame here and there to see what the film might tell her later. It had been a long week, a longer year, and the woods had a way of telling a story even if one hadn’t been prepared for such. Her boots sank into the soft ground and she looked down to pull herself free. When she looked up, the antlers had gone.

She kept on, northward of the house, she figured. The snow came and went and came again. It was fitful like her sleep. She paused every few steps to kneel to the ground, to see what she might find. Garlic mustard, glossy buckthorn. Invasive, both, but she photographed them all the same, thinking it would help her case, that this place needed restoration.

In the distance, laughter. She went still at the sound, listening. More than one voice, but all of them male. Deep, happy. She walked slowly onward, closer to the laughter, though she could not see anyone in the trees. Perhaps after all this time it was birds returning to the island, and the idea quickened her pace. The snow increased, blowing down upon her as she rushed past the skeleton of a hemlock. Its branches clawed at her jacket sleeve, but did not slow her. The mud did that, her boot slipping sideways until she was on the ground, hip screaming.

That was when she saw the two figures, walking hand in hand. By their height they were men, but their shoulders were too broad, and their heads too furred, antlers spreading crown-like from the top of each head. One set was broad and flat like that of a moose. The other was more like caribou antler, branching in countless points. Scarlet ribbons twined around the caribou, sparkling with glitter. Caught in a Christmas present, she thought, but the ribbons ended in bows and it all looked intentional. As if someone had decorated him.

The men, if that is what they were, walked away from her, deeper into the trees. They were clad in suits, sepia and black. One wore a coat of tails, the other a boa of boxwood, dogwood, willow, corn tassels, coneflower seed heads, and lupines. The lupines and dogwood were not in season, but blooming as if they were, bright purple and pale pink.

As the men drew farther away, she remembered her camera. She lifted it, only to find the lens caked with cold, red mud. She dug it free, flung the glob onto the ground, and aimed her camera. Her focus was poor, her grip unsteady, but she shot until the roll was empty, until the men had completely disappeared. There were other houses that way, she knew. Perhaps she had stumbled upon an old winter tradition—though she could not name it.

Turning back for the house, she saw the slate slab emerging from the ground like something of a tombstone. It was marked, though not with a name; the image of a fox had been carved into the stone, its outline weeping with melted snow.

Later that evening, as the prints dried in the windowless bathroom she had converted into a darkroom, she dried her hair by the fire and thought of the fox. She would have to return to photograph it, would want a record of every such thing in the region, to strengthen her case with her boss. The island deserved to be rehabilitated, the forests deserved to grow, after centuries of overclearing.

Her thoughts returned to the men, their hands entwined. If they had been aware of her, they had shown no sign. They had been in their own world, and she the trespasser.

Once dried, the film revealed two mud-blurred figures, shadowed and uncertain. The scarlet ribbon she remembered was a disappointing gray, color only clinging to the woods around the men. Their headdresses appeared clumsy, skewed from the weight of the antlers they had affixed to them. She laughed to look at them now, two young men coming home for holiday break, dressing as the beasts that had once roamed these woods.

She crawled into bed feeling like a fool, for she could not get them out of her head. The follies of youth, maybe, or the warmth of such companionship in the midwinter woods. She had not known either for too long, so naturally the young men felt alien, distant, and kept her mind spinning long after she should have stopped thinking of them. She pictured them entering their home, antlers banging into the door frame, into each other. Each would carefully free the other from the confines of the costume, until they stood laughing at one another still, hair standing on end, eyes wide from being inside the dark headdress. One would pull the remains of the lupins from the other, never once asking how they dared exist in midwinter. It was simply so.

Come morning, she loaded her camera with film, cleaned the lens, and packed more film into the bag alongside a sandwich and thermos of coffee. Notebook and pen completed the supplies alongside the sincere hope she would make progress on her proposal. She went north of the house again, drawn by the memory of the men, perhaps, but the neighboring farmhouse was still but for a curl of chimney smoke, and so were the woods when she set foot into them.

The trees stood in shadow still, though the sky above their crowns was beginning to lighten with the sunrise. Her breath came in gasps of fog, frosted undergrowth brushing glitter onto her jeans as she pushed through them. The woods were good here—diverse and strong—though the farther she walked, the more damage she saw, wide swaths of only dark pines growing where they’d been intentionally seeded.

A hundred years before, much of the land had been cleared for agricultural pursuits, and only now were people realizing the damage done, the birds not only fleeing the creosote-soaked air, but refusing to nest in coniferous stretches. They needed variety, not a thousand pines stretching from shore to shore.

She reached a neglected stretch of asphalt road, at which the trees stood starkly different on either side—pine, oak, ash, and maple to her back, endless pine spreading before her. Stepping from the ground to the asphalt road was like leaving the sea for land; the road was hard, uncompromising. She walked it a while, noting no trace of bird shit, nor any kind of scat from any animal in passing. No fox, no coyote, no raccoon. But there was a shoe, a horseshoe.

She photographed the shoe where it lay, then noticed how narrow it was, surely not for a horse hoof. It was narrow, as if a caribou wore a shoe. The metal was strikingly cold to the touch, as if it had lain there for years without the touch of sunlight. The chill was familiar to her, though the shoe itself called to mind the young men from the night before. Caribou, she had thought.

She left the shoe where it was, and only took a few dozen more steps along the asphalt before diverting back onto the ground. There was a wrongness to the world when she stood on the asphalt, though it had begun to seep into the ground, the dirt, the trees. She tried to put it into words, words that her boss would understand so he would recognize the urgency of her mission, but those words would not come. She walked deeper into the woods, until she found a stone large enough to sit on. She drew out her notebook, her pen, and found herself sketching rather than writing. She drew the trees as she remembered them, and the stone from yesterday with its fox face; she drew the young men, one with a ribbon of scarlet, the other with the end held loosely in his hand.

Hands, but also antlers. The idea stuck like a barb in her throat.

Her boss would not understand anything she wrote or drew; he would be incapable until he came, until he spent time beneath the trees. She closed the notebook and drew the thermos out, to pour a generous cup of coffee. It steamed in the cool morning air the way her breath had, coiling into the air before it vanished. She ate half her sandwich—chicken salad on wheat—and tucked the second half away for later.

She waited for the birds even if she didn’t know that was what she was waiting for at first. She was always straining to hear something that was no longer there. Plovers and blue jays, she thought, and her heart ached to see the paintbrush details on a jay’s wing or tail, but none came, the trees only moved by the breeze, or a branch stretching in the warming light. The trunks had begun to steam, frost evaporating as the light pushed deeper into the wood.

The morning and afternoon passed in a rush, coffee and half sandwich consumed in turn. When she returned to the house—not yet home—her bag was light of everything save for film. She spent the evening developing the rolls, hanging prints of local flora and fauna to dry, though she had seen precious little fauna. The horseshoe—the not-horse shoe—stood out among the prints, strange. Unfamiliar as the road it rested on.

She worked until midnight, labeling and categorizing the photographs, remembering childhood on the island, hunters in bright orange vests, stepping into the woods to never be seen by her again. Surely they had come out somewhere, but as she brushed her hair, her mind took a turn toward the outrageous, for what if like those young men, the hunters had donned antlers and furs, and slipped between the trees to live a life no other could imagine. She imagined a crown of antlers upon her own head, antlers the color of her flaxen hair, rubbed to a high shine against the trees, leaf and berry caught in every crook.

Upon waking, she was surprised to find her head so light, not weighed down by an antler crown, though upon her pillow she found the shred of an oak leaf that has escaped her careful brushing. She pressed it into the pages of her notebook, a quick uncertain knock at the front door making itself known. Bundling her robe around her, she went barefoot to the door, finding it was the closest neighbor, an apologetic look upon her face, a casserole dish in her hands.

Time got out of joint, the neighbor said; it was easy to let the days pass in a blur after the loss of a parent, so wouldn’t she take this dish, and find some comfort, some fuel, within it. Of course she took the dish, made a fuss of inviting the neighbor in though she knew the invitation would be declined—she’d slept half the day away, was standing there barefooted in her nightgown; the neighbor did her best to not flee instantly.

Alone again, she set the casserole into the fridge and, despite the lateness of the hour, looked toward the waiting woods. The light was bleeding out of the sky, the trees looking as if they’d been drawn upon it by a fine-line marker. Farther down, the marker was saturated, the darkness complete. Nothing pierced the solid line of black until the golden glow of a lantern passed through.

Kids had always loved the woods; her mother often complained about make-out sessions, smoke circles, “wild” parties amid the trees. She had gone there in her own youth, though never to kiss anyone she shouldn’t have been kissing. She had gone as she did now, with camera in hand, to see what she could make of the world beyond the tree line.

Nighttime always revealed something different, though it was the wee small hours when that something did finally emerge from the boughs.

The young men were not young men; the sputtering lantern light revealed the truth of them, which she had only guessed before. They were human, and yet not, two spirits seemingly bound into one flesh. Male bodies, showing skin and fur, but no clothing. Their antlers were no headdress at all. There was no delineating mark between flesh and fur, it was all one and the same. One moose, one caribou, the caribou’s antlers bedecked in scarlet ribbon. The tails of the ribbons loosely held within the moose’s broad hand as the caribou carried the lantern. The scent of lupines out of season.

She was small within their fathomless, black eyes and felt as though she could not move, even as she was also aware of the frantic flutter of her finger against her camera.

The photographs would be overblown, every detail lost in the nearness of the lantern light, but there would still be something, a memory perhaps, a memory of a scent, of a touch—chilled fingers against her cheek—of a sound—an iron-shod hoof crushing a branch—and the impossible awareness of the way they had drawn her through the low snow-decked boughs, the snow melting against her bare arms, the cold mud squelching between her bare toes, and shown her what existed beyond: A place no human could remember, for they had never traveled there in their human skins, could not travel in that manner. A price was required, necessary, and they could not explain that price with words, but she felt the truth of it—it was not her heart, but its beat; it was not her lung, but its breath. And she said yes and yes once more before they set her into the undergrowth where they had found her. You will not remember, they told her.

In her makeshift darkroom, she crumpled the photographs in her hands, feeling again the heat of the lantern, the willow-exhale of the moose, the cool caribou nose. The Mi’kmaq had carved animal images into the rock of the island, but whether it was to mark the passages or their presence, she could not say. By some miracle—being a part of the island itself—the eras of agriculture had not erased these places, but had only more deeply embedded them, until they could never be removed, nor could they be easily accessed. Not without a price.

Like the underworld, she thought, grasping at thoughts of her mother, walking blind into some fictional light (a lantern, why not). She lay dreaming, though wide awake, the scent of crushed willow pervading even her sheets. You will not remember, they told her, but she remembered. She rose remembering, and dressed remembering, and went once more into the trees, remembering.

She could not find it. Where rocks had once jutted, now ferns rose, green against the midwinter chill. She tore them between her hands, but the ferns revealed nothing, as if sworn to an ancient pact. She dug her fingers into the cold red mud until her nails cracked, until she bled, but the ground gave her nothing. She beat her fists against the trees, until blood flecked the air, but the woods did not relent. The way had been shut, and she returned to the house, remembering. The clarity of light, the flaxen antlers emerging unbroken from her skull, the scarlet ribbons trailing like veins from one hand.

The food in the house rotted; the chemicals in the film degraded to uselessness; everywhere she walked, dust stirred into the air. And she remembered: the softness of the fur, the warmth of the stones beneath her bare hooves, the impossibility of lupines.

When her boss called, the ringing of the telephone was something she could not place. It was part of another life, another place, but she found the words easily when he asked what she had found—she could not speak of the young men, her throat tightened when she tried—but she could talk at length about the woods, the ruin of trees, the poisonous line of abandoned railroad that wound itself like a chain around a throat. Tear it out, she whispered; we can tear it out and let this world breathe again. And he said yes and yes once more, and the work began, and she bloodied her hands every day upon the island’s dirt and stone. She hauled the used rails from the woods with crane and her very hands; she guided the men to tear it out, tear it all out, and when the hot-rolled steel rails rose into the sky, she felt the air return. It was slow and cautious, as if after a long time of not breathing.

She also breathed. She walked barefoot into the woods once more, and could feel the absence of the steel. She felt the green like a great rushing tide, through the dirt and the roots and the leaves that reached for the sun. She reached too, her flaxen hair gone silver under the warm light, so many years had passed. She had become her mother, inhabiting the woods as if they were a house. She lay among the ferns, and stretched her body into the mud, and prayed a prayer she did not know. She looked every day for a rock, for a sign, but it did not come. She hoped every day for a direction, and when it did not come, she carried on, lifting what she could, mending what others had torn. She guided her people to do the same, and watched in wonder as they did.

In the nights when she brushed her hair, she felt the smallest rise of a bump along her right temple—and its twin along her left. Her calloused fingers did not linger and she dared not look, could only trust in the promise that once her heart’s beat and her lung’s breath had been given, she would know the way by the curve of a flaxen antler.

Editor: Hebe Stanton

First Reader: K.T. Elms

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors