At The End Of Summer

After Hafez A deer, my companion for three seasons in the wilderness, has left me for her home. She has obligations there and announced her return with footprints delicately tracing her path. Soon relatives who do not know me will cluster around her, and she will be lost to me. I may see her with the others treading through the forest's silence, but she will respond with nature's shyness. And so it is that I enter a wide, treeless plain, alone, but not bereft. In my mind's eye, I see her standing still, as she listened entranced to my human speech, as if it were tree talk or sun speech, understood by all creatures touched with higher purpose. No doubt an impulse was placed into our beings by a power wiser than both of is. In our winter sleep far apart, a whistling wind or crack of ice will wake us, and each will see the image of the other, straining to locate the lost companion.