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I was discovering something that I suspect I had known since that first winter walk in snowshoes. I wanted to make this hillside my own in the way that the landscape of my boyhood had been my own. The way toward possession, in the best sense of that word, was to learn it, and the best way to learn it was with lots of long walks. I traversed the hill up and down, and sometimes I followed what would be the natural contour lines of rounded hills. Other times I plotted and walked straight lines, from here to there on the map. I sat on stone walls, leaned against the trees, knelt for a closer look at the brooks. I even took the occasional short nap, by leaning against some soft and slightly rotten stump and stretching out my legs. I ran the soil of the hillside through my fingers—it was simultaneously gritty and smooth, a dark pudding of rotten leaves and glacial rock flour—and tasted its bitter twigs.

I had grown up among marshes, sassafras, holly, and scrub pine. The South Jersey soil of my boyhood was gray beach sand—the bottom of an ancient sea. Rocks were so uncommon in that landscape that when people found them they painted them white and set them out as ornaments. By contrast, the Maine hillside was rugged and ledgy, and it coughed up a prodigious amount of rocks. The glaciated soil grows spruce, fir, white pine, beech, white oak and rock maple, trees almost entirely absent from my boyhood. These were two different landscapes, but they shared one powerful attribute: both were manifestations of the natural world—plants and animals and weather and soil and seasons working together to form a coherence of life, breath and natural beauty, and both spoke to me in a common language of metaphor and first principles. I never would be able to score the Maine hillside with the events of my boyhood—I would never be thirteen again and watch ducks come into a Barnegat marsh as the winter sun threw its first light of the day over the dark brackish water, nor would I be able to wade into the green briars and weed fields with my bird dog, Shadrach, to flush bobwhite quail. Those years and experiences were gone. But maybe I could come to know this little patch of hillside well enough to say I understood it. I wouldn’t know it as a boy can come to know the woods, because a boy gives himself to it completely, but I could learn it as an adult, by walking and watching and listening. There is no love like the first, and there is no landscape like the one we grow up in, but love has more than one life and I hoped I could possess this landscape with some of the feeling I had felt for the first. I could not go back and fix my family, make my father stay or find the money to stop the foreclosure of our house. Those things were done, and they would always be done, and the first landscape would always be gone. I would have to know this place differently, with more deliberation, experience and tempered hope. Yet there was a strong sense of return. I thought of the lines by T. S. Eliot:

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

One weekend in the late fall, I drove to the hills to soak in the pensive November atmosphere and reassure myself about the cabin site, which was still very much devoid of a cabin. I arrived in the afternoon and made my usual circuit up the path to the cabin site, and then higher still to the ridge below the knob, and then down an old logging road to the pond. As I walked around the pond toward the end of the day, I spotted what looked like a small bear swimming in the water, except that this bear seemed to have a canoe paddle lashed to his behind. I went in for a closer look. It was a beaver, a very big beaver, and when I approached, it swam three tight circles of exasperation, slapped the water’s surface with its long flat tail and disappeared. I scanned the water for its reappearance. It showed up a hundred yards farther off, near the mound