Martha loves, like so many of us, the big predators, which are generally much more intelligent than their prey: the wolves, bears and lions. She says that hunting is “the primary act of evolution that has most shaped the organic body we call intelligence.” That’s how she’s always talked, and I’ve gotten used to it. Her language, in its own way, carries just as much passion as that of a poet’s. It’s just that her passion’s hidden behind those awful words (evolution, and organic body of intelligence). It’s all held in. She’ll lay something like that on me, and I’ll say, “Oh, you mean the predators have evolved larger brains to hold all the different data, all the possibilities they need to factor in to hunt with — the wind, slope gradient, temperature, soil conditions, sun’s angle, moon’s phase and all of the other invisible things that are the very beat, the very pulse of the earth’s skin itself?” And then she’ll think I’m making fun of her.

Or she used to think that. But now she’s becoming less and less interested in her science, and more tolerant of mystery.

She hasn’t learned it—mystery—from me. I think she has learned it from the deer, and the woods.

And I—for the first time—want to know a few answers, a little science. Like, What is going on? Where is it all going to end? What are our lives going to be like, from here on out? I’d like a little direction for once, a little glow at the end of the tunnel.