Chapter 4
Ansel checks the tablet by the door. Sunset is two hours away. Good enough for a hike. He grabs a hoodie, hiking boots and a warm hat. Elke’s and Miriam’s outdoor garments still hang beside to his, and he steadies himself. Orange juice would be nice, but…
No, he pushes that thought away. He doesn’t need to restart that.
He swipes through five different trail cams. The last two aren’t working. Upon closer inspection, there’s no IP address leased from the last functioning P2P cam. One broken cam? Sure. Two? That’s a pattern. Ice build-up? Blown-over trees? Something else?
Inspecting them is a good excuse for a long walk.
Outside, the trail entrance sits across the cul-de-sac. Vaelin’s footprints scatter the snow.
Once, this place had been a dream of a community of homesteads, bonfires and homeschooling. Together, the community would overcome. But then people who had committed to buy shares didn’t show. Only two houses were built. Someone parked a camper trailer and proceeded to forget all about it. The moonshot barely got off the ground.
The Rademachers had funded the driveway, and now, with the divorce, what would happen to the cottage? The house in town? His heart grows heavier as he follows the rippling chain of events and how Elke’s death might upend Vaelin and his family too.
No, the Thorviks don’t deserve that.
Ansel feels untethered by the selfishness of someone he thought he knew. Sacrifice is essential in marriage, symbolized by the diamond; the struggle makes it unbreakable. However, instead of uniting through Elke’s loss, the opposite happened. Even when the video evidence clearly showed an accident, Miriam blamed him.
His breath quivers as he tries to keep thoughts of her away from his mind.
At the trail’s entrance, a Buddha statue draped in pink crystal beads rests beneath a sign: “Enter with Peace, All Ye Who Enter Here.”
“Screwy new-agers,” Ansel mutters. “Do they think aliens are real and crystals work?” Cringing, he realizes he sounds like his uncle. Too rational for his own good.
Off-grid living made people either chilled out or insane—sometimes both. The Thorviks? He wasn’t sure. Vaelin’s arithmetic was terrible. Six months ago, Elke had been teaching him multiplication with firewood stacks. Ten years old and no times tables? Red flag. Something should have been done. Maybe let Elke tutor him or Ansel print worksheets and make it a game. But now…
Now, he couldn’t hold his own life together, much less know what it was.
And without education, literacy, how could institutions hold together? Institutions kept humanity out of civilizations where choices were binary, haves and have nots. Without taxes, who would fund roads, hospitals, and schools? When left to fend for themselves, humans tended to be cruel to each other. Infrastructure was key. Without good, public education none of it worked. Without institutions, there was no middle class, no civil rights, and no means to enforce, even if flawed. Burning it down with conspiracy theories and grifters pretending to be ‘Just asking questions’ only left ashes.
A meadowlark’s call slices through his train of thought.
Very close.
Deliberate.
His attention snaps to it. Standing in the middle of the path, its tiny, beady eyes stare him down.
“I thought you only sang at dawn.”
And just as unnaturally, a runic sigil branded into pale wood grains of a Nordic shield burns into the front of his mind, like an image one sees when reading a story.
“Ahh,” he croaks. “What, what is that?” He mimes flinging a bug off his forehead, but it isn’t that easy.
He gets a flash of trail cams knocked down with a whittled stick, bashing the glass and plastic into pieces.
“Jesus, that was Vaelin?”
The shield flashes, intensifies in his mind, a command loaded into its design. Thought disappears, save for one.
The phone drops from his fingers before he even decides to let go. It vanishes into the snow, but he doesn’t look. He can’t.
The sigil lingers, flickering, insistent. Pulled to his mind like iron filaments to a magnet. His smart watch drops, the key fob too. Anything else? His ear bud. He always forgets that one.
The shield bursts, sparkling, pulsing embers revealing a towering tree in his mind’s eye. One tree rises above a sparse grove of towering poplars. The trunk, ten feet across. A magnificent titan among trees, its limbs shelter saplings, reflections of itself, growing, stretching upwards under its protection. It wasn’t just a grove of poplars with a stranger in the midst. The towering elders opened their ranks, offering height and shelter, while the newcomers took root beneath them. Two communities—one of elders, one rising—woven into something new. Welcoming a new grove into their own, the poplars facilitating their germination. A grove of cedar giants.
A new ecosystem was birthing. It was a grove of welcoming.
The vision fades. The meadowlark remains, staring.
It tilts its head, pecks at the snow. Again, it looks at him, taps its beak on something very small on the laneway. Once. Twice.
Waiting.
“What…” says Ansel, his executive functioning slams the door and hangs a “gone fishin’” sign on it.
He tracks back what he can remember. He remembers the buddha, feeling frustrated, the shield, dropping his electronics…
What is this?
“Not a memory gap…”
Tilting its head, the meadowlark’s feathers ruffle. It leans in, expecting an answer.
Ansel swallows.
As he moves, the bird hops back, taps again, then launches away. He watches it go, now more interested in the path.
Nestled in the packed snow are three tiny pinecones the size of grapes. He recognizes them from an old documentary.
Soft are the words.
“Thuja plicata.”
Western Red Cedar. Native to British Columbia.
Not here.
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