Episode Three: On Star Peak Chapter 2

Slim and straight as a young boy in her grey shirt and breeches, Eve continued on lightly through the woods, her rifle over her shoulder, her eyes of gentian-blue always alert.

The morning turned warm; she pulled off her soft felt hat, shook out her clipped curls, stripped open the shirt at where her snowy throat where sweat glimmered like melted frost.

The forest was lovely in the morning sunlight -- lovely and still -- save for the blue-jays -- for the summer birds had gone and only birds destined to a long Northern winter remained.

Now and then, ahead of her, she saw a ruffed grouse wandering in the trail. These, and a single tiny grey bird with a dreary note interminably repeated, were the only living things she saw except here and there a summer-battered butterfly of the Vanessa tribe flitting in some stray sunbeam.

The haunting odour of the late autumn was in the air -- delicately acrid -- the scent of frost-killed brake and ripening wild grasses, of brilliant dead leaves and black forest loam pungent with mast from beech and oak.

Eve's treat was light on the moist trail; her quick eyes missed nothing -- not the dainty imprint of deer, fresh made, nor the sprawling insignia of rambling raccoons -- nor the big barred owl huddled on a pine limb overhead, nor, where the swift gravelly reaches of the brook caught sunlight, did she miss the swirl of the furrowing and milling of painted trout on the spawning beds.