Something silent lives here. The same thing that lives in the monk's cave, I hear - I hear nothing.
The silent thing lives here.

He wore big boots. Carhart overalls. The season's obligatory orange hunting cap.
Not boldly fashionable, but effectively functional: a good hunter would never aim at something orange. Unless they take a "sound shot" aimed at whatever-made the-noise. But then, that would not be a good hunter, now would it?
Obligatory orange communicates without words.

Deer are colorblind.

My footprint fit once and a half inside his big boot print and sunk six inches deep in the drifting snow. Southern Michigan's winter began early this year and quietly glistened across 130 acres of grampy's farmland - my mom's dad, my grammy's husband - this leather skinned man wearing an orange hat.

He wore big boots and he stood silent and still for long periods of time - tracking animals by the shape, depth, snow cover, and direction of their stride. He followed: four very large deer that had calmly strode through this morning. I followed: my grampy, placing little footprints inside bigger ones. If a deer were tracking us, what would she think?

When we got to the back woods, we sat in a homemade hunting perch without a gun because after grammy died, grampy just couldn't see ending another creature's life. Quiet still, we perched, just like the hunters, in case the buck comes. Or a tree falls with us in the forest. Or a snowflake hums heaven's hymns all the way down.

I'm sure all of this happened, but it happened in silence. As did my weight shift, my conversation, my thought, my ego - and every other method I have of avoiding dissolution. It all was vacuumed, sucked straight away as food for the something silent I am trespassing. To enter the fairy tale all sound must be offered with generous genuine sacrifice.

I understand, in falling snow, following tracks, perched in stillness, how many of my sentences, so predicatable, begin with the word "I". And how sacrificing that word makes communication broader and more enveloping. Like: instead of using all these tiny specific words, there becomes only one with infinite entendres, that encompasses everything.
And then even the one word has no sound.

Something silent, something infinite, lives here.

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