The only other wild animal was a baby deer – huddled in its depression in the ground. We almost stepped on the poor thing as it was so well camouflaged. As each of us quietly crept up to look at it, the baby trembled
but didn’t move or attempt to flee.
I certainly felt like a junior explorer as I tried to figure out if we hadn’t just crossed this same stream, and weren’t we just on the other side going in the opposite directions? At one point in time Peter calmly announced that we had reached our bridge for crossing. No tree leaning across the water, no shallows – where was the bridge? It took the form of a beaver dam. Perhaps I am an underprivileged urbanite but I have never walked across a beaver dam before. We all made it without a single misstep – in part thanks to the instant walking sticks that Peter conjured out of the treed area.