“Call Leon, damn you.”

A robotic woman’s voice replied without emotion, “I do not understand your request.”

Doctor Herman Aebisher cursed quietly and squeezed the steering wheel as if he was somehow choking the irritating machine.  He did not much care for the voice activated car phone. Having grown up in the era when the telephone was a heavy plastic kitchen or desk ornament, he still felt a little awkward speaking at something not quite visible. Like a mad man.  

The rain had not stopped since he had left Bern and the highway, now less crowded remained slick with runoff. Reluctant to stop in the downpour to use his mobile phone, he squinted at the windshield. Again, he shouted at the hidden microphone.

“Call Leon!”

This was his fourth attempt to reach the man. Exasperated, he let the phone ring on and on this time. The bleating echo of it lost in the pounding rain and frantic thump of windshield wipers. Secretly he hoped that Leon had died so he could spare the old man the news and himself the task of delivering it.   

The phone rang on for miles before it was finally picked up.

Momentarily surprised, he listened. There was raspy breathing, but nothing else. Not that he had expected any conversation or even a hello from the man. He spoke again a little too loudly, the tension of the moment, the stream of traffic, Leon’s reclusive behaviors irritating.

“Leon, hello! Leon, are you there? Leon?” He paused for a moment, tried another approach, and said, “Its Herman…. Herman Aebisher.”

Silence.

 “Leon, I know you are there. I’ll be coming up this evening, please have the gate open. The gate, Leon, you hear, have it open.”

There was a grunt on the other end before the line went dead.

Aebisher shook his head, wishing again that he had sent someone else to attend to this business.

“Damned cantankerous old bastard,” he said aloud.

The machine replied, “I do not understand.”

Aebisher, hissed through his teeth, but said nothing more.

As the morning passed into afternoon traffic slowly fell away. Without even noticing, he found himself alone gliding through a vast forest reserve. The old growth trees dark and weighty, an ancient silent wilderness pressing hard against the long rain washed highway. The miles seemed to slowly lift the murky wet light as both he and the storm diverged along opposite paths. The forest, taciturn and sodden, blazing green and sparkling in a few rare spots as the watery sun wormed through miniscule openings in the dense evergreen canopy.  Had it been winter, snow would have forced him back.

At 5:30pm he turned off the main highway and started to climb up into the mountains, his German sports car taking the turns with ease.  As he rose higher, patches of snow appeared along the road or were strewn haphazardly on the rocky ground amongst the thinning trees. Small patches at first, dirty from the melt, then incrementally increasing in size until the ground was covered in thick hoary white. It was late spring, but winter never truly left the mountains merely slumbering lightly, awaiting any opportunity to awaken and drive the interlopers of spring or summer away.

Aebisher rolled down his windows and let the cold air rush in and over him as he had as a boy and later as a young man when he came up to these mountains. There was an intoxicating quality to the thin icy air that was absent from his life in the city, the aroma of evergreen and oak, water and snow and ancient rock as old as time itself. A familiarity and awakening that triggered a recollection of these forests, a remembrance of youth; the deep silence he felt as he hiked into its heart, only his breathing disturbing his thoughts or at other times the wind passing high in the trees as lightly as the loving caress of a mother’s hand on her child’s forehead or a whisper in the dark. There was the summer bleached sky, limitless and dazzling, a confusion of blue and white rising up until it blended with the stratosphere and the stars beyond.  High clouds of flawless frosty white moving on silent currents and breaking hard against the mountain peaks as oceanic tides. He recalled how he would lay for hours, unmoving in small flower covered meadows or on the edge of cliffs watching the sky, and the mountains imaging being underwater as the rush of clouds rolled over the craggy alpine peaks. Although thirty years had passed since he had spent any time in these mountains, and his life had become filled with a confusion of memories of people, places and the business of life, he recalled that far away time with a perfect clarity that was awakened by the current of cold air buffeting his face; memories that both astounded and filled him with a deep sense that for all that he had gained an equal amount had been lost. 

The road continued to twist upward, not reaching the distant snowcapped summit but skirting along the boney back of the mountain before it dipped downward again snaking through the forest until it reached the shrouded turnoff that would lead him to his destination, Hochweide Lodge. No sign marked the turnoff to the lodge except for a large granite bolder, with the etched words, Hochweide est. 1793, barely visible through the dense lichen.   At the turn, he pulled in under the trees by the great rock and parked. Leaving his car he stretched away the long hours of driving and let the silence wrap around him. Leaning against the hood, he surveyed the forest.

Aebisher knew that he was delaying the inevitable, the conversation with Leon, but remained lingering, hoping there might be some wildlife to see. Hunting season did not start until early fall. The animals seemed to sense it and were less shy now that the summer forest was in dense bloom. Even with the evening temperature hanging just above freezing he expected to see something skirting along the roads’ edge, a trail for wildlife long before it was a highway. He waited in the fading light, leaning against the hood of his car hoping for something to appear, concentrating on the forest or the road before slowly realizing that the rain had started again, a soft cold drizzle, the wet chill of it bringing him back to the task at hand. He returned to his car, but remained for a moment collecting his thoughts. He reflected that the last time he had traveled this road had been with his wife and teenaged daughters. His wife Francisca, had insisted that he should take them to the mountains to see the old lodge. A place he had never taken them before and had never thought to. Not that he was opposed to the idea; it was just that between his medical practice and other commitments he had never made the time. Francisca, he suspected had been more interested in the value of the real estate, wanting to survey one of his holding for a potential sale. The girls were reluctant to leave the city and their friends. They had protested, sitting in sullen silence during the drive up as if they were being punished.  The visit lasted a single night.  The girls yammering that there was no internet or signal for their phones, his wife complaining about the damp smell of the place, the cold, and the isolation. In the wee hours his women had confronted him, demanding that they be driven back to the city. He had obliged them, not wanting to endure any more of their moaning and complaining. That had been a fair number of years ago; he couldn’t quite remember the date of that unpleasant journey. Now his girls were grown, done with university and married with families of their own. He enjoyed the grandchildren but his daughters were still the whiney little princesses they had always been. He wondered on more than one occasion how their husbands could put up with them. Perhaps the life of wealth and privilege that he had provided was to blame. He regretted not spending more time with them when they were children, but acknowledged that he hadn’t and probably couldn’t or wouldn’t have given his all-consuming ambition and relentless drive to be the best surgeon in the country. His wife, he knew to be cut of the same entitled cloth as his daughters. Her charities and social circle the most important part of her existence.

Aebisher had for a long time known that his role in her life had eroded and diminished too simply that of a prop she could use for her status and ego, her famous surgeon husband with the deep pockets always willing to write a check for one of her current causes, the dreary dinner parties, tedious fund raising events filling the fancy hotel banquet halls with flabby bejeweled wealthy trying to buy their way into heaven. Fawning like supplicants at the feet of the enthusiastic, false smiling, windbag masters of ceremonies reveling in hot air testimonials of their good works; all the cows and goats purchased for the poor starving Africans or downtrodden Mexicans; like droning carnival barkers or maniacal circus clowns; all of it had become maddening. It wasn’t that the causes were inherently bad, it just that it had taken on a false hollow ring, a rotten core of political correctness and holier than thou attitude that galled. Aebisher had lost patience with all the hype. He made excuses in a steadily increasing number to no longer participate. The chasm that had grown over the years between he and his wife had widened since he refused angrily to attend any more of the events he had endured for decades.  He had been overly cruel, perhaps just for the sake of cruelty, or he thought, he just needed a change after all those years playing god in the operating room. Although he had vast wealth, inherited and earned, he could no longer stand to be around his own class of people. Rich entitles snobs, the same, he acknowledged as himself. He shook his head, disgusted and wondering why. He owed his wife an apology, but that would have to wait until he returned to the city and he was done with this business with Leon.

Starting his car he took a deep breath, observing the road disappearing into the impenetrable forest just as he had remembered it when he first came to the mountain as a young boy with his father. Not wanting to encounter deer or bear, the drive was slow, gravel popping under the tires, headlight glancing off the thick forest wall. The packed dirt road remained unchanged since his ancestor had built the lodge for hunting in the eighteenth century.  It was an eight kilometer drive to the games keepers’ cabin where Leon lived, another five further up the mountain to the lodge. As he slowly drove through the dark forest, he considered the change in his outlook and why life in general had become irritating, unfulfilling and different. 

Aebisher would turn sixty-five on his next birthday, the mandatory retirement age from the Swiss Government hospital system, the day they cast you out. He thought that his irritability was due to that looming cataclysmic date, the upending of lifelong routines and the transition from something, someone to nothing, no one. Other thoughts churned up the memory of events that now returned in such a wave of utterly clear recollection that his normally calm nature had turned sour.  Whatever it was, it had become a dreary cloud that crowded and darkened his thoughts over the past year, and yet, as he proceeded cautiously along the long night forest road, he felt all of it drifting away; his simmering anger, his arrogance; his ambitions, the meaningless squabbles; all of it melting into nothingness. It was as if the immense virgin forest and invincible mountains were wiping him clean, purging him of the pettiness; reminding him that he was simply a small insignificant human of no great consequence and forcing a reawaking within himself regarding a fundamental truth he had learned once as a boy in these mountains and had forgotten as an urban man; that the all-powerful earth patiently abides.

As he drove, his thoughts about the city, his work, his family, the stresses of his complicated existence, were gone, there was just the ghostly headlights flowing out ahead on the slow dirt road, glancing off the massive wall of trees until even that was lost in a clear memory that reconstructed before his eyes as if it was happening at that very moment; a vision of his father’s rucksack and black flowing hair bobbing along far ahead on a trail in this same forest, his ten year old eyes focused on the big leather backpack, fearing he would lose sight of it and be completely lost in the strange new alien world that surround him.

It was May 1939 and he was a small, stunted, frail boy, just recovered from tuberculosis and out of the sanitarium for the first time since the age of six. They had expected him to die. The telegram, his parents had received anticipating a brief announcement of his death, had instead revealed his discharge from the children’s infirmary. A stark mountain institute located half way across the country, where the deep cold, blunt isolation and high elevation was alleged to help cure the disease. It was a place of loneness and despair for the hundreds of doomed children seemingly abandoned by their family in the out of sight, out of mind way of dealing with incurables. In four years his parents had visited him only twice and very briefly with a glass barrier separating them, advised by medical authorities to stay away, lest they be exposed to the consumption themselves.

Death and dying devoured his ward mates each long cold month. It had happened all around him, the grim, hacking, choking, death. Sunken eyed children came and went, yet he remained in his ward, scared, resigned and waiting his turn for a visitation from the taker. The dark visitor, the taker, as he came to call it, was lingering in the ceiling beams of the sanatorium, greedily waiting to pluck him away or to pick another as if it were a game of random toss. Sometimes deep in the night awakened by a nocturnal sweat, he thought he saw it, lurking above, a blurry thing, an opaque smoky creature clinging like a shapeless gecko high above, moving quickly to take them one-by-one. So many of the children in the long dim wards, coughing themselves to death or dying quietly, others crying for their long absent mothers, all carried away silently by that ravenous thing. Night after night it had been the same, the taking, the waiting his turn, yet by some unknown miracle he had not perished. Later, he would think that the hard years in that forlorn place and his unexpected survival had driven him to become a physician, to heal others and to keep the angry black gecko, at bay.

At Hochweide, the spring air was cold and thin and full of light, not the warm golden glow of the tropics he would experience many years later, but pale high altitude light, a soft severe brilliance that was pure, clean and sharp. This was the first time that he had ever been alone with his father, his hardly remembered mother left worrying and waiting back in the city, his unknown brother already away at medical school in France. The rocky trail he cautiously hiked along was rugged and narrow, forged by animals over the centuries, his father far ahead seemed to flow along as if he were himself a great forest beast and not the editor of one of his grandfather’s newspapers.

“Come on, Herman,” his father said laughing, waiting at a turn in the trail, “Catch up; we have a long way to go.”   

The trail slowly slanted downward, hugging the mountain, alternating between the dizzying heights of open precipices to giant trees clinging thickly and tenaciously to sections of the steep switch back. Finally, in the afternoon they reached a valley floor.  They continued to follow the thin animal trace, winding through meadows of tall waving grass and dazzling wild flowers in their aromatic thousands, stands of giant conifers, European larch, silver fir and Norway spruce, the air lush with new smells that rushed at him in a pure, clean flow of wild scents that overwhelmed. So different from the monotonous hospital smells of bleach, sickness and the reek of confined humans. At dusk, they came to a wide stream flowing shallow, cold and loud. He was exhausted and although his pack was small and simple, it seemed to drag at him like a great sack of stones. Tuberculosis had stolen his strength and stamina and almost his life, but his father was determined to find them and return them to his small wasted body.

“What do you think, Herman, shall we stop for the day or cross the stream?”

“We will get wet”, was all that he could manage to say, his scared lungs screaming for oxygen.

His father chuckled, sat, untied his boots and slung them into his rucksack. He rose, said, “Let’s go, boy. There is a good spot to camp on the other side.” His father picked him up as if he weighted no more than a feather, placed him on his broad shoulders and slowly waded into the clear rushing water.  They camped on the other side some distance from the stream in a small round break in the forest away from the trail, but close enough to hear an abundance of animals, calling or grunting as they moved through the dusk, with the distant rushing water providing a sweet lulling melody. They made no fire that first night, eating cold mutton and beans from aluminum tins, prepared by Leon’s mother, the lodge cook. He floated slowly into sleep under his wool blanket and a canopy of dazzling stars. Before he drifted off lost in his fatigue and soreness, he squinted into the high treetops looking for the black gecko and not seeing it, slept the exhausted, dreamless sleep of a long traveler.

The two spent weeks hiking, exploring and camping in the deep wilderness. His father taught him to fish in the rushing streams, pointing out quiet deep holes where big fish lurked or casting their lures into eddies and letting them drift downstream on the current watching for a rise to the bait. His father spoke of the streams, rushing water, quiet pools as if they were living beings, the life blood of the forest and the mountains, he would repeat this often and with a hushed religious reverence that was stirring and warming to the young Herman. He began to see what his father saw, the beauty and vibrancy of the life all around them. A razor sharp contrast to the sterile atmosphere of the only life he could remember, the sanatorium.

Often times, they sat watching the fire or wildlife, birds floating in the thin mountain air, bees in their great number industrious working the flowered meadows, once a great old bear lumbered close, both man and boy mesmerized with the heartbeat of life. They made dough dodgers from the coarse ground flower his father carried. Mixing the flower with the hard, cold water that flowed down from the snow melt, wrapping it on sticks and baking it over the fire. Herman felt the beginnings of a new strength in his spindly legs and thin arms as they foraged and fished, dining on the many wild edible plants his father knew and varieties of fat spring berries, ate the few cans of food they carried and the bread they made together and although his father carried a rifle and the deer, wild boar, and heavy mountain goats were almost tame, in their innocence and curiosity, he never raise his gun to them.

“Leave them be”, he would say to himself or the Herman. “They are sharing their time with us and this is after all their home.”

As they sat at night by their fires, they heard wolves howling and running in the distance. They felt their presence during the night and early mornings, sometimes hearing their invisible panting and inquisitive sniffing. On the third day they saw a number of them, big Alpine wolves, black, gray and well fed, lounging on the sunny rocks across a wild rushing stream, furry brown pups wrestled at the feet of their elders, all intently watching them with a keen curiosity as they cast their lures into the flowing water.  His father laughed and called across to them and told them he appreciated their company. The big creature tiled their heads and perked their ears as if somehow sensing that the souls of their ancestors where forever linked to the souls of the ancestors of the odd creatures they were viewing across the stream. Herman felt their eyes on him, but he did not feel at all afraid, these were not the eyes of the black gecko that he feared, just animals displaying a deep curiosity, perplexed at the sight of these never seen before two legged creatures that they somehow felt an urge to bond with. At least that is what he thought in his young mind and what he remembered.

On the long hike out, Herman had felt stronger and more alive than he had ever felt in his short battered life. While he did not know it, he had gained weight and the beginnings of a joy and gratitude towards his father that would help to carry him through the coming years.

He shifted gears into low. The rain was falling again, slow and spindly, a gossamer spider web of mist dancing in the headlights, obscuring visibility to a few encapsulated feet. He slowed the car to a crawl, not seeing but knowing that the ancient gate was near. To his surprise, it was open. The tall stone pillars, high arch and massive iron gates hardly visible in the darkness. A forged steel arch thick with moss and carrying the weighty name of Ezekiel Aebisher floated above, a physical reminder of a long gone man who with the centuries had been elevated to the status of a demi-god. He could not see the arch or his ancestor’s name in the thickening darkness, yet he knew it to be there, felt it. Knew it was there when his grandfather and great grandfathers passed through the gate when they were boys and young men. Ten generations of Aebisher men since old Ezekiel’s time coming on horseback or in mule-drawn wagons long before they arrived in trucks or automobiles. They had come to hunt in Ezekiel’s forest, first with their war bows and spears, then muskets, then rifles. To test their own skills and strength and perhaps their manhood against the cunning and wily Eurasian brown bear, alpine wolf, Ibex, red deer, the wild boar and to challenge the dark wilderness itself. Animals and men locked in an ancient contest of survival of the fittest, or the smartest or the swiftest. Sometimes the men prevailed, other times the animals or the howling wilderness won out. There were Aebisher men buried near the old lodge, mauled or gored or broken in falls. There were also the names of others, the vanished, the lost, those swallowed by the forest and the mountains, names etched on a tall granite obelisk that stood silently next to the graves of their brothers, cousins, ancestors, those many with no grave to mark their passing but the forest and sky and a name carved in stone. Ezekiel’s simple headstone leaning with age and crowded with thick lichen stood near the tombs of other Aebisher’s, urban men tamed in the cities, old men, civilized men, broken of their wildness, who in the end had wanted to come back once more to the mountains to rest near their brothers, in death to return to a place where they had been genuinely happy and free, where they had felt truly alive beyond all measure in the embracing brotherhood that unites those rare few who have engaged in a contest of blood that offers no quarter, an exclusive fellowship reserved only for soldiers or the huntsmen they had been.   Ezekiel’s forest. Two hundred and ninety square miles of inaccessible mountainous Swiss terrain wedged between the steep slopes of the German Alps, the cliffs of the Austrian Alps and the towering peaks of the Swiss Alps, a wilderness untouched, unblemished and as ancient as the earth itself. Trod on gently and with a sense of reverence, awe and sometimes fear by successive generations of Aebisher men; those who had penetrated this vast, dark wilderness in the hunt, pushing deeply into its jagged edge, but never into its impossibly rugged inaccessible heart.

As he drove slowly underneath the arch, the high beams revealed an enormous wild boar standing in the center of the road, some distance away, unmoving, and staring at him. Aebisher slowed expecting the creature to move, but it did not. He stopped within a few yards, watched and waited. The animal remained as a statue standing in the slow drizzle and yellow light. It glared at him with such savage malevolence that Aebisher felt his skin crawl. The beast was ancient, enormous, a solid mass of hard muscle, bone and explosive courage.  Its great shaggy coat shining deep blueish green, long thick tusks gleaming bright, steely gray bristles spiked up its massive back.  A mosaic of white jagged scars crisscrossed its snout and flanks, a testament to countless battles and countless victories over lesser rivals. It appeared to Aebisher to be as old and as mighty as the forest itself.

“A wild forest king,” he thought.   “I have never seen a boar so large, so fearless and with such deep calculating eyes.”

The defiant beast remained standing in the road for minutes perhaps weighing a decision to charge or simple to ignore this trespasser in to its realm. On paper, Doctor Aebisher owned this vast land, but he knew in his heart that no human could ever truly own it. Not him, not his kin or anyone who had come before and not old Ezekiel who had declared ownership by some ancient property right of possession or force of arms as his own. Control of this scared place was an illusion, arrogance, an invention of men. It belonged to the creatures, the forest, the rushing water, the wind, sky and the mountains. Mother Nature, that creation of humans, held a claim, but only superficially and only to the extent that man allowed her such rights. The beast’s penetrating black eyes, its audacious wildness and enormous strength appeared to send a message to Aebisher, although he could not fathom what that might be. They both continued to maintain an intense eye contact as if they were engaged in some primordial battle of wits.  Eventually, after many minutes the beast broke away, snorted, quickly turned and disappeared like a ghost into the thick forest, dismissing him as if he were of no more importance than the swatting of a fly.

As Aebisher continued his slow drive, his thoughts were consumed with the chilling fearlessness of the boar and its soul piercing eyes. There was something almost mystical about the creature, as if it had come from a different reality or era, maybe a lost spirit from old Ezekiel’s time.  He pulled his car off the road and stopped. The Game’s Keeper’s enclosure and Leon’s cabin were at the end of the dark lane that opened before him. As he let the car idle, he realized that his hands were shaking.

By August of 1939, his life was to change again. There was nothing more bright than the remembrance of the quick happy months between May to August of that year, a short joyfully recalled interlude between his release from the sanatorium and his re-acquaintance with his parents and their home in Bern. It evolved quickly into something altogether different than what he had expected and had felt it should have been. Shortly after his arrival home and the hike into the mountains, his grandfather had insisted loudly that he be placed in a school that specialized in teaching the handicapped, the illiterate or the rebellious. He was ten and painfully remembered that he could barely write his own name or read even the simplest of children’s books. The four years in the sanatorium, their collective belief that he was lost to them had created a wide gap in his education that they all thought to be insurmountable. Especially with his grandfather, a wealthy, ironfisted corporate titian, accustomed to getting his way. A man who had little patience for anyone he deemed to be weak minded, unsalvageable or poor. Given his skittishness and quiet nature, his parents had thought that perhaps the old man was right and after hearing that he too reluctantly agreed had dutifully rerolled him in a distant and expensive academy, well-kept and staffed by wonderful professors, at least according to the brochures, but in reality an isolated prison for the hard to handle young, in Herman’s’ mind scarcely better than the sanatorium. But, in the end none of that really mattered. A few weeks after he had started in that rough and tumble school, Germany invaded Poland and in September 1939, France declared war on Germany. Although they were Swiss and thought themselves as neutrals, the war would quickly suck them in to its black ugly clutches and have far reaching consequences to him personally. He was sent home to his mother and the school closed. The day after arriving, a letter was received from his brother. He told them that he had left his Paris medical school to join the French Army as a medic. That was the last they were to hear from him as the French Army collapsed under the weight of the German assault. The Germans swiftly overcame the French, Belgians and drove the British Army off the continent at Dunkirk.

The memory of his older brother and his time at home before his illness was distant, small and sketchy, in fact, even if he tried to remember him, these many years later, there was little there, except the pain of the remembrance itself. A few photographs, several school books with his name written inside the cover, an empty bedroom, but no real memory of his voice or even his face.  

Leon was there waiting in the shadows, standing as a dark specter, his rugged face appearing to float behind the weak yellow glow of a kerosene lamp, a tall, lean and silent figure, a living part of the forest and as natural and as fundamental as the big blue boar. The two nodded but no words were exchanged. He followed Leon into the cabin and without thinking sat on the same bench by the hearth as he had as a boy.  The room was lit by logs blazing in the smoke blackened stone fire place and the dull, weak lamp glow. Although, Aebisher had not been inside this cabin for decades the vivid memory of his time there came rushing back with such a wave of clear, utter remembrance that he was shaken into a stunned silence. Although he had traveled widely, successfully preformed heart surgery on presidents and kings, lectured at medical schools around the world and been at the center of social life in the city, raised to the rank of chief of surgeons in the Swiss Army, the weight of those memories were crowded out and instantly dimmed as he sat before the fire. He could hear his own heart thumping wildly as he waited for what, he did not know.  Finally, summing his courage, he turned to see Leon watching him from the small table.

Leon tilted his head towards the stove. “Tea, Herman, soup in the pot, if you like, bread there.”

The two sat silently, eating and not looking much at the other as if the long years of separation had made them both humble or shy or weary as two strangers might be at first meeting, taking the measure of the other before speaking in a language that they both could understand.  Finally, breaking the silence, Aebisher said, “Where are all the trophies?” gesturing at the walls, remembering the dozens of stiff animal heads with their frozen expressions and long dead eyes. Without looking up from his bowl, Leon grunted, “Gone, buried, bugs and rot. Best they went back to the earth.” Aebisher nodded, wondered what else to say and how to start the conversation he had carried like a stone all the way from the city and for months before this trip. 

Leon was old, but Aebisher could not remember exactly when he had been born, if he ever knew. Old when Aebisher was a boy, older still now. He appeared the same as he always had; his face, gaunt, sharp and tree bark ugly, deeply furrowed, baked brown by the sun and cured by the smoke of countless wood fires he had tended. Worn more like an old coin, smoothed in subtle ways around the edges, but still hardly different from memory. He was a tall man, not stooped by his years, wiry thin but with muscles as strong and as hard as steel cable, his long white hair, absent his forest green alpine hat, flared wild, unruly and thick. There was something about the man’s eyes that reminded Aebisher of those he had seen in a large wolf that had crossed his path once on a long ago hike; dark, calculating and intelligent eyes, deeply curious but absent meanness or the cruelty he had seen often on the faces of his own kind in the cities down below. Leon’s were the quick eyes of a man who had lived alone and survived in the mountains his whole life. Leon was watching his as well.

“You have grown fat, Herman, soft. You look tired, empty.”

Aebisher nodded, took a breath. “Yes, it’s a long drive and late.” 

Leon’s wolf eyes now fully engaged with Aebisher’s.

“The years Herman, many years have gone. What did you come up here for?”

Aebisher felt the intensity of Leon’s eyes, nodded and finally rose from the table and returned to the bench by the hearth. He sat watching the flames, his back to the older man, his thoughts churning. He finally turned and spoke, softly and slowly as if he had to force the words out.

“Well, the thing is, Leon,” he paused, looking at his hands, “the thing is, the government wants me to sell this mountain to the National Trust. The Trust has proposed to turn part of the land into a national park and lease other sections for commercial use, ski resorts, condos, maybe commercial logging, that sort of thing. He paused for a moment. I know, the company accountants tell me that the revenue stream from this place has been good, all the Russian, American and Eastern European millionaires coming in to hunt here the past decades. Ever since Grandfather opened hunting to individuals outside the family, international interest and the big money fees have been exceptional. You have been busy as well keeping things going, bringing crews in to run the lodge, and guiding the hunts. But maybe it is time I consider selling and getting on with other projects.” Aebisher had no other projects, but said it anyway. “Besides, not many of my cousins come up here anymore, do they?”

He paused and watched the fire. He knew there was deep family history here, a great weight of tradition. He could feel it all around him, in Leon’s cabin, out under the night stars, floating in the mountain air, resting in the graveyard by the lodge. Leon said nothing. He sat quietly watching, listening, sipping at his mug. Finally he rose and moved to the bench and sat beside Aebisher. The two remained silent watching the mesmerizing glow of the fire. Leon lit his pipe and crossed his legs. There was a tectonic shift happening in the silence and they both could sense it, a massive life changing transformation, the dying of an era, a strange new factor that neither could quite visualize nor articulate. The smell of blazing wood, the dancing firelight filled the small cabin with a warmth that was more than the sum of the fire, more than the radiant glow, more than the ancient log walls, the massive stone hearth or the dark cold night outside, it was a feeling of peace, tranquility and a fundamental longing for a return to a simpler time before it had all been lost in the hectic, unnatural chaos and suffocating press of teeming humanity in the city, the country and the world.  A swarm of humans as ravenous as army ants were coming to devour this wilderness, as they had devoured the cities and each other. Aebisher felt these things stir within him, not knowingly as his logical, scientific, medical mind suppressed much. The feelings nonetheless pushed at him, an uneasiness that spoke of betrayal and a breaking of an ancient trust.  He shook it off and continued quickly so as not to lose his nerve.

“You have worked for my family for a long time, Leon, a very long time. You deserve a pleasant retirement. We own you much. I own you much more.”  

Aebisher resisted the impulse to nod his head and to look away from the fire. He kept going. “I’ve arranged for you to have a place in a nice retirement community down in the city. It will all be paid for, of course, nothing you have to worry about. We will also continue to pay your salary. I’ve brought some brochures and a contract that you can look at.” He took a thick envelope out of his coat pocket and laid it on the worn wooden bench between them. “Review this later and let me know what you think. I know this is a lot to take in. There isn’t a rush. If you don’t like the looks of this particular home for the aged, there are others. It might be nice if you had some company, don’t you think?” He instantly regretted saying that doubting that it was true.

Both men continued sitting before the hearth on the long bench of Aebisher’s youth. Leon did not look at the envelope. He kept his focus on the fire stirring the embers occasionally with an iron. The logs had burned down before he spoke.

“Is this what you really want, Herman?” Before Aebisher could answer, Leon went on.

“I’ve lit a fire up at the lodge and opened one of the bedrooms for you. There is a kerosene lamp burning by the steps. There isn’t anything to eat up there, since we will not open until the fall hunt, but you know that. If you are staying a day or two, I have food here.” Leon rose from the bench.  “I’m sleeping now. Work to do at dawn, tomorrow, then.”

Leon disappeared into the back room of the cabin where he slept. Aebisher continued sitting by the fire watching the flames die down before rising and returning to his car. The temperature had dropped below freezing. Herman could feel the mountain air biting through his city clothing. When he arrived at the lodge, he was grateful for the fire Leon had set in his small bedroom, exhausted from the long drive and the conversation. Not bothering to remove his clothing he crawled under the covers and immediately fell into a long dreamless sleep.

Herman awoke before first light to the faint music of Schubert’s Impromptus in G drifting quietly through the great stone lodge. He knew this music, but had not heard it in years. An ancient vinyl record spun slowly on a well-worn record player. Melodic notes sprinkled with well memorized scratches and thumps added to and did not distract from the composition, evoking long ago memories of the listener visiting this same lodge as a child. Herman knew that his grandfather could have replaced the record a thousand times over or even hired his own pianists to play for him privately, but he had not. The record and therefore the music had belonged to his grandfather and anything new or different despite the sameness of the music or the talent of the artist would not have been right. Not in this place of solemn family tradition. Leon must have put the record on to play in his grandfather’s office for his benefit. He wanted me to hear it, he thought. The office, had remained locked in the years following his grandfather’s death for no particular reason other than there was no need for anyone to use it, including himself. He knew the way.  Herman ambled slowly across the great lodge, past the massive fireplace, down a cold narrow stone encased hallway and into the old man’s now open office. The record limped along, wobbling slightly, the magnificence of the composition rising and blending with years of dust, ancient wood and stone, the fine Persian carpets, artwork, Chinese vases, tall cases of hide bound books, heavy wooden furniture covered in drop cloths all creating a richness as strong and as heady as the dusty bottle of eighty year old Scotch that sat untouched in a fine leaded crystal on an enormous desk which had served many generations of Aebishers, including it was always rumored, old Ezekiel.

The doctor stood, hands firmly clasped behind his back, dwarfed before massive cathedral windows that consumed an entire back wall of the office. The view was magnificent. High sweeping forests gave way to steep valley slopes cluttered with tumbled boulders the size of mansions, small plateaus or sharp narrow grounds flush with lanky grass the color of pure emeralds, making several groups of scattered mountain goats appear as wild floating specks of late spring snow; a few brightly lit waterfalls crashed white and misty to the valley floor, the craggy terrain and small flat meadows were interspersed with a few spotted deer, far below, a meandering river flush and roaring with the snow melt glittering in the rising sun as liquid diamonds.  Above it all, the craggy Swiss and Austrian Alps draped in granite gray and rimmed with brilliantly reflective glacial ice, rising up and up until vanishing into dense billowing clouds. Herman himself, despite his sixty-five years and growing paunch, stood ramrod straight and silhouetted in miniature against the windows. He was remarkably tall for a Swiss who had suffered much illness as a child, born with his mother’s sharp blue eyes and adorned now with a silver mane that curled and splashed on his collar as a foamy ocean tide. Life sized portraits of his grandfather, his grandfather’s younger brothers and several great grandfathers, glared downward from the lofty stone wall, stern, powerful men, judging, scolding, demanding perfection and success. A smaller portrait of old Ezekiel, the warrior, dressed in plate armor and a sporran helmet, his beard as fiery red as the city burning in the background. The old painting was relegated to a far corner as if he had been eclipsed by his descendants.  They were all long dead, yet he felt their presence, Ezekiel, the soldier, the other musty old gentleman, hard, ruthless entrepreneurs, at the height of their power and arrogance captured by the artists as fierce warrior-like gods, as unmoving and as unassailable as the Alps themselves. The morning sun unhurriedly rising behind the mountains projected elongated shadows and fine strands of golden light as thin and a straight as harp strings, translucent through the vail of gently falling spring snow. The all-encompassing windows heavy with colorful stain glass embellishments and aged pulled the thin light in as a powerful vortex creating a momentary illusion that the images of the old men were animated, breathing and alive. Demanding eyes and stern faces loomed large in the half light, towering over him, shaking fingers, ridiculing, as his grandfather had done when he had been a sickly child, commanding obedience, insistent that he stop being a weak, ill, sniveling little nothing. The old man had thought him intolerably stupid and had said so to his mother.  But the grandfather was wrong.  Regardless, he had come to terms with his childhood long ago and had forgiven his grandfather his many sins. He observed the paintings for a long moment seeing them as they had been, frozen in time, presiding like ruthless monarchs from their lofty perch, a vision of elegance and heartless superiority, robber Barons in every sense, capitalist giants, each more successful than the next. Their lives overlapping as the webs of poisonous spiders, linked yet distant, lurking in their own corners until a victim drew their common attention. They had engaged in century’s long competition with one another, the world and lesser men had not mattered except as a vehicle to wealth, nothing counted except to win their strange, clawing barbaric race to accumulate wealth on a colossal scale.  What little time they spared from empire building had been lavished in prodigious quantities on their great houses in Bern, Paris, London and their chateaus and vineyards over in France.

The doctor was a spare and a poor one at that, by the collective reckoning of the Aebisher clan, an orphan within a family, packed away to an expensive boarding school or to Hochweide for the summers with Leon. The hazy memory of a loving mother and father warmed him at this point in his life no more than a distant fire. Yet with the titian of a grandfather there had been a few gracious moments, he conceded, when the greedy old man had stooped to share a small measure of time, a smile or nod of approval, moments that remained like shining pearls, burning brightly in the vast barrenness of his childhood.  The colossal portraits filled the office with a looming weight and suffocating presence, pushing out all else. He forced himself to look away, wondering if he was still trying to please the old man and his avaricious brothers, acknowledged that it probably was true in some small way. Hating himself for that and the resentment, jealousy of the Aebisher empire, the feeling of abandonment by his young mother and rage at the old man, a rage that smoldered, flaring less and less often with the passage of years, but still an unhealed wound, sighing at the portraits.  He had long ago given up wishing for something that they had not possessed in life; a tiny modicum of love or humanity, or perhaps, simply an acknowledgement of his existence. That hope had died incrementally, with the passing of years as each of them had followed his mother into a cold grave on the mountain.

“Hope, he said, springs eternal.”

Or was it his own ego that drove him into this lifelong dilemma. A little of both, he thought.

“Self-psychoanalysis isn’t very helpful at this juncture. Save this conversation for the bartender.”

As the sunrise gathered, Schubert’s piano concerto was rising to its glorious end. The doctor questioned if the final notes of the music would mark the last chapter of what generations of his ancestors had created and the good works he had built on the spoils of their greed, with his skilled hands on the operating tables and in the donations he had made to his wife’s many causes.  He wondered. In all the years that had passed, there had been no forgetting. All the work of his life, his achievements, his world travels and family had been to no avail. As he stood in the great room, under the watchful eyes of the ancients, he realized somewhere in the back of his mind or deeply embedded in his soul, he had always been at Hochweide.  His father’s spirit was here, of that he was certain. His mother had died here, not long after receiving a telegram from the RAF stating in cold blocked lines, that his father’s Spitfire had vanished in the English Channel. Herman had last seen her, the day that she too disappeared, sitting near one of the deep crevasses, with her arms around herself rocking as if someone was holding her. The loss of his brother and husband had been the breaking point for her. He had witnessed her unobserved and had hiked away, too upset himself to want any company. Why he had not gone to her that afternoon in the forest was something that he would never forgive himself for. Perhaps, he could have saved her, perhaps not, but that doubt was always there lurking like an open wound, crowding his dreams. They never found her body, despite the long search.  Leon had kept looking, long after all the others had given up and as far as he knew, still searched for her bones, if for no other reason than to honor her and his lost father. The two of them had been his friends after all, perhaps the only true friends he had ever really had.

Aebisher understood as a grown man, why his father had left the relative safety of neutral Switzerland to join the fight against the brutal Nazi’s, but still, to his shame, clung to a childhood resentment that his father had left them adrift, that his leaving had resulted in his mother’s death and him being left an orphan. Much later, as an adult, he had discover an old attic box containing letters from his father’s commanding officer and fellow airman, telling how he had alone, incredibly and fearlessly taken on a flight of German bombers while his wingmen had engage the bomber’s fighter escort. He had downed all four of the big Heinkel aircraft, one by one in a wild desperate fight in the high clear altitudes above the English Channel, all of it played out in a crystal blue sky and in the golden blaze of the evening sun. As the last German aircraft fell as a fiery mass of burning metal and shattered men, he had radioed, calmly stating that he had been wounded in both legs and that his plane so badly damage by the German dorsal gunners that he would have to ditch. His Spitfire was last seen spiraling slowly downward in a thick trail of boiling white smoke disappearing into the yawning twilight waters of the tempestuous channel. Herman wondered if the lives of those Germans or the Londoners his father had undoubtedly saved had been worth his own life. He did not know. Conceivably his father had thought so. What he remembered now was the pain and anger of loss. Both parents had left him adrift again as they had at the sanatorium. He only really knew them for a happy few months before they were gone.   

Herman realized that the music had stopped. He looked slowly around the stone room as if examining it for the first time. It appeared smaller then he remembered, more compact, less intimidating. The big desk where he now sat appeared to be just a desk and not the intimidating thrown of hostility. His grandfather sitting there, tall, gaunt, unshaven, shouting orders or swearing at the woodsmen and mountaineers he had hired to search for his mother. Mostly the old man had remained drunk, gulping directly and deeply from a seemly unending supply of fresh bottles, glaring at Herman as if he were to blame for his father and brother’s death and his mother’s disappearance, shattering the empty bottle against the stone walls of the office, sleeping at the desk, cursing the men in their failure to find the missing woman, damning his mother for her stupidity. After weeks he sent the men away. He told Herman that he would have someone take him back to the boarding school. What possessed Herman to defy the old man, at that moment, he did not know.

“No!” he had yelled, “I’m going to stay here! I have to stay! I’m going to find my mother!”

“Do you have pig shit for brains boy!” the old man roared. “Your mother is long gone, dead most likely. Down some crevasse or swept away in the spring melt. Killed herself like the damned stupid fool that she was. You are going back immediately and you are going to learn something at that damned school. I’m not paying all that money for nothing! I’ll beat your arrogant little ass bloody, now, get over here!”

The grandfather flew out of his chair, but tumbled over on to the floor too drunk to stand.

“Damn your eyes boy, help me up!”

Leon was waiting outside the office for Herman and came in and got the old man up and seated back in the chair. Once settled, the grandfather opened a fresh bottle of scotch and took a long swig. Despite the cool mountain air that rushed through the open windows, his grandfather appeared as a ruddy, bearded, disheveled heap of a man, nothing like the portrait that hung behind him of the high wall. Herman would be ushered in to visit with him in future years at his corporate headquarter offices in Geneva. There the man was a cold sober vision of the well-dressed and commanding business man that he was, but to Herman, he would always remain that crumpled old man behind the big desk in that lost summer of sorrow.

Leon had been there that day standing by the massive desk speaking quietly and steadily, his voice as calm and as powerful a mountain breeze. It was an odd thing to witness his grandfather and Leon talking, having an actual conversation as two close confidents or brothers might or imaginably as a father with a favored son. His grandfather was the head of a vast empire of manufacturing, newspaper publishing and real estate development among many other worldwide holdings, one of the wealthiest men in Switzerland and Europe for that matter. Herman would never witnessed him having such a conversation with anyone; the old man dominated from his board room like an emperor; he ordered, demanded, dictated, yelled or cursed at all lesser humans with the single and solitary exception of Leon. Herman only caught snippets of their conversation that afternoon in the office, Leon saying that it would be a good thing for Herman to stay in the mountains for the remainder of the summer. That both Leon and his mother promised that they would see to Herman’s lessons and that work around the lodge and in the forest would help to distract him from the losses and the tragedy of it all. The whole time, both men glanced in his direction, his grandfather scowling and shaking his head, while Leon smiled, nodded and winked once at him. In the end he stayed. His grandfather left without a word the following morning. That first summer had been the hardest. With each year of school and the succeeding summers in the mountains, the pain of remembrance would lessened incrementally replaced with a growing joy and love of the wilderness, the mountains, Leon and his mother. He continued to come to Hochweide every summer directly from school. Except for one fall as a teenager brought up by his grandfather’s driver, when the foliage blazed crimson, ochre and golden and the air snapped with a hard startling cold on the cloudy day they buried Leon’s mother in the quiet graveyard by the Lodge. Although she had been no more than the lodge cook and housekeeper for her entire working life, his grandfather stood there with his hand on Leon’s shoulder and sobbed. Both he and Leon quietly wept as well, but seeing his grandfather grieve like that had shocked him. This little woman had obviously meant something to the old man. Herman had not realized that the man had feelings for anyone.  

He would continue his visits and work with Leon until he entered medical school and his life spun off in another direction.  Now he had returned, almost four decades later. As he stood in the old lodge office under the great windows, draped in the morning light, he felt that all the intervening years had simply disappeared and collapsed into the current moment. That the memory of what he saw and felt was more real than the reality of what he was seeing around him. He felt both joy and sadness and the strong, compelling and urgent need for the reconstruction of his memories of his father and mother as they had been, when he had briefly known them, the young people that they were and would forever remain, much younger than he was now, memories that perhaps only he and Leon now kept alive, remembrances that would die with their own passing as if his parents too were dying a second time.

His thoughts drifted to Leon’s mother. She had been the gentle and caring grandmother that he never had. The memory of her too would die again with their passing. They were all there in his thoughts as he returned to the great hall of the lodge. On a long ancient table, he found a newly stacked set of his old rugged mountain clothing, his father’s sturdy ruck sack, his rifle, axe, and worn hunting knife and in the pack a trove of dehydrated food, sleeping bag, tent, coil of rope and other supplies. Leon must have taken the things out of storage, he thought. His gear was ready to go, organized as he would have organized it. He examined the old familiar equipment, wondering why Leon had taken the trouble to find these things. Then he knew. The old urge to explore, his forgotten love of the mountains and his desire to renew himself prompted him to quickly change into the clothing. Herman felt exuberant, like his younger self and not the older man that peered back at him from the mirror. He rubbed his face and felt the stubble of a beard sprouting. He resolved to keep it.  After lacing his old boots, he returned to his grandfather’s office. At the desk, he drafted a letter to his wife, one to his employer announcing that he was retiring a few months early starting from today and another to his solicitors. He thought about writing something to his daughters but chose instead to compose a short letter to each of his grandchildren. He scribbled a note to Leon telling him he had decided not to sell. He briefly examined the documents from the National Trust and the unsigned offer to purchase Hochweide. The offered price he calculated in his head converting the Swiss Francs into Euros and US Dollars.  It was the equivalent of a little over a billion US dollars. A billion US Dollars. Herman pondered the number for a moment. The offer stated it would be free of Swiss taxes. He had more money than he could possibly spend in a hundred lifetimes already. Why had he considered selling? Perhaps the city life had dulled the memory of these mountains and the lodge. Here he stood in the great lodge of his forefather and his youth. Herman, slowly shook his head. The money was not even close to what he felt this place was worth to him, to Leon and to all the other Aebisher clansmen going back across the centuries. Somewhere out there was the resting place of his mother. There were other Aebishers’ who had disappeared in the wild places of Hochweide, or, he thought, they were not really lost at all, their spirits were simply now a part of the fabric of this living forest. There was no price that could be placed on that. He tossed the documents into the fireplace and watched them burn with a satisfaction that resonated through him and gave him strength for what he was about to do next.

In all the succeeding years, Herman had never returned to his father’s trail. That special time with his dad was a memory that he held as a sacred treasure. From the lodge, he loaded up his gear and set off determined to return to that place and to reignite and reconnect with the buried feelings he had experienced. It was almost as if he had been reborn in that long ago valley, released from the hospital, discharged from the immediate prospect of death, set free in the wild to flourish and to grow. There was a sense of openness and happiness that he had not experienced in years. He hiked as if a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. The sky was clear, the wind steady. The hefty rucksack felt light. He felt light. All the years of city life and the serious practice of medicine had weakened his sensitivity to the many moods of the Alps. Now like a blind man, whose sight was slowly returning, he knew that the weather was changing. There were signs that a storm was approaching, he could smell in on the wind and see the distant tree top sway. He marched onward. The forest felt alive, the light seemed brighter, more intense and cleaner. His pace was fast and despite passage of time, there was much he clearly recalled about the direction and area he traversed. Enormous trees, massive in girth grasped for the sky, granite boulders the size of hills and silvery crystal stones the size of automobiles littered the ground, sea green ferns stood tall and thick and a vast profusion of alpine vegetation covered every diminutive spot that the sun managed to penetrate. The animal trail he followed was just visible in the shadowy light, worming through fallen timbers, around obstacles and decades of forest debris. The landscape had changed but a little, as if time had preserved that part of the mountain in stasis, waiting quietly, patiently knowing that he would someday return. After half a day of hiking into the serene tranquility of the black forest, he emerged at the edge of a towering cliff that plunged as sharply as a razor cut, falling a vertical and dizzying kilometer. At the breathtaking edge the nearly invisible animal trace chiseled downward hugging the granite face of the abyss like a thin twisting snake. Far below his father’s lost valley stretched to the base of the cloud obscured mountains opposite. As he navigated the breathtaking switch back and he could see a great distance into the mountains, it began to snow, at first lightly, then more steadily. The air was cold; he could feel the temperature dropping, the storm thickening and the light weakening.  The sky over the high mountain peaks and glacier turned steely gray then an ominous black. A curtain of whirling snow descended quickly obscuring, encapsulating and blinding.  Visibility dropped to a few blurry meters. An intensely powerful spring snowstorm was plunging across the Alps roaring downward from Germany and thrusting southward propelled by a fierce artic tempest.  Despite the dark storm and the force of the wind pushing at his thick parka, he managed to reach the valley floor by the late afternoon. He found it covered in a growing mass of deep powdery snow. Herman knew the direction, his internal compass guiding him on. Ahead of him, the deep tracks of a heavy animal made it easier to follow than his dead reckoning. He tracked as quickly as he could manage his legs tiring while his spirits soared. The gusting snow covered the imprints of the determined creature ahead almost as soon as he passed them. Forward and barely visible a ghostly brute was pushing steadily through the drifts, following the ancient route, breaking trail for him. The whiteout was almost compete, but the creature was there as a hazy visible then invisible apparition. At first he thought it was a woolly bear but soon realized to his amazement that it was the big blue boar he had seen the night before, steadily leading him deeper and deeper into the heart of the forest valley. He did not question this or worry about the appearance of the now familiar swine as his thoughts were consumed by the storm. Herman recognized the weather was unusual for this time of year, unpredictable, tricky and murderous if not watched closely and understood completely.  Schooled by Leon in the unpredictable nature of the wilderness and in the skills needed to survive, he was not particularly worried. Even with the passage of so many years, and his mounting fatigue, he had not forgotten what he needed to do. He could not see much, but his mind was active, planning for all possibilities. This storm was not so different from others he had encountered; immense, demanding and treacherous but only a match for the unprepared, or those who let fear take them down its unpleasant path. Leon had taught him to respect such a high strung tempest. As the blizzard grew in intensity, the wind hurled the snow harder and faster making it difficult to see even a foot ahead.  The blue boar was so close now; he could have touched its flank. The wind moaned through the treetops, great drifts banked where the wind was able to penetrate into the forest depth. The blue boar leading, the trek continued, onward and deeper into the valley, he knew that he would find his parents souls resting in the heart of the mountain, in the place where he and his father had camped those many years ago. The storm he thought would bring them forth, the animal was leading him to the place that shone in his memory as a holy light. Why he had this notion, he did not exactly know. It was something that he felt was real and had been with him for a long time, perhaps since he was a boy. The boar led him to the right place, he could see little, but felt it as sure as life. The big animal disappeared into the white as he turned off and moved under the trees. He blinked after the boar, but saw nothing, uncertain if it had been real or imagined or perhaps the spirit of old Ezekiel bringing him home.

While the storm raged all around, the shelter of old growth timber stood as firm and as stalwart as a tightly packed formation of determined soldiers, the massive trees as wide and tall as the redwoods he had once seen in America. They held the storm at bay as if the giants had anticipated his arrival, embracing and protecting and perhaps recognizing and remembering the fragile boy he had once been; a perceptive and sensitive child whose broken heart had been repaired, renewed and reborn to life in this wilderness, a heart that had been filled to the brim with an abiding love for this land and all its great diversity of life. The heartbeat of the earth had synchronized with his own small heartbeat. It had been lost to him, now it returned in a rush. The old emotions rose up in him as he moved deeper into the darkness, feeling the way by instinct. The wail of the wind diminished the further he progressed. Until he switched on his headlamp, it was darker than the darkest night. Under their massive outstretched branches on a spot where no snow could penetrated, and where the remnants of his father’s old rock fire pit was visible as a soft ring through decades of debris, he pitched his tent and gathered fallen branches for a fire.  Over a small glowing campfire, in the heart of the wilderness and under the steady whistle of the wind streaming high above, warmed and enfolded in the cathedral of creation and embraced by the night, he found his parents again. As he floated lightly on the yielding currents connecting wakefulness and sleep, Herman told his mother and father about his life, how he had lived it, the sorrow of missing them and how he loved them still.