Holding Land   The return: everything was as we left it, mild winter, no heavy predation yet. The water I mean some never drank. And so we go about the place and touch each thing.   I know a land where the music of the herbs as they fell behind my scythe astonished me. I stood still in a biological eternity: life in the office, life in the trees, birds on the bush.   The mouth of the predator smells of unrestrainable fury and if you want to have them you have to have lots of prey.   Wolves don't make deer better except by being better at hiding from wolves, what's left. None of them return to the open places or the feeding stations and we don't either.   Small and abundant valley we saw the timbers out and pack them in, lumber piling up, roughcut spruce and balsam on our backs, uphill, on the way in. Always I have been afraid of this moment: breaking the land.   O well we say let the damn wind blow. Well, I hope it will bring something in and there we will go again. as when packing out, with it, a step at a time.