QUOTE : But knowing that moose had returned to Vermont in his lifetime pleased him enormously. It was the idea that things repaired themselves, that if you backed off a little and didn’t ask too much of the world then it would meet you halfway. This was one of the few corners of the planet that had gotten better in the last century, he thought—greener, healthier. The damage that too many sheep had done was wearing off. Or maybe you didn’t even need to think of it as damage. It had been good then, when Vermont was full of farmers, and it was good now, when Vermont was full of trees. Life ebbed and flowed, came and went. Goodness didn’t demand the one-way arrow toward Progress and More. It was, he thought, a blessing to have lived out his life in a place that spun slowly like that yellow leaf, an eddy in the American rapids, a place that was shrinking when most of the country was growing growing ever-growing. A place where—yow, a place where a grouse might fire up at any moment from right under your legs, scaring the wits out of you as it somehow flew off at top speed between the tangle of trunks and branches. A place where moss covered the back of a giant boulder, what the geologists delightfully called an “erratic” dropped in place when the last glaciers melted away. A place where the beech leaves still clung brown to the branches, shaking a little in the too-warm breeze.