Longleaf. Roger Reid

sixty degrees on that compass; that’s three hundred sixty different directions. One of those directions would take me back to camp, and maybe forty of them would get me close enough that I could find the camp. That still left three hundred twenty wrong directions I could take. No sense taking a step in any direction when for every one right step there could be eight wrong steps. I checked the ground for ants, sat down in the pine straw and leaned my back against a tree.

      Maybe if I stay quiet and listen I can hear those motor home air conditioners, I thought. Nope, all I heard were the motors of the forest. That’s what it sounded like. Motors. I’ve read books and stories where they describe the sounds of a forest in musical terms: the song of the whippoorwill, a symphony of crickets, the ballad of bees, things like that. In the longleaf forest at mid-morning, the birds and the bugs didn’t seem to be making music; they were all business. Millions of organic motors were revving up and drowning out any hope I might have of hearing the electric motors back at the campgrounds. I heard one of those living engines fly in over my head while making a rapid-fire chirping sound.