Yesterday, I went out with my friends to a patch of forest in my hometown. We'd never wandered down the trails before, so we had little idea of what we were doing and where we were going, especially since the fallen leaves of late autumn had pretty well obscured the path.
We wound up following a semi-hidden trail that someone had marked out with plastic tied to twigs, and found ourselves at a hidden beer-drinking spot. Someone had left a bunch of cans in a pile at the foot of an old folding chair. There was some other junk around like a nearly-prisine Radio Flyer wagon (full of water and leaves) and the remains of the beginning of a wooden fort someone had tried to build.
And an intact backpack.
It was covered in dirt, but it was still good, so I took it. I needed a new backpack anyway.
And then we turned around and tried to get back the way we had gone -- only to discover that we couldn't see the path we had just been taking. That's the New England woods for you. Full of briars and brambles thorn bushes and underbrush, because unlike the Amerindians who came before, palefaces don't burn out the underbrush, so our version of woodland is mostly a trackless maze.
I had the feeling that I had taken a treasure from the forest, and now it wasn't letting me go.
But we were led to the safety of the main trail -- which we hadn't actually found at any point when we were going in -- by my friend's little dog. Maybe. It might have been a coincidence. Or maybe that dog knew what he was doing.