Fog hung dull and thickening in the trees.

“It’ll clear up soon,” I told myself, trying to trick my mind into believing I could see the tree line just as good as a few minutes ago.

Rain dripped steadily as the footsteps of death from the branches above me and onto my raincoat. It was slow at first, licking the fabric of the coat, tasting its fiber. Nothing is ever waterproof under a waterfall. The rattling tempo of the drops increased.

“It’ll slow soon,” I told myself. The weather man is a false prophet after all, he’s already been wrong once this week. Although he had been predicting sun and we had gotten rain instead. It didn’t matter, the past doesn’t set the pattern for the present. (A lie)

The rain fell harder and faster, building in momentum, strengthening the fog, battering the leaves, like the laughing feet of Seraphim.

I stopped lying to myself and stood up slowly. The fog was too thick to see for a shot anyway. I glared shallowly into the mist, listening for anything through the patter of consolidated clouds on my hood. An entire herd of elk could gallop past right now and I’d never know it. I peered at the shadows in the mist a moment longer, trying to convince them they were elk but they remained, stubbornly, trees.

I shrugged and slowly started up the mountainside. My plan was to make a large loop through the trees and back down towards my four-wheeler and spend the last hour and a half of watery daylight watching a clear-cut. Provided my slow walk through the rain didn’t lead me to any elk that is.

I waded my way through the wet brush, eyes always on the move, trying to feel the ground through my boots and not bite the dirt courtesy of a slick stick. Shoving through a wannabe hedge of small trees I stood on the side of a meadow of dead grass and fog. Trails beam out from it like the broken spokes of a wrecked bicycle. Elk, deer and bear wander through here, slow and unhurried searching for food or just passing by.

But the fog sits like an unwanted truth and obscures everything that isn’t there.

It’s October, late rifle elk season, the leaves are falling, the drought of summer finally ended and the taste of winter is already in the air. Some people up here say Idaho only really has two seasons; winter and getting ready for winter. They always smile and chuckle at that, it’s truer than we’re usually willing to admit.

I squint and stare hard at the falling rain. The air isn’t cold enough yet for snow but there are very small flakes in the deluge. Shredded, grey, sad looking things, ash from the slash burning a few miles away. It’s too warm for anything else.

I wander upwards through the meadow, treading slowly and watching the shadows in the mist grow stronger and materialize, none of them into elk. A waterfall is streaming from the heavens now, God’s bathtub unplugged and flushed down to earth. This is the world now, the mist, the shadows, the rain (just mist brought to maturity) and me. Dead grass squelches beneath my boots, soggy ground and a dome of white above.

There’s a heavy expectancy that always comes with the fog. At least for me. As if it’s dead soul of Cthulhu vanquished, taking one last look at the world. The massive self certain way it spreads across the land, inevitable, impractical, able to change the appearance of everything it embraces and entwines. It creeps into the mind, demanding its attention and summoning thoughts from the depths. Mystery and majesty are in the mist, it is the clothing of the mountains, flying from them in ragged scraps, crowning them, highlighting their ridges and draws until the scene is so beautiful the mind can only take it in small parts and pieces. Even captured and reduced to a small screened screed we can scarce grasp the full poem of its beauty.

The meadow has been crossed, newborn streams stepped over and the trees loom tall and watchful from the fog, dripping coldly as the wind pulls at their crowns. There’s a trail here, a muddy ribbon winding across the mountain and up to the ridge like the ruins of a Roman highway. Someone hauled a chainsaw up here years ago and made it, cutting through logs and brush and  branches. But forests and the wind are alive, time has worked its entropy and the trail has faded until only the sharp eyed can track its once well used way. But here it is open and wide, someone roaded a four-wheeler in here last year and hauled out their elk. Better than hiking out with it quartered on pack-boards but the Forest Service doesn’t take kindly to such excuses. If, that is, they find out.

Somehow it’s raining harder, the stops are out, an entire sea has been evaporated and sent to Idaho and is all being poured out now, laughing at my raincoat, seeping into the layers beneath.

“Bully!”

I grin thinking of Theodore Roosevelt in Dakota, chasing antelope across the prairie, through the rain and muck, undaunted, grinning like a fool and hell bent on success. I am by no means him, for one I’m a better shot, but he haunts my mind just as he haunts this nation. I could get out of the weather, hike back to the four-wheeler and drive home, the elk are probably bedded down anyway. But I have Carhartt to keep me dry, Roosevelt didn’t. I keep slow walking, watching for the flick of an ear or twitch of an antler.

As much as this may suck it’s still far better than many things I could be doing. Elk burger beats looking at spreadsheets any day. And walking through the rain revives the soul.

In the mist you can change the world. Ignore the gun and manufactured clothes, imagine them an atlatl and skins and you are a man out of time universal to every age. The hunter in the rain, seeking his meal, or keeping a wary eye for his enemies. Perhaps you’re Kennewick Man, testing his body against the world,  seeking adventure in a dark spot of history, or mere survival. A nobody who is famous simply as a man who shouldn’t be where he was found, made an enigma by time’s mist.

You feel as though you are walking the world’s edge, or passing from one to another. In the mists the ghosts of the past come out, their insubstantial forms invisible, watching you as you pass judging the legacy of history. The world might end while you’re here and you wouldn’t know it, maybe it already has. Who emerged from a fog to find Pearl Harbor had been attacked and we were at war?

I know of men who were hunting in the backcountry of Alaska while two towers burned to the ground in New York. They waited to be picked up by grounded planes. They thought the world had ended, in a manner it had, but they waited, planning survival, scheming to hike out, follow the river and pray. But the planes came back and they were spared the adventure.

All it would take is an ambitious sun flare. That’s what they say anyway.

The arcane trunks of the forest give way to log decks and a muddy scar along the ridgetop. Three roaring streams tumble down and past from the right, fueled by the more than ample rain, it’s the road the firefighters made in the summer to reach the isolated flames contentedly eating the forest.

I look both ways, the road rises and curves with the land and the short distance I can see is made shorter by the blowing waves of fog. There are washed out elk tracks in the road, a lot of them. This is the main ridge on this side of the mountain, stretching and climbing up to the summit, the one that everything crosses if it’s moving. Perhaps I can catch something coming across, perhaps I’ll build a fire and warm up if I find a decent spot.

I turn and walk down the ridge of the world, into the mist.