The peace and grandeur of the forest are interrupted by a slight movement off to our right. In the leaves beneath a large, rotting log a tiny shrew restlessly sniffs with its long nose. It moves in short thrusts through the dead leaves, searching with a fierce intensity for worms, crickets, or any animal small enough to overcome. Impelled by hunger, this normally nocturnal animal has been emboldened by the shadiness to venture into the cove forest’s subdued daylight. The shrew is just one infinitesimal part of the great forest, in which thousands of living things seek the energy and nutrients needed for survival. The shrew hunts, as it were, a fragment of the sun’s energy, transmitted through plants and then through the small plant-eating creatures that it preys upon. Crossing a log bridge below a waterfall, we see fish darting under boulders. Spray from the falls drifts over us and onto the dark thickets of rhododendron crowding the stream banks. We try to keep the cool water in our minds as we start up the long switchbacks ascending the valley’s south-facing slope. Trees of the cove forest, buckeye, hemlock, sugar maple, and their many associates, gradually become scarcer, and oaks and hickories become the dominant trees. Halfway up the slope we have climbed from coolness into warmth. Here in the more open oak forest, the sun beams down through the foliage, heating the ground and air. A few gulps from the canteen and we can face the last switchbacks up the slope and onto a sunstruck, rocky ridge. The sun has real authority here. Winding more gradually upward along this ridge, the trail now takes us beneath pines, trees that are adapted to such hot, dry situations. If it weren’t for the trail, we would have a tough time making our way through the thickets of mountain-laurel spread beneath the scattered pines. A towhee, lover of such thickets, calls its name as we pass. In one stretch we go through a brown patch of dead pines. After several mild winters, southern pine beetles have multiplied and feasted here. If the next winter is not cold enough to kill most of the beetle larvae, the patch of dead pines may increase greatly in size. The trail now slants off onto the north side of the ridge. Right away the air is somewhat cooler here where part of the day the ridgetop shields it from the sun. The pines quickly disappear, and beeches, yellow birches, maples, and buckeyes form the forest. You New Englanders should now feel quite at home, among these tree species that accompany us all the way across the mountain’s north and east flank. Then, as we approach the 1,500-meter (5,000-foot) level, the dark spires of scattered spruces begin to appear, signaling the nearness of the Smokies’ crowning forest.