I go into a part of the oak wood which has been a little more protected ... a hollow fenced in and fringed by strands of bull briar. It is an open space where deer have come in to paw the ground and settle down at night. Skunks have left little holes where they clawed into the leaf mold on their hunt for grubs. Towhees have scratched the leaves apart. Cottontails have stopped here, hopped, nibbled, and jumped away. This land is mine. The deed is recorded in my name. But I cannot claim to have put it to better use than the animals to whom it is public property. It belongs to the deer, the skunk, the rabbit, and the towhee, who eat, pass through, or take shelter there. With my approach, of course, the whole question of tenure is rudely solved, except for the countless stay-at-home organisms in the ground beneath me. The deer turns once with a large gaze, then bounds away with its white, electric brush of a tail flung up. “Boom!” a partridge thunders up, cuffing leaves and twigs with its wings, and hurtles off through the trees. A crow gives a warning call as it flies overhead. I am allowed the land if I want it, though not much trust is involved. But why should I expect comfort or acceptance, in this open realm of risk? Neither man nor deer was mother to the skunk. It knew its own. Chance meetings will do, for the love I find in them. On the calendar this is the last day of October, and it has some justice to the title. The lunar months mirror the general character of the year’s transitions. In spite of the fact that all single days are lost in the passage of light and we are left behind, this one seems full of an end and a turn to something else. The local life is making its last forays, before a time of dormancy, hibernation, or struggle to survive. A mourning cloak butterfly beats lightly by, with no other companions to be seen. I find some mud dauber wasps, flies, and a cicada killer, all hibernating in a pile of rotten logs. The woods are full of the intermittent beauty of the last oak leaves, red, with a deep tone in the gray day, and the sumacs still show their shining raspberry color on the surrounding slopes.