Foggy Forest

The path was there yesterday; this morning the fog has taken it, and the trees are the only thing left to trust.

The forecast promised a clear morning; the mountain had other plans. She steps off the last stair of the trail and the fog closes behind her like a door. Fir needle is the first thing she trusts: green, cold, faintly citrus, the smell of a branch snapped in the hand. For a while there is nothing else. Then, as the sun works at the mist from above, elemi rises from the damp bark around her, lemony and peppery, a resin that seems to warm the air by a single degree. The path reappears in fragments. By the time she reaches the ridge the fog has thinned to threads, and what remains is cedar, dry and clean as a freshly sharpened pencil, the smell of a cabin she has not yet found. She hears an axe, somewhere below. She decides not to call out yet.