Someone Keeping Warm

I was exploring one morning in my SUV, scanning the landscape for something to catch my eye when I came across this valley yawning open in the otherwise dense timber.

I stepped out to consider it and caught the smell of woodsmoke. Someone keeping warm.

It pulled my nose toward the trees off to the left, somewhere.

Who had made the fire? 

A party of hunters who had just shoveled dirt over the coals? 

Another photographer who had endured the freeze to catch the stars over the ridge? 

A runaway lying low in the timber? 

A troop of scouts earning their winter merit badges? 

Old friends keeping a yearly tradition alive in their secret spot?

There was no visible column of smoke cutting through the pines. No murmur of voices. No clatter of gear. No idling truck engine. The smoke had been entirely diffused as it filtered through the thick canopy.

It was just me, the odor of smoke and the frost being softened by the sunlight in the twenty-degree air.