We Found A Perfectly Made Bed Of Moss Nine Miles From Any Trail

My partner and I go off-trail, which we are allowed to do where we live, and which we do because we like the quiet and we hate people.

Nine miles in, in a stand of old trees, there was a bed.

I do not know what else to call it. It was two metres long, maybe a metre wide, and it was made of moss that had been taken from somewhere else — you could see the scars, the pale patches on the rocks it had been pulled from — and laid down in overlapping courses, like roof tiles, with the growing side up.

At the head end there was a rolled log with more moss packed round it.

It was the most careful thing I have ever seen in a wood.

My partner, who is not fanciful, knelt down and put her hand on it. Then she took her hand away very quickly and stood up and said we were going.

It was warm.

Not sun-warm. There was no sun on it; we were under canopy in October. It was body-warm, in the middle, in a hollow the shape of something long.

We walked out fast and we did not stop for the four hours it took, and about halfway she said, "It was two metres."

I said yes.

She said, "It's longer than you."

I am six foot two.

We did not report it. Report it to whom? For what? There is no crime and no missing person and no story that does not end with a ranger writing "hikers" in a box and moving on.

I have looked for it once since, alone, which I did not tell her about, and I did not find it, and I was more relieved than disappointed.

Somebody or something is sleeping in that wood, in a made bed, nine miles from a trail, and it is bigger than me, and it makes its bed the way my grandmother taught me to make mine: properly, with care, so that it is nice to come back to.

That is the sentence I cannot let go of. It is nice to come back to.