The forest deepened - the twinkling star-like lights on his horizon grew smaller as Don tread steadily along the path. As the bright blinking lights faded, his eyes adjusted to the dark. It was a deep gloom that shrouded the forest, not an inky black. the trees twisted together forming strange brooding shapes - the path had taken him to a blackened forest of mysterious life. These trees and their roots were almost growing before his eyes. Don blinked and rubbed his eyes. He was growing as well - or regaining lost growth. The farther he was from that killing bed, the younger he felt. He couldn't remember the last time he felt this alive, but he could remember this vigor. A time when he felt like he could march all day, when he could swim across a lake - and back. He could remember playing the Don all night and napping before dawn - to awaken at first sign of light, show his ardor again and work the day and night after. How could that rain of kisses not sustain a man for another day? Don remembered the lust had for life and could feel his limbs stiffen with that long lost strength.

Something was happening in this flight from death, he thought. He wasn't fleeing the smothering death that was suffocating his life away on that stank ward. He was meeting something - and it didn't feel like the proud death he thought he was flying to, like a moth. This dark path had turned him from these glaring beacons of stark oblivion. He was treading to something else now.

His foot struck something hard and threw him straight to the ground. He just barely got his hands out to brace his fall and eased to the ground instead of crashing to his face. At the same time, he glanced about himself. His dexterity and canniness felt completely normal and indecipherable. The stiff bones and atrophied muscles were not his anymore. The catlike sense of his youth had rejoined him in this gloomy shape-shifting tangle of trees and undergrowth. His senses were sharpened by this sudden plunge to the ground. He could feel at his foot the wide-ranging root from that sprawling chestnut tree behind and to his right. He could feel its winds and turns through the soil and into the wide old trunk with this toes. The sensation startled him, but didn't slacken his calm awareness - this cool appraisal of this mysterious thicket. Don was acutely aware that he had shaken years of lethargy and indolence, ages of futility and waste and reawakened to this lost youth. This was a renewal though, not a rebirth. As his mind clicked through the inventory of sensations, he could still feel the ache of his surgeries - the twinge of years of injuries - even the senile holes of his brain could be accounted - somehow these physical degradations weren't a match for this swelling of spirit. This was a marvel, but Don could feel an urge not to tarry in this marvel - there must be a reason for it. The forest that he could feel spread about him must be the reason - or the cause way of this elixir. He had to penetrate this gloom and find where this path led.

Don pushed himself up to his knee and looked about. There was no path! His eyes were well adjusted to the gloom now. He could see the still figure of an owl away on the branch of a tree. Its silhouette indicating its attention to his presence. He looked about, back from where he had come. somewhere he had slipped off the path and stumbled among the trees. He didn't see any faint trail or pathway behind him in the dim gloom, though. Maybe not being on the path was the way he found his strength? Which way to go now, he thought? He stared hard in one direction and then another to discern any causeway to pursue.

Nothing was what he could see - one way was a gloom of emerging shadows of trees as was the other. No clear avenue presented itself. Any choice was as bad or as good as the next from this vantage point.

"It doesn't make any difference - this or that, I just wish I had a bat..." he murmured, surprising himself with the silly rhyme.

The owl startled and dropped off the branch on to its unfolded wings. The big bird swooped by his face - its splayed wing feathers brushing past his ear.

Don quickly turned and just caught a glimpse of the owl's shadowy flight disappearing to the gloom.

"Well enough - the rapier knows this place well enough. I'll follow its lead." Do thought it was not cautious to be speaking to this gloom, but his mouth seemed to be finding voice without his thought. He shook his head slightly and stood up. He would feel more comfortable with a shillelagh, as a matter of fact, thinking back to his grandfather's favorite walking stick.

The trees passed by slowly, one to the left, another to the right. It seemed like they were maples, more than chestnuts, but he continued to spy those great large trunks often enough. This was quite an old group of trees - haphazardly arranged by their own natural growth. Don didn't know where he was - but he was sure this was no city park. It was a harbringer of his lost childhood - a nest of trees undisturbed by any interest of commerce. As he passed by one tree and then another on the owl's mission , he became ever more sure that this was quite a large nest, as well. How wild was this thicket?

He came upon a fallen branch. It was fairly straight - too large for a shillelagh, not quite up to a staff for prophecies. It was a good size to brace him on this walk, though. He took hold and stripped off the loose bark where would grip it.

"All I need now is a pair of sandals and I could cross the desert, too."

"There was that mouth again, encouraging a carnivore's interest", Don thought.