As we drive on this road for the 300th time I notice ahead the open sky; it's really dark except for our headlights and the occasional string of Christmas wire wrapped around the old twigs of a windbreak near a farmhouse; actually it is probably more like the 100th; but ahead of us, so many thousands of miles north, patterns form like green ice in the sky, a projected forest so high and wide in scale it throws me back into the primeval. And then, as if to say this is what you're missing, a white falling star, like a single snowflake, disintegrates and dies up there, and I almost don't notice the six brown does crossing one by one from right to left at nearly midnight, moving while the hunters sleep.