Her limbs rejoiced to be outdoors again, out of her tiny cabin whose log walls had grown furry and overbearing during the long spring rains. Her body was free to follow its own rules: a long-legged gait too fast for companionship, unself-conscious squats in the path where she needed to touch broken foliage, a braid of hair nearly as thick as her forearm falling over her shoulder to sweep the ground whenever she bent down. She loved the air after a hard rain, and the way a forest of dripping leaves fills itself with a sibilant percussion that empties your head of words. But if she'd troubled to inspect her own mind on this humid, sunlit morning, she would have declared herself happy. She was frustrated, it's true, to be following tracks in the mud she couldn't identify. He would have judged her an angry woman on the trail of something hateful. If someone in this forest had been watching her - a man with a gun, for instance, hiding inside a copse of leafy beech trees - he would have noticed how quickly she moved up the path and how direly she scowled at the ground ahead of her feet. Every quiet step is thunder to beetle life underfoot every choice is a world made new for the chosen. But solitude is only a human presumption. Her body moved with the frankness that comes from solitary habits.
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