Driving along in silence was just fine with me; I’ve a taste for quiet. There was always something to think about, most often the next week’s column. But sometimes Arrie would yank me out of my reverie. Inside that closed cab, he’d nearly stop my heart with a sudden shout.

"COWS!" he might bellow, if he’d spotted some interesting ones. Or, more often, "STOP!" That might mean a pause for him to climb out and answer nature’s call. More often, it meant that he was seeing something special on what looked to me like a thickly wooded slope.

"House stood right there," he’d say, pointing. "Barn over there, milk house, corn crib, sheds. Good orchard, too." Short pause, then gruffly, "All that work! All gone!" The last was my signal, after my own respectful pause, to let out the clutch.

A farmstead gone, indeed. Nothing left, in among the trees, except perhaps a cellar hole and a few rotting fence posts. All that brutally hard work_dropping trees, dragging out stumps, shifting rock by the ton_all undone by reclaiming nature. For if we humans ease off our clearing, nature doesn’t waste time. In 20 years she’s closed things over again.

That’s why Otsego County is now far more wooded than a hundred years ago. And with the woods’ return, something else is coming back, too. Some native wild things, driven north into the Adirondacks as their habitats were bared, are back again. So far, they’re in small numbers. But to us country folk, their return brings unease. Some of those creatures feed on smaller animals, including livestock and pets.

A friend up Fly Creek Valley was shocked to pull in her drive and see a bobcat sitting right on her front porch, licking its paw and grooming like a big kitty. A really, really big kitty; bobcats can run to 70 pounds. Gray, it was, with spots of black. At the car’s approach, the cat was gone in four graceful bounds.

Hunters this year also claimed to see a few even bigger cats_the kind that Natty Bumppo called "painters," and we call panthers or cougars. These cats can weigh 150, and they can leap 15 feet, up and into a tree. Luckily, they try to stay away from humans. But they like livestock, and also dogs and cats.

I think about such animals each time I let Owen outside. Owen is 14, but he could still scamper up a tree ahead of a pursuing fox. But a pursuing bobcat would be right up the trunk after him.

And then there are bears. Black bears. A lot have been sighted this past year, and last month one of them raised holy hell with Paul Lord’s beehives. Please, put Pooh Bear out of your mind. This wasn’t a small, dear, slow-witted blunderer. This was a full-grown male, a loner, shambling along at over 350 pounds. And the brains that Pooh pretended to have? This bear really had them, in spades. [an error occurred while processing this directive]