THE SILENT LANGUAGE

It’s winter—December—and everything in Montana is buried beneath the heaviest snow in years. As with every year, but more so this year than most, I love the winter for itself, but also for the way it keeps nearly everyone else inside, releasing the woods to the gaze of only me and the deer, me and the mountain lions. I think about things going on in my mind, and then to recover my senses, when I get too lost or confused, I look at the woods.

After hiking in the woods all summer and fall, I find it hard to describe the feeling of how clearly all the pieces of the woods’ puzzle come together in winter: knowing exactly what animals are in the woods by the tracks they leave, and what size the animals are, and where they go, what they do and what they eat, and where they lie down and rest.

The snow tells almost everything. The woods are silent, except for the occasional croak of a passing raven. The geese and ducks have headed south, and in the woods it feels as if you’ve been abandoned, and as if you’re living at the top of the world—just you and the deer, marooned. Snowbound. It’s lovely.

With most of the other animals in the woods, you already have a rough idea of what’s going on in their lives. You see the deer and elk, moose and coyotes, almost every day.

The one animal you almost never see, however, that’s up here year-round, is the mountain lion. It’s a surprise to come upon their tracks each winter while out cross-country skiing, or walking in the woods, and find that they’ve been here all along, and closer than you could have imagined. (Once a lion’s tracks went right up on my porch after a fresh snowfall, investigating around my cabin as I slept, perhaps having listened to my snoring from afar and come closer to see . . .) A mountain lion’s big tracks are as easily distinguishable as any in the woods, and in the snow like that, they conspire to make you catch your breath and imagine the big cat stalking its prey, so silent with its big furred feet.

The tracks are beautiful, and when I follow those tracks it is always with caution and respect, as if I’m afraid of messing up the lion’s stalk by coming up on it from behind and making too much noise, scaring away its prey, perhaps, or interrupting it mid-hunt.

No other tracks in the woods seem to have as much meaning as the tracks of mountain lions; always, they seem to be hunting. It’s a feeling that seems to emanate from each pawprint. I always feel like I’m trespassing when I come across their tracks; I always feel like I’m somewhere I wasn’t invited.

Stories throughout the West tell of how curious mountain lions are—of how they’ll follow a man for miles, walking right in his footsteps, evidently just for entertainment. I have never backtracked in the snow to find the big fresh prints of a lion superimposed over my own, but occasionally—usually right before dusk—I’ve had the sudden feeling of being followed, or watched, especially in the summer and fall, when a lion would leave no tracks.

I’ll turn around and look back, and will see nothing, though who can say?

A thing I like to do is watch animals, when I’m fortunate enough to see them in the winter without their seeing me. I like to study what they’re doing, watch the way they’re moving, and then after they’ve moved on, I’ll go out in the snow to where they’ve been and study the tracks they made. I’ll try and match what I saw them doing to what the tracks in the snow tell me. It’s like learning, and listening to, a silent language. If you’re not in a hurry—which I’m not—it’s kind of fun.

Nobody up here gets in a hurry in the winter. I haven’t seen anybody in a week. Three days ago a truck drove past and the dogs ran out barking at it, having forgotten that trucks had permission to do that—to drive down the road past our cabin.

I’ve got this great book, AField Guide to Mammal Tracking, by James Halfpenny, and have been reading it—taking the little quizzes at the end of each chapter, after he shows an illustration of a set of mystery tracks. (What is this animal doing? What kind of animal is it? How old is this animal? Is this animal running toward or from something?) I will read from Halfpenny’s book and then think about all the hours, the days, the years I’ve been fooling around in the snow, trying to learn the silent language of the woods, and it amazes me how long it can take a person to learn something when he or she tries to do it on his or her own, without assistance.

Like I said, I haven’t progressed very far. But now I’m trying to be more careful. I’m paying attention to the claw marks at the tips of the tracks, to the differences between back and front feet . . . . It’s nice, being out in the woods in winter—whether on skis or snowshoes or on foot—and I like the fact that the more silent it gets, the more frigid and austere, the more it helps my focus. Even though I don’t see nearly as many animals in winter (they can hear me coming), I can still continue to learn about them. Even though I can hear nothing, they are still speaking to me. Because spring is a long time away, and because in winter I have all the time in the world. I can spend a long time traveling only a very short distance each day, following tracks.

A somewhat horrifying thing—but somewhat thrilling also—when you’re following mountain lion tracks through the woods is to come upon a kill: the blood-red snow and the thrashed-out area; deer hair everywhere and a leg here, a leg there—a few bones and sometimes a bare skull. Coyote and raven mop-up tracks will cover those of the lion; no meat is ever wasted in these woods.

No other track in the woods, in winter, has for me such a lingering force as does the mountain lion’s. I seem to be able to feel the echo of the lion’s leap, as it caught the deer—biting the neck to strangle its prey, bringing it down and then tearing out the entrails with a strange burrowing motion. (I’ve found fresh kills with the entrails separated neatly from the carcass.)

When I am walking or skiing or snowshoeing in the woods in winter and come across lion tracks—especially at dusk—I try to walk bigger, to discourage any nearby lions, propping my arms out away from my sides, and I walk in ludicrous yeti-like steps that would make anyone who saw me hoot, but there is nobody, it’s winter . . .

I’ve seen a lot of animals in the woods up here, and I have seen a lot of amazing sights—have been chased up the tree by a bear, have seen deer giving birth, otters playing in the river—but some of the things I haven’t seen have moved me just as deeply.

I have seen two wolverines’ tracks out in the center of the frozen river, heading resolutely north, upstream, the tracks crossing the international boundary, back over into Canada, as if disappointed with what they had found in the United States.

I’ve seen the huge pie-plate prints of a woodland caribou, up on Caribou Mountain, even though they’re supposed to be extinct in Montana and down to only a dozen or so in Idaho, just a few miles to the west.

I’ve followed a set of wolf tracks through the woods too, near a cattle ranch along the river, back in the 1980s, when wolves were not thought to exist in Montana anymore. I saw where the wolf had stood on the riverbank and looked across the broad snowy pasture and then had turned and gone back into the woods.

So everything’s out here, still, in the winter—except for the bears, who are sleeping like children. (I’ve heard that sometimes down in its snow cave a bear’s warm breath will melt a kind of blowhole in the ice and snow, a hole going back up to the surface, and while traveling across the snow I look for such holes. I like to imagine the bears beneath my feet, curled up and sleeping in all that snow. . . . I’ve also read that if you find such a hole and put your ear next to it, you can hear the bear half-breathing, half-snoring, and that it is a sound described as “a tremulant hum” . . .)

It is a fine thing, is what I mean to be getting at, to be seeing all the animals’ tracks so frequently, without seeing the animal. To know that a thing is still out there without ever really seeing the thing—just feeling its presence. To see the tracks but not the animal can yield a brief comfort sometimes when I am in the woods and grieving. Some moment will turn slightly, as with a screw. I’ll sense some thought, some presence, some feeling, without actually hearing or seeing her, my mother, and while I do not understand it—my loss of her—I will know with rock certainty that she is out there, in a different way, a way I cannot understand.

I have seen dozens of lions since I’ve lived up here. It is the second lion I ever saw that is most interesting to tell about. Two young girls and I were walking through a grassy meadow far back in the woods. We were going fishing. I saw the lion first, about fifty yards away, resting under the only tree in that meadow, looking back at us. The girls had been laughing and singing and I believe that the lion—a big one—had come to investigate their voices. The lion’s head was as round as a basketball, with beautiful, round, mascara-lined eyes, it seemed, and cheeks smudged with charcoal blush. It looked like the face of a human, watching us. The grass was tall and all we could see was the lion’s head, watching us back.

I thought at first it was just a deer lying in some odd position that made its face look like that of a lion. (It strikes me only now as startling that the lion and the deer, predator and prey, have the exact same color of fur.)

To tease the girls—to frighten them—I said, “Hey, look at that lion lying down, out there in the grass.” I lifted them up on my shoulders—Amanda, twelve, and Stephanie, ten—and they said “Yeah, a lion!” They were thrilled, and I felt badly then and had to tell them that I was teasing, that it was just a deer looking at us straight on, in a manner that made it look like a lion—that it had its ears tucked back or something.

Just then the lion turned its head sideways, looking as regal as a queen, and I couldn’t believe it, but there it was, right in the middle of the meadow. It was the meadow we had to walk through to get to the lake.

I’d read all the books. I knew that lions were leery of adults and would run from you if you approached them. I didn’t want this lion stalking us. I gave the girls the canoe paddles and I walked out across the meadow, through waist-high grass, toward the lion, certain that it would come to its senses and bound away, once it saw what was up.

I kept walking—getting closer and closer.

And began to walk more slowly.

The lion kept watching me. When I was within about thirty yards—close enough to see the animal’s eyes—I could see some flicker of interest, some curiosity, and more—intelligence—in the big animal’s eyes. I knew I should turn around and go back to the girls and lead them on home, but I couldn’t help it: I knew I could flush that lion into running away, and besides, the lion was drawing me on, as if hypnotizing me, and there was also the strange, foolish notion of territory; I’d been fishing this lake for six years and didn’t want to be run off from my fishing spot.

But mostly, it was hypnosis that made me keep walking.

The lion looked left and right, when I went inside that thirty-yard perimeter—as if looking for another lion to consult on this odd behavior in humans. (Coming right in to me, the lion seemed to be thinking, too easy!)

The books said the lion would run away.

This lion didn’t know that.

At twenty-five yards, there was an exquisite tension—and that is the only way I know to describe it, with the word “exquisite.” The tension had been building as the space between us compressed, and the lion had been handling the strange compression beautifully, and I had been steady and unfaltering in my own approach. A relationship was forming between us, with no two other things in the world at that moment for either of us except each other—and I paused, so aware of the tension and compression of air that to take one more step would suddenly have been as freighted a movement, as nearly impossible, as if I had been wearing lead boots on the planet Jupiter.

I knew with an instinct, a certain knowledge deep in my genes, that if I took one more step that compression would shatter, and I would become in that instant predator or prey, and that the lion would charge me, or would run away. The lion knew this too. We were both suspended at arm’s length—twenty-five yards.

I took a step forward, and the lion jumped up and turned and bounded away in a swimming, arching motion through the tall grass and into the woods at the other side of the meadow.

The girls were ecstatic when I went back to them; they had not felt the compression. They had only seen the lion run away.

“That was so beautiful!” Amanda cried. “A lion!”

“A real lion!” Stephanie said.

“You girls will remember this,” I said, “the rest of your lives.”

Euphoric—feeling privileged to live in such a wild place as to still be able to see a lion—we continued on through the tall grass toward the lake. We were following a deer trail through the grass, and at times the grass was taller than our heads, and the trail through the grass narrowed so that it was brushing our shoulders on either side.

When we got to the lake, we slid my canoe into the water and were about to get in when I looked out at the meadow and saw that the lion had come back and was closer than before—only about thirty-five or forty yards away, with that big round beautiful face, the head as big as a small pumpkin.

This time I was not hypnotized by the animal’s beauty, nor was it (I could feel this) in a mood to fool around with any games of compression. The lion crouched low into the grass when it saw we had it spotted. We stood up on the canoe’s thwarts to get a better view, and the lion sank lower still, disappearing completely in that sea of cool green grass, and then it did a strange and beautiful thing: it stuck its tail straight up into the air, its long black-lined tail as straight as a rod—held it stiff and straight like that for a moment—and it began twirling the tail back and forth, making it into the shape of a question mark, swirling it with a lazy, hypnotic seductiveness, trying to lure us out into the meadow.

We had gone to the lake to go fishing, but only because we were running late. What we had planned originally to do there was to play our favorite game—“Tiger in the Grass”—and had it not been so late in the day, that is what we would have done.

The way that Tiger in the Grass is played is simple. Stephanie and Amanda and I get down in that head-high summer grass and then begin crawling through it, growling, pretending to be tigers, crawling and parting the grass before us, growling all the while, until we hear someone nearby, and then we pounce and try to land on that person, surprising them: the “tiger” seemingly appearing from out of nowhere, so perfectly hidden, down in that tall sea of grass.

There is no telling which of the three of us the real tiger would have stalked and leapt upon, had we been down on all fours, oblivious, in that high meadow.

The reason I do not give the name of the lake is that I do not want hunters to go there with their dogs and hunt the lion. I was not smart—or not thinking, that day—but I will be ever after. The woods need lions. It was a thrill and an honor to see this one.

Nonetheless, it was now evident that we were being stalked. I gathered the girls behind me—it was nearing dusk now, and the lion had disappeared from sight completely, was somewhere down in that tall grass. I told the girls to talk in loud voices, deep men’s voices, not children’s voices, and we held hands and held the paddles and fishing rods before us and started back through the meadow, through the head-high tunnel of grass out of which the lion could lunge at any second, and I have never felt so fierce, so furious, so protective in all my life, and I knew then how a mother feels, for I love these girls dearly, and if the lion had jumped out I know that I would have throttled it with my bare hands before I would have let it get to them.

Like three-people-who-had-become-one, we moved slowly down the grass tunnel, and the girls were braver than anyone could ever have asked, saying, “Just go away, lion,” and things like that, in deep voices, and I was saying pretty much the same.

The lion could have made an attack at any time, while we were in the grass. It knew that, and I knew it, and I think that the girls knew it. But we passed through the meadow in safety, made it back to the trail through the woods, and whether the lion followed us or not, we could not see.

I’ll never walk through tall grass again without remembering that lion, and that day. Many people go all their lives without seeing a lion, but these girls got to see one before they were even teenagers, and I believe that special events such as that are like sterling, that there are only so many people blessed with such moments, and that those moments stay with them and shine within them, brilliant, while most of the other events of life fade with time.

Less sterling—more ephemeral—are the trails of deer through the woods in winter. I’m confused by what seems to be at first the paradox of my hunting them in November and then feeling great empathy for them as I fall out of the chase while they still labor on in the snows of December and January, trudging ankle-deep and then belly-deep and then worst of all, sometimes chest-deep, with never a moment to rest, never a night of safety.

Me, I get to lay the rifle aside and rest and become human again for eleven months, but the deer must keep going, must never rest, not even in the deepest snows or on the coldest nights, or the lions will get them, the coyotes, the wolves.

The woods up here seem simpler and more reduced in winter, but they’re not. The snow’s just what it seems: a blanket, hiding nearly everything, and letting it sleep. It’s still as intricate a system as it ever was. The deer must walk the tightrope, as must everything else in the woods, of too-much and not-enough. A little forest fire, for instance, is good in the summer. It promotes fresh nutritious growth for the deer. But too much fire, as has been the case in recent years due to man’s fire prevention policies (which backfire and lead to an excessive accumulation of “fuel”—dead trees that should have burned), is also bad for the deer, bad for the soil, which can get washed away by erosion following a fire, which is bad for the rivers, which is bad for man.

All of these variables are hidden in winter. The deer flounder through the snow, eventually packing down trails like highway systems through the woods. They experiment in December—cutting several trails before finally establishing a system by January that works for them, gets them to water and to feeding areas with the minimum expenditure of energy. Because I fear the terrible droughts we’ve had in the last several years, I am glad for every snowfall. “It’s good for the country,” I say, thinking ahead to the trickling, nourishing snowmelt of May and June, of wildflowers, of green rich July grasses. Too little snow can make an easy winter for the deer, but will assure them a very dry, hot, dangerous summer.

This year, however, I’m seeing what too much January snow can do to them—too much, falling too quickly. It will help make summer richer and easier—if they can survive that long. Too much snow covers their food (dry leaves and mosses), and wears down their fat reserves because it’s so hard to thrash around in. Deer have tiny hooves, of course, compared to the big snowshoe feet of the predators—bobcat, lynx, coyotes, wolves, and lions—and in deep snows such as this year’s, predators have the advantage.

So I stop hunting about the time the snow falls. But the deer do not stop being hunted.

Their trails through the woods—the further we go into the winter, the more worn-down those trails get. The deer use them every day, as does everything else in the woods—lions and wolves, predator and prey. The game, if one wants to call it that—though it is not a game; it is life and death—becomes much more focused. It would be like your trying to run from a pursuer, but having to stay only on sidewalks.

If the deer leave the trails they’ve created, and flounder in the deep snow, they’re goners—if something’s chasing them.

And yet, by January, in heavy snow years, all the food along the trails is eaten, and they must go off into the new deep snow, looking for new food, cautiously, always vigilant.

I like to think of them the way they are when I’m hunting them in November—fat, healthy, wild; not vulnerable, as they are later.

And yet, I love the predators, too—the wolves and lions.

And I love to see the snow fall, love to ski across it, and love the thought of how the deeper the snow, the lovelier the spring will be—“Good for the country,” I say, every time it snows—but there’s always that haunting ambivalence in my knowledge that after a while the snow can shut the deer down, can lead to their deaths in great numbers.

Never mind that it’s all a part of a very fine-tuned, constantly correcting system of balance. Never mind that if I’d only remember my manners, I’d realize that I’m only along for the ride.

I still can’t help it; I evaluate every snowfall, every day, with that odd mixture of satisfaction and worry—I get involved, as if nature cares one way or the other what I think.

The bucks drop their antlers in January. They’ve used them for territorial defenses in mating, and even for defense against predators, but by January survival has become such an iffy, day-by-day venture that they try and save every calorie they can and have evolved to shed the antlers to avoid having to lug that extra weight.

A thing I love to do in the spring, after the snow is gone, is to walk in the woods looking for the winter-dropped antlers of deer, elk, and moose. It is not unlike a naturalist’s Easter egg hunt, in that from the antlers you find you can determine rough life histories—sizes, sometimes age, and even temperament, if the antlers have the battle scars of combat. But mostly I like to find them because they are beautiful. The full basketball curve of the main beam, and the splaying fingers of the other tines . . . the palm antler of the moose, and the immense elk antlers . . . . Finding the giant elk antlers is as incongruous and exciting as coming upon a beached whale in the woods. The antlers speak silently to last year’s lives, which are now memories, and some not even that.

The most beautiful time to find a fallen antler is in an open stretch of woods late in the afternoon when the sun is dropping soft tiger stripes of light down through the cedars or pines, and one of those shafts of light happens to fall across the antler’s gleaming brown polished curve.

Sometimes the antler falls right-side up, like an open basket, cradled in the leaves as if to hold light and air, and other times the antler falls with the tines sticking down, like a pitchfork, so that the antler sits like a dome. And then in the cedar jungle, in that end-of-day light, with all the vertical trees and the horizontal twigs and branches on the ground, and the near-horizontal sun rays, the incongruity of that beautiful curve there on the ground, and the beautiful burnished gleam of the antler, will leap out to the practiced eye. And it is a thing worth seeing, in this life, a moment of no small consequence as you come to the spot where a deer lost part of himself but kept on going, a kind of a parting of the ways in that precise spot where you’re standing, and the deer went on into the rest of the winter, having jettisoned it all, and kept living for at least a little longer.

Deer grow new antlers each summer. I cannot grow my mother back, though I must say there are times when Mary Katherine looks at me with the same ice-blue eyes and I am confused, for they are as intent and piercing and beautiful as my mother’s, and they seem to know things that my mother knew, my mother knows.

Like the deer, I must keep going—must not succumb to the snows of winter, which is when, a year ago, I lost her, and the snows of sadness, which is, I suppose, more what this essay is about than anything. There are days . . .

Because it has now become clear to me that I have all the time in the world—for grief moves like a glacier, and sorrow like a slow river, and even memories move slowly, like clouds in the summer that seem not to move all day—because of this, I have started looking for antlers in the winter, right after the deer have dropped them.

It doesn’t matter if I find any. It is somehow the act that matters, the devotion to the pure improbability of it: like finding a contact lens that has been dropped out of a helicopter and into the ocean.

I want to find the antlers before the breach, the distance between loss and continuance—the deer moving on away—gets too great. I dream of seeing a deer with just one antler, having just dropped the one side and ripe to drop the second. I dream of watching the antler fall from the deer’s head, being there to see it when it happens, and walking up to that spot in the snow, groping, and finding that antler, while the deer has moved off only a short distance and is still in sight, antler-less now, browsing the winter-dry leaves of alder.

I take my dogs with me, and I go out on skis. Sometimes we ski down the deer trails, further packing those thin highways through the woods, which will help the deer run faster when pursued, and I feel good that I may be helping them in that manner. It is on these trails where they often lose their antlers—ducking under a branch, the antler joint (weakened by a cessation of hormonal flow) wobbles, then falls, and the antler is cast off.

I probe the snow with my ski poles, listening for the click! of the pole’s tip striking hard antler. My dogs are hounds, with hounds’ keen noses and curiosities, and they have come trotting home with deer antlers they’ve found before, carrying them only for the scent. It is my hope—and only a casual hope or dream, for I have all the time in the world, so much time before me—that my dogs will scent the antlers beneath the snow whenever we pass over one and that they will dig down and discover it with their good hot noses.

But this is unlikely.

We ski and we look, and we get through the short days, the dogs and I. Sometimes we cross the lion’s trail and follow it to the remains of a weeks-old deer carcass; the dogs dig furiously, and I hope at first they’ve found a dropped antler, but instead it turns out to be a whole deer, and usually it is a doe, no antlers, or a buck that has already dropped his antlers, and there is only a bald skull and hooves, hip bones, ribs, and vertebrae—no beautiful antlers, no prize in the woods . . .

Sometimes the dogs and I will cut new trails in the woods—the dogs floundering ahead of me, lunging like porpoises, half-swimming in the snow as they break new trail, with me following on the skis to help pack it down. We’ll spend several days taking the same route, until the deer find it and begin using it. It’s a pleasure to spend several days constructing, with only the strength in your legs, such a trail, and then ski it one day and find that the deer have discovered it, and to see all their fresh tracks on it where they have used it the night before.

I feel tender toward the deer in winter, and yet I do not grieve when I find where a predator has gotten one, or even when I find one that has starved, one that has used up its fat reserves in the deep snows and has been unable to find anything to eat. I’m sad and quiet, but I do not grieve.

Another quiet sight—but one that does not touch me all the way down, does not bring full grief—is to see the reckless dependence deer place, in a hard winter, on the random chance of a fallen tree. The black tree lichen, Bryoria—the old man’s beard—grows high on all the branches of the lodgepole pines, the Douglas firs, and the larches, especially in dark forests, which are usually dark because they’re overcrowded, and when the trees are overcrowded they’re more vulnerable to root-rot and pine beetles and other diseases and hence more likely to topple, to be blown over.

When they fall, they bring that previously unattainable Bryoria down to the ground. It is said that the deer start running toward the sound of a falling tree in winter the minute they hear it, though I have never seen this. I see such fallen trees alongside the road, however, and it’s true, there’ll be twenty or thirty deer standing around the fallen tree, chewing savagely at the Bryoria, a wispy lichen so thin and dry that a whole garbage bag full of it might weigh only a few pounds.

There is both a numbness and a desperation in the deer’s eyes, in the coldest of winters, and some of them do not make it, and what amazes me (and I think of this on nights when I am in bed under all the hides and blankets and the thermometer drops to forty below, and the stars crackle) is the fact that any of them make it. They have nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, and yet they go on because they have to go on.

There is a rock that we ski past, a cliff wall over the switchback of an old abandoned logging road that we like to ski, the dogs and I, when going up on the mountain. I call it “Panther Rock.” Sometimes when we pass beneath it (me skiing hard and fast down the steep hill and the dogs running hard, just in front of me), the dogs will suddenly come to a stop, whirl around, and turn their noses up toward the ledge above and growl and raise their hackles in a way that I have seen them do only for bears, but the bears are sleeping.

That’s one of the ways a mountain lion hunts—to perch hidden on a ledge, waiting for quarry to walk by below. I think about what a tempting target I would make on skis, how I would probably look to a hungry predator like just another deer floundering (my ski poles looking like third and fourth legs), and me running from something, and almost helpless, almost a victim.

I have not seen the lion on Panther Rock, but I know he’s up there. There are days when I believe that if I faltered, it would be within his capability to spring down and get me. Still, I ski past it, and sometimes right at dusk, because to shy away from it would be to also act like a victim, like prey, and I am confused in my sorrow, feeling some days angry and like a predator, but so many other days more like the deer, and I do not want to be a victim to my grief, and I respect the deer more and more.

Sometimes I sit alone in the woods, without the dogs, and I just think. I remember things: I turn the sterling memories of her over and over in my mind, polishing them like stones. I’ll think of just one day—sometimes a special day—a summer day. I’ll sit there just breathing slowly, breathing smoke clouds, remembering it.

Then I’ll get up and head on home, gliding silently through the woods, across deep new snow, breaking new trail, and I’ll wonder if this is how the deer feel, trudging through all the snow with their heads down.

I continue to look at all the other various tracks and realize that I am learning what so many others before me have learned: that there is no sense that can be made of it, and that it is more frigid and painful and hollow than you ever dreamed it could be, and that you want to lie down and quit but that because you are hers you do not, and you keep going. You keep going, but in so doing it does not mean that you are either understanding or accepting, only that you are still going, and that also by your still going on you know it does not mean that you are leaving the winter behind.