AFTER I SAW the way storms moved in, I began to wonder how Hannah had survived the storm and its angry waters. I wondered at times what she, my mother, had thought of that world with its island of spiders, its fish leaping out of the lake, the plaintive cries of loon and wolf. What had she seen in the low sky that rested on water and land? What had she thought of the storms that moved in so quickly and gave themselves back to water? I wondered, too, what the world had thought of her. Our lives, the old people say, are witnessed by the birds, by dragonflies, by trees and spiders. We are seen, our measure taken, not only by the animals and spiders but even by the alive galaxy in deep space and the windblown ice of the north that would soon descend on us.