"Once there was a little boy who lived on a high mountain. He loved living in a place where the hawks flew, where the eagles hunted, where the trail ran in and out of deep canyons. This little boy knew all the secret places of the mountain, places full of sage and thyme. At night he listened to the coyotes, and in the day he would find where the rattlesnakes liked to sleep…" The story went on for awhile, without much plot but full of the things I loved about the mountains.

I’m not sure how long I murmured the bedtime tale, but after a while I noticed the boy had fallen asleep in his chair. I pulled a blanket over him and looked again out the window. It was sealed with thick fog. The smell of burning was so strong that on my way out I checked the kitchen to see if the stove was lit. Everything was okay.

At the threshold the man and woman were still waiting. They were holding each other and weeping.

"You son’s asleep," I said.

"Thank you," the man said to me. "Just around that outcrop is a nice pat of grass for camping."

I walked away, pack in hand. Just before I passed around the rock, I looked back. The people were gone, and the house lights had been turned off. I couldn’t smell that strange odour any more. The higher reaches of fog had started to break up, and the ridge was startlingly clear in the starlight.

"All my children, the meeting is over

I will love you in my heart."

I rolled out the tarp and my sleeping bag and went to sleep. I woke at dawn and took my orange out of the pack. From my campsite I had, as the man promised, a fabulous view of the valley and the inland range. A bank of clouds stretched below me all the way across the valley, like a white-grey river in some ancient riverbed. I saw for nearly an hour watching the sun rise. The wind came up, and the cloud-river began to flow down the valley.

Before hiking back to my car I thought I’d go down to the house and see how the little boy was doing. I pulled my boots on and stepped around the outcrop of rock that hid the house from my campsite.

I stopped. There was no house there. I was looking at the Ruins. The driveway I’d walked on the night before was an overgrown trail. The fine looking house had simply vanished and in its place were the familiar stone foundations I’d visited many times before. The house was gone, and the man and woman and little boy with it. I hiked down the ridge road to my car and drove home.