I grew up in the foothills of these mountains. They feel like sisters to me. Not having snow-shoed since I was a kid on the wet side of the range, I'm sweating, creating my own weather, panting clouds into the air so that my face is obscured. I'm pacing up a steep incline on rented equipment. The quiet is thick as snow. It muffles my senses. I feel distant, aloof. Part of something and not part of something. I watch for tracks, spoor of another kind of reality.

The first one I discover doesn't give me enough to go on. Is it a set-down? Has something flown in and landed here? I'm not sure what I'm seeing; maybe just the imprint of snow that fell off a branch to land on drift beneath a tree. I see, only vaguely, what may be flight feather marks pressed into the scuffed mass before me. They begin to emerge more clearly uniform as spaced blade shapes. I pace round the disturbed area, measuring against my snow shoe's stride, estimating probable wingspan. It's a big one. The indentations are hours old, too much wind and friction have scoured the edges soft, made them indistinct. But if this is a print of what I think it is, it's a beauty. What makes me doubt my luck is the lack of any other telltale marks nearby. No similar set-downs. No other scuff marks. No lead-up tracks of any kind.

So I aim along a hog back leading over a ridge where, even with snow drifted well over 100 inches, huge rock outcrops stab through, slate colored, into daylight. I mean to hug the tree line since there is little point in going beyond it. Not much sense in traveling exposed above the protection of forest in Central Oregon's Cascade Range.

I love snow shoeing. It's quiet. It takes you places you can't always get to on skis. It removes you from the world of daily human commerce. It lets you reconnect to something so much larger than yourself, or your kind, that you begin to recognize a sense of the sacred against all reservations, including your own. I think it's the silence.

As I walk, the sound of my own breath becomes a mantra to focus my concentration. My thoughts drift away to the white rolling between pine trunks, the occasional glimpse of blue, a distant, broken mountain top. This is where I find peace. I grew up hiking these mountains spring, summer and fall. Only recently have I discovered them accessible in deep midwinter.

I see sign everywhere now. Coyote track, pine marten, snowshoe rabbit. Mountains are never dead things. They only shroud themselves in a meditation so deep it fools us into thinking that the breath has stopped, the heart no longer beats, the intellect has failed. But these are only tricks of the trade. This is all healing trance work. We have to walk the blank page of a slope to recognize the scampering of an EEG measured in the increments of animal prints.

It's while I am thinking these thoughts that I see it. Another set-down. Two… No… Three set-downs. And there's the weasel trail that leads to the first landing only to disappear in a fury of shattered snow. The distinctive, even, hopping register of a pine marten or small weasel doesn't appear again. Instead I see loosened, scattered snow, signs of a struggle. Just outside the disturbed area, on both sides, are the perfect prints of two wing tips, flight blades fanned open, rounded like a Cooper's or Red-tailed Hawk. A full two foot span from tip to tip. And it's recent. Everything is still clearly defined.

The take-off must have been ragged against the weight and struggle of even a winter-thinned animal, which explains the two extra set-downs. My approach is careful. I don't want to tread on what it is I have come to see. I follow along the progression of all three battle scars. At each touchdown I see the print of wing tips. They are precise. Beautiful. Now I know what snow angels were meant to look like.