You stay on the slot-path. Stream first: cold water talking over stones. Then a fallen oak like a bridge nobody planned. Then the bramble tunnel, a hallway of thorns that still lets a body through if the body is polite.

This is not a road. Roads are for carts. This is a corridor—the kind of path a wide-ranging animal uses to stitch two pieces of wood together. Cover on both sides. Water in reach. A place to vanish if a dog barks.

To the left, the logged square keeps staring. Stumps chewed as high as your chest. No seedlings. The browse line is a ruler drawn by hungry mouths: everything tasty eaten up to the height a deer can reach, standing.

Mira, who followed after all, whispers, “It looks like winter in summer.”

“It looks like too many eaters and not enough stoppers,” you say, surprising yourself.

The Pale One’s prints do not enter the open square. They hug the bramble, then the stream, then a strip of fern that still has shade. Animals do not vote, but they vote with their feet.

You can stop and study those chewed stumps until the lesson sits in your bones.

Or you can refuse the leftover logging and stay on the animal’s own hallway until the white shape is more than a rumor.