You step into the logged square only far enough to see, not to claim it.

Chewed stumps. Bark stripped in ragged collars. Every tasty sapling eaten. No young oaks waiting their turn. The browse line sits at chest height, a pale scar around every shrub that tried.

Sun hits the dirt too hard. It smells dry, like a cupboard.

Mira says, “Deer did this?”

“Deer and no one to scare them off the salad,” you say. Nan’s wolf-stories used to end with a howl on the ridge. The howl is gone—hunted out, or moved on when the road got loud. Without it, the eaters of leaves keep eating. Sun still cooks sugar in the old oaks. The young ones never get a turn.

You find a seedling oak no taller than your thumb, browsed to a sad stick. That is a future that got taken for breakfast.

The ridge above the square has a standing stone. People used to carve hunters and wolves there, before they carved only themselves.