When I heard the forest had vanished, I went to pay my respects. I leapt from one stump to the next and didn't dare touch the ground — an ocean that could not be fathomed, an origin I couldn't return to. Puttaarpoq, they say in Greenlandic, he leaps from one ice floe to another, like a hunter, a dancer. Mine was the only shadow and it was on fire. I thought of the roots below, letting go of the world like birds. The forest was once a glacier that crept over the Earth, calving the whims of time and climate. I stopped to survey the loneliness, like a city of basements. Not even a mushroom remained. A silence pressed in, cold and ancient. I shuddered. Suddenly I remembered the foxes — had they ever existed? I scratched the sediment of my memory and turned up only sand. And where were the children to wonder if the stories about foxes were true? When I was a child chasing a breeze I knew nuanaarpoq — the extravagant pleasure of being alive. The stumps became more spread out and I leapt farther and farther over the churning ocean, into a crack in the sky. And the butterflies? That night I dreamt of yellow-red leaves, fallen, strewn about in the wind, burnt like the sun.