Just then Mother whispered, “Look! Look! On that branch! There’s one of the babies!” About forty feet away, perched on a branch sticking up from a pile of logs awaiting my chain saw, was a baby robin just out of the nest. A shaft of sunlight through the pine trees was warming him, but he sat with hunched shoulders, clearly unhappy. Now and then he stretched out his neck and made little stretching motions with his wings, as if contemplating his future in the air. But he lacked the daring to go for it. Where, we wondered, were his parents?

Most of us love stories. They have an amazing capacity to capture and engage our imaginations and evoke responses. For example, I’ve been watching church congregations out of the corner of my eye for seventy years now, and I’ve noticed that when the preacher is preaching, almost every congregant deploys a nictitating membrane. Human beings, actually, don’t normally have one. Sharks, reptiles, woodpeckers, chickens, polar bears, and seals, among others, do. It’s a semitransparent extra eyelid that slides down to protect the eye underwater or in situations likely to cause damage. People deploy them when they hear preaching; they appear to be somewhat awake, but their eyes glaze and they’re not really listening. Let the preacher tell a story, however, and everyone in the house, from children to ancients, leans forward attentively.

All around us, if we could but hear or see them, are thousands of stories every day – stories of mortal peril, life and death, success and failure. But we rarely get even a glimpse, except just a bit of the story now and then: a scattering of feathers on the ground; a wolf scat full of broken-china bits of chewed-up caribou bones; a stone arrowhead turned up by a plow. We miss so much!

Mother went upstairs one summer day in 1995 to close the bedroom casement windows before a thunderstorm, and found that a robin had built her nest outside the screen on top of the levers that operated one of the sashes. Stymied, she left it, but checked it several times a day. We named the robin Maizie, after Dr. Seuss’ character in Horton Hatches the Egg. Three weeks to the day after the first blue egg appeared in the nest – two of those weeks full of frantic shuttling of food from forest to nest – the chicks were fledged, and Maizie, who, unlike her namesake, had done her duties faithfully, executed her last. Sitting on a hemlock limb about thirty feet away with a worm in her mouth, she fluttered and in the most animated body language encouraged the kids to come and get it. Finally one did, then another, and at last the runt. We never saw them again. That was a story we could follow from start to finish, as long as the finish was graduation from the nest. The rest of it we’ll never know.

That same summer, 1995, some friends and I were camped on a little beach on Hepburn Island, north of mainland Canada in the Northwest Passage. Up above us on a ledge we spotted a cache of rusty leg-hold traps. Fox traps, probably. Were Inuit still trapping foxes? Whose were these? Was he still alive? Would he ever return for them? It was a make-your-own-story situation, like letter magnets for a refrigerator door. A few feet below the traps was a bird’s nest that looked quite familiar; a robin’s, certainly. I climbed up and peeked in, to find four tiny, naked robin corpses. There was a story there, a sad one, possible again only to imagine. The only hint at a plot might have been the presence of a huge golden eagle who watched us all the while we were there.

Two summers ago, paddling down the Payne River on the east slope of Nunavik, we heard a frantic squawking from the right bank, and looked over just in time to see a great gray wolf disappearing into the riverside willows with a flapping Canada goose. The squawking came from the goose’s mate, who swam in disconcerted circles for long minutes afterward, while we slowly drifted out of hearing. There would be one lonely flight south in September.

There are dozens of those incidents in my old journals, all of them stories without beginning or end – the huge, bloated, dead muskox beside a river who probably had died in labor; the caribou skeleton with a broken lower leg in shallow water – but here was one before me and Mother still happening. Just as we were despairing for the little robin, his mother showed up, landed beside him on the throbbing branch, and gave him a strong nudge with one wing. He seemed to snap out of his lethargy. She flew off into a spruce thicket and called loudly, as we silently urged him on. Then off he went, fluttering slightly downward, disappearing into the trees, and coming to roost somewhere. We could hear them talking to each other in there.

The next morning I heard Mother run onto the porch shouting, “Shoo! Beat it!” and ran out to see a big broad-winged hawk flapping into the treetops, with two outraged robins swarming at his head and neck. He’d been trying to get at the nest tucked up between our roofs; but whether the little guy, or one of his siblings, was still there, we couldn’t tell. Nor can we yet. The nest is abandoned and quiet now. Another story that gave us just a quick peek as it flew by.