Just about the only way to find the cauldron is to know where it is, a relatively easy job for locals who’ve hunted that mountainside for decades, but pretty tricky for anyone else. On top of that, even only a few of those locals know that under a small rock nearby, disguised by encroaching moss, lie two old Mercury dimes. If I can ever get to that spot again, an increasingly unlikely feat, there’ll be three of them. It’s a long story, part of the lore of our now-defunct hunting camp and essentially an inside joke, but the memory means a lot to those of us involved.

I think that sort of thing is what makes the woods such a romantic place for me: my memories and those of others who’ve left behind marks, some ever so faint, of their passing. Just above our old camp, a slowly disappearing clearing marks the site of an abandoned logging camp – Theriault’s 1927 job, according to the old-timer who talked about it, and who, if he’d written about it, would have spelled it “Tario.” An old log road runs up the hillside there above the brook that watered the camp, and here and there beside the road, under now-mature spruces, appear mysterious moss-covered mounds. Lifting up the moss reveals that the mounds are piles of curved hemlock bark, tanbark left by the loggers almost one hundred years ago for a tanner to pick up later. Later has never come.

My kids and I stumbled upon the ruins of a logging camp in Maine’s Baxter State Park in 1971, The dumps of old camps are the most productive of worthwhile stuff; and sure enough, we came away with an iron crookneck for cooking over an open fire, a tool half-ax and half-adz (almost useless), and several Lydia Pinkham bottles, whose presence and 40-proof potency dated the old camp to the Prohibition Era.

My wife and I honeymooned about six years late at another abandoned camp above the Ausable Lakes in the Adirondacks. It was a pretty desperate pitch, but we were young and flexible, and again came away from its little dump with a beautiful milk glass Aladdin lamp that hangs today in the dining room window here at home, and a blue-painted sap yoke for lugging water buckets from the brook. It’s still here, too, a reminder of magical times in deep woods with all the people gone.

Most of us look at woods and think of them as forests primeval. Far from it. Not long before the oldest of us were born, what are now woods were either stone-walled pastures or scalped scapes of stumps. A popular saying in the Adirondacks was that if a crow were to fly across the mountains, he’d have to pack his lunch. One of the main reasons for setting aside so much territory and designating large sections of it as “Forever Wild” was that the clear-cutting of timber had so denuded the land that it no longer could hold rainfsll, which ran off quickly and by August had left the operators of the Erie Canal with insufficient water to fill their locks.

One of those stripped landscapes lay just east of Hanover, New Hampshire, and has now grown up to mature hardwoods, pines, and hemlocks. My seven-year-old son and I were walking through a hardwood patch one day years ago, when we spotted something metallic gleaming dully in the duff underfoot. It was an old harness buckle – as if we needed reminding that the patch had been logged with horses – its bronze rim intact, but its iron pin partly eaten away by decades of rust. My son put it into his pocket, and I pretty much forgot about it.

During the fall, without my knowing, he sort of apprenticed himself to a local leatherworker. At Christmastime I opened a small square gift box that rattled mysteriously and discovered what’s still my favorite belt, over half a century later.

The woods all around us have lived many lives, and we’re aware of only what we see or can guess at from the artifacts, stone walls, tree blazes, and overgrown roads that we stumble across in our rambles through them. I wish I could be a fly nearby when someday someone happens to move that stone and find those old dimes.