“In the relative cool of the timber stands, possum grapes and muscadine flourish with a cynical fecundity, and the floor of the forest – littered with old mossbacked logs, peopled with toadstools strange and solemn among the ferns and creepers and leaning to show their delicate livercolored gills – has about it a primordial quality, some steamy carboniferous swamp where ancient saurians lurk in feigned sleep.”