On the point formed by the confluence of Bobb’s Creek with the Tionesta, where Forest Road 116 meets Route 666, the forest is slowly reclaiming a clearing. My great-grandfather’s house once stood in that clearing. All that remains are a few foundation stones, an area near a back corner littered with shards of old glass and crockery, a dying apple tree, and the daffodils that bloom each spring.

Deer feed in the clearing—two well-worn trails enter from the back edge. I’m sure it’s an evening place. In the last hours of daylight, a falling thermal will pour off the hill and flow down the Tionesta Valley with a power and reliability stronger than even the prevailing wind. I built a blind of sticks to supplement a screen of grapevines just downhill from a place where a multitude of hoof prints pointing in every direction indicates that this is where ever-cautious deer pause to look, listen, and smell before venturing into the open space of the meadow. I was sure it would be a good place to hide with my longbow in the last hours of autumn days, hoping for luck and meat.

There are plenty of potential deer ambushes half this distance from home, but I am drawn to hunt here by something more than a hunter’s intuition and strategy. Just as certain aspects of my writing complete a circle that began with my great-grandfather’s journal, the idea of taking sustenance from this place seems ceremonially appropriate. I walked back to my truck savoring a newfound eagerness for fall and hence for winter.

But on the drive home, my thoughts wandered far away from the ceremonial and the sublime into the roughshod realm of politics, bureaucracy, and the uncertain future of the forest I love. It doesn’t look good, and that’s not just a matter of the details of the new forest plan the Allegheny National Forest was in the process of drafting, of the ugly fact that that even-aged management, herbicides, and oil wells are likely to prevail.

I’m worried. As I push on into the final quarter of my sixth decade on Earth, the local newspaper’s obituaries show a steady parade younger than me, and one favorite place after another is eaten by chainsaws, bulldozers, and drilling rigs; I need a little honest hope. It makes me a better dinner guest and it’s easier on my liver.

These Allegheny hills harbor many special, wild, beautiful places that I have loved and shared, that I have given to my son and others as they were given to me by mentors, dear friends, and the chance encounters of my wandering. The wildness of those places has helped us all through difficult times of self-discovery and loss. Its resonance in our hearts defines our sense of home. The current wave of rampant oil drilling and logging wounds our hearts and souls.

I don’t like it when a day of enthrallment with small and large forest wonders collapses into a funk of depression, fear, and loss. It makes me feel like a fool and it pisses me off. That’s not a sound basis for effective activism or self-indulgent denial, and frankly I find great comfort in both.

The motion of a grouse scurrying into roadside brush summoned my attention back to the here and now of driving a narrow dirt road through a long-loved forest. I shook off poignancy and pessimism in favor of a present filled with leaf-filtered sunlight.

On the west side of a broad bend in the road not far north of Heart’s Content there is a clearing that is slowly returning to forest, as meadows around here do if they’re not maintained by humans or beavers. When it was first hacked out of the roadside forest a wooden sign explained in Forest-Service-newspeak bureaucratese that the trees had been cut down for scenic purposes. Among the circle of friends I hike, hunt, and wander with it became sarcastically known as “The Pristine Meadow.” But I must admit that it does summon my attention because hawks often hunt there. Passing The Pristine Meadow, my alertness rises as the glances I can steal from driving while rounding the broad curve search for the flight or silhouette of raptors—usually red tails, but occasionally a Cooper’s hawk.

Today my attention was pulled away from the hope of feathered grace by the pickup towing an ATV-bearing trailer that suddenly swerved, braked, and pulled over ahead of me. Seeing a dark, sinuous form by the roadside, I did likewise.

The driver exited his truck with two young boys whose ages I would guess as three and five. The boys started to rush ahead of the man, and I spoke up, “Stay back; that’s a rattlesnake.” They stopped, wide-eyed. It was a black phase timber rattler—a big one.

Rattlesnakes, like bears, are formidable creatures whose powerful presence tends to inflate our impression of their size. All bears tend to be four-hundred pounders and all rattlesnakes tend to be five-feet long, but this was indeed a big snake. I’d guess at forty-five inches, maybe more. I tried to gauge him against more immediate and tangible measurements. He was bigger around at the middle than my forearm and a little more than the width of my chest longer than my arm.

The man said to his boys, “Look at the pattern in his skin. Isn’t he beautiful?” Then he turned to me and said, “’I’ve lived around here all my life and this is the first rattlesnake I’ve ever seen.”

“They’re scarce, but they’re also a lot better at avoiding us than we are at avoiding them,” I replied.

Another vehicle came along in the opposite direction and pulled over. The driver said, “Wow! I moved here from Texas twenty years ago and I haven’t seen a rattlesnake in a long time.” His voice was resonant with nostalgia and reverence. “I sure hope he doesn’t get run over.”

I said, “Yeah, it’s tempting to try to herd him off the road, but I’m afraid anything we try to do might backfire.”

He was a polite snake. He didn’t coil or rattle as I approached, but merely raised his head off the ground to look at me. To speak of a facial expression on a snake would be an unforgivable anthropomorphic stretch, but I’ve seen that look of implacable formidability before, and its meaning is crystal clear. I kept a distance far beyond safe—respectful, I hope.

I refer to the snake as “he” because I dislike the grammatically correct “it” that refers to living creatures with the same pronoun used for hammers, beer cans, boots, and cars. While I’m well aware of the valid issues swirling around the use of gender-specific pronouns, I would rather refer to a rattlesnake through the empathic identification of my own gender than depersonalize him or her into an object. This particular rattlesnake may well have been a she—there is no truth to the common folk belief that all black phase timber rattlesnakes are male. But this was a specific, particular being with his own life, history, and future, not an object or an abstraction. If he (or she) had a name known to me, I would use it.

We all returned to our vehicles. As I slipped back into the solitary thought stream of driving, I recalled the many occasions I had walked long distances through knee-high ferns, unable to see my feet, in that rattlesnake’s territory. I thought of the times I had sensed the presence of snakes without being sure if I was partaking of Pleistocene instinctive awareness or merely subconscious remnants of childhood angst.

Here in Northwest Pennsylvania, timber rattlesnakes (Crotalus horridus) are our grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis). We have a fair number of black bears and they’re a formidable beast indeed, but if you treat them with respect, they’ll reciprocate. Sure, you could be unlucky enough to blunder into a dysfunctional bear, but you’re far more likely to blunder into a dysfunctional human, and bears don’t carry firearms. Snakes, though, are alien—the ultimate other. Around here, nearly all the half-forgotten scariness to be found in ragged remnants of our land’s wildness has been assigned to the timber rattler.

When I was a child, this section of Heart’s Content Road had a reputation for its snakes. Rattlesnakes were hated, feared, and killed on sight. If you were a manly man it was your duty to kill rattlesnakes. The ability to spike your brakes at just the right moment to skid a back tire across a snake, shredding instead of merely crushing it, was a skill any self-respecting male ought to possess. I once saw my father do just that less than a mile from today’s encounter.

What I had just seen was a great ray of hope. I had seen two regular, rural northwestern Pennsylvanian males, one a native and one a long-ago transplant, react to a large, venomous reptile with appreciation and wonder. They had encountered the sharp, biting edge of this land’s remnant wildness and found it beautiful. They wanted to help and protect that wildness, despite its venomed fangs, scaly hide, and alien eyes, not kill it.

It’s easy to be open to sympathy with bears, wolves, or mountain lions whose young virtually define our collective sense of cuteness and arouse our tender, protective instincts and whose shared evolutionary heritage bespeaks an ancient kindredness. It’s not much more difficult to arouse a perhaps slightly less affectionate reverence for the delicate grace of small birds or the non-threatening formidability of raptors. But snakes? I had witnessed evidence of a real change, an honest-to-God paradigm shift from the world I grew up in.

Yes, the environmental movement has failed in several large ways. We’ve been mostly unable to loosen the grip of corporate greed on the throat of wildness, lost the natural alliance of hunters, and conceded the terms of most debates to an accounting of real or potential dollars. But still, something fundamental has changed. Though I’m not sure how much real difference it will make, despite the darkness of so many of my expectations, I cling to that afternoon’s renewal of hope. It’s better than whisky.