“I realized that they make maps in their heads – scent maps, event maps, thing maps, texture maps, sequential maps – that much of their activity on the trails is mapmaking and map following. I know why Ben whines for me to open the car windows as we drive. His mapmaking needs the scent element. A ride in the car is mapmaking in the fast lane. New places, new smells, new maps, enlarge brains. The world is a newspaper. It is my world my dogs are mapping, my world they are imprinting. Now I pay attention to their world: the tree limb, the new hole, the crushed hay where to deer slept. I begin to tread as they do. I am allowed, as I learn to pay attention, to participate, as my dogs do, in the wonders of the natural world, a world from which I had grown far apart.”