The zig-zag pattern on this scree slope on Puddin’head Mountain …

…makes it look like the deer are climbing the slope like Everest climbers trapped in the mind of M.C. Escher and going back and forth to get up the slope…

…or players in a game of snakes and ladders struggling to make a sharp turn and continue their slow plod home …
Na. It’s only humans who want to go up. The deer are going from side to side.

They just like angles. With their bones, that’s how they fit into a mountain. Sometimes one way. Sometimes another. Those are slippy-slide slopes, after all. These are rivers of stone. One is always working against the tendency of the scree to flow, and just like you’d cross a river at an angle, so the current didn’t take you all the way down to Astoria, or maybe just the next whirlpool, so is it here.

In the end, there are a permanent set of fords across the river. They have been followed for many, many years broken by stone avalanches and rebuilt by the deer and the mountain time and time again.