As if within her, beneath the span of her own days, there are other hunts going on continuously, giant elk in flight from the pursuit of
hunters other
than herself, and the birth of other mountains being
plotted and planned — other mountains rising, then, and still more mountains vanishing into distant seas — and that even more improbable
than her encountering that one giant elk, on her first hunt, was the path, the wandering line, that brought her to her father in the first place, that delivered her to him and had made him hers and she his — the improbability and yet the certainty that would place the two of them in each other's lives, tiny against the backdrop of the world and tinier still against the mountains of time.