**Whispers of the Dawn**

**Whispers of the Dawn**  

The first blush of morning stains the eastern sky in watercolor hues—peach melting into lilac, bleeding through a lattice of pine silhouettes. Somewhere beyond the mist-cloaked valley, a loon’s cry fractures the stillness, its mournful echo rippling across the glassy lake.  

Beneath my boots, frost-rimed ferns crunch like crushed cellophane. I breathe in air sharp with the tang of resin and decaying oak leaves, a scent as ancient as the granite bones of these hills. Sunlight bleeds through the fog now, gilding spiderwebs strung between birch trunks into necklaces of liquid gold.  

At the water’s edge, a heron stands motionless as carved ivory. Its reflection shivers when a trout breaks the surface, sending concentric rings to kiss shores feathered with blue lupines. The forest exhales—a breeze stirs maple keys into spiraling descents, each winged seed catching sunlight like falling embers.  

High above, contrails stitch the cerulean canvas into fragments. But here in the cathedral of pines, time dissolves. Lichen-cloaked boulders murmur stories of glaciers long retreated, while fiddlehead ferns unfold scrolls written in chlorophyll. Even the rocks seem to breathe, their mossy shoulders rising and falling with the rhythm of the earth itself.  

When the sun finally crests the ridge, it pours molten light through a crack in the clouds—a single radiant blade cutting across the mist. In that suspended moment, the world holds its breath. Then a red squirrel chitters, the spell breaks, and the mountain awakens.