With that in mind, before we go any further, the Cyberwoods has just one rule to live (and let live) by.

As you sit here on your cyberstump, you are a half-mile from the nearest human neighbor, eight miles from the nearest town (population 500), and fifty miles from the nearest mall, video arcade, traffic jam, jackhammer, office tower, parking garage, smoke stack, power lunch, and intraoffice intrigue.

This is the fourth place I've lived in the country. I contend that you can prosper in the country as long as you have a good pickup, a come-along, a high-lift jack, a little rain, and a lot of peace and quiet. Toward the latter end, I keep moving farther out, trying to escape from noisy neighbors and urbanization. My goal is to find a place where I can create the illusion that I am in the wilderness. Move over, Grizzly Adams, there's a new hick in the sticks! Much of the time I can create that illusion out here. For example, the road to my property is unpaved and definitely Frost's road "less traveled by"--maybe twenty cars travel by in a day. I can't even see the road from my house. If you hike from my house to my four fencelines, all you see beyond are still more woods. Woods and, it pains me to say, these quaint little structures.

Would you like to take a walk through the cyberwoods? Come on. It won't take long. Sixty acres is very small, really (it won't seem any larger than your monitor screen). If you stand in the center of the property, each fenceline is just eight hundred feet away. We'll take along my camera and have a safari--a photo safari. That way, after we aim and shoot an animal, the animal is still alive, good as new. What a bargain. Let's head down toward the pond, which is one of my favorite places.

Before we head out, here's a little something that I found just before you arrived. Look. On the side of my house, a moth is giving birth, laying rows of tiny yellow eggs. As the eggs mature, they darken in color and then hatch into tiny caterpillars. That's the sort of thing I like to find in the woods--everyday tableaux of nature. I enjoy being, to paraphrase Thoreau, a self-appointed inspector of creeks and groves and surveyor of hollow logs. And sides of houses.

Notice that around my house some of the stumps of the few trees I had to sacrifice to squeeze in my house have begun to grow back. That really pleases me. It makes me feel that maybe those trees have forgiven me for what Shakespeare called the unkindest cut of all. I have left 99.6 percent of this property just as I found it, indeed, just as it would have appeared to my family when they came to this county in the 1850s and maybe even to the Native Americans before them. I'd like to think that if those original residents could come back here, they'd still recognize their old stomping grounds. Although my doublewide and pickup might not ring a bell with them.

See this pile of corn fifty feet from the house? I put out corn every day for deer or any other critters who want it. Thus from my bedroom window I can watch birds, tortoises, snakes and lizards, deer, possums, raccoons, squirrels, skunks, rabbits, even bobcats. And feral hogs. They are the biggest wild animals out here. After I moved here, I had seen tracks of feral hogs but wasn't sure I'd ever see one because they are mostly nocturnal and understandably wary of humans. Then one day at dusk a big black boar materialized from the woods and began eating the corn. I got goosebumps the first time I saw that rascal. He looks like an ordinary barnyard hog, but this fella is no Wilbur. Feral hogs can be rather peevish and definitely should be allowed to make the first overture toward friendship. I have heard reports of feral hogs being almost fatally peevish to humans who got crosswise with them. Thus I have not tried to force my friendship on this one. Indeed, he and I have not reached even the Christmas card stage yet.

He's about three feet high and probably two hundred pounds--no giant, but big enough to be the lard of the jungle. Built like a sumo wrestler, low to the ground. I estimate that his center of gravity is somewhere down around Panama.

He has one distinguishing feature: an irregular, light-colored splotch on his face that stands out against his black hide. I call him Gorbachop.

About dark we'll come back to the house and sit in the yard and be very quiet and watch for deer to come feed at the corn. We have a better than even chance of seeing them.

As we get deeper into the woods, you'll notice that there are no formal trails--just a few faint paths in the fallen leaves worn by critters who use the same route day after day as they make their daily commute to food and water. We'll just meander in the general direction of the pond and see what serendipity provides.

These woods probably look just as they did hundreds of . . . hey, what's wrong? Ah, you've walked face first into a spider web. So much for serendipity. It's like the Halloween spook house all over again, isn't it? Triggers a very visceral reaction.

While you're picking spider silk off your face, I'm going to look at this mushroom down here. In damp weather they pop up as if by magic and grow faster than the federal deficit. Here's one growing in four parts. And here's one that someone has taken a bite out of.

Walking on, over here I see a patch of sleeping weed. At least that's what I heard it called as a kid. After you touch its frondlike leaves, the leaves on each side of the stem quickly but gently clamp together. Many plants that react to touch are carnivores, trapping and eating insects. But the sleeping weed looks as if it could do no worse than snore an insect to death.

Listen. It's starting to rain. Lightly. It's raining, and yet we aren't getting wet. That's because the rain has to percolate down through all the leaves overhead, zigging and zagging, plipping and plopping ever downward. A leaf can act like a cup and catch several drops of rain and hold them, quivering, until their added weight causes the leaf to dip. Then, like a lever, the leaf dumps the water onto the next leaf below.

There. Now the first few drops are falling on us from the lowest leaves. Now it's getting heavier, but it probably won't last long.

Now what's wrong? Oh, you're standing on a fire ant bed. Feel free to shake a leg. It seems to be an unwritten law of nature that any time you pause in the woods, you realize too late that you are pausing on a fire ant bed.

The itching and stinging will stop soon. Probably. Bothersome though ants can be, you have to admire their social organization and industriousness. They get a lot accomplished each workday. Possibly because they don't have staff meetings.

Speaking of itching, try to avoid this plant: poison oak. I had a run-in with poison oak when I was moving in here, and my left arm became hideously--nay, spectacularly--blistered and red. When I'd go into town, I'd have to cover my arm with burlap, Elephant Man-style, to keep women and children from fainting at the mere sight of it.

OK. The rain has stopped. Take a deep breath. The woods smell even woodsier when they're wet.

Let's mosey on. Over here is something else we'll stay away from: a bee hive in the hollow of this old oak. Africanized (killer) bees have spread into central Texas, although I don't know if these are killer bees. But let's not get close enough to ask.

Look over here. At the foot of this tree you can see where some animal has been digging in the sand. An armadillo or a raccoon, probably. Raccoons are the most entertaining critters in the woods. Clever, curious, mischievous, social, very dextrous. I suspect that if I didn't lock my doors at night, raccoons would let themselves into the house and make long distance calls on my phone.

(RACCOON: "Hello. Is Jack Hanna there? . . . He's in Sumatra? I'll hold.")

We are well into the woods now. Stop and turn in a circle. All you see are trees and more trees, broken only by still more trees. And listen. What do you hear? Total silence, you say? It just seems that way. But keep listening. There are sounds. Hear the rustling of the trees, swaying, dancing to a windsong that only they can hear. And there's a cardinal singing. Now there's a screeching overhead, like a fingernail scraped down the chalkboard of the sky. It's a hawk. Some days three or four of them circle overhead for hours, wheeling and screeching.

Look at how the shadows and sunlight on the forest floor swish and swap as the wind stirs the tree branches. No wonder people's eyes play tricks on them in the woods.

We're almost to the pond, I think. Over this way. Look at all of the ferns in this area. Now and then we come across butterflies and other insects among the wildflowers.

Listen to the frogs at the pond. Keep listening as we get closer. Ever walk into a room full of people and get the feeling that everyone is waiting for you to leave? As we near the pond, everyone falls silent. Frogs stop croaking. Crickets stop chirping. Birds stop singing. Squirrels stop chattering. All you hear are splashes. Ker-plunk. That's the sound of frogs and turtles hitting the water, seeking cover. "Dive! Dive!" Some of the frogs are barely an inch long. But the bullfrog--King Croak--can reach ten inches and has a marvelous speaking voice. If he applies himself and really gets to testifying, he can be heard a quarter-mile away.

Here we are. If we stand perfectly quiet, the pond sounds gradually will resume. The key to watching wildlife is to blend in. Sometimes, if you're quiet enough--no mean feat when walking in all these leaves--you can get close enough to see turtles swimming or sunning on logs. One turtle out here likes to perch about three feet over the water on the slanting trunk of that willow.

Look at the tassels of the willow trees on the water. And these reeds along the bank are cattails. The seed pods at the top of their stalks look like corny dogs. If you want to see a marvel of compression, break open a seed pod after it has dried. It is bursting with thousands of tiny seeds that drift away in the wind like parachutes.

This is the only body of water on the property, and thus it's an oasis that attracts everyone from great blue herons to field mice.

I've been calling it a "pond," but that's putting on airs a bit. It's really just a stock tank. Manmade. A big hole in the ground scooped out by a bulldozer and filled by runoff. It measures maybe one hundred feet by sixty feet. That's a puddle compared to Thoreau's pond. His Walden Pond was sixty-one acres--larger than this entire property. Maybe it's just Yankee understatement to call sixty-one acres of water a mere pond. In water-poor Texas we'd call it a dad-gummed lake.

Look over there. A dragonfly. All eyes and wings. "Dragonfly" is a term that must have a story behind it. Some of my country cousins called dragonflies "snake doctors." Probably a story behind that term, too.

And here's a tree frog clinging to this narrow cattail leaf. Note the jaunty racing stripe that runs from its mouth to its leg.

This pond gets most of its water from Little Sandy Creek, which, like most creeks around here, is little more than a ditch much of the year and traces its genesis to humble circumstances: cow pasture gullies. The creek flows into this pond, and when this pond reaches a certain level, the water flows into my neighbor's pond and so on southwestward until Little Sandy flows--always seeking the low ground, always obeying the great god Gravity--into Big Sandy Creek. Big Sandy Creek flows into Walnut Creek. Walnut Creek flows to the Little Brazos River, which meanders indecisively for miles and miles until it finally accepts the inevitable and gives itself up to the main Brazos River. Next stop is the Gulf of Mexico. Thus is my little pond with lowly cow pasture origins connected to the Gulf of Mexico and the seven seas beyond. The entire Brazos River watershed covers thousands of square miles. It's an organic Internet, connecting every pasture to every other pasture, every pond to every other pond. A grasshopper who leaps before she looks and lands in my pond could be washed downstream, creek by creek, county by county, eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. Then, if she got picked up by the Gulf Stream, she could conceivably be washed eastward and then northward, get caught in the North Atlantic Drift, and end up off the coast of Europe. Which would be pretty darned inconvenient for her, especially if she had stepped out only to get a newspaper.

So you've seen my little Walden West. By now it's getting late and dark. We'll walk back to the house along the road. That way you can get out of the woods, which, pretty and peaceful though they be, do have a certain sameness. The road is just over here. Across the road, that's an eight hundred-acre ranch. It has areas of deep woods and some pretty meadows. Notice how the cows react to us. They are not used to seeing people on foot. Some move away from us, alarmed; some move closer to us, curious. But if we drove by in a car, they would pay no attention to us.

Smell that? Someone somewhere is cutting hay. If you were reading this on the Scenternet you could smell that subtle, sweet fragrance.

Hear that? That sound, to me, says "Texas summer day" more than any other. It's the dry rattle of a cicada, which we call a locust, not to be confused with the biblical locust, which we call a grasshopper.

See those pawprints in the sand along the road? They might have been made by a dog. But they also might have been made by a coyote. Every evening about sunset, you can hear the yip yip yippie yi yo of the coyote chorus as they muster along here. I love that sound.

And look down here: A tumblebug, moving upside-down and backward, is rolling a ball of dung. It will bury the dung and lay its eggs in it. The larvae will hatch and then eat the dung. Tumblebugs are scarab beetles, which were sacred to the ancient Egyptians. Perhaps because of their refined palate.

Unfortunately, along the road you also see sights like this. After a deer blind, litter is the ugliest sight in the country.

This road leads toward the nearest town. Along the way you can still see the shells of old farmhouses settling into dignified decrepitude. In town, women still wear bonnets as they work in their gardens. Chickens graze along the main streets. The entrance of the little grocery store has a wooden screen door. And at the hardware store, still visible in big, faded, hand lettering on an outside wall, are the words "Moon Bros. Buggies, Wagons & Farm Implements."

OK, we're back at the house. Pull up a stump here in the yard, and we'll sit still and talk only in whispers and wait for deer. Sunset is the best time to see them. Listen to the sounds of sunset: a chuck-will's-widow (cousin of the whip-poor-will and the nighthawk) and crickets and maybe a katydid or two. Here in the woods, the day shift has punched out; the night shift has punched in.

Despite my interest in deer, I don't know where these deer come from or where they go or what their domestic arrangements or politics are. But over the years deer have become, to me, a metaphor for the good life in the country. A sort of litmus test of tranquillity. If you have deer in your area, your area has not yet become too humanized: too populated, too noisy, too polluted, too clear-cut, too shot-up, too bulldozed.

I get a kick out of just going outside in the morning and seeing the cloven-hoofed pawprints of deer in the sand, as if, during the night, Pan himself had fluted by.

Look over there. Oh, sorry. They're gone already. It was two lightning bugs, flirting as they flashed their lovelights in the gathering gloom.

I do know this much about deer: They are as sensitive as an exposed nerve. Shy and skittish, always looking and listening, ready to bolt. Even as they are eating, they are craning their necks, always twitching their tails like semaphore flags, always swiveling their ears like radar dishes. When they become very skittish, they raise a front leg, like a high-stepping majorette, and tap their paw on the ground.

They are such graceful, fragile creatures. I feel honored that wild animals like them allow me to watch them, share this property with me, come this close to my human scent, my human sounds, my human accoutrements. When I look out across the yard and see deer, I feel wealthy, I feel a kinship . . . Shhh. There's one! Don't move. . . .

OK. Here. Take a picture, why don't you? From this distance I don't think the sound of the shutter will scare it away.

Click.

And there's the second deer! Both are does, I think. They almost always show up in pairs. See how cautious they are as they approach the corn. See how they keep looking in our direction even as they begin to eat.

You can see the whiskers on their face and the lump in their throat as they swallow the corn. Look at those faces. Are they not the essence of innocence? No deer ever blocked the aisle with its shopping cart at the supermarket, changed lanes on the freeway without signaling, or took two parking spaces at the mall.

Take another picture, if you want.

Click.

Oh, my gosh. We've hit the daily double! Look at that: a doe and her fawn! Quick! Take another picture.

Click.

There. Got it. Now, in a way, you will leave here having "bagged" a deer. And yet you have not taken an innocent life, you have not disturbed the peace with gunfire, you have not diminished your own humanity. Just maybe, when Genesis talks of "dominion . . . over every living thing that moveth upon the earth," it means benevolent dominion.

I salute you.

And I'll bet that the deer do, too.

Uh oh. They heard us whispering. They're gone. Poof. Probably didn't appreciate being talked about as if they weren't even in the room.

Yes, I know that you need to be going, too. And I need to be getting inside to feed my cats. It is now well and truly dark outside, so as you leave, be sure to turn on the headlights on your mouse or trackball, and surf carefully. Oh, and before you go, feel free to take some fire ants home with you. I do believe that they've developed a taste for you.

Y'all come back now, y'hear?