He slowly cycled around the margins of the clearing. It appeared the surrounding trees had completely overgrown what must have been a homestead at some time in the long distant past, but the house, with its attendant sheds and outbuildings, had long gone. Nowadays, only a stone skeleton of its former presence still existed, half buried by mosses, pine needles and fast-growing seedlings.
The air in the glade held a deep silence, one that hinted at an ominous, yet peaceful solitude. An essence of the past permeated the strangely warm breeze, which occasionally wafted through these aged Pines. ‘Maybe this place belonged to a Slate Miner and his family, at one time, or another.......’
“I wonder what happened to them?” He asked aloud, just as Cheech came racing back into the glade, his tail wagging and panting in an excited way.
"Squirrel, was it?" Hovis enquired but Cheech didn't reply, he only wagged his tail more furiously when Hovis spoke to him. "Come on then, let's see where you've been," Hovis called as he pushed off into the needled detritus littering the pathway.
*
Back in the present, passing through the glade today, had he cared to look up, high between the obscuring trunks of the tall Pines, you could just see No.37, the last log cabin on The Hill; while all around it were the charred corpses of other people’s lives. Hovis knew this fate was inevitable for No.37. In a mere few weeks he would be both homeless and jobless, but today he was wearing the Big Mig’s Flame Red Onesey and he was still free to dream.