But there was a change—not long ago, perhaps as long as a pine tree takes to grow from seedling to hollow—and the humans, mysteriously and unanimously, stopped using one part of you. A strange choice: there was nothing particularly special about that one little patch. There was an old structure, small, stone and wood and clay; a little snippet of stream; a square of sweet earth, which the humans had regularly seeded for their own food; there were grasses, and clovers, and all the low-living things that made their homes in such: the mice, the worms, the beetles and burrowers.