Well beyond the banks of the Dead River, the terrain runs level for a while, bumps once or twice, then makes a sudden rise some thousand feet into crumpled loaves, leaving the horizon looking as though someone had slammed the oven door on a half-done soufflé' And yet the weight of the uplands can't erase the feeling that this is a subtle place, a place of nooks and crannies: small bowls scooped out of the pine-covered hills where black bears snooze in the afternoon heat; smooth blades of granite plunging into gardens of bracken fern. Muddy passages cut by beaver into the grassy skin of the willow islands."