“What seemed impossible turned out to be possible”

Charles has lived beside this plain his whole life. For most of it, the idea that the forest could come back was not something people talked about. The fires were a fact, like the rain or the heat.

“What seemed impossible turned out to be possible,” he says now, standing at the edge of a protected area where the pine is closing in. When the burning stopped, the trees returned — and with them, the animals.

The plain comes back to life

Deer move through the young forest again. Birds that had gone quiet are back. For families who depend on hunting and fishing, a living landscape is not an abstraction — it is food, and a reason to believe the next years can be better than the last.

“When the fire stops, everything else starts coming back.”

Charles is one of many who made the decision to protect rather than burn. The wildlife returning to the plain is, in a sense, their work made visible.