My childhood home is nestled in a verdant valley between twin hills. Just beyond the cornfield that surrounds the north and west ends of the backyard is a twenty-acre forest where my dad took my sisters and me hunting. Perhaps the term “forest” is misleading—it is a large grove of trees just dense enough so we couldn’t glimpse anything beyond it and wide enough to span the horizon of the view from the sliding backdoor. The “forest” outlines the furthest seam of the cornfield, separating that field from another, and is home to friendly hawks, rabbits, and deer, as well as the imaginary bears that haunted my nightmares.

When we all went out to hunt, we dressed in our old clothes and boots, wore heavy work gloves, and tied bandanas around our hair to keep the ticks at bay. We definitely meant business. Hunting took two days: the first day we went out, we carried a notepad and brightly colored plastic shopping bags. Some days, when we felt extra ambitious, we brought along duct tape. My sisters and I listened to our dad wax eloquently on the majestic maples and oaks. He pointed out fir trees and honey locusts. Even an apple tree managed to grow there. Suddenly, he hushed his voice. There it was: the perfect tree.

“See that, girls?” He pointed at a tiny sapling. We nodded even though it appeared identical to the surrounding foliage. Our black lab, Cosby, bounded over to sniff at Dad’s chosen tree, nearly yanking my sister’s arm out of socket.

“Plastic bag,” Dad said.

My sister handed him a plastic bag. He tied the bag-marker around the young tree’s branches and dictated “oak” to me. Success. Now, onto the next tree, a beautiful evergreen that was nearly as tall as my three-year-old sister. We did this until either we couldn’t stand the suspense of tree hunting or until Dad felt as though we had had, errr, found enough.

The next morning, we trekked back through the cornfield into the forest, grumpier than the day before and twisting our ankles in the clumps of dirt. I was old enough to know that “hunting” actually meant “getting out of mom’s hair for an hour.” One of us carried a shovel while our dad pushed the red wheelbarrow. We searched for the trees Dad had bagged. Once found, we suggested that it say a quick goodbye to its friends and loved-ones and prepare for its new home.

“Shovel,” he said, with a poorly suppressed grin and facetious formality.

One of us handed him the shovel and he carefully dug around the young tree. Sometimes, the tree was heavy enough that I had to help pull it out of the ground and lug it into the wheelbarrow. If there was room for another sapling, we kept searching for the bright plastic bags; if not, we trudged home and refused to go outside again. Our dad either returned to the forest alone or dug a hole around the border of our yard to replant the tree that we had “caught.” Our yard was eventually encased by a nearly solid line of hunted trees. Trees are very important, Dad would say.

Beyond the perimeter of trees lay a mysterious land filled with treasures to discover, cows to adore, holes to dig and hide in, and speeding cars fresh from the nearby dealership to scare with our water pistols. Not to mention the neighbor’s jungle of grass and weeds next door and that enchanted forest of huntable trees. Mine was the only family who ventured into that part of the no-man’s land of reclusive neighbors and gregarious raccoons. Perhaps the cosine hills to either side of my tiny so-called neighborhood scared away all the families with children. The hill to the west of the house shields it from the city’s glowing streetlights and raucous mall. Its eastern twin rises steeper and drops into anonymous farmland.

The traffic-free hills provided my brother, sisters, and me with hours of entertainment. In the winter, we tried to take advantage of its steep incline and sled down it, through the cornfield. Cosby became chief sled dog when we tied his leash to the front of the plastic, red toboggan.

“Mush!” we cried as we flicked his jump-rope reins. Our voices raised misty echoes and puffs of white above our heads. “Go, go, Cosby! Faster!”

We held onto the brittle-cold edge of the sled with numbed fingers and hoped he wouldn’t flip it over again. He did. We scrambled to sweep the snow out of our coat collars and rolled back onto the sled so Cosby wouldn’t sprint away with it empty and skimming the ground behind him. The leftover husks and foot-high remnants of the cornstalks multiplied our displeasure in falling, and we soon decided Cosby should retire from his otherwise promising career.

In the spring, summer, and fall, the challenge between my sister and I was to race our bikes up the steep hill. Near the top, when our legs burned too much to pedal one more inch, we turned around and zoomed down. We reached speeds of at least forty-five miles per hour and felt the sting of insects hit our cheeks and forehead. We squinted our eyes into slivers to keep the gnats from blinding us and clamped our mouths shut so bugs wouldn’t be our mid-day snack. The contest was to see how far our momentum would carry us up the opposite hill. The railroad tracks half-way up that eastern hill doubled as speed bumps, so we never could get more than twenty feet beyond them. The racing served a dual purpose: the rush of speeding for the Olympic gold and the responsibility of scouting out the land for possible dangers to our obsessive-compulsive runaway dog. After a few matches, we were satisfied that he was generally out of harm’s way and overjoyed that we had found a suitable racetrack.

The wide shoulder of the road on the western hill was home to my sister’s semi-secret fort and our chocolate chip cookie stand. Four dollars in profit could buy two toys each at the dollar store—we were rolling in dough. Further up the hill, the shoulder was the final resting ground for many a raccoon, opossum, and squirrel gone astray. During an afternoon walk, I saw a raccoon so perfectly laid out that I picked a bouquet of wild violets, lavender thistles, and Queen Anne’s Lace and set it between its paws.

One summer, the top of the western hill suddenly morphed from corn and soybean fields into hundreds of condominiums and cul-de-sacs. The steep angle of the hill’s final incline was evened out. My sister and I still had to struggle to pedal our bikes up the hill, but what awaited us at its peak wasn’t the familiar post-card-perfect scene of the city yawning in the comfortable distance. Instead, it was a jolting view of bulldozers and cranes, model condos and fancy cars, dead-end streets with freshly laid tar to zoom over. I was devastated. Families might move in and encroach upon our solitude. Foreign voices would answer the echoes that reverberated between my hills. I knew that eventually the remaining cornfield would no longer exist to hide our yard from the secret service agents my sisters and I suspected were hot on our trail. We would lose the fort half-way up the hill to a greedy contractor and the enchanted forest would simply become sparse trees to decorate the backyard of an apartment complex.

As the city grew greedier for land to annex for itself, the fruits of each committee meeting fell into our yard. Their construction at the top of the hill led to flooded basements for us in the mini-valley. They dug up and laid aside our front yard hedges to make way for underground cables and wires. My dad haggled with the crew to save his prize evergreen and made sure he could replant the hedges, but it took too long for their leaves to return and again camouflage my sister and me while we practiced our sniping skills with neon Super-Soakers.

Even the farm across the street was unsafe from the grasping city realtors. The lonely, elderly farmer, Mel, kept several cows and goats on his lush acres. We often spied him on his riding lawn mower and waved as we sped past on our bikes. Mel would invite us to visit his cows some days and laughed with my youngest sister when the cow mistook my hair for straw. But the city council wanted more land and the committee members pressured Mel to sell his. First the goats left, followed by many of the sandpaper-tongued cows. Mel grew grouchier as each tree at the edge of his ex-property was turned into woodchips. He no longer waved at us and frowned when we reveled in the sounds of our voices bouncing between the hills. He turned down my mom’s invitations of coffee and homemade apple pie. If he said anything other than a terse “hello,” it was to complain about Cosby slithering under the barbed wire and chasing his remaining cows.

The final straw was when yet another car dealership was built two miles away from the house. Car salesmen, eager to make quick and expensive sales to the daring drivers who liked to speed down hills, must have told them about our perfect pair. I saw a direct increase in road kill after that dealership announced its first amazing, never to be repeated sale and was forced to undergo my mom’s extensive warnings of the dangers of cars whizzing past me on my bike. Then there was still the matter of my dog. He belonged in the farmlands of rural Midwest, not in the newly fabricated crossbreed between city and country that my neighborhood was quickly becoming.

After chasing the neighbor’s tail-less cats through his Amazon of backyards, Cosby often responded to the ancestral canine call to organize a pack of animals, namely, Mel’s cows. It was the last day of the dealership’s incredible sale—we had seen their brilliant sale spotlights in the clear sky the night before and heard the remnants from their PA system that floated over the hill. Cosby answered the cows’ insistent calls with a low bark. He tore out of the front yard, through the too thin barrier of hedges, and across the road. We called after him to return – Mel had threatened to take his gun out next time he saw him on his property – and Cosby actually stopped. Maybe he lost the scent, the trail, the chase. Or maybe he picked up the scent of a new creature yet to be tamed.

The scent was gasoline, exhaust, and rubber from the car that we heard gunning its engine at the top of the hill. The sound bounced around the few houses and trees, drowning our calls for Cosby. My sister and I squinted at the noise and saw the sun sparkle off the windshield of a new, red car. We looked across the street and saw Cosby turn around. He watched the car and ambled toward the road. “Watch, slow, time it right now,” I thought. “Don’t get hit.”

Brakes screeched and the car fishtailed as it tried to avoid hitting our dog. Cosby bounced from the front of the car and into the ditch. The car lost its headlight. For weeks, we found shards of its red and orange plastic blinkers hidden in the grass by the road. We held a funeral for Cosby. I drew pictures of him pulling me on the sled and chasing the softball I would bat for him to fetch. Dad dug a hole in the backyard and laid Cosby inside. I leaned over the grave and let the pictures fall from my hand; the soft breeze played with them while I whispered my tearful goodbye.

The coming of the city to our odd neighborhood might have had its advantages – the chance to make friends outside of school, sidewalks for safer bike rides – but it destroyed the serene sense of growing up in our own world. My family still lives in the house, but now the house has cable TV, the yard is missing its transplanted apple tree, and much more traffic passes by. The doghouse became kindling for the basement’s woodstove long ago, and grass covers Cosby’s burial plot. An Alzheimer’s home was even built on one of Mel’s relinquished acres. When I visit home, I can see that the trees still surround the yard even though I haven’t heard of any recent hunting escapades. One of these days, I’m going to bring my bike and coast down the hills, feel the familiar wind in my hair, and smile to hear my voice echo in the valley again.