All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by frost.

J.R.R Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

The shovel we used for digging the hole in the woods that night was left behind by dope growers. We found it many years ago, along with plastic trays and white pails. Only the marijuana plants were gone.

The shovel was short so it would be easy to carry in a knapsack and hide in the woods. We put it in a new hiding place where no one would ever find it. Why bother, I thought? We'll never use a shovel out here while hiking in the middle of nowhere.

But there we were, taking turns digging a hole two feet deep and two feet wide through dry dirt and roots and rock. We weren't planting anything in our hole. We were hiding something.

Not only would our shovel never be discovered; our hole and its contents would probably not be found for hundreds of years.

We filled the hole back in by 7:30 at night, a half hour after we started digging. It was early August. There was no wind in the trees and no breeze from the lake, even though we were 20 yards from the shoreline.

It was also unusual that we did not see a single deer during our five hours in the woods, but, more remarkably, that there were no deer flies, black flies, mosquitoes or dragonflies hunting for them.

It was as if the wilderness had ceased moving, almost like it was holding its breath, watching, quietly waiting, to see what we where going to put into that hole.

We ended the night with a small celebration. We cooked bear steaks over a wood fire and watched from a rock stained white by turkey vultures as a new moon rose slowly above the tall pines across the lake. He asked me if I would like to hear a poem. I agreed and he recited a difficult poem called, In Memory of W.B.Yeats by W.H. Auden. When he hesitated after a reciting poetry for what seemed like two or three minutes I began to clap.

"I'm only half way through," He said.

I only remember one of the sixty-seven lines from the poem: The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

 Although the hole is unmarked, I know that I could find it any time of year. It's located along that lake by the railway bed, just inside the V where a well-worn game trail forks into two paths.

The contents of the hole will probably be found in one of two ways. A backhoe will dig them up centuries from now when a subdivision is built around the lake, or they'll be discovered floating in the water after a fire and erosion moves the shoreline of the lake.

While digging the hole I remembered that I knew someone who was a gravedigger. It was a man I hunt with now. He has one of those nicknames that says it all. We call him The Man of Steel.

"He dug graves for 30 years," I said.

There was no response, so I added, "He could dig a six-by-six-by-three grave in an hour."

My friend responded by saying, "That reminds me of the gravedigger scene in Hamlet."

He talked about a scene written by William Shakespeare more than 300 years ago. Hamlet and two gravediggers were discussing the absolute finality of death, which brings me to the contents of the time capsule we buried in the woods north of Kingston, near Chaffey's Locks.

We agreed to each put one thing in the time capsule, so I knew it would have to be something important. I put in a hunting book with 43 short stories and my friend put in 22 of his photographs from the woods around the hole where the time capsule is buried.

He handed me the photos in silence and I looked at each one as I put them between different pages of the book. I only had one question - about the picture with the full frontal shot of a naked woman floating on her back in the lake beside our hole.

"Who is this?" I asked.

"My wife." He answered.

"Excellent." I said.

The contents were sealed in a ZIPLOC bag and put inside a capped piece of rigid plastic PVC plumbing pipe.

Although the contents of the capsule are important to us, they will likely not be that important to whoever finds them -- if they are ever found at all.

The contents of the time capsule make a simple statement. The capsule contains the words and images of our time in these woods. They tell the story of our adventures over numerous years in all seasons and states of mind through all kinds of weather during all hours of the day and night.

The contents show that we were here and that we had a place in the wilderness, and that the woods for miles in all directions around the time capsule was once our place, even if those woods --like us -- one day will no longer exist.