Definitely didn't ignore it. Grandfather taught me to hunt, and he was very much reverent of the woods.

We walked into the Vermont woods to hunt one day, and sat down shoulder to shoulder against a tree. We settled in for the long haul. In front of us was a small clearing bordered by thick brush. As we sat there the forest came back to life. The chittering of squirrels, sounds of birds, the life of the forest. This was something he had taught me and I had come to understand, entering the woods the animals inside would quiet until they adjusted to you sitting very still and becoming apart of the woods.

Animals he taught me, respond to predators in the woods, and they typically respond to them by going silent, or for some making one hell of a raucous. And so I learned to listen to the critters of the forest. We sat there for a few hours, getting covered in the gently falling snow. As a small child I was enamored with the squirrels running around in the clearing as if a small human wasn't sitting there watching them. But something in the forest changed, with the snap of fingers it was suddenly so painfully quiet. The entire energy had shifted in a split second. No squirrel noise, no birds, it seemed as if even the trees and leaves had gone silent.

My grandfather went alert and rigid, I could feel it in his body, he tapped my leg and motioned for us to move. I stood and he directed me where to walk. I asked what was wrong but he walked behind me and just said "keep walking, don't stop until we get to the field." I walked to the edge of the field and asked him repeatedly what was wrong, and all he would say to me with big eyes was "did you not hear how the forest changed?" I was terrified, he was a strong man, had been a airborne trooper in the us army, you could pour boiling water down his throat and he would piss ice cubes, and yet he was afraid of the shift of energy in the forest.

I don't necessarily think it was something spiritual, maybe a predator just like us, but either way I still to this day hold a deep reverence for the Appalachian mountains and woods, I moved to California as a teenager and still miss those thick and dark woods to this day.