Night Wanderers in a Forest

Both Wanderers in Snow and Night Wanderers in a Forest, while tonally extremely different, are in fact made from the same reduction woodblock. Who are these wanderers, in a line, walking through a coppiced wood in the near foreground? 

As a family man, my own children regularly join me in my imagined paintings and prints.  Here I think  we are on a quest rather than just out for a walk, like hunter gatherers on the hoof, looking for a place of refuge.  Is the house on the horizon their house? I don’t think so.  They seem slightly too bedraggled to live there in imposing decadence. They are passing through and like that great tradition of the american dream which is regularly re-hashed both in real life as well as in the mythology of the western and the road movie, their current displacement will resolve itself when they finally find a better place to make roots in. They've got their belongings in their back packs and are walking towards the frontier. - TH