The Woods that Wouldn’t be Stolen

We would never have walked so deep into the woods had we not gotten lost.

Arms laden with sticks tied together with an old belt, Hamish and I went hand in hand through the trees, a rising fog leading us down old paths we didn’t recognise, but somehow knew were taking us home.

Hamish’s little hand in my free one lifted some of the weight on my back, when he suddenly pulled me off the path. Casting my eyes to where he pointed, wide-eyed and dusted with a curious smile that always lighted him in those days, I saw something being revealed to us. The fog rose higher to shield my gaze but I peered through it, and caught sight of shapes so straight and angular that no force in nature — the figure of winding roots and branches — could have formed.

Houses, squat and broken, like our late Grandmother once talked about before her mouth gave way to her age, and reduced her stories to fragments as winding as the roots of her ancestry. Long before Hamish was old enough to remember anything but her face and the feel of her wrinkled, pink hand pinching his cheek.

“Let’s go look!” Hamish tugged at my hand, and I wanted to deny him, but then my reflection in a broken and dusty window beckoned me closer, and our feet found a new path. We turned into the broken playground of dark green, moss-carpeted doorsteps and doors swinging loose on hinges, their creaks muffled by the air stuffed with ancient birdsong.

The deeper we walked, the more and more I started believing our grandmother’s stories. And the more I believed them, the tighter I held on to Hamish’s hand.

There was a time when men from our village thought they owned everything because nobody had said it before. They walked around new woods that had seen a hundred generations of trees before their youth came to them with saws and hatchets and signs to say ‘this is here and I own this.’

They ripped bark from trunk and roots from the earth and spared nothing for miles. They dug stones out of the ground and left it soft, and didn’t think twice when it washed away in heavy rain, because their new houses kept their feet dry. Every sunrise, they came out together and reaped a bounty they didn’t grow themselves, and left nothing in their wake but silence. Conferences of birds and beasts found no meeting place anymore, and fled the place.

Once the trees that orbited the heart of the woods were gone, and the noise of men no longer muffled, at last something awoke within the wood. It had no name, and no sign to tell it ‘you are here’ but it woke with the knowledge that a hundred generations of trees will teach in good time to a receptive mind and ear.

The spirit crept to the edge of the wood, a much shorter crawl than it remembered before its slumber, and waited, and watched. It watched men sharpen their hatchets and tie up their boots, kiss their wives and children and not look back until the sunset brought their lumbering masses home and into bed.

Once it knew enough, it changed itself into a shape befitting its mischief. With long dark hair and hooded black eyes, sharp nose and thin elfin lips, cheekbones sharp as snowy peaks, and hands as soft as moss. It made itself into a child, and wove from the bodies of its fallen brothers a basket, laden with rich red cherries from the top of any season.

Then the spirit waited some more, with hope in its other hand, that once the homes are finished the woodsmen will be satisfied.

When the first deer fell, a bullet lodged between its wide open eyes, so too did the spirit drop the hope from its hand, and ventured into the open.

The first wife who opened the door saw a child only after tasting the cherries with her eyes. She was told “Take some,” and so she did, digging with both hands into the basket. When she withdrew, three cherries fell from her hands and rolled into the corners of the home. In her new hunger she took no note, and devoured the juicy red gems without a second thought to the child at her door.

Her own children came into the kitchen and saw nothing but their mother’s red hands, and her looking around for more. But by then the spirit had moved on, and a second wife was digging in the full basket with a bowl.

Home to home the spirit knocked, and didn’t return to the woods until the first woodsman returned. But then the wives were too busy skinning the kill with cherry-red hands to tell their husbands of their hunger, or the child they had already forgotten.

That night the spirit slept, and still sleeps, its work being done, its judgement cast, and the seeds of the cherries buried between tiles and between doorstep and hinges.

In the morning, two or three saplings in every house had grown many hands high. Their roots already set into the floors of the house cracked the pristine tiles, disturbing the artful mosaic that heavy hands, known for killing, had laid piece by piece.

The first hunter to put a knife to it came away with a blade to dulled and bent that it would never mar another pelt again. The head of every bold axe fell off mid-swing, before it could even lay on the stem, or assault a single new leaf out of place. No flame would touch the saplings, instead burning the hands that lit them, or blew out in a sudden breeze. And so the saplings were left to live and grow, but threatened with a wrath that only a man would write and spit at something so innocent.

Back in the woods, the huntsmen and woodsmen were haunted with a silence that amplified every footstep into an earthquake, and found that every path they had trampled to dust before, to lead their way toward their purpose, the heart of the woods, merely turned them around and dizzied them until they stumbled out of the woods and to their homes, where their children sat busy picking loose cherries from the branches of the young trees. The hands of the wives were still stained red from the first feast, and now their husbands matched, red from the fury of heavy-handed slaps that sent more cherries scattering over the floor. They buried themselves too quickly to be swept.

After a few days of the spirit’s sleep, it woke up for a minute and slunk back into the village in the shape of rolling thunder with no rain, because it heard a sound that woke it up. Not the sound of breaking steel that had rung through the trees as every trunk grew solid and resilient, but the sound of weeping.

And men who had not shed a tear since they lost their mothers washed the faces of their broken tiles, because they made something beautiful and now it was dead. Dead as the things they killed to get this far.

And they wept as they packed up their hatchet handles and fled the silent woods. When the living things returned and the spirit went back to sleep in its acorn cap and cave and basin of a roaring waterfall, a blue-grey fog returned to mask the abandoned shells the empty houses, pierced on all sides by thick branches weighed down with fruit.

“Is the spirit coming back?” Hamish asked, as the fog thinned out and we found our path back home.

“No,” I said, remembering our poor grandmother’s words and red-stained hands. “No, I don’t think so. This is just the intermission. I think we’re all going to forget and try to take the woods again, and then be kicked out and keep forgetting.”

“I’m not going to forget,” said Hamish, kicking a round rock all the way up the path. It tripped on a root and skidded into a puddle, and I felt his hand tighten around mine.

“Maybe not,” I said, “but you will still try. What else is there to do around here?”