For a human to move into this hypothetical acre, a great readjustment has to be made by the rest of the population, and, as would be the case in any other community, this is not accomplished without a great deal of grumbling and resentment. Animals are not in the habit of banding together and forming committees, but if they were I would have been visited daily by outraged woodland representatives, demanding that I unhand their resources, cease consuming their kin, and move on to bother some other sylvan municipality. Once I had become attuned to the various meanings of birdsong, I understood what the birds said to each other every time I passed by: not some glorious ode to romantic, unspoiled Nature but “There goes the neighborhood.”
I couldn’t bring myself to leave the forest, and I couldn’t make up my mind to stay. I was alone now. It had been weeks since Grandma disappeared, and there was no hint that she might ever come back. I could sometimes sense her presence, if I searched for it, in the same way that small children can sense God. But this was always fleeting, and it brought me little comfort, just as my brief forays to church had always left me feeling vaguely unsettled and cheated of something that was just out of reach, that I was unworthy of grasping.
The animals were small help, but at least they kept my mind on the here-and-now. I was engaged in a running feud with a family of coons, notorious bandits, over my small cache of berries, pine nuts, and roots. Most of my time was occupied in thinking up ways to thwart them, and finally I went so far as to kill one of the younger ones, an adolescent. He was delicious. But this provoked such an outcry among the other members of his clan that I took to wandering in giant circles around my camp, exploring as I had never explored before, because their shrill cries of revenge had begun to haunt me even while awake. Despite the fact that the forest laws were in my favor (I was bigger, hence I was in the right) I began to suffer from a guilty conscience. This is why mankind will never again be at home in the wild; we have not left it so much physically as spiritually, and the prospect of a return journey is not a pleasant one. Conscience, when it exists, is a powerful master.
I was looking, I can see now, for a more permanent place to live. Not one that was set apart from prying eyes and curious little hands (the only thing that bothered me about eating raccoons was their hands, which have four fingers plus a thing that, if not precisely a thumb, looks enough like one to make me a possible cannibal). But such a place doesn’t exist in the forest, which is the least private of anywhere. I guess I was really only looking around. Now that I had no herb-gathering errands to go on, I felt like a girl who’d been let out of school early. Mixed with my sadness at Grandma’s—what? death? disappearance? evaporation?—was a sort of elation at being allowed, finally, to indulge my natural urge to move at random. I spent entire days in tracking the movements of the stream, following it to pools where the fish were large enough to eat. I developed a relationship with a fox, who enjoyed barking at me and then running when I chased him; when I’d finally give up, he would reappear, yapping delightedly at his superiority. I had known similar dogs. I passed by the same grove of ancient oaks again and again, until something about them seemed to beckon me, and when one day I stood in their center and raised my face to their canopy, I remembered Grandma telling me about the Tree People, and I realized with a shock that these were them.
The last Tree People, she’d said, believed that they were the children of the forest, descendants of trees who had gotten ambitious and yanked their own roots from the ground. Using them like feet and legs, they tried to explore the world, but they found that they were better suited for standing still than walking. When they tried to return to their natural state, however, they found it was impossible. They had succeeded in defying the laws of nature, which is never as hard as it seems, but always carries some terrible price. In this case, the price was loss of home. The newly mobile trees had to learn how to live all over again, and gradually they lost all similarities to their relatives and turned into people, with no hard feelings on either side.
For the Indians, who believed this story, living in the forest must have been like living among a host of conscious monuments to the past. For myself, who also believed this story, I understood that I had been surrounded by thinking, living beings all this time, the wise and immutable trees, whose ill-fated children were long gone but who themselves continued to exist, unperturbed.
Consider this: Me walking through that forest in that day and age, once home to many people and now empty of all but me, was as it would have been for an Indian to wander through Manhattan if everyone there had died of war or disease, and there were only empty buildings to peer at. This forest was their city; these oaks were their skyscrapers. I was existing in a ruined world. A terrible thing had happened here, and it echoed still in the living wood.
Grandma remembered everything from those days, and she told me what had happened to the Tree People with the authority of one who had seen it with her own eyes. First there had been wars with other kinds of People—Rock, Mud, Frog, Deer—but these were nothing new. Then whites had come, and brought disease. The numbers of Tree People quickly diminished. Of those who were left, a number fell victim to alcohol and went to live where they could get it more easily. Many were killed outright by men with guns. The rest of them moved on, eventually, to a reservation near the lake, where they live today, selling discount cigarettes and lottery tickets and toying with the possibility of putting in a casino.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered upwards. There was some response—moaning trunks, branches rubbing together, rustling leaves. Up high, there was a breeze blowing. On the ground, it was still.
If you spend enough time in the company of a tree, you can get to know it, just like a horse or a man or a dog. Trees have personalities, moods, and opinions; their modes of expression are subtle, which means you have to pay careful attention. I made a point of visiting these oaks as often as possible. It required patience to figure out what they were about. I had deduced by then that these trees were not just alive but conscious. I wanted to learn whatever it was they had to teach me. This became my new goal. I couldn’t just live in the forest and do nothing, like a nymph. I needed to continue my training.
By this time, I was going around completely unclothed. Chester Burgess had reappeared in late spring to retrieve the sacks of empty cans from Grandma and me, and to offer more supplies, but his load contained no new dresses, and for that I was extremely grateful. Had he seen me, perhaps he would have offered to return with some, but I stayed hidden the day he came and watched him from several yards off. I wasn’t in the mood for conversation.
He knew I was there, of course. He was exceptionally nervous, old Chester was. Moving as quickly as he could—I could see that he was suffering from mild rheumatism—he kept looking around, waiting for me to pop out at him. Or perhaps someone else. I wondered if he knew that Andrew Watkins and his team of researchers had followed him out here last time, and that he was responsible for Grandma’s flight. I had considered confronting him with that information, perhaps even suggesting that he take a few lessons in spycraft from Miz Powell, but I let him go on his way, unharassed. Poor old Chester. I wondered how long he would go on paying his dues to a woman who no longer existed. Probably until he felt that whatever debt he owed to her was paid off. Or until he showed up one season and saw that the previous year’s offering was still untouched, at which point he would be forced to draw his own conclusions about what had happened to us.
I wondered, too, how I would explain Grandma’s absence to anyone who came looking for her. It was not unthinkable that Mother herself would traipse out here to check up on us, and when she found that Grandma’s house was gone, there was no telling how she would react. And what would I say when she saw me? Hello, Mother—yes, I’ve given up clothes. Don’t need them. And Grandma—well, she just sort of vaporized herself, and she took the house with her. It’s all the university’s fault.
I didn’t even know how to think about Grandma now. I unders
tood the proper place of reverence one reserved for the dead, but I wasn’t sure if she fit there yet. In any case, the place she occupied in my mind and in my imagination far exceeded the level of anyone else I’d ever known. Was she a goddess? Was she a spirit? These questions to me were more of degree than credibility. It would never occur to me to dispute that goddesses and spirits existed. Of course they did. What I didn’t know was whether or not she was one of them. And really, this was only a distinction—a formality, nothing more. If she wasn’t actually a spirit, she was as close as one could get.
When Chester was gone I sorted through his boxes to see what goodies they contained. More food, enough for two; he couldn’t have known that Grandma was gone. No one did. I buried most of it right there, hoping the cans wouldn’t rust through, intending to come back for it in the fall, when food was scarce. A new knife, a very welcome gift indeed. Some twine, always handy. Matches. Soap—hah! That was a good one. A small camp shovel. Two small cooking pots. A couple of blankets. Scissors. Various other sundry items, most of them no longer relevant to someone like me. I left most of the stuff sitting right there, knowing that the brighter items would be picked up by scavenging animals, and that the rest would be scattered by the curious bear. There was a bear, I knew, though I’d never met him, nor hoped to. I knew the laws of the forest too well.
I fashioned a sort of belt out of the twine, wrapped it around my middle, and stuck the knife in it, having first created a scabbard out of bark. This took a while, but I had nothing but time. On the other side of my waist I carried the scissors, though I had no idea what I was going to do with them. They just seemed to complete me, somehow. Then I pretended to examine myself in a full-length mirror. Hair longer now, well past the shoulders, knotted and matted. Breasts definitely smaller since I had lost all that weight. I could see my own hipbones, count my ribs. A weapon at my side for the first time in my life. Well, why not? Everyone else in the forest had one. Bear had teeth and claws. Fox, the same, plus cunning. Crow had wings. Mouse had smallness. Haley had a knife and scissors, and the gift of reason. With those things, I could do almost anything.
I guess it’s not too far of a stretch to say that by now I had become more than half wild. Unlike my mother, I had been accepted by the forest. I was adept at tracking and trapping any animal I felt like eating, and I had learned to skin and cook an astonishing variety of creatures, none of which I would have considered edible in my former life. With Chester’s pots, I fried and stewed and made soup, and, adding these to the variety of herbs available to me, I ate much better than I had with Grandma. When undergoing the strenuous kind of boot camp she had put me through, a sparse diet was the most conducive to clear thought. The more distanced one was from the body, the closer to the spirit one became. I sometimes think that she prepared food only to humor me, as if she had already learned to subsist on almost nothing except water and air and moonlight, and was impatiently waiting for me to do the same.
But there had been a shift in my purpose. I had mastered a certain level of whatever-it-was, witchcraft or Zam or the legithatic arts or Flash Jacksonism. I was now onto a whole new field. I intended to raise survival to a fine art, to live in the woods not as if I’d landed there by accident but had gone there on purpose. Thoreau came to mind again, and for the first time since leaving home I wished that I had brought a book; his book about pondside living, to be precise. But there was nothing to do about it. I couldn’t very well place an order with Chester Burgess and hope he got around to filling in within the next nine months or so. No point. I would do without even that much human company.
Haley, I would ask myself, are you ever going home again?
Why? I would respond.
I never came up with a reasonable answer. I was becoming my grandmother after all. I had imbibed more knowledge from her than I’d known. I loved to walk through the woods alone now, naming every plant I saw, gauging its effectiveness in fighting this or that ailment, or as a preventative. I had graduated to a whole new level of herbal mastery. My eye was practiced. For the first time, the study of herbs began to seem like a pleasant immersion, one to which I could devote the rest of my life without ever being finished. Once this idea would have annoyed me, thinking of how far I had left to go. Now, however, it seemed like a blessing. Finally I had a purpose in life. I knew something most other people didn’t.
(Note to self: When menstruating, bury used tampons very deep. Something has been digging them up lately. Something big.)
Try this, next time you find yourself alone in the woods. Plant your feet firmly on the ground, and raise your arms at imprecise angles to your body, one higher than the other. Close your eyes. Now, never move again. When a breeze comes, allow it to sway you. When something sniffs around you, let it. If that creature chooses to burrow under your skin, don’t move. Eventually, your arms will drop off, and new ones will grow in their place—longer arms, and more numerous, so that at the end of your life you will have not two of them but seventy or eighty. Your skin will expand as your insides get bigger. Your heart rate will slow down, gradually, until it beats only four times a year. You will stay like that for years upon years, until you begin to die.
This is what it’s like to be a tree, a millionth part of the forest. I had learned to love trees even more than before. I sat and watched them, and this is what I learned.
Your death will happen at this same slow rate, taking perhaps five years, maybe fifty. Half of you may die while the other half lives on indefinitely. Your head could be lopped off by lightning while the rest of you survives. Eventually, though, you will fall. It may take an age for you to accomplish even that simple act. Don’t allow your spine to bend, not even in your penultimate moment, for a tree never gives in to death. Even after you’ve hit the ground, and your body begins to be consumed by thousands of insects, you are still a tree. Even after you have been carted off, molecule by molecule, you are still a tree. Even if in a hundred years, someone comes by and notices nothing where you once stood, you are still every bit as much a tree as you were when you planted yourself there, thinking tree thoughts and having tree dreams.
If we had time to make this kind of experiment, what would the world be like? But we don’t have time, of course. Time is a gift that comes with size. Trees are bigger, they outlast us by far, and are superior in every respect. This is what I learned, sitting at the foot of those ancient oaks, surrounded by them on all sides. It is an honor even to be with a tree. They are infinite in patience and understanding of every process ongoing. How could they not be? This is their nature. This is the way they were made.
I loved the trees not least because they knew everything that is happening everywhere in the forest. Once I had begun to learn to pay attention to what they knew, then I knew it too. That, combined with the gifts I had taken from Grandma, were what allowed me to realize one day that someone, somewhere, had an ax, and was doing some lumbering, not a mile from where I sat.
There is a romantic notion that trees resent being cut down. They do not. They understand their role in the world, that they are there to make homes. If a human comes along, chops a few trees down, saws the wood into lumber and makes a house out of it, this is only a very elaborate version of what an owl does, or a fox, or a bird, when they construct a nest or a burrow. The fate of trees is to give up their bodies. Nothing unnatural about that.
But I had come to believe that these trees were different. The woman I thought of as Grandma told me repeatedly that nothing had changed in this forest since she’d come to live there, and that it was the source of her ageless power. I understood then that if the trees were cut down, that essence would go away. That’s because they were, quite simply, the oldest trees around. In ordinary times, their demise would not have been significant. But these were not ordinary times. There were no older trees than these, at least not in this part of the world. I knew that this was not a permanent state of affairs. Trees were destined to outlast people, and someday there would once a
gain be continents of forests, stretching so far and deep that no creature living within them would know there was any other kind of place. But that was the long view, the big picture. Today, here and now, someone was cutting down a tree, and everyone in the forest knew about it.
I, however, was the only one who could put a stop to it.
It required little forethought. I was already as dressed as I was going to be, already prepared for battle. I slipped away from my grove of oaks—not bothering to say good-bye, since they would scarcely have noticed my absence by the time I’d returned—and headed off for the epicenter of the disturbance. I wore only my twine belt, with the knife in the bark scabbard. Though I knew I was still far out of earshot of whoever it was, I moved silently, from shadow to shadow. That bear had been around again, and another forest rule is that you never make noise, unless you are trying to attract a mate. Which I was not. Silence is golden.
Moving like that, I could cover a mile in about half an hour, not counting the time I took to stop and still my breath and heart, or the moments when I heard various noises and stopped to determine what they were before continuing. Trees do not mourn their dead, but they are aware of what’s happening, always talking about it. I followed the trail of gossip, that’s all. In an hour, perhaps a little more, I was within a hundred yards.
For a while now I had heard the blows of the ax. I smelled diesel fuel, though I couldn’t hear an engine. And I smelled a human, too. That scent, at once familiar and repulsive, cloyed in my nostrils, and I had to stifle a sneeze. Sweat. A trace of deodorant. It was, of course, a man.
I could see his outline as I crept closer, protected by underbrush and low-hanging branches. I did not make the slightest sound. There was a road near here, a seldom-used path cut out long ago by some enterprising ranger or lumberjack. It was mostly overgrown, but still serviceable for someone with a truck or a tractor. The trees here were not so old, either, but still important. They knew things that the other trees did not. I grew angry. Why, of all places, of all trees? Why did this person have to cut down these?