Forest Mage

“The river freezes along its bank in winter,” she told me.



“There will still be tracks to it. You’ll see.”



Kara had tagged along with us, and to my surprise Amzil had the child set the final snare. She seemed very young to me to be doing such a task. Nonetheless, I held my tongue, suspecting that in this, Amzil probably knew best. Small as she was, the sooner Kara stepped up to help provide for her family, the better they would do.



The cottage became a snugger place as each day passed. We mixed grass, moss, and mud, and chinked the gaps between the logs. With our salvaged wood, we put a floor in the cabin. I hunted each morning with my sling. My best day was when a lucky shot brought down a goose that I’d startled off the river. It was fat. Grease had never tasted so good to me. Amzil caught every drop of it before it could drip into the fire and saved it to flavor the lean rabbit that made up most of our meals.



Our days began to have a pattern. Each morning I hunted. I brought my kills home to Amzil, and she cooked them. In the afternoons, I did whatever I thought best to improve her cottage. It was rough, crude work for the most part, but even so, it made a difference. A slab of wood and three stick legs made a stool. I longed for an awl, but managed to bore and whittle the leg holes with my knife. I made a low table so that the children could sit on the floor in front of the fire and have their meals more comfortably. Every day, Amzil set aside a part of my catch to either smoke or dry as jerked meat. It pleased me to watch her little larder grow full. I built her another shelf.



Three times in that period, I saw travelers pass. The couriers who served the king passed every day, but other than them there was little traffic on the road this time of year. Once it was a train of wagons pulled by oxen, heading toward Gettys. The men driving them were hard-eyed, and both the first and the last wagon had guards perched on the wagon seats, long guns slung across their knees. Plainly they wanted nothing to do with anyone. We stared at one another, but no one called out a greeting. Another day, it was a man riding a horse and leading two mules laden with furs. He was headed west on the road. He nodded to my “Good day” but kept on his way. And the other traveler I saw was a tinker with a wagon pulled by a mismatched team. The wagon was painted with pictures of his wares, but the bright panels were thick with dust and the tall yellow wheels of his wagon were crusted with mud. I was on the edge of the stump field. I waved my arms at him, hoping he’d stop. I wanted to see what tools he had for sale. He waved back at me, but then stirred up his team to a trot, plainly disinclined to pause. I shouted after him, but he was gone, leaving only dust hanging over the road in his wake.



Often the children would come out to watch me at my tasks. I began to teach them the nursery rhymes I knew, the counting songs and memory games. They liked the one about the farmer calling his five goats. Kara wanted to learn how my sling worked. I made her a smaller one, and set her targets. She became a fair shot, but Amzil seemed reluctant to let me take her out to hunt. I could not decide if she did not trust me alone with the child or did not think it a proper task for her.



I cut firewood every day. It became a wall between Amzil’s cottage and the hut where the old man lived. At night, our fire was more generous and it filled the small space with both warmth and light. One night I took it upon myself to be the storyteller, and it flattered me that Amzil listened as attentively as her three small children. I told them two tales that my mother had told me when I was a boy, and then I found myself telling a story that I did not remember hearing, yet I knew I was not making up. It was the tale of a young man who sought to avoid doing a task that his mother had given him, and of all the misfortunes that befell him as a result of his attempt to ignore his duty. The ending was, in a way, quite comical, for when the boy finally surrendered and went to do his task, he found that his mother had already done it. The children seemed to enjoy the story, but after Amzil had put them to bed she said to me, “That was a rather strange story.” Her tone made it clear that she did not quite approve of it.



“It’s a story that the Speck tell to their children,” I said, and then wondered how I had come by such knowledge. “I think it’s to teach them that some tasks are so important, they cannot be ignored. Someone will do them.”



Amzil raised her eyebrows me. “And your telling it makes it all the stranger,” she said with even greater disapproval. A short time later, she sought her bed with the children, and I rolled myself in my blankets to sleep before the fire.



That night I dreamed of the Tree Woman’s forest. I walked alone down paths where once we had walked as a couple. It was autumn in the forest and the leaves on the deciduous trees were turning. I had never seen such a spectacle. In the area of the plains where I had grown up, there were groves of trees along the river or following the streambeds. In autumn, their leaves turned a soggy brown and hung on the branches until the frost and falls of snow took them down. Never before had I experienced walking in a forest where the leaves had gone yellow and gold and scarlet. When I lifted my eyes, the brilliance of their color against the bright blue autumn sky was shocking. The leaves had already begun to forsake the trees; there were drifts of them across the path, and as I waded through them they rustled around my feet. There was an incredible smell in the air, a rich odor of decomposing leaves and fresh rain and the promise of a sharp frost in the night to come. I felt alive, and in the strange clarity of that dream I felt that this life was larger and brighter and sharper-edged than in my waking world. I was going somewhere. I could not have said where, and yet I was hurrying to get there, eager to arrive. I went down a hillside through a forest of white-trunked birches with golden leaves fluttering in the autumn breeze. At the bottom, I came to a swampy place where high-bush cranberries dandled their translucent scarlet fruit below palm-sized leaves that had gone red with the frost. Willows grew there, and their long narrow leaves had gone a different shade of red. I cupped a scant handful of the fruit and tasted it. The berries burst in my mouth with the sweet of summer ending and the sharp tang of winter yet to come. I chewed the seeds as I walked on, deeper into her world.