Tree Slayer

by Harriet Springbett

  The wood above the village ended and she stepped into a green prairie humming with crickets, bees and horseflies. The grass was long and seedy and there were pockets of wild flowers. Some, a purple-blue colour, were irises, but she couldn’t identify the others. She stopped and took some photos to show Mum. There were no sheep, and the prairie soon gave way to steep slopes.

  She thought the summit of the mountain was just ahead of her, but when she arrived she realised it was only a bump, and that the top was a little higher. When she reached it, there was yet another peak ahead of her. There was also a car park, which she hadn’t noticed on her map.

  The mountainside was dotted with boulders. She caught a movement on top of a flat one and took out Domi’s binoculars. A marmot was sitting in the sun. It looked like a cross between a rabbit and a fluffy cat. Missing Apple and Acorn, she crept off the path towards it. It scampered a few metres higher. She climbed. But then she heard a sharp whistle, like an eagle’s cry, and it disappeared into a round hole under a rock.

  She continued up a steep, zigzagging path until she arrived, breathless and with aching legs, at a small plateau. It had slopes around it and looked like a giant’s seat. A tiny stone cabin stood to the right, beside a metal gate enclosure. In a dell behind the cabin was a lake, and a pencil-line waterfall cascaded into the far end. A path led around it and up to a pass between two ridges, with rocky peaks visible beyond.

  She took out her camera. The scene would have been perfect, had there been fewer sheep droppings and some trees. But there weren’t even any stunted bushes; just bare, grassy slopes sprinkled with scree. She was hardly going to find her soulmate in a treeless pasture.

  Actually, the slopes weren’t bare. A flock of sheep straggled in a loose group below the pass. She picked up her binoculars and searched for the shepherd. The sheep were grazing and moving slowly downwards. Some joker had graffitied their fleeces with blue stripes, which spoilt the natural beauty of the view. All except one, on the far right, which had escaped the paint can. She let her binoculars drift from right to left. There was no shepherd. A long way to the left, closer to her, one white-and-blue fleece was separated from the others. The sheep was struggling. It was caught in something.

  She walked up the path towards the sheep, skirting the lake and admiring the reflection of the mountain peaks and blue sky in the water. The air was almost still, with no sign of any tree-slaying wind, and it wouldn’t be dark until ten o’clock.

  The stranded sheep wasn’t on the path, and it was hard work picking through the rocks and squishy heather. She collapsed onto a rounded boulder, panting. Cloud fragments wisped like mist just above the pass, changing shape constantly. She’d never been so close to clouds before, and she watched, fascinated. They seemed to have a life of their own and were transclouding – if such a word existed. She fancied she saw a dog, which changed into a boat. She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, the clouds had evaporated.

  Back on her feet, she approached the sheep. It was lying on its side, its fleece and leg snagged in barbed wire. It was bigger than Dorset sheep, and had a huge hooked nose, long legs and curly horns like broken pasta twists. It bleated: a long, plaintive cry.

  A low, threatening bark answered the bleat.

  On the hillside, between the flock and herself, stood a large, white dog, its feathery tail raised. It barked again and trotted towards her.

  She drew back from the sheep.

  There was a different bark, short and sharp, and she saw a border collie sheepdog silhouetted on the pass. Beside it, the head and shoulders of a person appeared, suddenly, as if he’d been lying down.

  The shepherd.

  Rainbow waved and made pointing gestures to the sheep. The shepherd stood up. He was too young to be the old shepherd the campsite owner had mentioned. There was no golden glow around him – but why would she see an aura when she’d never seen one in her life before? Auras were Domi’s domain, not hers. And Amrita hadn’t actually said her shepherd would be old.

  She gestured to the shepherd again. He sat back down and disappeared from sight, as did the collie.

  “There’s a problem with a sheep!” she shouted, her hands cupped around her mouth.

  There was no reaction.

  The white dog crossed the scree and approached the sheep, which struggled even more. Rainbow prepared to shout at it and throw her rucksack if it attacked, but the dog sniffed the sheep and then nudged it, encouraging it to stand up. Then it looked at Rainbow again, as if accusing her of the sheep’s misfortune. Rainbow backed away.

  The dog turned and loped up the slope towards the shepherd. The trapped sheep stopped struggling. It panted, its sides heaving. Rainbow sat down and waited for the shepherd, rooting herself into the earth, as her reiki master had taught her, to calm her mounting excitement.

  Patou only bothered Eole if there was a problem, so when Eole saw him trot over the crest of the hill, he stood up again and looked back down towards the tourist.

  He didn’t spot her immediately. She wasn’t wearing the brightly coloured clothing that made most tourists visible from far away, and which gave him plenty of time to hide. This one blended into the hillside in her dark green and brown clothes. He breathed in and smelt lichen and goat cheese – and blood, which was probably why Patou had come to get him. There was another smell too, a rare one, which seemed nevertheless familiar.

  He followed Patou down the slope, Darwie at his heel, and riffled through his mental catalogue of smells for something close to the familiar woody-musty-green odour coming from the tourist. There was nothing in his memory bank.

  He rounded a bend in the path and saw the source of the blood: Dizzy. She was caught in a trap. He’d been concentrating on his mapopedia and his cloud practice, and hadn’t noticed the flock was one sheep short. Luckily, the green girl wasn’t between him and Dizzy. He wouldn’t have to acknowledge her.

  Dizzy was the worst one for this kind of situation: she panicked, which is how Hestia had chosen her name. If one sheep ran the wrong way when Darwie was rounding them up, it would be Dizzy. She probably suffered from itch, shuffle and escape too. Eole hadn’t named any of the animals. He had no idea how to find a name for something, and Tintin’s nickname had only arisen because he hadn’t been concentrating when they first met.

  The girl didn’t say anything to him. Normally people tried to talk, especially if he was with the sheep. Women were the worst. He would nod at them, as Alexandra had taught him to do. If they kept talking he kept nodding. They soon stopped talking and walked on.

  Dizzy’s rear haunch was oozing blood from wire barbs entangled in her wool and buried in her flesh. He knelt down and put one hand on her head and the other on her back. She struggled against him, showing the whites of her eyes.

  “Keep still, idiot sheep,” he muttered.

  “I think I can help.”

  The girl was right behind him. Patou hadn’t growled. In fact, both Darwie and Patou stood close beside her.

  Eole doubted she could help. She was just like the other tourists, after all. He nodded, hoping his silence would send her away. Then Dizzy kicked him in the stomach. The movement made more blood seep from her flank, and he swore.

  Instead of leaving, the girl crouched in front of Dizzy, murmured to her, and then stretched out her hands and brought them close to Dizzy’s head.

  Eole watched her suspiciously. She still didn’t say anything, but ignored him and closed her eyes. He would give her one minute and then tell her to go away.

  Dizzy bleated and lowered the leg that had been kicking. Forty-seven seconds later, she relaxed her head onto the ground. The girl shifted closer and laid her hands on Dizzy’s neck. A shudder ran down Dizzy’s spine but she didn’t move.

  The girl opened her eyes – which were green – and nodded to Eole, keeping her hands in place. He didn’t need to question what she meant: somehow, his brain knew it was the moment to disentangle Dizzy. He unwound the wire, looped it into
a circle, and bent it away from her flank.

  His Swiss army knife wasn’t adequate for the next job. “Wait here,” he said to Darwie and Dizzy.

  He jogged down to the hut, glancing up at Dizzy while he unlocked the padlock. The girl was still there, doing her magic thing. No, not magic. There had to be a logical explanation, a technique she might teach him if he was careful not to scare her away.

  Back at Dizzy’s side, he cut the wool from around the wounds and sprayed them with antiseptic. The girl gave Dizzy a final stroke and then rubbed her hands together and shook them hard, like he did when he wanted to get rid of a stench on his fingers.

  “Will she be OK?” asked the girl.

  “I don’t know.”

  She raised her eyebrows and then smiled, though he couldn’t see anything humorous.

  “Good point,” she said. “What I mean is, do you think she can stand up and go back to the flock?”

  “Yes.”

  He dug into the ground where the barbed wire was buried, snipped it off below the surface with his wirecutters, and put it in his pocket. He looked at the girl’s face again. She was staring at him, and had forgotten to put on a polite expression. Maybe she was special too; though did he still qualify as special, now he was adopted?

  He whistled to Patou, who nudged Dizzy. She gathered her feet under herself and heaved herself up, and then Patou accompanied her back to the flock.

  Eole’s stomach rumbled again. The girl was silent as she watched Dizzy and Patou. She was different from the girls at school with their red lips and pointless conversations, their giggles, mysterious pauses and ‘don’t-touch-my-hair’ shrieks. She was more like an extra dog than a girl.

  “I’m going to eat my emergency rations from the hut and then you can show me how to do that thing with your hands on the sheep, and we’ll practise when I go to check on Dizzy in one hour,” he said. He checked his watch. It was five forty-two p.m.

  Rainbow opened her mouth to tell the shepherd she’d used reiki to calm the sheep, and that she couldn’t just show him how to do it. But the boy, having spooled out his string of words in a monotone, turned and walked down towards his hut.

  He may be a shepherd but he didn’t match her idea of a soulmate. Besides, he was nowhere near a tree and didn’t have a golden aura. She took out her sketch pad. He was an interesting subject to draw, even so, because although his face was expressionless, his movements were full of emotion. She perched on a boulder and sketched his tall, bulky frame and blond hair. His shoulders sagged as if he carried the weight of the world on them, and he was compressed around the edges like a drawing contoured with a heavy black line. Maybe it was because he was ill: after all, he’d rattled out something about feeling dizzy and needing emergency rations, and he was much paler than the weatherbeaten shepherd she’d imagined.

  He entered his hut without looking back at her. She added his sneaky little border collie to her sketch, picturing the way it had sneered at the sheep. She couldn’t quite get it right. Nor could she capture the shape of the sheep’s head and its wild eyes. She shaded the shepherd’s face, disappointed that she couldn’t nail his awkwardness. Her sketch showed an ordinary, good-looking, sad boy. She needed to do some serious drawing practice.

  The boy came out of his hut with a plastic bag, looked in her direction, and waited. Was he staring at his flock, counting them or something? She glanced behind her. There was nothing there. Anyway, he’d need binoculars to count them. He was looking at her.

  She waved.

  He waited.

  She stood up and put her sketch pad away. He was still standing there, so she slung her rucksack on and walked down to the hut.

  “Are you waiting for me?”

  “Yes. I already told you. I’m going to eat my emergency rations and then you’re going to teach me to calm sheep.”

  “Oh. Actually–”

  He walked to the lake with his dog, sat on a flat rock, and took a little book and a dried sausage out of the bag. He cut the sausage into slices and stuffed a handful into his mouth as if he were ravenous.

  She followed him. “Do you want some bread to go with that?”

  “Yes, but I haven’t got any.”

  “I have. Here.”

  She gave him half of the baguette in her rucksack and he made a sandwich. His hands were coarse, workmen’s hands with bitten nails, though his fingers were long and artistic. He didn’t have bark-roughened palms from communicating with trees.

  As soon as he’d made his sandwich, he opened his book. It was a first aid guide, which seemed to be a strange choice for a leisurely read. She was obviously far less interesting to him than first aid. She considered leaving, but Mary pushed her to make conversation with him and ask about shepherds. It was all right for Mary: she was safe inside and didn’t have to overcome her shyness to speak to the unfriendly boy.

  “My name’s Rainbow,” she began.

  He glanced up. “That’s not a name.”

  At least he hadn’t given her a sideways look, like most people did. “It’s because my mum’s a hippie. So what’s yours?”

  “Eole.”

  She laughed. “That’s not a name.”

  He snapped his book shut. “It is. It comes from a mythological Greek god. The day I arrived, my–” He hesitated, and seemed to struggle to find his words. “Alexandra, heard God whisper the name ‘Eole’ to her, so that’s what she called me. It was totally illogical because if God exists, why would he choose the name of a mythological god? And isn’t it blasphemy to name me after a different god, even if Alexandra is Greek? If God existed, surely he would have punished her?”

  Rainbow hesitated, unsure of how to respond to the splurge of personal information and philosophical questions. She didn’t believe in God – not a conventional god, anyway – but she liked Domi’s suggestion that people’s souls fused with universal energy when they died. She still wasn’t sure how Amrita, with her ability to control parallel worlds, fitted into this scheme.

  “Those are rhetorical questions,” Eole added, “so you don’t have to answer them.”

  She smiled. “That’s a relief. Faith is a complicated subject.”

  There was no reaction from Eole.

  “Never mind,” she said. “Tell me, are there many of you shepherds up here?”

  His face was inscrutable. He reminded her of Guillaume, the intense boy whose parents had left him with Domi for spiritual healing. It was impossible to have a proper conversation with Guillaume or predict how he would react, so most of the commune avoided him. She remembered how isolated she’d felt at Le Logis when she first arrived, and had spent her spare time sitting with him and sketching. Domi told Guillaume’s parents that he needed no healing: he was perfect as he was.

  She changed her question: “What I mean is: are you the only person who looks after the flocks on these summer pastures?”

  “No. All the farmers look after their flocks, but I’m the only person who sleeps here now Tintin has gone. I’ve finished my sandwich, so it’s time for you to explain how you calmed Dizzy.”

  Rainbow had to play back Eole’s words and insert pauses before she understood that Dizzy was the sheep’s name.

  “Hang on. Who’s Tintin?” she asked.

  “He was my friend.”

  “And where’s he gone?”

  “He died.”

  He didn’t give her any more information about Tintin, and she wondered if, by waiting a week before she came here, she’d missed her soulmate.

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” she said. It felt wrong to ask if Tintin had healed trees. But she could ask if Eole had a tree gift. She hesitated, wondering how to form the question. Mary’s frustration rose: she wanted Rainbow to ask straight out. So Rainbow did.

  “Have you got a gift for communicating with trees?”

  He shook his head. Rainbow was pleased with Mary’s advice. Now she’d ruled out Eole, she could continue her search for her soulmate.

  “What a
bout the other shepherds?” she asked. “Can any of them do weird stuff with trees?”

  He shook his head again. “It’s my turn now. What did you do to Dizzy?”

  “Oh, just some reiki,” said Rainbow. She looked up towards the mountain pass, where the high pastures awaited her. It would take the rest of the day to explore them.

  “What’s reiki?” asked Eole.

  “An energy healing technique. I was taught by a reiki master, and I can’t teach you.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Well, there’s energy in all living things. Reiki is a technique for channelling that energy through your–”

  “Mass-energy, or motion-energy?”

  She hesitated. “Universal energy. Life-force energy. When we do reiki, we raise the vibrations of whatever we’re treating. You have to be attuned–”

  “How do you raise the vibrations?”

  His habit of interrupting was starting to annoy her. “You tune into the earth’s natural vibration–”

  “How?”

  “Well, that’s why you need a reiki master.”

  “Is it just in people’s heads? Like God and voices?”

  “No. Yes. I’m not sure. But there’s scientific proof that it works, if that’s what you want. You’ll have to look it up. Anyway, the point is, I can’t teach you to do it.” She paused. “Did you say ‘voices’?”

  “Yes. But reiki can’t be that difficult if it’s only in your head.”

  Mary was urging her to negotiate. Rainbow couldn’t teach him reiki, but she could show him a breathing technique. She suggested this and he agreed.

  “In exchange, will you take me to the other shepherds?” she asked.

  He nodded.

  “Cool! Let’s go.”

  He looked at his watch and then picked up his first aid book. “We can leave in nine and a half minutes.”

  She wanted to ask him why, but he was already absorbed in his book. He stroked his dog, whose chin rested on his lap, as he read. Seeing him and his dog reminded her of Apple and Acorn, and her hands ached to have a ball of purring fur to caress.