by Kit Peel
The bird nestled in the snowy branches, becoming invisible to Wyn. As she squinted after it, she saw movement from deep within the grove. Someone or something was in there. Wyn remembered the news of wolves on TV and was scared for Robin, but moments later a border collie trotted into the open. The dog and Robin seemed to know each other, the minister giving a wave as the dog bounded forward to greet him.
A bright light shone against the window. Wyn turned to see Lisa, standing in the bathroom doorway holding a flashlight.
“What you looking at?” she said.
“There’s a …” began Wyn, before regaining her composure. “None of your business.”
“Well? How much longer do you need in our bathroom?”
“I’m not the one who spends hours in here every day,” said Wyn. She jammed her toothbrush into a glass and pushed past Lisa. In her bedroom, Wyn drew the curtains and got into bed.
Night was the worst time for Wyn. In the stillness and the silence, an overwhelming sense of emptiness always filled her heart. It had been the same all her life, even after the happiest days with her first foster mother. When darkness came, Wyn felt utterly alone.
Wind was rising and falling all over the house, pushing under doors and through keyholes. Every now and then, Wyn thought she heard the wind whispering a name. She buried herself under her duvet, willing the night away.
3
—
The next morning, as the radiators were grumbling to life, Wyn put on a dressing gown and padded along the corridor to the bathroom.
She opened the window and leaned out, adding her breath to the morning fog that made the dale seem to stretch forever. For once the jackdaws in the wood were subdued, only squabbling occasionally. Wyn scanned the pine grove, searching for the blackbird and the collie dog from last night. If they were there, she couldn’t see them.
Leaving the window open, Wyn ran the bath. When it was full, she turned off the taps and got in. She lay back, listening to the sounds of morning rising across the dale. As Wyn began to drift off, her shoulders dipped under the water, then her neck. And still she sank lower and lower, slipping into a familiar dream.
She was soaring over mountains, her arms flung wide, weaving between warm clouds that hung lazily around the peaks. Winds traveled with her, brushing against her fingertips. Hidden in the highest mountains, where a pine forest ended, Wyn saw an alpine pass. In the heart of the pass was a small lake, fed by foamy white streams.
Suddenly she was aware of movement in the sky above her. A shadow moved across the sun, casting the pass into darkness. Snow was falling. Ice enclosed the streams. All she could hear was a voice in the wind. Whispering … whispering …
Wyn’s eyes snapped open.
The mountains were gone. Bath water gleamed gold around her. Her dark red hair swirled above her face. For a moment, Wyn didn’t understand. She heard distant banging and the sound of Kate calling her name.
Then Wyn was aware of where she was and she pushed herself upwards. With a gasp, she broke the surface. A wave of water splashed over the bathroom floor. From the other side of the door, Kate was becoming anxious.
“Out in a minute,” said Wyn, as she pushed the heavy locks of hair from her eyes and got out of the bath, letting out the plug and wrapping a towel around her. She was reaching for the door, when she glanced in the bathroom mirror. Wyn’s hand froze on the latch. Her eyes, normally a dull brown, had changed. Now the brown was nearly obscured by tiny golden flecks. Hurriedly, she rubbed her eyes with her hands and blinked. When she looked in the mirror again her eyes were back to their usual dullness.
“What have you been doing in here?” asked Kate, coming into the bathroom and closing the door behind her. “I’ve been knocking for ages.”
Wyn muttered something about washing her hair.
“John called. He wants us to go over to his place and bring a camera,” said Kate.
“What does he want with a camera?”
Kate told Wyn, who couldn’t believe it.
“I know, that’s just what I told him,” said Kate, “but he swears it’s true. If he’s right, we might have a chance of stopping the digging in Skrikes Wood. Unless it’s all some complicated plot to get you over to his place? You know, you could go on your own, if you like. Three’s a crowd.”
“Shut up.”
After breakfast, when Lisa was preoccupied on her laptop, Wyn and Kate slipped out into the fog and made their way down the lane.
Pateley Bridge was all gloamy lights. Cars and people moved slowly along the high street. Shadows turned into human beings as they went into shops. At the bottom of the high street, a group had gathered outside the magazine shop. Wyn and Kate peered past them, their eyes widening at the headline of the Nidderdale Herald, which was hanging in the shop’s window:
WOLVES SEEN IN THE NORTHERN DALES!
“Probably just dogs,” said Kate, as they walked out of Pateley Bridge. As they crossed the Nidd, the fog thickened around them.
“Anyway, wolves attack sheep, not people,” said Kate. She bit her lip. “Except when there aren’t any sheep about. What do they eat when they can’t get sheep?”
“Deer?”
“Great. Because Nidderdale is just teeming with deer these days.”
A voice called out from behind them. Lisa was walking cautiously through the gloom, her pretty face flushed and scowling.
“Where are you two sneaking off to?” she asked when she caught up with them.
Kate told her what John had said on the telephone. Lisa’s scowl deepened.
“He says that there’s trees coming into bud in Skrikes Wood? In this weather? This I’ve got to see.”
“Don’t you have something better to do?” said Wyn.
“Don’t you?”
Wyn had a burning desire to shove the older girl off the road. Lisa clearly read what was in Wyn’s mind and stepped back a fraction. Kate was quickly between them.
“I expect an extra pair of eyes won’t hurt,” she said.
“As if I need your permission,” said Lisa, setting off into the fog. When Kate slipped back alongside her, Wyn ignored her friend, angry that Kate had let Lisa join them. She received a light punch on the shoulder.
“Wolf bait, twelve o’clock,” whispered Kate, nodding in the direction of her sister.
On a clear day, it was only a fifteen-minute walk to John’s house. Today, as the three girls shuffled through the gloom, the short trip seemed to take forever. When Wyn finally stopped glowering at Lisa’s back and looked around, she inhaled sharply. Her eyesight had always been good. Eagle-eyes, her first foster mother had nicknamed her, for her ability to pick out a single flower a field away. Now, as Wyn squinted into the fog, she saw layer upon layer of mist fading to nothing. She glanced at Kate and Lisa, wondering if she was imagining things and wasn’t reassured to see that they were still inching along, hands reaching out in front of them. Wyn pushed herself to concentrate even harder. Fields appeared and scattered houses beyond them. Soon she could see right up the sides of the dale, all the way to the hilltops.
Wyn snapped her eyes back to the road. Lisa and Kate were still shuffling forward through the fog and Wyn, despite now being able to see far into the distance, did her best to copy their movements. Whatever was happening to her, Wyn prayed that it would stop.
Eventually, they left the road and headed up a long, straight drive lined with snow-caked rhododendron bushes and overhanging trees that lay deathly still in the fog. Wyn could see David Ramsgill’s house at the end of the drive.
When they heard the sound of a horse snorting, both Kate and Lisa squinted in the direction the noise had come from. Wyn didn’t need to squint. Further up the track, she saw John Ramsgill lead a dun-colored horse across the drive and pause at a gate that led into a paddock. The horse was agitated in the fog, dancing from hoof to ho
of, bucking and tugging at its halter. John struggled to open the paddock gate with one hand while also kicking away the snow that had built up at its base. The gate flew open just as John was mid-kick. Wyn saw the boy slip on the snow and fall backwards, losing his grip on the halter and landing right underneath the horse’s bucking hooves. Without thinking, Wyn broke into a run. She tore up the long track, grabbing the horse’s halter, yanking him away from John. The boy got to his feet and together they calmed the horse before releasing it into the paddock. They watched the animal trot off into the field as if nothing had happened.
“The silly sod,” said John. “I thought he was going to trample me to death. He might have done if it wasn’t for you.”
He smiled at her in a way that made Wyn uncomfortable. She glared at the scrape on John’s palm and the bruise that was beginning to show.
“You should put some ice on it,” she said.
John scooped up some snow and packed it around his hand, holding it up to show her.
“How’s that?”
“You’ll live,” muttered Wyn.
John was watching her with a thoughtful expression, smiling a little nervously. Kate’s voice rang through the fog, calling Wyn’s name.
With a quick glance down the track, John began talking hurriedly. “I was thinking we could, if you had nothing on, go see a film in Harrogate some time.”
Wyn fixed her eyes on her feet.
“Why?” she said.
“Because, I thought it’d be … I just think we’d have fun. Don’t you?”
“There’s nothing good on.”
“Oh … well … we don’t have to see a film. We could do something else. What would you like to do?”
“I’m not really into Harrogate.”
The thick fog had hidden Lisa and Kate’s approach, but now they were visible near the paddock gate.
“How did you get ahead of us, Wyn?” asked Kate. “And exactly what have we been missing?”
John flushed. He told them he’d be back in a second and ran off to his house. In the meantime, Lisa gave Wyn the filthiest look, then stamped away into the paddock, leaving Wyn to be subjected to a whispered interrogation from Kate. When John reappeared, he had a bandage on his hand and a camera slung around his shoulder. He had also regained his composure, saying enthusiastically to the three girls, “Let’s go.”
They approached Skrikes Wood along the undulating road from Bewerley. The road had been cleared but not sanded, and the snow underfoot was a hard, white concrete that squeaked beneath their boots.
John was recounting the conversation he’d overheard between his father and one of his men. The man had sworn that trees, which just a few days before were all but dead of canker and cold, had now shed their rotten bark and were coming back to life. Some of them even had buds growing on them.
“My dad told him he’d imagined it, and if he hadn’t, to keep it to himself,” John told them. “If it had been anyone else, I wouldn’t have believed him, but the man used to be a gamekeeper like my dad, so …”
“Which trees?” asked Kate.
“I don’t know,” said John, biting his lip. “He didn’t say.”
“So you want us to search the whole wood until we find some trees in bud?” said Kate.
“Yup.”
“In the fog.”
“Er … yup.”
Kate burst out laughing.
“Okay, John-o, but if we find them and get pictures, will your dad stop the digging?”
“I reckon he might,” said John, which prompted more laughter from Kate.
“I think it’s great what you’re doing,” said Lisa, casting the full glow of her smile on John, which left the boy even more flustered.
For once, Wyn was too preoccupied to get angry about Lisa’s fakeness. Skrikes Wood loomed large and silent ahead, its frozen trees rising up a steep hill. The sight of the wood wrenched at Wyn. Before the snows had come, it had been the loveliest spot in the dale and she had spent many, many happy hours in its scented embrace.
Wyn remembered one expedition with Mrs. March, her first foster mother, pushing through the gate by the river and plunging into a world of dappled sunshine and the heady smell of bracken and wild garlic. The lower parts of the wood were dark and dense with beech, ash and fir trees all clambering skyward to snatch the light. Only a little sunlight splashed onto the river where a family of yellow wagtails bobbed between rocks. Bracken filled the spaces between the trees, with spears of purple foxgloves rising among the green. Halfway up, the giant firs gave way to oaks and birch. Higher still, the wood lightened into delicate silver birches. She and Mrs. March had eaten a picnic on a level grove sitting among the silver birches, watching butterflies and bees drifting up through the wood, searching out light and warmth. Around them, the bracken had been high enough to let the old woman and the young girl view other visitors to the wood unseen. Mrs. March had told Wyn that they were like a little family of nightingales deep in a thicket, hidden from the world, and Wyn had loved being lost with her amongst the green fronds.
Just for a moment, Wyn let herself remember the past. And then the other, bitter memories came for her and she locked them quickly away.
They had reached the rusty metal gate that marked the entrance to Skrikes Wood. John pushed back the gate and they followed him down a path and along a narrow footbridge over the frozen river. On the other side, at John’s suggestion, they fanned out and began walking uphill through the deep snow, their heads tilted back as they examined every tree.
While she stared upwards, Wyn had the uncomfortable sense of being watched, and not by friendly eyes. Beeches and oaks, mottled with disease, seemed to tighten around her, hindering her path. Snow clutched at her feet, making each step harder than the last. The others were struggling, too. Kate and John were gasping for air and Lisa had stopped walking altogether.
Her hot temper rising to the challenge, Wyn fought her way on up through the wood, using tree trunks to haul herself onwards. Soon her arms and legs were aching and sweat blinked over her eyes, but she was determined not to be beaten. It was only after struggling on for a few angry minutes that Wyn realized that it wasn’t the snow that was holding her up. Every time she put a foot down, the soil under the snow was softening around her boots and gripping onto them. Wyn crouched down and scraped through snow until she reached the dark earth beneath. As she spread her fingers and pushed down into the dirt, she was shocked to feel a faint warmth rising from the ground.
Wyn was so preoccupied that she didn’t notice John until he was crouching next to her.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
“C’mon, something’s up.”
Without really meaning to, Wyn found herself telling John, “The ground … it’s warm.”
He pressed his bandaged hand into the snow beside hers, concentrating hard.
“I don’t know. It could be,” he said, and Wyn knew that he was lying for her sake.
Now Lisa arrived, with Kate floundering through the snow right behind her.
“What have you found?” said Lisa.
“We thought the ground wasn’t so cold around here,” said John.
Kate pushed past her sister and crouched next to John, pressing her hand to the soil.
“Feels pretty cold to me … Oh my God!”
Two bees appeared out of the fog, zigzagging low to the snow, heading downhill. They passed right over Kate’s hand, causing her to jump up in shock. Wyn watched them go; their brown and yellow bodies colorful against the white ground.
“Bees!” exclaimed Kate. “Real live bees!”
Another pair hurried past. Soon a steady stream of bees was buzzing by. John clicked away with his camera.
“If bees are up and about, summer must be on its way!” said Kate.
Wyn saw t
hat the bees were streaming from a knoll not far from where a community of beech and ash trees grew around massive boulders, almost invisible beneath snow. The others couldn’t see that far and Wyn didn’t dare say she could. Instead, she scrambled up the slope behind the others, following the noisy creatures.
“They’re coming out of here,” said Kate, examining the base of an old ash. The tree had grown around a boulder, clasping it with its frosty roots. The bees were crawling out of a gap where one of the roots had rotted.
“They must have built their hive in a hollow under the tree,” said John, pushing his camera as close to the gap as he could.
They all crouched near the hole, taking turns to peer into it. When it was Wyn’s turn, she felt the warmth rising up out of the ground even more strongly than before. She concentrated her gaze, staring down into the hole. Her eyes must have become accustomed to the darkness because she found herself able to see the path the bees were taking down through gaps between the long roots of the ash and the other trees. She saw the bees passing down, down … and for a moment Wyn thought she saw far-off colors and smelled wood smoke. Then it was as if a wall had sprung up in front of her and she couldn’t see any further. Wyn redoubled her efforts, trying to glimpse through it. In response, the earth under her shifted so violently that Wyn was knocked away from the ash.
John was helping Wyn to her feet when she saw the old man. He was standing a stone’s throw away, in the shadow of two beeches, as lean and mottled with age as the trees themselves. He was dressed like a farmer, in old tweeds with a pack over his shoulder, but Wyn knew all the farmers in the dale and she didn’t recognize the man as one of them. To her astonishment, she saw that he wore no boots and his trousers were rolled up to his knees, so that his lower legs and feet were completely bare. His eyes glowed unnaturally green and they were fixed, unblinking, on Wyn.
