Forest

by Janet Taylor Lisle

  Forest

  Janet Taylor Lisle

  CONTENTS

  UPPER FOREST

  LOWER FOREST

  UPPER FOREST

  LOWER FOREST

  UPPER FOREST

  LOWER FOREST

  UPPER FOREST

  LOWER FOREST

  UPPER FOREST

  LOWER FOREST

  UPPER FOREST

  LOWER FOREST

  UPPER FOREST

  LOWER FOREST

  UPPER FOREST

  A Biography of Janet Taylor Lisle

  Upper Forest

  THE INVASION OCCURRED JUST before sunrise while everyone was still asleep. There was a faint rustle, the smallest scrape. Then up through branches the alien climbed, stealthy as a hunting cat. Only her eyes, those huge glistening saucers, showed in the dark.

  This, at any rate, was how the inhabitants of Upper Forest later imagined her coming, for no one actually saw it happen. The Elders had posted no guards that summer night, nor had they felt a need to for some months. Cat scares had fallen off. The world had seemed at peace.

  The alien was not a cat, though she came, like those murderous creatures, from below. By the time Upper Foresters awoke, she had perched herself high in the boughs of a large white oak that happened to be a hub tree in the town’s branchway system. There was no missing her there. She stood out like a bear in a berry patch.

  “But how did she get up?” whispered Woodbine to an uneasy crowd of squirrels gathering nearby.

  “Some rope trick, probably,” replied Brown Nut, his sister, jumping forward to sit beside him. “Don’t look now: she’s staring straight at us.”

  They were mink-tailed squirrels, descendants of a rugged and sharp-witted band that had settled the forest in earliest times. Now they were among its most numerous inhabitants, with wide influence over the trees in every direction.

  “You know, I’ve never seen one of them so close up before, have you?” Brown Nut asked. “This particular alien is quite young, I think. No ears, and most of her snout is missing. Poor thing. I suppose it comes from living down there in all that dust.”

  “I suppose so,” Woodbine answered. He took a small step forward to get a better view.

  “Watch out!” cried his sister, who was older and always trying to look after him. “She might be dangerous!”

  Woodbine leapt back quickly.

  The town of Forest was divided into two parts, an upper part and a lower. Though they were separated by only a few dozen feet, the parts might just as well have been on different planets, so little did they have in common.

  Lower Forest stretched out along the ground, as human settlements usually do. There were the usual box-frame houses set in the usual square yards, with hedges along the borders and sidewalks and paved streets out front.

  Side by side, the yards spread from the big apple farms on the north of Forest to the Random River on the east and south. Edge to edge they went up Goodspeed Hill and down. There was a food store on the corner of Whipple and Whomp streets. There was Wilbur’s Pond, and the firehouse, and the musty-smelling library, and the school. Above all—and also around and among all—there were the trees. For Forest had once been a great hardwood forest, and though its trees had dwindled in recent years, many grand old groves still remained.

  It was high in the tops of these, green and shadowy, that Upper Forest flourished, connected by such a complicated spiral of roadways—or branchways, as the mink-tails called the ancient limbs—that anyone looking up from Lower Forest grew dizzy and confused and soon looked away. And since Upper Foresters were just as bewildered by Lower Forest’s land—so impossibly square! so ridiculously flat!—they did not very often bother to look down. The result was that there had been almost no contact between the two Forests over the years, and strangely little was known by either world about the other.

  How amazing, then, to find one of the huge Lower Foresters suddenly risen up (even if she was only a youngster) into Upper Forest’s leafy world. Everyone came out to stare. And to whisper:

  “So ugly!”

  “So awkward!”

  “So noisy!”

  It was true. The invader was breathing loudly, and with rude gasps. Furthermore, she was not sitting still on her branch as every young squirrel is taught to do in moments of doubt. She was leaning backward and forward, swinging her legs, turning her head. Woodbine looked on in astonishment.

  “If she is not careful, she will take a tumble,” remarked Laurel, a small, graceful squirrel who was Brown Nut’s friend. “I don’t believe she has the least idea where she has come. She does not even have a tail.”

  A chucking noise erupted from several of the mink-tails. To be tailless was a great handicap in Upper Forest, a sure sign that life would be short. Some parents pushed their tailless newborns from the nest at the first opportunity. Why prolong the agony? they said.

  At this moment the invader hiked forward on her branch, wrapped long, sticky fingers around the white oak’s, trunk, and attempted to rise on her back legs. Well, she did rise! The crowd of squirrels scrambled back.

  “She is going to climb higher!” cried Woodbine. “Has anyone told the Elders what’s going on here?”

  “Don’t worry, my dear boy. I sent for them personally,” a large squirrel named Barker replied with a sniff. “They are on their way. But even the Elders’ far gaze will be baffled by this. I can’t recall a single story, not the wisp of a memory, of foreign trespass from below. In other times and places, yes, where trees were short-trunked. But here in Forest? It could never be done.”

  “Well, it has been done now, or this invader would not be here,” Woodbine remarked, rather more sharply than he intended. Barker had a way of announcing his opinions, as if they were more important than anyone else’s. He was one of those squirrels who like to put themselves in charge and order others around. Woodbine’s ear flicked in irritation.

  “Here come the Elders now, so we shall soon find out,” Brown Nut declared.

  Woodbine glanced over his shoulder and there they were, just emerging from the shadows along a broad arm of the oak. Their familiar, gray-coated group moved carefully and slowly, as if, at their immense age, the Elders must pool what was left of their strength and balance to get about. And perhaps it was so, though this was not the main reason for their unity. The Elders not only traveled as one, but also spoke, gestured, slept, and meditated as one. In this way their experience, was combined to achieve the greatest, the most far-reaching knowledge possible. They were a walking stockpile of memory and wisdom, the most powerful body in Upper Forest’s squirrel world.

  Now, as Woodbine, Brown Nut, and Laurel watched, the Elders’ formation came to a halt, and their silvery heads, male and female, turned toward the invader. Their bristle of eyes examined her for a long minute. Their noses studied her scent. Finally, with a collective clearing of throats, they announced their opinion.

  The invader was a girl alien from the Lower Region. (“Well, we already knew that,” Woodbine muttered to Brown Nut under his breath. “Do the Elders think we are a pack of mindless beetles?”)

  The invader was not dangerous. She carried no weapons and seemed unlikely to interfere with their routines. She was young. She had come to their town by unknown means for a youngster’s adventure. The Elders had not seen, but they had heard of, such visits before. (Woodbine glanced smugly at Barker.) In fact, a fair number of squirrel kits had dipped their paws into adventure of this sort—on the ground. There was no meaning in it. Soon the young adventurer would grow bored and go away….

  The Elders’ speech was interrupted by a scrabbling noise. It came from the invader, who had suddenly lost her footing! With a terrific thrashing of hind legs—Woodbine’s heart thumped in fright—she ma
naged to find her branch. Shakily, she balanced upon it again.

  …Unless she should simply fall, the Elders went on, calmly, which would save them time and trouble. However she went, she must not return. To make sure, a special troop of guards would be appointed. Its job would be to encourage the invader to leave, and when she did, to discover how she had come. Once her route was found (the Elders’ decrepit tails twitched with uncanny precision), the guards could destroy it, blocking the way against future invasions.

  “And May Spring Follow Winter as Day Follows Dark,” the Elders intoned, to show that their remarks were ended. It was the benediction, the prayer most sacred to the mink-tailed squirrels. Many in the trees bowed their heads. Afterward the Elders gathered themselves and began to move off, their silvery raft of bodies melting slowly into the boughs’ gloom.

  The moment they were gone, a great clamor of chucking and chattering arose from the mink-tails, and the branches around the white oak swirled with excitement.

  “You see, young fur ball,” said Barker, sidling over to Woodbine. “I was right.”

  “Right!” Woodbine glared at him. Fur ball indeed. He and Barker were exactly the same age.

  “Yes, right. The Elders did just as I said they would.”

  “But you never said they would do anything. You said they would be baffled!”

  “You should listen more carefully. I went on to say that they would decide on exactly the course they did.” Barker’s voice took on a slippery tone.

  “You did not!” Woodbine shouted. “You—you—liar!”

  “Really, Woodbine. You mustn’t allow yourself to get so excited. These childish insults…”

  “Why, you… !”

  “Woodbine!” Brown Nut grabbed him by his scruff in the nick of time. With Laurel’s help, she dragged him away, up the white oak’s trunk.

  “Good grief! I thought you were going to bite him.”

  “Well, I would have in another second!”

  “Don’t let Barker tie you up in such knots. He is a cool operator and has his eye on a position on the Elders’ advisory council. Stay away from him if he upsets you.”

  “He doesn’t upset me in the least,” Woodbine shouted over his shoulder. “The rat-tailed fraud!”

  By now the invader had climbed to a place some twenty feet higher in the white oak. Woodbine caught sight of her snoutless face peering through the leaves. Despite their mink-tail racket, she was not looking at them. She was staring out into the distance, studying the land of her own Lower Region. And how strange it must look to her, Woodbine thought suddenly. She who had lived her whole life down there was now seeing her world from a completely different viewpoint. Woodbine leaned forward to look for himself. He was in the middle of trying to imagine how she saw things, and what life might be like in such a low-down place, when:

  “Woodbine! Pay attention! You’re about to fall off!” Brown Nut squawked in his ear. He caught hold of a branch just in time and swung himself back to safety. Sometimes he rather frightened himself. His mind had the strangest way of wandering off without him.

  Brown Nut and Laurel had been frightened, too.

  “What is wrong with you?” they chittered at him together. “Picking fights, mooning around on branches!”

  “And you never do any work,” Laurel told him severely.

  “Everyone is worried about you, not just us,” Brown Nut added.

  “They say you’ll never last through the winter if you don’t snap to and start taking responsibility,” Laurel went on.

  “You can start right now,” Brown Nut urged. “The Elders have gone back to Great Stump to choose the alien’s guards. We are going to see if we can make the troop!”

  “Come on!” cried Laurel.

  They were off in a flash of tails, flicking down limbs, along twigs, around the bends of trunks, and up the broad arcs of larger branches. Woodbine watched them for a moment. Then he turned his back and looked in another direction.

  He was the sort of squirrel who did not like to join in, who would rather be alone than travel with the crowd. How could anyone think in all that chatter and confusion? He did not like to wrangle with the other mink-tails for the nuts or nests or territory always under dispute. Quietly he stood aside and took whatever was left over. Or he simply went away to another place.

  “You are headed for the compost pile!” his father fumed. “How do you expect to get along in this world?”

  There was no answer to that. Woodbine would shrug uncomfortably and look away. The truth was that he was interested in other things: in distant views, for instance, and lower worlds. And now this invader. For some reason, Woodbine could not keep his eyes off her. No sooner had Brown Nut left than he began, cautiously, to creep closer.

  The girl alien had stopped panting and was sitting astride a branch. One arm was thrown around the white oak’s trunk. Her face was still turned toward the ground, but Woodbine saw that she was not really looking there anymore. She was lost in thought. Only an occasional blink, a throb of pulse on the inside of her wrist showed that she was alive. Woodbine’s quick eyes took in each detail.

  He climbed again and maneuvered closer. The other squirrels had gone for the moment. Most hoped, like Brown Nut, to be picked as guards, and were following the Elders back to Great Stump, their ceremonial den. Soon the chosen would return, trailing a throng of unchosen hangers-on. Then the usual haranguing and harassing would begin, for mink-tails could never idly sit by and watch, especially when the object of interest was an outsider. Now that the invader had been identified by the Elders, the Upper Foresters could have some fun. They would surround and tease her, chitter and laugh at her. Soon the alien would decide to go away—as well she should. This was mink-tail territory. She did not belong here.

  Woodbine crept another few feet toward the invader. He was very close now, close enough to see the fine layer of hair that covered the skin of her legs and arms and the back of her neck. These aliens were not so bald and bare-fleshed as the stories said, it seemed. They had coats.

  “Like ours,” Woodbine chucked softly, “only thinner.”

  And then, as he strained to discover more about this creature who had come so boldly into their trees, an extraordinary thing happened. The invader’s head turned, her face came around, and her two heavy-lidded alien eyes looked directly into his.

  Woodbine’s breath was knocked quite out of him at first, and he drew back in terror. Then, though he was tensed to run, he found himself unable to move. For, in the next second, a powerful beam of communication seemed to flow from the invader’s eyes. What exactly it was, Woodbine could not be sure. Greetings of a sort, perhaps? A strange bubbling sound flowed out of her mouth. Or was it more—an offer of friendship? For a long astonishing moment, Woodbine stared back.

  LOWER FOREST

  “SHE HAS RUN…” WENDELL blurted out, stopping for breath in the middle. “She has run…she has run away!”

  “Oh no, not again.” Mr. Padgett opened his eyes and gazed sleepily at his son, who stood at the door of the bedroom in yellow summer pajamas. “What time is it, anyway?” he asked with a squint. The digital clock was a blurry lump on the dresser across the room.

  Wendell turned to look. “Six-thirty-one. She’s been gone for an hour at least. I felt her bed. It’s cold.”

  Mrs. Padgett rolled over and lifted her head off the pillow. “What’s happened?” she croaked.

  “It’s Amber,” Mr. Padgett informed his wife. “Wendell says she’s run away.”

  “Oh no, not again.”

  There was a pause while everyone tried to think of where she might have gone this time.

  “Amber was angry,” Wendell offered at last. “She was really mad—that’s why she left.”

  “So what else is new?” his father said. “Amber’s always mad. She’s mad as a hatter at the whole human race. There’s hardly been ten minutes in the entire last year when she wasn’t—”

  “Do you think she could have
gone up over Goodspeed Hill?” Mrs. Padgett broke in. “Oh dear, I hope she hasn’t gone up over that hill again. We took all day last time finding her in that ravine. Remember how she’d crawled into that cave and decided to—”

  “No, she wouldn’t be there,” Wendell said. “She told me she’d never go back there. Snakes.”

  “That’s a blessing.”

  There was another pause.

  “Why was she mad this time, Wendell?” Mrs. Padgett inquired.

  Wendell was Amber’s eight-year-old brother. He was the only person who knew anything about her these days. Ever since she’d turned twelve, Amber had been mad.

  “She said the world was a sick place,” Wendell answered. He came forward and climbed into bed between his parents, who moved over to make room. “She said she was sick of living in a sick place. She wants to go someplace else.”

  Mr. Padgett shook his head. “A sick place. A sick place. That’s what she always says. What is it supposed to mean?”

  Wendell shrugged. “Amber says people have started to like killing each other. She says they like having fights. It’s gotten into their blood. Every time you turn on the TV, there’s somebody shooting somebody else, or there’s some war somewhere with people getting blown up. She says she can hardly stand it anymore.”

  “That’s a wonderful reason to run away at five-thirty on a Sunday morning,” Mr. Padgett said. “Just wonderful.” He sat up, took his glasses from the bedside table, and put them on. “So what else?” he asked, turning a sharpened gaze on Wendell. “Did she say anything else?”

  “That’s all”

  Mrs. Padgett sighed.

  “She said she knows it’s going to happen here, too,” Wendell said. “Sometime.”

  “What will happen?” asked his parents together.

  “A war,” Wendell said.

  Mr. Padgett snorted.

  “She did. She said so,” Wendell protested. “Because it’s in the blood.”

  “Well, I’m getting up,” Mr. Padgett announced. “I’m getting up and having a bowl of shredded wheat. And then I’m declaring war on the lawn. It’s grown about two feet in a week. Wherever Amber has gone this time, I don’t care. She can stay there forever. I’m not wasting my Sunday tramping all over town looking for her. She has some strange idea in her head again, that’s what it is. She reads some book or sees something on television, and the next thing you know, she’s off on the warpath, furious because nobody can understand How She Feels. Well, I’ve had it, let me say. This is the last time I—”