Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

  She had heard stories that the padaran wasn’t a normal Faeran like the other members of the clan, that he had come down from the top of the Great Mountain to lead the Faeran people. And it had been easy to believe. But what confused her now was that she had actually climbed the Great Mountain, felt its presence in her heart and heard its voice in her soul. She remembered vast clouds of mist, and a soaring hawk, and trees, and mountains for as far as the eye could see. But she didn’t see any sign that the padaran, or anyone like him, had ever been there.

  Near the end of the day, when she heard the man Nathaniel coming her way, she relaxed her blend so that he could see her. As he walked up to her, a vine was growing along her arm and around her wrist like a day-folk bracelet, and another was twining up into her hair.

  The man watched the movement of the vines in silence, astonished and transfixed by what he was seeing.

  “How do you do it?” he asked softly.

  Willa tried to think of a way to explain it in Eng-lish words, but it was difficult. “With my mind, and sometimes my voice, I ask the vines to move.”

  “Have you always been able to do this?”

  “My mamaw has been teaching me all my life, and I’ve been practicing more and more.”

  “What do you…What do you call what you do?”

  “In the Faeran language, it used to be called esperia. In Eng-lish, we call it woodcraft.”

  “Woodcraft…” he repeated slowly, as if he was trying to absorb both the sound of it and the meaning of what he was seeing.

  “Years ago, many of my people had the knowledge and the power of woodcraft. It still runs very strong in the members of a few families. My mother and father, and my sister, all had the power. And my grandmother was the one who taught me. But I think I might be the last of the whisperers now…”

  “The whisperers,” the man Nathaniel said in gentle surprise. “I like the sound of that. And you and your people call yourselves Faeran…Is that right?”

  Willa smiled and nodded. “And you and your people call yourself human, is that right?”

  The man Nathaniel smiled. “Yes, at least once I’ve had my breakfast in the morning.”

  She liked the way he smiled when he said these words, and she liked the way it made her feel.

  “Listen, I came over to ask you. I need to go check on something, and I thought you might want to come along with me. I think I could use your help.”

  Willa rose to her feet, pleased to be included.

  A while later, as she walked along with the man Nathaniel and the dog Scout through the forest, she asked, “Where are we going?”

  “We left the edge of my property behind us,” he said, making his way through the undergrowth of the trees, “but I saw something back here in the woods that’s been festering in my mind.”

  “What do you mean, your property?” she asked.

  “My land,” he said. “The property I own.”

  She still didn’t understand.

  As they walked along, Scout stayed close at her side. He had become used to her, and her to him. She liked the way he was always looking ahead, always scanning with his eyes and nose and ears. She thought there must be a little bit of wolf in him.

  When she reached down to pet his head, he looked up at her, and she was surprised to see the worry in his eyes. He was smelling something ahead of them that he didn’t like one bit.

  She turned to Nathaniel and saw he was anxious as well.

  They soon came to a footpath, and Nathaniel stopped.

  “Can you sense anything?” he asked her. “Do you see anything unusual?”

  Understanding that he wanted her to put her woodland skills to work, she crouched to the ground and looked at the earth, the lichen, and leaves. She noticed the way some of the ferns were bent and a few of the leaves were pressed down.

  “Humans have been walking here,” she said. “All of them wearing heavy boots, one of them dragging some kind of tool or object behind him.”

  “How many men?” he asked.

  “At least four,” she said, looking around at the footprints.

  Fear clouded Nathaniel’s face. “Can you tell how long ago?”

  Checking the amount of wear and dryness on the edge of the footprints, and thinking about the last time it had rained, she said, “Yesterday.”

  “That’s not good,” he said, shaking his head. “Let’s follow the tracks a little ways and see what we can learn.”

  As they walked on, they both noticed long red strips of cloth that had been tied onto some of the larger oak trees.

  “What are they?” she asked.

  “They’re marking the most important trees to cut,” he said, his voice filled with fear and anger all at once.

  “I don’t understand,” she said. The thought of cutting down these beautiful trees made her eyes water, and she could feel the heat rising up into her face.

  “These men are scouts for the logging company, surveying the forest to determine which groves to cut first, and finding the best route for their railroad to come up into the mountains. They’ve got a new kind of engine that puts power to all its wheels so it can handle hauling full loads of logs down the mountain slopes, but even the new engines have limits, so they have to map out their path.”

  “So, they’re coming up here now,” she said, her voice cracking in dismay.

  “Right now, what they most want is my land,” he said. “I own a section along the river, the only one flat enough for them to get their railroad line and their equipment up onto the rest of the mountain where they want to cut. So whatever you do, Willa, you need to avoid this area of the forest from now on. It’s going to be too dangerous. Don’t ever let those loggers see you.”

  As he said these words, she could hear the trembling fear in his voice. It felt like she could almost see the future he was seeing, and it frightened her to her bone.

  At that moment, Scout brushed past her leg and took to sniffing something on the ground. Then he began to follow the scent off the path.

  “Scout’s onto something,” Nathaniel said, moving toward him.

  They followed the dog into the forest until Willa saw something on the ground up ahead.

  “Wait,” she whispered to the man Nathaniel, touching his side to bring him to a stop.

  When she crouched down, he crouched with her.

  “What do you see?” he whispered, peering in the direction she was looking.

  It was well disguised in the leaves, but she could see it. It was definitely there.

  “Scout, come,” she said, her voice quiet but firm, using the word she’d heard Nathaniel use, and she was relieved that the dog quickly returned to her side.

  “What do you see up there?” Nathaniel asked her again, sensing her anxiousness.

  She pointed toward the ground ten or twenty paces in front of them. “Look carefully just ahead of us, by the roots of that oak there, and along the forest floor over to that chestnut tree. Do you see it? It’s a net, hidden beneath the leaves.”

  “It’s some sort of trap,” he whispered. “Someone must be trying to capture an animal of some sort.”

  “Do you think it belongs to the loggers?” she asked.

  “I’ve never seen them use anything like that before. They’re more interested in laying railroad tracks and cutting trees than hunting and trapping, but maybe they’ve been having trouble with a local bear. But for the life of me, I don’t understand why they would want to catch a bear in a net. Seems like it’s just asking for a face full of claws.”

  “Do any humans other than the loggers use this path?” she asked.

  “Yes, definitely,” he said. “Some of the other homesteaders use it, and so do I.”

  Willa stared at the net, not sure what to do.

  But Nathaniel suddenly rose up and moved past her. He picked up a large branch and heaved it into the center of the trap. The net sprang up with a loud, violent swoosh, bringing up an explosion of leaves with it. The
n he pulled out the long knife he carried on his belt and cut the net down.

  “I don’t know who did this or why, but something like this doesn’t belongs in these woods,” he said angrily as he sliced the net to pieces and rendered it useless.

  Then he touched her on the shoulder and gestured in the direction of the house. “Come on, let’s get outta here before somebody sees us.”

  All the way back, she kept looking over her shoulder, convinced that the loggers or night-spirits or some sinister beasts she’d never seen before were going to chase them down and attack them, but they made it safely home.

  In the days that followed, they continued on with the gentle patterns of their lives, working together in the water mill, taking care of their animals, and each morning, the man Nathaniel venturing out on his daily journeys down the river and back again, trudging with a grim and relentless determination.

  In the afternoons, the man Nathaniel showed her how he had planted corn, squash, and beans in his garden to grow some of his food for the next season. And she showed him where to find the tastiest roots and berries that grew wild in the forest, and how to pick the sweetest brook lettuce from the shallows of the nearby streams.

  When a group of otters moved into the section of river just downstream from the house, she took the man Nathaniel down to meet them.

  “The otters seem to be looking over at us every time they come up for air,” he marveled, as they watched them together. “But they don’t seem nervous about us being here.”

  “No, they’re not nervous,” she said. “They want to know why I’m standing around with my feet on the ground instead of swimming with them.”

  One afternoon, after he’d returned for the day, Willa watched the man Nathaniel from a distance. After completing some of his usual chores, he climbed into an odd-looking cloth suit with long dangling arms and legs that tied at the wrists and ankles, a hood that went over his head, and a metal mesh that covered his face. Then he tramped down a path that led from the house.

  Curious, she followed him through the stand of sourwood trees and then through a small field filled with white and purple clover, where bees and butterflies floated in the rays of the setting sun.

  He walked over to a cluster of five black gum tree logs that had been cut into sections, stood on their ends, and turned into beehives. Honeybees were flying to and from the hives. It perplexed her that these bees would make their home in these human-cut contrivances rather than a natural hole in a living tree, but that appeared to be what they had done.

  The man opened up the hive at the top and began to collect the wooden frames of honey as the bees buzzed and circled all around him. She could hear by their tone that they were a little bit agitated by his presence.

  As Willa approached him, she shifted her color and made enough noise to make herself known.

  The man Nathaniel looked up at her, peering through his mask.

  “Stay back, Willa!” he shouted at her. “You don’t have a suit on! Keep a safe distance!”

  His face went white with fear as hundreds of bees swarmed toward her and landed all over her body.

  “Willa!” he shouted in dismay, thinking the bees were attacking her.

  “Eee na nin,” she said softly to him and to the bees as she watched them crawling over the bare skin of her arms. “They’re just saying hello. They’re telling me where to find the best flowers.”

  “What?” he said, frowning in confusion and doubt.

  When he set down the rack he’d been working on and came over to her, she showed him how the returning worker bees danced in particular patterns to tell the other worker bees where the flowers were blooming that morning.

  “That’s incredible…” the man said. “I had no idea.”

  The bees in the colony worked closely together, communicating with each other, all laboring in harmony toward the common goal of keeping the hive healthy and strong.

  “Tia na lochen dar sendal,” she said.

  “What’s that mean?” he asked.

  “ ‘We all have our ways to survive,’ ” she said.

  “We sure do,” he said, still watching the bees. And then, after a moment, he turned and looked at her.

  “And what about you?” he asked. “What is your way to survive?”

  She looked back at him, not sure how to answer his question. She knew he wasn’t asking about the kind of leaves she ate or how she avoided predators. He had already seen these parts of her life with his own eyes. Although the words were the same, he was asking a whole different kind of question. And for the first time, it felt like she was beginning to see the hidden beauty of the language they were speaking.

  “What is your way to survive?” he asked again.

  “I survive here,” she said.

  That night, after they were done eating their dinner, Willa played with Scout in the main room while the man Nathaniel finished up the work in the kitchen.

  She knew he was a cutter of trees and hunter of animals, but sometimes, over the last few days, it had almost seemed as if he understood the world the way she did. But other times, she grew dismayed by the life he’d been living, and her growing part in it.

  When she looked over, she saw him chewing on a wooden sassafras twig as he swept the wooden-planked floor with a wooden-handled broom and then cleared the four-legged wooden kitchen table, sat down in a wooden chair, picked up a thin stick of wood in his hand, and began to scratch marks on a strange, impossibly flat sliver of whitish tree bark. He was surrounded by wood.

  When they first met he had told her that he could not survive without it, and she was beginning to see what he meant.

  Was the man Nathaniel evil for using the trees and animals to survive?

  She didn’t know the answer to that question anymore. Did that mean she knew more or less about the world?

  “You said a few days ago that you own the land,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said gently as he stopped and looked at her. “That’s right.”

  “I don’t understand what that means. How? In what way? The ground? The air? The trees? The animals? What does it mean?”

  “It means that this is my property, an area where I can live my life the way I want to live, without asking anyone else’s permission. I’m free. I can do what I want to do.”

  She stared at him, trying to understand.

  “My great-great-grandfather earned this land back in 1783 for serving in the Revolutionary War,” he said. “And there’s been at least one Steadman living here ever since, sometimes many more. This land is the only thing I have, and that’s one of the reasons I’m not going to let the loggers buy it from me, or take it away. As far as I’m concerned, it isn’t for sale.”

  “But how can you or the loggers or anyone claim a place to be yours and only yours? I don’t understand.”

  “I’ll ask you the same sort of question in reverse,” he said. “How can you wander through the woods without ever having a place to call your own, a place to call home?”

  “I live in the world as it is, without disturbing it.”

  He nodded and took a moment to think about her words. “Disturbing it…” he repeated. “Is that what you call it? Is that what I’m doing when I’m fixing my mill, planting my sweet potatoes, or tending to my apple trees? I’m disturbing it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What about the bees?”

  “What about the bees?”

  “Where do you think your friends the honeybees come from?”

  “They’ve always been here, like the trees and the river.”

  “No,” he said. “They haven’t. The people you call the homesteaders, the day-folk, brought them from England to America on their ships two hundred years ago. And then somebody brought them up into these mountains. Yes, the bees live here now. They’ve become part of the natural world. But humans brought them here. And humans brought the clover in the field as well. The clover, along with the sourwood trees, makes the hon
ey taste better. It’s true that we humans can do terrible damage, but we can do good as well. I’ll give you an example: there are plenty of sourwood trees in these mountains, but there weren’t any right here around our house and meadow, so my grandfather planted a hundred sourwood saplings every year for as long as he was living.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said, her brows furrowing. The bees that she knew so well—whose language of movement her grandmother had taught her—came from outside the world? They came from the Eng-land of the homesteaders? How could this be true?

  And did he say that his grandfather had planted the sourwood trees near the meadow? She had walked through those trees. She had spoken with those trees. She had slept in those trees. Day-folk didn’t plant trees, they cut them down!

  “I know how you feel about the trees of the forest,” he said. “I can’t live that way, but I understand it. And I know how you feel about the animals. Are you angry with me because I eat meat? Is that what’s bothering you?”

  She thought about his question for a long time. And then she slowly came to a realization, something she’d already known but hadn’t truly understood before. “You are like a wolf.”

  “I am not a wolf!” he insisted, raising his voice as his face turned flush with sudden red.

  It startled her a little bit, but then it made her smile.

  He didn’t like being compared to a wolf. He never had.

  “I don’t hate wolves,” she said. “I love them. And I don’t hate foxes or bobcats or otters. I don’t hate any of the animals that hunt for their food any more than I hate the vultures or the mushrooms for living off the decay of dead things.”

  Nathaniel stared at her, studying her for several seconds with steady eyes. And then he smiled, and narrowed his eyes a little bit at her, as if he was unsure whether he had just been accepted or scorned.

  A few nights later, after they had finished eating their dinner, Willa worked with the man Nathaniel to clean the table and wash up the plates. Then she went into the main room and sat on the sofa in front of the fire with Scout lying on her lap while she stroked the dog’s ears. She liked the touch of his soft white fur on her fingertips, and she knew by the way he nuzzled into her that he liked to be petted there.