THE FOREST WAS THE ENTIRE WORLD; IT WAS ALL THAT PETER KNEW. He might, in his life, have seen a score of cleared acres in one place, but they would have been cleared acres surrounded by trees and wooded hills and populated by stumps and the charred remains of brush piles, and in the midst of any such clearing was at least one building fashioned of trees in next to their natural state.
He knew Sheepscott Great Pond, of course, and the settlement there, but the pond and the settlement were similarly encircled, and the forest, and the tiny patches of hard won ground in the midst of the forest, and the lake in the midst of the forest, and the hardscrabble settlement with its spireless church were all that Peter had ever known, though he had heard tell of deserts and oceans and grassy plains. A neighborhusband two or three farms away–miles away–had once sailed for the British Navy, and he had tales to tell of islands of rock in the South Seas and cities that stretched over hill and valley as far as the eye could see. But forest was all that Peter could reasonably expect to find in his mind’s eye when it was all that he had ever known.
He was accustomed to little more than moonlight after dark, and along a moderately well marked trail he was able to move, hardly breaking his stride. Some of the hardwoods had shed their leaves, and the glow of the moon, hanging between nadir and zenith, made the shadows of roots look like holes in the ground, and pale granite and lucid quartz like basking faces.
The wind held a distinct note when the still-clinging leaves had turned and dried, a reeding hush that rose and fell like a breath; and where certain groves of oak and sugar maple were losing their foliage, soft dry veterans of summer brushed past his face like bat wings or drifted without noise onto his father’s hat. Trees squeaked and grunted in the wind. Now and then the echoes of animal calls drifted among the trunks and aging fern. He walked quietly and naturally, laying his feet down with ease without sacrificing his pace.
After a time, he sensed the large swamp to the west, some distance away–a presence marked by a change of air and sound that filtered through the trees. Beyond the swamp would be Great Pond and one little settlement further still.
When he did not look directly in front of him, the path almost glowed. Above him, the occasional breaks in the trees–a blink of starlight–led the way. The land rose and fell, rose and fell; the path plummeted occasionally and he was warned in time only by the sense of space yawning below him and the wind gathered, as in a great room. Streams trickled across the way, or the way met with one of these rills and followed it to the next little dale. The path widened as it gathered with others like it, or followed an ancient animal run; it wound round the feet of scarpy slopes and followed the course of least resistance between twin hills.
Peter thought of his little brother Amos waking to find him gone, and he felt a stab that was joined to his leaving with nary a goodbye or even a good notion where he was going. Peter was so long and Amos was so small that the little brother could sleep cradled against the big brother like a pea in a pod.
Peter heard the breent of a nightjar nearby and thought he caught the glimpse of something wing past a fleeting pool of open sky. He had no idea what he was about, walking the woods in the middle of the night, but he did not find them unpleasant, at first, these immediate sensations.
It was not long, however, before another reality of life, as he understood it, imposed itself–and that was the fact of uncanny things in the forest, the knowledge of curious and perhaps malicious disembodied minds lurking in the darkness between the trees. A moth of panic flickered against his chest and a hymn sprang quietly to his lips. Suddenly the shadows of roots, like holes in the forest floor, looked as if they gaped a little wider, and the pale faces of granite and quartz appeared more aware of him.
One such pale visage brought to mind his father, lying in the dark in their home. He thought of Amos again and what the little boy would do without his big brother to pilot him around the strange still presence in their midst. “Where’s Papa?” Amos had asked when their father’s body had been laid out in the midst of the room.
Peter stopped and considered what he was doing, what had brought him here, who had brought him here. What would the neighbors think when he was not at hand for his own father’s burying? What would his mother say if he turned about and went home? She had been so strange, so insistent. Maybe his father would have wanted him to find this Uncle Obed. Peter considered the moon, its disc cleft, in his view, by a single bare limb. He looked forward and was conscious of his own dim shadow stretched ahead of him. How many people were there in the world? How would he find one Obed Winslow? Would he stop from stoop to stoop asking after the man?
A friend of his, one or two years older, had left Sheepscott Great Pond when he was fourteen, saying he was going to sea. He had not been heard from since. Had the world swallowed him up?
These deliberations drove the better part of his night panic away, though the hymn continued silently on his lips.
Slowly, Peter was insinuating himself forward upon the trail, south and east in the direction his mother had sent him. He would stop and ask after Obed Winslow at Patricktown, and he would be back in time to bury his father, no harm done. Curiosity drew him. He was seventeen and able to take care of himself. There were young women at Sheepscott Great Pond who would listen to him over and again, if he had a story to tell–traveling by night through the woods on his own, visiting strangers in the next settlement. He would have news, other people’s stories. The thought of all those people, unknown to him, living their lives, sleeping now in their beds with their different faces and their separate dreams, drew him like curiosity.
He was striding along now at his previous pace, when heavy wings whooshed overhead–an owl, perhaps. “From things that go bump in the night, good Lord protect me,” he said; it was a child’s prayer, but he stated it with conviction, if not very loudly. He knew that pixies and demons could be confused from their motives if a person turned his coat inside out or wore his hat upside down, and he was about to take one of these precautions when he remembered that he was wearing his father’s coat and his father’s hat. Pas not even buried or prayed over yet, Peter thought. His father’s spirit was probably abroad, perhaps with him now. He would have guessed before this that the notion of a ghost, even his father’s, in the middle of the night in the dark of the woods would have scared him ferociously, but he felt unexpectedly calmed and even comforted that some portion of his father–who had been a brave man–might walk with him.
Peter’s eyes had adjusted to the dark, so that he was conscious of ranks of black and umber and able to separate things from their shadows, and to tell near trees from the wall of trees beyond; but even his young eyes were starved for light as the moon westered. Odd flashes of green and red puffed at the periphery of his vision. Startled, he looked away from these images, knowing they would only disappear if he stared after them. He walked for an hour and he walked for two, and the light all but left him and the world became a void clothed in the bark of trees, so he slowed and slowed his progress after tripping once and running his face into a branch, and he searched out the islands of starlight between the trees like a sailor watching for bits of land in an endless sea.
But the light continued to wane and finally died. He had reached a section of ancient wood where the groves overhung the path and thickly leafed oaks and elm and maple hovered their crowns like clouds between Peter and the sky. The sound of the wind in these giants was high and loud and the peep of night creatures and the call of nighthawks and nightjars more constant than in any other part of the forest. Peter’s uncertainty crept over him once again. What was he doing, and what would happen to him out here where someone might stumble over his body but never guess his fate?
He thought he would grope around for a tree trunk and sit down against it till light came. His eyes constructed spots of darkness and near darkness in the wall of black about him; then, as if a lamp had been turned up far away, the last of the falling moon found a hole in the forest and drove a single ray of pearly light down a level stretch of path before him. He was halfway down this columned hall when the dim glow began to lessen to a secret. He stood. The moonlight shifted across the path before him, moving like mortal life from left to right. Then he caught the hint of another, strange light on his left again, and heard the slightest beat, like a fat drop of rain.
There was a sudden huff behind him that choked any response or reflex, and he stood with muscles stiffened and eyes wide as another patch of moonlight shifted past his gaze. It might have been the trees themselves moving, dark as pines and graceful as birch, antlers for branches, black eyes and hooves for knots and roots. It was a great herd of deer, and he was conscious of them all around him and spread out in vast ranks, as God might be conscious of them without looking; the occasional flash of a white tail or the spot on a fawn’s coat had looked like the moonlight moving. He heard them, their hooves scraping the path or turning a twig. The noise of them rose out of the wind like a voice leaving its fellows in unison to harmonize and be heard of itself.
He had not imagined such a tribe of deer; they must be many herds, following a common call to move with the season. Peter hardly dared breathe, and he turned slowly to face the oncoming deer, mouth and eyes wide, fearing his scent would touch off a sudden panic and rush. He might be dead in a minute, cut to ribbons by sharp hoofs and pointed antlers.
And why hadn’t they scented him? He turned his shoulder as one tall buck walked by, almost brushing the young man’s face. It was an uncanny, lengthy wait; he had no idea how long it took, only that scores of animals moved past on either side of him, crossing the road and shifting from deep wood to deep wood. He could smell them, the musk in the air was overpowering, unnerving, and he found himself thinking of those young women, those he would tell his stories to, in ways that made him blush in the dark, and no sooner had he blushed, when it seemed one of the creatures found his presence in the air and let out a curious and half-disgusted cough. Something firm collided with Peter’s chin and nearly spun him about. There was another snort and the noise of graceful legs dancing backwards and sideways upon the path and on the surrounding floor of battered twigs and leaves.
Peter took two steps toward the oncoming herd and ran into the trunk of a tree; it seemed hardly large enough to protect him–only a medium-sized sort of oak–but he pressed himself against it. He sensed that the entire herd had stopped in its careful tracks, paused and tested the forest air with ears and nose. He waited, listening to the sniffing and stillness. Then the herd moved forward again, hardly bothered by the tremor of his presence. It was his father’s coat that had saved him, he was sure, or perhaps his father himself, standing near.
After some time the sound of the herd passed away, fleeing west toward hillier country. Before the last of them was gone he could almost see their dark shapes moving among the trees, and he could sight their tails’ white undersides flash as they made the short leap from the path to the embracing woods. He watched with his back to the tree he’d been hugging, wondering if there were the hint of dawnglow in the air. But the moon was gone and the darkness was severe. However, he did not have to wait long for the sky to rise out of blackness, and he had the impression that the single star or planet he could see through the canopy of leaves had intensified its light and turned the surrounding atmosphere to a muted gray.
After the pitch and complete dark, this small shift toward day seemed like noon to the young man; trees stood out opposite him like men stepping forward from a crowd. Peter picked himself up and continued on his way, picking up also the hymn he had been singing in a quiet reassuring whisper to himself.
He had not walked above half an hour before the light briefly waned before blooming into the predawn. He came to the place where the path turned west and met the Sheepscott River in its upwater youth, south of Great Pond. There was a ford where the river and men had conspired together to place large rocks in a neat row, and beyond there was as much cleared land south along the river as he had ever seen in one place.
It was still night in the west; behind the hill across the river the sky was black and strewn with stars, but the scattered rocks upon the slope, a single glacial cast-off, and the hundreds of stumps rose from shadow in the increasing gray light as if they had been hiding. Peter opened the sack his mother had given him and took a hard biscuit. He ate it at the edge of the river before taking a drink there, then he hopped from rock to rock to the other side with the river rushing about him.
At the top of the hill the road began to follow the Sheepscott River south and he walked another half an hour while the night retreated and dawn neared. Birds were noisy along the water’s edge and in the bushes and small trees that had grown up in the damp pockets of ground.
Finally he came to a broad slope above the road and a grove of birch in the midst of which stood a single powerful oak; the trees were bare and he broke off a sapling from the edge of the copse and, using its limbs as a broom, drove up a low mound of leaves against the trunk of the oak. He was weary and the wind off the river was cool, so he was encouraged to make quick use of his work. Like a low creature, he burrowed into the russet mound and, with his sack beneath his head, he was soon rewarded with the reflected warmth of his own body and breath; the ground, which he could feel through several layers of dry leaves, seemed welcoming, and he imagined that it beat with its own clement pulse. The river murmured below him. The breeze opened the diurnal events of the surrounding field and the forest across the water, but it only rattled the rough counterpane of his bed and entered his dreams by way of his ears. He was blind and deaf to the balance of the dawn.
