2. The Trees Are Screaming

Meanwhile, down on the ground, Crusher the giant; Xar’s snowcats, Kingcat, Nighteye, and Forestheart; his werewolf, Lonesome; his bear; and his wolves were making their way swiftly and quietly through the wildwoods. Wolves and giants are quite common, but I wish you could have seen the snowcats. Beautiful creatures they were, larger than lions, fur as deep as powder snow, padding through the ancient forest, whiskers twitching. Like the children on the flying door, they were looking skinnier and hungrier and a lot more bedraggled than they had been two weeks earlier. The snowcats had deep wounds from the talons of wyverns on their faces, the bear had torn his ear, and Lonesome was limping.

None would have known that they had passed that way, for as Xar said, they were untrackable, untraceable. Even giants know how to tread lightly on the world, so although Crusher was nearly as tall as the tallest of the trees around him, he did not make a footprint on the undergrowth below as he walked through the holloways, planting his great walking staff gently in the ground and humming happily to himself. Crusher was a Longstepper High-Walker giant, and these giants are BIG, so they tend to have BIG thoughts. Wandering gets their giant brains working, so as Crusher walked, his head was smoking with inspiration, and he was thinking in time to each giant gentle step:

“I wonder if you could say that trees have brains? They certainly learn… and just because they learn in their roots, is that enough to say that they do not have brains like humans and giants do?”

And then he stopped suddenly. He put his ear to the nearest tree.

His face, with wandering lines like an ancient map, normally gently interested in the world about him, assumed a very concerned and grim expression indeed.

Slowly he bent down to his animal companions.

“Now, I do not want you to panic, creatures of the forest,” said Crusher. “But the trees are screaming.”

There are people who think that just because trees do not have mouths, they cannot talk. Those people are wrong, and they are often the kind of people who think that other people have to be exactly like themselves to count as people at all. Trees speak to each other just as you and I do, but you have to have the right ears for listening. They send out messages on sound waves that giant ears can hear, scent chemicals that giant noses can smell, and just because our tiny little human ears and noses are too small to hear or smell or detect them, this does not mean that those messages are not there.

As Crusher said, the trees were screaming.