Picture our forest. See it stretching into the distance, farther than you can walk in a month’s time. Imagine the trees Sevastian has never seen, so remote are they, beyond mountains, beyond rivers, beyond lakes we know nothing of, their water as clear as that of the lagoons. It’s our forest, but it is infinite. The clearing is golden and grey. The ferns are autumn red. Leaves drop onto rocks. A brook cuts the clearing in two; its current has eaten the soil away. A pond lies in the shelter of a pine tree.
Watch the black stag, his muzzle deep in the water. Have you seen how his hide is like the night? You have never encountered an animal like this, with antlers so tall and fur so dark. He is the only one of his kind, he lives deep in the forest where no one ventures but other beasts.
He is our grandfather.
He drinks. Look through his eyes. Do you see the glimmer of sunlight in the pond? Does the light remind you of the flame of a candle reflected in a window? It is dusk. Our grandmother paddles, her white wings like winter snow. There are no other swans in the forest. The crows say she fled from a castle’s pond and followed the twists and turns of the creek to the clearing here. When Grandfather Stag catches sight of her, the sun’s rays strike her plumage and she is sequined in gold.
This is the story of a black stag and a swan who love one another, give birth to a daughter, and are devoured by wolves. The wolf pack raises the child until she falls into the river and is swept away to the sea, where she is taken in by a whale, who carries her on its back to humankind’s shore. Mie invents the story as she goes, picking up the objects around her that serve as her inspiration: the white feather she found in the tobacco box, branches like antlers spat out by the waves, a stone in the shape of a fish. She doesn’t want to talk about the creatures she discovered in the cabin, so she imagines something slightly different, better. As Abel showers her with questions, she sits on a dead tree trunk the sea deposited overnight, smoothed and burnished by salt and sand. She says, “This is the story of Noé.” And adds, “This is the story of where we come from.” Now she tells the tale.
Grandmother Swan wraps her neck around Grandfather’s rack. With her beak, she caresses the black coat no one has seen on any other stag. Can you feel the soft caress of her feathers along the dark male’s fur? Their manner of loving is like nothing else in the forest.
Mie doesn’t speak quickly, often she coughs. Her eyes pass from one brother to the other; she holds herself tall, turns her head this way and that, her hair a tempest around her scalp, her brow furrowing and smoothing out incessantly. Then she rises to her feet, sticks two branches in her headband, and walks as she always has, a little awkwardly and without grace. She has put her arms out in front of her belly, bends over and circles around the boys, swaying left then right; she’s a big, clumsy stag clasping the white feather, she brushes her brothers’ faces with its barbs.
The sun begins its descent, turning both the beach and the children’s blond hair red.
Wolves have clamped onto Grandmother Swan’s throat and decapitated her. Imagine the pleasure of fangs sinking into tender flesh. They shake her long white gullet, her beak striking the air then their flanks again and again; they let the blood run across their tongues and drip onto the snow. Her final shreds of skin tear away. To one side are her skull and half of her neck, to the other, her body. Her legs are slack, her outstretched wings have fallen back against her sides. All of Grandmother lies splattered on the ground. Can you feel the shiver of joy coursing through the pack? Imagine the pleasure of this warm soup in winter. Imagine the pleasure of pulsing entrails swelling with the fat they need to confront the cold. The pack devours her breast and her belly. It is beneath her carcass that they find the little girl, covered in blood and feathers. They eat her mother greedily and the stag, her father, his eye sockets empty and his viscera scattered across the clearing, lies a few metres away.
Mie tells her tale. Abel plays with a stick and a length of rope. His fingers keep busy; he’s not watching what he’s doing, all his attention is focused on his sister’s voice and her bizarre dance. In the meantime, his hands make a fishing net all on their own. Seth’s legs are crossed, right foot under his left thigh, left foot under his right. His splayed knees tap against the ground, but otherwise he is calm. At one point, Noé passes close to the two of them, a large grey phantom against the open sea. She has covered her shoulders with the skin of a deer, her hair tumbles down her back, her heels sink into the sand. She disappears into the dunes beyond the trees by the cliffs.
The she-wolf steps forward to take a bite of the child. The little one stares at her without blinking. She doesn’t cry. She is enveloped in her mother’s wing, naked against the soft, spattered feathers.
Some time later, Sevastian appears along another path that leads from the lighthouse to the forest. On his back: an empty pouch, a metal bow. Mie likes his woodman’s shoulders. He waves at them before vanishing between the trees.
If you are the whale, you feel a tiny little something tickling you. Imagine an ant on your leg, a button falling onto your belly. The little girl is no bigger than a stray pebble when she hits the flukes of your tail. The whale turns its pupil toward the something; she floats among the seaweed, she is blue and white.
Finally, it’s Osip who makes his way down. He hesitates on the path. Mie thinks he’ll follow Noé to the cove, he only ever steps onto the beach for her. But he stays where he is, paces behind the young brothers, never coming to a stop, his footprints endlessly erased by the waves. He doesn’t come close enough to hear the story, but instead observes from afar. Mie keeps seeing him in the periphery of her gaze, the face of a man staring at her, and suddenly she begins to quake, her story unravels, the boys don’t listen quite as hard.
She walks through cities full of shadows. She could have made out people in the play of light, but she sees nothing but obstacles. She is the daughter of a stag and a swan. The movement of her feet is a dance to avoid colliding with humans. There are white fountains and pink stones, houses taller than the cabin, as big as the lighthouse, arrows pointing to the sky, long grey shapes that evoke the sea. Forests are caged in by stakes.
A blast of wind from offshore bears the white feather aloft and carries it away. Abel, Seth, Mie: all three look up, follow it as it swirls out to the sea and, as Abel rushes into the water to retrieve it, Osip gathers the courage to move in closer. He pulls Mie by the arm, says nothing at first and then blurts out, “Okay you know the thing you asked me for the other day in the kitchen I’ll show you tomorrow after the noon ships.”