She passed the trooper academy, the parking lot flooded with white light, and started down Sky River Road. Backhoes and smaller vehicles sat at rest, their claws folded, asleep on pillows of gravel. Orange cones gleamed in the moonlight, set out around the machines. Farther along, Josie made out the dark shape of the big pincer machine from the mill. Up close its rubber tires were just as large as the Wheel of Fortune blade, twice as tall as her. Its steel claws reflected the moonlight, then went dark as a shield of clouds blew over. As she neared the trailhead, a heavier wind charged through the trees, lifting and dropping the branches.
A drab green tent had been set up at the trailhead. The fabric glinted in the moonlight. Nicky leaned her bike against a rock and peeked inside, where she saw a collection of pallets covered in blue tarps. She lifted the corner of a tarp. Steel wires looped in piles sat alongside ten or so new chainsaws in orange plastic cases. She smelled sweet gas, and picked out plastic cherry-red cans in the dark, alongside gallon jugs of chainsaw lubricant.
She walked the maze of pallets toward the trail, resisting the urge to take up the cherry cans and dump gas on everything, setting it afire. Instead, she switched on her headlamp. The white light lit up the dappled dark of a nearby Sitka spruce.
Sven was right. On that ferry she had been so sad and alone. Now, she decided, she was someone different. Unafraid of this silvery, rich wind that brought these fall storms to the island, perfect for toppling trees without deep roots. Unafraid of these machines, lined up like an army about to assault.
Taking a deep breath, she started into the woods.
Once beneath the canopy, despite the winds along Sky River Road, the world hushed. Thickets of fog drifted between the boughs. The moon returned, filtering in shards of tinsel-colored light through the branches, making jagged shapes in the moss. Somewhere behind her a branch crackled. It sounded like a firecracker, and she froze, pivoting her head to shine the headlamp into the woods. After a moment she reached up to switch it off. It felt safer to be moving through the forest without being lit up.
It wasn’t Uncle Cliff, Nicky decided as she stepped over the roots and picked her way along the trail, listening for the wind, which sounded like a far-off freight train. It must be Lars. She could even picture him there, removing his tortoiseshell glasses, lowering the chainsaw into the cedar, gritting his chipped yellow teeth as the blades spit plumes of sawdust. Wanting to be the first to draw blood against the forest, and his father, by toppling the oldest, tallest tree in the valley.
She quickened her pace. New chanterelles, no larger than her thumb, poked their caramel heads up from the moss. She touched one, then pulled her hand back to quiet the screams that instantly filled her. The forest was in pain. The leader of the family was gone.
She started to jog along the trail. Then she ran.
As she made her way up the valley, the trees seemed to greet her with hisses of needles. She had failed them. This was her fault. The sky clouded over again, though the moon still cast a wan light upon the moss and downed trees. Each time she dropped back into a walk, out of breath, the hiss of trees grew louder. Could Lars not even wait for first light? Had he been dreaming for so long, perhaps even as a child growing up with Sven, of cutting that tree? Of course he had to take the king of the forest. Then she was running again.
She neared the second bridge, and smelled a musty scent. She slowed her pace, and felt her ears come alive to some new danger. The smell of wet moss and old meat and something chemical. The smell of hospitals and school halls in the morning. Of seagull guano on the breakwater rocks, and on the ferry. Ammonia.
Then, just off the right side of the trail, the salmonberry bushes parted, and a shape rose. At first she thought that the storm had caught her, and that these fall winds she had heard so much about were now revealing a particular spot where a sapling was taking life before her very eyes, like some giant beanstalk. Then the monstrous, bullet-shaped head turned to her, and the jaws opened and closed, revealing a slash of teeth. The pungent smell swirled around her, causing a gripping in her stomach. She ached to run, but remembered Clete.
Don’t say the name, she remembered. Don’t even think the name.
The roar of the creature sent an impulse of such acute fright right down her spine that she lost feeling in her legs. The salmonberries quaked all around the dark shape. She ached to be somewhere else, anywhere else. After a moment, she was still in place, facing the apparition, which appeared both exquisite, otherworldly, and awful.
She kept her eyes on the trail, and began to slowly back away. “Hello,” she said, trying to remember what Clete had told her to do, but only coming up with the tune Row row row your boat. “I don’t mean any harm. I’m just passing through. This is your home, not mine. I’ll go away soon, I promise.”
As she spoke these words, Nicky focused on the tips of her boots, observing where the tan band around the sole met the darker brown. A heavy gust moved through the branches, signaling the storm’s arrival. The trees wailed as the branches shook side to side, the trunks wobbling all around her. She heard a snarfing, followed by a shuffling. When she looked up again, the shape was gone, just a whiff of old meat remaining.
She gathered herself, pausing to close her eyes and offer thanks to the forest, and to the world around her. Squaring her shoulders toward the head of the valley, she continued deeper into the woods.
At the second bridge, she forced herself to slow. She took the stump stairs one by one, holding the railing as she walked the length of the cedar to protect against the wind running up the river. The sky above had turned a milky purple. A few fish splashed below, their white bellies flashing. She caught her dim reflection in the running water, then made her hands into fists and covered her eyes, allowing herself to slip into blackness and pretend, for a moment, that she wasn’t in a forest full of bears, about to walk off-trail into a valley as a storm threatened.
When she opened her eyes, the river still ran. She looked up it, hoping to see her mother standing in the water, encouraging her to press on and be brave. But there was only the water curling around the rocks, slipping beneath the tree boughs waving in the wind.
On the other side of the bridge she dropped down from the log and began running again, this time smelling the air, ready for another encounter. The trail curved away from the river. Her eyes ran along the devil’s club, whose leaves had turned yellow with cold. She didn’t even slow at the opening, just plunged through, ignoring the scrapes on her cheeks, the needles jabbing at her scalp, digging into the side of her neck. She cleared the leaves and felt the flatness of the game trail beneath her boots. Ducking hemlock branches, she accelerated again. As she approached the grove, the trees came alive, the trunks wobbling in the wind and the needles making a sheering sound. A gentle rain worked through the branches. Her cheeks were moist with rainwater, and something else. Blood, she saw, looking down at her fingers. From the thorns of the devil’s club.
The band of light was coming up over the mountains as her boots sank into the spongey soil of the first muskeg. She could feel the earth beneath her crackling, as if the entire expanse had been shot through with current. Along the fringes the trees seemed to sparkle with energy. Even the moss was alive. She brushed her cheek against her shoulder to clean off the blood and kept going.
On the far side she pushed through the thicket of alders, climbing the hedgerow to the second muskeg. She watched as a pearl of dew caught in the filaments of old-man’s beard shined in the early morning light, then vanished in a howl of wind. The earth swayed beneath her feet as she ran past cloudy brown ponds, the surfaces sloshing. Sorrow began to work into her muscles. She didn’t know if the trees were spreading it through her, from the earth, if it was the electricity or magnetism of the incoming storm, or her own sadness, accumulated over the past year, breaking like a wave over her.
She should have been out here, storm or not. In the forest. Protecting the trees. They had asked her. They had depended on her. Instead, she had fought with her sister, and fallen asleep in her attic. She had been selfish, so selfish, caught up in her own sadness. And now she was paying for it.
Closing her eyes, holding her hands to her face to protect from thorns, she pushed through the brush separating the last muskeg from the grove. The fear she had felt from her encounter on the trail slid into anger. “Lars!” she yelled, her fingers itching as she cleared the branches. She felt the urge to tear him apart. His pride and his smirk and his selfishness. All Josie’s righteous anger at adults filled her as she muscled through the last barrier of devil’s club. She didn’t even register the scrape of the thorns on her forehead and cheeks and the backs of her hands.
As she broke through to the other side, the first thing she noticed was the bruised sky where the cedar had once been, just an inky welt filled in with clouds. The Three Guardsmen seemed to be leaning in, hovering over the downed tree, which stretched across the forest floor, branches of smaller trees sticking out, crushed beneath its bulk.
Then she saw him. Sitting atop the cedar, directly over the stream. He had undone his bun, and his wet hair covered his face as his shoulders heaved. He was cross-legged, crying into his hands. With the wind she could hear nothing, but at the base of the trunk Nicky saw the chainsaw, small and powerless, like a pin beside a deflated balloon.
She balanced on a moss-covered branch, and climbed to the main trunk, gripping the wet, soft green where the bough grew steep. She pulled herself up, reached the avenue of bark that stretched as far as she could see.
“Clete!” she yelled. Her boots sank into the mossy trunk. It extended so far ahead of her that the idea of reaching the top made her dizzy. Leaning into the wind and soft rain, she forced herself forward.
“I had to. I had to,” Clete chanted over the wind when she reached him. “It was the only way for people to see.”
She stood over her cousin and started to cry. “Why?”
“Nicky,” Clete cried, turning around and standing, “I cut the cedar down, just like the trees asked.” His eyes were swollen, his cheeks soaked in tears. A gust nearly pushed them off the trunk, and they both crouched along the bark.
“I knew you’d come,” Clete said as he started to control his weeping. “The trees said you’d hear. I wasn’t sure you’d have the courage. But you’re here.”
“I saw it from my window. I heard it.”
“You’re bleeding. You’ve got blood all over, and you look pale. You’re not dressed for this weather. It’s only going to get worse,” he said as a gust howled through the forest.
“I saw one,” she said simply. “I saw a—you know. On the trail. Then the storm started, and I think he got scared.”
“Did he charge?” Clete asked, suddenly paying close attention to her.
She shook her head. “I looked down, like you told me. I noticed everything around me. I was patient.”
Clete nodded. “The forest, even the animals—they know death is coming. They just want to breathe. It’s going to be a bloodbath. This cedar—it’s just the beginning. This stream, it will get filled in with branches and bark. The salmon will stop coming. The hemlocks, the cedar, and the spruce—even the alders. All of them destroyed, gone. The muskeg will be drained and filled in with cement to make a parking lot. We won’t recognize this land.”
“There’s something,” Nicky insisted as she recalled her father describing the tune he couldn’t quite hear. “There’s something we’re not seeing.”
“There’s nothing,” Clete said over the wind as he started down the cedar. “Except to get out of these woods before this storm really blows through. A tree could fall on us.”
“You mean, the wind could push one over.”
“Yes,” he said. “The bedrock is shallow, and the trees have no good taproot. They come down in storms like this.”
“Have the trees given up?” Nicky asked as she followed him down. “Have you heard them since you cut the cedar?”
Clete shook his head.
Nicky picked an alternate route, lowered herself through the branches to the soil. As she crossed the moss, she thought of her mother chanting when she couldn’t figure something out. Problem, solution. Problem, solution.
She stopped at the base of one of the hemlock Guardsmen. Clete sat in the branches of the cedar, watching. She wrapped her arms around the tree. She could feel her heart beating hard against the bark, as if nothing—no ribs, no flesh—separated her.
Then, taking a deep breath, she leaned over and clutched a mushroom.
She expected to hear screams, as she had earlier that morning on the way out. Only sorrow moved through her, a slicing, bitter sound, mimicking the winds of the storm blowing off the ocean. Then something else, that brought her back to the skiff ride out with Uncle Cliff. A dizzying, immense sadness, punctuated by bolts of unease.
Nicky pulled back her hand. She looked at Clete, who had come down off the trunk and stood now beside her.
“It’s not working,” she said. “I just feel sick.”
“Try these,” Clete said, pointing to another group of mushrooms, growing from the great wheel of the cedar stump. “The roots, they must have all this energy to send up with no branches left above ground. Whatever it is, it’s going to be loud.”
She squinted against the driving rain and leaned forward to touch the largest of the mushrooms, ignoring the roiling of her stomach. Immediately she felt a bright pulse of energy move through her arm. Clete called to her, but she couldn’t make out his words. His face appeared panicked, but she couldn’t tear herself away from the teeming nest of sorrow, insistent and loud, filling her ears. It was the thinnest thread of a tune, so faint she could hardly hear it.
She looked up into the slanted branches of a Guardsman, which rose into the night sky like a pillar. She turned her gaze back to the jagged base of the cedar, where Clete had hacked with his chainsaw, closing her eyes and reaching, with her other hand, for another mushroom, doing her best to concentrate as the sound grew louder, resolving into an eerie electric chant.
Look around.
She opened her eyes. One by one, windblown trees across the grove began to light up, blinking like fireflies. Slowly, she turned to Clete, who looked out over the forest as the toppled trees glowed with an unearthly phosphorescence. Trees caught in diagonals, or resting in hills of moss, releasing a rhythmic beat as they pulsed.
Then she knew. The answer was music.