The Man Who Was in Love With the Wood

I wrote this months ago.   At the time I bodged it together out of little fragments I had lying around and I could not appreciate it for what it was.  I just re-read it and thought it was brilliant; a fully formed, realised and rounded tale, an exposition on the subversion of drama.


Dangerous Ideas from the Wood: The Man Who Was in Love With the Wood

        That year was perhaps the first during which I understood my place in the world.  I shot a hind under the lush green canopy of the wood, and I carried the beast home on my shoulders – quite a task – and set about butchering it in my garden in the glade of maples.
        My wife came out of the house.  She was pleased that I had brought home meat, but was also saddened by the death of the animal.
        “Look at the blood upon the ground,” she lamented, “just so we might eat.”
        It was true enough that the animal had suffered.  I had killed it, and it had not been a clean death.  My first arrow was fatal, and it was a fair shot, but it had not killed the beast outright, and I had had to track her through the foxy elders and into a patch of briars where finally she bowed her head down to death.  How many winter's life had I deprived her of?
        But this sentimentality is easily invented in the hearts of the young and of women.  We must eat, surely.  As much as I have a duty to protect and nurture the hind, the hind has a duty to feed and nurture me.  It is the destiny of such a beast to line my belly.
        That night I had a dream.  I dreamt that I was butchering the deer all over again, and I saw the small elder bush that grows by our back door.  As I was cutting the meat from the bone, the elder grew high into the sky, where the tips of the leaves began to caress the shoots of a second tree.  In my dream, I followed the stem of this second bush down through the forest, and I found it was one of the same bushes I had tracked the hind past.  Just as we made our home by an elder in the forest, so too had the beast.
        I saw clearly then, for a moment, how we were interconnected and relied upon each other.  I saw the fates of the animals and plants of the forest, how each of us related to the others.  When I woke this direct understanding was gone, but the spirit of it remained.
        The next day I walked out under the greenwood.  It was high summer and the air was full of insects.  Here now came a bee, buzzing by my head.  Perhaps she would visit the flowers of the blackberries and help provide me with food in the autumn.  How could I begrudge her some honey knowing that?
        In the evening, as the forest cooled down from a blazing day, my daughter came to me with a plucked flower and said she had been stung by a bee.  I told her she must forgive the bee.  I asked her if she thought it was her fault she had been stung, and she replied that no, she had done nothing to provoke the little creature.  So I said that a bee doesn't sting without a reason, and it must have thought it was right to be angry.  What should we do with an angry bee?  We could do worse than to love it, the silly little thing.
        It was harvest time, and the trees hung bountifully with apples this year.  I had paid my respects to the trees throughout the year; I had nurtured them and I had prayed at their feet.  Now I took one of their fruits from a branch and I bit deep into the firm ripe flesh.  The juice was glory, glory as rays of sun cast between leaves and branches shone upon my face.
        “Thank you providence,” I said out loud, “thank you, my friends the apple trees, for this gift of an apple to nourish me today.”
        The year moved on and I found myself tending to the autumn fire in our hearth.  I went to the wood store and returned with logs which had been drying for months.
        “Well done,” said my wife as I brought in the logs.
        “I've done not nearly so well as the tree which we will burn to heat our home,” I said.
        “Oh, let it go, always thanking the forest, you daft thing,” said my wife.
        Winter came and with it the frost.  Now we collected hips and quince and boiled up the fruit into puddings and there was laughter around our table.
        At church I saw a friend shivering and blowing upon their hands.
        “Damn this cold,” he said, “I hate the winter, it makes me sad.”
        What could I do but smile?
        The snow came and the land was beautiful.  The air was dry and we climbed onto the cliffs above the yew trees and looked out over the white world.  Who could be unhappy in a world of such calmness and tranquillity?
        Spring came in due course, and as the buds blossomed out into great blooms and the shoots shot up into the sky I cried “hallelujah” to the strengthening sun and span around in circles and danced with my wife under the greenwood bough.
        I am in love with the wood, with its seasons and moods, its colours and smells.  Though I have been here all my life it is giving up secrets still; an orchid previously unseen here, and a turn of inflection in the soughing of a bough there.  It is wondrous to see trees come and go.  Rivers change their course and new flowers grow in the clearings where I fell timber.  Badgers move their setts and crows roost in different trees.  Everything about the wood changes and yet the whole stays the same, timeless and unassailable.  I am in love with the wood.  The wood is perfect.