At last, Grandfather releases his hold and the boy can fight his way through the brambles to see the silhouettes of the family disappearing in the trees. He sees the back of the little girl’s head – but after that, nothing.
‘They’re going to our house, aren’t they, papa?’
‘They’re bound that way, boy.’
‘But what should we do?’
‘Do?’
‘We should go and say hello … We can make them cattail root and acorn mash. You can catch them a rabbit.’
‘Boy …’
There is a throaty growl in Grandfather’s voice, but the boy is so keen to drag his papa along the trail that he barely notices it.
‘Papa, come on!’
Grandfather is rooted to the earth, but then he relents. Quickly, they snake after the family’s trail.
It is not so far to the house, after all. The woods are wide and the woods are wild and the woods are the world forever and ever, and it dawns on the boy that they are barely in its fringes, in a place the deeper forests would not even call the wild. With Grandfather slouching behind, they come to mama’s tree.
The boy slows. ‘Where do you think they are?’
Grandfather points, with a single long finger. ‘You tell me, boy.’
Along the length of his arm, the boy sees the tracks in the garden snow. He picks out the prints of Grandfather’s jackboots, and the smaller shoes that must be his own trotting alongside.
At first, he is not sure what Grandfather means – but then he realizes: there are too many prints in the garden, snaking from the forest down to the door. There is another papa’s boots, another mama’s, another boot the size of his own foot, made for a little girl …
Grandfather barrels him into an outgrowth of briars. There they wait. Voices curdle up again, and out of the ruin appears the little girl.
She is older than the boy, though perhaps not by much. Her blonde hair stretches to the small of her back, and it hangs in a single plait. Her face, angelic as mama’s in miniature, is dappled with freckles.
She noses forward, inquisitive as a dog, and seems to study the lattice of bootprints in the garden snow. She takes a step, to add to the patchwork, but then she is drawn to the remnants of one of the boy’s practice fires.
After she has scrutinized it for some time, she looks up. Her eyes search out the darknesses on the edges of the garden, but what she is looking for the boy cannot say. It cannot be that she is looking for him, because nobody knows he is here, nobody in the whole wild world, save for the Grandfather who hunches at his side.
Why, then, does the girl draw herself up and stride across the garden? Why, then, does she trample his practice fires and come, at last, to the roots of mama’s tree, to gaze up into the branches as if she has found the answer to some vexing mystery?
‘Papa!’ the girl cries out. ‘Papa! Here! Now!’ She swivels on her heels, stares at the empty portal of the ruin, and waits as another figure emerges – her father, swaddled up so tightly against the snow that he is more wool than flesh. ‘Papa,’ the girl declares. ‘There’s a face in this tree.’
Her father hangs his head, seemingly bracing himself for some inevitable storm. In the thicket, the boy’s hand blindly gropes out to find Grandfather. He cranes to see what she is pointing out, this face that has appeared in mama’s tree, but all he sees are ridges and knots in the bark. How can it be that this girl sees mama’s face sprouting, soaked up by the roots, but the boy will never see her again?
The girl’s father tramps halfway into the garden. ‘Well,’ he says. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think there’s a face in this tree and you’re not listening to me. Again. What do you think it is? Some kind of a witch?’
The boy bristles. Mama was many things, but she was never a witch; she would not come back that way. The tree could not warp her like that.
‘I meant the house,’ says the girl’s father. ‘What do you think of the house?’
‘I think it stinks in there,’ the girl declares.
‘There must have been a woodsman.’
‘A woodsman!? You mean people live in those woods?’
The father hangs his head. ‘It was just somebody’s camp. Come on, your mother wants to show you something.’
The girl turns from mama’s tree and, with dramatic dejection, tramps back into the ruin.
In the briars, the boy clings to Grandfather’s arm. ‘What do they want, papa?’
A low voice, that he thinks is only half Grandfather, utters, ‘I don’t know.’
‘What should we do?’
Grandfather whispers, ‘You must go back to the forest.’
‘On my own?’
‘You’ve done it before, little one.’
‘But what will you do?’
‘I’ll see them off, if I have to. But they mustn’t see you, boy.’
‘Why not?’
The boy’s eyes meet Grandfather’s own. The old man’s shine with dew, so that he cannot see into their depths; then, the boy’s do the same, so that two veils are drawn between them.
‘Why not, papa?’
Grandfather says, ‘You won’t go far. Do you remember the frozen pond, where the cattails grow?’
‘Will I wait there for you, papa?’
‘I’ll come.’
‘You promise, don’t you?’
Grandfather nods, ‘With all my heart.’
With Grandfather’s hand in the small of his back, the boy bustles back through the briars, beyond the line of the trees. He turns around once, only to see Grandfather urging him on.
It is not so very far to the cattail pond. Along the way, he sees a squirrel dangling from a noose, its eyeballs already gone where some famished bird has found an easy meal. He can see the track of a rabbit that has darted across the barren forest floor, and the gaping hole where a fox makes his earth. The wild points them out to him, like signposts telling him the way.
At last he reaches the slope where the cattail pond sits. He is sliding his way down, keen to drag up cattails and make Grandfather proud, when he loses his footing. When he stands, he sees mud clinging to his coat, thick and wet. It is such an unusual sight that, for the moment, he only stands there, staring. He dips a finger in and holds it up, and there is no doubt: the mud is not frozen; beneath a sprinkling of snow it squelches underfoot, oozing up around the sides of his shoes.
His eyes follow the slope. The pond is still covered in a sheet of ice, but at its banks he can see green waters lapping. He crouches, his fingers find a stone, and he hurls it at the ice. With a satisfying crack, the stone disappears, leaving a perfect hole in the surface. More green water bubbles up, a portal to another world.
He is still standing there, long after, when he hears the click of jackboots and turns to see the dim shape of Grandfather coalescing from the gathering dusk.
‘They’re gone,’ Grandfather whispers. ‘You don’t have to be afraid anymore.’
‘I wasn’t afraid, papa. I thought we could make …’
‘You should have seen them, boy. Tramping around our home, wondering at the cookfire and the pot. Types like that have no business wandering the forest. What would they know about the wilds?’
When the boy does not reply, Grandfather comes carefully down the slope, listening to the mud squelching under his jackboot heels. ‘What is it, boy?’
‘Look, papa …’
Slowly, the boy steps aside. Where he was standing, fragile as the wind, a fist of green shoots rise between clods of frosted earth. Their green is more vibrant than the strongest pines, and at the top of each stalk dangles a single bell, as white as the ice that has entombed them since the months before mama died.
Grandfather crouches, opening its face so that the boy can see a smaller bell hanging inside, perfectly white and lined in another vivid green. ‘Do you know what he is, boy?’
‘Milk flower,’ whispers the boy.
‘Snowdrops.’
‘
But what does it mean, papa?’
‘It means,’ says Grandfather, gently letting the flower hang down, ‘that things are changing.’
Together, they look into the woodland. Dusk is deepening, but already Grandfather seems to see new things, new depths in the forest.
‘It means,’ he goes on, ‘no more cattail roots and acorn mash. My boy, the wild is going to be kind to us for a time.’
SUMMER
On the branches of mama’s tree, peeking out from new tips of brown: the first leaves of spring, pale greens promising richness to come.
The boy comes from the kitchen to find Grandfather fingering the leaves with that strange, bewitched look in his eyes, the same one he has been wearing ever since summer dawned. He goes to him, and tries to take his hand, but the old man continues to finger the leaf, tracing its every vein as if lost in some reverie.
He is wearing a vest shorn from one of Mr Navitski’s shirts and trousers with their ragged cuffs cut off to make shorts. He has no shoes any longer, for the shoes of winter are battered beyond repair. Over his shoulder hangs the leather knapsack with strange foreign letters, and into it have been piled bark-flour biscuits, seasoned with young hawthorn leaves from the edge of the dell.
‘Boy, you take these.’ Grandfather reaches into his greatcoat and produces the package of mama’s gingerbreads, still wrapped up in paper. There are still six left, six reminders that she was once of the world.
When he presses them into the knapsack, the boy looks up in wonder. ‘Really?’
‘They’re not for eating.’
‘I know.’
‘They’re just for looking after.’
‘They’ve gone hard, haven’t they, papa?’
‘Winter was good to them, but they’ll be for fouling soon. Are you ready for your adventure?’
Proudly, the boy nods.
‘Well, say goodbye to your Grandma’s house. We have a long way to go.’
Grandfather is carrying a pack too, a bindle made from the vest he no longer needs. In the bindle is the pot from the stove and some other little implements scavenged from the ruin, but really all he needs is the axe. He has it pinned to his belt in a sling made from another rabbit skin, dried hard as rock over the fire. The boy spent nights kneading it until it was so supple that Grandfather could pin it and cut it and stitch it up again, a rabbit rib for a needle and sinew for his thread.
‘Ready?’
The boy takes a long look at the ruin, sees the final whispers of smoke curling out of the chimneystack, and turns to follow Grandfather under the trees.
In summer, the trees are full of scent. Grandfather says you can find your way in a summer forest by keeping your eyes closed, because the smells rear up more potently, and you can tell if you are walking through stands of ash or alder or spruce. Though the boy tries it, to him the smells are a heady concoction, pulling him in a dozen directions all at once. He snags his foot and decides to keep his eyes open, better to soak up all of the forest.
In the days since spring shook off the shackles of snow, the boy has followed Grandfather yet further between the trees. At the pond the ice is gone, and the waters are slowly clearing as little black shapes stir into life and dart from one bank to another. The cattails grow more deeply, woody stalks with blades of green and darker bulbs unfolding on top. In the clearings where the snowdrops flourished and took their brief, grateful gasps of life, new colours are appearing; carpets spread from hidden crevices beneath dead trunks, tiny points of blue and yellow appear among the new leaves, and insects hum.
At the pond the boy collects water. He has a flask made from a crushed tin can, while at Grandfather’s belt hangs a drinking pouch made from the hide of a hare. Still waters need to be boiled, says Grandfather, and the boy knows not to sip until the water has been sitting on the cookfire and the scum has been scraped away.
Today, they will go further than the pond. Further than ice and snow and the walls of winter. The boy does not know to which depths they head, but Grandfather can read the direction in the leaves. They reach a clearing with a fallen oak, and climb up and over. Grandfather goes first. On top, he is emperor of all the forest, and he reaches down to haul the boy up beside him.
It is easier to keep his balance, now that he no longer wears shoes. His feet squelch in the soft bark on top of the log. Teetering there, he looks down, into vaults of forest he has not yet seen. A ribbon of land is barer here, and at its apex he can see an oak, broader than all of the rest, its reach so vast that he begins to think of it as a kind of tenement, in which the boughs are hallways and the crooks between those boughs the rooms where a boy and his papa might live.
The woods are wide and the woods are wild and the woods are the world forever and ever. Together, they explore.
Grandfather seems to know these parts of the forest even more keenly than the trees around baba’s house. As the boy follows him, he wonders if it can be so. He thinks: the ruin was once a house, where papa lived with baba and mama, but that was the long ago, and surely the forests have changed. He makes as if he recognizes alders, ash and spruce, greeting them as if they are old friends. He strides with a purpose the boy cannot understand. Perhaps he is following trails, but the boy knows about trails now and he does not see the mark of boar or bison at their feet.
In the afternoon they follow the shore of a woodland lake, where dragonflies hum and great birds dart. The day lasts long, and dusk comes late, as it has come later every day since he saw the snowdrops. Inch by inch, night is peeling back to reveal more of day.
As dusk falls, Grandfather leads the boy through the trees and revealed before him is a beautiful open sky in which reds and pinks swirl like the marbling of one of mama’s cakes. Trees still line the horizon, but they are distant things, as unformed as the trees he remembers seeing on Yuri’s maps – and, between him and them, lie fields of undulating grasses, thick reeds and cattails, hummocks of land on which scrub clings. He smells stagnant waters, hears a distinct drone as a dragonfly drops into his vision, hovers there, and turns its odd pirouette to fly away.
‘Here we are, boy.’
The boy stutters forward, still feeling the dark press of the forest behind. ‘Where, papa?’
‘I knew they were out here.’
‘Is this where we’ve been coming?’
‘I thought of these marshes in winter. I could see them when I slept. It was as if the trees were whispering to me, boy, putting them inside my head.’
The boy thinks: he’s talking about dreams. But an old man should know what dreams are, for even little boys know that.
‘Will we camp here tonight, papa?’
‘Oh, tonight and more nights.’
Making camp means conjuring a fire. The boy uses his board; in moments the smoke comes. Soon, he has a cookfire raging, and has to hem it in with stones. Grandfather nestles the pot in the flames – and soon he is burying his face, rearing up with whiskers heavy with steam.
‘How does it taste, papa?’
‘Like I was a young man again …’
In the soup are the leaves of countless dandelions they picked in the long afternoon, and the stalks of a thistle on the cusp of bursting into flower. This thistle Grandfather calls the burdock.
‘How do you like it?’
‘It’s like peppers.’
‘It’s good for the heart.’
‘We haven’t had a rabbit today, have we?’
‘You’re hungering for it, are you?’
‘No!’
‘Well, let’s see what you’ve got.’
The boy upends his knapsack, making certain that mama’s gingerbreads do not roll out. He sets down three bark-flour biscuits for Grandfather and three for himself, but he knows to pick the smallest three for himself because Grandfather’s biggest and needs to keep his strength. Once he has spooned the dandelions and burdock onto the biscuits, he presents it to Grandfather.
‘I’m looking after you, aren’t I, papa?’
/> ‘There’ll be berries soon, boy. Brambles and wild strawberry and bilberry in the clearings. Mountain ash too, and crab apple and wild cherry if we know where to look.’
These are magical things to the boy, because it has been a long time since he had stewed apples or brambles with a crumb on top, or the strawberries in jam that mama used to give him.
‘And look at this …’ Grandfather unfolds his hand. Sitting in his palm are three eggs, speckled and grey.
‘Was there a nest?’
‘It had eleven eggs, but I only took three.’
‘Why only three?’
‘There’ll be other things wanting those eggs. Weasels and martens and stoats. All the other things of the forest. They’re waking up, boy. They have babies to look after too.’
A terrible thought occurs to him. ‘You don’t think I’m a baby, do you?’
In the firelight, Grandfather seems to mull the question. ‘Boy, listen to what the woods whisper. Do they think you’re a baby?’
‘They didn’t let me freeze, did they, on the night I came back?’
‘It’s because they wanted you back. Just like they wanted me.’
The boy turns to the marshes. The wind in the reeds has a different sort of music to the wind in the branches. It is good, he decides, to see the sky after a long day beneath the leaves.
‘How do the forests want, papa?’
‘Well, you remember the story of Baba Yaga?’
The boy nods.
‘And you remember the partisans in the woods?’
The boy nods again.
‘The forests are alive, boy. They live and love and hate, just the same as you and me.’ A thought seems to occur to Grandfather. He whispers into the fire, rousing the flames, and through that otherworld light beams at the boy. ‘You want a tale, don’t you, boy?’
The boy rises, just like those flames. ‘Perhaps a summer’s tale, papa?’
‘Oh no. Tonight’s not the night for that sort of tale. Our tales come from that land where it’s always winter. If it’s a summer’s tale you want, boy, lie back … and listen to the forests. They’ll tell you all the stories you need.’
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