Willa of the Wood

by Robert Beatty

  She knew that particular valley well, with its coves of giant hemlocks, towering pines, and black walnut trees—old friends who had shaded her from the summer sun while they listened to her singing her Faeran songs of old.

  She knew it must be a great outpouring of smoke for her to be able to see it from this distance. It was too much smoke to be the stone-steep breath of a day-folk lair. And too narrow to be the fire that consumes the world.

  A tight and sickening feeling crept slowly into her chest as she stared toward the mysterious smoke.

  A bright flash lit the spot. An area of trees disintegrated. And the trees around it collapsed to the ground, one after the other, like they were being eaten by a giant beast. A great eruption of smoke and debris rose up into the air.

  And then the sound of it hit her in the chest, like a crack of thunder after a bolt of lightning. The booming sound flew across the sky and echoed off the mountains behind her.

  A thick plume of black smoke rose up from where the trees had been destroyed. Even from this great distance, she could hear their screaming, their twisting, burning cries as their ancient spirits came crashing to the ground.

  “Anakanasha,” she cried out in anguish, her heart aching for the wounded and murdered trees, and all the birds and animals that lived among them. The pain welled up in her chest so quickly and with such powerful force that it sucked her breath away. The tears burned in her eyes as she gazed toward the devastation.

  What vicious force had caused such terrible destruction?

  Willa ran across the rocky terrain, leaping from one jagged edge to the next, diving headlong through thickets of underbrush, and sprinting through the groves of the tall, growing trees, pushed on by the desperate hope that she might be able to help some of the animals that had been hurt by the destruction she’d seen from the mountaintop. But she had miles to go. She knew that her camouflage wouldn’t protect her when she was traversing long distances like this. An onlooker would see a flash of movement and a blur of color as her skin changed from one rocky gray or leafy green texture to the next. It would leave her vulnerable to attack, but she had to find out what had happened.

  Exhausted from running, she slowed to catch her breath when she reached Moss Hollow, a deep ravine dark with the green shadows of its protecting trees where thin runnels of water trickled through the mossy rocks and gathered into a stream. It was the place where the valley’s river was forever being born.

  After taking a quick drink, she continued on.

  She followed the winding path of the young river until she arrived at the Three Forks, where several streams came together to become a true and powerful river with a life and soul of its own.

  From here, she ran along the rocky bank as the great river began finding its own way and making its own decisions, moving boulders and carving through the earth, getting stronger and deeper as all the streams around it joined its cause, mile after mile, winding through the forest until it was strong and unstoppable, wearing down the mountains through which it flowed. She had seen with her eyes and learned in her soul that where a river is born, the earth shapes its path. But where the river grows up, it begins, in turn, to shape the earth.

  When she finally reached the area where she had seen the destruction, she split off from the river and headed west into the forest. The sound of many footsteps scuffling through the leaves touched her ears. Then came the hushed whispers of muffled voices. A group of humans was coming her way. She ducked down into the bushes to hide.

  A dozen Cherokee families were moving quickly and quietly through the forest. They were breathing heavily, their simple cotton clothing soiled and disheveled, and their faces tense with white-eyed fear as they glanced repeatedly behind them. Many of the Cherokee carried sacks and other supplies slung over their shoulders, as if they had hurriedly gathered their belongings from their homes and fled. One woman carried her baby wrapped in a blanket on her back. The men were bleeding from recent wounds and their faces were smudged with black marks.

  She had often seen Cherokee walking on the gravel roads that connected the area’s towns, and she’d seen them trading peacefully with the homesteaders, but she’d never seen them running through the underbrush like this before. They seemed to be fleeing some sort of danger, but they were also scanning ahead and looking all around as if they were searching for something they had lost.

  Then she noticed that other than the one baby on the mother’s back, there didn’t appear to be any other children among them. Was that what they were looking for? Had they lost children?

  And then, at the rear of the group, following behind all the others, she spotted one boy just coming into view. He was a lean, bare-chested boy a few years older than her. He had long black hair and the dark-striped markings of his tribe on his face and arms. He definitely wasn’t from the same clan as these other Cherokee, but he was carrying one of their girls in his arms, and her hair was matted with blood.

  He turned and looked into the distance behind him, his face racked with worry. Then he gazed out into the forest, as if hoping to see something there. He’s not just looking for their enemy, she thought. He’s been separated from someone he loves.

  She wondered if this Cherokee boy knew the younger boy that she’d met in the prison beneath the lair, but she didn’t think so. There was something very different about this boy. He seemed so strong and fierce of heart, and as he walked across the leaves of the forest, his footsteps made only the slightest, most muffled sound. She could smell the other Cherokee men and women just like she could smell the homesteaders, for they were human beings like any others. She knew it was impossible, but when this odd boy walked past her hiding spot in the bushes, his scent reminded her of something very specific: mountain lion.

  At that moment, the boy abruptly stopped, turned, and looked right in her direction. His dark brown eyes scanned the forest intently.

  Holding her breath, Willa wove herself deeper into the colors and texture of the woods and remained perfectly still.

  The boy peered into the area she was hiding, like he knew she was there. But she could hold her breath for a long time if she had to. When it came to staying still, no one could outlast her. She had learned patience from the trees.

  The shock of a booming explosion tore through the forest, rattling the leaves and shaking the ground. Flocks of startled birds flew up. Small animals darted for cover. The ricocheting sound echoed across the walls of the nearby ravines.

  Willa ducked down with the Cherokee, cowering to the ground, white-cold fear surging through her body. She had never felt or heard such a deafening sound, one that slammed through her and everything around her. She was left lying on the ground, her lungs panting, and her ears ringing with a high-pitched whine.

  “Everybody get up!” the Cherokee boy called to the others. “Keep moving!”

  Willa climbed back up onto her feet. Just over the nearest ridge, a large plume of black smoke furled up into the sky. As the small band of Cherokee hurried away in the opposite direction, she went toward the smoke.

  As Willa ran through the forest, an eerie gray smoke drifted through the trees. The smell of scorched wood hung in the air, tinged with a sharpness that reminded her of the blast of a killing-stick.

  And then, as she pushed forward through the haze, something even worse invaded her nostrils: the sickening odor of recently cut trees. The overwhelming stench of hacked limbs, severed trunks, and spilled sap filled the air.

  She came to a ledge where the ground had been broken to pieces by a powerful violence, with loose rocks and dirt crumbling down a cliff at her feet. As she looked out from the edge, a shocking sight opened up before her eyes.

  The world was gone.

  A vast area of the forest had been cut down and dragged away. All the trees for as far as she could see had been murdered, leaving nothing but a slashed clearing with thousands of stumps in a field of damaged earth, broken branches, and piles of sawdust.

  Willa cried
out at the sight of it. The trees had all been killed! What kind of people would do this? Why would they destroy the forest?

  There were hundreds of men at work, savaging the trees at the edge of the forest. She watched in horror as two of them pulled a six-foot-long, jagged-edged saw back and forth through a living sugar maple tree, the sharp steel teeth ripping through the flesh of the trunk as sap oozed from the wound.

  The murderers weren’t the homesteaders or the Cherokee that she’d seen from a distance all her life. They were the humans that her mamaw and the padaran had called the newcomers. Now she saw why they had come to her forests.

  “Timber!” the men shouted to their fellow killers as the majestic tree came crashing down to the ground. Then a dozen other men fell upon the tree with axes and hacked away at its limbs.

  Trees she had known all her life—tulip poplar, black walnut, white oak, red maple—fell one after the other to the men’s saws and axes. A few of these elder souls had lived their lives in these mountain coves for more than three hundred years, others for fifty or a hundred, but all of them were being cut down in a matter of hours.

  Willa felt a rumbling in the earth beneath her feet and she heard a loud rushing sound. She turned to see a giant, black machine rolling on long steel rails that the men had laid across the earth. Even as distant as it was, the sound of the machine filled her chest and shook her body. Hot, spitting white steam poured out of the machine’s stack, breathing heavy, chugging breaths as it pumped along the tracks. Sweating men riding atop the beast shoveled black coal into its burning belly.

  When the machine reached the cutting area, crews of men used sweating, frightened, chain-enslaved horses to drag thick cables up the mountainsides and hook them onto the fallen trees. Then a second massive, belching steam engine mounted on the back of the moving beast dragged the bodies of the trees toward it, like a long-legged spider slowly pulling in its prey. A dangling, steam-driven boom swung out over the ground, grabbed the logs with huge claws, and lifted them onto the rolling beast’s back.

  The crews cut down the living, dragged in the dead, and stacked the carcasses one atop the other. She tried to imagine what they were doing with them all. She knew that they cut up the bodies of the trees to make their lairs and their tools and their weapons, their carriages and their toys and the cribs for their babies, but how many of the day-folk could there be in the world for them to destroy an entire area of forest?

  A crew of men with shovels and wheelbarrows, spikes and hammers, approached the area where Willa was standing. They began digging and hammering away at the disturbed earth exposed by the explosions. They appeared to be laying steel tracks into a new area of the forest, establishing the course for the cutters to come with their machines. Where a rocky ridge or steep terrain thwarted their progress, they stacked small piles of red sticks and lit a long white vine on fire. They had blasted cavities into the sides of living mountains, broken apart large rock heads, and filled in the ravines of the river—flattening the mountainous land so that the black, steam-belching machine could come. Some of the fires from the explosions still burned nearby, great plumes of black smoke rising up into the air. That’s what I saw from the mountain, she thought.

  Unable to take any more of the devastation into her mind, she pulled back into the forest and stumbled away. It felt like someone had ripped a hole in her heart.

  Saddened and disoriented, Willa found herself walking through an area of the forest that had been badly damaged by the recent explosion. The trunks of the trees were broken in half, their insides shattered, and their severed branches left to die on the forest floor. The bodies of dead birds lay strewn across the ground—blue jays and flycatchers, chickadees and woodpeckers—their feathers shredded and their necks broken. The carcass of a small red fox lay with its legs bent and its body twisted. She had come to the area of the destruction to help in any way she could, but it was too late. The fox’s spirit was gone. The animals in this area were all dead. It left her feeling so hopeless, so powerless to do anything.

  The disturbed earth beneath her feet suddenly gave way. She lost her footing as the soil collapsed around her. She found herself sliding down into the ravine of the dammed-up river, jammed with crisscrossing trunks and scorched trees from the explosion. She grabbed frantically at the dirt around her, but she couldn’t stop her fall. She was headed straight toward the churning rapids pouring through the logjam. Despite all that the humans had done, the river would not be stopped. Every muscle in her body bunched with panic. She was terrified that she’d get sucked into the powerful currents and pinned against a log. She lunged out, grabbed hold of a branch, and held on, clinging to the side of the ravine, just a few feet above the swirling water.

  That was when she saw it.

  It was one of the largest animals she had ever seen. But it looked so small with its body crushed beneath the trunk of a tree. It was completely exhausted, and badly wounded, pinned half in and half out of the gushing water, its claws sunk deep into the bark of a tree, holding on with the last of its strength. It was seconds from drowning. The animal had jet-black fur and a long black tail, and its bright yellow eyes were staring straight at her.

  The loose dirt crumbled beneath her feet as Willa plunged down the wall of the ravine toward the dark, churning current of the logjammed river. In a flailing, desperate leap, she flung herself out at an exposed root and clung to it, and then willed the living root to intertwine around her wrists and hold her in place. She hung there now, just above the dangerous currents. And trapped just a few feet away from her, there was a female mountain lion, a panther, as black as night, unlike any she had ever seen before.

  She knew a predator like that could kill with a single swipe of her claws, but it didn’t seem like the cat was going to attack, or was even able to. The panther’s back was bent beneath the trunk of a fallen tree, and her bloody wounds looked excruciating. The cat’s mouth was drawn up into a snarl, her whiskers trembling in pain. The panther growled repeatedly as she sunk her claws into the trunk she was pinned against and tried to pull herself free.

  Willa had overheard the homesteaders and the Cherokee telling stories around their campfires about the Ghost of the Forest, and her grandmother had described these mythical beasts to her as well, but she never thought she’d actually see one with her own eyes.

  She wanted to help the animal, but she was hanging on to the ravine wall by a spindly tree root, and she was terrified to go anywhere near the cat’s sharp claws and deadly teeth. Panthers were one of the wildest, most vicious animals of the forest. She couldn’t imagine how she could get any closer to her.

  As the powerful flow of the river gushed through the narrow chute of the ravine, it pushed the tangle of massive trees that had jammed up all around them, rocking it back and forth. She could hear the logjam creaking and groaning like it was going to give way at any moment.

  She had to get herself out of this ravine or she was going to get washed away when the river broke through. And she didn’t have the strength to drag a panther out from under a fallen tree or lift a trunk from a panther’s back.

  When she heard the loud, jeering call of the blue jays in the trees at the top of the ravine, she knew it wasn’t just birdsong. It was a warning. A warning to her in particular. Some sort of new danger was approaching. When she focused her ears on the area above her, she heard voices and footsteps at the top of the ravine. They were coming her way.

  Expecting it to be a group of loggers with their axes, Willa pressed herself close to the wall and tried to blend, but dangling from the root, she couldn’t stay still enough to hide herself very well.

  Then she saw them. It wasn’t the loggers, but Faeran.

  Gredic, Ciderg, Kearnin, and a band of other jaetters were coming, wielding not just the sticks they had before, but sharpened spears now, ready to kill the animals of the forest and bring their pelts back to the padaran. The group of them were scavenging along the path of the destroyed ravine. They
would soon discover the trapped panther just as she had.

  Her grandmother had told her that one of the reasons that black panthers were considered magical was because they were so rare and elusive—very few people had ever seen one. Willa knew that the panther’s black fur pelt would be highly valuable, far more valuable than a wolf pelt or coins or silver jewelry or anything else the jaetters might hope to get their hands on. When they saw the trapped and struggling panther, they would laugh with pleasure and chatter their teeth, then rush forward and stab her with their spears until she was dead.

  Willa couldn’t stand the thought of it.

  When she looked again at the panther, she could see the desperation blazing in her yellow eyes. And she could see the panther heard the coming jaetters and understood the danger.

  Willa’s heart filled with a desperate sort of foolish courage. She willed the roots holding her in place to unfurl from her hands. Then she scrambled across the crumbling wall of the ravine to get closer to the panther. The panther’s heavy, laboring breaths moved great rushes of air in and out of her lungs. Her grinding claws gripped the bark of the tree trunk she was crushed against.

  Willa thought she could make it over to the panther, but then the dirt beneath her feet and hands gave way. She slid down the slope of the ravine and splashed into the river. She reached out and grabbed the branches of the tree to keep from getting swept away, but the branches snapped in her hand as the rushing water pulled her under.

  She had been trying to help, but now she was caught in the same vortex of swirling current as the panther. They were going to drown together.

  Then something large and alive brushed past her leg under the water. She yelped in fear and scrambled up onto the bank of the river as fast as she could.

  On the ridge above her, Gredic and Ciderg were shouting. They’d spotted the panther. And they had spotted her.