From the Forest

by Sara Maitland

  In an unexpected way, although the trees and other natural phenomena themselves have little or no resemblance to the forests of the fairy stories, culturally Kielder is perhaps more like the medieval forest than the precious and beautiful little pockets of remaining ancient woodland are. A forest like Kielder is a profoundly social place as well as a wild one. In the fairy stories there is always a lot going on in the forests. People work there: the stories are full of characters busy about making their livelihoods – not just in the obvious task of wood cutting, but also mining, hunting, animal tending and farming. In the fictional forests, too, there are villages and castles. There is also a great deal of leisure in the woods of fairytales – meetings and eating and socialising of various kinds, like hunting, not only for food, but also for amusement. There are fairs, and evenings by campfires and chance encounters, and a considerable amount of social play. There is learning in the forests – they serve a true educational function: foolish young people go out into the woods and come back wiser, often through positive encounters with trees, flowers, animals, birds, or humans.

  The forests of fairy stories are large but, apparently, well populated. There are permanent residents: witches in gingerbread houses, robbers in dens, woodcutters at work, millers in their mills, farmers in their fields, landowners (usually kings) in their castles with their domestic servants and their families around them, and peasants trying to survive. And over and over again, there are travellers, people who do not live or have their business among the trees but who are passing through on their own quests and journeys – on foot, on horseback or in carriages of various descriptions. On the one hand the forest can be very large and lonely; Hansel and Gretel and Snow White are all lost and alone for a while in the forest – but then they all meet strangers, living and busy deep in the woods. The sister in ‘The Seven Swans’ settles like a bird into a tree to live out her vow of silence – and almost immediately a hunting party comes by; Little Red Riding Hood barely has time to reach her grandmother’s house when a woodcutter passes by. All weddings are well attended; all inns are full of company; and if you want to christen your baby daughter, there are at least thirteen wise women living near enough to invite.

  There is another fairy-story aspect to Kielder: the road goes right through the middle of it. In other large forests, like the New Forest and the Forest of Dean, there are roads of course, but they usually amble from one village to the next, with the forest broken up by farms and houses. The roads do not enter the forest on one side and go right across it for over thirty miles almost without any break in the solid wall of dark trees on either side and only a few places open enough to see the hills above the forest or the lake at its foot. You leave the wide hill country at Bellingham in the East, set off up the valley of the North Tyne, still small and gurgling over stones, and then it is all forest until you emerge into wide hill country at Riccarton in the West. If you were to drive past Kielder village in the night, you would see the twinkling lights through the trees as the travellers in the fairy stories do. It is a proper journey; once you have passed the dam at the bottom of the lake there are extremely few houses, no shops and no petrol stations on the road until you get to the other end. Off the road there are little rough tracks and paths which lead deep into the forest and eventually out onto the high moors above, but in this respect Kielder replicates the endless travels through the forests of fairytales, the road along which the heroes and heroines go out to seek their fortunes and find their adventures.

  I made that journey myself the next day, heading west towards home. The castle, itself an eighteenth-century fake built as a hunting lodge, stood up above the little village, constructed for the original forestry workers (before the village was built they lived in a camp now drowned under the reservoir). The road wound through the trees, up towards the Scottish border and then down into the Liddel Valley. There were miles and miles of unbroken forestry here, enough to be impressive. In 2006, Oliver Rackham wrote:Forty years on, was it wise to object so strongly to blanket afforestation? Ought plantations to be scattered over the country, rather than concentrated in a few areas? Blanket afforestation intrudes on fewer views than pepper pot afforestation; it affords economies of scale for the foresters; and it allows plantation ecosystems – whatever they might be – to develop on a large scale and with a wider range of habitats and of possible sources of animals and plants.15

  Like Rackham, in actual experience I found the enormous reach of Kielder much less intrusive that the frequent little blobs of forestry scattered around the Scottish hillsides. Driving across the open hills to the west, I started to think that all the forests in all the fairy stories are artificial: they are idealised fantasy forests in which strange things can happen and lives can be changed.

  Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf

  Once upon a time there was a man who lived alone in the forest.

  He lived in the forest in a small cottage a long way up a rough track. He worked in the forest, tree felling, track filling, ditch digging, and deer killing. Power saw and rifle. On the whole he worked alone, although if there were tasks to be done requiring more than one worker, he would do his share, silently and without smiling.

  Once a week or so he came down his rough track on his quad bike and went to the office to get his work schedule. He broadly followed his orders; no one could quite say that he did not do his job. His boss and his colleagues were uncomfortable around him. There was a faint shadow that fell when he arrived and that evaporated in the sunshine of his departure. They did not like him, but they never teased or bullied him. He was strange and dangerous.

  Once a month or so he came down his rough track in his Land Rover and went into the village and bought supplies. Tea bags, powdered milk, sugar, probably more biscuits and less fruit and vegetables than was good for him. He never bought meat, but then most of them didn’t – why pay for what you can kill for free? He looked at his feet, never received any post, and spoke to no one.

  Once a year he would bring his quad and his Land Rover in for servicing. He would draw his equipment from the store as and when needed, never asking for any favours, never taking less than his due. In the winter the smoke from his stove could sometimes be seen drifting up from among the trees. Occasionally, especially when it was misty or very cold, someone would say in the pub of an evening that he had taken to coming out at night, prowling, spying; but someone else would tell the first someone not to be so bloody stupid and the conversation would drift off again somewhere else. No one really cared enough to give a sharp, eager edge to the gossip. He was not originally from round there anyway.

  Once, maybe three years back, he had not come to the meeting and he had not been to the village. People noticed. They always do. After a week or so Ken and Davie were sent to check on him. They rode up, roaring their quads, partly delighting in the day off, partly irritated, partly curious and, although they would never have admitted it, partly scared. The cottage looked dark and shabby. They shouted a bit outside and finally bashed on the door. He came out looking dreadful, obviously ill, probably feverish; but he had his rifle in his hand and he cursed them, so they fled. Embarrassed by their fear, they told the office he was sick but did not want any help. The next week he arrived at the meeting on time but he did not thank the boys or the foreman.

  It was a life.

  He lived alone because he liked his own company and disliked the company of other people. He felt safe in the huge emptiness of the forest and its muttered comings and goings. He was at home in the wildness of it, the secrecy. Other people broke into those secrets and into the dark places in his guts. They gave him a fierce headache, which was hatred, although he did not know that.

  One night, late – almost midnight – in winter, with snow on the ground and a moon four or five days off the full, silvering the edges of heavy, fast-flying clouds, his phone rang. It was the emergency call – three rings, then silence, then another three rings and silence. After four rounds o
f that he answered the phone, grunting his name. Could he get down quick? There was a lost child. The voice was almost apologetic. It was Iain’s stag night and so most of the boys were away and probably drunk and hard to get hold of. The voice did not quite say they were sorry they had to bother him but it was implicit, hanging there in the frowsty cottage air.

  He dressed quickly, took his torch, his rifle, heavy boots, gloves, gaiters, balaclava. First aid kit. Keys to the gates. It was part of the job, although he had never had to do it before. When he went outside the cold caught his throat and he coughed; then, standing still in the dark, he heard a high-pitched scream. It was not a child; it was a rabbit, taken probably by a fox. He knew it was important that he got down as quickly as possible, before anyone started wondering where he was, but even in his haste he noticed the neat double footprints of the roe deer along the snow on the track. He preferred roe to the occasional big red deer that came down from the high moor; he liked the way their heart shaped rumps flashed through the trees as they leapt away. Their meat was sweeter and easier to manage too.

  The bike slithered on the icy track and the moon cast lumpy shadows, making it difficult to judge the best path, but he did hurry as much as he could. After a noisy while he saw the yellow lights from the office and the white and red lights from the gathering cars. He swung his quad into the car park, circled once and pulled up next to a blue pick-up. As he switched the engine off and there was the sudden stillness between his legs, he knew. He knew absolutely what had happened and he was both angry and frightened.

  In the shed they called the office there was a lot of coming and going. He stood with his back against the wall and watched the hullabaloo. His boss was sitting at the desk looking worried; there were four policemen, anxiously trying to get a decent signal; there were three walkers, rather over-elaborately kitted out; there were half a dozen folk from the village and a couple from the farms, already – and there would be more of both soon as the word spread. There was a conspicuous shortage of the forestry workers – Iain’s stag night was taking place over sixty miles away. In a chair in the middle of the office there was a hideous heap of blubber and peroxide blubbering. It was the child’s grandmother. His headache thumped at the sight of her. He closed his eyes. It was all her fault.

  She was ten years old. She was wearing pink trainers and a red anorak. She had been missing since about two o’clock, her grandmother thought. She had almost certainly not left the forest. Of course she would be all right, but frightened and very cold. They should find her. Not wait till the morning.

  His boss got up and pinned a map to the wall; took a felt-tipped pen; started marking circles, looking at his motley and inadequate forces, trying to deploy them sensibly, where there was little sense.

  He forced himself to speak through the thudding of his headache. He’d go up Carsfrae, he said, up to the loch, should he? He knew that best.

  She couldn’t have walked that far, could she, surely? Not if she was alone. If she were alone. The bulk of the grandmother wailed. The older of the policemen looked up sharply, glanced around, his eye pausing speculatively.

  He pushed himself stiffly off the wall. His boss nodded at him, relieved that someone was doing something vaguely useful. He went out again into the night.

  He took his quad up through the trees. Under their cover the forest was very dark, infinite pools of blackness retreating uncowed before his headlights. After about twenty minutes’ riding he stopped at the loch side. Out from under the trees it was much brighter; around the rough shore the water was frozen, glistening in the moonlight; but out towards the middle it was as black as the forest had been. A sudden fierce flit of white overhead was a barn owl on the hunt. The trees crawled up and around both sides of the water and then petered out. At the top end of loch it had proved too boggy even for plantation and the glen ran up into the hills as open rough grass and loose scattered rocks; the moon made enough light out there to see the shape of the hill line.

  He switched his engine off and the silence flowed down from the heights. Behind him the trees moaned and creaked softly. He listened, listened to the nothing of the night. Then he unstrapped the rifle, slid it out of its canvas tube and loaded it. Carrying it broken over his forearm, he left the quad at the end of the track and very quietly turned and began to walk up the western edge of the loch. He knew where he was going. Where the Menzell Burn cut down along the forest edge there was a small fall, frozen into silence now, and the channel curved away there and had carved out a peninsula of broken rock. Near the water it was thick with ferns, and in summertime with dragonflies. Behind this was a rock overhang, a small cave. There was its lair.

  Three years ago he had taken sick with a fever. Early one morning the two of them – a man, all beard and thick glasses; a woman, skinny with a steel peg in her lower lip and a wild intensity in her eyes – had come to his cottage.

  They told him they had stolen a wolf from a zoo and wanted to set it free. But now they had got lost; their van was stuck in some mud ruts quarter of a mile away; they needed his help.

  He would have told them to get lost. It was no concern of his. But Ken and Davie arrived, crashing, shouting, hefting his headache up on the muscle of their din. He signed to the two strangers to keep quiet and went out and ran the boys off. He came back into the cottage smiling, and then it was too late. He was committed.

  The three of them walked through the wood to the van. The wolf was in the back, mangy, desperate, sad. He could see the sadness, deep in the green eyes that stared without forgiveness, without kindness, without engagement. The beast was restless, turning and turning in the confines of the metal box; it was as lean and strong and fierce as his headache. It was pacing round and round, beautiful and wild.

  It was all folly; it was the fever, the madness of the fever and the headache and the green eyes and the sadness. With crafty skill he had lured the wolf out of the van and into the back of his Land Rover. He had pushed the van out of the mud for them and sent them on their way. Then he had taken the Land Rover up to Carsfrae and set the wolf loose. He had gone home to his bed and woken two days later uncertain if it were true or dream. Dream, hallucination, delirium. It was true.

  Now as he crept up the loch side in the icy moonlight he was fierce with rage. A stupid child, a little fat spoiled poodle dragged into the forest by her foolish grandmother, ignorant, arrogant, flaunting her so-called sweetness, luring men to evil thoughts, tugging, tugging at his chest. Stupid old woman, fat and flubbery in the chair, wailing. Stupid little girl who should have stayed in town and left him alone. Left the beautiful wolf alone and free on the hillside; the wolf who hunted alone, who struggled against the world. Stupid little brat. Stupid. Stupid. Dangerous idiots. Pink sneakers and a wretched whiny voice.

  But even in his rage he was silent, slipping through the trees, careful, deft in the shadows.

  Beyond the end of the faint path he had followed, up where the Menzell Burn, frozen into silence, cut down along the forest edge, he found them. The little chubby girl with her clothes torn and her soft belly sticking out under her red jacket, terrified into stillness, petrified, unable to move or shout, was pressed up against a huge boulder left there by a passing glacier a very long time ago. She could not retreat any further and she could not take her eyes off the wolf.

  The wolf was three metres away, watching her, crouching, tail and belly low, perfectly attentive. In the moonlight he could see that it was scrawny, too thin and desperate with hunger and grief. The cape of hair on its shoulders, which should have been heavy and luxuriant, was thin and matted into rats’ tails. There was terror and sadness in it.

  He paused under the shadow of the last tree. He could see that at any moment the child’s fear would break out and she would turn to run. She was too stupid and ignorant to know that wolves prefer to attack from behind. When she turned it would pounce. He smiled. Waiting and watching.

  Its claws would rip off the silly jacket; the weight of its
leap would bowl her over; the fangs would sink into her flanks, and then, when she was down, into her neck. The wolf would be well fed for once, would slink back into the rocks around its cave and lurk there until the winter was over and there was easier ground prey and it would live another wild season, free and beautiful. And he could go home to his bed and no one would ever know.

  When he looked at the wolf his headache eased. The wolf was beautiful. The wolf loved him because he had set it free.

  All he had to do was nothing. Just wait. She would crack, run, scream. The wolf would kill. Serve the little bitch right – that would teach them to avoid the forest and stick to the paths and leave him in peace; not come tormenting and tempting him. They would never know he had been here, that he had found her, that he had seen anything.

  But they would search until they found her bones and then they would hunt the wolf, and there would be weeks of noise and coming and going and being and doing in the forest and there would be no peace. No peace for the wolf. No peace for him. They were not free. They were not wild.

  He could sense the tension in the child and in the wolf. He waited as long as he could. He watched her as the wolf watched her. He knew she had not seen him and she was ready to break. Then he snapped up the rifle barrel, raising it in a single movement. The noise made the wolf turn and stare straight at him. He saw its eyes, filled with sadness. He shot it neatly in the dark space between the two green lights.