Voice of the Wood

SO YOU’VE REALLY GONE AND DONE IT THIS TIME you are lost in the wood how did that happen? The crazed Scots pines camped all around and blaeberries beneath and bracken shrivelled because it’s October and you stand hearing nothing, the non-sound of one leaf dropping to join its siblings on the ground.

You stand still. Behind each tree, more trees. Above: glimpses of bone-white sky.

You stand. The Scots pines arrange their great limbs with no heed of you. They are weighty but also like breath on a winter morning, but it’s not winter yet. Pines, and also birches, cold yellows aflame. The young birches are fragile, as though the first wind would send all their leaves fainting at once, but there is no wind.

How lost is lost?

You are not lost. You followed your map. There is a path – there is always a path through the wood; there has been since the dawn of time. The trees step aside to make one. It’s a ghost trail, an animal trail maybe for deer or badgers. There are no animals, it’s daytime. No wolves for sure and no bears.

You sense the woods miss the bears; they ought to be here huffing around the old trunks and berry-shrubs, but there’s no huffing now. Wolves, though – the wood is old enough to remember them, just.

But you’re standing in the wood, stock-still and listening and your hearing has sharpened. There fall the tiny tin-tack calls of birds foraging in the treetops, the race of water in a burn.

And now there is a moth. She appears fluttering in front of you. If this was a fairy tale she might want you to follow her, but she passes and will flatten her grey wings against the grey trunk of a tree. She has never been seen before and never will again, that was it – her sole appearance in our human world, and now it’s done.

What are you doing here anyway, in the woods? Ah, well, that is the question. You wanted to think about all the horror. The everyday news – the guns, the wars, the children’s tears down ashy faces, the chainsaws, the sea creatures tangled in plastic...

No, not to think about it exactly but consider what to do with the weight of it all, the knowing ... how to cope with it scroll down flick the page unplug the telly send a few quid. Really? Or take a long walk in the wood ’cause you are the lucky one and can do that, you can just shut up shop and go let the wood embrace you.

And here you are.

The trees all around, they commune with each other you can sense it, a knowingness between them. They’ve been rooted here centuries already and seen it all.

A plane is passing, up in the bone-white sky, above the branches and going where? Maybe over the shrinking icecap.

Concentrate.

Green ferns in the groin of an oak. Green moss cloaking a stone. Voice of a crow. Voice of a chiding wren. A smirr of rain too soft to possess a voice. Voice of the shrew, the black slug. Voice of the forest ... Did you hear something move out the corner of your eye? The same moth come back? Or another leaf falling? You are not lost, just melodramatic. The path is at your feet, see?

Now carry on.