The hole vanished with him. Nothing reemerged.
The horned wolf, Catskill, he called it, howled like the north wind, like a wounded thing, and leapt off into the night. I felt the earth tremble at that sound. Imagining what such a creature does in its grief is beyond me. I will not guess.
Perhaps Green lives on in some unknowable way. If I had anticipated events, I could have better prepared him.
Useless thoughts.
Clara and I still suspect that, eventually, his atoms must return to this dimension, though that process may take a decade or it may take athousand years of slow osmosis through the walls of our reality. Yet, with the hole closed, even that small comfort may only be wishful thinking. I doubt we can begin to conceptualize the number of variables involved.
It is also possible his remains have already returned, nourishing the cycle of living things, a part of the wholeness of nature. Such thoughts carry a kind of comfort for me. Would they have comforted him, I wonder?
My worst fear is that, in carrying the fawn through the hole, Green could have been fully torn away from our version of reality, where we may take for granted such comforts as change or sleep or even our cycles of life and death. I try not to dwell on that fear.
I find myself cherishing a sentimental hope that, if nothing else, his dust returns to these mountains. I want him to be a part of this landscape, this beautiful place that he should have absorbed into his heart over slow years of learning. I want that old wolf who guards this region to know that his human ally has come home to rest.
Fanciful thinking, I know. Something about him encourages that sort of whimsicality. It is difficult to put my finger on precisely why.
I honored Mr. Green’s final request, planting his acorn in the center of his campsite. I caged it off from questing squirrels and I can scarcely walk past without checking on its safety.
I paid Ms. Dancer to keep his camp unoccupied, more of a symbolic gesture than a real practical necessity. Now, his hateful vehicle can sit there in peace, no doubt becoming a nesting place for mice now and wasps in the spring. Already, the car has gained a respectable coating of leaves and twigs. Someone tucked a king of clubs playing card beneath one windshield wiper. I cannot guess why.
Ms. Dancer was eager to learn the significance of the caged acorn and I answered her questions. On one frosty morning a few days ago, I caught her sipping from her thermos and talking to it. I believe she was complimenting the sunrise.
I looked in on Alf and Jerome at the Count and Countess gas station last week. How I do loathe that awful place. They were surprisingly welland cheerful. They both had visible discoloration on the tips of their noses, ears, and fingers that I expect will take many months of healing, though I don’t think they will scar. I am told the young woman Casper had similar injuries. I did not express to them my thought that it is surpassingly strange any of them survived their encounter with the fawn.
Naturally, our conversation turned to Mr. Green and the quiet young man, Jerome, asked if I thought it was odd to miss someone you barely knew.
I told him, “No.”
I do not think it odd at all.
I offered Alf and Jerome the same comfort I offer to myself, the knowledge that Mr. Green achieved precisely what he set out to do. He left his old life far, far behind. He found something meaningful in the woods. He did something worth doing with his time here.
You might assume that losses like this are easier after centuries of living and countless such wounds on my heart.
I wish it were so.
V. Blackwood: Journal 516, PG 101
It is March 12th and the heavy snows of this winter have melted from all but the most shaded hollows. The mountains are muddy and disheveled. Here, a hanging limb broken in the January ice storm. There, a temporary stream of snowmelt carving a trench in the soft topsoil along Moss Man’s Row.
There is a fresh smell in the air and the pregnant quiet of a deep breath before a song. The sap is rising. We are at the tail end of maple syrup season and many heavy buckets have visited the sugar shacks and the low, boiling fires. The woods are waking up.
Now it’s maple sap. Soon it will be spring beauties. Jack-in-the-pulpit. May apples. The whole green cacophony that feels impossible in early March and inexorable by mid-April.
One awakening is particularly pleasant to me this morning.
The acorn I planted at Mr. Green’s campsite has germinated.
I checked the cage just after dawn and there it was, a scruffy sprout that will be a spread of small oak leaves in a few weeks. That little banner of growth suggests that the seedling’s taproot is already sunk deep. It is good. I may trim back the surrounding canopy to ensure plenty of sun.
Come autumn, it will be a foot tall.
Twenty autumns later, perhaps forty feet.
Today, it is a small thing, a token thing. It feels like a large victory.
I pointed the seedling out to Ms. Dancer and she fussed over it as if I had shown her pictures of a new baby. She may always be counted upon for enthusiasm. I suggested that if she insisted on watering it with sassafras tea, that it should at least be cooled first.
