I

T was long ago, in the wild woods of North America. I was barely sentient then, more a force of nature than a person, but I wasn't far off. Even then I knew everything that happened in my woods, and protected the forest and the creatures that lived there.

One spring, a child of four wandered into my woods, tottering off after an espied bunny. He father slept on one end of the porch swing, dreaming of his dead wife, and didn't notice his daughter's absence until the sun was less than a span from the mountains.

He and his wife had built a cabin on the edge of the Woods to be alone together, working side by side to claim a life from the wilderness. Every day before her death he had felled the giants of the forest, and hunted its beasts while she gardened and sang to their child.

Yet the woods endured, and I left them in peace. When his wife fell ill, he remained by her side day and night for more than a moon. Their child was often left playing with wooden toys her daddy had carved, though she was just as enchanted with fistfuls of dirt.

When the man awoke, his first thought was of his lost wife, but after a time he remembered the living, and looked for his daughter.

Within minutes he had searched the cabin and the clearing, and he knew she was not playing hide-and-seek. He wept. He knew the Wood well enough to know that he had lost the only living person he cared about.

Yet he threw himself into searching, though it was suicidal to go alone into the woods as dark approached. But if his daughter and his wife were gone he had nothing to live for. He was content to fold up into the wilderness and lose himself.

As I say, I was barely self-aware at the time. I was aware as an ancient oak is aware, a lover's favored boulder is aware, a called storm is aware. Yet even then I felt this man's pain as no other. It was not the pain of a lost child, of a fallen limb, of a hawk-caught rabbit. His pain was a forest fire, awakening the wilderness to its own defense. Others in the Wood felt his pain — some repulsed by it, some drawn to it, and dark things sloughed toward the distraught and widowed father to grant his wish for oblivion.

Deep within me, I felt that this was a thing that should not come to pass.

Drawing energy from the man's cries, I brought myself into presence, coalescing my personhood from a million points throughout the Wood, appearing at his side in a form similar to the one you see before you. Bigger, rougher, more blood-thirsty, but a beast-man in Indian garb as you see.

Such was the man's distress that the terror of that form was lost on him, and he ran to me, I imagine wishing to be ripped to shreds, ending his pain and sending him to his family. Instead I grabbed him and lifted him into the low branches of a mighty oak that is — was — sacred to me, and faced the Dark Ones that had come to his call.

In the language of the unlanguaged, I told them they should not have this man's pain, his flesh, or his soul. But the mindless forces of destruction are beyond reason when called by their prey. In this they are like sharks, and other Things of the Deep.

The man clung to his branch as the Dark Things slunk from the dark and leapt at him, their claws scraping curls of bark from the wood. As they flew at him I rose up and knocked them to the ground with a mighty sweep of my clawed hands, each in turn.

Enraged, their blind eyes turned to me, and they knew me only as that which blocked their feed. They came at me in a flood of Dark Beasts, and their jaws snapped, their claws tore, and their heavy bodies battered me.

I was not vulnerable in those days, in my own Wood. They were each killed, spines snapped and heads crushed, as I defended myself and my charge with the brute force that was the only language the frenzied Beasts could hear.

I knew as I did so that I was killing off one of the defenses of the Wood, for as much as these blind Beasts sought to harm me, they were part of what kept the Wilderness intact, protecting it from the encroachment of Man's civilization. To protect this one man, I had removed the claws of the Wood.

It was the first step of the journey that has brought me to this place, searching for a new Wood, a wilderness wild enough to serve.

When all was calm again, I turned to the man and looked into his mind. I saw the picture of his lost little girl, and his deceased wife.

"Your wife is near, and I can grant your wish," I told him. "And yet your child yet lives," I told him, for I could feel the flutter of her heart within the Wood's shadow. "You must choose which you would join this night."

I felt his pain increase, as happens before a wound may heal, and he sobbed. "God help me," he said, "God help me, I choose my wife."

In the Wild Wood things die every day. There is no mourning, no judging of right and wrong, no railing against fate. Things are the way things are. That day, the man fell asleep in the crux of the tree and did not awaken. In the land of the dead there is no right and wrong, either, and his guilt left him. He joined his wife, who had hovered close since her death, and where they went from there I do not know, except that their end was a better one than the Dark Things offered.

The child was too young to defend herself, and also died that day, with more pain than her father had, but with no guilt. As young and unformed as her spirit was, it dissipated into the Wild, and she is yet a part of me.

A very, very small part.

Since that time I have gained enough of humanity within me to mourn her passing, and that of the Wild itself. Though in the larger Wilderness of the universe, I imagine its passing is as insignificant as that child's.

©Scott "Scix" Maddix