| Chapter Eleven |
|
The wind blew into the forest from the east, as if it were being sucked into a vacuum created by the sinking sun, like air sucked into the heart of a fire to feed the flame with oxygen. For a time it seemed the wind was indeed feeding the fiery form of the sun, as it swelled its red and bulbous brazier and warped into shapes aped by every earthly fire. I have heard it said that the sun is a pyre upon which burn the sins it has witnessed in its passage through the day. The blood of the redeemer finally washing any stray traces away. All trespasses consumed, the better to begin tomorrow. Then must we be ever watchful for the sins that creep forth out of darkness, for they will remain upon our accounts forever, or until the final reckoning at least. A lone wolf treads a path eastward into the wind, toward the orgin of whatever dark power had blown the sun from the sky. He stops and raises his snout to decipher the scents brought him by that same source, blinks twice and continues on his way. He veers sharply southward, though he cannot have smelled anything to change his path so, his slow lope through the trees that shelter him from the wind's bite. Silent, steady, purposeful, mostly invisible in the dark spaces the halfmoon light has not the power to fill. A faint buzz is audible in the air above the wolf and he stops again and looks upward, head cocked, jaw held to, expression wholly quizzical. Hanging from a branch in the sycamore whose carapace stretches above, its whiskling leaves softly shadowed on the wolf's grey fur, hangs a hornet nest, agitated by the thin wind. Sentry hornets buzz a warning instantly recognisable in any tongue. The wolf darts his head from one to another, tracing a zigzag path that mimics the movement of the hornets from one spot to another and another, a geometric poetry. Nearby in a nettlebed hidden from the wolf a hornet forager drops from the air onto the withers of a grazing caterpillar and bites cleanly into its neck. The hornet dances its several feet on the caterpillar's back as the creature lurches in shock, an automatic response to whip the rider from its back, then steadies itself and bites the shiny black head clean off. The caterpillar continues to toss and writhe but the battle is lost and its life flows forth in juices from its mortal wound, hurriedly lapped by the forager. The ride shudders to a stop. A sentry sinks a sharp diagonal and skits in sharp lines around the wolf's ears, serving as warning enough for the animal to continue his trail, soon cutting northward, his path shaping a semi-circle around what centre. Above the sky is cloudless. The halfmoon arcs imperceptibly across its southern aspect, now in the zenith of its mechanical and dreamlike path, like a sleepwalking ghost, moving in silent trance. Around the constellations swing, the Pleiades like hieroglyphic graffiti, Orion sliding into his summer slumber, the Milky Way splashed messily by a giant child with a stiff brush. Hung there in random clusters, or the mathematic precision of chaos, celestial secret code. The forest beneath shimmers in the pale light, the trees sprung skyward as if magicked there by the stars and drawn irresistably toward their creators. Each new sapling turned by years of nocturnal study into a tall and gnarled wizard, contemplating universal truths and ages old secrets. Perhaps transmitting thoughts and findings and theories in encoded form within their seedpods, imparting their knowledge throughout the rest of the forest and beyond, carried by birds and mammals and winds and rivers, enabling the whole of earthly creation to procure a knowledge of all that the stars have ever witnessed on earth and the further vastnesses of the firmament. Here is the frontier into esoterica forged. The forest itself is not quite a full circle either. Its southern half is not rounded but pointed, tracing the rivers Welland and Eye Brook. These rivers running along its southern perimeters serves to further separate the forest and the wildlife it contains from the farmed lands surrounding. The rough circle that the forest shapes has only a sixteen mile diameter, barely sufficient hunting grounds for a pack of wolves were it not for the great wealth of fallow deer that run within. Just beyond the north-west boundary can be seen the lights of Stamford, a Medieval university town where lodged alchemists and academics and astrologers long ago, before Queen Elizabeth I's dignitary-in-chief Lord Burghley ever made his home here. Now a busy market town, and a focal point for much human activity within this area of Eastern England. Running roughly west to east within the forest can be traced the winding rivers Gwash and Chater, rich in fat brown trout hunted by sleek otter. Yet are there no wild boar, no eagles but the osprey that feed in the central lakes, no bear, no beaver, all lost now from here. Nearby the centre of the forest in a small clearing a herd of fallow deer graze, nibbling at the bark of immature trees and peeling it in strips or winding their black tongues around the tall grasses bent in the breeze. A stag stops and snorts. He waves his whiskered muzzle to the east and widens his damp nostrils. It seems he has caught the scent of a predator, for he lowers his head and with the argument of his thrusted antlers seeks to move the herd westward, in a direct line away from danger. The wolf, standing due east of them, follows, matching their pace, gaining on them but little, driving them west. The deer, thrown to panic, run along a favoured trail, as if drawn to where their own scent is strongest, in the hope it will negate that of the predator. Still the wolf follows. The stag has pushed forward and now leads the herd. In an ages old trick he leaves the deer trail and strides across the swift waters of the Chater, pausing in the middle of the river to hurry the several members of his herd across the magic water where no scent trace is left. As he climbs up the far back, his hooves slipping slightly in the mud, he scans the land ahead to seek out a path and safety. From within the gloom between the trees shine amber eyes that lurk and shine and leap and carry with them wolf. The stag bellows his herd to turn back, but there on the other side of the river stands their pursuer, panting, tongue at loll, saliva glinting on his fangs. The herd breaks south but the wolves strike fast and one hits the throat of a hesitant female and hangs there and another of their pack flattens her fawn to the ground and breaks its back with a thin crack. Held at the throat the mother twists and kicks and springs a hind leg equipped with a searing hoof but the wolf bobs and hangs on and pulls the deer downward until she is kneeling on her forelegs, the menace of her haunches sorely compromised. Another shaggy form steps forward and yips and bites into the back of her neck, severing her spinal cord, a gentle and not unloving execution. She falls to the ground and the wolves push her onto her back and lay their muzzles into her soft belly flesh as if nuzzling on her warm dugs.
|
