Almost Gone

By Keith Farnish

UPDATE: All profits from this eBook will go to Survival International, the organisation for Tribal Peoples

"I kept the early watch as Eoran slept almost silent, upwind of the fire. Watching him in his otherworld it seems absurd that either of us could have thought this would end well. He’s no more an Elder than me and curled up like that he could be mistaken for a child, no lines of age or marks of wisdom and barely a scar from all his adventures. Looking down at my hands in the flickering light I imagine using them to protect us from something bad, something unknown. They seem to clench without my help, but I’m not convinced. Too soft; too new."

Set in a place that may be familiar to many, in a time that could be now, but within a culture untouched by civilisation, Almost Gone follows the search for a threat to the world in which three young people live. As Caeleb, Merod and Eoran’s journeys weave across the rich and sometimes dangerous landscape they start to understand the true nature of the change that is happening to the world in which they live, to themselves, and to their relationships with each other, and the sacrifices they will have to make to keep any one of these intact. Above all it is a book about the need for connection in a changing world.

Almost Gone is the first book of the Conorol Trilogy.

This download contains a special READING GROUP GUIDE for use by book groups and schools.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Keith Farnish
• Release date: Sep 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310380280

Keith Farnish

Keith Farnish is a writer, volunteer and activist who, in a former life, was an IT professional. He lives in the Borders of Scotland with his wife and two children.He has been involved in environmental issues for a long time - for a large part of that as an active member of various environmental organisations, before becoming disillusioned with the mainstream environmental movement. He is continually striving to minimise his impact on the natural world.Keith founded The Earth Blog in 2006, intended as a source of inspiration for people who want to be challenged, and offering uncompromising solutions to difficult problems. He also became a regular contributor to high-profile websites including Culture Change, Resilience and Nature Bats Last, and founded the Unsuitablog, which became a highly influential anti-greenwashing hub.In 2009, his first non-fiction book, “Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis” was published by Green Books, and rapidly became a classic of the anti-civilization genre, particularly in the USA. His second book “Underminers: A Guide to Subverting The Machine” follows up on the work started by Time’s Up! in a more practical vein. It was published by New Society in 2013.He made the decision to become a storyteller, after about a decade in radical environmental activism. The move to fiction was inspired by the deep connections he's continually trying to create between people and the natural world in his daily life. A serial volunteer in his Scottish Borders village, he is also a bushcraft teacher who encourages young people to get out into the real world. Where he lives, and the people around him both inspire Keith's writing.

Book preview

Almost Gone

by Keith Farnish

Book text © 2016 Keith Farnish

Front cover image adapted from a photo by Neil Roger.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people without the author’s permission. If you would like to share this book with another person, please contact the author who may well say yes. If you want to read it in public then let the audience know who wrote the words, and maybe even tell them where to buy it 

CONTENTS

LEAVES

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

BRANCHES

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

HEARTWOOD

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

ROOTS

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

OTHERWORLD

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

HOMEFIRE

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

READING GROUP GUIDE

All stories have a beginning, but not all of them have an end.

I still can’t see the end of this one; perhaps it’s just not

mine to see. All I know is that this story begins with

a gap in the trees…

— LEAVES —

– 1 –

My face rests in the mud, my head still ringing from the thump it took as I tripped over a tree root and fell. It seemed to take so long to reach the ground, and all through my fall was that distant rumbling – not really a sound, more like a feeling that something is terribly wrong.

I open one eye and see a line of forest sloping upwards in all different shades of green and grey, as though it’s hanging from the side of a cliff. Right at the top is a small bright space where I am sure something was there before.

As the ringing in my head fades, tiny specks of light drift across the sky...and round, round, the trees now start to spin and hands pull at me as I am lifted up from lying in the mud into comfortable, friendly arms.

"Hey silly, what were you doing down there?"

A familiar voice dancing through the breeze, light and tuneful, then Merod is gently pushing me forwards as though I’m all better and still part of the running game, when all I really want to do is lie back down and look at that gap in the trees…

You were moaning in your sleep, Caeleb.

Mam and I have been checking the fire, something we normally take turns doing after first sleep, but she wants to talk so makes a play at walking to the wood store with me and sorting through the seasoned chunks we keep behind the lodge.

You’ve been doing that a lot recently. Were you dreaming?

I’m not sure. Sort of pictures...more sounds and smells, like that deep... I stop myself before mentioning the rumbling sound that woke me so suddenly; we don’t scare people unless we have to, ...soil smell after it rains on dry ground. It’s nothing.

But it’s not nothing. There were stars in the sky where they weren’t there before. I know the sky well, we all do. You learn to paint pictures with your baby fingers, both in the mud and in the air, especially in the winter when the dark comes quickly. The pictures become your friends, barely moving, like they are watching you grow, just like they watched your Mam and Dad grow, and theirs before them. When something changes, we notice.

Can you pass me some of those old cuts, the beech? Colder tonight.

I help her to put a few chunks of beech in the basket, then a bit of the lime from the softwood, to keep the midges away. Mam knows more than me about most things wood, like where we can go to harvest the trees after a storm; which communes need more greenwood; when it’s okay to cut rather than wait, that kind of thing. It’s good to be reminded that someone always knows a bit more than you.

She walks ahead, while I stand by the midden and take a pee that seems to go on forever, then I go back into the lodge and onto my platform, pushing up next to my younger brother Bragen to take some of his warmth. Mam prefers the hammock topped up with fresh hay, she says it feels like Dad’s still with her, being snuggled by the sides of the netting.

Bragen stirs, but then goes back to sleep again. He doesn’t wake for long between sleeps, being younger. I put my arm round him and he sighs. Mam is blinking, it is that quiet I can hear the wetness between her eyelids break.

I was sleeping when Dad died. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault. Someone did tell him not to take the back road in a storm, though when I heard I yelled that they didn’t tell him enough, and they should have helped him home. He’d been hard at the ferment, Mam said, and that was all. She never told us why. People don’t have too much of anything, unless something is very wrong.

The tribe wrapped us up, enclosed us, helped us grieve – ask, and you’ll find that everyone has lost someone, however distant, so we can all play a part. But when the loss is so deep, so close, then you really do need to float in others’ care for a while. Bragen screamed, a lot. He felt it raw, a limb severed. Mam was distracted pulling him through the worst, while others helped with the everyday things – cooking, gathering, cleaning, tending the fires. There’s always something to do.

I can’t really remember what I did. Just sat by the burn, I guess, listening to the churning water and watching flies move in the light. It all seemed joined up, like little threads were holding everything together: the water in the burn, the soil on which I sat, the flies reflecting the light on their wings, even the sun shining through the treetops. I’m not sure what I was looking for, maybe nothing, but if I was looking for something then it wasn’t there in the sunlight – not that day.

Huh?

Did you say something? asks Merod, who is taking me on some new way through the forest that she seems so good at doing.

No, nothing, just got a fly in my mouth.

It was a different sound – the deep rumbling still, but with a tiny crackling in the air, so small that if you were to ask someone, What was that? you would probably get the answer, What was what? You know how some creatures just ignore you, like you aren’t there at all? I reckon you’re just unimportant so they have no way of picking you out with all their strange senses. The sounds are like that. I feel them, maybe even hear them, but I have to really concentrate or they pass through my head and I forget.

We’ve been heading away from the village towards the place where the sun leaves the sky. I think all the tribes call it the same: sunset. If you walk in the other direction you will be going towards sunrise. If we get lost then we can use the sun, along with rivers and streams, the way the land rises and falls and all sorts of other things, to get back safely. Even though we’re taught these things so young that they are almost part of us, I have still somehow managed to get lost.

Eoran, where are we going?

Do you ever know where we’re going?

Not usually – that’s why I always take someone with me. Can you ask Merod?

Eoran catches up with Merod and says something I don’t quite hear, then they both burst out laughing; I feel a bit embarrassed when Eoran turns and beckons me to join them. As I get closer, I notice Eoran has a blob of black on his nose – they weren’t laughing about me at all. Merod is holding a small piece of burnt wood in her hand, which she has been using to draw on trees, and also Eoran’s face. She brings it towards me, probably to do the same, and I pull back. My insides feel hollow.

What’s wrong, Caeleb? she says.

Nothing…I thought it was something else.

The truth is, I don’t know what I thought it was, it just felt wrong. There’s something going on, but I can’t tell what. Dad would have known.

I’ve been told we’re not that different from the other people we know about. Every so often we get the chance to meet with one of the nearer tribes, and seem to get along fine, apart from the odd different word or custom – which herbs are best for sickness, the right times of the annua to seed the earth, that kind of thing. Familiarity keeps us connected, so when a family member or close friend settles with another tribe, the hurt isn’t too bad, usually.

Across the annuas we might meet again, tell stories and share songs, though not so much that we lose our tribal identities. But I like to think there’s no reason for me to ever leave – feet in the earth, head in the trees, arms around the place I have known since tumbling onto the forest floor covered in goo not really very long ago. Those few annuas make me a younger: older than a bairn but still not a man.

I really like Eoran. It’s a bit embarrassing because he really is a good friend, but you don’t get to choose who you’re attracted to, do you? No one’s going to punish you for being born different or not wanting to have childer, some people are just made like that. But you do have to make yourself useful in other ways, and I’m not so great doing the communal uncle thing either. Eoran says it just seems right for him, part of the family while others are away doing what they need to. But I have this odd tic that distracts me, so when a bairn walks towards the fire and forgets it is burning hot, my mind might be somewhere else.

Who would want to tell someone not to trust them?

Still, there’s plenty of other things that need doing, like looking after the shit-pits, which I manage to do pretty well, most of the time. We’ve always known if you do it right then people don’t get sick, but if you do it wrong then...well, last lune there was the storm, and it took a lot of us to stop the shitty water pouring down into Cold Burn, the one where the childer play. It could have been worse, but we prefer not to talk about the outbreak at Windash.

What I think I’m trying to say, if this doesn’t get lost in the generations of telling, is that we tread all sorts of fine branches as we walk our lives, but there are always people around to help us keep our balance.

Merod leaves today. It’s been a hard winter, but as the bright line of amber slips down the dark ridge, its glow lighting up the clouds above, the cold season suddenly feels distant.

We lost a few people, as sometimes happens. It seems callous, but we know that if the weakest pass away then the rest can usually get through bad winters fine. Mild winters use less food, less wood, and take fewer people. A winter that cuts deep tests the tribe; we have to work hard and for longer, and there is less time to care for each other even though we want to. On the coldest days we huddle in the big spaces. We eat, talk, sleep and share the warmth, but people still die.

Merod going away to live with another tribe, though, that’s different. Knowing she’ll be on the other side of the ridge, sharing the same luna, is a comfort I suppose. But when someone you’ve grown up with, shared everything with, goes away then it hurts. I’m being selfish, I think. It is right for both tribes: she is young, vital, healthy, and we heard they had a tougher winter than us. It is right, and she chose, no one else.

The celandine marks the path to the crossing point: a bank of yellow vibrancy at either side, to match hers. Our hands are in each other’s, bound tight as if to make up for the annuas we’ll not be together, my fingertips white. There’s no need for us to speak. Then the embraces, the gifts from the welcoming party, and the formalities are done with. I don’t want to watch her too hard as she walks on the raised way across the river, each stone that so perfectly keeps the leavers from being washed away gradually pushed aside to topple into the deeper pools beside the submerged shallows. It’s a symbol of separation more vivid than any other we have.

I look upwards and see the trees again. The gap is wider.

I managed to hold it in until Merod and the others were out of sight. Maybe she thought my dropping to the floor was just a joke, but it wasn’t – the cramps were sharp and as real as the loss I felt. Of course they blamed my throwing up on something other than what I saw in that brief moment.

He’s only young; it’s his first parting, they said.

He’s picked up a germ from the wastewater, was another one.

But it wasn’t any of those. When something changes, we notice, so why haven’t they noticed? Don’t they want to see?

It was a chasm. Where once the healthy pine trees climbed up the ridge there was nothing until the points where the smaller larches and birch mix and thin out. The forest probably had a name for Anwe’s sake! And now it is gone, killing the name along with the trees that made up part of our living landscape.

Loss upon loss. This isn’t how it was. This isn’t how it should be.

I’m sitting by Cold Burn again, making patterns with my feet in the mud, like the young boy I once was – like the young boy I want to be again, before Dad was killed by fear. Clarity punches a space in my head and in that space I see Merod beside a vast clearing and something unnameable.

A buzzard cries and pulls me out of my vision. I see it through the tops of the trees, pursued by a pair of corbies, fighting for the life of their stolen chick. I know it’s a futile gesture: if they catch the buzzard then the chick falls, if they don’t then the chick is a raw flesh meal. But they do it because they must.

Caeleb! Mam calls from above, and I scramble to my feet before noticing the shapes they have made in the mud.

Whatever comes out of this, it has to be better than not doing anything. The tree is old and stripped of bark making it easy enough to push over and span the fastest part of the big river. It moans