Forest in the Wind

By Mitch Jayne

Forest in the Wind is Mitch Jayne's classic story of life in the wilderness as told by the wild creatures that live there.
The fox, whose family inhabited these hills and hollows since time out of mind, is comfortable with his upper-class stratum of wild things; he has no natural enemies, unless it is the odd bare-faced new creature who walks always on two legs.

Mitch Jayne is recipient of the Independent Publisher's 2008 Gold Medal Award for Best Mid-West Fiction and the 2008 Missouri Governor's Humanities Book Award for his novel "Fiddler's Ghost", also selected as one of the Best Books of 2007 by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Jayne is the former spokesperson, musician, songwriter and founding member of the bluegrass group the Dillards, aka "The Darling Boys" on the Andy Griffith Show.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Mar 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781882467518

Book preview

Afterword

IN THE SLATE-COLORED SAMENESS of early dawn, the forest began to come to life audibly. Birds stirred on their roosts, while they questioned each other with peeps of sound that were scattered and tentative. A nuthatch shook the sleepiness from its ruffled feathers and preened thoroughly, cheeping now and then to let the others know it was awake. A roosting circle of quail, tails pointed toward an invisible axis, began to fidget and shove, and finally one bird broke the circle and emerged from beneath the windfall that had sheltered them. He uttered a little chirping note and another followed, and soon the birds scattered to feed in the dim light, leaving a circular pile of droppings beneath the leaning trunk.

Far down the length of the long hollow an owl called a low, powerful note that carried for a mile in the still air. Another one answered from a distance.

The light steadily pressed into the surface of things, but as yet, it was a false light, exaggerating and distorting the pattern of the woods, combining shadow with shape, and fantasy with reality.

A fox trotted homeward along a ridge, carrying a rabbit that swung limply from his jaws. To him the dawn was an ending rather than a beginning, and he was tired and hungry with the meat hungriness that never ended for him. The rabbit was for his mate, who waited in the den at the mouth of the hollow, and a responsibility that transcended his ever-present hunger kept him from eating it himself. The fox was old, his face held the sharp wisdom of his kind, mixed with a humor only an old fox could afford. His eyes were all pupil in the dim light, and he saw everything he wanted to see. The rest he left to his ears, which were pointed and alert and very handsome.

Despite the rabbit under his nose, he scented the quail roost and turned to examine it carefully. It smelled tempting, with a freshness that demanded investigation, but the fox knew the impatience of his mate. He made a mental note to revisit the place later, and shifting the rabbit slightly in his jaws, he continued his way down the ridge.

The light changed fractionally, trees and rocks became dimensional under its magic. All through the woods there was the steady, muted murmur of the birds waking. A chipmunk peered from a knothole in a fallen rusty tree trunk, and he yawned prodigiously. He braced his front paws and peered in every direction with his bright little eyes, muttering squeaks of information to his family, and with the explosive suddenness that lived in his tiny body, he popped out of the hole and crouched suspiciously on the bark siding of his dwelling. Bright with spots and striping, motionless except for the snapping tail that exposed his nervous questioning of all he saw, the chipmunk looked over his small domain. A blue jay lit, bouncing, on a branch nearby. Soundlessly and with perfect balance he watched the chipmunk curiously, his head tilted on one side, the black stripe behind his eye giving him a rakish wise look. In his excitement, jumping around on the log, the chipmunk chittered an endless stream of invective at the bird, until he nearly lost his balance.

The blue jay watched the little animal with catlike humor, pretending to be looking for seeds beneath the branch. Suddenly it flew over the log, and the chipmunk tumbled sputtering into his hole. The discordant notes of the blue jay’s laugh rang out as it flew away.

Now there was real light, enough to reflect in the dew that spangled the green umbrellas of the Mayapples, and to shine from the green skin of a measuring worm that inched its way up the shaft of a young white oak.

A turkey gobbled up on the ridge. It was an angry, petulant sound, commanding and unafraid, and the woods echoed to it. In the top of a tall black oak the turkey watched the progress of the sun and kept his feathers slick against the dawn breeze from the south. He gobbled several times, informing his hens that they might leave the roost, and with a mighty flup-flup of wings, descended from his perch to the forest floor.

The crows began to call, and soon a pair of them flew off the roost and winged over the woods, looking for breakfast or entertainment, whichever should appear first.

A woodpecker hammered industriously for his breakfast on a dead sycamore tree, and when he found nothing, swooped to another with a nicely timed opening of his pointed wings.

A young white-tailed buck left the new grass of the hollow to make his way to the ridge. He was very clean, with a snow-white belly and shiny, immaculate feet. His small antlers were coated with a soft covering like new moss. He moved carefully, tilting his head to miss branches, placing each foot in the exact spot where it would make the least noise. He was not nervous, because this was spring. There was plenty to eat after the long winter of scarcity and barren cold, and the young buck was fat and contented. He found a spot on the ridge that suited him, and he lay down among some young sumac bushes, his head to the south where he could sniff the wind coming up the hollow. The rising sun shone on his coat, taking away the chill of dawn, while a swarm of newly born gnats hummed sleepily about his head.

Far down the smoky distance of the hollow a hawk rose in breathless spirals, ascending into the sunlight like an autumn leaf on the wind, and now from everywhere came the endless music of the birds. The sun was up in earnest and trees stretched their gaunt limbs toward it, letting it draw the sap of life into them again, from where it had wintered in the subterranean labyrinth of their roots.

The sun was vibrant, it soaked into everything, searching and probing for the life it inspired. A rattlesnake crawled from a hole in the rocks, moving very slowly, because in its sullen, half-jelled body there was the cold of months under the earth. It sprawled over a flat rock in the sunlight and soaked in the warmth, sleeping with open lidless eyes that sparkled like small amber gems. Another joined it, its movement like a fluid rearrangement of the lichen’s pattern; soon the rock was strewn with looping, motionless creatures secure in the silent warning of their armor.

In a mud-chinked log cabin erected in a clearing where two main hollows came together and the glittering spring branch lay in pools of shade, the human awoke. A wood thrush sang its haunting notes in the still glade beyond the spring and the sound was almost something one could see, a bright liquid, spilled drop by drop from a shiny gourd dipper.

In front of the cabin’s stone fireplace, which still held a smoldering stump of log, the dog began to slap his tail against the dirt floor, knowing without lifting his head that his masters were awakening. After a moment he got up and stretched, his long hound ears nearly dragging, and he walked over to lay his chin on the edge of the laced hide that formed the bedframe. He stood there, with gently swinging tail, until the man’s hand moved to touch his head and to scratch satisfyingly at the base of his ears.

Outside, the rooster was crowing and the Jersey cow began to moo for her calf. The hound pup in the yard sneezed at the dew.

Beyond the fence, the horses nickered their pleasure in the cool morning and the mare bucked, jumped a few yards, tossing her head like a colt. A wren was fussing about a loose chink in the daubing between the logs of the cabin, while her mate darted about with bits of broom grass looped in his bill. After a while she perched on the rooftree and sang everything she knew as fast as the notes would come, satisfied with the world and the morning.

Across the hollow the squirrels were barking, and occasionally two of them would race around a hollow den tree with a great rattling of claws on bark. Blue jays went arrowing through the treetops, teasing, quarreling with the squirrels, each other, or with anything that was willing to argue. Their strident, querulous voices rang everywhere.

It was the start of a new day, but more than that, it was a new beginning, the start of a new year. Everything that had life felt this and basked in the marvel of the warmth that filled the woods. The long winter was over at last, and nothing that lived could doubt it. The miseries, the tragedies, the hardships of the winter were over, too, and things that could never be remedied could at last be forgotten in the excitement of a new spring and the start of a new season.

From the depths of a pile of last year’s leaves a terrapin crawled his laborious way into a patch of sunlight. Cold with the chill of months under the earth, his ancient carapace clammy with rotting leaves, he squatted silent in the warmth, blinking his fierce old eyes at the wonder of the sun. He was old—old as the trees that towered around him, old as the powdering log beneath which he had slept. For a million years his forbears had seen the cycle of the seasons and followed them, sleeping in the wintertime and emerging in the spring to live for another year on the leavings of the forest. In order for things to live, some must die, and the terrapin, slow, awkward, and immune to everything but time, would follow death about, making a final use of what it might leave him. A thousand breathing things would die in the coming days, and when the opossum and the buzzard were through, it would be the terrapin’s turn. It had always been this way.

Slowly, conscious of the new warmth that was soaking through his old bones, the terrapin closed his eyes and basked in the spring sun.

A HEAVY DEW HAD settled during the night, and the woods were soaked in the moisture of spring. Every leaf, among the derelicts of the preceding summer that still had skin on its withered frame, held a tiny pool of water, and the woods’ floor was a mosaic of these little pools, reflecting the calm sky of April.

Hollow stumps, acorn shells, everything in the woods that had a concave surface held its measure of water, as if these things expected drought and stored against the future.

During the night the lichen had taken on color, and the great dark boles of the trees were patched with the bright chartreuse