Forest Read online

  “Wait a minute, Leonard.” Mrs. Padgett held up her hand. “Just hold on one minute. Did you and Amber happen to have a…um…conversation about something recently?”

  “A conversation is hardly what I would call it.”

  “Leonard! For heaven’s sake. What did you say to her? When was this, last night?”

  “Nothing!” bellowed Mr. Padgett, throwing back the covers. He leapt out of bed. “I didn’t say anything. She was the one who was yelling. About guns and missiles, some TV program she’d seen. Why do they put that sort of stuff on the air? I told her not to get so excited. She’s just a child. How can she understand what’s happening out in the world? Our government has specialists who study these things. They know what they’re doing when they send our army in to—”

  The bathroom door slammed, cutting off his voice.

  Mrs. Padgett had also risen by this time. Wendell now occupied the bed by himself. The extreme wideness and emptiness of the sheets gave him a delicious feeling. It was a feeling of freedom and, at the same time, of perfect safety. He stretched his legs far down under the blankets and flung out his arms.

  “Look at me! Look at me!” he cried to his parents. Mrs. Padgett turned around to look. Mr. Padgett opened the bathroom door.

  “I’m in a giant swimming pool!” shrieked Wendell. “I’m floating around in this giant pool. I’m swimming, and now I’m…going…to…dive!”

  Wendell stood up and plunged headfirst under the covers, uprooting the blankets on every side. There came the unnerving sound of a sheet ripping.

  Mr. Padgett shot a furious glance at his wife. “Kids! There are times when I could just…” His hands seemed to grope for an invisible neck. “Yes, I do believe I really…could…just…”

  A sudden burst of rustling and chattering erupted from the trees beyond the bedroom window, and his voice trailed off.

  “What is that? Squirrels?” Mrs. Padgett asked brightly. She raised the shade to peer outside.

  Much as Mr. Padgett had sworn and declared that he did not care where his daughter had gone, or whether she ever came back, twenty minutes later he was standing on the sidewalk in front of his own house, looking anxiously up and down the street. Beside him stood Wendell, eating a piece of buttered toast.

  “You know you said more to her than that, Dad,” Wendell said with a full mouth.

  “I did not.”

  “You did too. Remember after you stopped yelling at her about the government—”

  “I was not yelling,” Mr. Padgett said.

  “Well, after that, anyway, remember how she started talking about that mass murder down in Texas?”

  “What mass murder?”

  “You know, when that man came in a restaurant with a machine gun and just started mowing people—”

  “Wendell! What kind of talk is that?”

  “And there were heads busting open and eyeballs popping out and blood pouring everywhere, and some fat old lady got shot in the—”

  “Wendell! Will you be quiet!”

  “It wasn’t where you think, Dad,” Wendell said in a hurt voice. “It was just in the—”

  “Wendell! What is wrong with you? The whole neighborhood can probably hear.”

  Mr. Padgett looked around in alarm. Luckily, there was no one nearby, just another bunch of squirrels chasing each other in the trees overhead. He lowered his voice. “And anyway, you shouldn’t be listening to stuff like that.”

  “Right,” said Wendell, taking another bite of toast. “That’s exactly what you told Amber. Eggs-zackly. And then you smacked her.”

  “I did not.”

  “Yes you did.”

  “Well, she wouldn’t listen!” his father cried. “What else could I do? Amber won’t listen to anyone anymore. All she does is watch a lot of hogwash on TV that gives her a crazy view of the world. It’s given you a crazy view, too. People don’t normally go around shooting each other, you know. Not educated people. Not civilized people, like us. For instance—”

  “Amber says there’s no such thing as civilized people,” Wendell cut in. “She says—”

  “Will you stop interrupting?” Mr. Padgett interrupted. He put his hands on his hips and glared at his son. “As I was saying: for instance, here in Forest there’s never been one shoot-out. There hasn’t been a single murder, and no bomb has fallen or ever will. This is a safe town. What I was telling Amber was, she doesn’t need to worry. The only way someone could get shot here is if some maniac came in from outside. And the chances of that happening are about a zillion to one…. Come on,” he said, after another look up the street. “Let’s start walking around and see if anybody noticed her leaving this morning.”

  “They didn’t,” Wendell said, trailing his father warily down the sidewalk. “No one sees Amber when she doesn’t want them to. She’s smart. She knows how to get around. She’s got ways of seeing and knowing that you wouldn’t believe. Someday she’s going to be president of the United States. She even told me.”

  Mr. Padgett wheezed. “That’s just the kind of thing Amber would say. Give her an inch and she’ll take a mile…. What on earth is going on with the squirrels around here?” he added as another terrific rattling of branches sounded overhead. “Whenever I look up, there’s a big rat pack of them running through the trees. Maybe it’s time to get out the old shotgun and cut back the number a bit. How about it, Wendell? Have you ever been squirrel hunting?”

  UPPER FOREST

  SCREECHES, JEERS, AND CACKLES echoed along Forest’s limb avenues. A flock of wood sparrows perching nearby in a hickory tree flushed upward. Woodbine’s ears flattened against his head. With a last glance at the invader, whose attention had turned once again to the ground, he scampered away.

  The guard troop was returning, running with such eagerness that the branches rattled under their feet. Clearly, the Elders had completed their troop selection. As the first guards streaked by, Woodbine crouched in the rotted hollow of a trunk, wishing he might somehow warn her, that curious, snub-faced creature, not to be frightened. This ragtag band would never dare to touch her.

  “You’ll be all right! Keep a tight grip and climb down slowly,” he would have advised her, if only she could have understood. “We mink-tails are a bunch of soft apples at heart. We’d never do anything to really hurt anyone.”

  He caught a glimpse of Brown Nut and Laurel springing past with the others. Whether they had been chosen as official guards, he couldn’t tell. They disappeared up through leaves in the direction of the invader.

  The teasing soon began, so loud and shrill that Woodbine fled. He did not want to watch. He took himself away to a pleasant grove of maples that grew around the eastern edge of Forest’s only pond. There, with a few wary flicks of his tail, he descended into the prickly heart of a blackberry bush for a meal.

  Afterward, still feeling queasy from the morning’s excitement, he curled up in the crook of a tree root and fell asleep. He didn’t wake until midafternoon, when a twig snapped close by.

  He was up the nearest maple in a second, circling the trunk expertly to confuse the enemy. Reaching the first limb, he turned about and looked down. Directly below him, a large golden-haired canine passed within inches of the blackberry bush. It paused to sniff and lift a leg, then loped on. Woodbine watched, frozen against the branch.

  He had barely recovered from this shock when he spotted a second dog. It was one of the fierce black retriever hounds that were a constant threat to fallen or disabled mink-tails. Across the field, it snuffed along a hedge of overgrown vines.

  A third dog appeared from behind the hedge. And then in the distance, baying self-importantly, a fourth galloped out. This was unusual. For the first time, Woodbine realized that something was amiss in the hazy world beneath him. With extreme caution, he climbed higher up, keeping the tree’s trunk between himself and the dogs. It was unlikely that they would spot him, canine eyes being notoriously dim, but he was not one to take risks.

  He
had no sooner settled into his new perch than an even more extraordinary sight appeared. A group of aliens came into view, walking slowly across the field near the pond’s western bank. To the south, he saw other aliens striding along the edge of the woods. And others, in other unusual places: climbing over stone walls, pushing through brush. Shouts, whistles, and yelps sounded from all directions in the hot, still late-summer air. Woodbine crouched, rigid as bark, against the bark of the maple.

  The Lower Region was hunting for something. The ground was being examined, the bushes probed. As the sun began to set, and evening’s purple tide of shadows rose slowly up the trees, the noise of the hunt seemed to increase, and the cries and tramping below grew more frantic. Only when the light began seriously to fail did the aliens stop their search. They huddled in the middle of a field, bubbled and muttered for a while, and left the place together. A final flurry of whoops and cries echoed back before the air around the pond grew silent again. Then slowly, uneasily, the fields and surrounding woods relaxed, and the usual evening cycles took hold once more.

  Woodbine sat up on his branch and looked about. He was still shaking a bit. The dogs in particular had unnerved him. He was not altogether sure they wouldn’t spring out again, though he knew them to be adoring slaves of the aliens. And the aliens were not looking for him. They had not even known he was there. They were searching for the invader, of course. Woodbine had guessed it in the first moments.

  She must, he supposed, still be hanging on up in the white oak—hiding out, it seemed now. Everyone for miles around had heard the hunters’ wails. She must have heard them, too. But why was she hiding? Woodbine could not see into her strange alien mind. Perhaps she had not invaded their trees so much as fled from her own flat world? In which case, she should be treated as a guest, not teased and hounded like an intruder. But was this true? Woodbine was unsure. He did not like to question the Elders, who were nearly always right in matters of this sort.

  Darkness had now fallen over the field. With a series of leaps, Woodbine struck out for home. At times, feeling night at his heels, he made use of a telephone wire that stretched across an open place, or an alien’s roof when it offered a shortcut. But mostly he kept to trees whose paths he knew and trusted. For some strange thing was brewing in Forest. He felt it rising in waves from the ground, reaching up through the trees. Some balance had been upset. A queer smell rode the wind. Whether this had to do with the invader, or the aliens at the pond, or an event yet to be, Woodbine did not like it. Something was coming. No, it wasn’t good.

  He was just passing through a beech tree, heading toward the hollow tulip tree that was home nest to his family, when a flash of white underbelly caught his eye.

  “Woodbine! Wait.” His sister leapt through the leafy dark and skittered up beside him.

  “Where have you been all day?” she chucked furiously. “Do you know what’s happened? The Elders are in a rage.”

  “I’ve been out by the pond,” he replied. “Something has gone wrong in the Lower Region. The hairless ones are tramping about in groups. Their canines are stalking unleashed through the fields.”

  “That’s just it! They are looking for the invader. She’s still here!” Brown Nut cried. “Up the big white oak. Nothing we did could make her move an inch.”

  “I thought so!”

  “We screamed ourselves hoarse and even threw seeds. Laurel and I were both chosen as guards…on the morning shift, no less. The alien would not leave. In feet, she hardly seemed bothered. In the middle of everything, she started to eat.”

  “To eat!” Woodbine gazed at his sister. Elating was something a mink-tail did only in strictest privacy and safety. No mink-tail would dare to eat during an assault of the sort the alien had gone through that day. It was unthinkable.

  “She has come supplied with food. And water,” Brown Nut informed him darkly. “They’re stowed in a pouch on her back. Many believe it is a sign of her bad intentions. A rumor is about that she has come to drive us away, or, at the least, to take over the town.”

  “But why?” cried Woodbine, now even more appalled. “She can’t even climb. Why would she want to live here?”

  “No one knows, and that is part of the problem,” Brown Nut replied. “No one understands why she should have come to begin with. And no one understands why she refuses to leave. No one knows what is in her mind, or what her plan may be. This leads to guessing, and guessing leads to imagining, and imagining leads to fear. Meanwhile, the Elders hold endless councils and mutter into their tails.”

  “Listen. This invader is nothing to be afraid of,” Woodbine said. “I went up quite close to her. There was only friendship in her eyes, which were powerful but very open. She is more in danger of us than we of her, I should say. It’s amazing she hasn’t fallen already with all your hounding.”

  “Try telling that to the Elders. They have charged her with official trespassing, now, and ruled her highly dangerous to the town.”

  “Highly dangerous! But that’s ridiculous. What has gotten into the Elders?”

  “Whatever it is, the invader will spend the night here, I suppose,” Brown Nut said. “Under heavy guard. Then the problem will be taken up again in the morning. Meanwhile, I’m heading home. It’s way past time for us to be inside. Look, here’s the moon.”

  It had been rising slowly all during their conversation. Now, suddenly, the moon sprang into view, pouring a shimmering light upon the leaves and boughs around them.

  “How beautiful. Beautiful!” Woodbine cried in spite of himself. “It’s as big as a pond tonight. No—as big as a…” He paused to think. “As big as an ocean!”

  Brown Nut sighed. “As if you knew how big an ocean was. As if you’ve ever set eyes on one.”

  “Well, I can imagine,” Woodbine said. “The old stories have spoken of such a thing. It is quite clear in my head. And who knows, we may see an ocean one day. Who says we have to spend all our lives in this place?”

  “And that, dear brother, is the whole problem with you,” Brown Nut replied severely. “Who among us has time to think about distant places, much less travel to them? A little less imagining and a lot more foraging will serve us all better in the long run. The home nest, for instance, is in desperate need of repair before winter, not to mention the seed storehouse, which is still quite low, and…”

  Woodbine was not listening. His eyes had taken on the fogged-in look that so infuriated his sister. His body sagged dangerously off the branch. No doubt he was on a beach at that very moment, gazing out at some mysterious sea.

  “You’re impossible. Impossible!” Brown Nut snapped at him. “You take no responsibility, at all. If Mother asks where you are, I shall say you’ve been eaten by a cat! It’s bound to come true before very much longer.” She turned and headed for home.

  The mention of cats brought Woodbine back to himself rather quickly. For several minutes he glanced around with nervous eyes. But then, as there seemed to be nothing moving anywhere, and as the moon was shining so brightly, he thought he might risk staying out a bit later and go to take another look at the invader. She would be under surveillance, of course. The night shift would be in charge. He made his way warily toward the white oak, avoiding guards. Most of them were dozing at their posts.

  The invader was not asleep. Her enormous eyes glistened in the moonlight. Her fingers were busy moving here and there. She rustled about on her high branch, taking things from a pouch, putting other things back. At one point she grasped an odd, long-necked instrument and proceeded to rap it loudly on the tree. The guard minks sprang up at this, but shortly, as no danger seemed to come from it, they settled themselves again. The rapping continued at intervals.

  Some time passed before Woodbine, hidden behind leaves several yards away, began to see what the invader was doing. Why he should have been so surprised he didn’t know. It was exactly what he would have done under the circumstances. It was what any of them in Forest would do—mink-tails, crows, raccoons,
possibly even cats (those slinking muggers)—after finding themselves alone, in a strange place at night, surrounded by unfriendly natives.

  “She is building a nest!” Woodbine whispered to the nearest guard. But since this individual was sound asleep, whiskers fluttering, he went on whispering in excitement to himself.

  “How absolutely amazing and incredible! A nest!”

  LOWER FOREST

  MR. PADGETT WAS WORRIED about his daughter. Up the room he strode with hard, angry steps. Back he came, red-faced and bug-eyed.

  “She’s been kidnapped!” he roared. “That’s what it is. She’s been kidnapped by some shiftless, cowardly criminal. From the big city, most likely. That’s where they come from. How he found Forest, I don’t know.”

  “Probably looked it up on the state map!” someone yelled from the rear of the crowd. They had all—search party, dogs, children, and mothers—come back to the firehouse after nightfall put an end to the search. Now homemade sandwiches were being handed around. Warren Wilbur from the food store had brought over several cases of soda, along with a pack of napkins.

  “Real nice of you, Warren,” Tex Teckstar, the fire chief, told him.

  “My pleasure,” said Warren. “It’s an emergency.”

  “I’d like to make a motion to remove Forest from the state map!” Mr. Padgett shouted. “I’d like to make a motion to remove it from all maps. If they don’t know we’re here, the criminals won’t come out. They’ll skip over us and go on to someplace else.”

  “Hear, hear!” cried some voices in the crowd.