The light had already begun to slant by the time he came down the wooded path. It glimmered in that particular flat gold of October that warms nothing and reveals everything. The air had turned dry sometime in the last week, dry enough that the leaves underfoot didn’t so much rustle as crack. He flicked his bushy tail once, then moved quickly through the sound of it, ears twitching at each snap without ever quite stopping to ask what made it.
He had somewhere to be. He had had somewhere to be all afternoon, in fact. He was a creature with a great deal of provision still to lay in before the cold closed the ground, and not quite enough daylight left to lay it in properly. His tail rode high, businesslike, with the flourish of an animal mustering the energy to get the work done with no time to spare.
The first tree held apples.
They hung plentifully and red, catching the low sun so that they seemed almost to glow from within. The breeze moved through them just enough to turn each one a slow fraction of an inch, showing its shiny, bright skin. He slowed. Not stopped, only slowed, the particular hitch of a stride reconsidering itself mid-step. For perhaps three seconds, not longer, his whole northward momentum tipped a few degrees toward something sweeter and far less earned than the work waiting farther on. Then he shook it off, all along the spine at once, and kept scurrying. The apples went on shimmering behind him, patient, unoffended, exactly as bright as they had been.
The canopy rippled with the first pale golden threads of autumn. A large, dull-yellow leaf came loose from the second tree and drifted slowly to the ground. He watched it settle on the forest floor. Suddenly, something large began to bark. It was not close. He couldn’t have said how far exactly, only that the sound of it landed low in his chest before his mind caught up to it. His whole body went sideways off the path before he decided to move at all. He came back to himself three lengths off course, breathing harder than the distance warranted, one paw lifted and trembling faintly. There was no dog to be seen. There rarely is at that distance. But something in his chest had gone tight and did not fully loosen again, even after the barking had trailed off into whatever had produced it.
He reached the third tree, his breathing shallow, already carrying more than he’d set out with.
The Crow was on the low branch, as he generally was, in the unhurried posture of something that has never once in its life seen the need to flee from anything. He ruffled his feathers as though to ensure attention.
“You’re later than usual,” the Crow observed, in the mild tone of someone remarking on the weather. “The western roots have gone slick already. Someone’s been digging near the base. I’d say it was within the day. The third root resembles a question mark. Oh, and the acorns you’re after, up past the fork: I noticed this morning at least one has a soft patch. Might be hollow at the center. Wouldn’t want you climbing all that way for nothing.”
None of it was untrue. That was the trouble with the Crow. He never once said a thing that wasn’t, strictly, defensible. Each observation arrived reasonable enough on its own. Objecting to any single one would have made the Squirrel look unreasonable. By the fourth or fifth, the Squirrel had stopped at the base of the tree without deciding to stop, one paw against the bark, not climbing.
“There was a fox through here Tuesday,” the Crow added, almost as an afterthought, “though I don’t suppose that signifies much for you specifically.”
The Squirrel stood a moment longer, breath still short from the second tree, the sweetness of the first tree not entirely gone from wherever such things go. Then he said, “Thank you, Crow,” in a tone that was not quite gratitude and not quite dismissal, but something closer to a door being gently and finally closed. He leapt forward and started up the trunk.
The Crow kept talking and hopped closer to the edge of the branch. He commented on the changing wind, on rain somewhere in the valley, on how the bark higher up looked recently disturbed. But the Squirrel’s back was already climbing away from him, and none of it altered anything. The deciding had already happened in the saying of thank you. His voice had only added its small weight to a day that had already asked for a great deal.
The climbing cost him. The bark was drier than it should have been for the season, crumbling under his claws where he expected purchase. Twice he had to stop and resettle his grip rather than fall. A web caught him full across the face going around the fork, and he scrubbed at it hard with one forepaw, grimacing, spitting, not stopping. He came up gray with the dust of the bark and something sticky along one flank he did not have time to attend to. As he approached where the acorn cluster waited, hanging far out from the branch, he was breathing like something that had run a much longer way than up a single tree.
He took the cluster. One shell yielded slightly beneath his thumb, exactly where the Crow had seen the soft patch. He opened it. Inside, the kernel was pale, firm, and sound. He examined the other, turning each once and then twice in his forepaws. Not one was hollow at its center.
Then he began his way back down, unhurried now in the particular way of a creature whose work for the day, whatever it had required, was actually finished.
The Crow did not say anything further.
He had gone very still on his low branch, feathers settled close instead of the restless flouncing he’d kept up the whole conversation. His eyes tracked the Squirrel’s descent without a single word offered to accompany it. For a bird who had not stopped commenting since the Squirrel first came into view, it was a remarkably long silence.
Beyond the tree, in the last full beam of sun, where the light fell slant and low enough to turn the dust motes visible, something dark with pale, unblinking eyes had been sitting the whole while. As the Squirrel passed beneath, small and gray and undeniably a little worse for the afternoon, she said, not loudly:
“The forest says many things. It does not require us to obey them all.”
— from the Spiral Vault™