Chapter 12 The Cost of Our Principles
Dancer walked down the gravel lane pulling a red wagon with an enormous peace lily in the bed. She intercepted Valentina and Green just as they were turning off the lane to hike to Wildwood Stable.
“Evening. What summons you two into the woodland dusk? I do believe the sky is getting a running start at a postcard sunset.”
“Business,” Valentina said. “But I will not fail to notice the sunset. What brings you out our way?”
“Just taking Archimedes here for a walk.”
Dancer grinned at the lily in her wagon.
“She’s about to be shut inside all winter and I don’t know how many fair evenings we have left.”
“Oh, hang on,” Green said.
He dipped into his pack and brought out Dancer’s cup.
“Here you go.”
She took it and touched it to her forehead in a salute.
“You’re a gentleman and a scholar.”
She leaned in confidentially.
“And you know full well I will be burdening you with this selfsame errand again soon, bud.”
“I hope you do,” Green said.
“I expect you guys have heard the latest bad news. Fella down in Hickory?”
“Yes,” Valentina said. “I’m afraid so.”
“Is it…you know…is it something from over on your side of the street, Val?”
“It is. That’s what brings us out tonight.”
Dancer shook her head and chewed the inside of her cheek.
“Is there something that I can be doing here? I mean, we’ve stepped past strange into deadly. Can’t just ignore deadly. This isn’t just oddball tracks in the mud or that Hole in Nothing.”
“You know about that too?” Green said.
“Everybody knows about that, Green. Hard to miss news of a thing like that.”
He threw up his arms in exasperation, giving up the idea of ever fully understanding his new reality.
“If you can, put on extra lights,” Valentina said. “Consider playing music outside. We think the danger prefers dark and quiet.”
The kids at Kinkaid would have had sound and light.
“What exactly am I trying to frighten off here, Val?”
“A pale, glowing deer, but I doubt you would see it.”
Green looked away.
He wanted to argue but didn’t. Yes, the deer seemed to be a threat, but he couldn’t shake the idea that the wolf was still somehow the greater danger.
“Alright. Well, Archimedes and I will visit the other campers and spread the news. Get loud and bright. Not exactly rocket surgery. We can manage that.”
“Other campers?” Green asked.
“Yeah, there’s four others here besides you two. Carrie and Jen down by Snaggletooth Rock. Travis and his sugar shack in the maple wood and Ol’ Animal up in Stumptown.”
Green looked at Valentina.
“Maybe we should keep watch here. I didn’t know there were so many others at Candle-Fly.”
Valentina shook her head.
“No, as I said, I have other protective measures here, though the events at your campsite have made me question their current efficacy. Still, I believe Wildwood Stable is the most vulnerable.”
Dancer caught Green’s eye and smiled.
“I don’t even think she’s being like that on purpose.
She just drops mystery grenades into the conversation on pure reflex.
Wildwood Stable, huh? Yeah, I guess they’re pretty isolated.
Alright. I better be off now if I wanna visit everybody before dark and get Archimedes to bed on time. Safe travels, neighbors.”
Valentina and Green walked into the trees to the crunch and squeak of Dancer turning her wagon and heading back down Moss Man’s Row.
Valentina walked faster than usual, forcing Green to exert continuous effort to keep up.
The speed of travel and the earnestness of the errand stretched the minutes. There was a kind of pressure in the woods. Green considered asking his teacher about it, but couldn’t find the words he needed. It was slippery, a sensation he couldn’t articulate.
Wildwood Stable was a sloped, grassy rectangle carved from dense pinewoods on a winding mountain road.
A weather-beaten, T-shaped barn stood in a broad field.
The barn shadowed a practice ring in front and a chain of linked paddocks out back.
A little white house was tucked off on the eastern edge beneath the skirts of pine boughs.
The property was a conspicuous lake of evergreen among a valley packed with autumn-brown oaks and sugar maples.
Valentina and Green arrived under a western sky the muddy red of drying blood.
“You haven’t said much about it,” Green said.
The pair stopped in the deep gloom on the edge of the wood and looked out over Wildwood, then made their way toward the hillside.
“About what, Mr. Green?”
“The acorn. My story. The giant bird. Any of it.”
“I suppose I am still mulling it over. You have added yet more unknowns to the landscape. Between the wolf, the fawn, and your own peculiarities, you are entering the field of cryptonature in a singularly unusual way. It requires consideration. It’s hard to say if you are profoundly fortunate or profoundly unfortunate.
There are so many unanswered questions.”
He glanced at his teacher, feeling a shapeless suspicion that there must be more she could say. She was a small, gray-haired woman walking through the dusk. She was also a collection of multiple lifetimes studying the most obscure knowledge imaginable.
They walked around the practice ring, keeping to the far side from the house. Green ran his hand along the rough split rail fence, looking at the hoof-pocked earth. Beyond, he could see a lamp shining in a window. Two red pickups sat in the gravel drive next to a little city of horse trailers.
They moved past the paddocks and up the slope. Night was gathered under the trees. It seemed to wait for some signal to rush into the fields beneath the open sky.
“I will have to broadcast an update about the nature of your encounters,” Valentina said. “We can’t, for example, allow our colleagues to assume it is safe to observe rag moth decay, not until we know more about your unique circumstances.”
“Maybe be a little vague about my situation in the broadcast, okay? At least until I understand more about what happened to me.”
“Why? What is the root of this caution? I can see no reason to keep your condition a secret.”
He winced. Thinking of his condition still brought a jolt of fear and pain. The subject, like the memory, had teeth. He wished he had smuggled Blobert along in a backpack.
He spoke through clenched teeth.
“There’s just so much I don’t know about myself. I mean, for example, am I, like, immortal now?”
“No.”
“Wow. You answered that awfully quickly. Is the question that weird? I survived the moth and the wolf or fawn or whatever. And you certainly seem to be immortal.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I most certainly am not.
We have never, in the whole of human history, discovered a single permanent, unchanging life-form in nature.
Never. That long-standing truth will not end with you or me.
And believe me, I have aged considerably, just not at the typical rate.
And you, maybe your mortality is somehow tied to that acorn, or to the bird you saw, but acorns and cryptids are likewise not built for forever. ”
“Okay. That feels right.”
“What feels right, Mr. Green?”
“That my mortality is tied up with the acorn somehow. I don’t know. It feels so important. I can’t stop thinking about it. Maybe this little nut really is a matter of life and death.”
“And why do you think that is?”
“It came to me when my…accident was undone. And I feel like I have to keep it safe.”
“Nonsense. If you truly cared about safety, you would have stayed in your old life. You certainly would not have agreed to work with me.”
“I guess that’s true, but seriously, what happens if I lose the acorn and suddenly there are bus tires racing to smash my face? That could happen, right? There’s no way to rule it out.”
“No, I do not think that particular fear is merited. That is almost never how time works. The past quickly accretes weight and rigidity. It may start as soft and pliable, a trait the editor of your death likely exploited, but it is like coral. We living organisms scurry about building it, then it becomes as hard as stone.”
Walking in pinewoods was different. Without the dry rustle of fallen leaves, their footfalls were a soft hushing sound as they trod the pine straw.
“Okay, so if the acorn is lost or destroyed, it may just mean my regular death.”
Valentina tilted her head.
“Perhaps.”
“So, what should I do? To keep it safe, I mean. I’ve thought about burying it in concrete or vacuum sealing it in a safety-deposit box somewhere. It can’t just stay in my pocket. It takes too much of my attention. It’s always tugging at me.”
Valentina glowered at Green.
“What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“The answer is obvious to me.”
“Which is?”
“In my mind, there is one highest and best use of an acorn. One thing that definitively sets it apart from other objects.”
She gave Green an expectant look.
Green returned a blank stare.
“Plant it,” she said.
He had a flash of abandoning the acorn under a little mound of soil and walking away. The idea drew his hand to his pocket in a defensive flinch.
“But that’s basically the same as throwing it away. I can’t predict what that would do.”
“It would bring new life into the world. It would become a tree, a fountain of leaves, and a home for countless species. A source of food and shelter. Perhaps the mother of countless more generations of trees. There is no question about the best attribute of an acorn. It may become an oak. What could be better than that? What can boast the same?”
Green was silent for a moment.
“Or it could become a snack for a squirrel.”
“There are ways to protect a seed from such mishaps.”
“What happens when the oak dies?”
Valentina sniffed.
“My apprentice, I am uniquely qualified to say that no one has any business outliving an oak tree.”
“I’ll have to think about it.”