The Forester and the Child

A man of the woods, the baby he's rescued, and a perilous race to safety on the mountain's far side.

Photo by Byron Johnson on Unsplash

First the forester heard the noise, then he smelled blood.

Past the slumbering sycamores and over the boulders the middle-aged wanderer slipped. Mid-spring, scant foliage this early. Stars above cast the shape of every branch, twig, and budding leaf upon the carpet of rotting leaves that muffled the forester’s steps. His coat sat over his shoulders tied by the sleeves like a cloak. A green wool scarf covered the bottom half of his face like an outlaw. His right hand held his bow and he nocked an arrow as he ran.

A half-mile down the slope he met the dirt road running through the pass.

There lay the ambush victims.

From the edge of the woods’ umbrage the forester waited and watched. A cold wind blew. The canopy swayed then stopped, its shadows returning to stillness.

Horses and men, the whole entourage slain. The dead lay unlooted. Several had bullet wounds. Not the work of highwaymen.

In the midst of the carnage stood a coach, the driver reared back in his seat in a frozen rictus. The coach door ripped open, the cabin inside pitch dark.

The forester approached, bow in hand.

A gentlewoman sat dead within, but a dark bloodtrail led out and into the woods.

Someone had survived.

The noise began again.

The forester followed the path into the undergrowth. The canopy scattered the light so he went by the broken foliage and came at last to a small clearing.

She lay in its center in a bed of tallgrass and yarrow. The starlight whispered upon her fine dress and her hair gathered in a net. A sheen of sweat made her cheeks and forehead shine. Her dark blood had gone everywhere: the grass, her dress, her marble-white skin. Her eyes were not quite shut, but looked down softly and eternally at the bundle embraced against her bosom. Her lips were parted as though to whisper one final sweetness.

The bundle was crying. Tiny fists flailed in the cold air. Toothless mouth open, tongue quivering with each frightful wail.

The forester looked down at the pair, then back at the wreck, then at her, then the babe. He sensed himself at a terrible threshold, and could feel the dark unknown breathing on the other side. With his scarf he wiped the corner of his mouth.

The babe screamed the louder.

Then came another sound: hoofbeats at the road.

His time had run out. He picked up the babe and hastened for the mountain forests.

***

It cried nearly the whole night, but he’d expected that. Its mother was dead, after all.

In the predawn light he smelled the foulness. He wiped the babe with leaves and learned it was a boy, then washed its garments in a brook and regirded them as best he could.

The babe still cried. He had planned to take it to a collier family he knew of in Winfenbog March, some twenty miles distant. But that would take days. The babe needed food now.

On a flat boulder the forester cut the meat of a grouse he’d cooked and gave a chunk to the babe. It dribbled down into the folds of the babe’s chin. The babe screamed. The forester cut it into smaller slices but had the same result. The babe screamed. He cut even smaller and tried a third time. The babe quieted, grew pensive at the new flavors, and accepted more. On the third morsel he opened his eyes and looked at the forester in the morning light. Something ineffable passed between adult and child in the solitude of the freshly awakening foothills. Then he coughed and coughed and spit up the chunks exactly as they’d gone down. Then he screamed.

The forester rubbed his temples. God preserve us…

He spent the afternoon carrying the shrieking bundle, looking for softer stuff. Beside a fallen beech he found a morel mushroom, cooked it on his wrought iron pan above his small fire pit, and in witless ignorance fed it to the babe.

The babe grew lethargic and fell asleep. In his ignorance the forester thought he’d succeeded.

Once the sun went down the screaming began. Different urgency, graver timbre. Then began the vomiting — not spitting up, but vomiting. Then the diarrhea.

The forester stoked his fire. He boiled willow bark in his clay pot and lowered his scarf to blow on it. The babe wailed and writhed and he shed the smallest diamond tears and vomited again.

Suddenly his thin lids quivered and closed and he went still.

The forester dropped the clay bowl which broke on the stone. He snatched up the babe and stood, bouncing and rocking as he’d seen women do in a life long gone. He hummed and caressed the babe’s head then stopped and looked at the limp and fragile form in his arms.

I’ve killed it.

Fiend take me, I’ve killed it.

I deserve this fate.

The babe convulsed suddenly and howled. The forester breathed again.

A cool wind blew over the mountain. A mote of light shone among the trees where wanderer and infant warred against death.

***

Morrow found the babe listless but alive. The rest of the day the forester boiled willow bark tea and made a mash with burdock root, ramsons, and sap. The babe screamed, ate, drank, made diarrhea twice more, and fitted all the next night but slept at dawn.

Birds chittered in the trees. The forester stared at the helpless, slumbering creature. He wiped spittle from his mouth and realized he himself needed food.

Ten minutes later and a quarter-mile away he had a fist-sized rock in hand to kill a bird when he heard voices coming from the direction of his camp.

Three men stood around the howling baby. They carried spears. “What if that’s not it?” one asked.

“It must be it! How many babes do you expect are on this mountain?”

“Well, who brought it here? Whose effects are these?”

“The Fiend knows. Now skewer it and let’s be back.”

“Must we? Shouldn’t we take it?”

“We’ll take the corpse. Our orders are to kill.”

“It looks sick. Mayhap ‘twill die on its own.”

“It hasn’t died yet, has it? Let’s be sure.”

“But… ‘tis but a babe! Is there not a rock nearby or somewhere we could hurl it from?”

“Plague on it, man! Run it through or—”

He was interrupted by a rock striking his dome. He staggered.

His companions looked around in surprise, but then an arrow thunked into the next one’s neck. His eyes grew wide as he looked at the third.

The third ran.

The forester ran out and inserted his knife into the armpit of the first scout. The second had lain down to spit blood and kick away the remainder of his life. The third was tearing away down the hill.

The forester nocked, drew, and released.

His arrow rebounded off a twig and vanished among the foliage. The scout escaped.

The forester lifted the crying babe, who smelled him and soothed slightly. The second scout stopped thrashing and lay still.

The babe’s thumb went to his mouth. The forester frowned at him. Who are you, child?

***

Small time to search the scouts’ effects. He took belts, boots, a few coins, then packed up and left. A mile later he paused and made a carrier with the belts to strap the child to his front. The babe cried a little, then settled and laid his head against the forester’s chest. It gnawed and gummed the carrier’s improvised straps, turning the leather dark with slobber. As they set out for higher ground the babe reached up and grasped at the scarf and its pleasantly textured fabric. The forester tugged it away and wiped his dribbling mouth. They were still bound for the collier, but they needed to get to safety first.

For the rest of the day they trekked, rising higher and higher. Warmth left the air. The little greenery vanished with altitude until the only leaves were the dark and waxy rhododendrons that grew in tight clusters along the slopes. The sun settled and the moon rose and sleeploss pricked at the forester’s scalp and eyes, but he reached the stone promontory on the windward side. Adjoining ridgelines in their folded shapes ran the length of his vision. The ribbon of the Aftrabech River shimmered between the hills some fifteen miles away. Beyond that lay the March of Winfenborg, and the collier he sought. To his back was County Hernbok. His mountain lay between the two polities.

Without removing the babe, the forester settled against a boulder and finally rested.

***

The next day was a day for answers.

Light shined golden through low clouds skimming the bald canopy. Its whisps curled and tumbled a few dozen feet above his head like a reflection of ethereal whitecaps. He fed and cleaned the babe, then swaddled him securely in his coat, ran rope through each sleeve, and suspended him fifteen feet off the ground between two oaks. The babe protested, but this would keep him safe from bear and wolf — the forester couldn’t risk bringing him back down for reconnaissance.

It took over an hour to reach the lower hills. He heard the voices from a mile away, so he spent another hour sneaking closer.

The cohort was large. They’d found where the mother had died and where the scouts had been slain. The cohort’s camp was in a field and they were organizing supplies and bringing in wagons. The forester watched from high in a tree.

“Drop that bow!” someone shouted authoritatively some thirty yards up the slope behind him.

The forester froze. His limbs coiled but he was trapped.

“Drop the bow and descend slowly or I’ll shoot you down.”

The forester did, and dropped from the last branch next to a thickly bearded soldier pointing an arquebus in his face. The soldier wore a saber at his belt and a red sash with a broach that the forester recognize as emblematic of a Hernbok County officer.

The officer stood staring for some time as though deciding whether to shoot. “Berent?...” he said finally.

The forester started. That was his name. That was his name in a different life.

“Berent! Sir Berent! My God! ‘Tis I, Sir Gerlach!” The officer dropped his weapon and put his arms around him.

The forester made a noise. He couldn’t remember when last he’d been embraced.

Gerlach pulled away and apprised the forester anew. “How long has it been, Berent? Five years? Ten? General Saomon thought you dead! We thought Count Dresser had executed you quietly!”

The forester’s eyes fell. These words and the tragedies they evoked fell too keenly.

“But he didn’t kill you. What, then? Speak!”

Instead of speaking, the forester pulled down his green scarf and opened wide his fish mouth. At the bottom where should have been his tongue was only a stub.

“He… he cut out your tongue. And banished you.”

The forester lifted his scarf to cover his disfigurement and nodded.

Gerlach’s eyes tightened with rage as much as remorse. “Plague on him. Fiend take him! Berent, my friend, you must know: things have changed in County Hernbok. Last month General Saomon led us against Count Dresser. We overthrew him. His head sits on a pike. Do you hear me, Berent? It’s a new day! The Prior has agreed to name Saomon the new count! Only one thing remains…”

The forester understood before his friend had even said it.

“Count Dresser’s grandson, Domi. He’s the heir. He’s but a babe, but if he lives then our Saomon can’t claim legitimacy. Domi’s daughter flew for the March of Winfenborg a few nights ago. Our agents intercepted her and her escort but…”

The forester felt for his knife.

“But you know this mountain! You could track the babe. Come down and meet the rest of us. We’re all here, your old companions! Be a part of us again! We can—”

The forester made a noise not of speech but reflex, then wiped his mouth and stepped back in shame.

“I… I understand, Berent. You need time. Much to digest. But… but you know where you’ll be. Come down and join us when you’re ready.”

The forester nodded, slowly picked up his bow, and began to walk away.

“And should you encounter the young Lord Domi, you know what to do! If that creature makes it to Winfenborg then there will be civil war, unavoidably!”

The forester — Sir Berent of General Saomon’s army — reached the promontory by evening. The babe — Lord Domi Hernbok, heir apparent to his mortal enemy — was crying hard. He got it down. It looked at him and reached to innocently scratch at his scarf.

He tugged the cloth away. Not now.

***

He sat all night. Staring.

The babe woke. He fed it more broth, cleaned it, held it, set it down. He did this several times but did not sleep. Only stared.

In the morning he put the infant in his strap and continued on toward the March of Winfenborg where the babe would be safe.

The infant clutched at his scarf, brought it to his nose, sucked on it. This time the forester let it be. His decision was made and would not be reversed.

***

He didn’t make it far the first day. The Hernbokers had fanned out more quickly across the mountain than he’d expected, forcing him to take alternate routes. Gerlach must have realized the forester had the babe. ‘Twas unlikely their next engagement would be amicable.

He was right. It happened on the following day.

He was crossing a ridge beneath a family of maples when he heard the cry and realized he’d been spotted from more than a quarter mile below. He began to run with his child and pack, but more voice were flaring up.

“I see him!” he heard them cry. “I see him!”

A dozen men were after him from one direction. Five more came from another side.

“Head him off! Head him off!”

The forester turned sharply toward a damp rock wall some thirty feet high which ran in a long stretch below the ridge. In its shadow spruces and ferns grew thickly. The forester ran therein and crouched.

“We’ve got him now! Surround the—”

The order was curtailed by an arrow sighing out and catching the speaker in the eye.

The other pursuers fell behind trees and rocks thirty yards from the grove. Somewhere beneath the spruces the babe was crying.

“Where is he?” asked another soldier.

“There! Beneath that tree!” cried one peeking over a boulder just before an arrow reflected off the rock in front of his eye releasing a small burst of granite dust. He fell back holding his face.

A man leaned out from behind a tree with his pistol raised, but the forester’s arrow entered his wrist and straight up his forearm. His pistol discharged without effect. He screamed, then knelt to stare at his life emptying out of his palm.

“What do we do?”

With gestures they decided three would creep in. One cocked a pistol.

“They tell us you’re a soldier of Saomon!” cried a man as a diversion. “A true soldier would recall what he fights for, and whom! There’s no need for further bloodshed! Give us the child!”

The three flankers reached the edge of the grove, then charged through the ferns and between the conifers toward where the infant wailed, sabers naked and pistol brandished.

Beneath a spruce they stopped.

The babe lay alone bawling on the nettles.

“Where—”

The forester came from behind. With his knife he cut the first one’s thigh then sliced the second’s neck. The third turned but was tackled and rolled as the pistol rasped and discharged.

“Go!” shouted the ones still outside. “While he’s distracted! Overwhelm him!”

They charged within and found the third with his throat opened. He gurgled and pointed toward the wall.

“There he is! He’s scaling!”

The forester was halfway to the top of the thirty-foot cliff with the babe in his chest strap.

One of the soldiers immediately sheathed his sword and began to climb after, making greater speed as he was unencumbered. The others milled about uncertainly below.

“Run around and head him off!”

“It’s too far, we won’t make it!”

“Where’s that pistol? Get the pistol! The pistol!”

The forester was five feet from the top and panting but the soldier below was nearly upon him. The babe was crying.

“Here, I’ve got it!” said the one below, tossing aside the pistol’s ramrod and aiming it in two hands.

“Shoot quickly, he’s getting away!”

The forester’s head peeked over the top as the baby screamed in his ears, but just then the soldier climbing below grabbed his ankle and began to pull. The forester’s left hand shot out and up the ledge to brace himself when he saw the creature basking on the rock above.

Blunted nose. Forked tongue. Coiled frame. Sunlight reflecting dully off matte black scales.

A snake.

The frightened serpent struck at his left hand. Teeth sank and he wailed.

“Hold him steady!” cried the pistoleer. “I’ll shoot him!”

“Nay,” shouted the climber. “I’ll pull him down!”

With his bitten hand the forester seized the snake and whipped it down onto the climber just below. The climber gasped and let go the rock just as the pistol discharged. Climber and snake fell and hit the ground and perished there.

Above the cliff the forester fled, and as he fled he looked at the oozing double puncture of the snake bite on his left hand. It burned and burned.

***

The surviving pursuers brought the dead snake back to camp. A Marwarlian viper. Highly venomous.

“They heard him scream. If he truly was bitten then he won’t make it far,” Sir Gerlach said confidently.

Scouts returned and skirted the cliff. Tracking commenced. They found where he had stopped at a creek to wash, then the remains of a hastily-prepared poultice on a flat rock. All evidence pointed toward a fast languishing forester. “Don’t slow!” said Sir Gerlach to his exhausted crew. “Nigh’s the time. Pursue him intently and we’ll have the babe before nightfall!”

The light fell when they began to find blood. Crimson drops on dead leaves gleamed like quicksilver beneath their lamps. Not fully dried. They were close.

Another mile and they found a scene even more sanguine. More blood. Churned undergrowth. A large stone bearing bloody impressions.

Sir Gerlach wondered if his old friend had been attacked. Guilt seized his chest. “Sir Berent! Sir Berent! Please come home and quit this madness! We love you! This cursed child isn’t worth civil war! It isn’t worth your life!”

“Sir Gerlach,” said one of the soldiers, “look yonder.”

Tossed a little ways away, lying among the treeroots, was a human arm, a left arm, colors ranging from pale to nearly black, severed at the elbow.

***

The babe slept. The forester sat in a recess carved by a creek long dry. The crickets chanted around him. The herbs in his cheek played games with his head as he pulled spiderwebs from a fallen, hollow tree and fed their silk into his fresh stump. He couldn’t cauterize. He couldn’t risk the fire.

The snap of a branch. His head whipped around, but it was only a fox. The treetops whispered in a nocturnal wind.

Through the foggy sedative he closed his eyes and could still feel them: his left hand; his tongue. They once belonged to him. He could still move them, if he tried. He could nock an arrow. He could touch each of his teeth. He could swallow.

His eyes opened and his arm and tongue were gone. He could still feel them, but they were gone. Colder than the wind.

He picked up his bow in his right hand, stood, then went to draw the string in his left. The string remained untouched. What hand would draw it anon? What tongue would speak of this loss?

He looked at the babe. The babe was awake, staring at him, then began to cry from the cold. The forester lay beside him and pulled his coat around them both. It was difficult to do with only one hand.

The babe scratched the forester’s scarf and watched the night turn. After a little while he heard the forester humming in his sleep, speaking through his valerian dream.

The babe listened.

***

Most of the Hernbokers assumed him dead.

“We cannot risk it,” said Sir Gerlach. “Winfenborg knows the babe is missing by now and has surely alerted his subjects. A loose end is bound to fray. Twenty years from now we’ll have false claimants, or worse, Domi will survive and it will truly be war! Do you wish to see our homes ravaged by conflict? We must see this through!”

At the bottom of the mountain near the border of Winfenborg March lay the Aftrabech River, impassable in early spring save for a locally-operated ferry. Gerlach seized this ferry, displaced the locals, and remained there with a guard of fifty men.

His comrades called him overly cautious. He rebuked them:

“You don’t know Sir Berent. Look what he’s survived already. That man is a dark spirit, a sentient shadow. But he can only feed that imp on forest foodstuff for so long, and he knows it. His time’s almost gone.”

Gerlach looked at the cluster of now empty huts near the ferry point. The ferry itself was a flat barge like a raft, thirty feet in length and half in width. The ferry’s upstream side had a rope attached to its partly submerged oar board, and this rope connected to a thicker fixed line running from bank-to-bank, allowing the ferry to hang just downstream of the fixed line and crawl along it between the shores, a length of about two-hundred feet. The Aftrabech River was flushed with spring currents, but the ferry rudder could be angled such that the water’s force would push the craft along.

The ferry bobbed along the shore on the mountain side. The fixed line trembled. It smelled of mildew and age. Someone asked why they not simply cut it.

“Because,” answered Sir Gerlach, “if we cut it he won’t come.”

***

Three days since the viper. Dusk. Hernoker soldiers laughed around fires, but Gerlach was looking into the shadows.

From one of the empty huts they heard a clatter. Men fell quiet, then rose slowly to check. Gerlach led the way.

Behind the first cabin they found a flame inching along the ground like an insect. Gerlach quickly stamped it out, then saw the frayed line the flame had been following like a slug trail. It was burning along a strand removed from a braided rope. It smelled of tallow, and was headed toward a larger nest of tinder near the base of the hut’s wall just below the thatched roof. That nest stank of grease and cloying resin.

Gerlach realized he was looking at an improvised wick. The hut was the bomb.

A sudden rush and crackle rose up and an orange and angry glow was thrown across the trees. Within ten seconds half the adjoining huts caught fire. Then another. Then another. Beneath a pine tree more flames ignited among popping nettles.

“He’s here!” Gerlach cried. “He’s here!”

Confusion lay upon his men and they shouted and ran in all directions as the fire danced and moved, seemingly coming from everywhere.

“Arm yourselves, you fools!” shouted Gerlach. “He’s here! He’s…”

Gerlach heard an infant crying. He looked down toward the water.

A man with a green scarf, a coat tied over his shoulders like a cloak, and a bundle at his chest was leaping onto the ferry and casting off the mooring line.

“There!” Gerlach howled. “He’s getting away! He’s getting away!”

The forester was already ten feet away from the bank and was heaving the rudder back and forth with one hand to generate movement, but now more men were spotting him and charging for the water.

“Stop him! Now! Your county depends on it!”

Almost thirty feet out, the forester saw the onslaught of men whitening the bank and swimming after him. As the first came near he let go the rudder and ran and sawed away the oar board rope.

With a pop the rope snapped and the ferry began to spin and float downstream.

Now men were seizing the edge of the ferry, but the forester was running and slashing at them with his knife. They screamed and slipped into the dark current. A few made it to their feet on the ferry’s deck and the forester fought them there with the babe crying at his chest and the ferry spinning and the Aftrabech spitting around them and bearing away their dead. Again and again he killed.

His calf took a slice and he dropped his knife, but kicked his aggressor overboard. When he turned there were six men on deck opposite him, not charging in immediately but unifying there to face him.

The babe was crying and the forester’s stump was bleeding again. He felt the warmth of his own blood issuing from several places. The rocking, rotating deck moved treacherously beneath him and his injuries jeopardized his balance.

From the blood-slicked deck he picked up a slain man’s saber. Raising it, he invited their attack.

They charged, and he fought like a monster. In the failing light his saber flickered. Arms and legs and chests opened. Fingers and noses were severed and lost to the waters and still the forester moved with perfect grace and fury as he had when these men had been called comrades and Hernbok had been his home.

He made a cut in the final enemy’s arm, but his opponent’s attack passed within his guard and sliced his shoulder along with the leather strap. The babe spilled partway out. The forester caught him painfully with his stump.

“What are you doing, Berent?!” His final enemy, Sir Gerlach, cried over the Aftrabech’s gurgling. True remorse afflicted his voice, but he was holding his offhand wrist which was hissing slightly as to a nicked artery. “This is madness! Does civil war mean naught to you? Do we mean naught to you?!”

The forester tried to stand, but his leg quivered. The banks rotated around him, the ferry pitched, and so did his head.

“What reward is there for you in this errand? You quell your own kinsmen to defend the child of your enemy!”

The forester tried to stand again, and failed.

Gerlach struck. The forester parried but tipped and the babe fell out the pouch onto the deck, weeping the harder. Gerlach snatched him up by the leg and held him aloft, studying him briefly with resignation.

“You cannot swim with those injuries, Berent. Let us see what you would sacrifice for this offspring.”

He whipped the babe into the river.

“Would you die?”

The forester dove overboard. He did not resurface.

Gerlach watched in surprise, but he himself felt dizzy and sank to the deck. His wound was making a slight squeal in time with his heartbeat. The land grew darker but not from night.

Forty feet away from him, a fist erupted from the water gripping a bundle. The bundle screamed.

“No…” said Gerlach as death coiled around him. “Impossible. No…”

***

“Stoffen,” said the woman, “I brought you food. Are you hungry?”

The collier sat among his charcoal clamps in the clearing on the edge of Winfenborg March. The clamps stood as tall as he, covered in turf like burial mounds or tiny volcanoes, the wood piles inside slowly baking into stronger stuff. The collier looked at his wife who had addressed him. “Nay, Katharina! I’ve your love to sate me!”

He always said that. And she always rolled her eyes, but this time her eyes went past him and her face showed fear.

He followed her gaze to the forest’s edge where a man limped nearer. Middle-aged, clearly wounded, racked by exhaustion. His maimed arm was wrapped in bloodstained cloth. He wore a green scarf over his mouth like an outlaw and he wore his coat with the sleeves tied about his neck like a cloak.

Stoffen stood quickly as the forester shambled forward. “Sir…” he said. “Sir, you’re wounded! If you need…”

He trailed off as the forester took the babe from his chest.

Word had spread all across the March. Stoffen knew exactly who this child was.

“Good God…”

“Stoffen…” said Katharina. “Stoffen, that child—”

“Aye, I know.”

“He looks unwell.”

“We can nurse him!” said Stoffen, taking the child quickly from the forester. “We’ll care for him. He’s not so dire, just underfed! And you…”

He looked back, but the forester was already walking away.

The babe saw him leaving and began to cry.

The forester stopped and turned around. He limped back to the babe.

The babe leaned forward until he grabbed the forester’s ragged shirt.

The forester unpeeled his companion’s hands and stood him back up in Stoffen’s arms. Then he removed the green scarf and offered it.

The babe took it, opening and closing his hands, put it in his mouth, smelled its comforting scent.

Stoffen now saw the forester’s jaw and teeth uncovered for the first time, malformed by so many years lived without a tongue. But the forester’s eyes were on the babe. He touched the infant’s head one last time, then turned back toward his mountain. He left his scarf behind, clutched tightly in the babe’s small hands.

Domi grew. War ensued between Winfenborg and Hernbach, as Gerlach had said it would. The forester’s deeds were consigned to the mountain, spoken by the tongueless and written by the armless. His fate remained unknown, but the innocent babe that he had carried lived.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this story, here’s another of mine you might enjoy:

Of Teeth and Heart

And as always, subscribe to Dunmore Dispatch for more tales like this delivered to your inbox every other week… and if you’re feeding a baby, please avoid morels.