Never smell
Never taste
Never love
Never hate
Never sleep
Never wake
Never talk
Never speak
Never walk
Never hear
Never fear
Never see
Nothing left except to be....

The people lived in the place in differing states of harmony for thousands of years. For many many years the people were colored a brownish red color.

In later years these people were mixed with people of fair skin. In a short space of time only the fair skin people remained. The ongoing conflicts of plant-life - forever in competition for space, sunlight, and water occurred thru a span of eons; a very great length of time compared to the comings and goings of people. The same colored trees had remained in this place since man appeared and remained thus as the colors of people changed around them.

***

Able Johnson had formed deep impressions on his mind of the place he had lived all his eleven years and the people who inhabited it. Higher up than the surrounding valley villages the hamlet of Shady Ridge received the colder breeze and earlier winter. The people who had followed the Indian paths upward generations before and cleared the deep thickets to form a settlement were much like the place itself and Able knew each one of them.

They had tough skin like a type of armor to shield them from the elements and each other. The surrounding mountain land was densely forested and though clearly spaced so a person could walk around and between their thick trunks the trees formed a lattice of interlocking branches more so here than in other areas of Appalachia. The sunlight that did reach the ground nursed to vibrant life a thick growth of scraggly and thorny vines which formed an impenetrable barrier to ground walkers and sealed many interior areas in a natural chamber.

Able knew all the trails in the area and especially liked to stalk the lesser known precincts of the forest with his boyhood friends, where they were sure to see no older persons. They gathered arrowheads off the ground and in the bottom of the creek beds and followed animal trails into the cave-like recesses of the underbrush. Their smaller bodies allowed them access through the dense vegetation to places no grown ups had traveled and many days Able would sit alone or with a friend deep in some secret cavity of the mountain surrounded by great mammoth bushes and shrubs and at the center the base of an ancient tree which stretched upward toward the sky.

The exposed roots of these trees fanned out like the digits of a many-fingered hand, old, and strong beyond belief. He could rest his body between the large roots as if he were cradled in the hand. Able would close his eyes and could sometimes detect a sensation in his mind - like the hand were squeezing, subtly contracting around his body and enfolding him within it's grasp. Through his clothes he could feel the rough skin of the tree pressing in on him. His mind would release itself it a relaxing fashion, in a way Able felt he would like to perpetuate if possible. It was in these deep trances that Able imagined something else. A different, and separate entity from himself...a sentience he could not identify which caressed his mind and would subsume him he thought if he did not blink his eyes and raise up. Able enjoyed laying this way and imagining these feelings and spent many hours doing so.

Able could remember strange complaints about the forest. When he was eight years old Amanda Callcut said They were coming closer each year and shortening up her already meager parcel of yard, encroaching on her cabin, and scratching at the roof every night. But Amanda was an old woman who lived up further than anyone else, all alone. The people who came from the village to comfort her didn't know and couldn't know the exact measurements of her cleared yard and did not direct their efforts in this direction.

Instead they sat her beneath an old oak out the front door and fed her a lunch while they rested their backs on the ancient botanical behemoth talking about nothing. Amanda sat looking around suspiciously shaking her head. Able often wondered how she felt at night by herself when the winter came early and she fetched her own firewood. And, firewood had always been an issue of some discussion on Shady Ridge. Able only understood that the Indians had had particular ways of collecting it and while, stubborn in sharing other bits of knowledge had been eager and adamant about the ways of wood and tried their best to impress these ideas on the European newcomers.

Able knew that the Indians had abandoned the area a generation prior in a peculiarly peaceful fashion leaving only a few living remnants too attached to the place who did their best to avoid the white inhabitants and generally lived deeper in the woods and traversed different trails. Able knew their habitations well and would spy upon their earthen dwellings high up in the mountains with his friends. They watched from behind large trees the handful of old men and women come and go, marveling with wonder at their strange habits, the way they sat, the manner of passing food around the fire to consume it together, and the way they slept outside on many nights among the large knuckley roots of great trees.

It was that Autumn, Able's eleventh, that Mitchell Prior had not come back home from out of the woods. He had simply gone in and not come out again.

Able joined in on the search which ranged far up the mountain and encompassed several days and nights in the late Autumn. This was the first time Able could remember being truly cold and feeling the loneliness such a physical feeling brings to the human soul. Being on the move constantly they rarely set a fire and rested only for brief intervals feeling the pressure of time and the immensity of the woods against them. As the cold and darkness of autumn seeped into his bones Able longed to be home in his bed and thought about Mitchell out in the woods alone and only seven years old. Able had never witnessed desperation and panic in the men who hacked through the woods and thickets and shouted into the dense forests and he began to wonder at the incidents of settlement he had missed before his birth. His peaceful sheltered life was shattered by this incident not from any violence he saw first hand, nor from the fact that a child was missing and presumed dead somewhere in the woods, but from the slack jawed unknowing faces of the men around him, men who, up to that time had tamed and manacled the woods and set them to their own purposes building sturdy cabins, feeding their stock, and coaxing vegetables and grains from out the ground. Now he saw them scared, running through the woods, their faces momentarily lit up by the lamp light which distorted their features into incomprehensible paroxysms of terror. He could never rely on adults as he did before, the bedrock had shifted beneath his feet.

Before Able was sent back down the mountain early on the second day with John Trudewell leading his mule he witnessed several conversations in the dead of night along the trail among differing groups of men, continually referring back to some older discussion or argument which somehow involved the Indians. Able only grasped tangential details on this topic but each inflammation of vocality involved Bibles raised in the air on the one side and encouragement to re-establish contact with the remaining original natives on the other. Able realized these issues touched on sore points within the pioneers who had striven to set themselves apart from the Indians ensuring the ways of each did not become mixed, the lines blurred, or the goodness of one corrupted by the shortcomings of the other. But Able took away from these meetings the distinct impression of a precedent set some time previous, a similar occurrence of a disappearing boy left unexplained by all accounts but dealt with none the less, and as the gaggle of men wandered deeper into the woods and further up the mountain their conversations became less sure and their expressions more confused. Able could remember gazing up at them in the darkness and dim lamp-light, watching them argue. The faces of the men were framed from behind by the branches of large trees enclosed around their heads like cages.

On the fourth morning men began filtering back onto their individual lands and Able saw several pass by his triangular loft window, their heads down and moving along the trail with their extinguished lanterns dangling at their sides. Later that day a small contingent of men departed the village on foot. Able knew from his parents' conversations early that morning they were headed for the Indian encampment and his father was one of the men.

They carried several axes and spades over their shoulders and were accompanied by Mr. Varner, probably the oldest man in town, and Able knew, the person most capable to speak directly with the Indians in their own language.

A tacit curfew bound the entire population near their homes and farms that day, waiting, it seemed to Able, for something. His mother did not speak about the task his father had departed on with the other men and appeared to busy herself unnecessarily in an attempt to avoid the subject. Able did not pester her with questions but slowly walked to the edge of town peering along the dusty trail and into the forest. A strange, quiet, uneasiness had settled on the inhabitants of Shady Ridge and Able noticed as they walked about how they scanned the tree line and scrub areas as if they expected a sudden rush from an enemy. "Enemy?" Able thought. The forest seemed especially impenetrable this afternoon. The branches of the many trees formed a tight mesh, low to the ground and ominous. Able drifted toward the boundary of the town and wavered there; the tight row of trees on one side and the buildings of the Hamlet on the other. He stood in the unclaimed no-man's-land of dust and rocks where there were no trees and no buildings only cleared land and wondered about the two encampments on either side of him; the quiet forest with it's inhabitants, the trees, slowly shifting in the wind and the town and it's people, sauntering in and out of buildings and onto wagons conversing with each other. His eye drifted to the wood pile on the side of the nearest building, firewood laid up for the winter and then he looked back into the woods and walked forward.

Able had no direct intention of searching for Mitchell but merely felt a need to escape the oppressing discord from the town. He knew where to escape such a feeling and headed deep into the woods along footpaths whose knowledge was passed from the preceeding generation of teenagers to his and upon which he was guaranteed to see no adults. He felt no fear though he knew Mitchell was missing and perhaps dead in the woods. Able could not explain his lack of fear or concern even and he walked deeper into the brush and eventually left the track and stumbled onto a path which was invisible until he parted the think undergrowth and wound his way around the large ancient trees which towered over him. Able went over the many ways Mitchell could have met a demise; a wild animal or stranger may have killed him along the trail and consumed or hidden his body. He may have drowned in one of the rivers. Able didn't think these were likely, "No." He thought calmly as his hand reached out toward the massive trunk of an old Oak. "It's not that I don't think - I know he didn't die....those ways." Able shook his head slowly and raised his left hand connecting with the next trunk before releasing the other hand off the oak. He leaned onto the trees to gain footing and miss the muddy regions beneath them. In their shadow his mind already felt clear, free from the troublesome intricacies of Shady Ridge and the worries of it's people. Their canopies formed a soothing shell around him.

He arrived at his intended destination; a magnificent space of exposed rock covered with lichen and great gnarled grayish colored tree roots which splayed and intertwined below the trunks of seven huge giants whose branches swayed far above his head. He walked to each tree placing his hands on the trunks palms fully spread and passing over the rough bark. As he did this he thought about the life of trees. He thought about being rooted to one place for many many years. He thought about being exposed to the cold, the wind, the rain, and snow - he thought about never feeling anything except the warmth of the cold ground with roots buried deep deep down. His mind began to swim as he moved to the next tree and he began again to imagine the Other....the presence in his mind which massaged his thoughts and rounded out the rough edges in his mind. As he moved from tree to tree he imagined that the entity changed as when one turns in a group of people from one person to the next.

Able sat down among the thick knobby roots and allowed his mind to wander.

He looked up into the canopy of branches and laid back onto the cold rock and moist earth. He relaxed his muscles and felt himself sink downward like he were pressed into the earth and was among the long finger-like projections of the roots as they wormed into the ground searching for tree food. Able thought again about the trees around him and the great gulf....the great division between his life and theirs'. He remained like this for some time; until he sensed something surrounding his body, as if the air were suddenly tangible and stopped around him, thickening into an invisible web. He imagined that this cocoon was real and he would be lost somehow in it forever. He suddenly stood onto his feet with an inexplicable feeling of incomprehension, a great loss of understanding like someone had draped a dark carpet over him and simultaneously handed him a box he couldn't open. He walked over to a thick group of bushes and pulled one aside to reveal the cross-legged naked body of Mitchell Prior sitting still in the midst of several saplings each no thicker than a man's fist.

Some time later Able was back on the path traveling fast toward town turning over in his mind what he had seen and felt. He remembered reaching out to touch Mitchell's skin and feeling the roughening, the hardening of it and pulling back quickly. He remembered the immovable quality of Mitchell's entire aspect, the rootedness of his entire body and the peacefulness of his still face. It was hard to make out Mitchell's legs and feet beneath the compost-like material which his lower torso appeared to be buried in....but he was alive. When Able extended his palm flat on Mitchell's chest Able could detect a slow solemn beating. Able saw Mitchell's barely parted eyes slowly open to full aperture and it seemed that he exerted every muscle in his body to speak three words in a croaky, waspy, measured voice. They were the last three words anyone ever heard Mitchell Prior speak; "Don't..........stop............them.........." Able began to run along the path and the many trees of the forest flew by him in a blur like they were on a runaway wagon moving by at incredible speed.

When he reached the village the sun had set and his mother was waiting for him on the porch. She was worried and mad that Able had stayed away in the woods for so long. She smacked him hard across the face and sent him to the loft to sleep. Able laid on the hard wood for several hours staring up at the exposed eaves of the roof before he drifted off.

***

Able could not explain to himself what woke him. He couldn't really hear from the loft the low tumult of the people gathered at the end of the village and the glow from their fire only reached his window as dim dancing shadows. He sat up on his thin mattress vaguely remembering a dream of an unrecognizeable friend borne beneath his window by many hands, roughly handled, jostled about, and pleading. He methodically climbed down the ladder noticed no one else was in the cabin and walked shirtless into the cool night air.

The moonless night was dark but he could feel the trees at the edge of town swaying on their stout trunks. The people were at the other side of town.

He could only see them gathered there where the buildings ended and a space had been cleared for a proposed church. The frame for this building was laid out with stakes. There were several fires around and among the moving people. The fires flared up briefly as women turned from the crowd and dumped fuel into the flames. Their figures danced on the wood of the nearby buildings like court jester phantoms. A feeling of horror pooled inside Able's stomach as he slowly walked toward the gathering, the people, the adults of Shady Ridge, assembled, almost to the person. He could see them flailing about, around something, a great object which took up a long section of the space planned for the sanctuary. They covered the object like ants, like insects deep in the wood of a house. And all the time the crushing feeling of loss and horror rising in timbre separate and distinct from the other feelings within him. As he got closer he could see the hatchets, the sharpened spades, and the axes moving up and down in the air and he saw the hands of the women gathering pieces from off the ground and pitching them into the fire. The action was frenzied. A few feet to the side apart from the activity stood an Indian. He stood still leaning on a stick his mouth slightly ajar staring into one of the fires. Able continued to shuffle forward even as he began to realize what they were set upon....as he got closer he could see the maniacal look in their eyes he could see the chips flying in the air and clinging to clothing and hair. He saw several persons inadvertently hit with the back end of axes and spades who continued on as if no blow had been received. He noticed the fury of a seething mob first hand and for the first time...and he saw the tree laid out on the ground spanning the length of the planned cathedral and the people at it hacking and cutting, hacking and cutting. It was not the largest tree, but one that could be conceivably uprooted and transported by a small contingent of men. And Able noticed that the tree had not been cut down with an ax but dug up out of the ground so as much of the root system was retained as possible. Theoretically the tree could have been replanted with some chance of living on but Able realized this was not the reason - the reason was to retain the life - it's life until the point the mob was set upon it, like a condemned prisoner kept healthy and safe until the day of his execution.

The feeling of horror and impending death swept down into Able as he watched the bark on the tree stripped away in several places and the pulpy insides exposed. He saw sharpened metal poles and wagon axles pushed into these wounds digging, exposing, and tearing out the insides. The flames licked around the participants and the jester shadows danced higher on the buildings. The faces of the people were distorted by the flickering glow into forms unrecognizable to Able.

The people at one end parted as Able walked forward and kneeled down stretching his hand out to touch the tree on the trunk. He saw his father walk the length of the tree. Able felt the death tremors in his mind, he felt the sentience slipping and before his father reached him all the people had stopped their leaping and hacking and stood still watching Able's father. The life of the tree slipped away and Able looked into his father's eyes and the outstretched hand with the pick axe.

The pain of feeling the tree slip away produced a wrenching trauma within Able forcing quiet tears down his cheeks. He shook his head dumbly looking at his father the inward feelings of horror now manifesting on his face in an expression of immense grief.

Mrs. Callcut stepped out of the group and spoke to the gaggle, "You see?

You see?! The boy feels it...he can feel the tree. We must get more...we must get them all!" Grunts and nods of assent followed her voice. Able looked at her hateful face and thought about her all alone far out on the mountain with the trees bearing down on her house. The fire danced in the eyes of Able's father. "We have to protect them...the children...from corruption....from this corruption." Mrs. Callcut continued to talk to the crowd but Able's mind drowned her out with the loud and ponderous thoughts within his brain.

Able looked around at the people and began to realize the gulf of understanding existing among these people and the dead thing along the length of the ground. He thought how little they knew of what they did or why any of this had happened. He thought about Mitchell up on the mountain path, on the same spot he had left him earlier, hardening and roughening, growing into the Earth. He thought about a life of peace and he thought about feeling all the seasons of the year not in pain and hardship but as sustenance. He thought about the vegetable matter rooted on the earth and all the animal matter moving about the face of the earth. He thought about an idea which had been growing in his mind since he had seen Mitchell out in the forest and now came together into a completed pattern, a design which he did not understand like many separate shards of pottery forming a container without a purpose....or, a purpose unknown to him; maybe....long, long, long ago the animals and the plants were much closer in likeness and being than they are now and maybe even longer back they were the same thing...and maybe even further back they were the same thing as the rocks and the mountains.

He thought maybe, the thing that happened to Mitchell was some kind of natural process...something which occurred with regularity in the past.

It was impossible to know, or even to fathom it in any reasonable degree.

These ideas created a great swirling whirlpool within his mind which he thought would devour him.

***

Before the sun was up Able was on the path again walking up the mountain dragging the shovel and pick his father had handed him to strike the prostrate tree. Able had simply grasped them and lumbered back to the house leaving the crowd to continue their work amid the glow of the fires and the darkness of the night. No one saw him leave the house and meld into the woods some time later. As he picked his way around the bushes and rocks and made his way into the forest he thought more on the connections of people and nature. He surmised it was not all the trees, in fact, only a few on these ridges. He wondered if these were the only ones surviving now. The only ones to escape the umbrage of ancient man - in these most ancient of mountains - the only ones still communing openly with man. He wondered how many times the older versions of man had worshipped the trees and how many times they had struck against them... afraid. Eventually the latter would win out he supposed. Able pondered that something great would be lost if they were all found, dug up, and pulverized by the minions of Shady Ridge.

He thought they would do better to stay quiet and pick more carefully the people they chose. But maybe it wasn't that simple or easy - maybe it was a reflex like a blinking eye. Maybe it was something in Mitchell which caused the trees to act in a certain way and then maybe he just had something they could not resist. Maybe they had used him in some unknowable fashion - a fashion which benefited the trees. He continued on up the ridge toward the great space of lichen covered rocks and the giant trees. He wondered if the process would be complete when he arrived.

***

It was almost a full day later when Able came back to the village. The sun was just rising as he reached the edge of Shady Ridge. The search party for him had only been gone one half day. After his actions the night before the entire population of Shady Ridge had feared the worst. He didn't stop at his own cabin but continued down the dusty street to the end of town near the proposed and planned church. He stopped with his load for a few moments viewing the length of a second tree corpse laid out beside the first one.

Both had been hacked to pulp and then charred with fire along the length of the phantom sanctuary. He continued walking carrying his load and stopped in front of the Prior's cabin. He carried in his arms a sapling tree not quite his own height in length but thicker than a normal sapling its age.

Its entire root system protruded out one end. Able carefully laid it on it's side and began digging in the area in front of Mabel and Curtis Mitchell's cabin.

By mid-morning Able had dug a hole he was satisfied with and a gaggle of persons had gathered around him not speaking but staring glumly, some even dumbfounded. Able was happy that the feelings from the tree were powerful, that the people could sense it. Mabel had been the first to come out and sit by the small tree. She could feel it...she could feel him. She stretched out her hand from time to time and stroked the trunk and felt out along the short branches. Able gently raised it up and set it in the hole and pushed the exposed dirt around its roots. He stood back to look at it and remained there sitting all day as the people of Shady Ridge came by.

They glowered before it and reached out to gently touch it. Mabel and Curtis stood close by the entire day. All the people drew away after their communion with an inexplicable but satisfying feeling of incomprehension.

The wreakage of the two trees along the length of the planned church were picked up and thrown into the woods by several men. Able went back to his house that night after Mabel had fed him. He didn't feel inordinately happy but his sadness had been eased.

***

No more trees were dug up out of the woods around Shady Ridge and no more children disappeared unaccountably. The proposed Church remained proposed for many years. When the succeeding generation finally coalesced to start the project stone was chosen as the principle constructing material.

Mabel Mitchell could be seen many days in front of her house beneath her tree. The spot where the tree stood in front of her house was regarded as a haunted place in later years because of the feelings it produced in people who stood near by but it was always held in a strange reverence by the generation that aged along with Mabel and Curtis. As he grew to manhood and went about his life Able smiled whenever he saw Mabel out front in the morning, the day, and late at night just sitting near the tree. He could see her palming it's exposed roots and feeling along the length of it's trunk. He would watch her lay along the thick roots pressing her body down and wonder. He thought that she was lucky.