The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [176]
There had been some logging activity not too long ago in this part of the woods, which had all second-or third-growth trees, not very tall, and thin. The earth here was still gouged by wheel ruts from the heavy-laden lumber wagons. But after following the main logging-trail for less than a mile, we found ourselves in a holler that had no path except what remained of some ancient passage, perhaps of Indians. The deeper we got into this holler, the taller the trees stood, until we were in rare virginal woodland: towering stands of oak, ash, and hickory, hung with huge grapevines and blackjack vines that had given up trying to climb the trees and made the place look like a jungle. Either these trees were too hard for the loggers to get at or whoever owned the land had not permitted logging. I didn’t know who owned the land. Not the Chisms, whose acres we had left far down below.
If these virgin trees were singing, they sang only with fragrance, not with sound. It was eerily quiet and still in this forest, a silence matching the darkness: although it was well past midmorning and the sun was high in the sky, the canopy of the forest shaded everything except a random patch of sunlight here and there.
A small branch meandered through the holler, and its gentle gurgling was the only sound besides the clop of Rosabone’s hooves on an occasional slab of chert. The branch was the runoff of the falls, which were still out of earshot. Along the banks of the branch grew wildflowers, and Viridis asked me to name them for her: my voice seemed to have an echo, nearly a boom in the silence, as I pronounced, “Bee Balm, Mallow, Lady Slipper, Fireweed…” We were deep into a rich, woodsy fragrance that was only partly flowers; the rest was moss and leaf mold and fern and the silent singing of the trees. I mentioned to Viridis in passing that the lady slipper’s roots are used in concocting one of the most powerful love medicines ever known, a surefire aphrodisiac…although I didn’t know that word, not then. “It makes a body right warm and lusting” was the way I put it, blushing furiously in the effort.
It was almost eleven o’clock when we came to the glade, or glen, which was illuminated by the full sun: the northeast end of the holler terminated in cliffs, and over the lowest ridge of the bluff spilled the waterfall, a white square fifteen feet high, dazzling in the sunlight. On both sides of the waterfall the cliff was deeply undercut into caverns, sunless grottoes in which Indians once had lived and which still contained the shattered relics of their habitation: bits of woven stuff, shards of pottery, bones. Viridis was entranced. Rouser was having a field day, sniffing around.
“Here we are,” I declared.
“Nail?” she softly called, but of course there was no answer. She tested the water of the falls with her hand, and so did I; it was much, much colder than my shower bath falls. “Is it safe to drink?” she asked. We were both very thirsty from our ride and hike. Rosabone had not waited for my answer but was already lowering her head to drink from the deep, blue pool at the base of the falls.
“It’s springwater,” I said. We knelt and cupped our hands to drink. The water was delicious: cold and fresh and pure. There wasn’t even a minnow swimming in it, nor a waterbug. A flitting dragonfly was the only creature besides us around the pool. But in the mud at the edge there were some tracks, of more than one animal. I wasn’t very good at recognizing animal tracks, and some of these I’d never seen before. Rouser was practically rooting his snout in the tracks and holding his tail very still, which he does when he’s trying to think.
Viridis didn’t seem to notice the tracks, and I wasn’t going to scare her with the thought that we might be surrounded by wolves, bears, or panthers, not to mention gowrows,