Freedom

I threw my reading aside and glanced at the clock. 3:20 PM. It was the second full book in twenty-four hours. I felt restless.

"I'm going for a walk! I have my cell phone!"

Different jeans. You can't cut it in the woods with those flappy stylish things that they make these days. Braided hair. Where I was going, there are plenty of thorns. I struck off behind the house, judging that I had at least an hour of daylight, and wishing that I knew where my bow had gone. A cell phone is all well and good, but there's nothing like a nocked arrow to make you feel confident about meeting with strangers in the woods.

I skirted the sinkhole, scaring up a herd of deer in the process. "What are you kids doing this close to the road?" I wondered, watching their white tails vanish. I stood easy to give them time, and to devote myself to uffish thought. The sun was pretty low, directly behind me, and cast burning lances across the old yellow grass. In my present mood of boredom and controlled savagery, I did not much fancy the usual route: horse trail to quaint wooden bridge, then on across the flattened grass and through the wood fringe and uphill-downhill to the Glade.

"It's high time," I told myself, "that I had a tour of inspection."

By inspection I meant repossession. I began to wander those woods at 14, and by 16, I had mastered them. I knew every stand of trees, every turn of the stream, every good path and nasty bramble thicket. But you forget, and the woods change. You have to stay sharp. I hadn't been by the back ways in a year or more, and I could feel myself growing skittish of them. Accordingly, I slipped down to the spot where a deer path opened, marked by the still-remaining bones of a small rodent. I had been there when they still had skin. Then farewell to sunlight, and in among the dry rustling leaves.

Ordinarily at this point, I turned left. Today, it was right and a lope. I like to move fast, and I go to the woods to practice, besides archery and tracking, the woodcraft of quiet movement. There were too many dry leaves around for that now, and it annoyed me. Some people can't abide silence; I like it. The expectation of silence is part of what sends me into the forest.

Circle round to the right, until the path ends. All well there. Then turn back and plunge off the path into the Warren. The Warren is a nasty, tricky place: big tangled bushes and low paths that you have to crawl through. It's worth it though, to know the Warren paths. You can hide better there than almost anywhere else in the South part of the wood, and it has the advantage of opening out on high ground: the hill above the Dip. A paintballer would be grateful for the Dip. Splendid cover. I prefer the hill, and so, judging by the droppings, did the deer. They're smart animals; they know what high ground means. Anybody coming towards me would have to approach from lower down, where I could see them moving.

So far, so good. There were few changes in the Warren. Down the Back Way, among the trees, skirt the Broken Treefort, and--whoa there! I pulled up short to listen. Footsteps? Nooooo... not precisely. The deer? Perhaps. Whatever it was, it stopped. I shook it off and kept moving. New thorns had grown up over the place where I usually went down streamside to get across the water. I frowned, and stepped 'em down. The bridge had gone, swept away or something. How long, how long... well, it was the work of a few minutes to make a new one; I only needed a middle stepping-stone, and only because I didn't feel like getting my feet wet.

Thorns, big ones. Even in mid-December, I could smell the skunk cabbages down under that frozen muck. Phew! No wonder I was the only person who ever strayed from the clearly-marked and carefully-kept paths. Now where was that... ah, yes. Gingerly over the barbed-wire fence. Someone had chopped down a tree. Interesting. Here's the edge of the Fields, and there are the kids again, bounding off towards Oakenhall. Laura named Oakenhall, that tumbled mass of oak trees and boulders on the ridge... and behind that the Pine Ridge... and behind that the high meadow... and behind that...

I stopped thinking about terrain. The Fields are always a lovely sight, sloping up to a blue dome of Heaven like the ripples of Demeter's skirt. But it's funny how your mind goes sometimes. As I set off across the sward, and as I paused to crouch by a very late dandelion blooming away under the winter grasses, I began to think--why was I out there at all? Was it just to watch the winter sun blush itself away from a good vantage-point? Was it just to feel the stark and barren loneliness of the high fields?

"Oh, for a horse." I murmured. Those who have not had a fast canter, who have never felt the muscles bunch and roll beneath them, never experienced the pounding exhileration... well. I'm sorry, that's all. But why had I come? It was cold, and sunset, and I was half a mile from home, alone. Why had I come?

A voice from Pirates of the Caribbean popped into my mind. It was Jack Sparrow, sitting by a tropical bonfire with his bottle of rum. "Rigging and sails and deck and hull..." he said. "Those things are just what a ship needs. What a ship is, what the Black Pearl really is, is freedom."

"You're right." I told him. "Trees and birds and grass and deer and a stream... those things are just what a wood needs. What this is..." I felt the wind, and saw the dying sun, and tasted again the wild aloneness. I thought of all the paths that I knew, the way that I possessed this land, and did not possess it at all. I could choose a direction and follow it like a sinking star. Perhaps the Explorers weren't so crazy after all. I felt a faint stirring of their wanderlust.

"What a wood really is, is freedom."

I stood still, glorying in it. I felt fearless, and fierce, and like laughter. But....

But I have promises to keep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.