Peter Loon Read Free Page B

the forest, hardly knowing what he ventured.
    He was almost glad to quit the cleared plot of land; even he who had lived all his life among acres of stumpage could imagine, in the dark, limned by the moon, that one out of many of those low-lopped trunks might be instead a figure crouched and watching.

3

Of Peter Loon’s First Night in the Forest
    THE FOREST WAS THE ENTIRE WORLD; IT WAS ALL THAT PETER KNEW. He might, in his life, have seen a score of cleared acres in one place, but they would have been cleared acres surrounded by trees and wooded hills and populated by stumps and the charred remains of brush piles, and in the midst of any such clearing was at least one building fashioned of trees in next to their natural state.
    He knew Sheepscott Great Pond, of course, and the settlement there, but the pond and the settlement were similarly encircled, and the forest, and the tiny patches of hard won ground in the midst of the forest, and the lake in the midst of the forest, and the hardscrabble settlement with its spireless church were all that Peter had ever known, though he had heard tell of deserts and oceans and grassy plains. A neighborhusband two or three farms away–miles away–had once sailed for the British Navy, and he had tales to tell of islands of rock in the South Seas and cities that stretched over hill and valley as far as the eye could see. But forest was all that Peter could reasonably expect to find in his mind’s eye when it was all that he had ever known.
    He was accustomed to little more than moonlight after dark, and along a moderately well marked trail he was able to move, hardly breaking his stride. Some of the hardwoods had shed their leaves, and the glow of the moon, hanging between nadir and zenith, made the shadows of roots look like holes in the ground, and pale granite and lucid quartz like basking faces.
    The wind held a distinct note when the still-clinging leaves had turned and dried, a reeding hush that rose and fell like a breath; and where certain groves of oak and sugar maple were losing their foliage, soft dry veterans of summer brushed past his face like bat wings or drifted without noise onto his father’s hat. Trees squeaked and grunted in the wind. Now and then the echoes of animal calls drifted among the trunks and aging fern. He walked quietly and naturally, laying his feet down with ease without sacrificing his pace.
    After a time, he sensed the large swamp to the west, some distance away–a presence marked by a change of air and sound that filtered through the trees. Beyond the swamp would be Great Pond and one little settlement further still.
    When he did not look directly in front of him, the path almost glowed. Above him, the occasional breaks in the trees–a blink of starlight–led the way. The land rose and fell, rose and fell; the path plummeted occasionally and he was warned in time only by the sense of space yawning below him and the wind gathered, as in a great room. Streams trickled across the way, or the way met with one of these rills and followed it to the next little dale. The path widened as it gathered with others like it, or followed an ancient animal run; it wound round the feet of scarpy slopes and followed the course of least resistance between twin hills.
    Peter thought of his little brother Amos waking to find him gone, and he felt a stab that was joined to his leaving with nary a goodbye or even a good notion where he was going. Peter was so long and Amos was so small that the little brother could sleep cradled against the big brother like a pea in a pod.
    Peter heard the breent of a nightjar nearby and thought he caught the glimpse of something wing past a fleeting pool of open sky. He had no idea what he was about, walking the woods in the middle of the night, but he did not find them unpleasant, at first, these immediate sensations.
    It was not long, however, before another reality of life, as he understood it, imposed