[Welcome to our latest Special Feature! While Forests Haunted by Holiness has included many interviews with authors and reviews of books over the last few years, this Special Feature marks the EHS debut of author Ron Wetherington. Here, we present his gentle and lovely story of the friendship between a special little girl and the spirits of the nearby forest.]

Of all the trees that grow so fair, old England to adorn
Greater are none beneath the sun than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn

                                                                   Rudyard Kipling

In a time long past, a small child lived on the edge of an enchanted forest in the emerald green land of the Northern Wood. She sensed its magic as we sometimes sense advancing weather, and when she talked to the trees, they spoke kindly to her. 

Her mother was a chandler and her father a woodcutter, and they did not share their daughter’s fanciful notions, but they loved her deeply. Olivia had what her family called a “separate ability” and was not as comfortable with speech as others were. In her eight years, she had limited her use of words, and did not express her feelings as normal persons do. To Olivia, her family could not fully understand what she needed, wanted, or thought about. 

But the forest understood. And so Olivia spent her days there. She took her books to read under the spreading chestnut. She took her journal to write beside the brook. She took her sketch pad to draw her world, often sitting against the giant oak. When she read aloud to the animals, they listened attentively, nodding and whispering. They favoured her with stories of their own, happy to have found a good listener, and she carefully recorded these in her journal. To her mother, this was a harmless activity. To Olivia these gentle creatures were her neighbors.

On a pleasant April morning, just after a light rain had freshened the air and released the hidden aromas of the forest, Olivia sat atop a small fallen hawthorn, sketching the willow by the brook. She carefully traced the graceful branches dipping into the water and gently brushing the mossy bank. Her skill with charcoal was occasioned by her patience in attending to detail, and the delicacy of her art was appreciated by all—her family and her forest friends alike. She chose the willow as her subject to return a favour: the very charcoal she used came from its branches.

“Lovely,” said a high, soft voice from above. A hovering branch of the nearby oak swayed just a little as Olivia looked up to see a wee sprite sitting there. 

“Who are you?” Olivia asked. 

“I am what some call a dryad,” said the nymph, hopping down to sit close enough to examine the drawing. “I’ve spoken with you before. My name is Faye.” She was a bit smaller than Olivia and seemed to be dressed in green fern-like strands. They swept and curled around her in filaments, caressing her face and shoulders in tresses that in places took on darker hues. Her chin and ears were pointed, and her eyes flashed with a hint of mischief. “You are called Olivia, and your father is a woodsman.” 

“How did you know this?” Olivia asked.

“We all know,” the dryad swept her arms to encompass all around her. “We fear your father. Only our magic has kept him from penetrating our forest.” She looked playfully at Olivia. “It was me you have spoken with in the past, not the tree itself.” 

“Do you live in the tree?” Olivia asked.

“I am this tree’s protector,” the Dryad nodded. “All of our trees need protection.”

Thus began an interlude of enlightenment for Olivia. She had not lived in a world where right and wrong set courses of action. Where there were sides to be taken. Where protection was even a word.

Olivia and Faye met almost daily after that moment, and each of them taught the other. The dryad learned about all the marvelous things humans could do—rendering tallow for candles, and spinning wool for clothing and extracting lye from ash to make soap. Olivia learned about how trees and their dryads could come to life from the tiniest of seeds and return again to the earth when they died, about the cycles of death and rebirth that happened in the forest. She learned that the father of the Dryads, the Dearg Corra, wanders unseen among the trees as the Spirit of Nature. 

And she learned that cutting down trees was not good for the forest, even if it was good for humans. It caused the Spirit great disquiet, as Faye frequently told her.

One day, sitting upon the hawthorn, Olivia asked Faye, “What will happen to this tree, now that it no longer grows?”

“It will decay and disappear back into the earth,” Faye answered, “just as Bree, its dryad, did.”

Olivia wrinkled her brow and thought about this. The next day, she said to Faye, “If my father could cut this dead tree up and bring it home, we could use the wood. Then he would not need to cut down living trees.”

“Yes, he could do that,” the dryad cheerfully replied. “And there is a fallen ash not too far away.” She thought for a moment. “Our forest has many such trees.”

“Then I will bring him here.”

And so, on the following day, Olivia coaxed her father to the hawthorn and he took his ax to the dead tree and carried the pieces back to their cottage. Then, together with Faye, Olivia guided him to others. He never saw the dryad and still did not believe in forest magic, but he did find it useful and less burdensome to extract the dead than to destroy the living. Olivia and the dryad were deeply heartened by this, and they became good companions. 

“Did you know Bree well?” Olivia asked one day.

“She was my sister,” Faye said.

Olivia sensed a note of sadness. “Maybe I can be your sister, now,” she suggested.

The dryad smiled, and they held each other close, something a dryad had never done before.

[Ron Wetherington is a retired professor of anthropology. He has published a novel, Kiva (Sunstone Press), and numerous short fiction, prose poems and literary essays. Read some of his work here.]