The Branches of Others
by Rebecca Raeburn
Out by the swirling eddies in the forest’s river, cool air nipped at the bare skin on Diana’s splintered elbows. Swallows dipped in and out of the water, sipping on the fragments of summer flies, but she could feel the approach of winter as it waited in turn behind the near brown and crumbling descent of the leaves. The cabin would need patching up before then—the inner walls had become furry in places where the pine broke apart, and a dampness clung to the corners of the windows, threatening to overspill. But she was glad to call this place home. Glad she had made the decision to ignore her mother’s letter asking her back to say goodbye.
It had made her dream of the old world again. Two years had passed and memories of the place stuck to her subconscious like the kiss of an old, unrequited love. She saw her parents in the early days, watched them dance around one another, preparing food in the kitchen as though it were an intimate ritual, one strengthened by the ease of their proximity to one another. Music swayed from a radio, soft and familiar, but framed in the window behind them was a chalk-laden sky growing darker with each passing second.
She shook the dream off. Memories like that didn’t belong in the forest.
Her feet wavered below her in the mint blue wash of the water. There had been an emptiness in the river for a while now, the salmon slow to return despite the summer stumbling to a close. Their absence did awful things to her heart, signalled that the earth wasn’t happy, that there was a wrongness somewhere in the chain of existence. Nearly a minute passed before she caught sight of any—a small shoal, pink-skinned and shaking diamonds into the water as they darted upstream. They were returning for the spawning season, propelled by the earth’s magnetism, but they were still smaller in number than usual.
After they had passed, Diana’s eyes landed on the marshy bank on the other side of the river. There were paw prints in the soft earth, too small to be wolves, but larger than foxes. On impulse she followed them as they led in a crescent-moon line upwards into the forest behind her cabin.
It was unusual, at this time of year, for any of the mammals to be migrating upwards. The muddy heat of summer should have kept them up high until now, where tracks as fresh as this, if seen at all, would be leading back down into the lower fringes of the valley.
A new hum of anxiety pushed her to keep following.
For the rest of the morning they led her uphill, skirting through thickets of curled bracken and peppered moss, urgent in their placement. They travelled away from the river to drier ground, along the jutting edge of a small rock face, which formed a cliff out and over the forest canopy. From there she could pinpoint herself within the mass of trees, could see the direction of the wind, the colouring of the domed sky. There were darker clouds along the horizon. They wrapped around its edges like tinfoil, scattering thin filaments of light across the tips of the Corsican pines and the rich-skinned firs. She could see the shadows of the warblers too. Flashes of their golden wings cut slices out of the sky as they called out to one another, heralding a storm.
A small dip in the forest’s surface marked the land around her cabin, not too far out of alignment from where she stood. But there was something else too—a disturbance, a curling ribbon of smoke, closer to the cabin than she would like.
Leaving the animal prints behind, she let the weight of the descent pull her downhill. The thought of another human in the forest made the blood in her ears burn hot, the tips of her fingers sting against the air. There were no maps, she had checked. No roads or pathways leading anywhere within the nearest twenty miles of the cabin. No history of the region.
It took just under an hour for her to reach the source of the fire. The smoke that was thin and almost transparent above the canopy of the trees was heavy and soot-coloured down on the forest floor. A sheet of canvas lay draped over thick branches, speared into the earth to form a makeshift shelter, and beside it, a man, using a knife to cleave away the innards of a large fish.
A salmon from the river.
Under her gaze he glanced up, eagle-quick in her direction. Mud brown hair and matching eyes leaned towards her, squinting, as though she might not be real.
‘Hello?’ he spoke, softer than she had expected. ‘Have I intruded?’
The salmon lay draped across his left palm like a wilted flower. She found herself staring at it. Nobody cares about the skin beyond their own. Her mother said this often, in fleeting moments—the first time as they watched their neighbour dragging suitcases from his home, a knife-sharp expression between his eyes that told Diana people held the capability of turning off their love. Then a look exchanged between her parents. The one that made her seasick, that made them strangers.
‘My name’s Anthony,’ his voice cut into the sway of her thoughts like a breadknife.
‘Ok. And what are you doing here?’
‘You don’t have a name?’
She thought about it for a second. Then. ‘Diana,’ it tasted odd on her tongue—it had been a long time since she’d had reason to hand it over to someone.
‘Diana,’ he reformed the sound of it in his own mouth. ‘I’m camping here...fond of the wildlife. And you?’ She could tell that the beard cradling his chin and neck hid his youth.
‘You’re not supposed to be camping up here. Especially not hunting.’
‘No? Is it private land?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Do you live here?’
‘I...’ She became aware of the rain that had started to tear its way through the clouds, making the leaves swell, dulling the man’s fire. ‘I should be going actually. And so should you. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t kill anything else.’ She turned her back on him and took a different, convoluted path home towards the cabin.
The rain grew heavier, heavier than it had all summer, pulling the mud away from the soles of her shoes, gluing her clothes to her now dimpled skin. She hoped that he wouldn’t be able to follow, that he wasn’t a good pathfinder, because she had already learned that the earth here was much more temperamental than she could have ever anticipated. She had learned to live in sync with the comings and goings of the forest, knew how not to disturb its patterns—no hunting, no hurting, or taking without giving back. It had to be that way, because it was never that way in the other world.
In that place the fractures always grew and splintered from the smallest of things—snippets of overheard conversations, the telling look of troubled eyes, the sound of bottled crying. Because when her parents weren’t dancing, they were fighting against their own trappings. Her father would disappear for entire nights and return swathed in malt-infused skin and curses. There would be howling, the sound of broken wolves into the early hours of morning. And when the light rose fully, the gathered husks of the promises he would try to make would resurface again. He would find her, duvet-tangled, and hold on for dear life, murmuring incantations to himself as much as to her. Don’t mind the workings of this world my Di, one day it’ll all make sense. But it was never the world she feared. It was the people within it, the people who knew how to take your light and give you darkness in return.
Days passed without a sighting of the stranger, but she spent each of them uneasy. The land was churning. It felt unsteady beneath the foundations of the cabin. Even the birdsong in the mornings had grown staccato, hurried instead of celebratory. She fought the overwhelming urge to stay inside and decided instead to look for the animal prints again, hoped that maybe they’d tell her something about the changes around them. By now they were barely visible, covered in the debris of summer leaves and the budding clusters of forest moss. She began tracking her way uphill again, passing the spot where she had seen the smoke trail from the stranger’s fire when the unfamiliar cry of an animal sounded against the rock face, reverberating as though trapped in a concert hall.
The sound of it turned her bones and muscles to lead.
A cat, she thought. Possibly a predator, but not a threat.
It was frightened, maybe even hurt. The knowledge of that rolled in her stomach like eels.
The animal sounded again and she was drawn towards it, reaching a dip in the forest which rolled out into a clearing she had never come across before, rife with tangled wildflowers and soft, almost transparent grass, the kind found lower in the valley. There was a mound of fur just visible through the vegetation—rich auburn and burning like the sun. The closer she drew, the faster the animal’s chest rose and fell. It was some kind of wildcat, an unusual looking thing with curling, black-tipped ears, and when she stopped by its side it shifted as though to try and run, which is when she saw it—a monstrous, rusted trap that had closed shut on the cat’s hind leg, too big to crush it but sharp enough to have pierced the skin. There was a small smearing of blood like melted candle wax on its paw.
Diana leaned down carefully, slowly, and searched the trapping for the release button. It was so old that the mechanisms looked like they shouldn’t work, but she was able to prise the mouth of it open. At first the cat didn’t move, as though it thought it might never be free.
Slowly, it managed to pull itself to its hind legs, and then to all four. It wavered in the grass of the clearing and scanned Diana with a pair of bright, amber eyes that glinted like fossils. She felt as though it was trying to pull apart her very soul. She wanted to cry out that she wasn’t a threat, could feel the tears pushing through her eyelashes because this wasn’t the way of the forest.
She made to move but stalled. Through the corners of her eyes she could see the shadows of lithe, sun-coloured creatures careering down each side of the clearing like a river parting, silent in their progression but fierce and impossibly fast nonetheless. It made her shiver, that there was so much she might not know about this place. She didn’t dare look until the vision stopped, until the cat in front of her disappeared, then slowly climbed to her feet, retracing her steps back towards the cabin before night fell.
The following evening she moved around like static. The over-ripe tomatoes she had grown in the garden bled into the pasta shells as she ate, absently, sure that there was something outside, brooding beneath the shadows of the pines. Images of the cat from the clearing flitted through her mind.
Placing the stained bowl in the sink her eyes took in the darkness beyond the small, lace-framed window, and she stilled. Anthony wavered like a ghost on the perimeter of the forest line. He stood with his palms upturned, appeasing, as though she might be an animal prone to attack.
When she reached the back door, cracking it open a margin, he stepped forward so that the light from inside fell soft on his features. ‘Diana? Sorry for coming here. I figured this would be your place, I haven’t seen anyone else up this way,’ his words were rushed, frantic, almost. He was afraid. ‘I wanted to warn you about something I saw further up.’
A hot anger clawed at her sternum. ‘Have you laid any traps?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Animal traps... I found a wildcat caught in a trap yesterday. It’s not allowed, not here.’
‘No,’ his eyes were dull and grey, like he hadn’t slept in days. ‘I’m not a hunter, that’s not what I’m doing.’
‘Well, there’s nobody else here.’
‘You can’t know that.’
There was something else he wanted to say—she could see it waiting behind his teeth.
‘What did you see?’
‘Landslide starting, I think, up at the top ridge. It’s causing the riverbanks to swell. I’d hazard there’ll be flooding on its way, as well as whatever the stone and the soil manages to bring down the hillside.’
‘Ok.’
‘And I think you should come down with me so we can be clear of whatever’s on its way.’
Diana shook her head. ‘I appreciate your telling me, but I won’t be leaving this place.’
He took a step forward and she one back in response, a different sort of dance.
‘I understand that, but I really wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving you here.’
‘I’ll weather it out,’ her words were concrete.
Torn, he waited. He hadn’t anticipated this reaction. There was a subtle gentleness to his presence as his head bowed to the side. ‘You really won’t come?’
‘I won’t. I’ve no interest in returning.’
He opened his mouth to continue but she cut him off.
‘I’d suggest you start moving though, if you’re right.’
When morning edged into Diana’s cabin the sound of the river was louder than usual. Her right hand hung like a tulip over the edge of the bed, fingertips kissing a blanket of water. The cold of it raced towards her heart and she sat up quickly, taking in the soaked edges of the mattress.
The river had found its way inside.
She slid off the bed and dragged her calves through the water to the nearest window and climbed through on instinct, landing on the other side, where it was deeper, mid-thigh. The river’s banks had burst and formed a wild ravine, too much for the cabin to withstand. There wouldn’t be enough time to get down into the valley, she would have to make her way further up the mountain.
She had slept in her jeans, and already the denim was heavy in the water as she fought against the flow. All around her branches were lashing against the trunks of trees, rocks tumbling like marbles in the growing sea. At some point she came to a mound of earth that rose slightly higher than the ground around it, giving her aching legs respite from the water. When she searched for an exit, she realised it had trapped her in. There was no easy way out of this without risking getting caught in the current.
But there was a movement too—a shadow flitting through the swath of trees towards her.
‘Diana!’ It had a voice. She knew the familiarity of it should have brought her comfort, but instead she recoiled and darted in the opposite direction, uphill along the small ridge of island managing to push its way out of the river like the spine of a whale. Within moments it ran out of expanse and there was nowhere else to go—in all directions the water was too deep, too fast.
By now the shadow had taken the form of a man. Anthony had followed. He reached a pocket of earth jutting out and over the river’s edge, letting him close some of the distance between them. He scrambled towards the last remaining ridge of ground, one arm wrapped around the protruding root of a tree, the other reaching for her.
‘Jump into the water, towards me,’ he pushed out the words, barely breathing. She could feel the earth shaking under her feet and glanced around at the rising river, considered the possibility that she might rather risk staying where she was. She didn’t know what was waiting for her otherwise. In hours the cabin would be gone, sodden beneath the weight of the water, and only the animals that had seen far enough ahead would be left.
It would be a different world.
She knew this was her fault. She had led Anthony here. She had given too much thought to the past. Even now, it was her father she thought of. How he’d always foretold that he would die alone. Recited it on a morning school run as she sat in the back of their dented Volvo, casting himself an unshakable curse. And she believed it.
Now that his prophesy had come true, she knew her mother would be turning herself inside out, trying to find the beginning and the end of it all. Some people took in guilt like oxygen, let their cells become swollen with it until it spilled out into the words they spoke and the days they remembered. Diana had promised she wouldn’t be like that, but it was in her DNA, coded into her waking and sleeping moments, and as she stared into the growing darkness of the forest, she felt the trees stepping slowly away from her, the grass that bound them pulling into the earth, the sky itself retreating.
‘You have to jump now. Reach my hand,’ Anthony’s voice was labored and urgent.
Diana stared back at him, tried to capture the truth in his eyes as he strained towards her. Resolution burned in them, and beyond that—a blinding fear. His fear was in failing to save another. The ground rolled and trembled again beneath them. This time she jumped away from the earth, letting her limbs stretch forward through the water until her hand reached his, the scarred lines in their palms knitting together.
