The hay-stubble felt cool and damp under his bare feet. Hans walked on the field-side of the Road, and kept well behind the wood-cart lest Father catch him spying. Not once did Hans let his feet touch the Road itself.
The grim face of the Forest was daunting where it glared at him across the Road. Up ahead the wood-cart creaked and bumped. There the Road bent under the trees. Father turned with it and went into the woods.
All too soon Hans himself stood at the bend in the Road. The trees arched over the cart-ruts. In the gray half-light Hans peered down the gloomy tunnel the trees made over the Road. The tunnel wandered among the trees until branches and bushes and ferns swallowed it from sight.
The Road and its tunnel were empty. Nobody was there. Father was gone. Even the wood-cart’s creak and clatter were gone.
Hans faced the Black Forest all alone.
‘I’m not afraid,’ he said, but all the same he shivered.
Behind his back the Dimmerthal rose like a wan riverbed through the morning mist. The Sun still hid behind the mountains. From somewhere deep in the Schwarzwald a wolf howled, lonely, hungry, mournful.
‘Where did Father go? He’s a man and so am I. If he can go into the Black Forest every day and come back out alive, then where’s the harm for me?’
With a effort Hans lifted up his foot and set it down on the hard clay and pebbles of the Charcoal Burners Road.
Slowly he walked down the Road to where it crawled beneath the woods.
He breath came heavy. His throat came near to choking. The trees loomed overhead darker than the Night’s last tatters. A low wind moaned in their boughs. Hans stopped just shy of them.
There he stood, unable to take another step.
‘What’s the matter with you, you stupid feet? Walk when I tell you to!’ He watched his foot rise – and step back.
He found himself back on the hay-stubble at the Road’s edge.
Hans felt his heart racing. It beat as fast as if he’d run to Mutterbad town and back, all the way up the Dimmerthal and across the main valley and all along the hills. His shoulders were shivering and he couldn’t make them stop. He sat down on the roadside.
‘Give me back my Father,’ Hans said.
Something was standing in the Road underneath the branches, peeking out. It looked like an old man. He seemed to lean out from the shadow just far enough into the light so Hans could see him. He was tall and thin, his garb was blackish-green, and it seemed as though it waved a little in the wind, like the trees were waving. His garb and hat were blackish-green but his face was pale and narrow, his hair and beard were silver, and he wore a big green belt pulled tight about his middle. He fixed Hans with his eye.
‘Who are you?’ asked Hans. ‘What do you want?’
‘Tell your Father I want a word with him,’ said the old man. He shook his head sadly and said, ‘You’re older than I thought. What have you been doing all your life? You’re neither strong nor tall. How will you manage when all the weight of it falls on you?’
The old man stepped backward, deeper into the Black Forest. He grew taller the farther he went, until his hat and garb blended in with the branches and only his eyes stood out, burning like two coals among the topmost boughs.
‘Darkness stalks the Dimmerthal,’ said the old man’s mouthless voice. ‘And I am old and won’t strike where I ought to.’
The faceless eyes began to grow. ‘Beware, beware, the ground fogs come!’
The burning eyes stretched and melted among the red streaks in the sky. Then they were gone.
The Sun appeared above the trees. The Charcoal Burners Road turned pink, and Hans saw his own hands and feet redden in the hot dawn light. But the trees in the Black Forest stayed as dark as Night, as cold as Night, and their black boughs swayed and waved, swayed and danced, slow and stately, awakening, alive with menace.
Hans sat and stared at them.
Before his very eyes, as though he looked into a story, Hans saw how the Schwarzwald stretched back North and East for miles and miles. God had set the Schwarzwald across the Earth’s face in the world’s beginning, and in all the long years since then it had fought off all man’s efforts and held itself as wild as wild could be. Only now it seemed as though the trees were not set in place as they ought to be, but were creeping slowly forward, gathering about the Dimmerthal like bands of robbers crowding up beneath a house they meant to rob.
Deep in the woods Hans thought he saw a thread of smoke running in a circle many miles across. Within that circle the Schwarzwald waxed even darker, even wilder. Bears were gathering inside the smoke-ring, taller than men, shaggy and black, their jaws slavering blood red. Wolves flocked there also, with thick white pelts and smoking tongues. Eagles soared above the smoke-ring, their eyes as sharp as pins. All those things flocked together as if at a fence, and the thought sprang to Hans unbidden: ‘They are waiting for the one whose hand will set them loose.’ More and more of the beasts and dark, unfettered trees were coming. They made no sound but pressed with greater and greater weight against the unseen walls that held them back.
‘Ho there! What are you up to, rascal?’
Hans awoke from daydreams. He blinked and looked about.
Already the Sun had sunk behind the southwest hills. The sky glowed with fire and the Earth was dark. Before him in the road reared a great awkward beast. It was as big as a bear and bristling like a hedgehog. The thing bent closer over him and all at once he knew it.
‘Father!’ He jumped up and hugged him. Father was burdened with a load of sticks strapped across his back rising high above his head. The wood-cart behind him groaned with a full load of logs. Father pushed him back.
‘What’s gotten into you, boy?’
‘Nothing.’ Hans felt himself blushing. He turned awkward and shy, ashamed of himself for being afraid of a daydream like a little boy. ‘I’ll help you with the wood-cart,’ he said. ‘That is, if you don’t feel you can handle it.’
Father turned and spat but kept his eye on Hans. ‘As much as any day,’ he said, and bent over the cart-yoke.
Hans walked beside him. From time to time he glanced sideways at Father hauling the wood-cart, bent crooked under the load of sticks. He counted many care-lines in Father’s face. His hands were scarred and rough from years of toil. His skin, burnt black by weather, seemed as gnarled as tree-bark.
Father grows old, he thought.
Out loud he asked, ‘Isn’t wood-cutting wretched work?’
‘Wretched? It’s brutal hard, and perilous too, until you learn the art.’
‘Surely there’s no art in chopping at logs.’
‘No art at all,’ Father said, ‘for know-nothings.’
They walked awhile in silence.
‘Does Mother know you’re out?’
‘I don’t tell her everything,’ Hans said. He looked down the Road and saw a pale shape waiting before the house-lights. It was Mother, clutching the girls about her skirts and nervously jangling her keys.
‘Oh Hans!’ she said and rushed to him. She smothered him in her arms. Her apron smelled of flour and sugar and cocoa. ‘Where were you all day? You worried me so!’
‘Let go,’ he said. ‘I’m all right.’ But he was ashamed of himself.
‘And you, Herr Waldman, Mr Forester, what have you to say, taking your son away into the Schwarzwald with never a word to me?’
‘No need to pamper him,’ said Father. ‘Don’t you know there’s nothing in the woods for a Forester to fear?’
Mother looked into Father’s eyes. She dabbed her cheeks with her kerchief. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘you Foresters!’
And Father emptied the wood-cart and stacked the logs, and Hans drew water from the well, and they went in to dinner.
That night the Foresters ate on their feast-day dishes, and Mother doled out the soup with the pewter ladle. For once there were no quarrels; Hans sat quiet and thoughtful. He looked at the window where eight candles burned beside a mug of cream and a small cake like the big one Mother made for the family.
‘Tonight is Summer’s Eve, and that’s Mossbeard’s Night. The Old Man in the Woods likes his sweets,’ said Father, seeing where Hans looked.
And Hans nodded and ate his cake slowly and with relish. Mossbeard, the Old Man in the Woods, came every year on Summer’s Eve about the time they mowed the first hay. And Summer’s Day Hans knew was his birthday, and that meant gifts.
And yet even as he filled his mouth with the rich chocolate cake and tart cherries, Hans thought about the Schwarzwald; and a strange unquiet grew in his heart. The others went on eating and Hans eyed them as if they were somehow unknown to him. They laughed and shouted and their voices clashed in his ears. Their faces twisted, noses growing, eyes shrinking, brows sloping back like rats. Their teeth grew jagged and long and yellow. Gerta and Guda were like nothing but beetles in dresses, and their hands were claws. Mother was as fat as a hog and Father bristled like a porcupine. Only Granny seemed herself, knitting in her corner and eating nothing.
She nodded to him with a sly smile and said, ‘The ground fogs are coming, my boy. Look out!’
He shook his head. What is it, what is it? he wanted to ask, but his throat wouldn’t make the words. The walls bent in over his head. Sweat rolled down his face. His hands clutched the chair and his feet jerked back and forth and he couldn’t make them stop.
The others thrust their snouts into their plates. They smeared the dark cake over their drooling muzzles. Mother grunted. Father barked. The twins squealed.
‘Stop it, stop it, stop it, stop!’
Hans shouted and fell forward. His head crashed into the table.
