There was once, long before you and I came into the world, a boy named Hans who lived in a little lonely house with his Father and Mother, twin sisters, and Granny. They were subjects of the Prince of Mutterbad, whose realm lay just north of the Alps. But the little lonely house where Hans lived stood far from Mutterbad town, at the very bottom of Dimmerthal Valley where the last hay-fields fell beneath the shadows of the dark trees of the Schwarzwald, the mysterious Black Forest of legend and folklore.
Each morning at first light Hans looked out through his crooked attic window, and watched Father take pack and axe and trundle the empty wood-cart onto Charcoal Burners Road. Father earned his bread as a woodcutter, and Mother called that a poor trade, but somehow there was enough on the table each night, though never anything left over.
‘Come with me, if you’re eager for some work,’ said Father, looking up over his shoulder.
‘I’m never eager for work,’ answered Hans. It was an old joke between them. Father waved and walked on up the Road to where it bent under the trees.
The Schwarzwald crouched just across the Road, dense and dark. Granny said the trees were full of strange creatures, but Hans wasn’t sure because he never crossed the Charcoal Burners Road or set foot in the woods.
He shut the attic window and crawled back under the covers of his snug warm bed.
The Sun was high in Heaven when Hans awoke again and pulled on the first rags that came to hand. He went down to the kitchen where Mother fed him.
‘I’ve run low on water, fetch me some,’ she said.
‘You say that every morning,’ Hans answered, and went on eating. Mother sighed and stooped over the pots and sighed again, until at last Hans pushed away his plate and stomped out. He filled two buckets of water from the well, then two more, and two more. At last thirteen buckets stood upon the kitchen floor, all the buckets he could find.
‘And I hope that’s enough for you,’ he said, ‘because I won’t touch that well-rope again this year.’
Mother shook her spoon at him. ‘What a good-for-nothing you are!’
‘Good-for-me, you mean,’ Hans answered, and went out.
In the sunshine he forgot his quarrel with Mother right away. Gerta and Guda were playing among the geese, and Hans joined them for awhile until he tired of his little sisters’ childish games.
He climbed up on the wood-shed roof. Already the shed was half stacked with wood split and cured and ready to trade with the farmers up the valley. Hans sat and swung his legs over the brink as hard as he could, watching the farmers mowing hay up the Dimmerthal.
‘Ah! it’s too hot for such work, is everyone in the world a fool but me?’ He swung down and dropped from the end of the roof.
Granny was sitting in her rocking chair at the end of the porch, looking into the woods. Hans sat beside her with his back against the post facing the other way. Granny wouldn’t speak to anyone but Hans, and even to him she spoke only rarely. Now she watched him with her sly old eyes while his thoughts wandered out across the world.
‘I can’t be a woodcutter’s son,’ he said.
‘Why not?’ asked Granny.
‘I must be more than that. Or at least something different.’
‘Ah, so that’s the way it is?’
‘I don’t feel like a woodcutter’s son, for one thing.’
‘But what else would you be?’ Granny asked. She gave a funny little twitch of her hand, making Hans look up the fields. ‘A cow in the fields?’
He watched the milch-cow grazing. ‘Yes, I could be a cow,’ said Hans. But he thought about eating nothing but grass all day and going under the prod into the byre at night. ‘No, that’s not the life for me!’
‘Oh. An eagle in the sky?’
High in the sky he watched a dark speck floating. He saw himself soaring on high breezes in the Sun, looking down on the world. ‘Oh, that’s nicer! But it’s lonely up there and a little cold. I miss the feel of earth beneath my feet, and my sisters’ gabbing.’
A twinkle kindled in Granny’s eye. ‘A wolf, then – a fearsome wolf in the woods,’ she said, and he turned and looked deep into the Schwarzwald.
He glimpsed a beast lurking among the dark trees. He saw himself prowling through the forest at night with his fellow wolves.
‘They take what they want, the best of all there is,’ he said. ‘That’s a good life for a bold lad like me. But even so it doesn’t feel quite right. No, it seems there’s nothing else for me to be.’
‘Hans doesn’t know what he is,’ said Granny.
Hans smiled a big foolish grin. He loved his Granny best, even though she mocked him. ‘I guess there’s no better life than this. I have everything just the way I want it. So I shall stay exactly as I am forever.’
‘Will you indeed,’ said Granny. And she chuckled, so that Hans would long remember those foolish words of his. But how was he to know that this would be the last happy day of his life?
For it happened on that very night that a storm rattled the crooked attic window and rain thundered on the roof. Hans couldn’t sleep a wink. He had no fear of storms, but there seemed something dire in this one, that went beyond mere weather. He thought of old men’s tales of Loomland in the clouds, of mountain-giants throwing boulders across the sky. And when at last he fell asleep he dreamed his old Dream, the nightmare that had plagued him for as long as he could remember.
In the Dream he was standing in the middle of the Charcoal Burners Road. Mother was calling but his back was to the house and somehow he couldn’t turn around. The Schwarzwald scowled down at him through the oaks and firs of the Devil’s Cathedral.
And Hans fancied he saw where Lost Souls Path began, under the big oak they called the Mankiller because long ago robbers hanged Prince Joachim Firebrand from its branches. Something drew Hans across the Road beneath the Mankiller’s heavy, drooping leaves. He reached out to the trunk. He knew that if he touched the Mankiller something dreadful would happen. And yet he saw his hand reaching for the trunk and he could neither halt it nor draw it back. His fingers neared the bark – and he woke.
‘Ah!’ he shouted and fell out of bed.
He sat on the floor in his attic room. The house lay still below him. The storm had passed and quiet weighed on the night.
Hans went to the window. Many times since he was little he had dreamed that nightmare. What did it mean? This time he had almost touched the Mankiller. Never before had he come to close to touching it. What would happen if he did?
For a long while he stared across to the trees in the Devil’s Cathedral. They rose up taller than the house, black as pitch against the stars. He shuddered.
At last pale cracks appeared in Heaven and Hans heard a bustling in the house below. He watched Father take pack and axe and trundle the empty wood-cart onto the Charcoal Burners Road.
‘Come with me, if you’re eager for some work,’ said Father, looking up over his shoulder.
‘I’m never eager for work,’ answered Hans, but he didn’t laugh today. Father waved and walked on up the Road like every day.
But this morning Hans put on his clothes and followed him.
