…and the Tree

The Naturalist, July 5, 2020

It was the morning after the storm and the power was back on. It was Sunday, which meant the kids were still asleep and I didn’t have to work, so I came downstairs to eat breakfast and watch the news. Watching the news had become an uneasy process over the past several months. Between the constantly changing landscape of COVID-19, protests, riots, skyrocketing unemployment, and an election year, the news tended to be a daily rollercoaster of emotions. Today, however, I was uneasy and distracted as my mind kept wandering back to the events of the previous night.

I sat on the couch, slowly spooning cereal into my mouth, when a news story pulled my attention back to the TV.

“…the freak storm. Despite lasting only about 20 minutes, it left hundreds without power and caused minor flooding throughout the western suburbs.” The anchor’s voice was the typical mix of gravity and positivity that was only found in news media. “The real tragedy was when lighting struck a tree that has been the centerpiece of this local park since the land was purchased in 1948...”

As she spoke the video switched to a different camera feed showing local footage. The captioning indicated the site’s name, “Randall Park.”

That’s just down the street, I thought to myself and set down the bowl of cereal.

The camera panned across the park to what was once a tall, thick tree in the center of a grass field. The lightning had split the tree down the middle and lit it on fire. The upper branches and canopy were gone, and what remained of the trunk was black and charred.
This was something I had to see for myself. I went upstairs and changed out of my pajamas into jeans and a short-sleeved shirt, then tossing on my shoes I went back downstairs. However, I pulled up short before leaving the house. Raven sat, blocking the front door. As I approached, she cocked her head quizzically, but didn’t budge.

“What?” I asked her curiously, “You want to come with me?”

Surprisingly, she responded with a single sharp bark.

“OK, I guess I can’t argue with that.” I ran into the kitchen and grabbed the leash. A moment later we were out the front door and walking briskly in the morning heat.

The effects of the storm were immediately noticeable. Downed branches of various sizes appeared haphazardly in yards and streets. Most of them were small enough that they didn’t interfere with vehicle or pedestrian traffic, but every once in a while we saw a larger tree limb that had obviously been dragged into the easement to clear a path for cars or people.

The air was damp and stagnant, as if the storm had blown out any hint of a breeze. By the time we arrived at the park I was sweating and Raven was panting heavily, so we stopped for a moment at the park’s edge under the shade of a small group of trees. Even from our position we could see where the lightning had struck. What remained of the tree was a charred black spike that jutted about fifteen feet into the air. Most of the foliage and upper branches had burned away completely, except for a single massive limb, which must have broken off at the time of the strike and was now lying on the ground perpendicular to the trunk.

Several people had gathered around the tree and were talking in sets of twos and threes. They appeared to be making an effort to keep to the new social distancing protocols put in place during this stage of the pandemic, but kept drifting closer to each other as snatches of conversation or a new observation would jump back and forth between the different sets.

Raven’s panting had slowed, so we got moving again and casually approached the group. About half of them wore various kinds of face coverings but were otherwise dressed in typical summer fashion. Most of them were probably between thirty and fifty years of age, a normal demographic for the neighborhood and there were no signs of the news crew that had taken the footage I had seen earlier on TV.

“Did any of you see it happen?” I said as Raven and I stepped into a gap in the loose ring of observers.

“No,” a woman in athletic tights and a tank top responded. She adjusted her cloth face mask to keep it from slipping while she spoke, “most of us live on the other side of the park. I heard the Jamiesons might have seen something,” she motioned to a red house sitting at a slight elevation across the street.

“Eric said they were out here earlier, when the news crew came through,” this time her head turned to acknowledge a middle-aged man in khakis to her left who was nodding his agreement, “but they went back inside when the camera crew left.”

“Craziest thing I’ve ever heard of, that storm,” the man spoke up. “I’ve lived here since…”

I looked down while the man was speaking. Raven was walking toward the tree where a ring of scorched earth extended about two yards from the base of the trunk. She stopped right at the edge and began to cautiously sniff at the charred ground.

“…back then we didn’t have most of these houses. Oh, there were houses on the lots, but they were smaller. Then as the new crowd moved in people tore ‘em down for these bigger, fancier models…”

I nodded and made appropriate remarks as the man’s story continued, but my attention was focused on Raven. She seemed to be growing agitated. She had reached the length of leash that I had allowed but kept turning back and forth at the edge of the dark circle. I let the leash out a little farther to see what she would do.

“…the Jamiesons moved in about then. They followed all the others and knocked down a nice little rambler to build one of those big modern homes…”

Raven was now pacing back and forth, tracing the forward edge of the charred circle. She would walk out to the full length of the leash and dip her head, sniffing for a moment. Then she would turn and followed the circle’s black rim to the other side and repeat the process. Each time she turned, she became a little bit more insistent, until after the third or fourth time she was pulling slightly each time she reached the end of the leash’s length.

“Excuse me,” I interrupted the middle-aged man’s story and motioned in Raven’s direction, “I need to see what’s going on with my dog.”

He nodded and I stepped away. I drew the leash tighter as I walked over to where Raven continued her pacing, but I also stopped at the black line’s edge. Now that I was close to it, that area of charred earth somehow felt wrong, almost alien.

Raven approached me during her pacing, stopping just long enough for me to absently scratch her head as she passed by. This time, I followed her. Without having to stop at the end of the leash she continued her circumference of the blackened circle, head down, exploring mostly through scent. We had made it almost to the fallen tree limb when she abruptly halted.

A man was standing in her path. He was tall, thin, and very pale, wearing light gray slacks and a dress shirt. A fedora sat on his head at a rakish angle, but he wasn’t wearing a mask and I could see that his face was creased and worried. I could swear he had not been among the small crowd of people when Raven and I had arrived, and I hadn’t noticed anyone come or go in the meantime. He glanced absently down at the dog and then started slightly as he realized that we were both looking at him. However, he recovered quickly, and smiled.

“That’s a fine animal you have there,” he said. His voice had a heavy accent, maybe Eastern bloc, but I was never very good at identifying such things. “May I?” He stepped back, away from the black edge of the circle, but motioned toward Raven as if to pet her.
I stepped closer and shortened the length of the leash, “That will be fine, just be calm. Sometimes she’s a bit aggressive around people.”

He bent down slowly, his long limbs folding up like some kind of scissor-lift, and slowly extended his hand for Raven to smell. She sniffed cautiously for several moments, but then surprisingly gave his hand a hesitant lick. The man smiled again and began scratching between her ears, then moved down to her chest. She opened her mouth and panted happily.

“Well, she seems to like you,” I said, not hiding my surprise.

“I have a way with animals,” he replied.

I glanced at the other people in their scattered twos and threes, but everyone seemed to be pointedly ignoring us.

“My name is Jovan,” he said, still petting the dog. He did not offer his hand and I did not offer mine as I gave my name in return. In the current era of pandemic, handshakes had stopped being a part of introductions.

“Crazy night last night,” I offered.

“Yes,” he responded, that heavy accent forcing me to pay close attention to make out his words, “one of the stranger storms I have heard of, and I have traveled all over the world.”

I hesitated, but for some reason it felt right to ask, “Did you see anything… unusual before the storm?”

“I wasn’t here,” he answered, “I was in the city, I only came out this morning to take a look after I heard about it.” His eyes narrowed slightly, “did you see something unusual?”

I hesitated again and glanced at the other people milling around the area. They still seemed to be ignoring us, talking amongst themselves. Even when one of them glanced in our direction, their eyes slid over us, not truly seeing. I sighed and gave in to my need to share the experience.

“I did,” I spoke slowly, “right before the storm hit, I saw a deer. Actually, it was a hart. A red hart.”

Jovan’s eyes narrowed again, “Truly?” he questioned.

“Yes,” I continued, “we watched each other for several moments, and then it ran off. The storm came up on us right after that.”

He gave Raven a final pat on her flank and then stood up and looked at me for several moments, seeming to weigh something back and forth in his mind. Then he spoke:

“Your dog was tracing part of the edge of the circle. Let her walk it.”

That wasn’t what I was expecting. Still, I decided to comply with the request. I opened the leash and motioned Raven forward. She instantly put her nose back to the edge of the blackened grass and began tracing its circumference with Jovan and I following slightly behind.

Again, I had the irrational feeling of wrongness that seemed to come from the charred ground, and I found myself getting goosebumps despite the heat. I rubbed my arms briefly to get rid of them and Jovan glanced at me, noting my reaction.

“You feel it, too, don’t you?” he said, his accented voice grave.

I didn’t answer but kept my eyes on Raven. We were nearing the great limb that had fallen when the lightning struck. It must have been a foot in diameter and more than twenty feet long. It had fallen next to the base and lay across the ground vertically from the center, extending several feet beyond the blackened area. Somehow it had survived the fire and had suffered little damage apart from its separation from the main tree. Long secondary branches still extended from the primary limb, some of them several inches in diameter, and many shoots of green leaves still remained.

As we approached, I realized that the feeling of alienness was fading once we were a few feet from the fallen branch. Raven came up to the limb, sniffed a few times and then hesitantly turned and began walking into the circle. She picked her way slowly, staying close to the fallen part of the tree as she approached its base.

“I think we can enter there,” Jovan remarked, but I glanced back at the people who still lingered in their sets of twos and threes.
Noting my look, he addressed it, “Don’t worry,” he said, “they won’t notice us. They haven’t noticed you or the dog since you started talking to me.” Then he followed Raven into the circle.

I made a puzzled expression, but I would have to ponder that mystery later as Raven was getting close to the end of her leash. I gritted my teeth, not sure what to expect and walked into the circle. Surprisingly, nothing happened. Yet, I could still faintly feel the wrongness of the circle just a few feet beyond where the fallen branch lay.

Raven had come up to the tree’s base and was sniffing about. Suddenly, she found something and stopped. Her head stayed low to the ground as her lips peeled back in a low growl. I stepped past Jovan and came up to her side, putting a reassuring hand on her neck as I tried to see what she was growling at. It was something on the ground, so I squatted down to get a better look. Raven had gone rigid and the hair on her neck and back was standing tall and stiff in anger, fear, or both.

Finally, I found what she had already spotted. A small pool of liquid, about six inches across, had coalesced between the base of the tree and the start of the fallen limb, but it was covered in a layer of black ash so that it wasn’t easy to distinguish from the burnt earth around it. I reached out to touch it but felt a staying hand on my shoulder.

“Easy,” Jovan’s voice was low in my ear and I realized he had squatted down next to me, “better let me do it.”

Raven relaxed slightly in his presence, but her lips stayed curled and her eyes were focused on the small pool. I retracted my hand and shuffled to the side, remained on my haunches in order to see and stay close. Then, Jovan reached out his own hand and dipped his fingers into the liquid. He drew them back quickly, but the liquid clung stickily, its dark red color streaked black with the ash and soot that had mixed in.

“It is blood,” he said.

My stomach lurched in revulsion mixed with some fear and Raven gave a single, low bark. I shot a glance at the people gathered loosely around the tree, but they still seemed to be indifferent to our presence and a few of them seemed to have trailed off and left. Even Raven’s cry had not drawn their attention.

“My guess,” Jovan continued, “is that it is from the hart you saw earlier last night.”

I was still feeling uneasy, but that didn’t make sense, and I told him so.

“But how?” I asked, “that was hours ago, it should have dried. And the fire, it should have burnt it up. That looks fresh! And why would it be there in the first place.”

Jovan nodded, but continued to stare at the blood on his fingers. He absently rubbed them together, as if confirming to himself the truthfulness of his observations.

“I think you know the answer to the second question,” Jovan’s voice was soft, “this was once more than just a tree. It held life,” he glanced briefly at me, “and power.”

I twitched slightly at the statement. It didn’t make any sense according to how I understood the world, but he was right. 

“Someone killed the hart, and used the sacrifice to take that away.” He stood up and walked a pace or two back down the length of the fallen tree branch.

“The answer to your first question is simple,” he spoke, reverently caressing one of the remaining green leaves that still clung to an adjoining branch two or three inches thick. “Some of that life remains, some of that power. And it preserved the blood.”

There was a sudden snap as Jovan lifted his foot, and with a swift kick broke the smaller adjoining branch from the main limb. I jumped to my feet in surprise, and Raven turned to face him as well, but he ignored us and was already walking back toward the small pool of blood. His hands worked to strip the freshly broken stick of as many leaves and small twigs as possible until he had a rough staff that was almost my height. Then he squatted again, those scissor-lift legs folding up beneath him, and dipped a cupped hand into the soot-covered blood.

I couldn’t help but feel some revulsion and once again I looked around to see if anyone had taken notice. Only a small handful of people remained in the area, and despite Jovan’s activity with the tree, they continued to ignore the three of us.

Jovan drew his hand out, holding as much of the blood as he could cup in his palm. He seemed to weigh it briefly and then began smearing it up and down the length of the short staff he had made.

“What are you doing?” I asked, growing more confused and concerned the more we interacted with this strange man.

“I told you that there is still some power left here,” he replied, “I can save some of it in this.”

Still squatting, he closed his eyes and held the staff in front of him at arm’s length. Then he began to whisper. It was so soft that it was hard to make out, but I could tell it was in a language I wasn’t familiar with, neither did it match his accent. As he spoke, I felt a tingling sensation enter my extremities and the hair on the back of my neck stood up as it would in a storm. Raven whined slightly, but then went silent.

I watched as, impossibly, the blood he had smeared across the staff began to soak into the wood’s surface and disappear. A slight breeze picked up, stirring the remaining leaves on the piece of the tree that lay on the ground, and the tingling in my fingers and toes increased. Something seemed to expand in my mind and then a soft, warm feeling seemed to fill my whole body. My fear and unease that I had felt since the night before faded. Somehow, I knew this was right. This was good.

Jovan’s whispering trailed off, but he remained where he was for several moments, motionless, eyes closed. The breeze slowly stilled and finally he opened his eyes. With renewed energy he stood up, the scissor lift legs stretching high. He seemed even taller now, the staff practically a cane in his hand.

“It is time for me to go,” he said, and quickly walked along the edge of the fallen limb to step outside the circle of ash. Raven and I followed, but a quick glance around showed that the blood next to the tree had also disappeared and we were now alone in the park.
Once we had stepped free of the burnt earth, he turned and extended his arm, offering me the staff.

“There are places I need to go, and some people who need to know about what happened here,” his voice was once again grave, “but I fear your part in this is not yet over.”

I slowly reached out and took hold of the rough wood, but he didn’t immediately release it.

“Strip the bark and smooth it,” he instructed while we both gripped the haft, “turn it into a proper staff.”

“I don’t know what’s going on, I have so many questions,” I started.

“You have stepped onto the path,” he interrupted, “you may not know where it goes yet, but just keep walking. The staff will be your talisman, and Raven will help you find your way. You know that she is a special animal.”

I nodded and he released his grip on the staff, letting it softly fall back against my body.

“Now, I have to go,” he said.

Then he turned and began walking away to the south side of the park. I watched him go for a moment, but then realized something and called after,

“Wait! How did you know the dog’s name? I never told you.”

I heard him laugh as he turned to call back over his shoulder, not breaking stride,

“She told me!”

A few moments later he disappeared into the trees that lined the park. I watched the space where I had last seen him for several minutes, trying to sort out everything that had happened. Finally, I looked down at Raven who had, uncharacteristically, been sitting patiently beside me.

“You have some explaining to do,” I gently chided her.

She cocked her head and gave a single bark in return. Then the two of us began the walk home.