Beast

By Susan Palmer

There is a place in the forest the animals will not go. A place which whispers of danger and smells of death and foul rottings, where even the rain falls softly, so as not to disturb the thing that hides in the dark recesses of the thorny bower ‘neath the diseased cedar tree. It is a thing of sour disposition, the last of its kind, old and half blind. Only three whiskers remain, jutting out of the scars of a mouth once firm but now hard and never able to close fully. The black and grey tissues are full of tiny lumps, like pine sap hardened on the tree where long ago a limb fell off under a heavy load of snow. The rheumy eyes are closed for now, oozing mustardy pus, moving in jerks at the dreaming, the breath now quick, now relaxing; and an occasional grunt from deep in the belly rising like sulphur gasses out of thick bogs, bursting forth with an audible pop.

The end of winter is in the air, white rime instead of dew on morning leaves, the winds occasionally moaning in the tops of the pines over how cold it is and carrying away the last of the myrtle and oak leaves to the river’s cold embrace, then testing the holly leaves, dusty with the summer and fall accumulation of dirt firmly attached to their stiff branches, ready with needle tips to defend themselves against deer.

But the deer have not been here for months, the path unused, beginning to fade back into the forest ways. Sprouts of berry bush and ferns and a few vines venture to occupy the place once paved with pine needles. It is the highway from a stream, through mushroom groves and on to the rocky place at the bottom of the tall bones of the Earth, which have stood for millions of years five hundred feet tall, steep, stained in tall stripes over time with iron-rich seepage which never was enough to do more than feed the spring growth of ferns weakly clinging to cold rock, wiggling tiny roots into crevasses too narrow to allow real plant growth, but cool and dark against the summer light.

This place, this path, even the holly all know the bower creature. They remember his singular birth, his infant play with rabbits, the death of his mother in the same month he first ate apples. They saw how he explored his hunting prowess, feasted, and suffered the pangs of poisons in eating experiments, his wary defense of his birthplace against an outcast puma, and the long weeks of recovery before he came into his full power, useless in this place of utterly passive creatures, so that sometimes he felt compelled to beat his ruined face against the rough bark of the pines in an attempt to feel alive and strong. His roaring rages raised fear in all warm-blooded residents of the wood. They watched the struggle in his tenth year to emerge over a week’s time from the heavy tangle of the ancient pine that lightning dropped on him while he slept by the bog’s edge. He is lean.