The Forester's Wife

Copyright 1985 David E. Cortesi

Well, well. I will tell of how one forester came by his wife, or was come by.

On a sharp February afternoon, then, observe a forester. Burl is his name, and he is in peril of his life. Hours ago he misjudged a step, and now he sprawls askew over the brow of a frozen waterfall, one arm clutching a glassy boulder, fingers of the other hooked stiff in a snow-crust. One leg hangs free, the other is wedged in the crutch of a frosty branch. On that leg, blood has splotched the King's green leather where it encases what, in better times, Burl has secretly approved as a manly calf. Now, when all he can see is the lichened stone into whose coat of clear ice his beard is being frozen by the warmth of his breath, he is glad that he can't see what, to judge from the pain that radiates from it in time with his pulse, may be the wreck of his leg.

Burl hangs so, the air and snow sucking his heat and dimming his reason, for a small eternity. In its latter eons, a man attuned to the sounds of the wood ought to have heard small, crisp sounds, hardly more than the footfalls of a squirrel, but this man's senses have contracted to the tiny progression of icy drops beneath his stiff, gloved fingers.

Then a clot of glittering snow drops into his face, and a voice says "Well, forester! What have you done?" in tones as clear and light as a clarinet.

He lifts his head -- careful! No. Balance re-caught, he lifts only his eyes, and looks into a face that suits one who goes as lightly as a squirrel: two eyes of startling green in a pale triangular face spattered with freckles; pointed nose and pointed chin both red with cold; all framed in a worn skin hood from which threads of bright copper hair kink and curl at all sides.

"Did my deer lead you to this?" she asks. "Don't answer" (he hadn't been about to) "and don't move" (he is desperate to avoid it) "while I get my" (the face vanishes; he hears thrashing fabric; more snow falls in his eyes) "rope out."

She returns, now as a dark roof to the niche in which his cheek rests, now as a puff of warm breath on his ear. "I must thread this under your arm; don't start. Ah. Now across the back. No, under the pack you goose, yes" (he is breathing snow and both shoulders are in flames) "other arm; good; and a knot. I hope this is the right knot."

Once more he can see: snow. "There, belayed," she says above him, "I think that will --," and all at once his fingers and forearms give up. He falls free for a span (far enough to believe the fall will be unchecked), then comes to rest in the loop of rope. Relief is exquisite pain in his shoulders; it dances with the unrelieved agony in his leg, and he faints.

And wakes in the same posture, hanging against stone and ice, but now it is twilight. A hand is rubbing his cheek.

"Wake, forester, you must wake." Something warm butts his lips. He opens an eye and squints: it is a cup of stitched leather. It steams.

"Ah, good; can you sip?" He slurps a little; it is only tea, but warm.

"That's right. Sip again." He does. "Now: I can lever you up bit by bit, but you must help. You have to take up and hold the slack as I make it. Can you move your arms?"

Of course he can, or, well, can he? Yes; he orders an arm and it moves. And the other? Yes, it moves also. They weigh a great deal; he brings both up beside his head.

"Capital. Hold this." It's the end of a rope, powdered with snow. He holds it. "Take up on it." He does. "Good. You'll be up in a minute. What?" He is about to say that he knows three distinct rigs by which she could raise a body, be it unconscious, dead, or dancing a reel, and to explain one or all three, but suddenly it comes to him that taking slack in a rope is easy, next to speech. He shakes his head. "Fine, let's begin." She moves out of view again.

Heavily, by jerks that jolt his leg, with pops as the buttons of his coat scrape off on stone, spitting and blowing as icy snow is heaped into his face, he is raised up. When at last he can roll over and be supported by the Earth, he does so, and faints again.

During the forester's previous faint, the woman had built a fire on the shore of the frozen stream and brewed tea. During this one she turns to completing a rough camp, gathering evergreen boughs to make an insulating couch, erecting over it a skin lean-to to reflect and trap the heat of the fire.

Then she looks at the forester, shakes her head ruefully, and turns to half-dismantle the tent. That done, she squats behind his head and fits her arms under his shoulders. She takes three deep breaths -- in through the nose, hissed out under the teeth -- and hoists the brawny shoulders. Taking small backward steps, breathing rhythmically and loudly in the winter afternoon, she drags him back to the shore and up to the campsite.

When she has his bulk disposed on the couch, she ransacks his pack, finding a bulky robe which she wraps over him, and a folded linen shirt which she admires for a moment before she tears it into broad strips (nipping the hem in her teeth to start the tear, winding each strip quickly around spread fingers).

Hunched under the tent, she slips off the forester's short fur boot and considers the bloody leg. The King's soft green leather may look well on a healthy man, but it impedes examination of an injured one: with a small, glinting knife whose scabbard hangs around her neck, she slits the garment from ankle to mid-thigh. Folding it out of the way, frowning, she examines and binds the worst of the abrasions and cuts above and below the knee.

In deep night he wakes to a wash of air cold as iron. She is sitting up to feed the fire, her motion lifting the robe from him. He feels weak and febrile, his upper body is stiff and painful, his knee aches and the flesh around it burns. I shall not be able to sleep, he thinks, and is unconscious at once.

Again he wakes. Above the coals, above the trees across the stream, is a faint bluing of the sky. The woman is curled against him, her back to his chest. She snores lightly. He is stiffly erect, in his leather garb, against the roundness of her in hers. Muzzily, he considers the recent past and possible futures. Perhaps he moves; her snore cuts off.

She turns her head and regards him sidelong. "Do you need to pee?" He is startled to realize that he does, urgently, and nods while he is still making up his mind to deny it. "I thought you might. Give me your hand, it's only a step."

She has trodden a neat path in the snow and laid branches on it to break the slickness. He limps along it, his arm on her shoulder. The snow seems to glow of itself in the almost-dark. The cold is shocking. They take only four steps past the head of the couch and stop. "Go ahead," she says, her voice clear in the night, "it drains away from camp, here."

Her seamless preparations, her inexorable logic, tickle him and he begins to chuckle as he works at his trouser-band with one hand -- then ceases, drawing breath with a hiss when, teetering, he brings weight onto his injured leg.

"Careful," she says, bracing him. "Get on with --," and ends in a huge yawn.

The orange glow of the fire is a balm, the faint warmth remaining in the robe a healing, the knobby lift of the boughs beneath him a caress. Once more sleep takes him.

Sunlight, when it first reaches over treetops to the bankside, sparks diamonds in the frost on every twig. A nuthatch, fluttering up from a branch to seek its breakfast, shakes loose a skein of gems. The woman, emerging onto the bank from the forest behind, pauses to watch it fall, and smiles. Then with a sweep of her arm, she throws a coil of rope over the same branch and hauls the free end in.

At the rope's other end a short, hooked branch threads the exposed tendons of the hind-hocks of a dead deer. The woman hauls on the line, and at first the carcass comes easily, plowing a wake in the snow with its haunches, its stiff forelegs waving like the masts of a drifting boat. Leverage lessens as the deer comes closer. On her fourth drag the deer stops and she only swings herself into the air (it weighs nearly as much as she does), but she is prepared for this, too. She flips a loop around a stub branch at her feet and, holding the free end taut with one hand, pulls at center of the vertical span with the other as if drawing a huge bow. The carcass draws a grudging inch closer. Her upper hand yields as her lower takes up the slack. Sawing at the rope with alternate sweeps, sawing at the air with her breath, she brings the deer up. When its hindquarters clear the snow she stops briefly, bends between the furry legs and, neatly, with the shiny knife, cuts around the beast's anus (peering at the work around the smoke of her own breath), brings forth the great bowel-end (eyes closed, tongue in the corner of her mouth as she feels for a sure grip) and ties it closed with a scrap of twine. She pushes her hood back with the heel of a bloody hand and returns to the line, where the work of lifting soon shakes free her mop of orange hair. When the animal's chest clears the snow, she bends to tie off the line and, straightening, sees across the clearing the forester's face, black hair and beard tousled, regarding her over the shelter skin.

"Good morning, forester! Make up the fire; I'll bring something sweet for breakfast." She waves. He stares. She squints and says "Hmmm," and, frowning, turns back to the deer. She inserts the tip of her knife between its legs and, slowly, guarding the blade-tip with a fingertip to avoid cutting into a bowel, steering carefully around the pizzle, she opens the front of the skin to the breastbone. Steaming bowels slide past her as she exposes the liver and slices off two generous collops.

These she brings to the fire, and stands across it from him with one dripping slice draped on each out-turned palm. He is rebinding the linen strips outside the slit leather leg, to hold it in place. When he looks up his expression, as she feared, is as black as his beard.

"My name is Filon. What are you called?"

"I am Burl."

"Good morning, Burl. Will you eat with me?"

He starts to say one thing, then another; waves a hand; finally, harshly, looking away, says "I owe you my life. Thank you."

"You are welcome. Think no more about it. Will you join me for breakfast?"

"I --" He turns squarely to her. "How can you!"

"What?" Her smile is dazzling. "I'll cook both of these and then, if you don't want yours, I can have it later." She squats and begins to thread each cut of meat on a barked wand. He realizes that she had prepared even these wands while he slept, either before bed or in the dawn. She plants one to droop over the coals, then the other, and sits back on her heels.

He looks. A drop of blood falls from one cut to sizzle. At the sound, he shouts "No!" and sweeps both wands away with a swing of arm.

"Have a care!" She starts back. One lump steams in the coals, the other sinks in snow. "What--?" She looks up, furious.

"It is the King's meat!" Firmly.

"Let the King come to breakfast; I'll cut him a slice, too!"

"I wear his uniform; I can't eat poached meat with a, a, a --"

"Poacher!"

"You said it."

"I do, but I don't wear it."

"You don't --" He shakes his head, "You hunt in the Royal forest; you wound a deer, you lose it --"

"Oh, you knew, then."

"Knew! What do you think I was doing but following the track of a wounded animal to finish it, when..." He waves toward the waterfall's brink.

"When you slipped on the ice like a clumsy thing."

"Where were you? Looking for another deer to wound, I suppose."

"I do not leave wounded beasts to suffer," she flared at him. "I had not expected to be out --"

"Were you hunting or not? A huntsman expects to be --"

"I usually kill what I shoot at! I had to go home and settle Ma and get my pack before I could follow. When I found the slot all trodden by your great feet, I came on only to see who was stealing my meat."

"The King's meat."

"Will the King starve in the winter?"

"Which I am sworn to guard."

"My Ma and brother will, lacking meat."

"Can you not farm, like honest folk?"

"Have you lived a winter on pickled cabbage and moldy beets?"

"Poachers are hanged, Filon!"

"First they must be caught, Burl!"

They glare across the embers. He puffs his cheeks in exasperation. "My pack is--?"

"There," she points.

He dons it. He takes a step, looks at her, puffs again, takes a step on the injured leg and nearly falls.

"The ridge pole," she nods at the lean-to and he looks, too, "would make a staff. If you wanted a staff."

He limps back to it, slips it from under the skin, and departs, treading carefully, awkwardly, over the frozen river and up the far slope. She crouches close over the fire, back to the river. Later, she resumes cutting up the carcass.

Burl pumps his way up the ridge that rises east of the river. Over it, in the next valley and higher up, is the lodge where he winters with two others. His blood warms as he climbs, returning flexibility to his leg, so that when he reaches the crest he only occasionally uses the staff. Still, it is a long walk on only cold bacon from his pack and no drink but snow, so when he reaches the crest he slaps the snow from a slanting trunk with his gloves and straddles it to rest.

He sits on the tallest of three ridges, parallel wrinkles in the green and white skirt of the mountain that thrusts up its knobbed head to the North, his right as he sits. In the valley behind his right shoulder lies the lodge he and his fellows keep up for the use of the King or, more often, his guests.

Below him the valley sweeps away and down. The hasty winter sun is already past the median; the trees on the far slope are gloomy, their blue shadows pooling in the bottom of the valley. He looks toward the ford where he spent the night, and beyond it to where, lost in the winter haze, farmsteads begin on the shallowing slopes. Somewhere there, well upslope from the wealth of Kingston town, in the shadow of the western ridge where the soil is thin, must lie Filon's home. Would her Ma fret at her absence? Why was nothing said of a Pa? Well, that was common enough. Why must a woman of such skill, such blooming health, be a poacher unashamed? Filon! Felon, more likely, and well-set to end as one. Would they hang a woman, or be lenient and only crop her ears and brand her? A vision flays him, of blood clotting the orange hair over cropped ears. He hammers the log with a fist.

From far up the valley to his right drifts the faintest yelp of a hound.

It is noon before Filon finishes butchering, stacks the choicest cuts on the skin and wraps the whole in a bundle. The remaining carcass and the offal, four-fifths of the deer, she leaves in a heap for the forest scavengers. She recovers the cut of liver from the snow and, blowing up the fire, props it broil while she cleanses her hands and forearms with snow, then warms them over the coals. She crouches on her heels to eat the liver, cutting strips with her knife, catching them in two fingers, leaning over the coals to swallow them without dripping on her knees. Afterward, she trims two poles to make a travois, recovering to complete it the stick that had spread the deer's heels. She ties the bundle of meat and hide to it.

Who hunts the upper valley? Burl scrambles onto his log and peers into the blue-white distance (grabbing a branch for balance, impatiently brushing off the snow it sprinkles on him). There: at the limit of vision, a snowy knoll stands in sun above the flooding shadow. Over it flows a scatter of dots, then flecks of yellow and brown: horsemen in the livery of -- Burl turns to look down the valley, knits his brows, looks north again -- yes, the livery of Egmont, Earl Marshall, Holder of the Black Rod, the King's especial friend. And a saddle-rooted madman who thinks nothing of riding up the west valley and home down the eastern one in a day.

And a choleric defender of royal prerogatives, whom Burl has seen ride down a tinker who'd encamped in the forest fringe.

Well, what of it? In an excess of energy, he leaps from the log and faces homeward. Surely a sensible poacher would be well clear of the valley before a pack of hounds and irritable, home-bound nobles cantered through it. Wouldn't she?

Muttering, he swings right and strikes back south along the ridgetop. He stops often to listen for the progress of the dogs.

After scattering the campsite, kicking the couch apart and stamping snow into the fireplace, she brings the travois poles to her shoulders and sets off downstream. At first she has to work slowly between the thin growth on the bank, encountering several balky stretches where the travois jams. Once below the frozen waterfall she can turn out onto the frozen stream and walk faster, although the footing is tricky and the poles jar her shoulders as they bump over snow-covered boulders. The shadow of the western ridge is climbing the eastern slope of the valley.

The first dog into the abandoned camp misses the remains of the slaughtered deer; it is sniffing the latrine site when a second finds the meat. In a minute, the heap of offal is the center of a ring of wagging tails; in two there is a fight over the head; in three, panting grooms have run up and waded in to restore order. In four, the clearing is crowded with shouting grooms, yelping hounds, gesticulating nobles on blowing, stamping horses. The head groom feels the fireplace, looks up at a horseman, spreads his hands. The horseman makes circling gestures, and men on foot spread out toward the treeline in the twilight. One finds the track of the deer being brought in, others find the confusion of tracks above the waterfall. But another finds the clear sign of a load being dragged south. The hunt leader is pleased. They've started no game in a long day; the spoor points on their homeward track; why not chase a poacher for sport? After a few minutes of milling confusion, the dogs spill out on that trail.

From the ridge Burl can hear precisely when the hounds behind find the remains of the slaughter. Soon after, he sees what he'd prayed not to see: the dot of a walking figure flickering between the bare trees fringing the river. He angles downslope to intercept it. Then the belling of a pack on a scent (so different from the amiable dog-talk of the early afternoon) reaches him, and he begins to leap and bound down toward the river.

Born up by rhythmic motion and easy, downhill travel, Filon is in a comfortable trail-trance when the pack-music reaches her, and at first it has no meaning. And then it does: a hunting pack, on a scent, coming down the valley behind her. They might have started a deer farther up and be running it down toward her, or they might be on the scent of her load of venison, or her own scent. It makes no difference; in any event she will soon be overtaken by dogs, and if they have no interest in her, the huntsmen riding after them cannot fail to have one.

She bends forward and begins to run, the poles hopping and yanking behind her, her heart making sick leaps in her chest. She scans the banks ahead, searching for anything that would promise escape. A climbable tree? and be treed like a cat! A cave? and be dug out like a badger! She could drop the meat; it would slow the dogs, but men hunt by sight, and her track would betray her. Where is the sun? Half an hour till sunset at least.

Then a green figure bursts through brush in a cloud of snow to stumble and roll out onto the river at her feet. It is Burl, his face brick-red between hair and beard. Both of them are gulping for breath. He tries to speak, gives up with a wave of frustration. He takes the travois from her shoulders and yanking, jerking, opens the heavy parcel of meat. He takes the largest piece and, grunting, throws it full-armed high over the bank. And bends for the next.

She is gasping still, hopping around him, as he throws the next piece, and the next. "No. good." she gasps, "They. will. know." She waves upstream. "My track."

He heaves another chunk. "No. Got to get it where -- uh!" (he throws another) "dogs won't scent. Uh!"

One piece is left. He kicks the travois onto a flat area, lifts the heavy hide, and flings it flat on top like a bedcover. "There," he says, pointing to the hide, "Get down."

When the Black Rod's party overtakes the dogs, they find the pack clustered around a forester who is supporting a travois. Beyond, in the rapidly-gathering gloom, a huntsman might make out two travois-trails, one going and the other coming, at least as far as the nearest bend.

"Ho, forester." The Black Rod edges his horse into the group and leans down. "Burl, isn't it?"

"Yes, m'lord." Burl pulls off his cap. "From High Lodge."

"Ah, good. Is it you we've been chasing this evening?"

"No, my lord, it was a gypsy, I think. I saw him as he was trotting home with his provisions done up pretty as you please." He pats the pole on his shoulder. "I tried to flank him up-slope, but he must have heard me. At any rate, he dropped the load and made off sharp. I scraped my leg a bit this morning," he gestures easily to his torn and bandaged leather hose, "and didn't think I could head him, so I picked up his meat instead, for the larder up at the lodge, with your lordship's permission."

The Black Rod's attention has wandered to the last pink gleam of light on the eastern crest. "Very good, er, Burl," he says, glancing down. "Very good; you keep it. Well, folk, day is going, and we should as well, eh?"

When the last clatter and yelp has faded to silence and the sky has gone from green to midnight blue, Burl is still plodding upriver, his burden hopping and thumping behind him. At length it begins to hop and jerk in a rhythm of its own, and to emit muffled sounds, so he puts it down. Crouching over the bundle, he teases out a corner of the odorous skin and says "I dub you venison. Did you hear the Earl Marshall say I may keep you?"

From inside the flap she says "I hate to spoil a good hide, but I am about to slice free with my knife."

"A pity; if I could keep you tied, you couldn't go poaching again."

"And what would my poor Ma stew with her cabbage?"

He loosens the rope and unwraps her. "A forester's wife cooks venison when she likes."

She is slimed with blood and fat from the hide. She wipes one side of her face on a shoulder. "Done." She wipes the other side on the other shoulder. Blinks. "Has a forester's lodge a hearth and water, I wonder?" He squats on his heels, watching her, grinning.