Silver in the Wood

lying in a soft white bed, with his wood too far away, listening to old wives’ tales of himself.

He let Silver come to see him a time or two, took care to have his cottage in the same place every time. Braided his hair when he felt Silver’s tread snapping careless twigs on the forest’s edge.

“Silver,” said his guest after a moment. “Henry Silver.”

Tobias looked at the tree. He thought of four hundred years repairing and re-repairing that roof; of scrubbing out the floors, fixing the doors and shutters, planting and replanting his little garden. Four hundred years while his cottage grew around him like a tree growing its rings; Pearl’s mother and grandmother and great - great - great - great

Bullet lodged in his thigh, and he was no doctor; nor was anything that lived in his wood. Well, there it was. He’d live or not. If he lived, he’d manage, and if he died, he’d die in the shadow of the old oak. Maybe it was time. He’d seen nearly four hundred summers come and go by now.

He often intimidated people, being a big and grim-looking sort of fellow; he’d accepted it years ago and had long since stopped trying to be the kind of man who smiled enough to make up for it.

More than half the night was through by the time she arrived, and she’d missed the midnight hour, when she would have been strongest. “How now,” Tobias murmured when he saw her swell into being on the edge of the clearing. She was twisted and reddish, and her eyes lacked the sunlight-in-the-canopy gleam of a healthy dryad.

At once slow deep green rolled over him. He took a breath, and another, smelling old rotting leaves and healthy growth and autumn light. He felt almost as though he could have planted his feet and become a tree himself, a strong oak reaching up to the sky, brother of the old oak who ruled the wood. Ah, he thought, and nothing else.

“The Wild or Green Man figure comes up over and over in this part of the country,” he said at one point, “and is obviously the modern interpretation of one of the so-called ‘old gods,’ a tutelary spirit or woodland demigod. I think the myth is separate from—although similar to—to the myths of the Fairy King, because regardless of the Wild Man’s par