At dawn, the carving-deer arrive. I emerge from the half-daze of nighttime to the warm glow of sun upon my leaves and the vibrations of hooves over the earth. The day is damp, the dew of morning softening the moss. The bees’ nest is waking with a sweet honey hum. From the broken place, where the mold makes its slow colonizing progress, I feel the stabbing tendrils of a now-familiar ache.
Reaching my awareness down into my roots, I tap into the mycorrhizal network. Through the collective flow of the forest’s sensory data, in the electrochemical signals carried along fibers of mycelia and whispered among roots, I track the carving-deer’s progress: their long necks brushing against my neighbors’ lowest leaves, the skittering wave of their footsteps over bracken. They take their positions. I feel the heat of their blood-warm bodies. Then the mammal-roots, tunneling through soil, uncoiling swift as worms from the deer’s planted hooves. The feelers burrow into the shallowest layer of surface soil. They twist around the raw, exposed ends of our own roots, entwining close enough to emit a pulse.
Greetings, they say in their rudimentary electrical speech.
They have come at the elders’ request, come to divide me from my wound. The carving-deer subsist on our bark, eating away at overgrowth and rot. We are their source of food and shelter; they trim our ragged ends with their vast pincers and seal the cuts with their saliva. We use them to self-prune. A clean break is always safer than a ragged one, where insects or disease might take up residence.
Through eons of this symbiosis, they have evolved root-like feelers that can reach beneath the earth and intertwine with ours, the better to communicate what may be taken without causing harm. Speaking to them is not like speaking to my own kind, each message electrochemically tagged with origin and recipient and flowing from root to root as smooth as thought. Instead, their speech is hazy and amorphous, reaching us as if from a great distance with much of the accompanying information corroded or lost. It is the price of having their minds concentrated inside their heads, rather than diffused throughout their bodies as ours are. A great deal is lost on the narrow journey from brain-organ to root-tip.
I greet them respectfully, but I hesitate. I am not certain I want to go through with this procedure. Currents of wind flutter and interweave in my leaves. The oozing fungal growth eats at my decay.
When our Elder fell, she took a part of me with her.
It only makes sense that one I grew so close to would hurt me when she broke. She had been with me since my seedlinghood. I still remember the day of our first meeting: that moment when my searching roots spread a little further, among the fertile lattice of the soil, and found hers.
Until that moment, I had not known I was alone. I spoke to mycelia, of course, and birds and earthworms, and the beetles that made their home in my bark and the caterpillars that laid their soft egg masses on the undersides of my leaves, but all that paled in comparison to the touch of another mind like my own. Elder’s roots were firm and inevitable as stone. They pulsed with wisdom, extending deeper into the earth than I had thought possible. My grasping root-tips, delicate and fibrous by comparison, wrapped curiously around hers. Thoughts sparked and flowed from her body into mine. In an instant, my world widened. I tasted sugar and wrapped greedily around the root.
Hello there, little one, she said to me, her tone at once patient and amused. Who are you?
She fed me sugar-water and bolstered me with phosphorus and nitrogen, and in doing so, she taught me what it was to be a part of the forest. Before I entwined with anyone else, before I knew neighbors or seedlings younger than myself, I was joined to her. Through her, the stories and sensory experiences of others flowed to me, histories and mythos and collective knowledge, wisdom passed down through millennia of thought and interconnected growth. It was through her that I first spoke to those who would become my neighbors, beings whom I had known only from aboveground, that limited sphere of weak vibrations and scent-tags on wind. In time my roots would twine around theirs and we would grow together, speech passing between us as effortlessly as the thoughts that travel through my own body, weaving over seasons and decades into that vast interconnected web that makes the world. She was my point of entry, my lifeline.
A summer storm brought her down. The rain had poured for days, thinning the soil. We all felt the looseness of the earth around our roots, the cold trickle of water softening our sapwood, the frantic clamor of insects as they fought to crawl to the surface before they drowned. Elder’s core was hollowed by a slow-acting mold. Though she was the most ancient among us, she was weakened. We wove our roots with hers, sustaining her and holding her in place the way she once sustained us, but we are mortal beings, and there is only so much we can do.
The fall was too fast to say anything, too fast for thought. She pitched forward, and the cracking of her roots was like lightning. The volley of pops and tremors shattered through us. The earth itself opened. Nests, entire societies of insects were upturned and exposed. In an instant, roots which for a lifetime had shaped the contours of our world were torn from us. Our connection to an entire swath of forest flickered and went dark.
When she fell, the vast span of her branches clipped my own. For one fleeting moment I held her weight with the broad span of a single bough. I felt the limb tear from me, the wood splinter. Then it was gone, and in its place was an open wound, raw and terrible, my heartwood exposed, and my limb lay on the ground, leaves dull and lifeless, grotesque among the body of our Elder whose branches now touched the earth for the first time in the centuries since they sprouted from the black soil.
We still feed her remains. Sugars, nitrogen, news of the ever-growing world, we channel it all toward her place in the earth. It does not feed her, of course; she is gone. But the ritual sustains us. The remnants of her roots entwine with ours, well-worn topographies underground.
The day after Elder fell, the carving-deer arrived to trim the ragged gash. But I refused. To amputate the wound is to cut away pieces of my mind, and already so much of me had been torn away.
Elder was gone; so was the branch that had grown closest to her, the branch whose chemical pathways stored so many of my memories of our time together. Where once my mind roamed free, I now could extend my awareness no further than the abrupt break. Those raw and seeping splinters were all I had left to ground me in what was gone. Not even memories, but hints of memories lost: a gift of sweet water when I was ill. The warmth of sun dappling my branches through hers. A few lines of a poem she spoke on an icy winter’s night, when sap freezes and thoughts flow slow, the end and beginning forgotten.
I have waited too long. Now the fungus has taken root in the wound and reached its tendrils deep toward my heartwood. Concerned for me, my neighbors called for the carving-deer to return. Yet still I am not ready.
I would rather let the fungus eat away at me from the inside, let it hollow me slowly into a quiet oblivion, than to lose so much more of her at once.
One of my neighbors sends a pulse of energy into my roots. The energy carries a memory. The chemical signals bloom and unfurl in me, releasing their contents into my thoughtstream like spores.
The memory is of Elder. Through it, I witness Elder from my neighbor’s place: the steady presence of her roots, defining the landscape underground. The abundant shadow of her crown, home to microcosms of soft mosses and birds that wove their nests in her boughs. It is the birds that the memory homes in on. They are creatures of light feet and soft vibrations, and with surprise I realize that they are the same birds that have taken up residence in my branches, weaving their nest from Elder’s fallen twigs.
My neighbor’s message is clear.
We still need you. Don’t make us mourn you as well.
She remembers Elder, too. I am not the sole archive of her life. Memories of Elder are seeded throughout the forest, rooted in our very bark and being as surely as the sugars she fed us are the make of our own trunks. As surely as we sprout from earth.
Earth is dead things. The soil we root in, the very medium through which we speak, is made of ancestors. Their body-minds are decomposed by worms and fungi into the raw stuff of being. I am made of roots I have never touched, of bones and birds and carving-deer and whole societies of plants that are long extinct. When I think, I think with Elder.
The carving-deer await. I feel the mind-link, the open stream of their alien consciousness. I feel, too, the waiting feeds of all my neighbors, ready to bolster me with strength and sugars when the teeth slice into my flesh. They remember; they were wounded, too. I reach out to them for balance as I give my assent.
The pincers open. I feel the heavy weight of my crown, the rotting bough, the lithe flow of thought through the remaining healthy branches. I feel the wholeness of myself, and the blur at my edges where pieces disappear.
Earthworms wriggle at my roots. The blade presses bark.
Susannah Duncan is a writer, bookseller, and educator living in Philadelphia. She studied literature and creative writing at Bryn Mawr College, where her fiction was awarded the Alexandra Peschka Literary Prize. She can be found making zines with the West Philly Dog Bowl Zine Club, writing plays in collaboration with third-graders, and climbing trees.
Icon Credit: Deer by Legona from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0).
