Story time

We will eventually forget our stories if we don’t renew our capacity for wonder. Walter Benjamin has written that we are now much more interested in information than in wisdom, and information must be plausible, whereas wisdom from afar often employed the miraculous. - Hollow Places: An Unusual History of Land and Legend by Christopher Hadley

Once upon a time, an oak tree that had long, long ago been an acorn and was now growing down, in the late stages of nearly a millennium of life, decided it was time to pass on his wisdom.

His trunk was a hollow as an old snail's shell and big enough to squeeze in representatives from many of the woodland families - Aurochs, Bear and Elk, Wolf and Deer, Fox and Hare, Lynx and Rabbit, Pine Marten, Stoat and Rat, Weasel and Mouse, Badger, Squirrel, Vole, Frog, Toad, Owl, Goshawk, Raven, Rook, Crow, Jackdaw, Jay, Magpie, Pigeon, Blackbird, Robin, Wren and all the other little birds that sing the woodland symphony. Not forgetting the worms and beetles, flies and bees, wasps and millipedes, moths and butterflies, slugs and snails and all the rest. The fungi, algae, lichen, moss, plants and flowers and trees leaned in to listen. It was crowded, but these creatures knew how to be together.

"Welcome," began the Oak.

And everyone barked and called and sang and croaked and squeaked their appreciation.

It took quite a time for them to calm down. But the Oak was patient. He knew the value of patience.

"The future is upon us," he said,"and the past still takes its toll. Some of us are extinct." The Aurochs lowered his heavy head. "And some of us are extinct here." Now, he saw the Elk send his tongue up a nostril, while the Wolf lay down, ears flat, her eyes blinking slowly. The Lynx was washing their paw and didn't seem to be listening. The Pine Marten chittered. "I know, some are making a come back. That's something to celebrate." The Rabbit, Rat, Squirrel and Mouse didn't seem entirely convinced but kept their peace. "Many of us are under greater threat now than ever before." Through his roots he felt the weight of his fellow oaks, the grief of the ash trees, the fear of the horse chestnuts and the on-going lament of the elms, the rare tremors of spindle, small leaved lime, black poplar and wayfaring tree. It was hard not to be Aborocentric at times like this.

As he paused, considering how to go on, how to tell all the wood's wildlings to hold strong, to remember that their community was their defense in dark days, the Crow flapped his wings.

"Some of us are doing just fine!" said the blue-black winged bird in his rough-edged mezzo.

The Fox, who'd left her four lively cubs with her mate, added, "The people leave scraps. They kill us less."

Agitated, the Hedgehog rattled her prickles. Her voice mingled the huff and the squeak. She said, "Apart from the roads."

At this, everyone started up again - the four-legged ones and some of the winged ones. The Oak waited. Patient as ever. He did not have all the time in the world, but he had more than many of these others.

In the quiet, when it came, the Bee buzzed and the Oak heard. "Yes, the roads are bad - the chemicals too." Now the sound was all in the underground and in the high zone. The plants and the insects knew the agonies of soil and air that couldn't be trusted, of pollen that killed and water that poisoned.

The birds added their chorus, for the lack of creatures to eat, the loss of morsels to feed fledglings and the hunger of those that survived.

The Oak felt the damages of time when the pain of his community hit him. That proud crown, now broken off and shattered, that once housed and fed so many. Those lost branches, with their holes and nesting sites. Even when leafless, his dead stag's head was the favoured perch for generations of raptors. He thought of all those acornlings perished by drought and disease. He grieved for a land that promised so much and now seemed capable of giving so little to the wildlings and the woodlings, the free and the feral.

His great wisdom waned in the face of such adversity. The strength of community? A community that seemed to count for so little among those whose world-shaping power decided their fate.

In all his long life, he had seen much and these days little surprised him, but what came next surely did.

The Hare sat up. She had been crouched like a basilisk. White, like paired sickle moons, gleamed at the edges of her eyes, slivers of light in the dim centre of this hollow place.

She said, "It was bad enough to be food, vermin and trophy. But it is now just as bad. Perhaps yet more damning for us.

"We are numbers, not stories. We are data, not deities. We reside in their science instead of their imagination.

"That is our tragedy."

"Then," said the Oak, in the sudden silence, with the spirit of ages rumbling up from his roots, "we must seed ourselves back into their wonder-starved souls."