Foraging in the Forest

The morning was yet young when she passed beyond the shadow of the cave and entered the Northern Forest, the chill of the season already touching the air. She carried upon her arm the gathering basket Scar had woven from willow-like shoots, bark fiber, and tough forest reeds, its workmanship plain but strong, suited to the hands of those who lived by the forest rather than by the markets of the cities. She had watched him make it by the light of their small fire, stripping each length, bending it, and binding it against the others until the vessel took form beneath his scarred hands. It pleased her in a way she would not have admitted aloud that he had made it.

She moved beneath the great trees as a panther moves through grass, placing each foot where the forest would not betray her passage. Beneath a fallen trunk she found nuts scattered among the brown needles, and she gathered them, testing each with her fingers before placing it within the woven carrier. Farther on grew bushes bearing small forest fruits, some dark with ripeness, others still hard and green, and she took only those the forest had made ready to give. A careless hand might strip a bush bare, but she knew better; the forest was not a merchant’s stall from which one purchased all that caught the eye, but a living thing from which a hunter took according to need.

Near a hollow where water seeped slowly beneath moss and fern, she found the tops of several edible roots. She crouched and worked her digging stick into the soil, loosening the earth with care until the first root came free without breaking. She brushed away the dark soil, inspected it, and laid it with the nuts and fruit before covering the disturbed earth once more. It was the way of the forest: take, but do not ravage; kill when there is need, but waste no part of the life taken; leave seed, root, and young beast so that the turning of the seasons might continue.

As she straightened, she glanced toward the basket and found herself thinking of Scar again. He understood such things without her teaching him, and that troubled her more than she cared to admit. He knew the trails of beasts, the language of tracks, the proper way to shape a spear, the making of fire, the curing of skins, and the many small arts by which a man might keep himself alive when no settlement lay within a hundred pasangs. Yet none of that answered the question that had begun to trouble her: where had such a man come from?

Her thoughts went then to the strange book Scar was making. Page by page, upon sheets he had fashioned and prepared, he drew the creatures of the world as he knew them, giving form to beasts whose tracks he had followed and whose habits he had studied. Sometimes she had watched him work without his seeming to notice her, his blue-green eyes narrowed in concentration as charcoal moved beneath his fingers. There was something almost reverent in the way he labored over the book to show her animals from whatever land he hailed from. What man did such a thing? she wondered, and what had he been before the Northern Forest became his home?

She walked on, gathering what she could while the light strengthened between the branches. A squirrel scolded her from high among the trees, and she paused, listening to the sharp chatter before continuing. Scar would know what it was doing, she thought, perhaps even know what predator had passed beneath that tree during the last turning of the night. She wondered whether he had learned such things from another man, from some people whose names he had never spoken, or whether the knowledge had been purchased with blood, hunger, and long years of surviving alone.

By midday, the woven vessel had become a pleasing weight against her hip. Nuts lay beneath the darker fruit, while the roots rested carefully above them so their soil would not spoil the food below, and she considered what might be done with the gathered things when she returned to the cave. Perhaps the roots could be roasted beneath the coals, while the fruit might be dried for the colder turnings ahead. Scar would say they should save what could be saved, and she found herself smiling at the thought before realizing she was doing so.

She stopped beside a narrow stream and knelt to drink, dipping her fingers into the cold water afterward. Her gaze settled upon Scar’s handiwork, upon the places where his fingers had pulled the fibers tight and bound them together. A strange thought came to her then: perhaps the basket told her something about him that Scar himself did not. A man who could make such a thing did not simply survive the forest; he understood how to take what the forest offered and transform it into something useful, and that suggested years of knowledge she had not yet uncovered.

She rose and continued toward the cave as the afternoon began its slow decline. The forest was changing, the nights lengthening and the warmth diminishing, and soon the gathering of food would become less a daily pleasure and more a matter of survival. They would need dried meat, stored roots, nuts, rendered tallow, warm skins, and perhaps even another shelter before the worst of the cold descended from the north. She knew all this, yet beneath those practical thoughts another remained, stubborn and unanswered: who had Scar been before he became the man who slept beside her?

The question followed her through the trees until she saw the familiar signs of their dwelling ahead. She imagined finding him there with his strange book upon his knees, perhaps adding another beast to its pages, his hands stained with charcoal or pigment. She was not accustomed to wondering about the past of another, yet Scar had somehow become a part of her present, and perhaps that was why his past had begun to matter to her.

At last she reached the cave and lowered the gathered food beside the hearth, the rough vessel making a soft sound against the stone floor. She ran one hand over its rim once before turning toward the darkness within, already wondering whether Scar was there and what he might be drawing upon the next page. Perhaps she would ask him this night again about changing caves, she decided, though the Panther Girl knew herself well enough to understand that she might instead sit beside him in silence and watch his hands. For now, the forest had given what she had sought, but it had also given her another question, and she was beginning to suspect that questions concerning Scar might prove far more difficult to hunt than any beast beneath the trees.