The Hamadryad

Man takes what he will

And leaves the forest bare;

To be man is to steal

And live without a care.

    When the second coal factory in Laconia, Washington opened its doors and black smoke began to churn into the overcast skies, the Hyades were not happy. Sky spirits by nature are flighty and temperamental, as seen in the way rain and wind come and go in fits and starts. They have a hard time maintaining any sort of emotional stability on any given day. So, when man began to push his black pollution into the Hyades’ atmosphere, they flew into a celestial tantrum. Rain—already a heavy affair in the state of Washington—came down hard and with an acrid taste as the sky spirits spewed the factory’s toxins back down to the earth, and it didn’t let up for months on end. As long as the coal factory billowed smoke, so too would the Hyades let their rains fall and their lightning crack the sky above the city of Laconia.   

    So it was that when Alexander Mena stepped off of Church Street and into the Olympic National Forest and Washington Dryad Reserve, he was surprised to find that it was not raining at all. His worn blue cargo jacket was still soaked through, his high-tops were still full of water that squished in his socks, and the metal of the Beretta M9 handgun stuffed into the waistband of his jeans was still wet against his skin. But the ground beneath him was almost completely dry. Surprised by the sudden change, Alex turned slowly on the spot. It was a different world, within the realm of the trees. Instead of the muddy sky hanging over Church Street, sunshine shone off of the leaves of the underbrush. The air was filled with a swishing breeze unencumbered by the incessant pattering of rain on pavement. Vibrant greens of all shades surrounded him, interrupted by trunks of red, white, and brown. There was an intense calm in the air, as if the entire forest were holding its breath and waiting to see what Alex would do.

    Patting the pocket of his cargo jacket to make sure the cash was still there, Alex turned to make sure that the Laconian cop that had been chasing him wasn’t going to follow him into the forest. But the fat man had disappeared from view, blocked out by dense foliage. Of course he wasn’t going to follow a seventeen-year-old punk into the forest. No sane cop—no sane person—would willingly walk into the Olympic National Forest, a place everyone knew was a dangerous wilderness, a reserve for the dryads who would kill a man on sight in retribution for what had been done to their brethren in the early days of mass-produced electricity.

    No sane person, Alex thought to himself. Then what am I doing here?

    The answer was simple; it had been the only place to go. In the few minutes since he’d held the Beretta up to the poor old man behind the cash register in the rundown Shell station, his choices had been severely limited. Get caught by the cop, go to jail, lose the money, be unable to pay bail. Or, run into the Olympic National Forest, risk getting pulled apart by forest spirits, and make it home with the cash in hand.

    Then again, it wasn’t as if he’d had much of a choice before that—the electric bills had needed to be paid, and with the flooded coal mines and his dad no longer working, there were few options. Robbing the one gas station near Laconia had seemed like the best one, even if it had now forced him into the Olympic National Forest and Washington Dryad Reserve.

Alex shook the issue from his mind. Now wasn’t the time to worry about what he’d done—he could do that once he’d safely made it through the forests without a nature spirit ramming a sharpened stick through his gut. Turning back to the center of the forest, he spotted the remnants of a trail that wove through the trees before him, half-covered in underbrush. Hoping that it was the same trail that led out of the abandoned trailhead at the edge of Laconia, Alex stuffed his hands in the sodden pockets of his cargo jacket and began the long run home.

    The forest evolved as he ran, unfolding into a sprawling empire of green life unlike anything he’d ever seen. Before the Nereides had taken her, his mother had told him stories about the forests. She’d lived in Laconia since before the dryads and hamadryads had been forced into the reserve in the Olympic National Forest and had hours and hours worth of tales of her wandering the woods with her older sisters, climbing trees and building little shelters out of fallen wood. As Alex took in the trees around him, he couldn’t help but wonder if any of them had met his mother, if she’d played on their trunks or nestled in their branches.

    The trail ended abruptly, running straight into a gigantic tree trunk. Surprised to find such a large tree—he thought it might be an oak—in the middle of the path, he stepped up onto one of the tree’s thick roots and looked up and into its foliage. The sun’s weak beams pierced the leaves of the great tree before him, casting dancing ripples of light onto his face. The warmth sent a shiver through him, a feeling of awe that he couldn’t fully explain. He reached out a hand and touched the great tree’s trunk, the rough bark scraping against his fingers.

    “Hello?”

    The voice was so unexpected that Alex stumbled backwards, tripping over a protruding oak root and landing firmly on his backside. An image of the cop—dressed in blue, hand on a poorly-angled hip holster—flashed in his mind, and before he could stop himself he’d pulled the Beretta out from his waistband and had his thumb on the safety.

    “Hello? Is someone there?” called the voice again, and Alex let out the breath he’d been holding. It was a soft voice, a feminine sound that was most certainly wasn’t the hefty cop. He got to his feet slowly, gun still in his hand.

    “Hello, are you there?” asked the voice again.

    Pitching his voice high, Alex answered with a careful “Yes?”

    “Who are you?” asked the voice in response. Alex glanced around the edge of the tree, hoping to see who it was that had wandered into the woods.

    But there was no one around the other side of the tree. Alex felt his heart beating in his throat. The stories, the warnings, the fears. The trees grown up in the middle of hunter’s houses. Young men that stepped into the forest on a bet and didn’t come back out.

    “I’m…I’m Alexander Mena,” Alex replied, the words catching in his throat at first.

    “Alexander…Mena,” said the voice, as if tasting the words.

    Suddenly, there was a faint glow around the oak tree. Alex leapt back in surprise, half-raising the Beretta into the air. The glow grew stronger, a bright white light that emulated the glow of the sun as it gathered around the tree trunk. Alex raised an arm over his eyes, unable to look directly at the light as it continued to glow brighter and brighter. Then, just when the light was becoming unbearable, it dimmed. Hesitantly, Alex lowered his arm.

    A young woman stood before him.

    At least he thought she was young—it was hard to place her age exactly. Her face was lined like the bark of the tree behind her, a gentle shade of green that grew deeper at her cheekbones and beneath her eyes. The eyes themselves were an enchanting gray-brown, a color repeated by oaky growths that served as eyebrows. Her hair grew out in long vines that seemed to ignore the natural laws of gravity, floating about her head as if she were submerged in water. A single oak-colored vine—thicker than the rest though still flexible—wove out from behind her until it connected to the trunk of the great oak tree, giving the impression that she was some sort of astronaut, still attached to her spaceship. In place of a space suit, she wore a grassy shift that moved along with her hair, the hem flowing about her knees with an ethereal grace.

    “Alexander Mena,” the soft voice repeated, only now it was coming from the woman standing before him. “You…you are a man?”

    “Yes,” said Alex breathlessly. “Well, no. Kind of. I’m only—”

    “You are a man,” the young woman repeated, as if they were the most interesting words she’d ever heard. Her mouth had parted slightly, her gray-brown eyes wide with curiosity. 

    “My friends call me Mena,” said Alex, forgetting he’d already given her his name. Then he shook his head. No, she’d been a tree then. Or…something. He wasn’t entirely sure how it worked. Had she come from the tree? Or had she merely spoken through it?

    “Why do they call you that?” asked the tree-woman, sounding genuinely interested.

    “It’s just a thing we do when we play soccer,” said Alex, feeling his face turning red. Here he was, stuck in the forest talking to a dryad, and he was explaining his nickname. “That’s what goes on the back of the jersey. It’s my soccer name.”

  “Mine name is Erato,” said the woman, apparently unbothered by the stupidity of his explanation. “It means one who is lovely.”

    “And you’re a dryad?”

    “A hamadryad,” said Erato. “You don’t know much about forest spirits.”

    “Not really,” said Alex. “They made this forest a reserve before I was born.”

    “What is that in your hand?”

    Alex looked down, only just realizing that he was still carrying the pistol. “Oh…nothing. Nothing, it’s just—it’s just a gun.” He swallowed hard. The hamadryad’s barky brow had lowered, though in anger or confusion he couldn’t tell.

    “Are you a hunter?”

    “No, not a hunter,” said Alex quickly. The gun felt suddenly hot in his hand and he dropped it to the dirt path. “I was just…running from someone.”

    Erato cocked her head to the left, eyes narrowing as if she were listening to something. A wind moved in the trees around them. Alex looked up, following the current of air as it rustled through the pine branches above them.

    “A…policeman,” said Erato. “He was chasing you…to catch you. You took something.”

    “Not from him,” Alex corrected, and he could feel his face turning red. “From a business man. The one who sells gasoline at the edge of the woods. I—my dad and I needed money.”

    “You are a man,” said Erato, as if up until now she hadn’t been able to confirm the fact. She began to walk around him, moving on the balls of her feet. Her leafy hair bounced and waved behind her, the single brown vine still attaching her to the oak tree. “I have heard about men—you take what you will from others, from nature, from everything. Like you took from the man in the station. That is what makes mankind, isn’t it? You take what isn’t yours.”

    The accusation lit a spark of indignation in Alex’s chest, and he responded instinctively. “I needed the money,” he said, and he felt his pulse quicken as the hamadryad took a step closer, tightening the radius of the circle she walked around him. “He sells gas. He makes more money from that rundown service station than anyone in town. He doesn’t need all of it.”

    “You want to care for your father,” said Erato. “Is he ill?”

    “Out of a job,” said Alex. “And cold, in the dark. Waiting for me to get home.”

    “I’ve never met a man before,” said Erato. She was behind him now, but Alex could hear something new in her voice. Less accusation, more fascination.

    “I’ve never met a hamadryad before.”

    “You don’t seem like the men they talk about,” said Erato. She stopped in front of him, her gray-brown eyes inches from his. Alex didn’t dare blink, as if by doing so he would banish her from his sight. He held her gaze, transfixed by the miniscule striations in her irises. “They always say that man is dangerous. We watch you on the wind—the trees at the edge of the forest say that you kill, you steal, you burn. You make things out of metal, you tear down, you ruin. Nothing gets in the way of what mankind wants, not even the Mother Earth herself. But you aren’t what they say, Mena. You are…beautiful.”

    “And you haven’t killed me yet,” said Alex before he could stop himself.

    For some reason, that made Erato laugh. The laugh was a spectacle—she threw her head back, tendrils of hair whipping up and around her face as a bizarre sound erupted from her mouth, like the creaking of tree-branches grown too close together rubbing against one another. The noise was contagious, and before he could help himself, Alex found himself laughing along with the hamadryad. His throaty laugh only made her laugh harder, and soon enough the two of them were reduced to tears, the fear of a running into a supposed enemy leaking away in the face of finding an unexpected friend.

    They laughed for several minutes, and then Erato invited Alex to sit down at the base of her tree. He did so, and the two began to talk. Erato asked about the outside world, and if Alex had any friends that were trees living outside his house, and what it was like to drive a car. Then Alex asked about what it was like to live inside a tree, which Erato told him was the dumbest question anyone had asked her. They sat talking for over an hour, Alex’s shoulders relaxing the more they spoke and Erato’s wide-eyed curiosity fading into crinkling smiles of familiarity.

    Finally, as the sun began to go drop beneath the tops of the pine trees, Alex realized that he had stayed too late. He bade Erato farewell after securing her promise that he would be able to travel through the rest of the Olympic National Forest and to Laconia without any trouble from her hamadryad and dryad family.

    “Will you come back?” Erato asked, her arms wrapped around her tree.

    “I’ll be back tomorrow,” he said, smiling at her as he walked backward down the path on the other side of the oak tree. “And this time I’ll bring some food.”

    True to his word, Alex returned the next day. He’d given part of the Shell station money to his father—enough to get the lights back on and the electric heater glowing red—before taking the rest down to the Safeway Supermarket and picking out a bag of Funyuns, a package of Twinkies, and a can of shaving cream. Erato seemed surprised to see him again when he found her tree, but the surprise quickly faded into excitement when she saw the white plastic bags in Alex’s hands. She enjoyed the Funyuns—“crunchy, like leaves in the fall”—but didn’t like the Twinkies and was confused by the purpose of the shaving cream. She told Alex that she didn’t think he should shave anymore, but should let himself be one with nature.

    He came back the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that, until he stopped counting the days. The journey across Laconia and through the trees of the Olympic National Forest and Washington Dryad Reserve seemed to grow shorter with each trip, and with every passing day the hours spent sitting at the base of Erato’s oak tree went by faster and faster.

    Sometimes he would bring her food, sometimes a book or something else from his room. She was always interested, but more often than not she had things to show him of her own. She taught him about all the different types of trees in the forest, the shapes of their leaves and the feel of their bark. She taught him to smell the earth and know whether or not it was good for planting, how to read the signs of animals in the area, and what plants could be ingested. Even as he showed her splinters of the world of man, she taught him about dryad culture and custom, their ways of life. Occasionally he saw them as he traveled in the forest, and soon he was able to distinguish them with ease. The western hemlock hamadryads were a pompous bunch, standing tall with their backs erect and wearing long sleeves of woven pine needles. The oak hamadryads moved about their source-trees like Erato, with grace and a wisdom that belied the youthfulness of their faces. The dryads themselves—spirits of forests rather than of individual trees—went freely through the forests, regal creatures with narrow faces and long, unkempt hair.

    During the times when the Hyades let their rains fall on the Olympic National Forest, Alex would curl up with Erato at the base of her tree, the two warmed by each other’s body heat as they listened to the steady symphony of raindrops on leaves. 

    “Do you ever wish that you weren’t locked up in here?” asked Alex one such day. He lay stretched out across Erato’s roots, his head in her lap as he considered the leaves above them.

    “If I left, I would break the contract my kind made with yours,” Erato replied, stroking his forehead.

    “I break our contract every day when I come in here.”

    “Men care more for contracts. Besides, I can’t leave my tree. I’m tied to it, and it to me.”

    “But if you were to leave,” said Alex. He’d heard rumors, stories about it happening. Nereides leaving the water to marry mortal men. Hyades leaving the clouds to marry mortal women. He flipped around, propping himself up on his elbows so that he could look at her. “You could leave your tree, couldn’t you? If you wanted?”

    “You could stay here,” she said, avoiding his question.

    “As a dryad?” Alex asked, pulling at his beard. The idea had never occurred to him.

    “Not as a dryad,” said Erato, leaning back on her trunk. “As a tree. It happens more than you think. All those stories you’ve told me about people disappearing into the forest…it’s most likely that they were transformed into trees by the dryads. Willingly or not.”

    “Don’t you want to go outside your forest? See the world of men?”

    Erato hesitated. “I…I don’t know. The more you tell me about the world of men, the more I start to wonder if it really is like they say. Combustion engines, indentured servants, state taxes…I don’t know if I would last long in a world like that.”

    There was a pregnant pause, during which the silence was only interrupted by the drip-dripping of falling rain slowed and strained by layers of leaves.

    “I want to be with you,” said Alex quietly.

    “You are with me.”

    He rested his head on her lap once more. “More than I am now. I don’t know how much longer I can keep doing this. Dad got a job bailing out the mine, but he wants me to find a job to help start paying the bills.” He didn’t mention the conversation he’d had the night before, where his dad had mentioned that he was saving up to take them to Deckerville. There were more jobs there, more factory positions that paid better and were more likely to higher younger workers.

    “Maybe our time is over,” said Erato. Her voice had lost its usual warmth.

    “Don’t say that.”

    “But maybe it is,” said Erato earnestly. “You can become a tree and live here, but otherwise you are a mortal. You will come and go in my life—I understood that from the first time that we met. I will live for centuries after you die.”

    “We have to make a decision soon,” said Alex.

    “You have to make a decision soon,” said Erato. “But for now, let’s enjoy the rain.”

    It wasn’t more than a week later when Alex finally made his decision. He brought a box of raisins with him—her favorite food from the outside world—and a small knife. The metal was cool where he’d tucked it into his sock, a hiding place where none of the nature spirits he greeted on his way to Erato’s tree would be able to see or sense it.

    He greeted Erato with a kiss before they sat down and shared the box of raisins. He gave him the ones that still had stems on them, and she let him have the slimy ones at the bottom of the box. They talked as they ate, discussing the nice weather Laconia had been having recently. Unable to see an end to the black clouds coming from the coal factories, the Hyades had finally relented, nature giving way to the willpower of mankind.

    “I’ve decided,” Alex announced as Erato folded up the box and added it to her collection, wedged between two of the lower branches of her oak.

    A sad look crossed the hamadryad’s face at his words. “Oh,” was all she could say.

    “I want to be with you,” Alex said, and the words set his heart beating against his ribs.

    “And I want you to be with me.”

    “But I can’t stay here,” said Alex. Thump-thump, thump-thump. “I need to be out in the world, I need to help my dad. I need to move forward. I’m part of mankind. I can’t just abandon that part of myself. I need to live.”

    “I know.”

    “Will you forgive me?”

    In response, Erato pulled him into a hug. He felt her strong arms wrap around him, a familiar sensation of love and comfort. He felt her body pressed up against his, the gentle toughness of a sapling bending to conform with his own shape. Their lips met. Her hair swirled around him now, and he reached up to it with one hand. The tendrils were silky between his fingers, like the new growth of a climbing jasmine. He moved his hand through her hair, slowly, until his fingertips found the harder, thicker vine that extended back from the base of her neck. He gripped it firmly, holding it steady.

    “When you first met me, you said I was a man,” said Alex, pulling his lips from hers so he could speak. “That men take and take and take, and that’s all they do.”

    “I was wrong to say that,” she said. “All you’ve done is give.”

    He pulled her back into a tight embrace, pressing her shoulder into his neck. “I’m sorry,” he muttered into her hair, his hand grasping the thick vine. “I’m so sorry.”

    It was over in a flash of metal. The knife was slipped from the sock, pulled through the air until it had severed the thick cord of life that ran from hamadryad to tree.