The Stone Turned Over

The rising sun was already drying the grass when I left the western path. I moved slowly, keeping the known trail over my right shoulder while the faint disturbance wandered through fern and hazel.

A hare had crossed first. Its prints were neat and obvious in the soft earth, four marks together, then four more. A beetle had dragged a crooked line beneath a leaf. Rainwater had carried two pine needles downhill and left them against a root.

All of Sherwood leaves some account of where it has been.

The trail I followed did not.

It vanished whenever the ground hardened, then returned as a pressed edge of moss or a fern bent against its natural turn. Whatever had passed was light, careful, or very good at making a forest keep quiet.

I approved of the technique. I disliked being on the wrong side of it.

The trace led into a stand of young hazel. There, low on a branch, I found three cuts laid side by side. Each was short. Each was clean. Pale wood showed beneath the bark, and a bead of sap still clung to the lowest mark.

I touched it with one claw.

Fresh.

A deer might scrape bark, but not so neatly. A squirrel might chew it, but not stop after three matching lines. The wind has many talents, though counting is not among them.

I searched the ground beneath the branch. Nothing. No dropped blade, no hair, no print pressed deeply enough to hold water. Only a shallow groove moved away through the moss, narrow as a bowstring and twice as difficult to follow.

By then the sun had cleared the ridge. Birds moved in the canopy. A squirrel scolded me from a beech tree for standing too near whatever it considered important. The forest was ordinary everywhere except directly in front of me.

That was what made it interesting.

The groove ended at an old watercourse, dry except for dark silt beneath the stones. I expected the soft bank to give me the track the moss had refused.

It gave me nothing.

I was studying the empty silt when a sound came from the far side.

Knock.

A pause.

Knock. Knock.

Not the quick tapping of a woodpecker. Not a branch falling. Three measured sounds, close enough to hear the grain of the wood that carried them.

Then every bird above the watercourse went silent.

I drew my bow—not because I expected a fight, but because curiosity is most useful when it survives the morning—and stepped down among the stones.