IV. The Many Countries

Beyond the mountain pass, the traveller entered a forest.

At first he was pleased.

Here, he thought, was a country he understood.

The trees gave shade.

Their fallen branches provided firewood.

Their trunks marked the distance between one place and another.

Their roots could be stepped over, though sometimes with difficulty.

The traveller walked for several hours before remembering the old woman's question.

What can happen between this thing and something else?

He stopped beneath a great tree.

A branch stretched above him.

“A good branch,” he thought.

But then he was not sure what he meant.

A bird descended and landed upon it.

The branch bent.

The bird remained.

Soon another arrived.

Then another.

The traveller watched them move along the branch, leaping from one place to another.

“A resting place,” he said.

The birds continued their business.

A squirrel appeared from the trunk.

It ran along the same branch and disappeared among the leaves.

“A road,” said the traveller.

From somewhere beneath the bark came the faint sound of movement.

He placed his ear against the trunk.

Something small was feeding within the wood.

“A house,” he said.

Then he looked down.

At the foot of the tree, a pale fungus spread across the roots.

“To you,” he said, “it is something else again.”

The traveller sat beneath the tree and waited.

As the day passed, the tree became many things.

A shelter from rain.

A ladder for the squirrel.

A hunting place for the birds.

A dwelling for insects.

Food for the fungus.

A source of warmth for the moss growing on one side of its trunk.

By evening, a fox had curled among its exposed roots.

The traveller could no longer decide what the tree was.

At last he climbed onto a low branch.

He sat there for some time.

The branch was firm.

For him, it had become a seat.

Then he remembered the great stone.

He climbed down.

The next morning he followed a narrow track through the forest.

Soon the path disappeared.

He stood uncertainly among the trees.

Above him, a bird passed from branch to branch without touching the ground.

A squirrel followed another route through the canopy.

An insect travelled beneath a sheet of bark.

A root pushed slowly through the earth.

The traveller suddenly understood.

There was no forest.

Not one forest, at least.

There were many.

The ground was his country.

The branches were another.

The spaces between the branches belonged to the birds.

The bark contained passages he could not enter.

The soil concealed routes he could not see.

The air itself had paths.

He stood in the middle of all these countries without having known they were there.

That afternoon he found the old woman beside a small pool.

“I thought I had entered a forest,” he told her.

“And?”

“Now I think the birds live in a different one.”

The old woman smiled.

“Do they?”

“The same trees are here. But what they can do is different.”

She nodded.

“The squirrel also.”

“And the insects.”

“And the roots.”

The traveller looked towards a young plant growing beside the water.

“And this?”

The old woman knelt beside it.

“It cannot walk.”

“No.”

“It cannot climb.”

“No.”

“It cannot fly.”

“No.”

The traveller waited.

“But it grows.”

“Yes.”

She pointed upwards.

“Light comes from there.”

The traveller watched the leaves.

“They turn towards it.”

“Sometimes.”

“Then the light is a path for the plant.”

The old woman looked at him.

“Perhaps.”

“A possibility?”

“Perhaps.”

The traveller frowned.

“But the plant does not know where the path is.”

“Must it?”

He thought of the bird moving through the branches.

Of the squirrel.

Of the insect.

Then of the root moving beneath his feet.

“No,” he said slowly.

The old woman touched the soil.

“This one finds water.”

The traveller looked at the small plant.

“Does the water mean anything to it?”

The old woman stood.

“That is another question.”

And she walked away.

The traveller remained beside the pool.

For the first time, he tried to imagine the country without imagining himself at its centre.

The light fell differently upon the leaves.

The ground held water.

The roots entered the soil.

The branches bent beneath the birds.

None of these things seemed to require an audience.

Yet each entered into the lives of creatures organised differently from himself.

The traveller looked again at the forest.

Nothing had multiplied.

The trees were still trees.

The ground was still ground.

The light was still light.

But the possibilities had become innumerable.

Or rather, he thought, perhaps they had always been innumerable.

He had simply mistaken his own country for the whole of it.

As evening came, the traveller climbed a hill overlooking the forest.

From above, he could see the dark canopy stretching to the horizon.

He thought of the birds moving through its upper paths.

The animals moving below.

The insects beneath the bark.

The roots entering the earth.

The plants turning slowly towards light.

All inhabiting the same country.

All inhabiting different fields of possibility.

The traveller sat quietly.

For once, he did not ask what the forest meant.

He wondered instead:

What could happen here—

and for whom?