The Woodsman

 

It was a simple enough pact, one he made with himself after his wife and son died, something to keep the grief at bay. The despair of knowing he would never see either one again.

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And what could be more natural than for a woodsman to carve, a craft his father had taught him. So each autumn he began to sculpt in replica the creatures he saw in the forest.

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The shy deer hiding in her stillness, the russet squirrel with his elfin ears, and most beloved of all the small bears he only ever glimpsed at twilight, their humbug colours a distillation of the smoky air. 

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Other creatures too small to carve, the ones he sometimes saw at the corners of his eyes, glimmerings of the might-have-been, the phantasmagoricals that haunted the margins of the natural world. 

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By year’s end he always reached his quota. Sufficient to fill a sack.

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Enough to leave one on the doorstep of every home in the village where a child lived.

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And to keep two for himself, to place on the mantelpiece above the fire.

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One for each member of his family, though their chairs by the hearth were empty.

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Always a doe and a hare. The hare, the wood sprite who often watched him from glade and glen, growing taller year by year.

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Just as his son might have done. 

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