A line of seedling oaks stands in the middle of the Harker Fell hay meadow, each one a foot tall and spaced exactly a stride apart, where last August there was only grass. The farmers did not plant them. Behind the row, the ground is pressed into two deep furrows the width of a wagon's wheelbase, filled with leaf mold that does not belong to any tree in that field.
Three people told me what made them. Rhys Penhallow, who keeps the Harker Fell sheep, says the oaks appear after the first rain of spring and that the treant simply walked through at night, dropping acorns from its sleeves the way a man drops crumbs. He does not mind. He mows around them. Dilys Brandt, who runs the mill at Brandt Scar, says it was never night at all: she watched it cross her millrace at noon, a bark-skinned figure twelve feet high, and it stopped midstream and stood with its feet in the water for most of an hour. Its toes, she says, went pale green and thickened by the end, and she had to wait for it to leave before she could open the sluice.
Corin Voss, a boy of about eleven, found it first. He says it was asleep upright against the old boundary stone, with a wren nesting in its beard of gray lichen, and that when he came near it opened one eye, the color of amber sap, and looked at his boots. Then it took the wren's side of an argument he had not known he was having, by turning its whole shoulder away from him until he left. The stories agree on more than their tellers would like. It keeps a schedule. Every dusk it walks the same loop of the fell and drinks from the same pool below the quarry, three long pulls, and every dawn it plants one acorn wherever it happens to stand, whether or not the soil is good. The creature leaves a broken-off twig on any fence post it has leaned on, pointing downhill, though nobody knows why.
The one law concerns wood: never cut green wood within a mile of the quarry pool, and never burn it there either. Dilys says a neighbor once split a young ash for kindling and spent the next week finding his gate rehung upside down and his woodpile stacked into a perfect hollow square with the logs bark-side in. Then there is the wren. Every account that mentions the beard mentions the wren, and Corin says the treant tolerates its droppings with open resentment, shaking its chin twice each morning with a creak like a door. To track it, follow the leaf mold and the straight rows of oaks. I left Harker Fell at dusk, and on the lane behind me I saw a new post-twig, still wet at the break, pointing toward the pool.
- Classification
- Sylvan tree guardian, oak-bodied
- Habitat
- Old oak woods and upland meadows
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 12 ft tall, broad as a haywain
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Fae and Sylvan Folk
- Binomial
- Quercus ambulans
- Diet
- Rainwater, soil minerals, sunlight
- Temperament
- Slow, patient, stubbornly territorial