When at last the morning sun streamed in through his cabin’s window, only then did he look out to see that the trees had up and left in the middle of the night. Scattered about were leaves and branches, and even a few young saplings and the trunks of dry old trees that had fallen along the way.

Shaken, the woodcutter packed up his meager belongings and left the land that had been a forest. Some of his fellows left, too. Some stayed behind, determined to harvest what fallen wood was left and then make something of the land that remained. He headed west, for the badlands where nothing larger than scrub could grow. There he became a ranch hand, and eventually a rancher. Some nights when he was in his cups he would tell the story of his former occupation and how he had come to leave it.

“But why come all the way out here?” his disbelieving friends asked. “If there was all that empty land that used to be forest, why not claim it for yourself?”

“If trees can walk, they can do other things,” he said. “I wanted to put myself beyond their reach in case they came back.”

“Why would they come back?” someone asked.

“If they didn’t hurt anyone the first time, why would you have anything to fear if they did?” another asked.

“There were a lot of us,” the man who had been a woodcutter said. “We had sharp tools and fire at our command. That they left suggests they were afraid of us, and rightly so.”

“So what do you have to fear?”

“There were a lot of us, but there are a lot of trees in the world,” the man said. “I had it in my mind that maybe they just went for reinforcements.”

Still, she wasn’t exactly lost… she knew the way back to her car, or at least she knew what direction it was in. She headed back, feeling confident that she’d be quite near the edge of the woods by the time it was well and truly dark. On the other side of the trees was the road, and if she came out too far north or south she’d just follow it back to where she’d parked.

She felt a tiny prickle of fear, small and distant, but she pushed it away. When she’d been a little girl, the thought of wandering the forest paths close to sunset had always been deliciously thrilling in the way that only fear can be. Everybody knows the witch lives in the woods. If she catches you there after sunset, she’ll eat you right up.

She wasn’t a girl anymore, of course. She didn’t fear a witch in the woods. She simply had an adult’s understanding of all the perfectly mundane but also perfectly dangerous dangers that the witch had symbolized. A daytime hike was a pleasant way to spend a Saturday afternoon, a good way to get some exercise and take in some fresh air. A nighttime hike in the woods was a good way to get lost or to trip down an embankment or startle some wild thing that if it did not exactly have a taste for girl-flesh could still have claws and teeth.

She wasn’t a girl anymore, and if she didn’t have her younger self’s sense of supernatural terror she also didn’t have her younger self’s sense of direction. As a child she’d walked the paths of the forest so often that she ceased to be aware of them. Now as the twilight deepened and blossomed into darkness she wasn’t sure was on a path. The setting sun had provided some sense of direction, but it was gone.

“Lost, dearie?” a voide said from behind her.

Laurie just about jumped out of her skin. She might have, if her feet hadn’t been rooted to the floor in terror. She might have ran headlong into the night without sparing a glance behind her. She couldn’t. She heard the sound of feet crunching on fallen leaves and a light moved into her peripheral vision. She fought the urge to close her eyes, fought to calm herself.

The figure who stepped into her view was a woman who stood tall and proud, not a twisted and hunched old crone but a statuesque woman dressed more sensibly for hiking than Laurie was. Her bangs showed blonde in the light of the electric camper’s lantern she held. Laurie was relieved to see another person, she was relieved to see the pleasant glow of that artificial light, but most of all she was relieved to see the kindness in that face. Not a witch after all.

“Oh, dear,” the woman said. Her voice was soft and kind, motherly-going-on-grandmotherly. At a guess Laurie figured she was in her late forties to a very graceful fifties. “I didn’t startle you, did I?”

“I’m sorry,” Laurie said, feeling silly. “For a moment, I thought you were… you know, the witch.”

“Oh, I am.”

“You mean you’re a Wiccan or something, right?” Laurie asked.

“No, I mean I’m the witch of the woods,” the woman said. “The original, accept no substitutions. Established 1798.” She jerked the hand holding the electric lantern and suddenly it was old and made of brass, a fat wax pillar candle flickering in the place of the bulb. “There. You see? Just a bit of magic, so we can skip all the tiresome ‘You can’t be, witches aren’t real.’ nonsense and get onto the next bit. Come now, close your mouth before all your breath escapes.”

“I… uh… this isn’t what I expected.”

“Of course not,” the witch said. “It’s magic. It isn’t what anyone expects.”

“I mean… you,” Laurie babbled. “I thought the witch of the woods would be all gnarled and warty and… I’m sorry, I don’t mean…”

The witch just laughed. It was a pleasant laugh, full of honest joy, and it put Laurie at her ease.

“Oh, dearie, no, that’s a myth,” the witch said. “An unfortunate stereotype, as people say these days. Sometimes I look a bit older and sometimes I look a bit younger, but I like to take care of myself.”

“So I suppose you don’t eat children, then, either?”

“Oh, I should think not!” the witch said. “Can you imagine why I’d want to? So much work, so little meat… no, I prefer a heartier meal.”

Laurie was suddenly aware that even though the fear had subsided, she still couldn’t move her feet… and just like that the fear was back.

The witch’s kind face suddenly became serious and impassive. With long quick strides, she walked back past Laurie, heading back in the direction from which she’d come. A snap of her fingers and Laurie turned on the spot.

“Come along,” she said. “If you’re good, I’ll let you stir the pot… for a little while, at least.”

She goes to the box and picks it up. She starts to open it when she notices the key in its side. There is no reason to think that a music box would work after being left lying out in the woods… in fact, that was probably why it had been left there, she thinks… but on the other hand it seems to be in good condition, and if it does work it seems like it would almost be a crime to not wind it before opening.

So she does so, and when she opens it she is not at all surprised to see the tiny, perfect figure of a ballerina.

With slow, graceful moves that gave no hint of mechanical origin, tiny ballerina raises her arms above her head and goes into a perfect plie. She curtsies to the little girl… or straight ahead, the girl realizes, then makes a quarter-turn to each side and repeats the motion. Tiny tinkling chimes begin to play as the little figure’s hands go behind her back, and pull out a pair of cymbals.

CRASH! CRASH! CRASH!

The girl shrieks, her eyes closing as if to shut out the loud and terrible sound. When they open, the cymblas are gone, and the ballerina is reaching behind her back again.

This time she pulls out a gun.

The music box is still there in the woods.

It has slept for a long time. Now for the first time in ages it awakens in pain, pain such as it has never known. The air is hot and thick, strangely invigorating but unfamiliar. The beetles which live on the forest’s trees, thinning them at a reasonable level and then dying in the winter, have not been dying, and so the trees are in agony. The forest is not the trees, but the trees are of the forest and it feels their pain. It acts. Taking in a deep breath of the newly vitalizing atmosphere, the forest acts. It adjusts its trees, changing their sap to be thicker and more abundant, better suited to repelling the insects.

It’s a start, but a slow one.

I can do better, the forest thinks, taking in another mammoth breath.

It reaches out and it awakens some of its children. There are spiders in the forest, and insects that hunt, and birds with long, clever beaks. They can be adjusted, too. Made cleverer, made hungrier, made more numerous. The forest is alive with activity now, fully awake and alert It reaches out within itself. The wolf packs that once roamed it are all but gone. The great bears are dwindling in number and lazy. Long paths have been cut through the forest’s body, and in some cases covered over with rocky earth and barriers of metal. Its boundaries have retreated inward upon themselves.

The forest exerts itself like it is giving a great shrug. Roots extend towards roadways, seeds find their way into cracks. The effects of this are not immediately apparent. The plant parts of the forest are not as quick as the animal parts, even with the refreshing effects of the altered air.

The forest touches the bears and the wolves, along with the bats and the owls and the blackbirds and the raptors and the raccoons and the badgers in their dens. It reaches out to all of them, along with the deer and the rabbits and the squirrels and the mice. All the hunters, all the scavengers, all the foragers. They are all awake now, attent and waiting for the forest to act.

I can do better than this, the forest thinks again, and it adjusts them all. They remember when they were larger, when they were wilder and fiercer, stronger and smarter. They remember when the forest they were a part of was a thing of greatness and they themselves become greater.

There are men in the forest. It didn’t notice them at first, because there have always been men in the forest, though they stopped being part of the forest long before they adjusted to their present shapes. Its attention is on them now that the initial shock of pain that jolted it to consciousness has subsided. Some of the men are felling trees, not with stone and fire or even with iron but with strange metal implements that shriek and spin. Trees are being dragged off by great mindless metal beasts that belch out precious carbon and toxic-flavored fumes. Elsewhere, the forest’s insects are being killed by poison, the forest’s birds are being frightened back into their accustomed timidity by the roar of men’s strange devices, and the forest’s beasts are being hunted with things it can’t even begin to describe.

Shocked, the forest reaches out… and receives yet another shock. Across the world, its brethren have all been similarly penned in, reduced, or even destroyed. Their cousins, as well. The wetlands: drained and built over, or starved, or poisoned. The undulating prairies: fenced in, ripped apart, made to bear tamer seeds from other places. Rivers channeled and dammed, and everywhere men have laid their rocky paths and spun webs of metal carrying lighting and water, built their odd angular lodges, and constructed their roaring engines.

We can do better, the forest says, and it starts to wake the others up.