Stephen Baxter: The Martian in the Wood

“It’s December. Can’t be helped.”

He shrugged. “Leave a trail, like we said. And if you aren’t back sharpish I’m comin’ in after.”

“He won’t harm me. You know that much, Pierce.”

“Mebbe. But mebbe he in’t alone in there. He wun’t answer, wud ’e?”

“I’ll watch my step. Is my pack done up? See you soon, Pierce – with, I hope, my brother.”

And with that she was off, haring along the track. She did not let herself look back, to the house glowing with light and warmth, at Pierce’s comforting bulk. Instead she faced forward, staring at the Wood that was a black mass growing in her sight as she ran, and Nathan, a small figure fleeing ahead.

From the beginning the trees seemed to resist her. She thought the thick black trunks were like a crowd of inconsiderate men, their backs turned, through which she had to force her way.

The trees themselves were heavy with age, the squat trunks weighed down by huge branches, and hollowed out by lichen and rot. Branchlets and twigs, gaunt, leafless and tangled, pulled at her coat and scratched her flesh where it was exposed, and snagged on the straps of her backpack. The ground was soft, yielding, a cake of rotting mulch and foul-smelling lichen; it seemed to suck at her feet, and the roots tripped her with malevolent purpose. She quickly tired.

It was dark too, and the last of the December daylight would not last long.

She tried to be systematic. She had brought that pot of paint; with a small brush she dabbed bright yellow splashes on the trunks she passed, every few yards. As she went on, and the dark closed in, she looked back at the line of yellow dots that receded back through the Wood, a track of her footsteps. A way out, and a guide to keep her straight as she pushed on into the Wood.

Which method of navigation worked well enough until she came to the snow.

There had been no snowfall in Holmburgh that winter, not yet. Yet here it was, a scatter of flakes on the ground at first, soon piling up into drifts that would further clog the way. Well, her boots and leggings were reasonably waterproof. She adjusted her gloves, pulled her fur-lined hood around her face, and pushed on, under a big bent branch a little like an archway into winter, and kicked her way through drifts that could be waist high. Still she marked her way with the yellow paint splashes. She knew the Wood was only three miles across – only a mile and a half to the centre. She was making slow progress, she knew, but even so she had no sense that she was nearing the heart of things, let alone emerging from the Wood’s far side. She had her watch, but her sense of time swam; she wished she had written down the precise time she had set off.

Still she pressed on, still she made her marks.

And then, quite suddenly, she came to a clearer space, where twigs and branches had been brushed aside and the snow trampled down, as if by the passage of huge hooved feet. On the trees she saw scrapes on the bark, even lengths of coarse russet hair. It was as if some immense animal, or a herd of them, had pushed through here. At least the ground here was easier to navigate. She stepped cautiously over muddy slush frozen into ridges, following the more open path. The air was colder still, a dry, sucking chill. She tucked her gloved hands under her armpits, her arms wrapped around her torso for a bit of warmth.

Then she saw brightness ahead, beyond the trees. It was as if she was nearing the edge of the Wood, as if the trees were thinning at last. But the light beyond seemed stark, pale grey or white, with none of the muddy green of the English ground that, she knew from her circumnavigations, lay beyond the forest. Not the end of the Wood, but evidently she was coming to the edge of a clearing.

And there, beyond the last trees, before the grey light, huge shadows passed. She heard a soft ripping of turf.

Instinctively cautious, she approached the open space but stayed tucked behind the final screen of trees. And she saw deer.

She thought they were deer. Tremendous animals they were, with muscular torsos and rust-brown hair, and the big males sported sculptures of antlers that must have been ten feet across, chipped and scarred. As this herd moved, slow and graceful as grounded clouds, they worked steadily at the sparse grass that grew here; that was the soft ripping sound she heard. And she smelled their rank animal presence, the dung they dropped.

She cowered back, into the trees, obeying instinct. She had never seen such animals, not in the wild in England, not in any zoo.

The herd did not take long to pass. There were only perhaps a dozen individuals, she saw, including females and a couple of infants, leggy and uncertain. But they had blocked her view of the clearing. When they passed, she expected to see a wall of trees not far beyond.

But the scrubby grass stretched away, into a dense, cold mist that obscured any far side to the clearing, any horizon. More animals were dimly visible through the mist. Great beasts like boulders, wrapped in orange-brown fur. She thought she saw a trunk curl, heard a thin trumpet. And further out, a herd of still more extraordinary animals, though as giant as the rest: massive bodies on quite fine legs, each graceful head with a single horn protruding from the nose. Like beefy unicorns, she thought, and she almost giggled.

But how could this great space be? The whole of this Wood was only a few miles across. She knew that was true. She had walked around it, more than once. Where was this?

A hare popped up, right in front of her, gazing curiously. A very ordinary animal, but pure snow white. Not all the fauna of this place was gigantic, then.

Something broke in her, some dam of composure overwhelmed at last by this flood of sensory experience. Perhaps it was the hare. Gasping, she pushed back into the forest’s shade which, clinging and sinister as it was, seemed almost a comfort after the tremendous vistas beyond the tree line. She could see her paint marks; she could simply run all the way home.

But she made herself stop, think, breathe. She checked her watch. It had stopped. Yet for all the distance she had walked, it still seemed to be early evening. She was looking for her brother, she reminded herself. She had to go on.

But to cross that clearing – even assuming she could find the far side – seemed an unwise course. If the huge deer and storybook unicorns and the rest did not trample her, then the huge cats or other predators which must feed on these archaic giants would target her in their turn.

So she cut sideways, and began to walk around the clearing while staying in the cover of the trees. She remembered how she had circumnavigated the exterior of the Wood; now here she was circling a clearing entirely contained within that same scrap of forest, following a circle that itself seemed much larger than that outer perimeter. “Best not to think about it, Zena,” she told herself, her breath a helmet of mist around her head, her hands and feet growing numb.

She walked on in this fashion until she smelled wood smoke.

She had found another clearing in the Wood, though much smaller than the plain of beasts. This one was dominated by a sandstone bluff, like a tilted block, on top of which only straggled trees had embedded their roots. She could see immediately that the south-facing wall of the bluff offered shelter from the worst of the wind.

This was where the people gathered, near the mouth of a cave, a wind-carved hollow in the rock.

Zena, still in the cover of the trees, crept closer, scarcely daring to breathe. People : they wore bundles of crudely-cut furs, all squatting on the ground, around a heap of old wood that burned fitfully, a tendril of smoke rising up into the cold air.