Robin McKinley - Fire - Tales of Elemental Spirits

ʺShe’d do,ʺ he said. ʺGiven she’s willin’.ʺ

Welly returned to her ladling. She seemed not to notice the way her hands trembled. Dave carried the bowls to the table.

ʺBest you sit there,ʺ he told Ellie. ʺJust let old Vick take a sniff—she won’t ’urt. Likes to know who’s what, an’ she don’t see much no longer. All right, girl!ʺ

Ellie sat. An old spaniel heaved herself up from beside the stove, limped across and sniffed at the hand Ellie offered.

ʺVick the Fourth, she is,ʺ said Dave as the dog went back to her snooze. ʺ’Nother name as runs in the family.ʺ

That sounded like a private joke. Ellie didn’t get it.

ʺTake your jersey off if you want to, my dear,ʺ said Welly. ʺI’m afraid I need it warmer than most people can stand. Now, you can have your picnic if you prefer, but this is very good. Dave makes a lovely stew. The rabbits are out of the wood.ʺ

Rabbit stew! More and more Ellie felt she was in some kind of dream. Mum could do without cooking any more than she had to, so mostly at home they ate microwaved stuff out of packets. Mum would have been horrified by the mere idea of rabbit, too. But here she was with her mouth already watering at the smell, in this wonderful old cottagy room with its log fire burning on the huge open hearth and its Aga and its long-lived-in feel, and this strange, strange couple.

Welly spun her chair deftly back to the table. Dave took a large bib out of a drawer and tied it round her neck, then sat opposite Ellie and hacked three chunks of bread from what looked like a home-made loaf.

ʺNow,ʺ said Welly, ʺyou’re right. Not everyone that calls and asks to visit us gets this kind of treatment. The fact is that we have been looking for someone like you, to help us. This wood is rather special. You’ll have seen at the gate that it’s a conservation area, but there are plenty of those these days. What makes it special is that it has been one now for almost a hundred years, and, uniquely, diaries have been kept of everything that happens in the wood, including an annual tree census and a five-year census of all the wild creatures that live here. It is now time for both. I can no longer do my share, and Dave can’t do it all, so we need a helper. We could no doubt find one by advertising, but that would mean an adult and there are various things against that. They’d probably have ideas of their own, rather than being content to do it our way—ʺ

ʺNever work level along of a kid,ʺ said Dave, ʺ’lowing I might maybe know best. An’ the birds an’ animals, they’re used to me—saw that, didn’t you? You won’t bother ’em, neither, not like a grown man’s going to.ʺ

ʺThat’s certainly the case,ʺ said Welly. ʺIt makes the task so much easier if the creatures don’t keep hiding from you. But at the same time, any helper has to know what she’s looking at, as you appear to do—ʺ

ʺKnew a beech from an ’ornbeam,ʺ said Dave.

ʺSo, my dear, are you prepared to help, if it can be arranged?ʺ said Welly.

ʺOh, yes please!ʺ said Ellie.

That was how she came into the story, and so late on. From their very first meeting, she had felt that there was some kind of a mystery about Dave, and a story to go with it, and as time went by, she became more and more curious, but she was afraid to ask in case they were offended and she wouldn’t be able to come again. On her fourth visit, her resolve cracked.

By now it was the school holidays and she had come for the middle of a week, three whole days with the two nights in between. This also meant that Dave didn’t have to be careful not to show himself on weekdays. Officially, he lived with his father in London during the week and went to school there, then came up and stayed with his grandmother at week-ends and in the holidays, while his father went mountain-climbing. Since there were no school parties to be guided round, on weekdays he and Ellie had the wood to themselves. They spent the whole of the first day working through a single section of it, doing the trees systematically, filling in the forms that Welly had prepared for them and adding the animals and birds as they came across them. Ellie would do one tree and Dave a neighbouring one, so that Ellie could call to him if she needed help. In the evening Welly entered the results on her PC.

Ellie slept in a small room at the top of the stairs. She guessed that it was Dave’s, though it was far too tidy to feel like a boy’s room—like her brothers’ at any rate—and that he had moved in with Welly on the other side of the landing so that she could have it.

Next day they went on with the census and were busy and happy until late in the afternoon, when they were measuring the girth of an oak tree. This was the immense old fellow in whose hollow branch Ellie had photographed the woodpecker’s nest. It had in fact lost more than that single limb, and they had both spent almost an hour up in its crown recording the progress of its decay. Now their joined tapes met round the base. Ellie held their ends together on one side, and Dave drew them taut on the other and read off the inches. He couldn’t be bothered with centimetres, he told her.

ʺI don’t know,ʺ said Ellie as she straightened. ʺSomehow it doesn’t seem to matter that it’s lost its top. It’s still the emperor of the wood. But that must’ve been a storm and a half, Dave.ʺ

ʺThat it was,ʺ said Dave. ʺThat it—ʺ

If he hadn’t caught himself but just carried smoothly on, Ellie mightn’t have noticed the repetition, or grasped what it must mean. As it was, she froze for a moment, then turned slowly and stared at him. He waited, unreadable as ever.

ʺYou were there, weren’t you?ʺ she said. ʺIt was almost a hundred years ago, and you were there. How old are you really, Dave?ʺ

ʺOne ’undred and ninety this New Year past,ʺ he replied, untroubled. ʺGettin’ on a bit, you might say.ʺ

Midwinter 1899/1900

On the last night of the old century, or the first of the new one, Dave Moffard was woken by a single tremendous crash of thunder. Outside the wind roared through the trees of the wood and whined between his two chimney-pots like a man whistling through a gap in his front teeth. If there was rain, the noise of the wind drowned it. A little later he caught the whiff of smoke borne on the same fierce wind.

Wonder what’s caught it, he thought. Timber of some kind—leaf-litter burnt with a sourer smell. There were a few dead trees in the wood, but nothing he’d have guessed would catch that easy. Though you never know with lightning.

Must be past midnight, he thought. ’ Ello there, Nineteen-hundred. Never reckoned I’d live to see you in. ’Appy birthday, Dave Moffard.

He fell asleep and slept on until less than an hour before the late midwinter dawn. For a man his age, Dave didn’t sleep too bad.

As on all other mornings, he first lit his lamp and riddled the ashes out of the stove, opened the dampers, fed in a few small logs and a couple of larger ones and put the kettle on for a pot of tea and his shaving water. For breakfast he had porridge cooked overnight in the oven, and then a morsel of ham with the tea, chewing slow and careful because his teeth didn’t fit that well. He shaved—harder to do these days, with his left eye so clouded and his right beginning to go the same way—then fed the stove again, put the tea-pot on it to stew a bit more, half-closed the dampers and looked out of the door. Dawn just breaking on a cold, clear day, but dry. No rain seemed to have fallen, then, after all that bluster. The wind had dropped too, to not much more than a breeze. It was still threaded with smoke.