In Which Leaves Have Common Sense: A (temporarily) free short story

Hello! Hurrah! We are celebrating!

What are we celebrating, you ask? Well, I’m not sure about YOU, but *I* am celebrating the launch of my latest Kickstarter, which is for the collection And Then I Shall Transform! And as part of this, I am offering the first short story from the collection here ENTIRELY FREE for your viewing pleasure – but only until the Kickstarter ends on April 4 😉

Enjoy!

In Which Leaves Are Common Sense

Most people think leaves fall in autumn because they die, fluttering drifts of red and yellow and orange and brown, twirling on a breeze that smells like the promise of ice before falling to skitter along the ground with a hollow tick-tick-tick.

Most people, it turns out, are wrong.

About many things of course, but in this case about the leaves: deciduous trees don’t just shed their leaves wantonly, carelessly—or even regretfully.

No.

Deciduous trees lose their leaves because they are frugal.

Turns out, the only reason the leaves change colour in the first place—be that ruby or pumpkin, butternut or hazel, or some striated rainbow in between—is because the cooling weather lulls the plant into sleepiness, and a sleeping plant is a plant that can’t eat (frozen leaves aren’t much good at collecting sunlight anyway, not when frost bursts their cell walls like bubbles, sharp fragments of ice severing pathways like a knife through warm, fresh neurons).

The colour change is just the outward signal of the tree’s common sense: drawing back in all the nutrients the leaf has to offer, slurping them back into the trunk where the tree can nurse on them all winter long, shedding the now-empty leaves like scales, sloughing them off like old skin, discarding dead storage units until the risk of frostbite has passed.

The day I realised I could do the same changed my life.

The snow was—predictably—cold. It was also early, and I’d been caught out hiking unprepared, which was just about the dumbest thing I’d managed to do yet in my life—apart from, maybe, George, and also attending New Beat University. An avid hiker since I’d been old enough to carry any sort of day pack with my parents, I knew the risks inside and out, backward and forward, upside and down.

Never go hiking alone.

Always pack extra Puritabs.

Let people know where you’re going, and when you expect to be back.

Take warmer things than you think you’ll need.

No one gives advice on what to do when your hike-mate has a sudden attack of lunar-cy, though, three days before the full moon. No one tells you what to do when you’re abruptly alone in a sea of grey-trunked eucalypt trees and tea tree scrub that stinks like face cleanser and scratches like the blazes, and you’ve now got two packs’ worth of gear to hike out. Alone.

Werewolves are not considerate hiking buddies, let me be the first to assure you.

Well. Amendment: Probably some of them are, maybe even most of them.

George? Not so much.

(In hindsight, unsurprising: he’d never been a very considerate roommate, either, no matter what physical form he was in.)

And, of course, it was cold.

And as I stood in the clearing where considerate wildlife had trampled down the tussock grass and a fallen gum tree was busy turning silver as it weathered, cold air singeing the inside of my nostrils and burning the tip of my nose, I realised I had a choice: I could get really, really cold as I sat around waiting for George to human up again—probably in three or four days once the moon had passed, but then again, he wasn’t supposed to have wolfed out this earlier either, so who knew?—or I could get really really warm trying to hike two packs’ worth of gear back out.

Or—I scratched my nose, face screwed up—I could redistribute the gear, take the expensive or vital stuff out in one pack, leave the rest somewhere covered and come back when it was safe.

With someone other than George, of course.

Bloody George.

I sighed heavily, rolled my pack over onto its back like a floundering sea lion, and began unbuckling the straps. Stupid to think I could hike a whole day out with both full packs. Not worth the risk.

The sky told me what it thought of that: the clouds that had been fitfully scudding across the sky coagulated into something thick and soupy and so low it seemed like I could practically touch it (or at least throw something high enough to touch it, like a rock, or maybe George, who deserved to be tossed into the sky) and the sky began to spit at me.

I rolled my eyes at the melodrama, rustled the brim of my cherry-red raincoat down over my forehead, and set about repacking the packs.

Out came my bag of dirty clothes. Would I regret leaving them if I needed extra warmth? Probably not.

Stupid weather, sky-spit freezing my fingers and making them slow.

Sleeping mat. Ditched. I had one night max to spend outdoors, and that was if I spent the rest of today lollygagging around instead of moving at pace.

Stupid moon, exerting whatever stupid influence it was over stupid werewolves at a stupid time of the month.

Sleeping bag.

Well. Obviously I was going to hold onto that one, just in case.

Only one though. George could keep his own furry butt warm if it came to that.

Food—check, definitely coming with. Compass, maps, cook stove—yes, yes and yes.

Tent. Obviously. Just in case.

Dammit. I’d have to take both halves.

I fished the fly and poles out of George’s pack and rammed them into my own.

The sky stopped spitting and started snowing at me, frigid air turning my fingers red, the scent of the bush subtly shifting from eucalypt to wet grass and now to snow itself.

The hell.

It was March. Yes, okay, fine, it was autumn by the calendar, but the last five, ten years March had grown hot. Like, summer hot. No one reasonably expected even a sudden transient fit of cold weather until April, which was why I’d agreed to this hike with George in the first place.

A cold snap? Sure. Unfortunate, but this wasn’t our first hike in the bush and we’d brought layers.

Snow?

What. The actual. Hell.

I scowled at the steely clouds, shoved the last of the necessities into my pack, and drew the drawstring tight around its neck.

Flipped the lid of the pack shut, canvas scuffing loudly in the silence of the bush. Snapped the buckles shut—snap, snap, echoing around the clearing.

A third snap.

I froze.

My pack definitely only had two buckles to close, and George’s pack was right there in front of me, wallowing on the ground like an unholy grey hippopotamus.

My ears tried to crawl off my head as I tried to surveil the bush around me without appearing to.

…A rustle, perhaps? Behind and to my left, where the gum trees thinned in both density and girth and the spiky, pale tussock grass traced a path down a gentle slope to a green hollow largely occupied by a white cedar of impressive height.

The dang berries on the cedar were toxic. I knew that. George knew that. But did George’s lunar form know that?

I may or may not have let my pack fall sideways with a bit of firm assistance as I swore and clambered to my feet.

Definitely a rustle, that now became a susurrus of disturbed grass as something grey and the size of a large kangaroo or a small wolf vanished into the teatree scrub.

I ground my teeth. Inhaled icy-cold air. Buried my hands under my armpits and cursed past-me momentarily for not packing gloves, summer-like weather be damned. Then I trudged after the critter toward the hollow.

The white cedar gleamed like a golden crown amid the grey-and-olive eucalypts, framed above by the grey sky, its buttery autumn leaves flipping and fluttering in a breeze no other tree seemed to feel.

And underneath it, George: a grey wolf resting on his haunches with a wide, doggy grin on his face, tongue lolling to one side.

“George,” I said sternly, “I have too far to hike today to be messing around anymore with you. Either get your butt back here and let me strap a pack to your furry hide, or leave me alone so I can get home without losing my fingers to frostbite.”

I burrowed my hands deeper into my armpits, which probably would have been more effective if I’d had them under my raincoat, but that would mean opening said raincoat, which, no.

As if sensing the nearness of the end of my emotional tether, the sky very kindly hit pause on the whole snow situation.

My nose still burned with the cold.

“On second thoughts, get your furry butt over here so I can bury my face in it for a moment and warm up.” My nose wrinkled. “Your fur, that is, I’m not burying my face in your butt.”

George’s grin didn’t budge. He’d told me before that he had a hard time remembering how language worked while he was a wolf, but I squinted at him nonetheless.

“If you laugh, I’ll murder you on the spot.”

Happy panting.

Heaving a sigh to end all sighs, rolling my eyes hard enough that even Temporary Wolf Boy couldn’t fail to read my emotions, I stomped back to the clearing where I’d left the packs.

The packs were gone.

For the splittiest of seconds, I froze again—and then because I was actually starting to freeze, I strode to the spot where the packs had lain, thin rapiers of grass still crushed and buckled in their wake, and howled, “George!!”

To his credit, he appeared almost instantly at the fringe of the clearing again, peering out between the gnarled and twisted fingers of the tea tree.

“Where,” I said, “are our packs?” As if staring at him sternly with my hands on my hips would suddenly spur him to speech.

I ground my teeth.

The clouds hung above, not even a little movement in them to indicate the passing of time, no glimpse of the sunlight we’d been expecting shining through. Surely it was at least mid-morning now though, and I had, what, six hours to hike out to safety?

Fine.

Fine, I’d do it without George, without the packs—and without water I realised with a sinking stomach.

Okay.

Okay fine.

That would suck, but it was six hours, maybe seven or eight if I took it really slow to conserve energy, and sunset wasn’t until… I narrowed my eyes. I don’t know, maybe five thirty, six o’clock? It was twilight when I was sitting down to dinner on Tuesday and that was…

Sure, sunset was maybe six o’clock if I was lucky.

So I had six, maybe eight hours to walk on six, maybe seven, possibly eight hours of daylight.

Easy.

Absolutely plausible.

And it was freezing, so no doubt I’d drink less anyway. Ah ha. Ah ha-ha ha ha.

At least I’d walk faster without a pack.

The second time I came across the white cedar in the hollow, I swore loudly enough that I disturbed a pair of magpies fossicking around in the dirt. They flapped and squawked back at me, perching up on a tea tree branch just above my head and giving me the indignant eye.

Much as I was so sorry to have interrupted their lunch, I was far more worried about the tree.

Butter yellow, still shivering as though it could feel the cold as well as I could—and bloody George sitting right beneath it, grinning at me.

“George,” I said in a perfectly reasonable tone, “what the actual.”

He whuffed, wagged his tail twice as though domestication had already sunk its claws into him, and watched me stomp out of the hollow, footsteps heavy with boots that weren’t doing enough to preserve the circulation in my slowly numbing toes.

The magpies squawked happily as I left and fluttered back to the ground to look for lunch.

My stomach rumbled.

The third time I came across the tree, I said nothing, just scowled at it, at George, at the pair of magpies still busy aerating petrichorish soil, and stomped away with the tasted of dirt and damp bark in my palate.

The fourth time, I sighed, shambled over to the granite boulder that crouched, lichen-spattered, beneath the cedar, and sat. “What’s going on?” I asked George.

He rested his chin over my legs, wet-dog-gone-feral temporarily out-competing wet tea tree for my olfactory real estate.

I grimaced. “You’re disgusting.”

He licked my face.

I squealed, wiped slobber from my cheek with a nearly numb hand, and scowled again. “I’m just trying to get out alive,” I told him. “Why do you-and-or-this-tree have such a problem with that?”

He didn’t answer, but apparently the sky had a problem with it too, because now it began to snow in earnest.

Snow in Australia isn’t pretty like you see in other places. I presume it falls in flakes because that’s what science tells me, but if it does, they’re far too small to make out. It mostly just looks like sleet, like tiny white specks that might be rain if not for the fact that the wind blows them sideways just a little too easily, and that occasionally, they flurry.

I guess for some people it might still count as pretty.

I guess I’m not some people.

Even the magpies decided to pack it in, launching themselves into the air and swooping featherily away.

If only.

Instead, I was stuck in the slowly freezing bush, apparently doing circles with neither food nor water nor warmth, and at any point now the          sun was going to start its inevitable decline from the zenith somewhere behind those clouds, and before I knew it, I’d be foodless and waterless and warmthless in the dark.

George whined.

“What?” I snapped. “What do I have to do? I can’t just magic myself into a warm coat like you can, you know.”

Idly, I wondered if that was exactly what he’d done; had he—or even just his body, his subconscious—had some sort of warning about what was going to happen, and this was his body’s way of dealing with it?

Where the hell had the packs gone?

I leaned over, buried my face in the musky wet fur of George’s ruff, and may or may not have cried.

Only then I realised that was wasting water, and it was making my face wet i.e. cold, so I performed an extremely inelegant face-wipe against George’s fur that I expressly forbade him ever to mention, and sat up with a horribly shaky inhale.

It was still snowing.

I still had no packs.

But probably there was something to the theory that crying was your body’s way of purging excess emotions, because I did indeed feel calmer.

Calm enough that I closed my eyes, tilting my face up to the underside of the white cedar’s canopy. The air was still, and quiet, the kind of quiet you only get with snow.

George was warm on my lap.

The cedar’s trunk was more or less at my back, and if I slumped just a little, like so, it was shaped just right to cradle me.

A momentary wind gusted past, and even though my eyes were already closed, I squinted against the cold.

A cedar berry boinked me on my nose.

I wrinkled my nose.

My breathing slowed.

Eh.

If I was going to die here, at least there were worse ways to go.

I’d always heard that hypothermia was a weird one, where you got colder and colder and sleepier and sleepier until suddenly, right at the end, you got a burst of warmth, and felt suddenly so hot you wanted to strip all your clothes off, shed all the excess layers that you didn’t need anymore because you’d drawn all their warmth into yourself, and you had everything you needed from them, and could discard them like the useless, empty vessels that they were.

I shucked out of my raincoat.

It slithered nylonly to the ground.

Boots. My boots were big and hot and heavy, anchoring my feet to the ground. They were hard to unlace, though, and harder still to lace back up.

I stayed where I was against the trunk and let my feet sink into the ground, just like George was sinking into my lap and I was sinking into the tree behind me.

Oh.

I hadn’t realised hallucinations were part of hypothermia as well, but it really did feel like I was sinking into the tree, my arms rising slowly to meld into the branches, my spine lengthening toward the steel-grey sky, my heart slowing as my blood pulsed in time with the sap.

I smiled.

Wood creaked.

George whined softly.

I tried to pet him, to reassure him that it was okay, I didn’t mind dying like this, that maybe now the university would stop hassling me about my parking fees and the dean of boarding would quit complaining that our dorm room stank of dog because—didn’t we know—there were “No pets allowed on campus,” we chorused together for the millionth time, in the deep-fried cafeteria, in the cigarette-smoke pavilion, on the creek-water bridge where the ducklings came to try their hand —wing—feet?—at swimming, and…

And, well, I couldn’t well pat my wolf friend with branches for arms, now could I. Hmm. That wouldn’t do.

I opened my mouth—knothole—mouth—what was I doing?

My sap hummed happily up and down my phloem, and my toes—roots? Yes, roots, they wriggled happily in the soil, chatting chemically with the cedar whose roots entwined my own, warning of a nematode outbreak on the up-sun side at the furthermost extent of our reach.

I shivered.

Yellow leaves drifted away in the wind.

All creatures, it turns out, have their own form of common sense. We can’t always access it—sometimes we’re numbed to it by circumstance or choice—but when we do?

I smiled, caressing the trunk of the cedar who’d once been a woman. She’d turned in the depths of a snap far colder than mine, had had to clothe herself in bark and arboreal frugality much longer in order to survive—until now, she had only one choice: remain a tree, or die.

I could think of worse things.

I was still glad the weather had warmed after only a day or two for me, my soft body slowly returning to itself, disorientation at having to remember how to speak with my mouth and not my extremities, how to breathe through a single, inefficient appendage instead of with every pore of my skin leaving me frozen in place as the sun’s long fingers crept across the grassy green hollow, the warmth baking tea tree into the air.

George was still a wolf. The full moon probably hadn’t passed.

But this time, as I rose stiffly to my feet and hefted the grey pack onto my back that had somehow always been resting just there at the periphery of the white cedar’s reach, George stayed with me. And he kept staying with me, the whole way back to the car, which he’d never done before as a wolf because he told me humans stank too much to live with when you had about fifty times more scent receptors than your average nose-blind human.

So maybe George wasn’t the biggest mistake I ever made.

And maybe—though it’s truly bizarre to consider—neither was getting caught out in early snow, effectively hiking alone, unprepared for whatever it was that was just about to happen.

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