A Wonder in the Woods

A night journey into a mystical forest leads to a really supernatural encounter.

Dusk. The soft chirping of crickets. Slowly, the weary day star descends toward the dark edge of the forest. Sounds, rustles, the groans of trees in the wind — all this merges into a single symphony of the twilight forest and, filling the reigning gloom, gently gives birth to a quiet northern summer night. In the sky, a scattering of stars appears as fine, silvery specks. There will be no moon tonight — it's the peak of the new moon.
Following a path known only to me, I walk through one grove after another, passing meadows and small, warm lakes, carefully avoiding the bright patches of settlements.
It's a strange thing: it's already past midnight, but I walk on and feel neither drowsiness nor fatigue. My body is light, my thoughts are clear, like the sky above me. Clear and sprinkled with the silvery specks of emotions that overwhelm me. In this night, it would be a sacrilege to take a flashlight out of my backpack and walk, my gaze fixed on a small yellow circle of light beneath my feet. It’s a pity that people are used to seeing everything in the light, and they have no idea how beautiful and captivating the night can be. The innate fear of darkness in many people has always seemed strange to me. The darkness around you cannot cause harm; it is much safer than the darkness within — perhaps people are more afraid of it, because it lives in so many of them constantly, while the external darkness reigns only at night.
There's not much left to walk — about a kilometer, no more. I descend a pine-covered hill and for some reason stop, toss my heavy backpack to the ground, and sit on the warm meadow grass, not yet cooled after the hot day. I silently gaze into the stillness of the night: above me, the bottomless sky, the stars. I sit and look up. Soon my head begins to spin, and losing consciousness, sinking into the blackness of the endless sky.
Darkness and silence. Time flows like viscous resin. Trying to escape this maelstrom, I run through the darkness. Suddenly I see my own body, flashing with a bright blue light, dispelling the gloom. Somewhere far ahead, I hear a distant female voice. I run toward it, tearing apart the black shreds of darkness with the radiance of my body… and suddenly, a white light floods everything around.
I come to. I look around, check my watch — I was out for at least five minutes. Trying to shake the haze from my eyes, I shake my head. Gradually, the gray veil covering my eyes lifts, and I, having gotten up from the ground, walk on slowly. The forest around is unusually quiet: there is no sound of crickets, no rustling of grass in the wind. Everything living seems to have frozen, silenced in anticipation of something magical, something supernatural.

From a distance, from the top of the hill, I spot our camp. The orange glow of a fire burning somewhere beyond the dark wall of the forest illuminates the tops of the trees, and above them, a thin thread of smoke curls. I walk there. I slowly descend into the floodplain, cross the quietly babbling stream below on a log. Only a few steps remain to the fire, but, obeying some inner impulse, I do not rush. I stand, listening to the silence. Hesitantly, I take one step… another… a third. I slowly peer out from behind the trees and, finally, emerge into the clearing lit by the fire.
“Hello!” I say to the dark figure by the fire.
“Hello…” a soft female voice whispers.
“Sorry I’m a little late. You weren't too worried about me, were you?”
I sit down next to her and put my arms around her shoulders.
“I know how you love the night and that you are at home in the woods. How could I have been worried about you?…”
Her voice trembled a little.
“Helga… you’re…” I began, and then cut myself off mid-sentence, “forgive me, my dear, I just got carried away.”
“Did you bring the potatoes? And salt?” she asked, looking at the backpack at my feet.
“Yeah, I did. Brought three kilos of potatoes — and even some salt. Should last us a while.”
“That’s good… Go on, get it out and put it with the rest of the stuff, and I'll warm up some food for you. You're hungry, right? Want some soup?.. I made it for you…”
Helga started fussing with the pot, and I dragged my backpack over to the tent and began to sort through the provisions. About an hour passed with this unpacking and eating. When I had finished, I noticed how often she glanced at her watch.
“Waiting? Scared, huh?” I asked Helga.
“Of course… it’s just—what you told me, it’s so unusual, so strange. Every year… this month, this day… two hours before dawn,” she said, her voice faltering. Then, almost whispering, as if afraid of her own words: “…something like this, here, in this forest… a normal forest… it’s almost unbelievable!”
Helga fell silent, set down her mug, and taking the watch off her hand, cleverly tossed it into the depths of my backpack. “Let it stay with you, I'm already all nerves.”
I looked at my own watch, set the timer, and tossed it into the backpack after hers.
“Why’d you do that?” She asked in surprise.
“Well… I’m worried too,” I said as nonchalantly as possible. “I set the timer… my alarm is loud”
My words had the desired effect — she calmed down a bit. After sitting by the fire for a while, she went to the river to wash the dishes. I had no desire to follow her or to hinder her wish to be alone with her thoughts. I just sat by the fire, looking at the flames, at the red sparks swirling above it, and I thought. The dance of the fire plunged me into some inexplicable trance, and I remembered what that first night was like for me, when I first saw this myself. For me, fear then was intertwined with curiosity and some strange feeling of closeness to this forest… and not just the forest — to the whole world…

When I came to and tore my gaze from the fire, she had already returned. I hadn't even noticed her come and sit down next to me. At that moment, her eyes shone with a sincere, almost childlike anticipation of a miracle, an anticipation of something magical and fairy-tale-like that usually only happens on New Year's Eve. When I invited Helga, I never thought that this would become such a significant event for her; I didn't expect it to move her so deeply. I was very surprised when she, without hesitation, agreed to come here with me. She — a resident of a big city, who traded the comfort of her apartment for the thin cover of a tent, the smoke of a fire ...and the great wonder awaiting her ahead. A wonder that cannot be measured or valued with money, a wonder you won’t see anywhere except in this remote, wild forest, where life has not yet lost its power — where only it rules. For some inexplicable reason, it was here that the boundary between the past and the future was torn apart; it was here that the present looked into the face of infinity…

The muffled beeping of the watches at the bottom of the backpack tore me from my thoughts.
“It's time,” I whispered, “we need to hurry if we want to make it on time.”
Helga got up from the log, brushed off the clinging ash and pieces of bark from her pants, and taking my hand, said:
“Well, I’m ready! Lead the way.”
Having covered the fire with earth and stuffed the backpacks under the tarp, we set off. Holding her hand, I felt the rising excitement in her slowly transfer to me. The vague feeling that had once before swept over me on that first night now took hold of me again.
The path ahead was not long, but it was quite difficult, especially when walking at night. After passing two small streams with deep floodplains, we soon came out into a clearing — this was the very place where I came at the same time almost every year. In this place, I was able to find my place in this world and understand my purpose.
“We have arrived,” I said. “If you want, you can sit a little way off for now. I'll call you when it all begins.”
Without a word, she sat on a small mound in the middle of the clearing. I sat down next to her.
“Will we have to wait long?” she asked softly.
“Quiet… Don't make a sound…” I replied, putting my finger to my lips. “I don't think it will be long… but I left the watches back at the camp, so I don't know for sure. We’ll just sit and wait.”
She nodded in response, and we silently began to wait. Suddenly, the forest plunged into an incredibly dense silence, so thick that even the rustling of leaves was inaudible. I knew — it had begun!

Glancing at the girl sitting next to me, I was stunned: her entire body was glowing, enveloped in an unthinkable silvery-blue radiance. She looked at me with surprised eyes too, and I could see the reflection of my own body's glow in her pupils. The strange thing was that I couldn't see my own luminescence.
The magical spectacle continued: a frantic play of colors engulfed the surrounding trees. Their branches sparkled as if covered in multi-colored frost, waves of light ran through the grass — flaring up and immediately dying down. The heads of forest flowers glowed in the darkness like colored beacons. The surrounding silence was suddenly replaced by a delicate chiming, as if thousands of crystal bells had vibrated in unison.
Before our eyes, dozens of animals, shimmering with all the colors of the rainbow, passed one after another: a graceful roe deer darted by; a forest cat strutted by, its head held proudly; a wolf passed, baring its fangs; and following it, a fox trotted by, casually wagging its fluffy tail. A little way off in the bushes, snow-white rabbits were stripping bark, and above us, golden squirrels were jumping from branch to branch. Here and there, unseen plants grew out of the earth, and majestic pines soared upward.
The commotion around us did not subside, and soon the clearing was filled with a multitude of various animals and plants, and the air was filled with indescribable aromas and sounds. Everything around was so real and so close: it seemed as if it would be nothing to reach out and pat a fiery red lynx behind the ear, to touch the cup of a huge flower, or to feed a squirrel from your hand. I saw how Helga, as if reading my thoughts, reached out her hand to a fox standing in front of her — without meeting the slightest resistance, her hand passed through the animal’s shimmering red fur. She pulled her hand back and looked at me questioningly — she did not yet know that before her were only ethereal phantoms woven from colored light.

The magical fairy tale ended as unexpectedly as it had begun: in the first rays of the rising sun above the forest, the surrounding riot of life dissolved, the colored illumination faded, and the forest returned to its usual colors and sounds.
I, sure that it was all over, was about to get up when suddenly the bushes in front of us parted, and a large reddish lynx with dark spots came out. Surveying the clearing with its yellow eyes and seemingly not noticing us, it casually sat down under a tree. I saw the rising sun playing on its reddish fur, saw how it was reflected in its eyes — this was no longer a phantom, but a real, quite material lynx, which for some reason was not afraid of us at all. We sat side by side, afraid to move. Helga held my hand with all her might — it was clear that she was scared. I also felt uneasy: I had never seen these cats so close before. The lynx, however, was not at all embarrassed by our presence: it began to lick its paw with a completely unconcerned look, occasionally listening and looking somewhere past us into the space behind our backs, as if we were transparent to its gaze. It began to seem to me that we ourselves had become ghosts, or, having fallen into some warp of time or space, had fallen out of our reality.
Meanwhile, the lynx, having finished its grooming, began to peer intently at something behind us: its ears perked up, and the tufts on their tips began to twitch slightly. Soon, from behind us came the rustling of parting branches, and a moment later a long, drawn-out growl echoed across the clearing. Surprised, she and I forgot our fear and looked back in unison — behind us sat a second, exactly the same reddish lynx, and it was carefully examining its relative, completely ignoring our presence. Approaching each other, the lynxes touched noses, rubbed affectionately against one another, and walked into the thicket, waving their short little tails goodbye to us.

I no longer remember how long we sat in the clearing, unable to tear our gaze from the bushes that had closed behind the animals. I only remember how I, gathering my strength, finally got up from the ground and walked around the clearing a bit, stretching my numb legs. I remember how I was then shaking with excitement. Helga, however, could not come to her senses for a long time: time and again she tried to get up, but her legs did not obey her, and she fell back onto the grass, exhausted. Only when I held out my hand to her was she able to get to her feet. I remember how we, stunned, holding onto each other, with stiff legs, trudged back to the camp. I remember how at the camp we drank cold tea from the pot and ate cold porridge. Until our departure, we were unable to talk to each other about the miracle we had seen.

06.02.05