The bus pulled up silently to the grassy plain. Its tempered glass exterior iridescent in the sun, it appeared smaller than it was as it brushed against tall strands of thorns and wildflowers. When it came to a full stop, with a click, a panel on the left-hand side of it pushed in then out, and with it, beads of children. Little legs and arms in thick linen uniforms tumbled out and onto the grass.
“O-o-o-kay, everyone, don’t wander far just yet…” The young teacher’s feathery voice spread through the children who, while exuberant and chatty, nonetheless stayed close to their supervisor, who was presently adjusting their jean jacket and thinking about how, for all of humanity’s advances, still nothing could consistently protect their skin from the sun. Inevitably, the teacher thought, observing their reflection in the bus surface, their nose would turn coral. They just knew it.
This might be the one thing they didn’t like about the yearly school trip to the edge of the city: all the open space. Coming from the lush canopies that soared over every rooftop back in Osam, the plains made them feel nervous, exposed. Still, the teacher thought, it will only be for a short while, and besides, the children seem to enjoy it. As the teacher moved to adjust their short, carefully swooped hair, the children began to chant.
“Aru!”
“Arhu!
“Awooooo!” one child’s voice stretched into a howl and was joined with others.
“Awooo!” “Urf!” “Arf!” The children ran around like wolves.
“What the—” the teacher muttered through a laugh and then interceded themselves with, “Ah, yes.” They hoisted themselves onto the bus and looked toward the back.
“Aruzhan?” they called out, “Care to join us?”
Aruzhan pulled her black hair out of her eyes and blinked her digital access lenses twice: one to save her search, and one to close. The milky grey of her irises turned to the usual black-brown that engulfed the pupils. “Yes! Sorry hocam — I got caught up.” She felt around the bus seat for her prefect pin. Seeing her struggle, the teacher scooped up the gold acorn emblem beside her.
“Ever since that unit on wolves, this group won’t stop howling,” the teacher complained while fastening the prefect pin to Aruzhan’s vest, “They’re calling you now. They’ve really taken to the whole pack leader thing.”
Aruzhan tapped the bus wall and the iridescent coating cleared. She watched her classmates run around as if from within a bell jar. “I wish that they wouldn’t,” she said, keeping her eyes on the glass.
“Mhhmm,” the teacher let out absent-mindedly, then paused and reconsidered: “Why not?”
“It’s tacky. Besides, the term has lost all meaning now that wolves are semi-domesticated. Humans are alpha now,” she continued, putting a mocking emphasis on “alpha.”
“Well of course humans are alpha,” the teacher mocked back, “but only because we carry the greatest burden, the greatest responsibility. You remember the first-year curriculum? The age that humans failed to act on that responsibility?”
“The Anthropocene.”
“That’s right. So here is where the analogy is apt: the wolf doesn’t eat the whole lamb, or else there won’t be anything left for the pack.”
“But the pack leaders dictate the feeding hierarchy,” Aruzhan contended, “and restrict how much the others can eat.”
“Yes, and it is through that restriction — also of ourselves — that humans have ensured planetary harmony.”
Aruzhan breathed in as if to say something else, but hesitated, deferring to her teacher.
“Now,” the teacher spoke, announcing the end of discussion, “What were you reading about?”
“Boreal ecosystems.”
“Relevant. To today, I mean. Come on.”
Aruzhan and the teacher stepped off the bus. The other children lay in the grass in varying levels of put-on exhaustion and boredom.
A red-haired boy opened an eye, and seeing Aruzhan, leaped up saying, “We had been waiting!”
“We had been calling!” a voice answered.
“And still you do not come!” broke in another child, with laughter.
“Aru!” “Awooo!” “Urf!” “Arf!”
Aruzhan rolled her eyes. Onni was already at her side, all red curl and freckles. The other children fell in line with them, forming a cluster with Aruzhan at the centre.
“All accounted for.” The teacher asserted, took a final glance at the bus, and pressed a button on their belt. The door slid back inwards, then outwards, and as silently as it came, the bus drove away.
Together, the group crossed the meadow and came to the edge of the forest.
“Woah,” Onni let out, lifting his head up to the trees. The other children followed, looking up at tree crowns hundreds of feet up in the air.
“Welcome to the Forest of Lifetimes,” a sharp voice called out. The lead guide was a tall woman in her thirties. Her long, straight, black hair complemented the forest guide uniform: a thick, wool, green vest that opened at the shoulder to reveal a muslin sleeve, and brown leather boots that cushioned her steps on the forest floor. “This is an important visit for every young person of Osam. Here, at the end, you’ll learn about our beginning. This forest,” she motioned with a thin hand, “is the burial place of every past citizen of Osam. When we die, our bodies are brought here and joined with seed. The body gives of itself, feeding the seed that grows into a tree.” With that, she turned and led the way into the forest.
The teacher breathed out in relief as the blistering sun gave way to damp, dark, green. Their next breath filled with earth and sap and moss. They looked up to the tree crowns that folded in and around each other, filtering out the light into a soft hue that was welcome on their, yes, predictably, already blistering nose. As the procession moved forward, other guides in green wool appeared as if from within the trees.
The lead guide held out her hand in invitation for the children to explore the terrain, though there was no need. A guide was already unpeeling Onni off a particularly accessible tree branch.
“We have a quarter of an hour until the lesson,” the teacher called out, “stay where I can see you,” and with that, the cluster of linen uniforms broke. Little legs carried the children around the edges of trees. Hands dug and clutched at roots. Tongues darted at sap, and ears glued to tree trunks, listening for movement.
Aruzhan decided how she would use the quarter-hour as the class cleared the edge of the forest. She headed for the patch of birch trees. Once, her grandfather said that one can charge from trees, and birch trees emit the strongest energy of them all. She didn’t know whether she believed this. She didn’t know if he did either, but the story passed down from generation to generation, so Aruzhan turned her back to the nearest birch, bent at the knees, and sat down, with her head back. She closed her eyes and thought about how quiet the forest was. How still. She set a mental timer, determined not to let her teacher down again.
At 14 minutes and 55 seconds, Aruzhan folded her legs back up and headed back to the clearing. The teacher was calm yet visibly dreading gathering the children. “Come everyone!” Aruzhan called out, and the children did.
The children gathered around the lead guide and sat down in the grass.
“Four hundred and seven years ago,” the lead guide began, “this forest was desert: sand, sky, and wind as far as the eye could see. In those days, people buried their dead in wooden or metal boxes in the ground. That is, until a woman named Myriad drove a truck into the desert. When Myriad buried her brother Klim in this valley, she changed Osam forever. Klim, taken tragically young at 29 years old in a political uprising, became the first person in this land to join with trees. Myriad buried him in acorns, and from those, saplings grew, and from those young trees, and from those, giants of the forest that still stand with the others.” The guide motioned to two oaks, wider than they were tall — and that was a feat, for they stretched a hundred feet up into the air.
“When Myriad returned to the city, she told her loved ones of what she did, and news spread. Over the coming year, people of Osam began to bring their dead into the valley.”
Aruzhan dug her fingers into the grass as she listened, looping the strands absent-mindedly around her fingers when her knuckle thunked against something hard. She looked down and saw movement. At first, she thought it was a small pile of wet, dark branches, but the shape was undeniably alive.
“From the burial ground trees rose, and as the rains came in and the tree crowns shielded the forest floor from the sun,” (at this, the teacher rubbed their nose again), “moss crawled through the valley. By the first century, it was customary to bury one’s loved ones here and to wander the forest in remembrance of lives past. With the Forest of Lifetimes came other changes: trees entered the city, were woven into the fabric of life. As you perhaps know, the city passed the No Roof Past Crown bylaw, ascertaining that every building in our city limits defers to trees. Since then, we’ve modelled our lives on the wisdom of these giants: we are rooted in place, and we are in harmony with our surroundings.”
The guide paused for Onni, who catapulted his arm up in the air. Bent at the shoulder, he looked like an arrow piercing upwards. “Yes, child?”
“How do you keep track of where someone is buried?”
“We don’t. Though some families take a liking to specific species, there’s no telling which trees are which. As trees die, they give their life to seeds, and young trees take their place. The forest is one. Each tree is yours and mine.”
Aruzhan stared in amazement at the glistening shell-like centre of the shape in front of her, rounded as a bead. Out of the bead, black as onyx, legs stabbed out and into the grass. She lifted her hand to the two whisker-like strands coming out of the creature’s head. It moved from her touch. She had never seen an insect before. Without thinking, Aruzhan blocked the creature’s path with her hand, not wanting to let it go just yet—
“Aru!” Onni tugged at her shoulder. Aruzhan looked up and saw that the lead guide had stopped speaking. Aruzhan felt her cheeks flush.
“What do you have there, child?” the guide asked as she kneeled to Aruzhan’s level.
Aruzhan looked to her teacher, who nodded. She shifted the palm of her hand so that the guide could see.
“A beetle,” the guide concluded gravely. “It’s a bark beetle,” she repeated, louder, and the guides flurried. The bug, frazzled by the sudden movement, began to scutter, but Aruzhan cupped her hand around it, trapping it between the palm of her hand and the grass. Aruzhan looked over at Onni, who smiled conspiratorially. Confused mutters rose through the children as they shifted from their positions to look in Aruzhan’s direction.
“Settle,” the lead guide motioned the intended effect with her hands, and the children bent under them, “your classmate found a bark beetle — a kind of insect, a pest. Forests were once filled with them.”
“In times past,” the teacher chimed in, “forests relied on insects, which carried seeds and pollen, ate away at ailing vegetation, and fertilized the earth. This one must have caught a ride with us,” they said, looking cautiously at the beetle sheltering within Aruzhan’s palm.
“These trees are sacred to our people,” the guide’s tone turned grave. “The oaks, elms, firs, larches, pines, and birches carry in their roots, in their bark, all that is left of those dearest to us. The forest before you lives eternal because humans care for it. The planting, trimming, treating, fertilizing, watering, even decomposing — it’s all done by us. No ancestral tree is destroyed by a pest.”
Onni, direct witness to the beetle, seemed unconvinced by its tree-destroying capacity, so the guide answered before he could ask, “Trees, even large as these, are vulnerable. Insects feed on their leaves, their branches, and even on their skin. Some beetles,” she cast a chilling glance towards Aruzhan whose breath snagged, “can climb underneath the bark and lay eggs within it, burrowing pathways all throughout the tree trunk, weakening it from the inside.”
Aruzhan sat very still, imagining black beads burrowing their way into tree bark. The image sent shivers up her forearms that felt like tiny feet, and she fought the urge to pull her hand away.
As her thoughts turned to dead, decaying birch bark, Aruzhan felt the beetle struggle underneath her tightening palm. While the anger pulsed in her wrists and temples, she thought about what it would be like to bring her force down onto the hard exterior. She wondered if the inside would be soft, and if it would splatter. The beetle thrashed around, now digging, she felt, into the moist grass. In its attempt to shift away from the weight of her palm, it toppled on its side. Surprised by the sensation of its legs scratching at her skin, Aruzhan lifted her hand and looked at the beetle wriggling helplessly. Her desire to kill it faded.
Aruzhan thought that maybe her grandfather wouldn’t mind being eaten by a beetle. She didn’t think she would either. Aruzhan picked a small branch from the forest floor and nudged the beetle upright. It hurried across the grass. The lead guide traced Aruzhan’s gaze to the beetle, frantically making its way towards the nearest pile of leaves. She took a step, a second one to cross its path, and a final one to crush it under the heel of her boot. It was soft. It splattered.