The Tree stands atop a knoll amidst rolling, grassy fields; yet no grass grows upon it, its slopes bare and lifeless even in vibrant heights of golden summer. Its roots reach deep into the soil, worming their way through soft wet earth like eels, and its thick pale trunk rises high into the cloudless sky, its bark smooth and unblemished despite the age its girth betrays. Its broad branches spread wide, casting a shadow upon the ground that seems to drain the sunlight. Its wide, thick leaves remain verdant all year long, shining splendidly in the winter sun.
The first record of the Tree comes from a faded sketch in a nearby cave from a time before history, and it was largely discarded as a source; for it is surely a fantastical notion that a tree, rooted as it is deep within the ground, could with its roots strangle wild animals, snapping their necks and rending their corpses to fertilize its soil. Though many remains testify to their presence in the area, the proto-humans seem to have shunned the Tree, for no fragments of tools were found upon the knoll – only complete human skeletons scattered within the earth, buried amidst the grasping roots.
Though there is evidence that tribes of druids lived near the Tree, naught is left of them save fragments of demented carvings depicting trees with jagged maws rending open their bark. The writings of the Romans leave a more concrete record; for a military captain stationed nearby wrote that his men were forbidden to approach, though he did not say why. The Tree appears visually depicted only once in that period, in mosaic form within the buried, vine-draped ruins of a villa filled with shattered skeletons. There the Tree appears strong and healthy, much as it appears today; but the artisans surrounded it with visions of torment and madness more befitting of a piece depicting the underworld than the tranquil countryside.
The next millennia harbours little evidence of the Tree, for the Christian missionaries gave its environs a wide berth. “I would not go near that thing, not if one thousand heathen souls would be saved,” wrote one traveling priest in the middle of the 10th century. Soon the Tree disappeared from the record altogether.
Thus it came to pass that the world spun through the void, and day followed night, and the world came into the nineteenth century. The world began to expand, and the needs of its population blossomed, and science grew until it believed that all the mysteries of the universe could be unraveled. The agricultural fields, that once had shunned the Tree and its grassless knoll, broadened, until they surrounded it; and a village sprang up amidst the fields. Legend still hung heavy and thick about the Tree, winding along its leafy branches; but the power and might of the era was thick about the villagers, and they disbelieved them.
The fields were plowed, and seeds planted in the damp furrows amidst the heavy early-autumn rains; and as time flowed the seeds germinated, and crops grew from the soil. The birds came, flocking to the ripening fields in black whirling clouds against skies of lead and slate; and the villagers put up scarecrows to keep them away from their crops, bodies of straw stuffed into old, moldering coats with jagged branches for hands. The heads they carved from the rotting orange shells of large, round gourds, growths of mold and fungi lining the sides like tumorous growths. Their jagged grins leered over the fields beneath jagged grey clouds.
The birds swirled in a writhing swarm into the south, and did not return.
The records indicate that it started towards the end of October, as the nights drew shorter and the chill of winter bit and held. Villagers, out late at night, would vanish without a trace, searches of the fields turning up nothing but dead leaves and the vague sense that the world had shifted overnight. It took several weeks and a dozen disappearances before it was noted that the scarecrows seemed to be in different places than they had been the night before.
Then one night, as the last warmth of October faded out of memory in the icy embrace of cold, bleak November, the village was woken in the small hours by the insane cries of a drunkard, wandering the fields, scared out of his mind. According to the diary of an eyewitness that night, he “stumbled into the town square, eyes bloodshot and wide as saucers. The mayor, with a few stern words, was able to quiet him enough to get some coherent words out of him; but they were utter nonsense about ‘burning faces’ and grasping claws of jagged wood.”
Not much else has been found of written records after that night, save brief mentions in diaries of half-glimpsed faces of grinning flame in the nighttime windows; but my team has unearthed far more than anyone could ever imagine or can ever know. For we have solved the two-century-old mystery of how the entire village vanished during one winter; yet we have uncovered a wholly more terrible mystery. For how could the corpses of one hundred people bury themselves in the soil of that lifeless knoll, entwined amidst those grasping roots?
It cannot be the Tree, as verdant and alive today as in Roman times, despite what the proto-humans’ primitive carvings indicate. It is equally impossible that the scarecrows haunting the fields are anything more than pranks by local children (there are no local children) to teach the nosy team of archeologists, historians, and biologists a lesson for poking their noses where they don’t belong.
Perhaps a more sane explanation could be found, and indeed I wish that I could believe in one; but I am cursed to be a biologist. The test results from the sample we extracted returned yesterday from the lab: the Tree has stood, on its grassless, lifeless knoll, for over five hundred million years!
Writer | Kidane Pincus ’28 | kpincus28@amherst.edu
Editor | Mikiko Suga ’27 | msuga27@amherst.edu