When night fell, I slept at times, and each time I dreamt that the forest went on forever.Īfter three days of wandering, I reconciled myself to God and sat under a tree waiting for death. Trees, which had once seemed benign and beautiful to me, blocked the sun, fell before my path, tore at my hair, and yielded no fruit but bitter leaves. I left the path in hopes of finding an easier way to the creek, but soon I could no longer hear the water at all, and I could not find the path again. Some had fallen and lay like blackened bones in the clutches of the upright trees. Trees grew upward out of the sheer face of the ravine. Far down in the cut I could hear water, a creek, but I could not see it. I walked a deer-trod that wove its way for a time along a ridge above a ravine. I thought I saw him between the trees, and then I did not, and then I did, and after a good long while I turned about and realized I was lost in the wood. I thought only to follow the pig path a little way into the forest in hopes that I might have a new story to tell of him at the common fire. I meant only to peek into the trees to see more of him. At last he slowly turned and walked back into the forest.

He raised his head, and for a long moment he looked upon me as if I had stumbled upon him in his own domain, so proud he was, and so royal. I saw that he was a sixth-year hart at least, and I would have run at the sight of his antlers, spread like a young tree, had I not been entranced by his beauty. I was picking new peas in our garden, which is bordered by the forest, when the famed hart, the hart that had eluded Lord Temsland and his finest hunters many times, the hart about which I had told many a story, came to nibble on our lettuces. I was sixteen years old the day I was lost in the forest, sixteen the day I met my death. Of myself, Keturah Reeve, and the personage I meet, a story scarce credible to one who has never been lost in the woods.

Keturah and lord death