A Noble Death

The end has got to be close now. My end … the end of a life. I still had hope not that long ago, but beaten down, tortured, abused and humiliated, not anymore. I lie here in the dark and can only wonder what I have done to deserve this cruelty, and wonder what comes next. This makeshift graveyard is so cold. By the few dim lights, I can see the hundreds, maybe thousands of others, just like me. More are brought and dumped here every day. We cling to life with whatever little bits of energy we have left.

Three, maybe four weeks ago, I’ve lost track of the days, my life was relatively normal. Yes, it was culling season, that dreaded time that comes every year when the days grow ever shorter and cold weather sets in, so I was somewhat worried, I confess. But I had survived so many seasons now that I was one of the biggest left, maybe even too big to be chosen. The people who came, the choosers, almost always favored the fairest ones, those of a certain age, about twelve to fifteen. I was nineteen, and far from fair. In fact, I was deformed.

An accident when I was seven had left an ugly scar, a bald and mangled patch too prominent to hide. Over the years, others had made fun of me with horrible names and mocking chants. It didn’t help that back then I was also one of the smallest of those my age. The few elders left in our homestead tried to assure me that my size was normal, telling me that my kind simply grew slower and would catch-up in time; that even my scars would fade, so much so that eventually no one would even notice.

I never completely believed them, even though I wanted to. Elders like to fib, to try to make the young feel better, or alternately to scare them into behaving with their wild stories about the Great Harvester or the horrors of the Burning Winds.

I guess I am about to find out if any of those childhood tales are true. Even if my captors don’t put an end to me soon, I know I can’t last much longer, malnourished and exposed to the elements as I have been. Will the Great Harvester actually come for me to judge my life? I survived a glimpse of the Burning Winds, if only barely. Will I see them again at the end, in their full wrath?

I try to suppress such horrible thoughts, but can’t for long. Just the cold itself is almost unbearable now. And to think, up until a few weeks ago, I had never known what true cold really felt like.

My whole life, or at least as far back as I could remember, I had lived on the farm. Broad fields surrounded by beautiful, rolling hills, with streams of the clearest water. It was all I had ever known, my home.

If not for the culling, it would have been paradise.

This year’s choosers had already been coming for a few days, but their assessment of me so far had done nothing but reassure my beliefs. Most discounted me on size alone, with barely a glance. But others, likely those few who did seek a larger specimen, would be excited at first. They would often come up on my good side, maybe wondering how such a tall and rugged choice was still available, only to be disappointed after a closer look.

During the culling, my scar was my salvation. In my youth, I had always wished that I could hide it, but now I wanted to turn my deformed side toward everyone who passed by, shove it in their faces and dare them to pick me. ‘Look at the freak’, I would have shouted if I had been able. ‘Take me, I dare you.’ With each new day, my confidence that I would live to see another year on the farm grew.

Until they showed up.

There was nothing particularly special about them. The four of them talked among themselves as they walked among the rows, or at least three of them did. The smallest ran about wildly playing in the new fallen snow, ignoring the shouts of the others directed toward him. I could not understand their language and could only guess at their intentions by their expressions and gestures.

The tallest of them walked past with a typical shrug and roll of his eyes when he spotted the bare area so prominent on my backside, but the woman walking next to him surprisingly stopped and lingered. The man turned back. These two stood beside me, not angrily arguing, but obviously in disagreement. Their gesturing and so blatantly pointing out my imperfections was rather embarrassing, so since I could not turn away, I shifted my attention to the fourth member of the group, a younger woman. She had taken over the group’s attempts to curb the smallest one’s rowdiness, and like myself, seemed inclined to ignore the couple’s discussion. For some reason, I felt a strange kinship with her, though we had nothing in common except perhaps that we were of a similar age.

Distracted as I was, the cold bite of sharpened steel teeth slicing into me came as a complete surprise.

I would have screamed aloud in pain and defiance if I had a mouth, but a voice is not an ability of mine. If I had either arms or legs, the tools of mobility, I would have fought back.

Unable to protect myself, the sawing continued, cutting straight through the heart of me from one side to the other. Toppling to the ground, the view I had known for my entire life shifted dramatically in a sickening lurch, twisting sideways as I fell and landed in the snow.

Cut in half, savagely severed from my underground parts, I truly felt the cold for the first time in my life. It started at the raw, fresh amputation wound in my trunk, shooting up my nearly nine-foot of height, flowing through every branch and needle. Instinctively, I reached out for the subterranean warmth of the soil, only to find more cold and frigid air in its place.

Brutally exposed to the elements like never before, I was dragged helplessly through the snow. They hauled me toward the barn, the one that I had looked at in the distance day after day since I had grown tall enough to peek over the edge of the hillside. The familiar faces of the farming family waiting there briefly gave me hope that I could still be rescued, but they seemed friendly with the tormentors who were stealing me away, even helping them to throw me on top of their curious wagon and lash me down.

 Riding atop the wagon, we moved slowly away, the only home I had ever known receding behind me.

But this was just the beginning of my ordeal.

I was taken to their strange shelter and propped up in a corner, in some bizarre mock replanting. Over the next several weeks, I was subjected to all manner of humiliation. I was bound with both lighted and glittery cords, had object of all shapes and sizes hung from my branches, and even made to wear a silly sculpted version of a tiny woman with wings on top of me. I was starved, dehydrated and deprived of sunlight. My only small consolation was that, inside their shelter, I was able to stay warm.

Along with the abuse, the group made me the focal point in odd rituals.

They liked to sit in the room with me, either staring vacantly into the lights wrapped around my torso, or watching a slender lighted box on the wall showing pictures of other people and places.

And each day, boxes of all shapes and sizes, wrapped in colorful designs, were placed beneath me until they were stacked so high that they crowded against my lower branches.

One evening, when only the two eldest of the group were there, they laid on the floor beside me, stripped off their outer coverings and proceeded to wrestle and rub against one another for some unknown purpose.

After the initial humiliation of being bound and adorned, I was little more than a silent witness to the weeks of bizarre events at the shelter.

They all seemed to culminate one morning when, with all the members present, the boxes were torn open and their contents examined. Each member had a stack they processed, then stacked up whatever had been inside before hauling it away. They all seemed to take great pleasure in this particular exercise.

After the day of the box openings, interest in me faded. The lights wrapped around me were turned off that night, and not turned back on the following morning, or the next. No one sat gazing dreamily at me, or laid beneath my branches, and no new boxes were set underneath. For nearly a week, I stood in the corner, ignored.

Then one evening, for no apparent reason, I was noticed again. The woman turned on my lights, turned off all the other lights in the room, and she and the man sat across from me. They talked for hours, occasionally looking my way, and drinking from a couple bottles, until both had fallen asleep.

I should have been worried that this renewed interest in me could bring with it new hardships, but I didn’t have the will to care. Cut off from the earth, I was hungry. And I was so dry. The woman had thought to give me water once, but only once. That had been weeks ago. My needles had starting to turn brown and become brittle.

Some of the lights binding me were different than the others, and they gave off more heat. This had felt rather good weeks ago, but now they were becoming uncomfortably warm, almost hot. One spot in particular bothered me. Uncomfortable quickly rose to painful, and the small spot began to spread larger and larger. A new light began to flicker in dancing orange flares among my branches, emitting willowy black puffs at its edges.

I recognized the description of the black wisps called smoke, and the yellow-orange flashes of light known as fire. Great Harvester, it was the Burning Winds! That fearsome force that engulfed entire mountainsides in searing flame, consuming whole populations of pines. But this was how they started, we were taught. A small flame now, it would grow, and grow quickly. But what could I do?

The pain intensified. Nothing in life had prepared me for this, the injury from my youth no comparison to the agony I felt now.

The man and woman slept on. I did not know if their kind could do anything to combat the Burning Winds, but they were animals, able to move and react, do things that immobile life like me couldn’t, so it might be possible.

But how to wake them? Never had I wished so much to have a true voice. Desperately, I yearned to scream into the night, to sound the alarm.

As my branches burned and the destruction spread, the heat became excruciating. The walls and ceiling of the shelter started to blacken around me. I tried in vain to scream, to cry out at both the pain and injustice of it all. Flames lashed at the winged figure that sat atop my highest point. As she melted and fell, from somewhere near the very top of me, a wailing, siren shriek suddenly burst forth, piercing the night and demanding attention.

The man and woman both awoke quickly with the blaring noise, jumping up to action or escape, I didn’t know which.

The undulating noise persisted. The man and woman had been asleep, there were no signs of the other two, and I could find no other source for it. Could it be, was it possible that this noise was coming from me? 

The man returned carrying a red can, stood back and sprayed a dense cloud at the flames. The cloud was cold and smelled odd. To my amazement, it quenched most of the Burning Winds. The woman soon reappeared with a bucket of water, ran right up to me, coughing and sputtering, but splashing or pouring water on any bits of fire that remained or tried to rekindle.

If this alarming wail was indeed coming from me, I couldn’t stop. I didn’t know how it had started, and now I couldn’t stop it. The excitement was dying out with the Burning Winds, but the wailing remained. Wounded, coated in residue from the cloud, I was so exhausted that at first I didn’t see the young woman coming at me, brandishing a long stick. She swung it back and forth, beating at my top branch, but missing and striking the ceiling of their shelter. Whether her actions sufficiently scared me or I simply ran out of energy, after a few moments of her flailing, the screaming finally stopped.

In the dark and quiet that followed, they huddled together, staring at me. Their actions had successfully beaten back the Burning Winds, but without the warning alarm, would they have come too late? Had I played a part in the response? If so, would they recognize my contribution and maybe take pity on me?

They left slowly.

I spent the night wondering.

It was a somber group the next day who stripped me bare. Most everything that had hung from my branches was tossed carelessly into a single tall drum. Very few items were packed back in their original smaller containers.

I was in a truly sorry state. Nearly half my branches were gone, burned away from my side. I was blackened and charred, the little moisture that had remained in me driven out by the heat.

Once the remains of the bindings had been removed, the man rapped a large piece of cloth about me, pulled me down, and roughly shoved me back out into the cold. Outside, he dragged me a good distance away from the shelter, as if to banish me from site. I could only guess that since the Burning Winds had started with me, they were blaming me for the damage. I wanted to tell him the truth, but didn’t try to speak again. Even if I had been able to speak, I knew that he wouldn’t be able to understand, just as I heard them speak many times but had no idea what they were saying.

He left me there and sulked away, not saying a word to me either.

Two men in a large wagon picked me up and brought me here, along with so many others. I thought at first that this was a punishment for what had happened, but now I believe that this place would have been my destiny anyway.

We lay in piles upon the stony ground, unable to even feel the comfort of a bit of soil beneath us. In the two days I have been here, I have seen entire piles hauled to the far end of the yard. A terrible noise comes from there.

The sun is up now and the tractor like machine that carries us away is coming for me. It lifts me up with a stack of my kinfolk and moves us toward the dreadful noise. As we approach, I can see men standing next to a large machine. I watch in horror as a man lifts a noble fir such as me, but still green and full and perfectly shaped. No matter, he feeds the poor tree into the machine, its grinding noises dropping just a fraction as if it might choke. But no, from its other end, it spits chips out into an ever-growing pile; our final resting place, though it hardly qualifies as restful.

 I am dumped next to the men, and before I even have time to panic, I am grabbed and carried forward. I can see into the machine now, see the spinning and glistening teeth that will be my demise. I look away in terror … but then we stop.

When I dare look again, I see another man, standing next to the machine, shaking his head and pointing back over his head. The men holding me start walking in the direction the other has pointed. I don’t know what is happening, as I am hauled past all the other fallen trees awaiting their fate, carried to the very edge of the yard.

I am cast down a hillside into a ravine.

I land and slide clumsily the last few feet to the bottom, where a small creek flows through weeds and fallen leaves. There is very little snow here, but what there is on the sloped hill is pure and white. I can still hear the machinery grinding away above me, but the sound is muffled and faint, almost in another world.

Because I have been transported, out of the hell that was my life since being stolen from the farm, back to a world that I can understand.

I am shocked, injured, as close to death as is possible, half burned away with no hope of recovering. But I have been released.

Has all this suffering brought me to this place? Am I to be allowed to die a dignified, honorable death. Have I earned the right to lie upon the earth like one of the great sentinels of the forest, those that grow hundreds of feet and live hundreds of years before they finally fall to the forest floor and slowly, slowly pass back into it, until finally, just a brittle husk remains, a home for some small creatures, or sustenance for future generations?

If such a restful end is to be mine, then I can be at peace with that. A noble end.