He had separated the wet grass and ferns like a pair of curtains and was peering intently forward through the gap. I had longed for this, offered up gifts for it, but now I wanted nothing more than to run back to die Hütte, even though my father’s responses were likely to include grabbing the axe and hunting the man down, or setting the forest alight to smoke him out. I moved one leg up and backward. But before my foot had even touched the ground, the man took his hands out from the grass and slowly, deliberately, turned his head toward me, as if he had always known I would be there. Shaggy hair hung down to his shoulders and his beard flowed over the front of his green and orange plaid shirt like a swarm of honeybees. His look was plaintive, as though he might be about to cry at what he had seen through the grass, but later I came to know this as his natural expression—melancholic, as if a terrible tragedy had happened that he couldn’t bear to speak of. Everything about his face flowed downward: his eyes, his mouth, even his thick, untrimmed moustache.
He lifted a finger to his lips and at the same time cocked his head, beckoning me with it. I stayed where I was, almost tempted to glance behind me to check that he wasn’t nodding to someone else. He repeated the twitch of his head, and without waiting to see if I would come, he parted the grass again with his hands and stared through it. Gingerly, I went forward. If he had turned his head toward me once more, I’m sure I would have bolted, but the intensity of his stare beyond the grass drew me on. I walked toward him and crouched down beside him. He smelled different from me and my father. His scent was of the woods—bonfires, autumn berries, and leather, and underneath, something sweet: soap, perhaps. Tucked under his bent legs were the boots, damp again and creased across the toes. He still didn’t acknowledge that I was there; he just spread the grass wider, so I could see what he was looking at. Amongst trampled ferns, a doe licked her newborn fawn, still slippery with blood and membranes. The mother’s thick tongue lapped over the baby, cleaning and checking. She raised her head and fixed her large brown eyes on us, but in the same way that the man I squatted beside had looked at me, the doe took us both in and carried on with her work. She nudged the fawn with her nose, encouraging it to stand. It staggered to its feet and the man withdrew his arms from the gap and let the grass fall back into place.
“I think that, just now, we are not wanted there,” he said, standing up and stretching as though he might have been crouching for hours. It shocked me to hear another human voice in the forest, one that wasn’t mine or my father’s. I wanted him to carry on talking so I would know we weren’t alone. He reached his arms high over his head and cracked his elbows. He seemed to go on forever, and I thought that when he had come into die Hütte to carve his name beside the stove, he would have had to dip his head under the door lintel to get in. I stood too and stared up at him as he yawned. His beard opened up a pink hole in the middle of his face, and I looked away, embarrassed.
“You’re Punzel, aren’t you?” Then he held out his hand and said, “Reuben.”
Awkwardly, I shook it, as I had shaken the survivalists’ hands when I had greeted them at our London door. He was younger than I had first thought, his face less weathered and creased than my father’s, whose skin had become leathery from his time spent in the sun and the wind. Reuben smiled, and the exposed cheeks above his beard shaped themselves into pouches.
“You have the dirtiest face I’ve ever seen,” he said.
He reached his hand out toward my temple, and I realized I still hadn’t washed off the blood from yesterday or the mud from the river. He looked down to where I clasped my shoe to my chest.
“That’s an odd thing for a girl to be carrying around a forest. Do you want to clean it? And your face?”
I hesitated, and as if he understood my reluctance, he said, “Not in the river. We can go to the gill.”
He didn’t wait for an answer but walked off, away from the deer and her fawn, seeming to assume I would follow. I stood looking at his retreating back, then went after him. He seemed to know the forest as well as I did, striding along the same trails I used every day, and I wondered again how he could have been here without me seeing him. In the middle of the wintereyes he headed right and uphill, passing within a few feet of the nest.
“It looks as if there was a landslide last night after all that rain,” he said, patting the new boulder which had nearly killed me. We carried on until we stood at the lip of the steep channel. The tumble of mossy rocks had been dislodged by the rainstorm and had rolled down the gill, taking chunks of earth with them. The trunk of a tree had wedged itself crossways between the banks, and forest debris had collected behind it, water seeping through the gaps formed by a tangle of branches and logs.
Reuben picked his way down the slope with obvious practise, each foot placed with confidence, and didn’t even glance at the temporary dam above us. It wasn’t until he was standing on the boulders at the bottom that he looked back at me, still hesitating at the top of the bank.
“Oh,” he said, surprised I wasn’t behind him, and, “wait there.”
But before he had a chance to come back for me, I slid downward on my bottom, the backside of my shorts gathering mud. I dug the heels of my moccasins into the bank, clung on to clumps of grass with my hands, and in one blind leap I was on the rocks and beside him.
“That’s one way to do it,” he said, smiling. Balancing on a green boulder, he bent down and gripped a neighbouring rock with both hands, hefting it to one side, revealing the secret, gurgling, rushing water beneath. He scraped moss from the bank and dipped it into the flow. We sat side by side so that Reuben could wipe my face with the water; I flinched at the cold shock of it.
“Sorry,” he said, still wiping. “I’ve never seen so much mud and blood on one face. Hot or cold?”
I looked at him.
“Go on, hot or cold?”
“Hot,” I said, beginning to understand.
“Interesting. Town or forest?” He threw the moss away and got a new bit.
I didn’t want to point out to him that his first choice wasn’t available any more, so I said, “Forest.” Up close, and while he was occupied with cleaning the blood and mud from my face, I noticed that every hair of his beard was a different shade—red and brown and blond, mixed on the palette of his chin until they merged to the colour of rust.
“Forest or river?”
“Forest,” I said, even though I was keyed up at the thought of the danger behind us, the sudden burst that might carry us away.
“Day or night?”
“Definitely day,” I replied, remembering the night before. I kept my eyes averted from his, but I was aware of his breathing and his concentration while he cleaned me. He was quiet for a while.
“Rabbit or squirrel?”
I laughed. “Neither.” And Reuben laughed too.
“All right, apple or pear?”
“Apple,” I said, because I didn’t want to tell him that I couldn’t remember the taste of pear.
“That’s a shame,” he said, “there aren’t any apples here.”
“There’s the gribble,” I said, looking him in the eyes for the first time.
His hand, holding the moss, paused. “Ah yes, the gribble. Sour little good-for-nothings.”