The Oak That Pulled Up Its Roots

In the Autumn Woods it is always the golden end of the year. The leaves are red and orange and yellow, they crunch underfoot, and the air smells of apples and woodsmoke.

In the middle of the woods, for a thousand years, there stood an oak.

It was so old that its trunk had gone hollow inside, like a cave, and so wide that six gators holding hands couldn't reach round it. Owls lived in its branches. Squirrels lived in its hollow. Beetles lived under its bark, and a family of hedgehogs lived among its roots. Hazel the Hedgehog, who keeps the trading posts in the autumn towns, was born there.

"It was the best home in the woods," she says. "Warm in winter. Acorns every autumn. And the old oak used to creak stories at night, when the wind moved it. Stories about the woods when they were young."

When the Gloom came through the Autumn Woods, it didn't creep up the old oak's trunk. It crept down, into its roots, which drank it up with the rainwater. And one grey night, with a noise like a hundred doors opening at once, the Old Hollow Oak pulled its roots out of the ground and started to walk.

It has been walking ever since. It stomps through the woods on its great twisted roots, and when anything gets close it lifts its branches high and pounds the ground, sending out a ring that knocks everyone flat.

"Don't try earth magic on it," Hazel says. "It's been standing in earth for a thousand years; it doesn't even notice. Fire is what it fears, like every tree. Step back when it raises its branches, then go in while it's getting its breath back."

When it's calmed, the old oak stands very still for a moment, as if it's trying to remember where it used to live. Then it lets fall logs and acorns and golden resin, and sometimes a chunk of amber. And now and then, from somewhere in its hollow, a pair of fine boots that nobody remembers leaving there.

"One day," Hazel says, "it'll find its way home. And plant its roots back down. And we'll all move back in."

Then she lowers her voice. "Mind you, our oak isn't the oldest. On the far side of the woods walks Thornwood the Elder, the oldest oak of all, taller than a house. When it wakes, the leaves stop falling, and then they fall all at once, like a storm. That one needs a whole party."