Outdoor writing contest third place: Dryad

Sweat soaked my hair, and my chest felt heavy; every breath was more painful than the last. Oh, how my feet ached! Each step was a challenge. A part of me wanted to turn back and go home, but in my pride I dismissed it. The beauty of the hills and the feeling of being outside were enough to make me want to go on.

Tall ponderosa pine trees, with their sweet, musky scents and basil colored needles covered the hills like jewels on a scepter. The air was cold, and the sky, pale blue now, still retained the faintest hints of rose and citrine. On either side of the trail, dry bushes and grass were abundant. Fallen trees were scattered here and there. The wildflowers that had been prevalent during the spring and summer were now scarce. I missed seeing them. But autumn was still a beautiful time of year to be roaming the mountains. If I could, I would spend hours just wandering about among the hills.

But for the moment, I was too overcome with exhaustion to continue walking. Gasping, I plunked down on an old log. My body sagged with relief, but breathing was still painful. I closed my eyes for a moment. Slowly, the aching faded.

After a few minutes sitting like this, reveling in the coolness of the air, I stood, adjusted my pack, and continued on.

“Hey!” The loud, exuberant voice pulled me away from my thoughts, which had been fixated on reaching my destination. “Where are you going?”

Coming down the trail toward me was a tall, middle-aged woman in an incredibly bright orange hat, lime green sweatpants, and a cherry red coat. She carried no pack, and didn’t seem at all tired, but strolled along as cheerfully as if she didn’t have a care in the world. I stared at her grumpily, feeling annoyed at her ease. Of course, she was walking downhill, while I was toiling upward, but somehow I had the feeling that this woman could climb a mountain as easily as she would take a neighborhood walk, and that in either case she would outdistance me by a long shot. I eyed her clothes with distaste. They looked very … artificial. And bright. Incredibly so.

“I’m hiking to the Rocks of Sharon,” I replied. “Where are you going?”

“Oh, nowhere in particular,” she said. “Inspecting my land, you might say.” As we met, she turned around and fell in step beside me, and – as I had expected – continued uphill with ease. “How has your morning been?”

I had been trying to figure out a polite way to say, “Go away and leave me alone,” so her question took me off guard. “Fine enough,” I said. And then, almost without knowing why I did it, I added, “I’m tired, though.”

She nodded.

“Are you tired?” I asked, feeling a little malicious.

This produced a sigh. “Goodness, I’ve been tired for years,” she replied. “Wandering these hills is one of the things that refreshes me. I love seeing everything, marveling in the beauty of a world so grand I can’t comprehend it all. Like the ocean. I’ve been to oceans before, but I’ve never really understood them. Have you?”

“I don’t believe so,” I said. I was beginning to like this woman, and felt bad for my stinginess earlier. “I still love it, though.”

“Me, too,” she replied. “There are a lot of things I don’t understand, but at least I know trees.”

“Trees?”

“Yes. I can’t say that they make complete sense to me – how could I, when I get confused just thinking about myself? But I feel closer to them than I do to most things, and even to some people.” She smiled. “They are so beautiful.”

“I agree with that,” I said. “I love trees.”

“Do you ever wish that you could be inside one?” she asked. “What do you think it might look like?”

I pondered for a moment. “I’ve never thought about trees quite like that,” I replied. “How do you think they look on the inside?”

“They look something like a still brook,” she said. “I don’t mean a stream that’s stagnant; I mean, if you could take the way a brook looks when it’s running, and then make it hold still while keeping the shape of its movement, and then you colored it in gold and orange and amber and brown and filled the air with it … oh, I can’t describe it correctly. But it looks something like that.”

I was trying to figure out how to apologize for my earlier rudeness when she suddenly said, “I believe we’re here.”

I looked around. We were standing on a steep slope. A mica-scattered path to our right led down to immense gray rocks. One seemed to jut out sharply from the mountain; others lay spread about like broken pieces of dishware. It was a little strange to see enormous rocks standing like sentinels on the slope, so different from the forest around them. There seemed to be less vegetation here, but it was still incredibly beautiful.

“Thank you so much for walking with me,” I started to say, when I noticed that the woman was gone.

I looked around frantically, but couldn’t see her. How could she have disappeared so quickly? Was she all right?

And then, suddenly, I heard something that sounded surprisingly like laughter coming from a nearby deciduous tree. Bright green moss – unusually bright – grew on the trunk. The leaves were cherry-red. In one of its branches was a bright orange hat.