Chapter Text
The woods of the Shenandoah Valley – towering, old-growth deciduous forest, sweeping in majestic swathes over the oldest of the Appalachians – were breathtaking every time of year. Peaceful or powerful, serene in a springtime afternoon or rushing and raging in a storm, a holy gray in the nakedness of winter, resplendent red-gold of autumn, dense green in the summer sunshine.
And fresh, ripe, new, alive in the late spring, as the world woke up again.
Samantha Brathwaite had lived in these woods her whole life. Hiked these trails, ventured far from the small mountain-tucked town she called home (to be honest, a little farther than her mom would like sometimes, but such is life when you’re 12 and already obviously know everything important about woodland safety).
Her friends at the small school, of course, were all rural kids too. Everyone loved the woods, hiking, camping, swimming in valley streams.
But Sam just got the forest. The plants, the way the trees and leaves spoke silently, touched the sky, grounded to the earth. Understood and felt right with nature, with the earth itself, in ways the other kids just didn’t seem to connect with.
Well, until she’d met the new girl who moved here back at the start of the school year.
Heather could keep up with her on mountain trails, even outpace her, hop her way up steep rock trails that even Sam had to climb with hands, footing sure over the roots and rocks. Sam would have never thought a girl from New York would have such a connection to the earth.
Granted, Heather had to repeatedly remind everyone that New York was an entire state, not just the city. Plenty of nature up that way too.
Allegedly, Heather was on some kind of exchange program, just visiting for one year, so she stayed at the only sort of motel-inn-thing and kept in touch with her parents via mail (and sometimes the phone).
Sam, personally, thought that seemed kind of odd and lonely. She was independent enough out in the woods, but home was always waiting back in town. Her mom and older sister – it would be bizarre to spend a whole school year away from them.
Heather hadn’t been secretive about her own family, though. Two twin little brothers who were, as expected, absolute terrors (who she clearly loved anyway). Her parents worked in fruit agriculture, and various other small-town sorts of jobs.
With where she was from, Sam was no stranger to that.
The portion of town she lived in had once been mere outskirts – a farming and homemade textiles and homeschooling colony, built in the late 60s and early 70s, for women of a certain inclination to depart from the rest of the world.
…but of a certain manner of practicality, realizing that separatism doesn’t entirely fix the problems of modern American society. So they’d slowly, like a rhizome, reconnected with the local town, ended up creating a rare oasis of certain tolerances for the region.
Even still, the sections of fields and orchards of that former-separatist colony had always been strangely bountiful, as if shielded from a drought or a stormy season or a blight, always enough for the women who worked those gardens and then some, keeping things going.
Guess that was just the luck of lesbian know-how.
But for being 12 and growing up with all that as just everyday life, Sam didn’t think too much was out of the ordinary there.
There were mountains to explore and friends to play with and trees to climb and other wonderful things about rural life.
“There’s a brook down that way!” Heather called from up ahead, pointing down the steep drop off through a stand of oaks.
Sam hurried to catch up, her ever-present her-height walking stick working along to keep her steady on the bumpy roots. Even as in-tune as she was with the woods, she peered over Heather’s shoulder, straining to hear anything.
“How d’you know?”
“I can smell it,” Heather chuckled, tapping her nose.
Sam cocked an eyebrow – even with almost 9 months of friendship, she still sometimes had a hard time telling if Heather was joking about her apparent super-sense of smell.
“I don’t hear anything.”
“C’mon!” Heather laughed, bounding over the edge, skipping the short distance down the sheer drop to lean against the largest tree.
A little more carefully – seriously, Heather always wore these (albeit fashionable) ground-touching flare jeans, how was she so nimble? - Sam followed, stick out to prop up her descent, fingers gripping the edge of the path they departed. She haltingly caught up, standing with Heather in the small plinth-like spot in the oak’s roots.
At a more normal pace, Heather picked her way over to the next, Sam following behind.
Something had been sort of gnawing at her mind, now as the school year wound down.
There was only one week to go before summer – and Sam figured she knew what that meant.
The silence between them was comfortable enough as they worked their way down the mountainside, tree to tree, but Sam hoped for some kind of comment on all of that, some kind of plan, some kind of certainty.
Heather did not seem inclined to provide that, more interested in finding this stream.
Sam didn’t like ambiguity, or not knowing things.
So, sometimes, you have to just ask.
“So, um, are you gonna move back now? To New York?”
“Huh?”
“School’s over. So your, uh, exchange program? Isn’t that over too?”
Nonplussed, Heather just shrugged with a mischievous smile. “Eh, I’m not in a big hurry.”
“Your parents don’t miss you?”
“I mean, they do, but we talk enough. Told ‘em all about you.”
Sam felt her cheeks get a little warm. Granted, Heather had basically half-lived at the Brathwaite household for the last several months; with Jackie in college, they had the extra room, so Sam’s mom knew all about Heather too.
Heather got a curious sort of look as they reached the next tree-step. “Do you think your mom would let you visit? For the summer?”
“Oh. Hm.” Sam bit her lip, gripping her walking stick tighter as she looked down the hill.
Wow, Heather wasn’t wrong. She could hear the brook now herself.
“We’ll take care of ya,” Heather snickered, a weird almost bleat-like sound.
Some of the girls at school had been rather unkind about Heather’s laugh. To be fair, Sam recognized that it was extremely odd.
But Samantha Brathwaite commanded enough social respect to shut that all down fast.
So what, her new friend sometimes sounded like a sheep when she laughed. People have all kinds of differences.
“Uh, I’ll ask?”
Heather got a strange sort of satisfied look about that, like she might have been planning that conversation.
“I think she’ll say yes,” she said confidently. “You’ll love the strawberry patches, they’re - !”
They both jolted, a very, very different sound cutting through the peace of the woods around them.
Quite literally.
Sam knew the sound of a chainsaw when she heard it.
And she knew for absolute darn-sure that there should not be a chainsaw anywhere near the part of the valley they were in right now.
You don’t grow up with your mom working for the National Park Service without learning logging rules.
Heather sniffed at the air, standing up ramrod straight, eyes darting around down the hill.
Maybe she didn’t have weirdly-good sense of smell, but Sam knew how to follow a sound.
With an authoritative stab of her walking stick, she changed course, footing suddenly surer, like the earth below her was helping her along now.
“Sam, we should go get your mom, or a ranger, or something…”
“Sure. After I tell ‘em off.”
Heather watched her friend’s back as she stubbornly continued forward – noticed how, after a short distance, Sam shifted to no longer using her walking stick.
Heather knew enough about certain kinds of combat – historical combat – to recognize when a certain sort of grip on a spear comes naturally.
At a turn of the wind, Heather also caught a very different, very alarming smell.
Her eyes widened, ears twitched under her hat, panic mounting in her chest…but followed by a practiced protectiveness.
She knew that scent immediately.
This was no human illegal logger.
Well. Guess this was bound to happen eventually.
“OK, wait up!” she called, picking up to a trot.
With a practiced eye – as if the forest itself was helping out – she spotted another staff-worthy stick on the ground as she hurried after her charge.
She muttered a catch-all sort of prayer of thanks; the woods around her now felt sharper, clearer.
Ahead, Sam was moving with a quickness Heather hadn’t seen before.
Even if she wasn’t 100% sure yet, Heather had a pretty confident guess about who might be answering that prayer, urging along Sam’s righteous fury and protectiveness of the sanctity of nature.