All three men had been complaining about their artificial Christmas trees, so Paul called a cousin who had twenty acres of woods. Afternoon on Christmas Eve, the three friends carpooled over. Each cut a four-foot tree; they hefted them onto their shoulders and, single file, started back to the car. The rich scent of pine resin hung in the frosty air.

#

As a boy, Paul had been browbeaten into spending two weeks every summer with his father's sister and her family in the country. He still thought of those weeks as little slices of pure hell.

Even worse than the summers was one particular October when he was fourteen. His maternal grandmother--Gramma--had just died. All Paul wanted was to clasp hands with his mother in the pit they shared. No one could understand that, just now, their only comfort was to follow Gramma as far as the living could into the grave.

Dad decided the best thing for Paul was fresh country air. Paul was exiled to Aunt Vinnie and Uncle Arvin's farm, with cousin Russ to "pull him out of it."

Aunt Vinnie sat Paul down to shell dried beans with her.

"People do pass, Paul," she said. "It's as natural as being born."

"Yes, ma'am." I'm not stupid. Just because I don't pop the heads off live chickens doesn't mean I never heard of Death before.

"Your granny isn't entirely gone. Her soul is with the Lord, but part of her is still here, in your heart, ready to give you advice and help you when you're in trouble...."

Paul said, "Yes, ma'am," periodically and shelled beans.

He kept his sorrow to himself, and his relatives told people about the good that getting back to the land will do you.

Aunt Vinnie made bird feeders out of pine cones for her church's Christmas Bazaar. She gave Paul and Russ a pillow case and a pruning hook apiece, and they hiked through the fields to Uncle Arvin's twenty acres of woods.

Paul had wanted to blaze a trail, but Russ had laughed at him. "Even a city boy could find his way out of these woods," he said. "A blind man could find his way."

"How?"

Russ shrugged. "He just could, that's all."

"You're talking about a sense of direction. I don't have one."

Russ raised his pruning hook and snapped off a large cone. "Some other way, then. The woods don't want to keep you. They'd just as soon send you home safe."

"People get lost in the woods all the time." Paul wielded his hook mercilessly, determined to harvest more than Russ. "People die, lost in the woods."

"They weren't listening. Something helps you out. Something shows you the way. You just got to have faith and listen."

"Listen to WHAT?"

"I don't know. God, I guess."

It was not a good time to talk to Paul about God. Paul spat.

"What did you do?" Russ lowered his pruning hook. "Did you just spit?"

"What if I did?"

"Did you just spit on God?"

"What if I did?"

Both boys threw aside their tools and faced each other, bristling. The accumulated animosity of fourteen years radiated between them.

"Take it back!"

Paul spat again.

Ten minutes later, Russ thundered off with a black eye, leaving Paul on the ground with a bloody nose. Alone--finally really alone--Paul let his tears come, and he blubbered shamelessly. When he had finished, he cleaned himself up as well as he could with his handkerchief, then used one of the pillow cases.

Russ would be back soon, sticking out a paw for a "friends again" shake. Paul considered himself lucky not to have been caught in his grief. With a final sigh, he resumed his harvesting. Russ would come back any minute.

But he didn't.

#

The men were lost, though only Paul realized it.

He felt like a man who has agreed to a game of Russian Roulette and knows, just as he pulls the trigger, that he has done a stupid thing. Why had he trusted himself to this place again? Did he think he would teach it a lesson? Well, who had taught whom?

The others caught on before long. Paul could hear the two of them talking and snorting behind him.

Ron was the first to say something aloud: "You're lost, ain't you, Boy Scout?"

In a way, it was a relief to turn and face them. "Yes, I'm lost. And I'm not the only one."

Jeff raised his eyebrows, grinned, and said, "Good point."

They dropped their trees and stood silently for a few long moments. Paul looked at the darkening sky, as if he could navigate by the cloud cover. "I hate the country."

"Now he tells us," said Ron.

Jeff shook a finger. "This isn't 'the country.' This is 'the land.'" He threw out an encompassing gesture and intoned, "'...valleys, groves, or hills, or fields,/or woods and steepy mountains....'"

"Thank you, Mr. Poetry Man," said Paul. "A little less Christopher Marlowe and a little more Junior Woodchuck."

"All right, all right. Let's look for landmarks. Do either of you see anything--anything at all--you recognize?"

They peered through the thickening light.

"Well," said Ron, "seems to me I've seen you somewhere before, and maybe this man, too."

Jeff cackled and sat on the stump of a long-gone oak. "Anybody know how to make a fire by rubbing two sticks together?"

"Yeah," said Ron, and all three finished at once, "if one of 'em's a match."

It gets damp as it gets dark, Paul remembered. Clammy, and chill. And that was only October.

#

He became absorbed in his task for Aunt Vinnie, wanting Russ to find him hard at work. He left Russ' things where they were and moved on in search of prize specimens, using the clean pillow case to carry what he found.

When he started shivering, he stopped work. The sun glinted from between the trees, but no rays penetrated to where he stood. He was lapped in blue-gray shadows, his feet cold, his hands half numb.

"Russ?" he called. No answer. He walked at random, giving the woods its chance to let him go. Eventually, he tripped over Russ' pruning hook, invisible next to the dappled wad of blood-stained pillow case.

"Russ!" he called louder, though he knew, now, he was alone.

#

They blew out billows of white breath, shuffled the orange pine needles that covered the ground, and tucked their gloved hands into their armpits.

"Listen," said Paul. "No kidding. Did you hear what it's going to get down to tonight?"

"We're not going to be here that long," said Jeff. "This isn't The Great North Woods--it's just a little piece of land. We walk until we come to a road. If we don't come out where we see the car, we'll drag our trees up to the first house we see and ask for directions."

Paul cracked his knuckles. What had he gotten his friends into, to prove a point to himself? He wasn't even certain what point he had been trying to prove. "We're probably going around in circles."

"How many times have you seen The Blair Witch Project?" Ron asked.

"What?" said Jeff.

"I said--"

"Not you." Jeff cupped a hand around his mouth and called, "Hello! Hello! We're lost...!"

Paul and Ron traded Looks.

"--There! I heard it again. It came from over there. A voice. It said, 'This way.'"

"I think I heard something," said Ron. "A whine or something."

"You're both nuts!" said Paul.

#

Something helps you out of the woods. Something shows you the way.

Paul, at fourteen, stood very quietly and listened. A bird sang--far off, where the sun still touched the land.

"Gramma?"

Silence. The shadows between the trees deepened.

"Gramma?"

Silence. Nothing but silence.

#

"I didn't hear anything," said Paul. "Neither did you."

"I did!" Jeff insisted. "From over there." He pointed an unwavering finger.

Ron shrugged. "That way's as good as any. Let's go."

The men shouldered their greenery and pushed through branches and dried brambles.

"You there! Wait!" Jeff called. "Come on, you guys! We better keep up."

"Keep up with what?" Paul shouted, but he followed.

"There's the road! I can see it through the trees!"

"And there's the car!" Ron gave Jeff a congratulatory punch on the arm. "Aw-ri-ight! You are a steely-eyed deerstalker. Thanks, man--you saved our asses."

"Not me. I just followed the voice." Jeff looked up and down the moonlit road. "Where'd he go?"

Paul felt colder than he had in the woods. "There was no 'he.'"

"We were following somebody, I'm telling you. You heard it, didn't you, Ron?"

Ron shook his head. "I was following something, but.... A dog, maybe. No kidding, you thought you heard a voice?"

"Who do you think said, 'This way?' Lassie? Smokey the Talking Bear?"

"I didn't hear anybody talk but you. Who do you think it was, out in the woods after dark on Christmas Eve? You think the Little Lord Jesus climbed out of the hay and came out here to lead us to a late-model Chevy?"

Jeff winked at Paul, who looked away, into the empty woods. "Personally," Jeff said, "I don't care if it was jolly old St. Nicholas. I just want to get my feet up off the cold, cold ground."

Paul hunched his shoulders against the frost. "I don't know if I want to be in a closed car with the two of you. I think you've both been hitting the eggnog. Good thing I'm driving."

#

Uncle Arvin and Aunt Vinnie didn't say it, but their faces told him how worthless they thought he was, how stupid, how much trouble.

A group of Russ' friends had shouted Russ out of a field on his way home from the woods. He called his parents from one friend's place so they wouldn't worry about him; they assumed Paul was with him, and he assumed Paul had found his way back to the farm house. Nobody knew Paul was still in the woods until Russ came home after midnight. They went looking for him with flashlights, and found him worn out from walking and just about where Russ had left him.

Later, in the bedroom they shared, Russ asked, "How could you get lost?"

"Because I didn't know the way out, you moron. I haven't been running these ridges since I was old enough to toddle after my Pappy."

"But I told you about the woods--"

"Yeah, and then you left me out there, snipe-hunting. Real funny, Mortimer. What a scream."

"I never meant for you to get stuck. I told you--All you gotta do is listen."

"I listened!"

Russ made shushing motions. Paul only deciphered that years later: Be quiet, it meant. They already think you're a horse's ass. I'm trying to take care of you.

At the time, though, all he understood was that Russ wanted him to stop talking and he didn't want to.

"I listened!" he shouted. "And I didn't hear a thing. Not one god-damned thing!" He gasped, sucking in enough air to fuel the rage. "And the reason I didn't hear one god-damned thing, you god-damned hayseed, is because there's nothing to hear!"

#

Jeff and Ron bickered companionably all the way back to the parking lot where they had left their cars.

Ron watched the tail-lights of Jeff's tree-topped Volvo recede, opened his door and, as he slid in, said, "He was putting us on. You were right; there wasn't anything there." He drove off, his tree sticking out of his trunk, bobbing like an uncertain arrow.

The night was clear and bitterly cold. Paul stood alone for a moment and listened, staring his longing into the black and silent sky.

Marian Allen lives in the Southern Indiana woods. She has had three electronic novels published by Serendipity Systems, and has sold stories to online and print publications, including Marion Zimmer Bradley's FANTASY Magazine and Oceans of the Mind. Her stories have also appeared on packages of Story House Coffee and in World Wide Recipes' electronic newsletter and web site. She is a member of Southern Indiana Writers Group and is a regular contributor to their annual anthology.