The Humming Tree
"What's making that sound?" Bree asked, stopping in the middle of the moss path. Plum turned her head almost all the way round and listened. The forest was warm that night, warmer than the day had been. Bree could feel it rising through the moss into her boots. Somewhere ahead, under the old trees, something hummed. It was not the wind. Wind did not keep time like that. It was low and round and steady, like someone breathing with a closed mouth. Bree took one step toward it, and then another. "Did you hear it? There it is again," she said. Plum lifted her sleepy lids and hopped onto Bree's shoulder.
The path went downhill between roots as thick as Bree's arm. Lanterns of starlight hung in the gaps between the branches. With every step the air got warmer, the way a kitchen gets warmer near the stove. Bree pushed her hat back. Plum fluffed out and then smoothed down again. The hum grew until Bree could feel it in her teeth, soft as a cat. She walked with her hand out, touching bark, following the warmth like a thread. Beetles crossed the path in no hurry at all. The moss steamed a little where the starlight touched it. "Did you hear it? There it is again," Bree whispered.
At the bottom of the slope stood a beech tree wider than a doorway. Its trunk had a hollow in it, shaped like a cupped hand. The hum was coming from inside. Bree knelt down slowly and looked in, and the warm air breathed on her face. Hundreds of moths sat along the curved walls, grey and furry and small. They were not flying. They were shivering their wings in time, all together, making heat. Plum made the quietest click in her throat. Bree had never seen anything work so hard and so gently at once. She stayed very still so she would not startle them.
In the middle of the hollow, on a low green stalk, grew one closed flower. It was pale as candle wax, with its petals wrapped tight around themselves. Bree understood then. The moths were warming it. She held her palm near the stalk and felt the heat gather there, then slip away. Cold air was coming in through a split at the back of the hollow, thin as a knife. Every bit of warmth the moths made leaked out through that gap. The flower stayed shut. The humming went on and on, patient, and no one inside it ever stopped to complain.
Bree sat back on her heels and thought. Plum stepped down onto a root and watched with her tufted brows up. First Bree tried her hat, pressing it over the split, but it slid off and the cold came back. Then she tried a flat stone, and the stone would not stay. She looked around the base of the tree. There was moss, deep and damp, and a long curl of fallen bark. Bree rolled the moss into a rope between her hands. She tucked the rope along the split, pressing it in with two fingers, and laid the bark over it like a lid.
The thin cold stopped. Bree felt the warmth come back into the hollow and stay, filling it the way water fills a cup. The humming changed. It got deeper, and slower, and somehow rounder. Bree held her hands near the opening without going in. The pale flower moved. One petal loosened, then another, and the whole thing opened like a small sleeve turning inside out. A smell came out of it, honey and rain and cold grass. The moths let their wings go quiet. One by one they drifted down to the open flower and drank.
Bree and Plum sat together against the warm beech while the moths drank. The quiet after all that humming was the softest quiet Bree had ever heard. Above them the starlight moved slowly through the branches. The moss under Bree's legs was warm now, and her hands were warm, and her ears had stopped stinging. Plum shuffled closer along the root until she leaned on Bree's arm. "Did you hear it? There it is again," Bree said, though now there was only the little sound of wings folding. She packed the moss rope a bit tighter, so it would hold all night.
They walked back up the slope, slower than they had come down. Plum rode on Bree's shoulder with one wing resting against her cheek. The forest was cooling behind them, and the path smelled of wet bark and green things. Bree looked back once at the beech, which was only a tree again from far away. Then she climbed into the hollow of her own root bed, where the blankets were, and lay down. Plum settled by her pillow and put out one grey foot. Bree took it in her hand and held it, warm against warm, until her eyes closed.
