The Snapped Branch

The branch the thing had taken was the lowest on the old locust, and it had been dead for years. It creaked. It did not break at once; it complained, the way old wood complains, slowly and with warning.

The drover above did not wait to hear the warning out. He climbed again, up past the next branch, and the next, and his hands were numb and his breath came in white clouds that the wind took away as fast as he made them. He was not a young man, and the tree did not care.

Below him the thing climbed too, steadily, without hurry, its green face turned up to him. It had found its tree, and it meant to finish what it had begun, and there was nothing below but snow and the open door of the inn and the two men who had run.

The drover reached the fork of the tree, where two main limbs branched apart, and he clung to it and thought, absurdly, of his mother. He did not pray. He was not a praying man. He only thought of her, and of the small house he had left, and whether anyone would tell her how it ended.

The branch beneath the dead thing groaned. It was not a young branch; it had been dead, the innkeeper would have said, since before his daughter was born. It had held the weight of a man in summer a thousand times. It had never held the weight of a dead woman climbing in the dark.

It snapped. The sound of it in that still yard was like a shot. The thing held on, and the broken branch went down with it to the snow, and for a moment the drover in the fork thought it was finished. He thought it had fallen, and he almost dared to hope.

Then he heard the snow shift below him, and he looked down, and the thing was standing again. It had dropped the branch, and it was already reaching for the next one, and it had not been hurt. Dead things are not hurt by falling. They are inconvenienced.

The drover did not climb higher; there was no higher worth climbing to, only thinner branches that would take him nowhere. He clung to the fork and waited, because waiting was all there was left to do, and he watched the dead woman climb up toward him, branch by branch, patient as a spider.

And then the dawn came. It came the way dawn comes after a storm, sudden and grey and complete, and with it came the innkeeper, who had heard the broken branch across the yard. The dead woman stopped climbing the instant the light touched her face. She stood quite still on her branch, as though she had been a doll left out overnight, and she did not move again.

The innkeeper looked at her, and did not scream. He was her father. He had dressed her body that morning, and wept over it, and laid it out. He went to the tree with two men and took her down, and laid her on the table again, and covered her, and this time he nailed the coffin shut before the sun had set.

The drover came down the tree shaking, and he never again traveled that road. The two men who had run told the tale wherever they went, and they always told it the same way: that the dead woman had climbed the old locust after them, and that she had only stopped because the light came. They did not tell it as a ghost story. They told it as a warning, and men who heard it crossed themselves and did not laugh.

The inn at Li's never took another traveler in a storm. It became a place men passed. The old locust still stood, and on its lowest branch, for years afterward, there was the mark where the dead woman had taken hold. Travelers pointed it out to one another in the daylight, and did not wait to see whether it moved again.