The Oak

• Oliver Baitch, Grade 5, The Scots School -
• Short Story
• 2018

1st in the 'Horizon of Dreams 2018' competition

The night was dark, like the dens of the burrowing cicada nymphs sucking at my roots. I reached out through the earth to my eldest friend, Betula, the neighbouring birch tree. Her presence was comforting, but it occurred to me that she didn’t grip my roots as tightly as she did years ago. She shivered in the cold of the night. I supposed she just needed a rest with all the possums running on her branches. She was ninety eight years old, but as a birch she could have many more years. Without her firm grip, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that something horrible was about to happen.
The next day was sunny and peaceful, but for some unknown reason, the sense of foreboding remained with me.
“Quercus!” cried a magpie. “Quercus Arbor!” I looked up at the sound of my full name being called so urgently.
“Yes?” I reluctantly replied.
“A TwoLeg prepares to chop Betula down,” he squawked in his haughty voice.
“Why?” I asked the bird, as it landed on my highest branch.
“They fear she is about to fall. Quercus, you must have felt it. Betula is dying. Many of her limbs are already dead,” the bird said.
I was surprised by the bird’s declaration, but of course, deep within me, I had been feeling this change in Betula for a long time now.
“Quercus, you are the eldest and wisest after Betula; it all falls to you now. What are we to do?” the screechy bird said as he started to panic like all birds do. His flapping wings annoyed me, so I repelled him back into the air.
Through the ground, I sought Betula’s tap root and called for her. Before I could even speak, she whispered to me, “I have known this was coming for a long time my young friend, as have you.”
I felt a deep sorrow inside me. Nothing in my eighty years had prepared me for this.
“Make room for my resident animals, Quercus, for when I am dead they will need a place to live and somebody to look up to. You will be supreme tree of the neighbourhood,” foretold Betula.
The rest of the week was a rush, like the first day of spring. I had to move bats to different branches, possums to higher hollows and the caterpillars had to clear room on my limbs. Then Betula’s animals moved in. My load almost doubled and I have to say, for a moment I thought that I would collapse under the pressure.
Suddenly I heard a rumble as a truck pulled into Betula’s yard. A giant TwoLeg climbed out like a twig falling from a nest and started up a chainsaw. He levelled it with Betula’s trunk.
“Be strong,” were her last words to me just before she fell. As her body was loaded onto the truck, I sensed something. There it was; a young, green birch sapling, right next to Betula’s stump.