them, and roared with the certainty of impending triumph. Then, to their astonished surprise, the children vanished. When the creatures reached the spot where they had just seen the children, there was only a single large tree standing nearby. The tree, being one of the biggest in the forest, was too big to hack down, even if the children were somehow within it, which seemed all but impossible. The leader of the enemy forces ordered his warriors to halt and be quiet, hoping to hear the children who had somehow been able to elude them. They looked and listened with keen eyes and even better ears, but saw and heard nothing. At that point the leader motioned for a number of his forces to encircle in opposite directions the trunk that was the width of a house, assuming, with an ugly smug smile of accomplishment, that he would shortly discover the children hiding on the other side of the tree. But, again, there was nothing.
In anger, they attacked the trunk with all of their resources, including the “hacking machines,” but the tree was impenetrable and incapable of being taken down, and the thought, finally, that the children would somehow be in the tree struck them as ludicrous. They then began working away at the forest in the direction they had been heading in their pursuit of the children only minutes earlier. They were determined to follow the children as long as it took to capture or kill them, even if it meant clearing the entire forest to do so. Besides, should the small ones reach the other side of the forest, which was highly unlikely, they would be met with nothing more welcoming than those now pursuing them.
Just as the creatures were about to see and pounce on them, all four children had frantically squeezed themselves through the narrow opening in the trunk from which the light was emanating, stumbled to the uneven floor inside the tree, and then heard the sound of a massive wood door slamming shut behind them. They looked back, but saw no one. The door seemed to have closed of its own accord before disappearing entirely by blending perfectly into the rest of the tree.
They looked around, frozen in silent wonder—each where he or she had tumbled to rest on the floor. The light had seemed bright at first against the pitch blackness to which their eyes had been accustomed outside, but as their eyes adjusted, they realized that the light was soft, streaming in all directions from healthy flames in a stone fireplace on the other side of the large circular room in which they were sitting. The mammoth door that had closed behind them, likely not heard by the enemy above their own loud noises, sealed out the darkness and greatly muffled the sounds of the enemy raging and assaulting the tree.
The children remained quiet, examining their surroundings and unconsciously enjoying their first sense of well-being since they had first arrived in Bairnmoor. It became evident that they had landed on the solid wooden floor of a circular room inside a tree, the diameter of which was about forty feet. There were no windows, and the smooth walls of the room curved gently upward into a circle of shadow that obscured the height of the ceiling—if, in fact, there was any ceiling at all. In the room was a large round wooden table with thick and gnarled branches surrounding it, as if they were a circular barrier to anyone or anything actually being able to use the table. There were also similar tree limbs and branches protruding in a number of different places from the continuous wall of the room, as if they were growing inside the tree and weaving themselves together into complex knots. And although the children could not imagine how anyone could sit in them, there were several articles of twisted limbs scattered about the room that vaguely resembled high backed chairs.
There were also two tall wooden cabinets spread apart along the wall, and perhaps five or six stacks of sticks leaning against them, or against each other, as well as some cups and plates on the table containing remnants of recently eaten food.
Now that she could no longer hear any sounds from the enemy outside, Elli ventured a modestly loud “Hello?” She paused just a bit, out of politeness. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?” she now yelled.
“You don’t have to yell so, especially given the acoustics. I can hear you very well, indeed,” a voice somewhere inside the room or beyond the shadow of the ceiling replied.
Elli, Alex, and Jamie looked wide-eyed around the room, straining to see where the voice was coming from, but saw no one or anything else that appeared able to speak. Beatríz said, “I’m sure the voice came from right behind us, near the door that slammed shut.”
“But of course!” the voice said.
Jamie looked back after having looked there already. “All that’s there, Beatríz, is just an old stack of tall sticks.”
“Well, this ‘old stack of tall sticks,’ as you call me, had just pulled you, sir, out of an entanglement a few minutes ago,” the voice said, directing his remarks at Jamie.
“What?” Jamie exclaimed, utterly confused.
“Wait!” said Elli. “I saw what looks to us like a stick move in that stack, and I don’t think it’s a stack of sticks anymore than we are piles of bones! It’s a . . . a . . .”
“A person, I think you mean!” the voice said, whereupon the apparent stack of sticks unfolded and spread itself into a creature that looked like a huge walking stick with two bulbous, knot-like protrusions at the top of the tallest “stick” that opened next to each other as large round eyeballs. The creature blinked a few times at the children, seeming to be not nearly as surprised to see them as they were to see him.
The three children who could see were staring into the creature’s eyes when it spoke to them again. “If the four of you are persons, then I am surely a person, and I suspect that you are persons, so that, therefore, I also am a person, although,” he said a bit wryly, “I have to say that you don’t look very person-like, at least from my perspective. But, if you’ll concede the argument, then I’m satisfied.” He then walked rather giraffe-like over to one of the chair-like articles of tangled branches and, one might say, made a sitting-down movement, finishing it off by crossing one leg over the other.
The person had two legs, and two arms nearly as long as the legs, with four thin fingers and two just-as-thin thumbs at the end of each limb. He had two distinct, porpoise-like holes the size of dimes well below his eyes that constituted his nose, and, just beneath those, a most diminutive horizontal slit of a mouth that seemed almost to move about his face when he talked.
“So,” the stick man said, once he had settled the ontology of their mutual existence—and himself into the tangled wood that resembled a chair, “I suspect that you are persons in the form of children, and that, since there are no known children remaining in the land of Bairnmoor, although at one time they constituted the primary form of personhood here, you are strangers in this land.” He paused and rubbed his chin, ruminating on what self-ascribed profundity he had just uttered, and then added, “Am I correct?”
“Yes,” said Elli, before anyone else could speak, and especially before Alex spoke, “but that’s all we can tell you.”
“By the way, Mr. . . . um . . . person,” said Jamie, to break the ice, “I want to thank you very much for saving me earlier.”
“Not a thing. Not a thing,” replied the stick man. He pulled out a beautifully grained wooden pipe from a hidden pocket on one of his legs that looked like a typical bulge on a branch, and lit it.
“But,” Jamie continued, “why did you save me? And why did you save all of us? And who and what are you—I mean,” catching himself quickly, “besides a person, I mean? And, um . . . what were those lights that led us to your place?”
“So, you have a lot of questions for me, do you? But,” said the stick man who then paused to puff a couple of puffs. “But, you apparently won’t answer my questions; is that correct?”
“We can’t!” Alex interjected himself into
