The Song of the Trees

A long time ago before the first white man set foot in the New World an Indian girl called

Lalita awoke from a frightening dream. She had seen great white birds crossing the ocean

and a mighty wind that shook the trees so hard their trunks bent. She had heard the

trees crying.

“What does it all mean?” she asked.

Her mother and father did not know.

“It is just a dream,” said Lalita’s father. “Pay no heed to it.”

One day, soon after Lalita’s strange dream, the little girl looked

out to sea. There, on the horizon she saw huge white birds

skimming over the sea towards her.

Only they were not white birds, but big ships with white sails, carrying strangers to her

beautiful land. It was her dream, and Lalita was afraid.

The men who came across the sea strode ashore. They brought their axes to the beautiful

forests of the New World. They paid no heed to the Indians, who loved the trees and

could understand their language. The men began to cut the trees down, one by one.

They dragged the felled trees away on great sledges and the ground beneath them was

left bare and empty. Lalita wept to see all the destruction.

All the creatures of the forest fled, from the largest bear to the smallest bird. The

Indian people went too, the old on sticks, and the babies in their mothers’ arms.

But Lalita did not go with them. She knew in her heart that she must stay with her beloved

trees to the very end.

“I will follow later,” she told her mother.

Lalita crouched in a tiny cave, watching in fear and grief all that she saw. She could hear

the trees crying as the axes swung against them. Their voices were like those of children,

and they almost broke her heart with their sadness.

Lalita watched and listened until the very last tree had been dragged away, and the

strangers left at last.

Lalita came out of the cave as night was falling. The stars shone in the sky like jewels. The

Northern Lights leapt and played above the hills in their sapphire, ruby and emerald fires.

But Lalita could not see any of it.

She cried for the forest she had loved and for the trees she had known by name. She

cried for her people whose home it had once been. Through her tears she did not see the

great curve of the silver moon as it rose over the mountains and shone across the empty

silence of that place.

She lay on the ground and her hair that was the colour of ravens’ wings, trailed in the

empty mud beneath her. For seven days and seven nights Lalita lay there, and for seven

days and seven nights Lalita wept.

Lalita’s tears fell so hard that they flowed into a single stream… and then into a river that

crossed the bare clearing and wove its way through every hollow.

But on the morning of the eighth day a strange thing happened. A single green shoot

appeared beside Lalita’s river of tears. The shoot flowered into a beautiful snowdrop, with

a head as white and soft as the wool of the first spring

lamb.

Soon came another and another until the thick black mud

gave way to a sweeping carpet of white petals.

But Lalita did not see them. Lalita continued to weep, and

so her tears fed the stream, which flowed on into new

corners and new hollows.

And through her tears she did not see the sprouting of tiny oaks, or the first sharp spines

of fir trees.

She did not see the ash and rowan growing around her feet, or the birch trees appearing

beyond her outstretched hands.

And one morning, as dawn was breaking, Lalita heard a sound as clear

and thrilling as a flute. “Birdsong!” she whispered. She stopped crying at

last and opened up her eyes. There in the branches of a maple tree was

a robin redbreast.

Lalita laughed aloud for joy and stretched out her hand. The robin

shared her joy and soared into the air before coming to rest on her

fingertips.

Lalita’s beloved forest was coming back to life. Her tears of love had

refreshed the earth and watered the seeds. Her love had brought back

the animals and the birds and her family.

To this day the Indians say that if their love is as strong as Lalita’s, all that has been lost

in the world will be restored, and all the destruction will be returned to beauty.

Kenneth Steven The song of the trees

London, Little Tiger Press, 2002