Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest Read Online Free PDF Page A

only the whole village, not only all people, but all living things. All of us. But I'm still not sure what the right answer is to this question: are plants in some way our distant relatives?
    So anyone who mocks or hurts another passenger, Matti said, is actually being stupid and hurting the whole boat. After all, no one here has another boat.
    A moment later, or perhaps in less than a moment, the small fish twisted its body, spread the fan of its slender fins widely, and plunged into the dark water, down to the river plants.
    That was the only animal Maya and Matti had ever seen in their lives. Except for some drawings of cows-horses-dogs-birds on the pages of books or on the walls of Emanuella the Teacher's classroom, and the small carvings Almon the Fisherman made and gave to the village children.
    Maya and Matti knew it was a fish because they had seen fish in picture books. And they knew without a doubt that it was a live fish and not a drawing because no creature drawn in those picture books could move its muscles, twist and turn, and slip away from them so quickly, dive so suddenly to a deep, invisible place among the shadows of the water plants.

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    That was the first living creature seen in the village for many years, since that horrible night when Nehi the Mountain Demon gathered a long procession of animals, from horse to dove, from mouse to sheep to bull, and led them out of the village forever. Some of the parents, without any warning, would suddenly be flooded by a wave of longing or sorrow and begin to imitate animal sounds for their children: the chirping of a bird and the lowing of a cow, the howling of a wolf in the forest, the cooing of a dove and buzzing of a bee and the flapping of a river goose's wings and the croaking of a frog and the whoop of an owl. But a moment later, those parents denied that they were sad, pretended that, in fact, they only meant to entertain their children a bit, nothing more, and insisted that none of those sounds were part of the real world but existed only in fairy tales and legends.
    The twists and turns of the villagers' memories were strange: The things they tried very hard to remember sometimes eluded them and hid deep under the blanket of forgetfulness. And the things they decided they'd be much better off forgetting were the ones that would rise out of the forgetfulness as if to deliberately upset them. There were times when they remembered the smallest detail of what had almost never been. Or they remembered what had been and no longer existed, remembered it with pain and longing, but their shame or sorrow was so great that they would decide firmly that it had all been a dream. And they would say to their children: It's just a fairy tale.
    Others said: It was just a little joke. That's all.
    Some children, when they heard those stories, felt a vague longing for what might have been there once, and perhaps had never been at all. But many children never wanted to hear those stories, or heard them and made fun of their parents and of Emanuella the Teacher: no animals had been seen for so many years that most of the children came to the conclusion that all those moos and coos and maas and meows, all those bzzzes and baas and yaps and quacks, were all just strange inventions their parents had come up with, old-fashioned superstitions that should be tossed away so they could finally live in the real world, because people who live in their imaginations are not like the rest of us, and people who aren't like the rest of us will get whoopitis, and everyone will avoid them, and then it will be too late to save them.
    Perhaps only Danir—the jolly, long-legged roofer, favorite of all the village girls, who loved to sing all day with his helpers as they worked on the high, slanted housetops, and liked to stop on his way home and talk to children through open windows as if they were grown-ups, or the opposite, to chat with them as if he himself were still a child, and also liked