THE SCREAMING TREE

The tree had stood there for over two hundred years. Generations of the tiny, noisy people had come along, grown up, grown old and gone away and he’d seen all of them, and they’d all seen the tree. They had given the tree many names, and the one it had most liked was “Beech” although some people occasionally came along and quite convincingly called the tree “Ash” and others had been equally certain that it should be called “Birch”. The tree didn’t really mind what they called it, As far as it was concerned it was just plain old “tree” and that would do just fine.

Around the tree stood its faithful companions, all of them seeming so very broad, wise and noble. There they were, trees of all types, standing closely together and enjoying a rather harmonious and pleasant existence. Many of them were much older and more verdant in their splendour and some of them were much younger but somehow they’d found room for them to flourish and spread their branches. Some of these youngsters looked for all the world as if they would shoot up higher and further that any of the older trees could have possibly imagined when they first began to sprout, but that is just the way the world should be.

Over the many years of its life, the tree had come to learn many things about the birds that nested in its branches, about the tiny little furry creatures that ran up and down its trunk and branches and about the tiny insects that burrowed into his bark and nibbled at his leaves. At first they had seemed intrusive and invasive but the wiser, older trees about him had told him that these were good things to have around you and they all worked together to make the forest a happy and healthy place.

Occasionally, even one of the people might come along, but things never seemed to be quite so harmonious when they were around. They would either just clamber up and down the tree for no particular good reason or just decide to hack bits off the tree and take them away and burn them. This didn’t seem to be the most friendly of things to do, and the tree started to feel quite worried whenever the people came too close.

Now, just like a person, a tree is a complicated thing. It has many, many leaves and many, many branches and they are all part of one great big living, breathing complete whole. The people seemed to think differently of course and, as their tastes and needs got ever more sophisticated they would come along and decide that there were too many of them, that they were in the way, the wrong shape, gave too much shade, or even just that they were preventing them from doing some of the little things they seemed to do in their short little lives and had to go. Time and again the little people with the painful blades that screeched and buzzed would appear and a faithful old companion would be reduced to a stump, or some on their limbs would be hacked away. Sometimes they were prepared to admit to themselves, they did feel better after a trim, but generally the appearance of those little people with the hard hats and the saws spelt trouble for them.

When it had been a little sapling, pushing its roots through the warm earth things had been very different. The sky had seemed so far away for one but it had tried its best to reach it anyway, and day after day it had got closer and closer to the great big sky but it never quite reached it and one day it realised that it probably never would. From time to time the occasional cloud would come down from the sky and visit, but that seemed to be the closest the tree was ever likely to get.

As the tree got older, the world changed. The people discovered how to make great iron engines that burned coal and made smoke that chugged out into the air. Later on they built great big houses to build more of the engines in and they poured out more and more smoke into the air. The tree tried to remember the pure clean air that it had breathed when it was young, but with every passing season it became harder and harder to remember and harder and harder to breathe. Across a hundred years the machines got faster and noisier and more plentiful and the air got thicker and greyer. More and more of the little houses began appearing and taking up more and more of the land and it was always the trees that had to make way for them.

The tree felt that it was dying. Already it was finding it harder and harder to sprout its leaves when the spring came around again. Time and again its neighbours would be bursting with new life whilst all of its own branches were bare and lifeless. One half of its main branches, where its trunk split off in two directions was already feeling numb and would probably never come into leaf again and the birds and the insects were starting to feast upon it. the little people had started to come and stop and stare and scribble onto their papers and clipboards. The final indignity was when the younger sapling people had started coming along and abusing it, bashing spikes into its trunk or just hitting it with bits of steel and rock.

Why did they feel the need to do that? Had the tree not been kind and nurturing and friendly to the little humans for all those many years? Had it not helped to scrub the fetid air clean again for them to muck it up again?

Well, the tree decided that it had had enough with the ungrateful little humans and their choking little metal boxes on wheels. It decided that if it was time to go, it wasn’t going to go down without a fight. Come the very next storm it was going to loosen its roots and let go, and topple to the ground and see whether, with any luck, it could take out a couple of those cars parked across the road when it did.

It put all its energy into one last effort, and screamed a final scream.