In the Shadow of the Trees by Elenor Gill

at the nape of my neck rise and know someone is watching. It is like being in a crowded room when a stranger has you in their sights. Your fingers search out the place where their eyes touch your skin.
    There is a sound, a very faint sound that should not be there. Music? A fiddle playing a long way off, the notes strewn on the night air. Could that be possible?
    Upward, I must go towards…? The ground pulls steeper and steeper. Now there are rocks to scramble over. I hold onto branches to pull myself along. Is there some urgency? I feel it and the night will soon be gone. I have to reach…to reach…? There it is again, the fiddle music, something slow and sad. But it’s all wrong. And there is someone through the trees. I can see a face in the shadows, it looks familiar somehow. I move towards her and she comes closer to me, so close that we couldtouch. I reach out my hand as she does. We both reach out to each other and I touch…
    For a moment I couldn’t understand where I was. But my hands moved to the edge of the mirror, fingers tracing the carved branches and leaves. It was me. The woman was me. I was at the dressing table, seeing my own reflection glowing dimly in the pre-dawn light. What was going on? I must have sleepwalked. My arms and legs were bare. No wonder I felt cold. And yet I could hear…Was that music? Or just the wind in the trees. No, there couldn’t be music. Not here. Just the ragged remnant of a dream.

FIVE
    I T starts with the sharpening of the tools. It’s a meditation that hones the mind ready for the task and prepares the body as a channel for communication with the wood, rather like a musician tuning up his instrument. That’s how it always begins for me and that morning was no different.
    I sat on the deck steps with my tool bag, unwrapping the leather rolls of gouges, chisels and knives, laying them in a straight row and greeting each one as an old and revered friend. The stones next, each lightly filmed with oil and stored in its own box since last use. I had performed this ritual so many times that my body knew the sequence of each movement, the exact pressure required to produce the perfect edge. Eyes and hands followed their tasks and conferred their own judgements, leaving the conscious and the subconscious minds to communicate without distraction.
    My thoughts were still with the dream, the forest and the trees. And whatever it was that was watching me. I took each image in turn and focused on it until the edges were clean and sharp. Whatever was going on in my head, however shaken and distressed it had left me, the sensations it produced were also tools to be worked with. It was all a part of the process.
    There was no chance of returning to sleep but a hot coffee and some warm clothes had made me feel more human. Even though I was still shaking inside I knew the best way to get my head together was to work. It was still early, no sun as yet, and the dampness of dewfall hung on the air. In the pre-dawn light the birds were creating that uproar poetically eulogised as the dawn chorus. Actually it is a territorial shout-off that puts me in mind of the racket set up by a rugby crowd the morning after a home win.
    I claimed my working space by bolting the workbench together and adjusting the height. It’s not really a bench, more like a square platform with a cradle in which I fix the wood to be worked upon. The pictures drawn the day before were taped to the wall, reference information about what I had seen and, more importantly, what I had felt.
    Using the kitchen furniture as a prop, I levered the first piece of kauri onto the bench and looked at it from all sides. Moving around the block, I drew it from several angles. This is my usual approach since it gives me insight into the wood’s true form. I always study the wood carefully, particularly the lie of the grain. If you ignore the grain, not only does it split, but also you find yourself at odds with what it’s telling