The Revenant

by Michael Punke

Though no law was written, there was a crude rule of law, adherence to a covenant that transcended their selfish interests. It was biblical in its depth, and its importance grew with each step into wilderness. When the need arose, a man extended a helping hand to his friends, to his partners, to strangers. In so doing, each knew that his own survival might one day depend upon the reaching grasp of another.

The tree was a sibling to the lodgepole pines that the local tribes used to frame their teepees, but the seed of its origin had been lifted high above the fertile soil of the forest below. A sparrow had pried it from a pine cone decades before, carrying it to a lofty height above the clearing. The sparrow lost the seed to a crevice between the rocks. There was soil in the crevice, and a timely rain for germination. The rocks drew heat in the daytime, compensating in part for the exposure of the outcropping. There was no straight path to sunlight, so the pine grew sideways before it grew upward, worming its way from the crevice before turning toward the sky. A few gnarled branches extended from the warped trunk, each capped with a scruffy tuft of needles. The lodgepoles below grew straight as arrows, some towering sixty feet above the floor of the forest. But none grew higher than the twisted pine on top of the rock.