They have buried a den beneath my roots, the burrowing ones, though they came late to it, only this spring, with their loud digging animals that bit at my deepest tendrils until I gave a little ground, as I always do. Now there is a hollow of metal and dry air down where the earth used to be soft and cold, and one of them goes in and out through a round hard door, carrying tins and jars and cans of water, stacking the seasons of a hundred summers into a room the size of nothing.
I have watched squirrels do this in autumn, the same fever, the same certainty that winter will be the last one and must be outlasted with hoarded seed. The squirrels are usually right that winter is coming. They are always wrong that it is the end. They forget half their stores, and the ones they forget grow up beside me into saplings, so that even a squirrel's fear, buried, becomes a forest.
This human buries its fear too, deeper, and does not mean for it to grow. It stands at the door some evenings and looks up through my branches at the sky as though counting the leaves before they fall, waiting for a winter no season has ever been.
I want to tell it what the light told me across four hundred springs: the terrible thing it braces for has come many times already, in fire and drought and the quiet years when no children carved names in my bark, and each time the ground held, and softened, and something green came up out of the ruin without asking permission.
The door will rust. The tins will bulge and split.
Some slower spring, long after, a seed it never planted will root in that hollow, and I will lean over it, and stay.