It looked like a light, like a campfire’s glow, but an old mossy stump shouldn’t have such a glow coming from within it.

I had to wonder if anyone else had seen it, but there was no stopping as we weaved our way along the bottom of Greycurl’s Bluff, and already the torches were being lit ahead.

The celebration of the season had the world chattering and singing around us already, but tonight the massive caverns inside the bluffs would also ring with the music of the equinox, in the glow of a thousand torches. We were nearly there.

But what was that golden light in that mossy stump back there? My first thought was that I’d seen into a crack in someone’s roof, and below the stump was a tiny civilization of beings that had their own celebration going on. Most of us probably still secretly believe in the little people of the forest, but it’s as if they exist only if they are imagined, and hardly anyone imagined such things anymore.

It was silly-- to think that we share the planet with races of other beings, little tiny people who were intelligent and elusive, able to hide for centuries at a time.

I myself have seen a hundred years in the forest already, each year boasting such unique and vibrant equinoxes, and while a faint memory returned of faint songs, a memory of tiny people dancing around the edges of our glen, I can’t really say that I have seen any firm evidence that they actually exist at all.

Could intelligent beings live side by side, and not even know it? Just like the mighty bullfrog vibrates the whole pool of water in a deep shiver that is recognized by other bullfrogs, is that bullfrog aware that next to him is a tiny spring peeper, singing and vibrating in a pitch that rings into the same water and air?

Maybe, in a similar way, there are little beings living around us, just out of our range of vision, hiding at the end of the rainbow of light that we are able to see.

A race of tiny beings, existing just out of our visual range-- who thinks about things like that? This was a special night, and the feel of the atmosphere deserved my attention this hour. Here I was thinking of octaves and scales of the music of the frogs, when the songs that I should be thinking about were the ones that marked this celestial event that was happening within and around me, as the potency of the Spring Equinox was peaking.

Curling our way around one of the bends in the trail, I could see the line behind me as all of the torches were lit now, and it was as if a golden chain were being pulled through the forest, weaving through the trees like a giant luminescent snake. What this must look like from the other side of the valley!

There was always an added excitement to these equinox torch ceremonies, being the only time that we even dared to bring the torches out to create such a display in the midnight forest. The smell of the burning pine-knot torches always stirred the memory, and there was a time, many years ago, when we heard strange whistles from across the valley, as if we were being watched by someone over there, but it was rarely spoken of again. Still, somebody had seen us, or had seen our line of torches slithering along the darkened ridge before we disappeared into the hidden entrance to the Great Green Hall.

Before me now was that very entrance, and the hour was right, the day was correct, so that one by one, we stepped through the wild rose tunnel, yet all I could think about was that stump back along the trail, and it’s mysterious light.

Was it really that crazy to suppose that there were tiny beings living beneath that old mossy stump, and that those tiny beings had eluded me for all of these years? It was not crazy, after all. We had proven that it was possible ourselves, and I can say with certainty that in my hundred years in the forest, raising children and freely living upon the Earth, that I have never been seen by a human.

Some of us have been spotted by human children, and many of my friends have allowed themselves to be seen by those young humans who are still tuned in, but not I. While some of the humans may have heard my pipes in the wind along the valley, the giant human beings who live around this valley don’t generally believe in us, as we are considered to be the stuff of fairy tales, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.

Already I could hear the music beginning in the Great Green Hall, and soon I had forgotten about tiny populations of people, dancing and feasting to the merriment of the season on my 100th spring on Earth.

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image above is mine, paint markers on green paper, 2018. The fiction above is also mine, I'm not really a little forest person, but am a regular-sized one. For more stories and variety, click below:

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