So Much Forest Winner: The Robert Day Award for Fiction Selected by Rebecca Lee
Tanya Pengelly The best time to enter the forest is when it’s raining, like right now, when the sky overhead is all dark with an ocean of water between the sun and me, when the slam of my van door is muted by dampness, and I give up straight away on keeping dry at all, but I still pull on my boots and yellow raincoat and the huskies are already bedraggled, but that can’t be helped, and anyway, look at their excitement, their longhaired tails wagging, pink tongues lolling with joy, and as we all set off they tug at their leads and zigzag across the little path that leads into dripping trees, across a narrow footbridge green with moss and slippery as hell, watch out, careful there, they tug me across, eager to get into the forest proper, and I follow, steadier now on solid ground, ground which is still dry because the canopy overhead is dense, dry and springy with thousands of years of leaf mould, rich reddish ground that smells of cinnamon and nutmeg and decay, and I almost wish I could get down onto all fours and sniff that ground with as much abandon as the dogs because it smells of the deep history of a childhood where I was plopped down on a blanket in a hundred different outside places and left to crawl and sniff and lick to my heart’s content, and it’s funny how quickly the van and the road are left behind and the world of men retreats, the world of men retreats, how nice that sounds, Harold would have liked that, and I wonder who we’d leave the world to after us once we’d retreated, or if the