A countryside mystery for young readers

By Gareth M. Parkes

The name Grizedale means Valley of the Pigs.

Benji had read this on the noticeboard at the forest entrance, and he'd been turning it over in his mind ever since — padding along the trail between the tall spruce and larch, red collar bright in the thin morning light, wondering what the people who named it would make of the place now. No pigs. But buzzards, and deer, and the kind of deep green silence that settles between old trees like something left there on purpose.

He'd come early, before the other walkers, when the forest was all its own.

The trail wound between the trees and opened briefly onto a small clearing where a sculpture stood: a figure made of woven branches, arms raised as if in surprise, bark face caught mid-expression between wonder and laughter. Benji sat in front of it for a moment, studying it. He liked that someone had thought to put a face in the forest. Then he moved on.

He was watching for red squirrels. He'd been told they lived here — shy, quick, the colour of autumn, harder to spot than you'd expect. He'd been watching the high branches for ten minutes without seeing anything move.

And then something moved.

Not a squirrel.

It was larger — lithe and quick in a way squirrels weren't, flowing between branches with the easy sureness of something that knew exactly how much weight each limb could bear. Chestnut brown. A flash of cream at the throat. And then gone, as cleanly as a shadow when a cloud covers the sun.

Benji stood very still.

His ears were up. His nose was working.

Something about that movement had been too deliberate, too knowing, to be anything ordinary.

He followed the trail in the direction the shadow had gone, nose lifted to the cold air, reading the faint alphabet that drifted down from the canopy. Not fox. Not squirrel. Not anything he could name with certainty. Something older, somehow. Something that smelled of high branches and spruce resin and very great distance.

He was moving along the base of a particularly tall Scots pine when he heard it.

A very small sound from above him. And then — from inside a wooden box fixed to the trunk, perhaps eight feet up, half-hidden behind a bracket of ivy — a small frightened face.

Round eyes. Ear tufts. The most vivid shade of amber-red.

A squirrel.

She was pressed into the doorway of the box, peering down at him with an expression caught exactly between relief and alarm.