He was born on a cold morning when the mist curled low across the moss-covered forest floor. The air smelled of pine needles and damp earth. There were no walls to echo his first cries, only trees that stood like sentinels and the whisper of a nearby brook murmuring lullabies older than names.
Walker came into the world as quietly as he would later move through it.
Elsha, his mother, wrapped him in a blanket made from stitched rabbit furs, her hands shaking not from cold, but from the realization that she'd done this alone. Alone in a place where wolves still howled and men had long since forgotten how to live without machines. The pain still clung to her body, but she looked at her child and knew: he would not be a child of fear. He would be born of wildness, raised by trees, taught by struggle.
There had been no midwife. No waiting room or bedpan. Just the breathless silence of the forest and her own stubborn will to survive. Blood soaked the moss beneath her knees, and the trees stood witness as her body bent and broke and rebuilt itself into something fiercer: a mother.
Their cabin wasn't really a cabin, not then. Just a lean-to made of split logs and tarp, half-shelter from wind and rain. A place more animal than human. It grew with the years, log by log, nail by rusted nail. Walker watched it grow the way other children watch apartment buildings from stroller windows. Every improvement was a lesson—how to notch a beam, how to seal the cracks with pine pitch, how to trust the grain of wood like a heartbeat.
Elsha was never sentimental, but she was tender in her own way. She showed love through instruction, through survival. She taught him to lay stones so they would not shift under snow. She taught him to boil spruce needles when sickness came and his throat turned raw. She never said "I love you," but she pressed her palm to his cheek on cold nights and sang songs with no words.
By the time he was six, he could catch fish bare-handed, sitting still in icy waters until the moment was right. Not flinching. Not breathing. Patience taught him more than hunger ever could. By eight, he could set snares for rabbits and skin them clean with a knife carved from bone. He learned to read tracks the way others read books—to know how long ago a deer passed, whether it limped, whether it was alone.
He spoke to birds without expecting answers. He listened to trees, and though they said nothing, he always heard something. A shift in the wind, the creak of bark, the quiet agreement between roots and soil. The forest had its own language, and he became fluent not in words, but in rhythms.
There were no birthdays. No candles. No cakes. But there were moments—like when Elsha carved him his first slingshot and taught him to use it by knocking down apples from a stubborn branch. Moments that passed quietly but left warmth in the bones. There was the winter she let him stay up past dark to watch the northern lights smear green across the sky. He hadn't known the sky could move like that—like breath, like memory.
They had little. A kettle with a dent in its side. A mirror the size of a hand. A single wool coat between the two of them that Elsha insisted he wear when the snow was thickest. But Walker never felt poor. The forest gave what it could—berries in summer, roots in spring, firewood in every fallen limb. He learned to take without greed and give thanks without words.
One year, the snow came in early November and blanketed the forest like a soft death. It came heavy and wet, bending branches until they snapped like bones. They spent days indoors, burning what wood they had. Walker read the same book every night—White Fang, pages worn and corners curled from his hands. He knew every word, but he liked the way the story unfolded just the same, like footprints leading somewhere familiar.
He didn't know much about cities, only what his mother told him in fragments—places with concrete, glowing boxes, and people who never looked each other in the eye.
"I lived there once," she'd say, brushing his hair back. "Before I remembered who I was."
"Why did you leave?"
She never answered the same way twice. Sometimes it was, "I was tired." Sometimes, "I was scared." Once, she whispered, "Because I loved someone who made me forget I was worth loving too."
Walker didn't understand that then. But the woods taught him early that love wasn't always warm.
Sometimes it was the weight of a log too heavy to lift, but carried anyway. Sometimes it was silence held between two people because words might ruin what was sacred.
Elsha carried old wounds. Some Walker could see—a long scar across her thigh, a crooked knuckle that ached in rain—but others lived deep in her eyes, the kind of hurt that never bled but never healed either. On restless nights, when the fire died low and her breathing turned ragged, he would lie still and pretend to sleep, listening as she whispered to someone who wasn't there.
"I'm sorry," she'd say once, to the dark. "I should've left sooner."
In spring, she smiled more. The melt turned the streams wild and unpredictable, and the air buzzed with life. Walker loved spring. Not just for the food or the warmth, but because it reminded him that nothing stayed buried forever. The forest, like his mother, always found a way back.
He spent his days climbing trees, learning how the wind moved through the canopy. He learned to mimic the calls of hawks and owls, to stitch wounds with pine thread, to navigate by moss and starlight. Every cut and bruise was a lesson. Every meal earned by sweat or blood tasted like a reward.
By ten, he could read the weather by the smell of the wind. He knew when to set traps higher because the snow would rise. He knew how to build a fire even when the wood was wet. And he knew, more than anything, how to be alone.
Loneliness, he realized, wasn't a shadow. It was a sound. The kind that settled in your bones when the world went quiet and stayed that way. It wasn't cruel—it just reminded him that he was small, and the world was vast, and there was no one coming but himself.
Elsha did what she could to shield him from the worst of things. She never let him see her cry. She never spoke of the past unless it came gently. But he noticed the way her hands shook more as he got older. How she leaned against trees when she thought he wasn't looking. How sometimes, after long walks to check the traps, she'd sit on the porch and stare into nothing, as if expecting someone to return who never did.
One winter, he woke to find her gone. Panic gripped his chest like a trap sprung tight. He followed her tracks through the snow, barefoot, not caring. He found her kneeling by the brook, hands in the freezing water, lips moving silently.
"I couldn't sleep," she said when she saw him. "I was listening."
"To what?"
She looked up at him. "To who I used to be."
He didn't understand, not fully. But he sat beside her, and neither of them said anything for a long time.
Later, back in the cabin, he asked, "Do you miss it? The city?"
She shook her head slowly. "I miss being seen."
That night, he carved her a pendant from riverstone and strung it with deer sinew. He didn't say what it meant. Just left it by her cup. In the morning, she wore it around her neck without a word.
Time passed like fog, slow and shifting. Walker grew taller, leaner. His eyes took on the same sharpness as the hawks he watched. He began to ask questions Elsha couldn't always answer—about other people, about music, about what it meant to kiss someone. She answered gently when she could. Other times, she just looked at him like she was mourning something she didn't have a name for.
"You'll go someday," she said once, when he was thirteen and the wind howled like an old memory. "Farther than I ever did."
Walker didn't answer. But that night, he dreamed of streets he had never walked and voices he had never heard. He dreamed of lights that didn't flicker and hands that reached for his without calluses.
He woke with a strange ache in his chest, like longing and fear had decided to live side by side.
And in the woods, the brook still murmured. The trees still stood. But something inside him had shifted, just a little, like a compass beginning to turn.