Organic form within radiating lines on a back

You asked whether the beech wood still has its old wood-warden's rides, and I can tell you it does, though I have spent three weeks cutting new ones. The fan I wrote about last time is finished. I pegged the lines out from the stump of the Dunmore beech, twelve strings, each run through a hazel fork and tied off at the fence, so the whole thing looks like a gate somebody forgot to close. Mr Pell thinks I've gone soft in the head. Perhaps I have.

The grub sits in the middle of it, where the bark split last winter. It is the size of a man's forearm, ridged and lumpy as a clot of wet clay, and it doesn't so much move as settle. Every dusk it shifts a finger's width along the trunk, and every dawn I find it on a different string. I have counted nineteen crossings of the same two lines. I have started to think it is reading them.

Yesterday I went out with the lantern and found the outermost thread snapped, the one that runs down past the pump toward our back step. The grub had gone round. It had taken the long way, out past the orchard wall, and it was sitting now on the bottom rung of our ladder, very neat and very patient, like a thing that has finally found the right door.

I have left the kettle on. Come up when you can, and bring the good wire.

Yours, Nell