The Shaforay

A Winter Solstice Story

I had never seen it before, that curious custom of the village children.

The snow fell heavily in the village that night I arrived, all but silencing the gentle roar of the river and the creaking of the mill’s old water wheel. The sun had drawn a slow, low, lethargic arc across the eastern ridge, north past the valley, and had begun to set sleepily behind the treeline hours before families would even begin gathering for dinner. Seeming to combat the thick snow and rapidly spreading gloom were the windows of the twenty-or-so homes in that rustic little town, all aglow with candles and welcoming hearthfires. 

Just after sunset, when the sky adopts that strange otherworldly lavender blush and woodsmoke hangs just a little heavier in the air, I could spot the doors of those warm houses quietly opening and the children gingerly stepping out into the fresh snow. They would then gently place something small and green by the doors of their homes: bundles of tree moss, lichen, and evergreen, rolled into balls no bigger than apples. 

I was only a visitor there, just passing through with some supplies for the foresters and other folk who worked the mill and lumberyard which the town sprouted up around like the tall tenacious evergreens for which it was known. I was struck with a sense of curiosity about this practice the village children carried out and so I entered the village inn seeking not only a room for the night, but answers to slake my curiosity. The village inn was full of people of all ages eating, drinking, singing, telling stories, and feeling festive for the coming holiday. Every threshold was adorned with evergreen and a Christmas tree stood proudly by the large hearth in the dining room. I rented a room, sat for my dinner at the bar, and finally inquired to the barkeep.

“Why do the children put bundles of moss outside their homes?” I asked as he slid me a bowl of venison stew, ribbons of steam rising gently like the smoke from the village chimneys.

“Well, ‘tis the solstice!” He offered. I knew the winter solstice was the shortest day of the year, and the day was especially short this far north in Vermont, but that hardly explained why the village children were placing little bundles of moss and other forest things outside their homes with care. He sensed my confusion.

“It comes on the solstice. The creature. The gifts are for the creature.” He smiled and winked.

“Creature? What, some kind of deer migration? I do not follow.” He laughed low and shook his head. 

“No, no deer. It does have antlers like one though. It’s the Shaforay.” 

“Shaforay?” I scoffed. “Never heard of it.”

The inn’s festive clamor fell silent. The people eating, drinking, and making merry looked at me now like I had cursed. One man shook his head while another looked to an old woman in the corner and said flatly, “Tell him.” 

The woman was dressed for rough work, with worn pants and a barn coat speckled with mud and animal hair. A long green scarf was draped around her shoulders that reminded me of a priest’s stole. Her white hair was pulled back into a bun and framed her kind, ruddy face that had seen many years of bright sun and cold wind. Bits of pine needles were stuck in the hair just behind her ears. A little girl had been bouncing on her knee, presumably a granddaughter, but now tugged at the old woman’s worn barn coat. “You have to tell him,” she pleaded softly. 

An uncomfortable minute or two passed. Maybe more. The woman smiled at the little girl before turning her kind face to me, the deep lines around her eyes encouraging me to be calm and welcome.

The tension in the room faded immediately as she began her tale…

❧ ❧ ❧

Pa and I had come to the inn after an afternoon helping birth a breech calf. Inside, people were laughing and singing songs with their neighbors and friends. Christmas was less than a week away and everyone in the village was glad. Before we went in for dinner and to see our friends, I noted to my father that it was very dark outside but it did not feel particularly late. We had been working so hard helping the new calf and its mother all afternoon that I hadn’t even noticed the sun had set! He smiled down at me and explained that the day was the winter solstice; the shortest day of the year and the longest night. I smiled back at him and we went in to join our friends and neighbors for a well deserved dinner.

We had just enough time to finish our food when a man came bursting through the doors. His name was Etienne and he had come to the village from Quebec looking for work at the lumber camp up on the ridge that past summer. He barely spoke any English at all. Most of the men working there had left for the week before Christmas but there were a few who stayed to work through, mainly drifters and others who did not have family nearby like him. He was sweating and out of breath. The shins of his wool pants were thickly padded with snow. Clearly he had run all the way from the lumber camp. He went straight to my father who he knew was a veterinarian since he had treated the camp horses now and then. He grabbed my father by the arm and in a panic tried to explain something urgent. He kept repeating the words “chat!” and “forêt!” while indicating that someone or something had been hurt. All the children gathered for the festivities at the inn thought it was a funny joke of course and started chanting “Sha! Foray! Shaforay! Shaforay!” mimicking Etienne while dancing around in circles, laughing.

Pa, weary from the day’s work, sighed but smiled and reassured the panicked man that he would come right away. He quickly finished his drink, grabbed his veterinarian bag, and gestured for me to come. I was only a little girl then and was so excited to be helping my Pa. We left the light of the warm inn behind and followed Etienne quickly up to the lumber camp on the ridge in the cold December dark. I did not like going up there. Some friends and I had explored the woods around the camp that summer when the men were working and there was so much litter in the forest! Tin cans, glass bottles, broken tools, and more. It didn’t feel right and I had not returned.

Etienne urged us to hurry up the hill past the lumber camp into the forest. My father kept trying to ask him what was wrong with the camp’s horse but the man from Quebec would just rapidly shake his head and say “Chat! Forêt!” as he led us down an old logging road that ran deep into the wood. It was dark. I could hear my heart pumping in my ears and I was getting hot under my coat from the fast pace. We half-ran down that old road through twists and turns, past broken old logging machinery rusting in the forest, all the way to the top of the ridge. We had come to a small clearing and I could see the glint of something on the ground. Bottles and cans. More litter. This must have been an older logging camp; over the years, as the ridge trees were cut, the loggers would move down the hill toward the village, leaving this clearing to become just a dump for their camp trash. 

All that was left of the forest here were saplings and small trees that had begun to grow back years ago, except for a copse of very old, very tall firs near the middle of the clearing, growing thickly together. Etienne pointed to this thick grouping of evergreens and whispered “There. Chat forêt,” and urged us to go forward but he himself did not follow. He was scared.  Pa had given up trying to get more information on what was wrong. We walked quietly through the clearing, past piles of bottles and cans and into the ancient firs, moss and snow intertwining in their branches creating a quiet canopy of white and green. 

There, under the thick, silent, snow-covered boughs lay a creature. My father and I stopped dead still when we saw it and did not say a word. The tiny forest was dark but through the cold starlight I could see it: it was like a large cat, black as night, and with antlers like a deer. I realized that I was able to see it not because of the stars or the moon but because it was making its own light; tiny delicate orbs floated around and away from its antlers like candles or golden fireflies before fading into the dark boughs of the trees. 

It was beautiful. It was beautiful and it was hurt. 

Etienne’s words made sense to me now. Chat. Forêt. Cat. Forest. 

Pa held my hand and we walked closer into the silent, dark copse of trees. We had helped wounded animals before and Pa had always told me to stay behind him lest I get hurt, but somehow we both knew that this creature would not harm us. As we drew closer, I could see that the creature was in trouble; its antlers were beautiful but they had become wrapped in a tangled bunch of thrown away fishing line that was knotted and caught terribly in a briar, trapping it. The snow around it was dirty and heavily disturbed. I could tell it had been struggling there for a long time and was now exhausted. To make matters worse, one of the creature’s large paws was caught in a tin can and another had a cut. The snow around the paw was red. The little lights, the firefly-like golden lights floating around the creature’s antlers were growing dimmer. 

It was like watching a candle slowly flicker out.

I felt a lump in my throat and asked Pa if the creature was going to die. He did not answer at first. He looked at it and slowly turned to look down to me, looked me right in the eye and I saw he was silently crying. Pa never cried. Past the tears, though, were his eyes and in his eyes was an evergreen reassurance: a look as eternal and as good and as green as those old fir trees. It was a look that told me we would not let that beautiful creature die.

I was not sad anymore.

We got to work. Pa told me to open his bag and start by taking out bandages and antiseptic while he inspected the creature closer. I knew he meant to start by cleaning and bandaging the cut, so I had dabbed a little alcohol on a strip of clean gauze bandage and began to hand it to him but he just looked at me and nodded and I realized he wanted me to dress the wound. Again I saw that look of reassurance in his eyes, that good green fir tree look, and I reached for the creature. Its big golden cat eyes looked at me and it let out a deep sigh before closing them as if it could sense I was there to help. As I dressed the wound on its paw, Pa gently removed the tin can trapping its other paw with his strong calloused hands. He then took a pair of small scissors he normally used for cutting stitching thread and began removing the fishing line from the creature’s antlers that had become tangled in the briar. The creature did not move, but as Pa cut away the fishing line, I could see the little golden lights grow a little brighter and float a little further. 

Pa told me to build a small fire to warm the creature. I was reluctant to leave but I hurried off to gather dry wood and tinder. When I returned, I saw Pa had made good progress; the creature’s antlers were no longer attached to the briar by the fishing line and it was able to relax its head into the snow. I took the flint and tinder from Pa’s veterinarian bag and lit a small fire to warm the creature and gathered some moss, pieces of fir boughs, and lichen from a nearby tree to make a little cushion so it wouldn’t have to rest its head in the snow. It nuzzled against my little wild pillow and stretched its paws out toward the fire like a great housecat. For the first time since we entered that little copse, I saw Pa smile. He cut away more fishing line and I began to see that the creature’s antlers had moss in them. The small fire crackled, casting a warm glow over the clearing, and the once dimming lights of the creature began to flit about with a renewed vigor. Pa removed the last piece of fishing line from the creature’s antlers and I could now see that they were draped with moss and lichen like the limbs of an ancient tree. 

The forest that had been silent with the weight of the creature's pain now seemed to sigh with relief. It laid there content, resting, healing. I crept closer to the creature. I wanted to pet it so badly but Pa gently shook his head; as beautiful and otherworldly as it was, it was still a wild animal and he had told me before that we need to not interfere too much or an animal could become scared or even sick. We instead fed the fire a little more and stood some distance from the creature, admiring the soft glow of the firefly candlelights that were now gently illuminating the ageless grove. 

We stood there, holding each other's hands, hoping we had done enough. We stayed for what felt like hours, and it very well may have been, for as we stood there keeping our silent vigil over the creature, the sun began to rise. With it, the creature stirred, slowly standing, testing its mended paws. Even though it was healing from its wounds, it moved with a strange grace I had never seen before in an animal. It was like watching smoke rise from a chimney or the way water moves during the first snow melt. It moved like the feeling of a new year. It was stronger now and the light from the morning sun after the longest night now broke through the boughs and shone between the creature’s antlers, silhouetting it against the sun of a day that would be longer than the last. 

It looked at us then with its golden eyes. In them I saw the same eternal reassurance I saw in Pa’s eyes earlier. The same feeling of fir trees green in the dead of winter. The same feeling of a promise, like something evergreen and good, something new and old at the same time. 

The creature stretched languidly and nuzzled its head into the mossy pillow I had made for it, rubbing more moss and dirt into its great antlers teeming with those ethereal lights. It looked at us once more, slowly blinked twice, and bounded out of the copse of trees into the meadow and deep into the forest with its strange more-than-feline grace. The little firefly candlelight from the creature's antlers lingered in the air for a moment longer illuminating the clearing like a warm farewell before they themselves disappeared into the boughs of the trees leaving only the soft glow of the dying embers from our makeshift fire.

Pa told me it was time to go then. We walked back down into the village and went home, exhausted from our strange encounter in the forest. The following week, Etienne did not speak of the creature, but I did see him and the other lumbermen remove cart after cart of litter from the forest that spring. 

❧ ❧ ❧

The woman laughed, surrounded by the smiling faces of her family and neighbors. With her story concluded, she lifted the little girl from her knee and rose. She stepped forward to where I sat at the bar, removed something from her barn coat pocket, gently opened my hand, and closed it around something soft. It was a small ball of forest things: moss and lichen and fir. She winked. Dumbstruck, I could only stammer a meek “thank you,” before she returned to her family and the festivities of the inn. 

I finished my dinner and retired upstairs to my room. As the longest night waned and the festivities quieted, I looked out my window up the hill to where the fields of snow met the woodline, to where that old lumber camp would have been all those years ago. It was a clear night, revealing countless brilliant stars. I stood there, looking at the woods and the snow and the stars for a long time before quietly creeping out of my room, down the stairs, through the darkened inn to the front door. I stepped out into the cold night, the longest night of the year, and reached into my pocket. 

There I held the mossy bundle the woman had given me. A small green gift given in good faith with no expectation of return. I gently placed the soft green ball outside the inn's door, adding it to the small offerings left by the village children outside their own homes. There, resting gently in the snow, it looked like a promise. A promise that the days would grow brighter, that the woods would grow greener, and that the Shaforay would still be there, in that forest and all forests, forever lighting the way to a new year.

As I climbed back to the comfort of my room and the warmth of my bed, I felt my eyes grow heavy. Before I fell asleep, however, I could swear I saw something out my window: little golden lights like fireflies or candles floating at the edge of the forest.

I knew then that tomorrow would be a little longer, greener, and brighter than today.