Whispers Beneath the Pines

Whispers Beneath the Pines

The night the forest learned our names was the night we could no longer decide who wore the bravest face. Three of us hiked in with tents and stubborn pride, thinking the wild would keep to its own rules if we followed ours. It didn’t.

The lake mirrored the sky, and the pines stood like quiet sentries, dripping needles that sounded like rain whenever the wind shifted. By the second day the camp stove hummed a tired lullaby, and the whispers started as a soft rustle that felt almost deliberate—like someone turning the pages of a book no one was meant to read aloud.

“We are only passing through,” I told myself, but the woods replied with a rusted oath: you are staying.”

We kept a strict routine: fire, water, rest. Yet the routine refused to acknowledge us. Mornings brought frost on the tent zippers and a scent like forgotten pennies. By dusk, footprints appeared around the edge of the campfire circle—bare, careful steps that stopped at the wood’s mouth and listened back to us. We learned to whisper the moment we heard the first twig snap, as if the forest would mistake our breath for a signal of surrender.

• Staying in one place too long invites a different kind of hunger—one that smells like rain and old socks.
• The wind through the pines can carry a voice with no mouth, and a warning with no eyes to see it.
• When the fire grows still, the night grows louder, counting the heartbeats of those who listen too closely.

That night the whispers found us in the space between sleep and waking. They spoke in a language of sighs and needles, a chorus that knew every fear we carried, including the fear we would not survive to tell the tale. I woke to the sound of wind twisting the canvas, and the others were gone as if dissolved into the patina of the forest itself. My breath fogged, and a final whisper settled on my shoulder: you never left. The pines remember everything.