In March, a man goes into a forest.
Anderson absolutely loves his job.
Is logging hard? Yeah. Is it dangerous? Oh, yeah. But last week at the bar his wife's office worker of a brother was sobbing into his beer because the best days of his life had been getting third in the championship tournament when he was seventeen. Anderson can't relate. It'd been fun enough to get out of school and run around challenging other kids, and sure it's important to see the world and all that, but he'd never thought that was all there was to life and frankly, even pokemon battles get boring when you're doing them all day every day. He had always wanted to be a lumberjack, carry on the family tradition. Being outdoors, up and down trees and then downing them yourself, actually accomplishing something instead of just another cog in the mass of kids shoving to try to be king of the hill.
And, he thinks, as he breathes in deeply, the crisp, fresh mountain air flooding his lungs, there's more than one kind of outdoors. Kids on their pokemon journeys move about on the established roads between towns and cities, made safe by the weight of travelers and with the ground hard-packed by so many feet. It's easy going. It's boring going.
Even the ground out here is challengingly heterogeneous, pillow-soft and leafy soil shot through with an unyielding tangle of almost rock-hard roots, the sort of thing that can snap an ankle if you're not used to it. It smells clean and alive. His wife says the smell of it is that of decay, the gentle tugging apart by fungus, but his wife also says that after all, isn't the fungus just as alive as they are, shouldn't the fungus' supper be as celebrated as our own? Hamburgers on the grill are dead meat ground to paste by machines being seared by fire and coated in smoke and ash, and no one badgers people about how, actually, liking that smell is a trick of the brain, did you know that really...
(His wife keeps a parasect, though it's hard to say what came first, her defensive love of fungus or strangers who wouldn't stop making comments about how sad it was the paras evolved. All the cognition occurs within the mushrooms, she snapped at a party last month.)
It's a bit early to be out, March, but the thaw was early this year too. There's not even a crust of ice left under the leaves by now. It's been early more often than not these last years, though Anderson doesn't care much about the politics people insist on bringing into things like that. A little early, a little late, it's not a big deal in the scheme of things. The forest's still here, still the same as always. In some ways, he thinks he prefers it this way, how you have to pay attention to all the little cues, the crisp tang of the air and the wetness underfoot, and decide for yourself the best time to start on the trees again instead of just doing things the same time every year.
It's also good to be on the lookout for anyone a little too into politics, the sort who think spiking a tree and wrecking someone's livelihood makes for a fun day trip, the sort who might believe that they should get in a bit of sabotage before logging starts up again in spring. You wouldn't think tree-huggers would be so gung-ho about stabbing trees with metal, especially with all the complaints when he does that, but then, pretty much everything he hears from them seems to be a mess of contradictions. Now people are complaining about all the fletchling in the forest, saying there's too many of them and they're not 'native' species like that should matter and somehow that's all bad for biodiversity. Isn't it good so many pokemon can make a home here? How can anyone have anything against fletchling? They're great! Way less trouble than a lot of other pokemon.
He doesn't expect any of those sort to actually be dangerous or even particularly difficult, confronted alone out here. The dangers of the forest are the forest itself, of big trees and how high it is climbing up them and how hard and suddenly their branches can fall and the sharp things it takes to bring them down and all the ways all of that can go wrong.
And right now, he's also not too worried about risks of his job either because he's not here to fell trees just yet but just to get the lay of the land again. True, the leaves underfoot are more slippery than usual, not just from the dew between their layers but the slick mud underneath them. There's talk about mudslides, and yes, this is the sort of soil for that. But there won't be any.
If you listen to some tree-huggers talk about his job, you'd think it was about destroying the forest and leaving nothing but a barren wasteland behind. He's had people say to his face they can't believe someone like him can claim to love nature when he spends his life wrecking it. But there is not, in actual fact, any need to cut down every last tree before you move on to the next area. You don't look at a farm and accuse the farmer of destroying the land he harvests on. Or, well, maybe you do, that sounds about dumb enough for them. At any rate, he's not some clear-cutting incompetent. Take out the mature trees, leave others to hold onto the land while they grow. By the time they've taken advantage of that extra light (you're welcome) and moved from gangly adolescents to thick, hearty, harvestable adults far faster than they ever could in nature, they've also seeded the ground around them with the next generation of saplings.
Everyone wins. That's the thing some people just won't get, that you can have something that's best for everyone. The pokemon keep their forest home because there's still plenty of trees and the land can be harvested steadily because there's always new trees maturing.
And the proof, as they say, is in the pudding - or the river, to be specific. If he wasn't taking proper care of the land, if the mud was loose, the river would clog up the very next rain. The tree roots here hold fast to the dirt of the mountain and you can see that from the crystal clarity of the river flowing through. The water's clean enough to drink from, something he plans to do once he gets over the next ridge.
When he sees it by the water line, he's just confused. It looks like a a broken-down snag somehow still managing to leaf out in places, but this is a well-managed forest. Trees aren't just left to die around here, and even if he did miss signs of one ailing, it would never be allowed to get this far. It takes decades for a tree to fall apart like this one, maybe longer given that looks to be hardwood. That he can't quite identify what the tree is makes him still more confused, especially how he thinks he's seen that leaf shape before but for the life of him can't match it to a species or even an impression of the tree's shape.
Bidoof scatter into the water and onto the other bank at his approach and he scowls. He's going to have to clear this new nest out before they start wrecking things, chewing up his trees and clogging his river. See, this is exactly what he means, bidoof were never around when he was a kid and without his and the others' hard work caring for their forest, all sorts of things that shouldn't be here would just move right in.
And then the snag itself moves and he realizes his mistake. It's not a dying tree, it's a trevenant, ugh. He pulls the pokeball from the cord around his neck and pops it open, releasing his pokemon. "Fletchinder, burn it," he starts, and a dopey-eyed bibarel pops out of the trevenant's hollow trunk. It drenches his pokemon, and thanks to the splash, him, with a blast of icy water.
Anderson just feels irritation. It's just a stupid bibarel, after all, it's not much of an addition to the battle. "Acrobatics, Fletchinder," he orders. "Let's get this done fast."
Fast is what he expects but it's not what he gets. His fletchinder beats her wings like she's in water rather than air. For a moment he's concerned she's disoriented - that'd been water pulse just now, hadn't it - but then he realizes her chest is fluttering up and down in gulps of air the way she usually does before a fire attack. She launches herself at the bibarel, still far too slowly, and the trevenant's left branch, or limb, brutally smacks her to the ground before she can reach either of the pokemon, scattering half the feathers on one wing.
That hurt, but it's not enough to win the fight. "Flamethrower!" he cries. He's realized what's wrong. Soaked and chilled, the internal flame of his fletchinder, the fire she stokes to give herself her marvelous speed, is far too low. And the bibarel isn't the real concern here, it's the trevenant. They're vicious. The bibarel will turn tail when it sees the battle going against them, but once a trevenant goes after you, it doesn't stop.
Fletchinder puffs like a bellows and finally manages a white-hot jet of flame only for the attack to splatter outward around their opponents, dissipating harmlessly. One of them must know protect. The trevenant, evidently, because the moment Fletchinder's attack sputters out, the bibarel blasts her with more water.
He feels the first bit of real concern, not fear but the awareness this could go badly, that he needs to pay attention and be careful about this. Even if he had the choice, he'd have kept hammering away a while longer, would only have actually tried to run when his fletchinder went down. So, the fact it's now rather than any later that the roots twist under his feet, that he's tangled ankle-deep...the timing of that, at least, is not particularly important.
Anderson does not know what happens to his fletchinder. She is still alive when last he sees her, and it is entirely possible she turns tail and runs.