The Whistling Came From Above the Tree Line

I’d misjudged the light. I always promise myself I’ll turn around earlier, but there I was, shouldering a damp backpack and descending a narrow ribbon of dirt while the day was already giving itself up. The late sun had folded into the ridge behind me, leaving the trail in that gray-blue that isn’t darkness but isn’t exactly sight either. I could still see the pale scabs of quartz punched into the ground and the white blaze on the bark ahead, and I had the reflexive hope that the parking lot, half a mile down through the pines, would be standing there with its honest rectangle of gravel and a single sodium lamp humming to itself. I remember the temperature dropped as soon as the hill’s shoulder cut the last warmth, and a clean smell came in—sap, stone, something damp cooling in the moss. My calves ached in that even, practical way. It was a workday evening. I expected no one.

The trail cut along the slope and worked through a stand of pitch pines. Their trunks made a repeated pattern that was easy to follow; my mind took comfort in those stately lines. I could hear small things in the brush making bold, last-minute errands—one chipmunk that sounded too large for its size and made me laugh a little under my breath just to let the air out. Far off, a creek I hadn’t crossed in an hour murmured a statement too general to disobey. Somewhere higher up a wood thrush tried one more spiral, which made the hairs on my arms rise for no good reason; there’s a loneliness in that call when the light has gone stingy.

The first wrong thing came as a clean whistle. It was the kind of whistle a person makes to get a friend’s attention across a park, two bright notes pinched together by teeth and tongue. It wasn’t loud; it didn’t try. It was simply there, drawn with a fine pencil into the air. And it did not come from the trail. It came from above the trees. Not above my head the way a woodpecker would be, but from a height that suggested standing space where there wasn’t any standing to be done—far up, above the line the black needles made against the washed-out sky. I stopped without meaning to. The breath I’d been carrying came out too noisily. I tilted my head and the crown of every tree shifted into a net of black points. The whistle didn’t repeat right away. A gnat found the corner of my eye. I listened for any other person sounds—boots, laughter, the paved syllables of conversation—and heard nothing but my own soft racket settling into the dirt at my feet.

I told myself bird. There are high calls disguised as human effort. I told myself the slope was playing with acoustics, that off the sheer of the ridge sounds bounced strange. I tried to place a perched thing against that feeling of lift it had given me. But even while I talked myself into the practical explanation, there was a neatness to the whistle that sat badly with the half-wild noise of a bird’s throat. It had that little vibrato of someone’s lips when they mean to show you they can do it.

I walked. Packs make their own speech; mine creaked when my shoulders adjusted and my bottle clicked once against the strap. The first bend dipped under a maple whose leaves were already stippled with a thousand points of brown. I kept an honest pace, not wanting to turn the last stretch into a stumble. In two minutes, just as the thought had thinned enough to slide away, the whistle came again. Two notes, the same, but now ahead of me, farther down-trail. Again from high above where the needles cut the sky.

It felt like being waved to from a window you didn’t know existed. I tried to do that practical thing, shape my ear to where the sound could have come from on the ground, picture the wide flat of the next switchback and the little runoff gully that always made my right foot land awkwardly, picture someone standing there with their chin tipped up. But this wasn’t that. It was geologically above, where the crown of a white pine let loose a scatter of dead twigs when a crow went too hard on it. That high. I stood again, feeling silly for stopping, yet I did. Mosquitoes found me right away like I’d rung a dinner bell.

I carried on. The trail made a lazy S and worked my view so that I could look down through the trunks to where the lot would be if the trees politely weren’t there. Between the poles of the pines I could sometimes see the overcast lowering into a single sheet. It had that look of held breath in it—no wind in the needles, no mothering breeze. And then, a third time, the whistle. This time it wasn’t just ahead; it was higher and to the left, closer to the ridge’s spill. And because I’d slowed for the second time, this third one arrived just as I stepped, so I felt it hit a rhythm in me I didn’t care to examine. I felt watched, which is a sentence people throw around like it can be attached to a sense and measured, but what it did to me then was make my wrists feel empty, as if I’d dropped something small and important back there and just kept walking.

I peered up in the way you never do on purpose—it throws your balance on a slope—and a grain of bark fell down into my hair. The topmost branches of the closest pine gave a faint shrug. Then a second tree, twenty feet farther along the trail, shook in that careful way like a cat deciding how much dignity to keep after a failed jump. Dry needles whispered together and a bit of dust chalked loose and floated. It would have meant nothing if there’d been any wind. There was not.

I took three steps and the overhead sound moved with me. It wasn’t a true sound yet, not like a voice or a footfall; it was a compound of small, undeniable facts—the slip of bark against bark, the little dry zipper of needles, the slow drop of something that had been held too long. But it tracked me. When I stopped again—because I had to know if I was making a pattern where there wasn’t one—the movement above me ceased like a song cut off by a switch. The needles finished their fall. The quiet reset itself. When I set my outsole down again and put weight into it, the upper branches somewhere along my line of travel caught and slid as if an invisible person had put a palm down there and shifted their weight to the other foot.

My arms felt cold. I wanted very much to switch on my headlamp and decided I would not do it yet because the circle of light has a way of convincing you that you’ve turned the rest of the world off, and that’s when the rest of the world shows you it hasn’t gone anywhere. I tried to count my steps, a trick I use when the trail gets into my head. I counted twenty quietly, then twenty again. By forty the tops of the trees were rephrasing themselves in a way that made me think of someone climbing along a roofline, crossways, no need to go down to the corner stairs like the rest of us.

The whistle pulled me forward as if it had snagged a thread in me. It stayed ahead, always just beyond where the next turn would let me see more sky, but it also behaved like a thing with elevation. It would lift and then—this startled me—the next time it rose it seemed to come from broken whiteness above the ridge itself, not seated in a crown but floating a clean foot or two above the line of trees, in the bare stripe of not-quite-night. It was a person’s whistle in the air where there was no person’s place to be. That wrongness landed with a neat click in me, and I suddenly wanted very much to be where gravel had been spread by a truck, where numbers were printed on metal signs, where my car waited with its foolish dashboard lights I’ve always resented for how they refuse to share their glow outside the glass. I wanted keys and the ragged floor mat and the low music station that never comes in.

I rounded a bend and came to the little footbridge of two planks laid over nothing. In the spring water pretends it owns that crossing; in late summer it is a dry seam of pale stones. I walked onto it and stopped hard there because I wanted wood under me, I wanted the sound of my shoes on wood. Above, something accepted that decision. The tree immediately to my right—an oak with a limb like a broken arm—gave a small adjusting knock I have only ever heard when someone sizeable leans their weight somewhere it was not meant to be and decides to be careful about it. After a moment, something as minor as a single pine cone let go and fell into the leaves beyond the bridge, where it landed with a pop. I cannot say whether it had been ready to fall or was persuaded. I only know that when I took a step, I heard the deliberate, low rearranging of thin things above me, and when I stopped, I did not.

I did turn my lamp on then. The beam cored the air and found, as beams do, very local wonders—the flat arch of a spider’s web strung across a twig, each thread hung with tiny round water and a fleck of wing; the pale bodies of saplings flexing inward a little as if shy; a scar in a trunk which, at that range, looked like the messy mouth of a gallery. It did not reach the moving place above, not entirely. My circle turned the blackness a paler black and showed me more needles than I cared to count, each holding still the way things hold still when they are weighing you.

I thought about my phone, which was dug down in the front pocket of my pack under a damp bandana. I thought through the choreography of finding it, negotiating the zipper, the fumbled on-screen numbers with my thumb. It seemed to ask too many motions. I thought of calling out, of saying “hey” the way I’d talk to a dog in a yard I don’t know. I thought of whistling back and felt, with a chill that made me put a palm flat against my sternum, that doing so would be an invitation I didn’t want to extend to anything that could make a person’s sound from a person’s nowhere.

The wooden sign that had been nailed into a cedar announcing the mileage to various destinations appeared, warm in the headlamp’s beam. It said 0.7 to the lot, though that number has always been a rumor that feels longer after dark. I kept my measured pace. Where the trail switchbacked, whatever had chosen to keep company with me didn’t bother with the economy of my steps. Up there it went in a shorter line, gliding its presence across three crowns where I would pass under ten. It made a long creak once, like a swing chain without the seat. I didn’t like that, and my body announced it by making my jaw feel hollow and bright like it was full of mint.

Once, in a narrow straight between two trunks, I lifted my lens and risked pointing into the space where I felt it would be if it allowed me to know. Dark is his own thing though, and it gave me only the feeling of looking into my own breath. I dropped the lamp and watched instead the shape the trees made together—saw how two branches made a crooked gate, and how something I could not see seemed to make its way through first as if to hold it for me. When I was under that place, dry needles sighed down and caught in the sweat on my neck.

Then the change that meant the end. The air learned the smell of tar and old rain before I could see anything made by men. The downhill eased into a little bench, and between trunks I got a few terrible, saving flashes: the pale scrape of a guardrail, the corner of the brown sign with the rules nobody reads after they’ve already broken them, a thin line of sky channeling into a straight hard edge where roofs happen. The trees fell away on the left and the world widened in a way I have never not felt grateful for. The gravel lot received me with a crunch that felt like a homecoming. There were two cars—mine and a truck I didn’t remember next to the trail map board. The dusk settled there differently, bigger-shouldered and less personal. My key fob chirped and my car flashed its little eyes the way it always does, all pleased with itself. I wanted to kneel down and kiss its dented door.

And still there was no wind. The trees around the lot stood as if folded by a careful hand. The whistle had not come in a while. I told myself something practical again and felt foolish in my picture of stepping into my car and having to explain my own heartbeat to myself. My hand went to the handle. I had the thought, absurd but real, that if something wanted me to look up, it would ask me to, and felt a quick, juvenile spike of refusal—I did not want to be a person in a story who looked up when asked.

The last thing it did was not give me a choice. From no point on the ground, from no limb or light pole, from no edge I could claim for a person’s foot—directly above the roof of my car and just about as high as the rough black line of the tree tops around the lot—a clear, two-note whistle fell into the space where I stood. It was the same voice I’d heard on the slope, careful and casual like a neighbor at a fence. It came down as if gravity belonged to it, filled the shallow bowl of evening with a round, unmistakable shape, and lingered just long enough to make the gravel under my boots feel softer than it should have. I think I made a sound without wanting to. The dome light came on when I opened the door and lit my shoulder pale. Behind me the trees kept their black edge. The whistle did not repeat, and that was worse than if it had. I slid in, my eyes finding the mirror because they know what to do. The lot’s isosceles of dark and deeper dark held still. The night smelled like pine and my car smelled like old coffee and nylon. I closed the door as softly as I could and waited for the silence to admit what it had kept. It gave me nothing, what I’d wanted all along and did not want in that moment. When I started the engine, the sound of it seemed vulgar. I backed out with both hands on the wheel. In the mirror, as the last of the trees stitched themselves into one line and the lot fell behind, something whistled once more, too clean, right where the black met the sky.