Animals had minds. People had minds, although human minds were vague foggy things. Even insects had minds, little pointy bits of light in the darkness of non-mind.
Granny considered herself something of an expert on minds. She was pretty certain things like countries didn’t have minds.
They weren’t even alive, for goodness sake. A country was, well, was—
Hold on. Hold on…A thought stole gently into Granny’s mind and sheepishly tried to attract her attention.
There was a way in which those brooding forests could have a mind. Granny sat up, a piece of antique loaf in her hand, and gazed speculatively at the fireplace. Her mind’s eye looked through it, out at the snow-filled aisles of trees. Yes. It had never occurred to her before. Of course, it’d be a mind made up of all the other little minds inside it; plant minds, bird minds, bear minds, even the great slow minds of the trees themselves…
She sat down in her rocking chair, which started to rock all by itself.
She’d often thought of the forest as a sprawling creature, but only metterforically, as a wizard would put it; drowsy and purring with bumblebees in the summer, roaring and raging in autumn gales, curled in on itself and sleeping in the winter. It occurred to her that in addition to being a collection of other things, the forest was a thing in itself. Alive, only not alive in the way that, say, a shrew was alive.
And much slower.
That would have to be important. How fast did a forest’s heart beat? Once a year, maybe. Yes, that sounded about right. Out there the forest was waiting for the brighter sun and longer days that would pump a million gallons of sap several hundred feet into the sky in one great systolic thump too big and loud to be heard.
And it was at about this point that Granny bit her lip.
She’d just thought the word “systolic,” and it certainly wasn’t in her vocabulary.
Somebody was inside her head with her.
Some thing.
Had she just thought all those thoughts, or had they been thought through her?
She glared at the floor, trying to keep her ideas to herself. But her mind was being watched as easily as if her head was made of glass.
Granny Weatherwax got to her feet and opened the curtains.
And they were out there on what—in warmer months—was the lawn. And every single one of them was staring at her.
After a few minutes Granny’s front door opened. This was an event in its own right; like most Ramtoppers Granny lived her life via the back door. There were only three times in your life when it was proper to come through the front door, and you were carried every time.
It open