Believing

As she stands looking into the forest that covers her newly acquired land, Rosalind McKay senses that all is not right within those trees. Her first tentative steps into the forest leave her shaken and frightened of the sensations she experienced and the voices she heard. Despite deciding she would never again venture into the foreboding trees, she finds herself in a clearing where she is presented with the possibility of learning what happened to animals and people who had lived there for over the past one thousand plus years. This is accomplished through Murdo Nicholson, the ‘essence’ of a doctor who practiced in the area more than a century before. The tales are not happy ones, as a curse had been thrown on the land by the first human to die in its then-boggy landscape—Mud Woman.

Roz is a 49-year-old unemployed school teacher with Scottish roots and a fiancé called Jasper, a hard-working salesman. When her Aunt Cathy died, Roz inherited a small fortune, and she and Jasper purchased 160 acres of land, built a house and prepared to live the country life. But Jasper travelled often and for long stretches of time Roz was left to tend horses she didn’t want and doesn’t know anything about caring for, and adjust to the adventures and perils of living more or less alone.

As her relationship with Jasper disintegrates due to his undiagnosed mental illness, she manages to secure a job in a nearby town, establish a friendship with the farming family next door, and be at odds with her best friend, the highly capable Olena.

While Roz is discovering and relating what she is shown by the various ‘essences’ that dwell within the forest, she is also discovering her own strengths and developing her abilities as an oral story teller. Roz becomes enchanted, especially with Murdo, and is furious when she learns that Jasper has a notion to subdivide the property without consulting her.

But is she simply imagining these ‘essences’, or perhaps losing her mind? Or, spurred by the volatility of the nature around her, has she tapped into a part of her creative brain that had otherwise been dormant? She begins to wonder what is inspiring all this. Is it the lower leg bone of a horse discovered buried in the remnants of an old garden? Could that large white rock actually be a sleeping wolf? Perhaps the large butterflies really are butterflies and not the spirits of two dead little girls?

Where do stories come from anyway? Are they triggered by items, places, people and events? Can tales come through unbidden? How can a person tell the difference between receiving messages from outside themselves and their own fertile imagination? These are questions Roz must deliberate, and—maybe—find the answers to, as she brings an end to Mud Woman’s curse and becomes her own woman within the forest.