Pixies exist. I will admit that I, too, was skeptical. Yet as sure as the sun shines and winds blow, pixies, along with sprites, elves, gnomes and other wee folk, inhabit the earth. I present to you, here, the irrefutable evidence of such beings. If you can tell me, in the end, you don’t believe, I beseech of you to close the page; seek out your imagination, and resurrect what remains of it . . .
Once upon an uneventful afternoon, in the most dreary time of year, after autumn undresses its fiery gown and lays it wrinkled on the ground, I found myself on a woodland walk. My furry companions far ahead of me, I stepped along the well-worn trail until I heard something to the right of me. The sound, being of a scurrying type and not an alarming type, did not beckon me to stop. Rather there was something I saw that turned my head not once, but twice, and brought me to a standstill.
It wasn’t something one would see if one hadn’t been looking, but having been coaxed by a rustling through the crisp leafy floor of the woods, I saw it. Exactly what I saw was not intelligible upon first glance, but having taken the second, became immediately clear. There, beneath and around the base of a nearby tree was a well-worn path much like the one I trod. Yet this was a miniature path, fit for tiny feet, tucked under a branch, and leading seemingly nowhere.
Had this event occurred only in my deepest imagination, I might not have taken out my camera and snapped a photo. I later scoured the pixels for a camouflaged face, or the unobscured hem of a miniature coat, to no avail. There remained only the trail leading nowhere around a tree like any other.
Having had my curiosity piqued, on subsequent meanderings through the woods, I became much more aware of irregularities within the familiar landscape. There were, at the base of many a tree, openings. One might imagine a passageway, an access to underground tunnels, or a series of elevations within the tree. One might, indeed, imagine any number of things beyond the deep, dark opening in the bottom of any ordinary tree. And I, possessing a healthy imagination, conjured up a number of stories, each more fascinating than the one before . . .
Wee Folk in the Woodlands, Part II
