This particular nut, buried and dampened by the rain, opens softly and releases a green-tipped stem that, like a finger pointing the way, uncurls and stiffens and presses its way upward until it breaks the soil and takes in the warm air and the warm sun, so thrilled by them both that it grows three inches that day and three more the next. Its roots mine the soil, burrowing downward, extending like capillaries, drinking up precious moisture and gobbling up nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, knocking aside worms and grubs, feeding, feeding, feeding off everything, so that several other nuts can find no sustenance and wither and eventually break down into particles the tree consumes as well.

It is so hungry.

The tree grows, and growth remains its principal concern. It is a ponderosa, thick-waisted, towering already, with three-needled fingers and scab-colored scales of bark with black lining the crevices between them. For so many years its branches stretch skyward and its roots grope downward and it drinks with great thirst, allowing no neighbors except sagebrush and cheatgrass, knowing no company except for the turkey vultures that roost in its branches, and the ants and the beetles that scuttle in and out of its bark, and the occasional cow that takes rest in its shade.

The cows—and the tree, for that matter—belong to the Mosses, a family that for several generations has ranched this acreage. When the old man, Samuel, doesn’t wake up one morning—a bloody starburst filling one of his open eyes—his family begins to parcel the land to developers who build, on two-acre lots, homes of a similar neocolonial design, with rustic touches such as river-rock facades and wide-board hardwood flooring. Big bay windows look out over the patchwork of sage flats and alfalfa fields that stretch to the upthrust of the mountains.

Though the tree at first views the front-end loader and the concrete truck and the flatbed carrying lumber and the big-bellied men wearing tool belts as invasive, as if they form a strange garden that might steal nutrients from its soil, and though it at first spits sap and drops pinecones like bombs and makes of its interior a groaning complaint when anyone comes too close, really the tree is cautiously interested, after so many years of nothing but the birds and the bugs for company. It has not realized up to this point its hunger as a kind of loneliness.

Its hunger—once consigned to sunlight and rain and subterranean nutrients—suddenly transforms when one day a moving truck followed by a bullet-shaped car crawls up the driveway. The car door kicks open to reveal a little girl with hair the color and curl of wood shavings. There are a mother and father, of course, but the tree sees only the girl, who immediately runs to it and balances on a snakelike root and places a warm little hand on its trunk and asks her father if he might hang a swing from one of the branches. Aside from a construction worker who crushed out a cigarette against its bark, this is the tree’s first human contact, as welcome as a warm rain. It trembles its needles.

“It’s talking to me,” the little girl says.

Soon a swing with yellow ropes dangles from one of the lower-reaching branches and nearly every day the girl pumps her legs and bends her body to reach higher and higher, as if she hopes to toe the clouds from the sky. She reads books in the tree’s shade. She plays with her dolls and stuffed animals in the tangle of its roots. Nights, it scratches at her window, delighting in the way she startles, her eyes wide, her arms out before her and then falling to her side in relief when she realizes it was only a branch, only the tree.

In the winter, her father pulls from the garage a box full of blinking colored lights and wraps them around the tree’s trunk and along its branches. The tree doesn’t mind, not when it sees her mouth open in wonder, her eyes a glimmering reflection of the lights, the tree as though it is inside her, a part of her.

When the wind blows, the tree dances—its branches bending—and sings—its needles hissing, its trunk moaning, crick-crack—for her. As a child the girl claps and giggles. And then as a teenager she gives a half smile and maybe hums something back at the tree before turning to a magazine, her phone. She still swings, but lazily, her bare feet and painted toenails gently scuffing the ground, its roots, an almost-caress.

After so many years she knows the tree and the tree knows her.

And then one day she shoves the car full of suitcases and duffel bags and hastily taped cardboard boxes and rolled-up, rubber-banded posters. A window fan. A computer with cords dangling from it like roots. When she slams shut the trunk, she stands looking for a long time at the house and the tree, and then she and her parents vanish into the car and the engine roars to life. They hurry down the cinder driveway and the tires kick up a reddish cloud that rises again a day later when the parents return without the girl.

She has left before—usually for a weekend, sometimes for a week, even two—vacationing somewhere exotic, returning to the tree with her skin smelling of salt and coconut oil and glowing from too much sun—but never for this long and never at this time of year, when the alfalfa is being reaped, when the aspen’s leaves go golden. Without the girl, the mother and the father continue to watch television in the living room, to heft groceries from the trunk of their car, as if nothing has changed. The air grows cooler and when the wind rises the tree sheds many of its needles and empty cones like tears.

In a hollow where a woodpecker once burrowed for grubs there is now a wasp’s nest, and the tree threatens to crush the larvae into a yellow paste if the wasps do not do its bidding and find the girl, find her. In a buzzing rush they rise from the hollow and wander many roads and wind currents to peer into cars and houses and caves alike, hunting for her. A week later one of them returns to the tree—its wings tattered, its stinger limp from a run-in with a robin—sputtering out the girl’s location, far away from here, over the mountains, in a dormitory on a college campus.

Of course the tree does not understand why she has left, only that she has left, has begun another life away from here. The tree wishes that its roots could uncoil, that it could slither like a wooden octopus across the many miles that separate it from the girl and deposit itself outside her window and tap at the glass and earn once more the warmth of her smile.

Since it cannot, it schemes other ways to earn her attention, hurrying the sap through its system and opening its buds a season early to send spores on the wind. The spores follow a maze of updrafts and downdrafts to finally find her. They arrange themselves on her window in a constellation of pollen, a foreign alphabet whose letters she does not understand. She wipes them away with a damp paper towel and when they reappear the next day wipes them away again.

The tree seizes a crow and whispers splintery threats into its ear and sends it off with a nut tucked under its black feathers like a jewel to carry over the forested foothills, the snowcapped mountains, the green expanse of farmland interrupted by clusters of alders and oaks, until the crow finally swoops down onto the campus. Outside a brick dormitory, on a lawn shaped like a half moon, the crow pecks a hole and deposits the nut and then flutters past the girl’s window, a black cackling shadow. The soil here is rich and dark and almost immediately the nut cracks open and begins its probing ascent, like a periscope, to spy the girl, to seek her out. But on the third day a shirtless man in jean cutoffs sits on the seedling and strums his guitar, singing off-key songs for a good two hours. And on the fifth day a lawn mower snarls across the lawn and lops off the green shoot of its head.

Back at the girl’s home, the tree’s bark begins to darken and grow knotty. It has been betrayed. Its branches twist. Its roots curl. Spiders and beetles creep out of its hollows. A vulture roosts in its crown and screeches all night its rusty music.

Winter comes. The sky goes gray. Ice clots the ditches. Frost steals across the windows of the house and the figures inside become blurred shadows. The sagebrush and rabbitbrush wither into dry wigs. The ants and wasps die with their eggs and become the food of next season. Geese fly south in flocks the shape of a spearhead.

When the first snow falls, the tree knows the father will soon drag from the garage the box full of colored lights to weave around its branches. And he does. And the tree is ready. A ragged crack is the only warning before a branch the size of a missile falls from above and crushes the father’s skull, a red smear on white snow. His legs twitch. The colored lights blink. The tree pleasures in the taste of blood warming its roots.

And the girl comes home, as the tree knew she would. She looks different somehow. Her face squarer. Her body longer. Her hair a different color, the yellow of the mullein flower. Her black clothes match the black bags beneath her eyes. She stands for a long time looking at the tree. A wind rises and the tree dances for her, waving its empty branches, moaning out a song. She does not clap or smile. If anything her face grows more pinched and severe. She goes into the garage and emerges a moment later, not with a fistful of lights, but with a chain saw. She yanks the cord, and the chain saw coughs a cloud of black smoke before settling into a full-throated growl.

The tree does not fight the blur of the machine’s toothy blade, even as sawdust covers the ground like newly fallen snow, even as it bleeds and weeps trails of sap, so hungry for her final touch, its loneliness repaired.

Illustration: Danica Novgorodoff