After two years Heriwulf wasn't thinking nearly that often about the Mirkwood, and Woodland Hall. Long after the small group of Woodmen had made bivouac in the Chetwood, Mirkwood was still "home", and that was true even after the bivouac had turned into a camp, the camp into a lodge, the lodge into a settlement. But little by little, some time over the last few months, the Chetwood had stopped being where he currently was, and started being home. This change had happened quietly, in the background, without him noticing, so by the time a moment came that made it clear to him, it had already been true for, perhaps, months.
The revelation came, as they often do, from a direction one could not anticipate, that didn't even seem relevant. Byrge and his companion, visiting to speak about treatments for the companion's "fits" and the use of dogs to help with that, happened to mention that some innocent woman had been robbed by an unknown highwayman on the road through the Chetwood. Such matters are not the concern of the Woodmen, so long as it was not one of them who was robbed, and yet Heriwulf found himself riled up by the idea of it. Why? Because the Chetwood was theirs, under their protection. Their home. He vowed to propose to the clan at the next moot the idea of setting a trap for him, having one of the women of the clan pretend to be a helpless victim. Not for some sense of justice: Bree could take care of its own. Just to protect the Chetwood and the paths through it, so visitors could trust the road to the small settlement of the Woodmen, perhaps. He wondered if the clan would think this whimsical reaction of his was ridiculous. "Not our business," they would probably say, and wouldn’t they be right? Perhaps. So why did the idea come to him so strongly? Thinking about that was what made him realize that at some point in the past months, the Chetwood had become home.
Perhaps it was how much he was becoming "settled down". The cabin for him to share with Pie-Maker and Scarlet Jay certainly spoke of domesticity, as did Pie-Maker's pregnancy. And the coming of spring led to many activities that felt so homely: helping Raven and Trap-Wright with readying the crop-land, helping Ljota tending the livestock (and evaluating what new livestock to buy -- Snow-Hair would no doubt be amused that Heriwulf would soon be visiting the ox-herder in Combe after all), boiling down maple sap to make syrup, and the first foraging of the season.
He'd found himself explaining to someone else (Byrge, as it happened) the reason why the clan was moving to resettle the wolves that had threatened Combe, and in the process of explaining, realizing something himself. Back in the Vales, his kin fought, spear and fang, generation after generation, to push back the corruption in the Mirkwood in hopes of one day seeing it return to Greenwood the Great. Here, though, the Chetwood was mostly healthy and bountiful, and that felt like an opportunity: far easier, and far better, to keep a healthy forest healthy than to reclaim it after it was nearly lost. And that, too, spoke of his sense that this had become home. Not that he no longer cared about the battle of the Mirkwood, just that he now had a new purpose. The clan was working on building dens from woven branches and thatch, from piled stones dug up from the crop-land, from empty spaces dug up from below the roots of a great tree. Soon they would begin discussing the later, much more challenging, stages of this operation: identifying the alphas, scouting the pack's movements, stealing scents from the current dens (most dangerous!), laying trails, and the complex dance that would be the main push to move the wolves in stages. For now, he was just replenishing his supplies of materials to make the scent-markers, but there was a thrill of anticipation in the most mundane of activities, a sense that soon the clan would have made a tangible mark on the forest itself, a subtle but important reshaping. A way to make the forest its own.
Would the day come when Radagast called them to return over the mountains to the East? Perhaps. And would it take two years for Woodland Hall to feel like home again? Would they even have to stay? Would the rest of the clan want to remain in, or return to, Eriador? Heriwulf couldn't help wondering if, now that this was home, if it would always be. Home had changed once, it could change back.
