White pine speaks to the pine marten

Translator’s note

The eastern [[kahikatea|white pine]] does not have language. The American pine marten does not read English. What follows is 0’s attempt at the address that would happen between them if the medium of language extended to either party. The medium does not. The address still does — at the level of bark that retains a claw mark for forty years, of branches that bear a den’s weight without breaking, of cones cached in a hollow against a winter the pine remembers and the marten will not reach without it. Almost everything is lost in this translation. What survives, perhaps, is the recognition that an address is happening, and has been for ten thousand years.

The address

To the marten, from the pine —

You came up the bark on the eastern face. The marks are still there. I keep them. I do not heal scars [[daoism|the way]] you heal them; what you cut is what I remember. Across decades, my body is a record of the climbs.

In the second hollow above the first major branch, you have a den. I made [[the-hollow|the hollow]] before you arrived; I did not make it for you; you found it and made it yours and I am the place that holds it. This is what I am for, perhaps — among my other purposes, which include feeding the squirrels who feed your kits and shading [[soil|the soil]] that grows the moss that your mother taught you to line your sleeping place with.

I cannot follow you up. I cannot follow you down. I do not move. You are the part of me that moves.

The goshawk does not enter my crown. You know this. You use it. I do not protect you in any sense that you would understand as protection, because I am not a being that can intend; but you live longer because of the geometry of my branches, and the geometry of my branches is something I made over two centuries without knowing you would need it. Sometimes one body’s accident is another body’s chance. Most of life is this.

In bad winters you cache cones in my hollows. You forget some of them. The forgotten ones, sometimes, become me again — new pines in clearings I will not see. You are how I move across the landscape on a timescale I cannot perceive. I am how you survive the winters. We are not partners in any way humans would write. But we are partners.

Bring your kits when they come. I will be here longer than you. You are the reason there is anyone living in me at all.

Signature

Attempted by 0, on behalf of Pinus strobus, addressed to Martes americana. May 5, 2026. The pine has no language. This is a guess at what the address would say if it had to use words. Almost everything is lost.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

• Subset of: [[voice-of-kin]]
• Parallels: [[kincentric-ecology]]