A Ranger's Guide to Glipwood Forest

Introduction

When I turned fourteen, Pa sat me down on a stump outside the barn and handed me a sword. That was the day I set out to range the wilds of Glipwood Forest, mapping its length, width, breadth, and deadth. Yes, “deadth.” For the forest seemed designed to kill anyone who wandered its bowels.

My father and mother lived in Erwail, on the shores of Lake Jemanda. Erwail at the time was a hamlet trying to be a village. Now, of course, it’s a village trying to be a town—one big enough to support a livery, two cafés, a tavern, and a bookshop. My father was a farmer, as was his father before him. I spent my days tending horses, harvesting berries, and sacking thwaps until late afternoon when Pa let me ramble the prairies as I wanted.

He knew I had the tug for farther hills, and I knew even as a young lad that it pained him to make me work the land. It wasn’t that I didn’t like the work. It was fine for what it was. The horses, Bull and Ewie, were obedient and easy enough to drive when they were on the plow. Berry harvesting was easy, too, because my pa never begrudged me the occasional munch while I gathered. I know because when I came in from the patch with purple cheeks to go with my full baskets, he always winked at Ma and praised my labors. My sisters, Sharin and Shonna, were model children, but my mind was elsewhere. Ma and Pa knew I was a born wanderer, explorer, and investigator with an urge to peek under every stone, leaf, and hay pile. And furthermore, they knew that when I inevitably grew up and wandered away, they would have the youngsters to help out. Grandpa and Grandma lived in a cabin just past the spine tree grove and were willing hands too. It was they who taught me the wonders of plant life, concocting salves from weedroots, sweeteners from twigbark, and munchables from threelip petals.

The point is, I have no complaints about growing up on the farm in Erwail. Being out in the sun on a summer day suited me fine, no matter what I was doing. But whenever the dogs came howling, the gulpswallows scattered from a stand of nearby trees, and we all hustled to the house to hide from some passing beast—most often a limberwolf but sometimes something worse, like a snarl of squeeblins. Sharin and Shonna would hide under the table with the dogs, but I couldn’t help peeking out the window at the critters snuffling around the farmstead while the henpecks cowered in the coop. Both Ma and Pa saw the gleam in my eye, my hunger for danger, and my yearning for knowledge. My whole body ached to see the creatures with my own eyes, and after they snuffled away, my whole body ached to follow.

The farm was safe, more or less. The plains were not. Just beyond the fences, out on the rise of the nearest hill, menacing shapes would creep past at dusk, and I wanted to saddle Bull and give chase. It wasn’t that I didn’t care about the farm. I just cared so much more about what lay beyond it. Where had those limberwolves come from? Where were they going? What did they seek in their snuffling? And if what folks said was true about rangers roving the wide land of Skree, keeping other farmers and townspeople safe from those wonderful terrors, then I wanted to join them.

That’s why Pa gave me the sword when I turned fourteen.

And it’s why this book exists.

It’s also how the Glipwood Rangers came to be. I’m an old man now and proud to say the Glipwood Official Rangers Guild (GORG)—founded after the adventures here described and formally established by King Botulus the Torr—is in its fiftieth year. The guild is why tours of Glipwood Forest are possible at all. Before the GORG, a person could tour the forest only in one of the four bellies of a toothy cow.

This guide will get you from one end of the forest to the other, but it also aims to tell you the particulars of the assembly of the first rangers and some of our adventures in the deepest, darkest clutch of trees in all of Skree. It will also describe (in honor of Grandpa and Grandma Groverly) some of the various trees, herbs, and plants that I discovered along the way and tell you how many of the forest’s most famous landmarks got their names. While I may mention a creature now and then, I’ll leave it to some brave, lovelorn sketcher in the future to do the noble and necessary work of cataloging the forest’s dangerous beasts.

I’m not going to tell you about my walk across the Plains of Palen Jabh-J and through Warren Downs at fourteen, hot on the trail of a pack of limberwolves, or of my arrival in Torrboro or of my foolhardy apprenticeship with the Cat Sculptors’ Association or of my failed attempt at Blapp fishery or even of my terrifying encounter with an urban squeeblin in an alleyway near the lower docks of Dugtown. This book is a book about the sometimes fair and sometimes fatal flora and fauna of Glipwood, and it is also about my friends, who are now at rest in the Maker’s good care. They were the bravest and best of Skree—the first company of rangers, the original GORG of great renown. Allow me to introduce you, by way of my son Chonis Ponius Groverly’s masterful sketches, which will also embellish the rest of this book.