Something about the trees is wrong. Something in their sap has changed. New habits all around us. We lived with the cure all around us, incubated in the branches:
Drain the larch cankers in the swamp.
It was crazy, but every impulse was on course, so I trudged through the thin crackling sheets of ice. As the wind swayed the tree trunks, their skirts of ice cracked and twinkled the air with cellophane sounds. Every step was like the sound of eating potato chips with a great booming mouth. The wind found many surfaces to hum over, like a great chorus of broken things. There were diamonds, diamonds everywhere. The waning spark of my consciousness was blown back to life.
I found the larches all swollen with cankers like grotesque sausages of sputum. I tore at the tumors till the sap flowed and I tasted there the most horrid bitterness my tongue had ever encountered.
All that burn of bitterness came into me like the larch had interfaced with my tongue, or at least as if something in the larch were desperate to speak. As if a voice had come into me.
Then I knew a new piece of the mystery. The souls of men had fled their bodies and were trapped now as if in amber.