Night Wings (6 page)

“W
henever you are feeling sorry for yourself, sweetheart, just remember things can always get worse.”

That is one of my mom’s favorite sayings. She trots it out whenever I am upset, and then she smiles. For some reason, it almost always makes me smile too. It is like another thing she says: The best thing to do when your troubles get really big is to relax and not worry about them, because they are way beyond your control.

Somebody who doesn’t know my mom might think that her saying things like that means she is telling me to give up and be a quitter. But that’s not it at all. What she is talking about is a kind of mental jujitsu, a reminder that
you shouldn’t wear yourself out with worry and self-pity when things are tough. Let me put it this way: If you fall into a flooded river and you are being swept downstream, you can’t escape from drowning by struggling against the current. Instead, you should put the current at your back, let it carry you along, and try to angle your way toward the shore downstream. Go with the flow. Like I’m doing now.

We’re driving up Base Road, the approach to the slopes of Mount Washington, which leads to the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail that ascends to Lake of the Clouds Hut and is the shortest route up Mount Washington from the west. The views along the way are beautiful. It always touches something in me when I look out over those long vistas. The ancient mountains roll on into the distance, one range after another, with more shades of blue and green than you can have names for in English. And the rocks along the road are just as beautiful. Most people look beyond them, trying to see the long views. But I like to sit and study those big old boulders.

The sun is rising over the slope ahead of us. It’s a brilliant golden ball of light, and its warmth touches my face through the window of the van.
I close my eyes to accept its blessings.
Kisos o-o.
The sun, it shines. The Giver of Life who always returns with a new day. I open my eyes and look over at Grampa Peter, who nods his head at me. I know that he, too, has just given his morning thanks to the sun. Despite the fact that we are in deep trouble, he hasn’t forgotten to be grateful for another day of light and life.

Grampa Peter looks ahead again and I look at his profile. It is what some people call a classic Native American look. If you are a coin collector, you’ve seen a profile like his on those old nickels, the ones with a buffalo on one side and an Indian head on the other. Some have also said that his profile is like that of the Old Man of the Mountain. In case you don’t know what I am talking about, let me explain who the Old Man of the Mountain is—or was. Not far from here, back to the west, is Cannon Mountain, which got its name because of a natural stone table that looks sort of like a cannon from Profile Clearing.

The three ledges at the upper end of the east cliff of Cannon Mountain looked like a huge face when they were seen from the lake and the clearing below. Mom says there is actually a story about it by an author named Nathaniel
Hawthorne, who lived way back in the nineteenth century. Hawthorne called it “the Great Stone Face.”

Anyhow, people made a big deal about the Old Man of the Mountain for years. Tourists came to take its picture, there were postcards made of it, and all kinds of stories were told—like that it was actually the face of an ancient chief who had been turned to stone because he dared to defy the Great Spirit.

Because it was made of piled rock ledges, that stone face became unstable over the long winters of freezing and thawing and looked as if it was going to fall. So the state actually tried to protect it. They poured rocks into the cracks and strapped the whole thing together with a system of cables and turnbuckles. Up close it made those rocks look sort of like King Kong when they had him tied down on display in that New York theater.

Then, a few years ago, guess what happened? Yup. The whole thing slid down the mountain, all three ledges. The Great Stone Face was gone. You can still read some of the wacky postings that went up on the Internet, like how this meant that the few remaining Abenaki people in our region were doomed because that great
face had been watching over the land and protecting them (and doing a lousy job of it, considering New Hampshire is one of only two states in the entire Northeast without even one acre of reservation land). A number of officials in the state parks, and even more in the tourism industry, wanted to drag those poor rocks back up to the place where they had been and rebuild the Old Man of the Mountain.

Somehow, someone from one of the local TV channels got word about Grampa Peter, this old Indian who looked just like the famous profile and who was some sort of elder, maybe even a medicine man. They called to ask him to come with them to shoot a story about the fall of the Old Man of the Mountain. I was visiting him when it happened and I watched as he nodded his head while the voice in the phone kept talking on and on, so loudly I could hear it from where I was sitting on the couch.

When there was a pause in the conversation, Grampa Peter spoke his first words since he’d said “Hello.” They were, “You gonna feed us?” When the voice on the other end assured him that we’d be taken out to lunch before the shoot, Grampa Peter said, “See you at eleven,” and hung up.

The day wasn’t bad. The newscaster did his intro, and then the lens was turned on Grampa Peter, who really did look pretty impressive with his long white hair around his shoulders and his brown-skinned craggy face turned just so that the mountain and its empty face were behind him. He raised one hand dramatically, his open palm gesturing toward the place where the ledges had been.

“Rocks,” he said. Then he dropped his hand down and shrugged. “They fall.”

That was the end of his speech. The newscaster tried to save the day by stepping in with his mike and asking one question after another. But Grampa Peter was finished with talking. All he would say in reply was “Hmmm,” whenever the reporter paused in hope of an answer. Needless to say, the piece was never aired.

Remembering that almost puts a smile on my face. But then the van hits a bump and reminds me where we are as I am tossed to the side, unable to steady myself with my hands because they are taped together in front of me.

How could things get worse?

A
s we start to slow down, Darby Field looks at Grampa Peter.

“Where’s the spot?” he asks.

Grampa Peter jerks his head to the right, pointing with his chin at a narrow pull-off on the shoulder.

“There,” he says.

The van edges off the Base Road to a steep dirt track, just wide enough for a single vehicle. In only a few yards we have dropped down at least forty feet below the road, turned behind a jumble of huge boulders, and stopped at a spruce thicket. We aren’t quite high enough yet to be in the alpine zone. Up there all the trees are so dwarfed by the altitude and the thin soil that a
two-hundred-year-old juniper might be only ten inches tall. The spruces here are no more than ten feet high, but they provide effective cover from the road above us. The only way the van could be seen now would be from one of the higher slopes across from us or from an airplane or helicopter.

Stazi goes around the back, opens the door, and pulls out a pair of brush cutters. He goes to the front of the van and begins working on the spruces there, cutting them down and piling them to the side, creating an opening. The smell of the cut spruce branches fills my nostrils. I’ve always liked that scent, but it seems jarring to me right now. It also mixes with the odor of Stazi’s sweat, which makes me think of the musky scent of a dangerous animal. When the big man is done, he puts the brush cutters back and opens the door next to us.

“Rausen,”
he says, gesturing for us to get out.

When we don’t move quickly enough, he reaches in, grabs each of us by the elbow, and yanks us out as if he were unloading cargo. It’s easy for him to do that because we each have our wrists taped together in front of us. I manage to keep on my feet, but Grampa Peter takes a step, stumbles, and falls to his side in front of
Field and the other two members of his crew. That surprises me. My grandfather is usually as sure-footed as a mountain goat. Did he stumble over something? I thought I saw something on the ground as we were yanked out, but there’s nothing there when I look now.

Tip, who obviously still bears Grampa Peter some ill will, lets out a loud nasty laugh. “No time for a nap now.” He chuckles and pulls back a foot, taking aim at my grandfather’s side as if he were going to attempt a field goal. I’m about to try to throw myself in between Grampa Peter and a rib-breaking kick, but I don’t have to.

“Tip!” Field steps in front of his stocky henchman with one hand raised. “Not now.”

Tip grudgingly lowers his foot and steps back. “Later, pops,” he snarls.

I reach down with my taped-together hands and help Grampa Peter to his feet. It’s not easy. He’s almost a dead weight. His legs don’t seem to want to work right. It’s as if my grandfather has suddenly gone from being as strong and flexible as a man half his age to being an elderly person crippled by arthritis. When he stands up, his shoulders are stooped and his head is down.

I’m worried about him and angry at the same time. I glare at Field and Tip, who completely ignore
me. Louise, though, gives me one of her predatory smiles. She’s enjoying the sight of my grandfather looking like a scared and beaten old man.

Stazi has paid no attention to any of this. There’s a cold, businesslike air about the way he does things. He gets back into the driver’s seat and pulls the van forward into the space he has cut in the spruce thicket. Then he unloads the remaining gear from the back and begins placing the cut spruces around and on top of the vehicle. When he’s done, Field’s
Forbidden Mysteries
van has totally vanished from sight.

Field dusts his hands together. “Excellent,” he says. “Now a bit of set-up, eh?”

He turns toward Tip and Louise, who have taken out their equipment. The camera Tip is about to use is small enough to hold in one hand. Louise’s sound recorder is the size of an iPod and is clipped to her belt. The microphone she holds up is no bigger than a lollipop. Even the larger stationary camera that Stazi has produced and fastened to the top of a collapsible tripod must weigh only a few pounds.

Field nods. Then he clears his throat and gestures dramatically. “Many have perished in search of our elusive quarry,” he intones. “Among them, the native elder who gave us the clues that we
will follow today, and who showed us the secret path known only to his ancestors, whose feet trod these trackless wastes for untold centuries before the arrival of the first Europeans. I’ll say more about his tragic fall later, about the climbing accident that took his life.” Field pauses and attempts to look pensive. To me, though, he looks like a rat thinking about a piece of cheese he just ate. “Or was it an accident? We must press on without pause or trepidation. Another forbidden mystery awaits us at Pmola’s Peak, where we seek the great winged creature who guards a lost treasure.”

Field makes a throat-cutting gesture and looks at his crew.

“Well?” he asks.

“Perfect,” Louise says, giving him a thumbs-up.

“Nailed it on the first take, boss,” Tip agrees.

Stazi just grunts.

Field favors them all with one of his wide, toothy grins.

I look over at Grampa Peter. He still has his head down, and his eyes are half closed. Is he sick or hurt? Has he given up? I can’t believe what I’m seeing. I’ve always thought of him as indestructible, like a part of the mountain itself.

The way he is standing bothers me as much
as what I’ve just heard in Field’s overblown monologue. Because if I heard it right, Field was talking about my grandfather. And the tragic fall, the so-called accident he mentioned, is not in the past but is yet to come.

W
hen I was a little kid, Mom and Dad used to take me to the Abenaki shop in Conway, New Hampshire. It was a special place because it was the one spot in our state that most people thought of as really belonging to the Abenaki. Many generations of Abenaki people had sold such things as baskets and carvings and crafts on the same site, and the same family, the Laurents, had always been there. The state highway department tried to put a bypass through their land, but the Laurents had managed to stop that—with the help of their friends and neighbors, who may not have been Indian themselves, but who valued the family’s gentle presence. There was even a state historical marker in front of their shop.

The stories Mr. Laurent told me whenever I visited have always stayed with me. One story in particular is going through my mind right now as we trudge along. It’s about an Abenaki man who wanted to see the Manogemassak, the Little People. The Little People in our stories are kind of like those leprechauns the Irish talk about. They have special powers, and it’s said that they can grant wishes. But they don’t like to be seen unless they are ready to show themselves.

“I wish I could see those Manogemassak,” I said to Mr. Laurent when he first told me about them. I was only five years old then.

“Ah,” he said, going down on one knee. He was a very tall man, and I remember how big his hands were when he reached out and placed them on my shoulders. “There was a man who said that very thing, not long ago. He knew that the Manogemassak had a certain place by the river where they came at night. They used the clay to make pots and sometimes left little swirls of clay that people would find. So, do you know what that man did?”

I shook my head.

“That man decided he could trick the Little People. He put his canoe down by the river and left it there upside down for several days and
nights. When he thought those Little People must have gotten used to it, he went and hid under that canoe and waited until dark, sure he would see them and not be seen. Do you know what happened then?”

I shook my head again, even though I had a feeling, young as I was, that it was something unexpected.

Mr. Laurent smiled. “That man did not come home the next day or the next, and people went looking for him. They found his canoe right side up at the riverbank. At first they saw no sign of the man. Then someone noticed a big pile of clay, about this tall and this long.”

He held a hand up to my chest and then spread both of his long arms out to either side.

“It was sort of shaped like a person. And there was a little hole in the head where the mouth would be. That clay was as solid as a rock, but when they listened at the mouth hole, they thought they could hear a faint voice saying, ‘In here, in here.’ They broke the clay open with rocks, and there was that man who had wanted to see the Little People. He was weak and could barely talk. They took him home, and after a few days he finally told them what had happened. As he hid under his canoe and it got dark, he
began to hear soft whispering voices. Then, all of a sudden, his canoe was flipped over, and he felt little hands all over him. The next thing he knew, he was trapped inside that mound of clay.”

Mr. Laurent looked down at me. “So,” he said, “what do you think of that?”

I remember pausing and scratching my head. Then I looked up. “I would like to see the Little People,” I said, “if they would like me to see them.”

Why am I thinking of that story right now? Because as I’ve gotten older, I’ve better understood the lesson that Mr. Laurent was sharing with me. We don’t have to see everything or solve every mystery. In fact, there are some things that we do not need to know, things that should be left alone.

If trying to see the Manogemassak without them wanting you to see them is a dangerous thing to do, think of how much more dangerous it is to go looking for a being as powerful as Pmola. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place!

We’ve been on the hidden trail for an hour now and we are way off any of the regular hiking routes. I’ve actually walked part of this very
trail before with my grandfather, but everything seems different today. Usually when I am out in the woods, every step I take that leads me away from roads and cars and the sounds of the modern world feels like a step toward freedom. Not so today.

And there is something else. The land around us, even the sky above us, feels different. Do you know how sometimes the air seems to tremble because a big storm is coming? It’s that kind of feeling. The air has that clean, edgy scent of ozone in it.

I look up at the sky and squint my eyes. There’s not a cloud in sight, but I think I can see something way up there, circling. Maybe it’s an eagle. Maybe not. I know it isn’t an airplane. I actually haven’t seen a single vapor trail from a jet since we left the van hidden in that spruce thicket, and on a clear day like today that’s strange. Commercial jets cross over here all the time, and air force planes also use the sky over the White Mountains. In fact, I remember one time when Grampa Peter and I were walking a trail not far from here and a whole group of those little single-passenger ultralight planes came buzzing over like lawn mowers with wings. But today there’s nothing.

Someone shoves me hard in the back.

“Move,” a voice growls.

I don’t have to look back to know it’s Tip. He’s probably hoping I’ll fall down when he pushes me, like Grampa Peter did. He’s itching to get a kick in on one of us when Field isn’t looking. I keep my balance, even with the heavy pack on my back, and continue on up the trail.

Oh yeah, the pack: Field strapped it to me before we started on the trail. I’m not sure what it contains, but there has to be at least forty pounds of stuff in it. I’m used to backpacking, so I’m not having much trouble carrying it, though I do resent being both a doomed captive and a beast of burden. Yet another reason for me to glare at Field’s broad back as he strides up the trail ahead of me, unencumbered by anything other than a walking stick.

When we set out, I’d wondered how the four of them would do hiking a trail. I sort of hoped that they’d be soft and not used to this kind of mountain walking. I imagined them stumbling and falling and getting worn out to the point where Grampa Peter and I could slip away from them.

No such luck. The four of them seem to be experienced hikers, and even Louise changed into well-worn hiking boots before we started
on our trek. I guess they have all gotten toughened up by searching out forbidden mysteries in other parts of the world and gracing other indigenous people like me and Grampa Peter with their friendly presence. From what I’ve overheard, it sounds as if being chosen to be a guide for this group of psycho documentarians is like being invited for a swim in a shark tank. For example, one of the cliff faces we just passed reminded Louise of “the one that Quechua guy in Peru fell off when we were filming ‘Lost City of Gold.’”

How have they gotten away with it? I suppose I don’t have to ask that question, do I? These days the world is full of remote and dangerous places where law and order don’t mean much if you are a poor, uneducated peasant. No one pays attention when one more peon meets with an unfortunate accident. Especially if the people that peasant was working for are famous and wealthy westerners.

So Field and his gang have gotten used to it, I guess. And they think it’ll be just as easy to get rid of us when we are no longer useful to them. They’re wrong about that. They don’t know who my parents are. If anything happens to me, my mother and father won’t rest until
they’ve tracked down the people responsible for my death.

Whoa! This thought is not at all comforting. I’m already writing my own obituary. I look over at Grampa Peter, who is trudging along with his head down. He looked so old and frail before that they didn’t even try to put one of the packs on his back. Field didn’t want to take a chance on Grampa Peter giving out before he had showed them the way to go. So he is pretty much being left alone, aside from Field coming back to ask him at each turn in the trail which way to go and Grampa Peter lifting up his shaking, infirm, taped-together hands to point out the right direction.

I’ve heard about stress making people grow old overnight. About people’s hair turning white from fright. Stuff like that. But I never thought I would see that in my own grandfather, who has always been as tough and resilient as an old cedar tree. Is it possible that he might be faking it?

There’s a big rock across the trail. We can’t go around it, because the brush is thick here on both sides. Grampa Peter is having a hard time getting up over the boulder. If my hands were not still taped together, too, I’d reach out
my arm to help him. Instead I lean my shoulder against him as a support. His foot skids on the rock and falls back against me, both of us stumbling partway off the trail into the brush. The scent of crushed cedar needles fills my nostrils, and then the smoky leather scent that always clings to my grandfather. He’s landed right on top of me. I find myself looking up into his smiling face. Then I feel his hands pressing against mine. He whispers a word into my ear.

Stazi, who has been bringing up the rear of our little party, wades into the brush to pull us out. First Grampa Peter, who seems so shaken by his fall that he grabs holds of Stazi’s shirt and has to be pried off. Then he has to sit down, pathetically gasping for breath as the rest of the nefarious crew comes back to make sure their antiquated guide is still capable of keeping on.

This gives me plenty of time to shove the rope that Grampa Peter passed to me into my shirt and under the waistband of my pants. By the time Stazi reaches in to extricate me from the brush, I have also managed to get the smile off my face that appeared when I realized some things. One, of course, is that Grampa Peter really has been faking this routine of being a tired old man. He’s playing possum. Another is
that I had indeed seen something on the ground when we were yanked out of the van. It was a coil of thin nylon rope that must have been lost by some previous hiker. And it was plenty long enough to be used the way Grampa Peter told me to with that one word he whispered.

“Snares.”