The Dark Valley (2 page)

Victoria Rowe, Ph.D.

Gomidas Institute London,

England June 2009

The Dark Valley

Short Stories

The Dark Valley

The only path leading to the Dark Valley closes off with the first snowfall—until spring not a single man sets foot in its forests. However, there are also dense forests in the Dark Valley where no foot has ever been set. Trees fall and decay. In their fallen place new ones grow. Bears dance whistling like shepherds, wolves howl pointing their snouts to the moon, boars dig the black earth with their tusks assembling last year’s rotten acorns.

The Dark Valley is a peculiar place: almost virginal and wild. It resembles one of those forgotten places from an era when mankind did not exist and the fossilized dinosaur felt as free as the bear does in our days. Perhaps the world was like that in those days, when immense layers of coal began to shift, and on those layers, since long ago, the imprints of obliterated vegetation and reptiles remained.

And now, in the Dark Valley, there are lizards with dark green skins that have never seen a human face, but are not afraid of mankind. They lie on rocks, basking in the sun; for hours on end you can watch how the skin of their belly beats, and like a weak vein, you can catch them. The lizards of the Dark Valley do not flee from human beings.

The mountains of the Dark Valley are high, and it is because of them that the sun also provides a few hours of light to the forests of the Dark Valley during the long summer months. And when the sun begins to turn toward the West on the distant horizon, the shadows of the Dark Valley rise and inscrutable darkness sets in under the foliage. The bears come out to hunt, the boars descend to drink water, the eager wolf howls from its lair with its thousand-mouthed yowl echoing through the Dark Valley.

When night falls, the natives of the Dark Valley wake to hunt. The bears eat pears, paw each other, roll about on the dry leaves, and wait in ambush when they hear the wild boars approach. The bear knows the strength of the wild boar’s tusks, so it will not attack at once. If a weak boar straggles from the rest, the bear will slice its gentle throat with one stroke of the paw, eat a few bites, cover the carcass with wood and dry leaves, place a rock on the pile, and turn away grunting, until the carcass begins to decompose.

If by chance the boars hear the squeals of the strayed boar… their tusks will shine like sharp arrows, and all the bear can do is crudely clamber up the oak tree. Like raging horses, the boars will grunt, plow beneath the oak tree with their tusks, and bash the tree trunk. The graybeard forester of the Dark Valley saw the skeleton of a boar one spring, its tusk driven to its root into the trunk of the tree, and in the hollow of a branch, a bear’s dead cub.

The forester, Panin, resembled a wild boar. He was a giant with the garb of a forest chief and a cockscomb hat on his head. He would appear in the forest without warning, stand near the lumberjack, and watch how fast he axes the tree. Suddenly he would come out of his hiding place and roar so loudly that even the bears would wake from their sleep and grumble in their dens. All the terrified lumberjack could do was either to flee or to contort like a snake under the blows of Panin’s whip.

Panin was a hunter. He had six dogs—the one more aggressive than the other. He would go hunting with them in the depths of the Dark Valley. During the moonlit winter nights, when no one would come near the Dark Valley out of fear, Panin’s dogs would wrestle with the bears in the forest clearing or chase startled wild goats. Panin would run after the dogs, shrieking with delight. The nighttime hunt was a familiar element for him.

When day broke, drops of blood would cover the snow; here and there jumbled traces, the carcass of a strangled wolf, skin in shreds. Panin would sit by the hollow of a tree until the dogs had finished eating their quarry.

Panin would not touch a single killed or living animal, and after the dogs had finished feeding themselves, he would return home. If on his way home he caught someone carrying stolen firewood, he would order his dogs to attack him and make him run until the sweaty, bloody man found cover.

That is how Panin was. His terror had spread far and wide, and stories were told about him by word of mouth. No one knew neither his nationality, nor his religion, nor his ancestry. They said that he had been a military officer, that he had killed people, done time, and then gone to the forests. In one of the northern forests, he had supposedly killed his wife on a night out hunting, or more precisely: he had ordered his dogs to maul his wife.

Such were the stories that were told about the forester Panin.

* * *

Avi had a good reputation as a hunter in the village. He would get part of his household nutrition from the depths of the Dark Valley’s soul. He hunted pheasant in the forest clearings, partridge and quail by the fields; he set up traps for foxes, and sometimes he went into the depths of the Dark Valley and sat on the butt of a rock for hours until the boars approached the water.

Avi would aim accurately, and the bullet of his rifle would gash the boar’s fat flank. The boar would tumble, dig its tusks into the ground in pain, tear roots, and fall to the ground grunting.

And when he was not afraid of Panin, or when he knew that Panin was not in the Dark Valley, he would lift a bundle of firewood on his back, hide it somewhere, to bring home in the evening.

On this particular day also, Avi had gone out to hunt. There were fresh prints in the snow. Avi followed one of the prints, and just as he ascended the top of a hillock, he saw two foxes. By the time he was ready to shoot, however, they fled. That was a bad sign for Avi: it meant that the hunt was not going to be successful. He walked a little more, saw the prints of a wild goat, looked around, but could not find it. And because on that day Panin was not meant to come to the forest (Avi had heard that the forester was ill), he judged it a good time to take home a bundle of firewood.

Evening was closing in when Avi laid the firewood on a rock and sat on a stump to catch his breath.

A hunting dog appeared, sniffed Avi, and moved on. Avi’s breath cut short. A second dog appeared, then a third, and behind the dogs, Panin, as if he had grown out of the ground.

The snout of one of the dogs was as coarse as canvas. The snout of another was as red as a beet. Panin sputtered like one of the bears in the Dark Valley, and when he raised his whip, Avi hunched over and covered his head with his hands. It seemed to Avi as if Panin’s hand had turned to stone and the whip had frozen in the winter evening’s cold air. Panin pulled back his whip, and when Avi raised his head, it seemed to him as if the devil was cackling in the Dark Valley.

Avi was astounded by the dilemma. He was either to pay a twenty-ruble fine for stealing wood from the forest or kill one of the bears of the Dark Valley. After Panin repeated his proposal one more time, he pulled back his lips and hurled a deafening laugh. Avi started. He left behind the bundle of firewood and retraced the road by which he had come to the Dark Valley. Not a single bear, whether from the forest or outside of it, was worth the price of Panin’s fine.

Avi looked for cartridges in his rifle, tucked the woolen flaps of his overcoat under his belt, and tightly drew his shepherd’s hat onto his head. He walked as lightly on the snow as a bear does on dry ground.

Avi looked back once—neither Panin was in sight, nor his dogs. The moonlight spread as far and wide as a large snowball and its rays illuminated snow crystals. Avi could clearly see the tree trunks, the road he was on, and the big fallen boughs.

He ascended the valley, listening intently to the gurgling water under a sheet of ice. The sound of the water reminded him of the bubbling cauldron on the fireplace at home. His family was probably waiting for him.

He heard the sound of a twig breaking behind him. It sounded as if it had snapped under the heavy weight of the snow. On his way up, however, Avi got the feeling that someone was following him. He turned around and saw a bear the size of a man standing a little further back with a branch, resembling a shepherd’s crook, on his shoulders.

Avi aimed his rifle, and when the bear, foaming at the mouth, flung aside the branch and became quadrupedal, a thunderous sound echoed throughout the valley, causing snow to fall from the trees. The bear bellowed. Through the smoke of his rifle, Avi could see the bear bounding as it extended its paw toward the barrel of the rifle.

An unequal fight between man and beast began in the Dark Valley. The bear punched with its paws, working to push the man to the ground. Avi was trying to protect his wounds with one hand, and with the other to push the barrel into the bear’s jaw to fire one more time.

The bear leaped to its hind legs, kicked the snow, fell down, and got up again. Suddenly it put the barrel in its mouth and began to chew it. Avis hand glided along the rifle and pulled the trigger blindly, making it thunder one more time. The bear bellowed louder than before as it fell to the ground and rolled down like a snapped bough. When it reached the ice sheet, it tried to get up.

Avi fired a third time. The bullet hit the snow and fizzed like glowing red tongs on a cold anvil. The third time was also the last time the rifle thundered. Avi could not understand why the fourth bullet would not fire.

The bear bellowed and leaped to its feet once more. Avi felt the warm breath of the injured beast very close to him. He turned around, knocked over the bear and ran, staggering in the thick snow as he struggled to get away. The bear was after him. Avi was trying to run and jump over thick boughs. Twigs scratched his face like sharp talons, and he slipped and scrambled up again. To Avi it seemed as if all of the beasts of the Dark Valley were after him.

At one point, his shepherd’s hat got torn off by the thorns on one of the branches. At that same instant he also felt a heavy blow to his back as a hirsute paw slashed his nape. Someone fired a gun, but Avi felt nothing.

Panin was laughing demonically as he stood with one foot on the bear’s corpse.

* * *

Avi lives to this day.

He sits in a corner retreated from the rush of the street making and repairing moccasins for people.

Avi wears a woolen overcoat and moccasins. He has an average body with healthy hands that dexterously punch holes in the leather and braid strands into laces. But on his average body, instead of a head, he has a skull, wholly peeled, hairless and skinned.

With one stroke of the paw, the injured and wrathful bear had sliced through Avis soft nape and pulled the skin off his skull. And with the skin had come Avis hair, eyebrows, eyes, and nose.

Avi does not have any lips. You can see his teeth through the cracks of his bones. His nasal cavities are bare so that when Avi speaks, his breath also comes out of the cavities. In his eye sockets there are bits of dried skin that look like withered apricots hanging from a tree.

His ears are all that have remained intact on his skull. And even if you look carefully, you will not be able to tell whether Avi is young or old, where his voice comes from, whether he is even human and not a monster, and whether there is perhaps nothing other than a skeleton, without skin and body, underneath his woolen overcoat.

Only on his hands can you be sure that there is flesh and skin, with fingers that move with great dexterity. If you ever mention the Dark Valley, you’ll see him jutting out his teeth and hear his voice crack.

And you would never know whether the old hunter was angry or happy…

Everybody in the village knew Badi and that he belonged to the Vand family tree. They knew that his house was on the road to the pasture, not quite near the water mills yet, but by the Atans’ great walnut tree.

Badi was the village cowherd. He was the first one up in the morning, calling out with a voice that resounded through the whole village.

“I’m taking the cattle! Hey! Oh, people, don’t be late…”

The villagers had become as accustomed to his call as they would have to a cock’s crow. To know the time, they would often say, “Badi did not take the cattle while I was on the pasture, did he?” or “The first time Badi called, I jumped out of bed.”

Badi himself could not remember for how many years he had been a cowherd. He only knew that during the year of cholera he had been conscripted into the army as a soldier but had stayed in the village instead. In those days there were no water mills yet by the Atans’ great walnut tree.

No one knew the pasture and mountains as well as Badi did. He had walked the mountains and valleys with his cattle countless times. He knew his herd very well too: he knew who owned each cow, whether one of the cows had grown a new spot, how many calves there were, and why the Karams’ bull had a broken horn.

When he drove his cattle from the village to the pasture, he only needed to look back once to tell instantly whether a cow was missing and which one it was.

In the evenings, on his way home, Badi would stop at the spring where young brides and girls gathered and tell them:

“The sorrel is ripe on Mount Pear-Rock and the dewberry has blossomed by Sand Spring…”

After tending his cattle, Badi would lean on his crook and return to his home by the Atans’ great walnut tree.

At home his wife and only child, who was growing as fast as a sapling, would be waiting.

Like him, Badi’s wife was old. She knew exactly at what time to start cooking dinner. Over the course of years everything, every day had become so repetitive that her movements had become mechanical.

As soon as the door creaked and Badi entered putting his crook by the threshold, he would ask his wife:

“Hatam’s daughter, have you given water to the calves?”

Hatam’s daughter was his wife. He had become accustomed to calling his wife that way and this habit had become as rooted as the thick trunk of the neighboring walnut tree.