The Endless Forest (2 page)

D
aniel Bonner wakes in the deepest hour of the night with the sure knowledge that something is not right.

First he takes stock of his oldest and best-known adversary. In his mind he follows the pain as it moves from its cave deep in his shoulder to slide inch by inch down his left arm. At times Daniel thinks he can hear the nerves snapping and hissing, but just now it only flexes and turns, a big cat sleeping in the shade. If he stays very quiet and relaxed, the pain might settle and sleep come back for him. Three or four hours, if he is lucky. He thinks about sleep as another man thinks about a lover, with a pure yearning.

But there is something wrong, and so he sits up and swings his legs over the side of the bed to listen. The bed ropes squeak and the banked fire hisses to itself. From the main room, the faint tick of the clock on the mantel. There is a sound he doesn’t hear, one that worries him. His nights echo with the sound of Bounder’s wheezing hitch, the sound of an old dog struggling toward another day. Bounder is utterly quiet, and somehow Daniel knows without going to look that the dog is dead.

Now he realizes what it is that woke him: a dripping sound, from outside. From the eaves.

It is the first week in April. Three feet of snow would be no surprise, but the sound of running water is unexpected. Daniel goes to the window and opens the shutter. The thaw has a smell all its own, and it is thick in the air.

There is a figure standing outside, a dark shape against the coming dawn. A large man, strongly built. He has a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. What light there is picks up a glint of his scalp, shaved clean but for a topknot that still gleams yellow, though Throws-Far is a full sixty-six years old. Born to Yankees in the village of Paradise, Throws-Far is nevertheless Mohawk in blood and marrow. Since he came back to Paradise he often roams the mountain at night; Daniel has the idea he is trying to find his boy-self, the person he was before he took his rightful place among the Turtle clan.

“Throws-Far,” Daniel calls out to him in Kahnyen’kehàka. “Why do you stand in the not-yet-light?”

The dark shape shifts and bends, arms extended to the sky. The voice that answers is deep and sure. “The Snow Eater is come. He brings the hundred-year water with him.”

A rain had begun to fall, as soft and sweet as new milk.

“The Snow Eater is come,” Throws-Far says again. “And I go.”

The old man has been talking about leaving Paradise for a long time. About his wish to see his own children, who live far to the northwest on the other side of the great lakes. That he would pick up so suddenly, that things might change with a simple shift in the wind, this is not at all surprising. He doesn’t think like a white man.

In Kahnyen’kehàka Daniel calls to him. “Be well.”

Throws-Far raises a hand, and then he walks away into the rain.

In the light of the fire Daniel dresses, not to teach school, though this should be a normal day, but in lined leggings, a heavy flannel hunting shirt, and winter moccasins. Sudden thaw and rain together promise trouble.

The ground is still frozen and it will take more time than he has to see Bounder properly buried. He picks the dog up, the slack body already unfamiliar, and lays him in the root cellar. Birdie will want to help bury Bounder.

His knives are laid out on a linen cloth where he left them, along with whetstones and files, oils and soaps. They gleam dully in the firelight, like a mouth full of crooked teeth. He puts small knives into loops inside the cuffs of each moccasin, another, larger and double-sided, in a sheath on his left hip. Two short-handled hatchets, one he inherited from his grandfather and the other made to his specifications, he tucks under the wide belt to lie along his spine.

Today or tomorrow or the day after, his sister will come home. His twin, who has been gone very long, who he has missed every day. She is coming with her husband, but not quite soon enough. The hundred-year rain has beat them home.

W
hen the clock in the hall struck seven, Birdie roused herself out of bed, dressed in the dark very quietly so as not to wake her nieces, and went downstairs to Curiosity Freeman’s kitchen. She might have slept another half hour but for excitement: by Birdie’s calculations, her parents and sister Lily and good-brother Simon should have been back from the city three days ago. They would surely be home today.

She paused in the doorway and waited for her eyes to adjust to the brightness of firelight reflecting off polished copper and pewter. “Little girl. Come on over here.” Curiosity was sitting at the long table, a tray of breakfast biscuits just out of the oven in front of her. When she smiled there was nothing halfway about it. At almost ninety she was proud to still have every one of her teeth, strong and white. Between the bleached linen of her head wrap and her smile, Curiosity’s skin was as wrinkled and dark as an apple left to dry out to a sweet smelling husk.

“Bring me that plate of ham while you at it, would you?”

She was tying up a napkin of biscuits, which meant somebody couldn’t wait for breakfast but would have to eat when time permitted,
someplace out in the weather. Most likely it would be Birdie’s oldest sister.

“Hannah?”

Curiosity nodded. “Missus Rountree in travail.”

“Who brought word?”

“Why, your brother Daniel. The teacher his very own self.”

This idea was so odd that for a moment Birdie couldn’t make sense of it. Right now Daniel should be on his way from his little house on Hidden Wolf to the school, where he always arrived by quarter past seven at the very latest. But Daniel was running errands and bringing messages.

Curiosity was saying, “Missus Rountree got a good set of hips on her, I doubt she’ll have much trouble though it is her first.”

Birdie found herself staring out the window at the rain, and feeling suddenly sleepy again. The kitchen smelled of brewing tea and ham and fresh bread and it was warm, as familiar and comfortable as Birdie’s mother’s own kitchen. As she buttered biscuits and stacked them, she let herself be lulled by the familiar noises: Anje humming under her breath, the crackle of the fire, the soft creak that the cradle made as Curiosity rocked it with her foot. Birdie glanced down at the round face of her youngest nephew and saw that he was watching her too, content for the moment with the sound of their voices. Simon’s eyes were the startling green-blue of spring lichen, a gift Ben Savard had settled on all three boys but neither of his daughters, whose eyes were hazel.

Nature ain’t got no interest in playing fair
. Another of Curiosity’s many sayings that were true but shouldn’t be.

Outsiders saw the household as odd, and in fact it had a reputation that reached to Albany and down the Hudson in one direction and to Quebec in the other. Once in a while a stranger came through and knocked on the door out of pure nosiness and bad manners, wanting to see the old black woman who had started her life as a slave and ended up with land and property of her own. And was it true she had a half-Mohawk woman who claimed to be a trained doctor living with her in the house, and a dozen children with skin the color of deep red clay? The rumor said that the only white faces in the household belonged to the maidservants. And if that wasn’t a backwards picture, Birdie had heard a tinker say to his horse, then what was?

It
was
an unusual household in some ways, but to Birdie it was a second home. Noisier than her own maybe, when her nieces and nephews—known in the family as the little people—were all in the same room.

Rain was rattling against the shutters so loudly that at first Birdie didn’t realize Hannah had come into the kitchen. She sat down at the table, tucked a stray dark hair into the scarf she had wrapped around her head, and then scooped up her youngest child and sat him, a solid six-month-old brick of boy, on her lap. He immediately began to bounce softly and sing to himself, thumping her breast with one little fist, as if demanding admission.

“You had your fill not an hour ago,” Hannah said to him. “You just want to noodle.”

“The sweetest child yet,” Curiosity said in approval.

A soft rumble of thunder made the baby blink in surprise. Hannah nuzzled him, but she spoke to Birdie. She said, “Little sister, can you look after the children for me while I’m gone?” Birdie straightened in her surprise.

“But there’s school.”

“No school today,” Curiosity said. “That’s the other thing your brother come to tell us.”

No school. A day here—a rainy day here—with the Savard nephews and nieces, the oldest not three years younger than Birdie herself, but twice as much trouble.

Birdie drew in a deep breath. “I don’t understand. What’s wrong? Where’s Daniel now?”

“Out the barn with Ben and Runs-from-Bears and my Joshua and all the rest of the menfolk,” said Curiosity. “Talking about the weather.”

Birdie’s eyes moved to Joan, who was opening the window in order to pull the shutters closed. The rain was falling in sheets, and Joan’s face and arms got wet. She looked purely disgusted, but that was nothing new. Joan was always sour and her sister Anje was always sunny. Today Joan was especially sour because she didn’t like coming to help out at Downhill House; and she was even more eager than Birdie to get back uphill.