The Wolf Tree (27 page)

“The Darkness!” Sally said. “That Darkness to the south. I know about that. I saw it too. My brother is going to find out what’s causing the Darkness. He’s going to a town called … Ontha … Ompa …”

“Omphalosa?” Hethy’s tears had stopped and she spoke earnestly. “I sure hope that ain’t where he’s gone. That’s where I’m from. Town’s turned wicked, for sure.”

“My brother has powers also,” Sally said. “Not like your beholding, but he can take care of himself there, I know.”

“I hope so. I really do. Is that why you’re out here? You trying to find him?”

“No,” Sally said. “I’m looking for my father.”

“I knew it,” Hethy said, turning her eyes down. “I just wanted to see if you’d tell me straight.”

“What? How’d you know?”

“When I beheld you a bit ago. I looked in your heart. I seen you was looking for your daddy and you’re carrying
something that’s leading you to him. What is it? What’re you carrying?”

Sally’s mouth hung open a moment. Tentatively, she took out the golden rabbit’s foot.

Hethy whistled. “Ain’t that a pretty one,” she said. “Where’d you get that?”

“I don’t know if you’ll believe me if I tell you.”

“Try me,” Hethy said, wiping her nose on her sleeve.

“My father lost his hand to a mechanical hound, called a Hoarhound.”

“Hoarhound?”

Sally nodded. “This is his hand now. It points to tell me which direction to go. If I keep following it, it’ll lead me to him.” The foot had twitched to the south. Had it meant to lead her to Hethy? She felt the rabbit’s foot stir, and this time it turned to point again to the west.

“What in the world?” Hethy muttered as she watched the paw move. “You’re right. That’s hard to stomach as the truth. But I believe you. When I was beholding you, I seen you was good, good in your heart. You didn’t venture into the Dark, did you?”

“No, why?”

“People turn bad from the Dark.” Hethy reached over to her bags and took out a dried seedpod, strangely like a bat in shape. “Granny give me this to carry and these other charms, back when the Dark started. Said it would protect me and I reckon it has. If she had only had enough for the whole town …” She squeezed her eyes against her tears, but then calmed herself with a few deep breaths.

Sally looked at Hethy. She had thought the girl was crazy at first, but now she found Hethy fascinating. She could see into people’s hearts. She could build a fire on the prairie. She set traps to kill marauding coyotes. She was tough and honest and kind.

“Where are you going to go?” Sally asked.

“I don’t know,” Hethy sighed. “I ain’t got no family left. I hear there’s work in Chicago for those that want to work for the big Expo there. Or I could take a job root working. I know a bit from Granny Sip. How to heal and how to behold people. But that’s what got Granny killed, so I don’t know where folks would look kindly on that kind of work.”

The girls sat for a time watching the fire send sparks up to mingle with the stars. Then Hethy began chuckling.

“What?” Sally asked.

“I was just thinking how funny it was, I thought you was a coyote and I jumped out under that blanket with my hatchet to chop your head off. I ain’t never figured it’d be no little girl like me.” She erupted into laughter. “Thought … I thought … you was a coyote!”

Watching Hethy’s face, her expressive mouth curling wide, her bright eyes flashing in the firelight, Sally was grateful to have found her. She felt Hethy was glad she had found Sally, too. Sally began laughing, laughing with relief, laughing with joy, laughing with puzzlement over how strange and terrible life could be.

“Coyote girl,” Hethy said, pointing at Sally.

“Lumberjack!” Sally said, pointing at the hatchet.

The two girls laughed for a long time.

*   *   *

In the morning there was no discussion of whether the girls would part ways. They simply hoisted their packs to their shoulders and set off together, west across the empty prairie.

Hethy was nearly a head shorter than Sally, though they were the same age. But trudging along in the warm sun, Sally found it hard to keep Hethy’s pace. “Slow down,” she said. “You’re walking too fast.”

It was nearly midday, and Hethy stopped to let Sally catch up. “I’m thirsty and I think I seen something sparkling up ahead. Might be a creek or something.”

As the girls headed on, Sally looked at Hethy. She hadn’t noticed it the night before in the dark, but now in the full daylight, she saw how oddly gray Hethy’s skin was tinted. It was still brown, but faintly, as if the color was fading from it. And her hair. It should have been black, but it looked as if it had been dusted with flour.

“Hethy, why’s your skin look like that?”

Hethy turned her hand before her. “We’re all like this. All that lived in Omphalosa. That’s how come Granny Sip gave me that bat-looking pod. If I ain’t had it, my skin would be gray as a river stone.”

“Do you know Mister Bradshaw?” Sally asked.

Hethy’s lips pursed a moment. “Can’t say as I do. He from Omphalosa?”

“Yes,” Sally said. “He came to Shuckstack. He was awfully sick. Ray said the Darkness made him sick.” Sally hesitated before saying, “He died.”

Hethy cocked her chin at Sally. “I ain’t sick. Granny Sip’s pod’ll make sure of that. So don’t go on trying to scare me like that, Yote. I’ll be all right.”

“Yote?” Sally asked. “Why’d you call me that?”

“Like a coyote,” Hethy said with a grin.

Sally laughed and put a hand to her brow as she peered around at their surroundings. A big blue sky. An ocean of green. There was not so much as a windmill or sod house in sight. Nothing between the girls and the distant horizon but miles and miles of windswept grass and the black drifting specks of faraway birds.

“Okay. Where’d you think you saw that water?”

“Just over that hill, Yote.”

Soon they found a small pond, tucked into a depression and bordered by tall grass. The girls dipped their flasks and drank. The water had a funny, salty taste, but they drank anyway.

“So how much food do you think you have left?” Sally asked.

“Maybe for a few more meals if we’re skimpy.”

Hethy took a corn cake out for each of them, and when they had finished them a moment later, they looked at one another, still hungry. “Want to eat another?” Hethy asked.

“No, we’ll wait until supper.”

When they stopped that night, Sally looked through the
Incunabula
again, hoping to find some reference to wild foods. It mentioned medicinal herbs and roots that could be ground up for potions, but they were mostly found in the eastern forests back home. There was little more than grass
out here. And she did not recognize any of the plants growing around the ponds they continued to pass.

Sharing the spoon, Sally and Hethy passed the pot back and forth until they had finished a small batch of beans they had cooked from the remaining sack. Sally continued reading the
Incunabula
, hoping to find a way to cross into the Gloaming when she reached her father.

Hethy leaned back against her pack with her hands cocked behind her head. “What’s that book you’re always reading, Yote?”

The sod fire crackled and gave off a pungent smoke.

Sally closed the page, her eyes sore, frustrated that she had found nothing helpful. “Do you read?”

“I learned my letters a bit.”

“This book was my father’s. Have you ever heard of the Ramblers?”

“You mean like in the old stories about John Henry and such?”

“Yes!” Sally said. “My father was Li’l Bill.”

“John Henry’s shaker? Those stories ain’t true, are they?”

“They are. Mister Nel, that root worker who takes care of us back home, he was once a Rambler, too. He and my father and John Henry and all the other Ramblers, they destroyed the Gog’s Machine.”

“Gog?” Hethy asked. “Ain’t heard that part of the story. I heard it John Henry beat a steam drill.”

“No. It wasn’t a steam drill.” Sally told Hethy the story of the Gog and how her brother and Conker and the others from the medicine show had destroyed the Gog and his train.
“But they never found the Machine,” Sally said at last. “That’s really what my brother’s looking for in Omphalosa. He thinks the Darkness is because of the Machine.”

“Hum,” Hethy wondered, her expression darkening.

“What?” Sally asked.

“Granny Sip used to say she reckoned there was something in the mill that caused the Darkness. A wicked and enormous clockwork buried beneath the town. She’d know if there was.”

“So maybe my brother will find it,” Sally said excitedly. “Maybe he already has and—”

In the distance, they heard a howl.

Sally looked nervously into the shadows. “Was that a wolf?” Sally asked.

Hethy cocked an eyebrow at Sally. “You scared?”

“Aren’t you?”

Hethy waved a hand dismissively at the dark. “Nothing out there’s going to hurt us. We’re all right. It’s just a coyote or something is all. There ain’t no wolves left in these parts. They’ve all been shot or run off.”

The girls lay down beneath their blankets.

After a time, Hethy rolled over on her elbows and asked, “You reckon that noise could have been a Boo Hag?”

Sally flipped over to look at Hethy. “What’s that?”

Hethy narrowed her eyes seriously. “An old witch, except she ain’t got no skin. She’s just blood red. She catches you, she’ll tear your skin off and wear it.”

“That’s not true,” Sally said. “Is it?”

Hethy kept her brow lowered but couldn’t hold it for long
and gave a wide smile as she rolled onto her back. “People tell about them Boo Hags though.”

Sally laughed, scooting a little closer to Hethy. “Have you ever heard of a Wampus Cat?”

“Never. That some kind of bobcat?”

Sally told the story she had heard from Mattias and Dmitry about the half-panther, half-woman. Then Hethy told her about hodags and the Tailypo and the ghosts of Pony Express riders who haunted the prairies. Soon they were out of stories, and Sally lay listening for wild animals or Boo Hags or whatever it was they had heard howling. After a time, she curled closer up against Hethy and fell asleep.

The girls continued to follow the rabbit’s foot. It led them further into the desolate expanse of great grassy dunes. Hethy had been making their campfires by cutting sod from the earth, but this soil was too sandy and too moist to burn. Sally did not mind sleeping without a fire as much as she did the meager meal. Without a fire, there was no way to cook Hethy’s beans. There was little more left in Hethy’s bag than a few pieces of dried beef and some rubbery carrots, which the girls nibbled at sparingly.

Fortunately there was plenty of water. Some of the ponds were as big as lakes and thick with ducks and swans and strange birds she’d never seen, with red eyes and black tufts on their heads. If they could only catch one, Sally thought. But then she remembered they had no way to make a fire, and besides, it was hopeless; she couldn’t catch a bird. She wasn’t Ray.

Sally pored through the
Incunabula
for some charm to help ease their rumbling stomachs or produce a fire. She found nothing helpful, but she did come across a passage she had not read before. It concerned sacred stones used by some medicine men. The stones could locate misplaced objects of importance or lost horses and even missing people. In the margin, her father had written “lodestone” in his scrawling cursive.

The lodestone!

Sally looked back at the
Incunabula
. More writing in her father’s hand was further down the page: “Place what is lost in your thoughts and follow.”

What had she been thinking when the foot led her to Hethy? She hadn’t been thinking of Hethy. She hadn’t even known her then. She’d been cold and hungry and tired and wanted nothing more than to find …

Sally gasped. She had wanted to find someone out on the prairie who could feed her. This was like when she and Ray were in the city and the lodestone often led them to food or helpful things. Could she think this again and would the rabbit’s foot lead them to a homestead or town or even a bramble of blackberries growing mysteriously on the dunes?

The sun was high overhead, and Hethy was splashing water from a pond on her neck.

“Hethy!” she called. “Come here quick.”

Hethy ran back with her hatchet out. “What? You seen a rattler or something?”

“No! I think I’ve figured out how to find food. This rabbit’s foot. It’ll lead us!” Sally held the golden foot in her
palms, trying to calm her excited mind. Food. Lead us to food, she thought.

The rabbit’s foot turned until it indicated the west.

“Is it telling you, Yote?” Hethy asked, watching Sally with wide eyes.

“I don’t know. It’s pointing the same direction it has been.”

“Well, maybe there’s something up yonder. Let’s go!”

The hope that a hot meal was just ahead brought new energy to the girls’ legs. They ran up and down the dunes, across flatter expanses and around ponds. But they soon grew tired and resumed their original pace. When the sun set and nothing had been found, the girls ate another piece of the dried meat and found a spot to sleep for the night.

“You think that foot’s pulling your leg, Yote?” Hethy asked.

“It doesn’t do that,” Sally replied. “I don’t know why it’s not working. Maybe we’re not there yet.”

But Sally remembered how the rabbit’s foot had begun to vibrate urgently when it led her to Hethy. The foot was not doing that now. It would turn to point out the right direction to go, but otherwise the rabbit’s foot remained motionless.

The next day, they trudged with hard, angry stomachs. As the afternoon grew late and they came over a ridge, Sally realized that Hethy had stopped several steps behind her. She was staring at some point far in the distance to the east.

“What?” Sally asked. “What is it?”

Hethy kept staring. “You see something back there?”

Sally narrowed her eyes. The undulating plain was as
wide and empty as an ocean. But then she saw it. A form—dark against the green and gold landscape—moving their way. Sally had no sense for distance and could only assume it was several miles perhaps.