Tsuga's Children (6 page)

As she began to be able to see the rocks around her she climbed faster toward the light. The bats still flowed all around her, none touching her with anything but the wind from its wings. The light grew and at first hurt her eyes. She saw blue sky and the tops of green trees, and she was stumbling, crying with relief to see daylight. Finally she got through the entranceway and ran to the side of the cloud of streaming bats. She was in a new warmth full of autumn smells, looking down across a mountain valley to a blue, island-studded lake, tall trees, a mountain meadow, all surrounded by mountain walls reaching up into glinting white.

The bat cloud rose above the cave entrance, swirling into a confused whirlwind in the brightness. Above the dark cloud and beside it, two great hawks turned and then fell into the cloud, which received them and let them plummet straight on through, each of the thousands in the hawks’ way swerving aside from the arched talons at the last moment. But then there was a bump in the air. She could almost feel it. In all that flowing and falling there was ajar, a stoppage somewhere up in the swirling cloud, then another and another, before the two hawks broke out below the cloud to brake with their broad wings and cupped fan-shaped tails. Each had a broken bat in its grasp.

Another bat fluttered down and landed near her feet, one of its soft wings splayed out, blood on the dark furry body. It tried to fly, but one wing was broken, the fragile wrist of the bat’s wing. She felt sorry for it, and bent down so she could see its clattering little fangs, and its nose, which was bare and pink and flat as a pig’s snout. Large pointed ears stood out from its head, full of little white hairs. It was ugly, but she knew it was ugly only to her and not to itself. She wanted to help it. The bats in the cave were like a nightmare to her, and had frightened her badly, but really she had frightened them and caused them to fly out into the daylight where the birds of prey had an advantage they wouldn’t have had at twilight or at dawn. In a way, she had caused this little animal to be hurt. But when she bent nearer to him he felt her presence, or saw from his pinhead eyes, or heard her in the echoes of his squeaking, and opened his mouth, coughing with hatred and fear, to display his white fangs. He couldn’t fly any more and was doomed to die, but he didn’t yet know it. Jen knew it, and knew that she couldn’t help.

The bat cloud turned once more above the cave and then, as if sucked like smoke into a flue, came down toward the cave entrance. She scrambled away and hid in some ground juniper as the cave received its thousands and thousands again into safe darkness. The air was clear, warm in the low sun that was about to go behind the white rim of the mountains. The hawks were little specks now as they climbed toward the cliff’s behind her. The wounded bat was gone. No, there he was beside a stone, not moving now, lying there in that extra kind of silence that meant he had suffered other wounds, and he was dead.

As the sun went down behind the distant rim, the air turned colder and the light turned around, growing golden as it was reflected from the snow fields high above her on what must be the eastern rim of the valley. But it was not winter down here. The sweet juniper smell mixed with all the live odors of fall. If Oka had come this far she might still be alive, maybe in that green meadow below, beyond the dark forest. With the thought that Oka might be near, she felt for a moment some of Oka’s calm warmth, but then it all changed and seemed so impossible and strange that her fright and loneliness grew worse. She didn’t know if her weakness came from fear or from hunger. Between her and her home was the bat cave. She didn’t want to think of entering that shrill blackness again, and even if she did go back inside, she might never find her way across the vaulted cave to the narrow passage that led back toward her home.

“Oka?” she called, but her voice winged away and was lost in the far distances of the strange valley. She still carried Oka’s rope bridle and the iron crampons, which were heavy, so she untied the crampons and left them on a rock near the cave entrance, keeping the bridle. She wanted to get away from here, to try to find the mountain meadow below, before dusk when the bats would stream like a black wind out into the darkening valley. Yet she was afraid that even in the meadow, if she could ever find her way to it, she would be alone; it would not be her father’s field with the smoke from the cabin chimney rising nearby.

She could find no hoofprints on the broken rock around the cave, or see any in the dim light fading down into the cave itself, where she didn’t dare to go look. She would have to try to guess which way Oka went, and hope to find her trail on the softer ground in the woods.

Her fur parka was too hot to walk in now, though she didn’t leave it behind because she knew she would need it in the night, when the cold would slide down the snowy mountainsides into the valley. She wished she had taken her rucksack, and some rawhide to tie her parka into a bundle. Arn would have thought of that. He liked his gear so much. If only he were here she wouldn’t be so much afraid. She was too young and didn’t know enough to have come this far from her home, but it was too late now. She carried her parka under her arm, Oka’s bridle over her shoulder, as she descended through the broken rocks. Trees and shrubs appeared as she descended. Darkness descended with her; like the cool air, it seemed to be seeping down to settle into the valley. She was weak from hunger; when she made a misstep her knees felt like warm water.

In the dying light she came to a bog she had to cross. As she started across it something moved very near her, something large as a tree. She felt the soggy earth depress toward it, as if the bog were a hammock, and then the thing rose higher and higher above her—it was a bear, with massive narrow shoulders and wide head. It looked down at her in the twilight, motionless now, judging. As with Oka sometimes, she seemed to hear deep rumbling thoughts that formed themselves into language. At first she wanted to cry out and try to run, but the slow deep thoughts came into her mind with the power of stillness and contemplation, holding her silent.

What is this small animal?

It is small enough to ignore.

Unless it is good to eat.

Jen felt the hard eyes looking down upon her, and at the same time she saw herself caught there, crouching down in the brush of the bog. She didn’t look like herself, but like a dark bunch of fur and cloth and skin, with odors rising from her in the form of a dim bluish glow that wavered and changed like the Northern Lights. The bear’s deep thoughts changed, grew more hesitant.

This small animal reminds me of an old danger.

I am not hungry.

I am not angry.

I shall move away.

The bear silently turned, his black bulk folded down, and the boggy earth moved again as he pushed steadily and quietly away through the brush.

She trembled, and took the deep breaths she hadn’t dared to take. Every time she blinked the dark seemed to double itself and the low spruce trees along the side of the bog melted together into furry secret depths. A night bird screamed off in the forest as if it had been suddenly startled.

She didn’t know which way to go. She waded through the bog to where the ground rose into the black spruce. She could see nothing here. It would be dangerous and even impossible to go on, now. So she did the only thing she could. She felt among the roots and dead needles until she found a place between two roots, a hollow where she curled up and tried to hide, crying a little but not daring to make a noise, her parka over her head.

Back in the Hemlocks’ log cabin, back over the several long miles of iron-hard ice, through the frozen trees where no bird flew and no wind whispered, the cold light came.

Though Eugenia had got up several times in the night to put wood on the fire so that Tim Hemlock, sleeping on a pallet before it, might stay warm, the dawn brought a chill over the embers and gray ashes. The dawn’s wan light came through the icicles that hung heavy from the eaves, webbed together like thick screens outside the small windows. Eugenia got up, shivering but with some new hope because of Tim Hemlock’s easier sleep, and built up the fire, not as high as she would have liked, because the wood supply was very low, but enough so that soon the yellow warmth was felt around the hearth.

Arn called from the loft, “Jen? Is Jen down there?”

Soon they knew that Jen was gone. Not just outside, or to the barn, but gone. Arn came back from outside, rubbing his mittens on his cold nose, to tell Eugenia that he could see the marks of her crampons, like little ice-pick stabs in the ice, heading on a line toward Cascom Mountain. “She’s gone after Oka,” Eugenia said. “Oh, Jen!” She turned to her husband, who slept on, his thin, wasted face dark and calm in his sleep. “Tim! Tim!” she cried, but he couldn’t hear her.

Arn saw his mother’s fear and before he even had time to think he said, “I’ll go find Jen!”

“No,” Eugenia said. “You must stay here and take care of your father. Feed him the broth you know how to make, and keep the fire going.”

“But I could find her,” Arn said. “I could find her all right. It’s slippery out there and you could fall down! It doesn’t hurt me to fall down. Sometimes I even do it on purpose!”

“I must find Jen,” Eugenia said.

Arn saw that there would be no arguing with her, but he made her drink some hot broth before she left. She took some bannock with her in one of the deep pockets of her deerskin parka to give to Jen if she found her, and Arn helped her strap her crampons tightly to her boots. When she was dressed and ready she kissed Arn and Tim Hemlock and set out into the cold.

Eugenia knew only too well the old tales about Cascom Mountain and of those powerful gods deprived of their people. Yet Jen’s trail of crampon scratches in the ice led straight toward that dark towering mountain to the north-west.

All day she walked and clambered over the ice, through the silent trees, until she heard the long sighing that turned to a dreadful roar, and came upon the last icy knob where Jen had stood to see and be buffeted by the roar of the falling water. When Eugenia saw the narrow path along the sheer cliff and knew from the tracks that Jen had taken it and not returned this way, she was afraid she could not make herself go on. She was afraid of heights. She could never trust herself not to almost want to fall. But she saw in her mind Jen’s determined, sweet face and went on. Many times, on the slippery path, she thought she would give up and fall, or die of fear. The falling water seemed to want to pull her down, to argue with her in its demanding roar, telling her that all was lost, that she must let herself go and end her fear forever in the rocks and water far below.

The path thinned in places where she had to stop, her hands against the black rock of the cliff, and pray for her nerve and strength to come back. After what seemed hours, days, forever, she came behind the swirling mist of the falls, where the long tumbling columns of water fell beside her, so that all the world except for the narrow rock ledge she held to was falling. And then the path stopped, went no farther. It ended. In front of her was only streaming black rock. Below her the pulling water fell into the thundering mist hundreds of feet below. There wasn’t a crack, a foothold or a fingerhold anywhere. She knew from the tracks that Jen had not come back from here along the path. She had to believe—there was no other thing to believe—that Jen and Oka had fallen and were gone.

In her sorrow she wanted to fall herself, to give up to her hopeless sorrow and let go. But she knew that back at their home were Arn and her husband, who were still alive and needed her. She clung to the rock, balancing herself against a cold voice from the water and rock that said,
Why suffer? Come, descend with the water and make it all end. Come, come down with us where it is all cold and gone.
She felt that power, that pressure as though arms dragged at her to pull her down. But she could not let go, and the bravest thing she had ever done was to hold on, to think of the family that was left and to turn and pick her way back along the ledge, though she found herself crying out of terrible weakness and despair. Away from the falls, into the freezing air, the mist that had entered her clothes turned them solid, and she had to crack the ice in them in order to walk at all.

It was long past dark when she returned, another almost full moon letting her see the trail and at the same time draining the warmth from the world like an evil magnet of ice in the sky. Arn was waiting; Tim Hemlock slept on.

“Jen’s gone!” she cried. “She fell into the waterfall. I know she’s gone!”

She was feverish and weak. Arn helped her out of her frozen parka and leggings and made her sit by the fire. He could not believe that his little sister was gone forever. He did not want to believe it and he wouldn’t believe it; he would go and find her himself. He knew that his mother wouldn’t let him go, so he didn’t ask. He could see that she was exhausted and would soon be asleep, so he waited, thinking of Jen lost on the forbidden mountain and how he would have to go there too. He thought of not going, of staying here next to the warm fire, just him and his mother and father now, safe in the cabin. But he knew he would go, because his father couldn’t. It was his duty. His mother was brave but she didn’t know the wilderness the way he did. His father had taught him how to follow a trail as faint as a breath, to see an animal that wasn’t there and to see it whole from a single scratch of a claw or a dropping. It was up to him now to use the knowledge his father had taught him.

And so, while the moon was still high and his parents both slept, he prepared himself. He took one of the little birch-bark boxes and put into it some of the brownish powder from the box marked with the drooping hand, some of the powdered purslane and dock, and some of the powdered mushrooms. He took the stale bannock from his mother’s parka, a flint and some tinder from his father’s possibles bag, forty feet of narrow hemp rope from the rack by the front door, the small but sharp sheath knife his father had forged for him a year ago, and a small iron pot in case he would have to cook. The birch-bark box, bannock, rope, flint, tinder and pot he put in his small rucksack. His knife he put on his belt, with a rawhide thong to hold it in its sheath in case he fell. He looked up at his father’s flintlock rifle, but knew that it was too long and heavy for him to carry, even though he had shot it over a rest. If the Traveler had come this year his father would have made him a smaller rifle, of smaller caliber; together they had drawn the plans for it. But there was no use missing what he’d never had. At the door he strapped on his crampons, slung his pack over his fur parka, and quietly left his warm, firelit home for the moon-cold woods.