Tsuga's Children (8 page)

When she reached home she was so weak from hunger and despair she could barely chop loose and drag in the last of the wood and remake the small fire. All the food was gone except for the seed they would need to plant in the spring, carefully stored in hemp bags hung from the rafters. There was a bag of corn, bags of tomato, turnip, cucumber and squash seeds, beans and other vegetable seeds, and wheat and timothy. In a dark bin dug into the floor of the cabin were the precious seed potatoes. All this time she had tried not to think of using the seeds, but they must eat if they were to live, so finally she took some corn, found some seed potatoes with two eyes or more and cut them in half, and with the small amount of milk the nanny goat gave, made some chowder, which she fed to her husband with a spoon. He could not wake up enough to see her or talk to her, but took the thin chowder. When she lifted up his head and shoulders to feed him he seemed as light as a forkful of hay. Though he slept calmly and took his soup, he was growing thinner, his nose as shiny and sharp as a blade.

The spring on the hill had frozen over for the first time in her memory. When she had to go outside and chop into the blue ice with a mattock she could feel the warmth of her life itself drifting away into the frozen air. If the two of them were to live, they had to have warmth and food. But then she would think of her children, who must have fallen into the chasm of the waterfall and drowned, and she wondered why she cared whether she lived or died.

She knew that Tim Hemlock needed more nourishing food, so in the morning when she woke cold and stiff in the fireless cabin she dressed and went to the barn. She would take the male goat from the barn and slaughter him. This would take all her strength, but her husband needed the sustenance meat would give him.

There was silence as she entered the dim light of the barn. Brin breathed long breaths but made no other sound. When her eyes got used to the dim light she saw that the goats stood side by side, the male goat in his pen, the nanny goat in hers, not moving, staring at her through their strange yellow eyes. They didn’t move their heads or stamp their narrow hooves as they usually did, but stared at her as though they knew why she had come. In her hand she held the rope noose. In her pocket, sheathed in its leather scabbard, was the short sharp sticking knife.

The goats stared at her. The nanny goat moved her jaws once, chewing, then stopped.
We know something,
the goats seemed to say through their unmoving attention. She could almost hear dry goat voices.

She turned away, shut the barn door and latched it, and went back to the cabin, where she put the noose and knife on the table and stood, dazed by her inability to do what she had to do. Tim Hemlock slept. She could not wake him. She would lie down next to him on the pallet, cover herself with the bearskin robe and wait for the final sleep. The small wilderness farm would die and be retaken by the forest. She must at least set the animals free, even though they would die too. All of these thoughts passed with unnatural calm through her mind as she stood looking down at her husband. But no, she could not leave him. She would burn the tables, benches, chests and chairs, make food from the seed corn, beans and potatoes as long as anything lasted. Maybe when the last of these were gone she would have the desperation to kill the goats. Even Brin. She knew how to load the flintlock rifle. The thought of entering the animal silence of the barn with that weapon dismayed her. They would know and she would know.

She poked the fire into life, sat down beside it on the still-warm hearth, reached for her husband’s hand and held it in hers. Though still hard and calloused on palm and fingers, his hand had shrunk toward its bones.

If it were all going to be over—her life, her family—she could at least remember their times of happiness, and other hardships they had overcome, other bad winters. She and Tim Hemlock had been married when they were very young, back where the people lived. Her mother and father had died when she was a little girl and she had been brought up in the Hemlocks’ house in the settlement. She could barely remember her mother and father. When she was sixteen and Tim Hemlock eighteen they had been married. She knew he would go deeper into the wilderness but she hadn’t cared then. They were both strong and young. He could never explain why he had to live in this far country where there was no other smoke but the lonely smoke from their cabin chimney. It had always seemed to her that he was searching for something, not just wanting to get away from the other people. He was known as a strange, silent one. Like his grandfather, the people said, who had been a dark, quiet man who went his own ways and would disappear for weeks, even months at a time to hunt in the wilderness.

Many times she had watched her husband’s face as he gazed toward the mountain, often in the early morning just at dawn when the sun shone on its long slopes and granite peak, making each tree and rock so vivid and near, the great mountain seemed closer and higher than it was, like a wall leaning toward them. His face would be perplexed, fierce with a kind of baffled curiosity. At night the children would sometimes get him to tell some of the legends of the Old People and their gods, and then he would tell them, smiling at the magic tales, that the ancient stories were just legends, and they shouldn’t take them as the real truth. Yet he had never gone to the mountain.

He helped her teach the children how to read and count, to learn the things that people must know, but he was best at teaching them the skills of the forest.

For a moment she felt angry at him because he had brought his family so far away from the other people, who might have helped them now. But then she knew that it was his nature, that she had known it well when she was sixteen. Just for that one moment resentment flickered before it was drowned by care.

She remembered long evenings by the hearth when the children listened to the old stories, felt their warm bodies again as they hugged her goodnight, remembered how in the night she would know that they were sleeping on the loft, the heat from the hearth rising on winter nights. Now the loft was empty and she, too, was empty, even of tears. Where were her children? Tim Hemlock’s son and daughter were gone away from them forever, taken by a cold world that had no mercy toward the weak, the young, or anyone.

As if in answer the wind pushed against the cabin and the ice rang like struck iron.

Jen woke up just at the first silver paling of the sky, the coldest time. Her feet had pushed out from under her parka and were numb with cold, so she pulled her legs up until she was all in a ball, but still she shivered. The cold made her feel more alone in the strange valley. A white-footed mouse sat on the root next to her face and looked at her, then ran away terrified when she blinked her eyes. She heard him scrabbling away across the frost-rimmed spruce needles, so scared he couldn’t remember for a moment where his hole was. She knew what he thought, feeling his terror and confusion at finding this large animal right in the middle of his usual morning path.

She seemed to remember the small voices or thoughts of other animals who had come across her in the night, their interested or frightened questions before they moved away from her.

She got up long before the sun came over the mountain rim, then went through the dark spruce toward where she hoped the meadow would be. It was a green darkness beneath the spruce, cool and moist. She walked for a long time, quiet on the hummocks of needles, before the sun rose. She never saw a hoofprint or a track of any kind, and she worried that in going around and ducking through the random tree trunks and dead lower branches she might even be going in circles. She was still cold and shivery from the long night and yearned to come out into an opening where she could feel even the pale rays of the winter sun. There were high boulders and thickets of fallen branches and vines, all dim below the green roof of spruce. When she had to cross a small brook one foot slipped from a mossy boulder into the dark water and cold knives of water went down over the top of her boot. She would have to find the sun in order to dry out her boot and stocking before she spent another night, or her foot might freeze as she slept. She knew how her heat would slip away through dampness.

She was running out of strength, so hungry she stopped to pry a small sphere of spruce gum from a tree and chew it. It would do little good but it made her feel a little better to chew on its sticky spruce-flavored bitterness, as if it were really food.

Ahead she thought she saw the broader light of an opening, and went toward it as fast as she could. It turned out to be an alder swamp, where dark stagnant water lay in random ditches between the twisted alders. She would have to go around it, out of her way. Many of the surrounding trees were poplar, yellow birch and ash that beavers had gnawed. Stumps, pointed and etched by beaver teeth, stuck up here and there. The alder swamp was probably the upper reaches of a beaver pond, which might be enormous. She would have to guess which was the shortest way around it. Her father or Arn could have told her, maybe, just by looking at the beaver trails that ran in shallow muddy depressions from the trees to disappear in the deeper water. She couldn’t tell, so she decided to go to the right, unhappy that she couldn’t go straight south, into the sun, where she believed the meadow to be—if it was, as she thought, about midday and the sun was in the south. She was mixed up, probably lost, twice lost because she was in this lost valley. Where was Oka, her friend? She wiped away her tears, saying to herself that they certainly wouldn’t do any good at all. Her foot was squishy and wet, heavy as she walked.

Arn had come to the edge of a swamp where willows grew in thick bushes. “Willows make whistles,” he said out loud. He had called for Jen many times that morning, but the spruce had absorbed his voice and he knew he couldn’t be heard very far. But with a good whistle maybe Jen might hear him. He took out his knife and cut off a willow wand as big around as his thumb, cut off a piece three inches long, then cut a notch for the hole. As his father had shown him, he cut carefully around the wood, bark-deep, and began to tap the bark with the back of his blade to loosen it from the wood so it would slip off and he could cut an air passage along the top of the wood. Then it was a matter of adjustment until he got the shrill sound he wanted. The whistle would last a few days until the bark dried up and cracked, but in the meantime he would have a whistle that could be heard twice as far as any shout. When he was finished he tried it out, hoping that if Jen heard it she would recognize it for what it was. Their father had made one for her last summer and she’d blown it until Arn’s ears rang.

As he walked on toward the south, ducking branches and stepping carefully over swampy places, he would stop every once in a while and blow the whistle. He was hungry. He was pretty sure he could find some food one way or another, but he felt he ought to find Jen first. She didn’t know as much about the woods as he did, and she hadn’t a knife or rope or anything useful with her, as far as he knew. He had the stale piece of bannock he was saving for her, his little iron pot and some of the old lady’s powders. If only he could find Jen he could give her something to eat, at least.

Jen thought she was never going to get around the beaver swamp. It went on and on, each part looking like the last. The channels of dark water might have been getting a little shallower but they were too wide to jump and they were certainly over her boots. The bottoms of the channels looked mucky too; she might sink in to her waist if she tried to wade them, even get mired there. So she kept trying to get around the swamp, stumbling more and more because of weakness. Several times she fell down just trying to step over branches she knew she could have avoided if she were stronger. She had the desire to give up, to lie down on the damp earth and cry, but she knew the swamp had to end somewhere and she had to get out into the sun and dry off before nightfall. It didn’t help to know that the swamp was home to the beavers, who made it comfortable for themselves. They loved its clutter of edible branches and bark, its dank water channels. She could feel in the musty air their pride in their work, which meant life and comfort to them. But to her it was like a trap.

And always before her was the vision of Oka, large and kind, who might be in the meadow waiting to greet her with a soft moo of recognition. She could lie down next to Oka and be warm.

Finally the ground began to rise and the watery troughs grew farther between. The weeds and brush changed, and the trees were bigger. As she came around the beaver swamp, pines and juniper took over. Great thickets of naked blackberry stalks, their berries all gone, grew here and there among the juniper, so she had to choose between the springy juniper and the clasping barbs of the blackberries that hooked into her sleeves and pantlegs, an occasional barb going all the way through into her skin. It was almost impossible to climb over the juniper, which let her down and then pushed her up and made her lose her balance. She tried crawling below the branches of the pines, but those passageways always ended in juniper and clusters of blackberries that were like toothed arms wanting to gather her in.

She was trying to climb over a patch of juniper as high as her head when suddenly she fell right through its rough branches, the small juniper berries turning like tiny blue stars as she fell, and she was down on her hands and knees beneath the branches in a sort of tunnel. The ground was trampled by sharp hooves, and she smelled pig, the bitter-sweet, biting odor of pig, just like the pigpen in the barn at home, but here it was fiercer, more alive and wild.

She had a feeling she had never had before, only heard about in stories, that she was trespassing. It was not her fault; she had fallen down into this passage by accident. But that didn’t matter. She tried to climb back up through the juniper, but the branches that had let her fall were bent the wrong way and wouldn’t let her get back out. By bending way over she could walk down the tunnel.
Boars,
she thought; this must be wild boars’ property. Along the side of the tunnel the juniper trunks were slashed to the quick as if by scythes. As she moved along the tunnel she heard, or felt beneath her feet, a thudding like thunder heard behind a mountain, far off over the rim, but advancing. She tried to find a way out, up or to the side, but the branches and trunks were too thick, so she began to run, bent over, though she was not even sure which direction the thudding came from. She might be running toward it, or the sound might not be what she thought it was—wild boars’ hooves shaking the earth.