Passager (2 page)

“Hwonk,” he cried after them. Then louder, “Hwahoooonk.” He waited for a reply but none came. Unaccountably his right eye burned. He rubbed his fist in it and the fist was wet. Not a lot. But enough to make the dirt seem like filth.

Abruptly, he turned and ran down a deer track to the nearby river. He plunged in, paddling awkwardly near the edge, where the water pooled and slipped under exposed tree roots. He brought water up in cupped hands and splashed it on his face.

“Hwonk,” he whispered to himself. Then he stood for a moment more. The cold water made his skin tingle pleasantly. When he climbed back up on the bank, the grass slippery underfoot, he shook himself all over like a dog and pushed the wet hair from his eyes.

He hummed as he walked, not a song, not even anything resembling a melody. It had no words, but a kind of comforting buzz. Then he yawned, his hand going up to his mouth as if it had a memory of its own. Finding a comfortable climbing tree, one he had used before, he got up in it, nestled in the place where two great limbs forked, and fell asleep. That it was day did not stop him from napping. He was alone. He made his own rules about time.

He had been asleep perhaps a quarter of an hour when a strange noise woke him; he did not move except to open his eyes. Caution had become a habit.

The sound that awakened him was not yippy like foxes or the long, howling fall of the dogs. It had teased into his dream and had changed the dream so abruptly that he awoke.

The call came closer.

Carefully he rose up a bit from the nest in the fork of the tree and crawled out along a thick branch that overlooked a clearing.

Suddenly something flapped over his head. He craned his neck and saw a hunting bird. She had a creamy breast and her tail had bands of alternating white and brown. Beak and talons flashed by him as she caught an updraft and landed near the top of a tall beech tree.

“Hwonk,” he whispered, though he knew this was never such a bird.

No sooner had the falcon settled than the calling began again. It was an odd, unnatural, intrusive sound.

The boy looked down. On the edge of the wood stood a man, rather like the one in his dream, the one with the sword. He was large, with wide shoulders and red-brown hair that covered his face. There was a thin halo of hair around his head. When he walked across the meadow and then beneath the branch where the boy lay as still as leaves, the boy could see a round, pink area on the top of the man's head. It looked like a moon. A spotty, pink moon. The boy put his hand to his mouth so that he would not laugh out loud.

The man did not look up, did not notice the boy in the tree. His eyes were entirely on the tall beech tree and the magnificent bird near its crown. He swung a weighted string over his head and the string made an odd singing sound. The man whistled, and called, “Come, Lady. Come.”

That was the sound that the boy had heard. The sound that had pulled him from his dream. Words.

The bird, though it watched the man carefully, did not move.

Neither did the boy.

THE MAN AND THE BIRD EYED ONE ANOTHER FOR
the rest of the short afternoon. In the tree, the boy watched them both. His patience with the scene below him was amazing, given that at one time or another his hands and his feet all fell asleep and he had an awful need to relieve himself.

Occasionally the bird would flutter her wings, as if testing them. Occasionally her head swiveled one way, then another. But she made no move to leave the beech.

The man seemed likewise content to stay. Except for making more circles around his head with the string, he remained almost motionless, though every now and again he made a clucking sound with his tongue. And he talked continuously to the bird, calling her names like “Hinny” and “Love,” “Sweet Nell” and “Maid,” in that same soft voice.

The boy took it all in, the bird in the tree, often still as a piece of stained glass, the sun lighting it from behind. And the man, with the thick leather glove on one hand, the whirring string in the other.

He wondered if the man would attempt, before night, to climb the tree after the bird, but he hoped that would not happen. The bird might then leave the tree; the tree, quite thin at the top, somewhat like the man, might break. The boy liked the look of the bird: her fierce, sharp independence, the way she stared at the man and then away. And the man's voice was comforting. It reminded the boy of something, something in his dreams. He could not remember what.

He hoped they would both stay. At least for a while.

 

When night came, they each slept where they were: the man right out in the clearing, his hands around his knees, the hawk high in her tree. The boy edged down from the tree, did his business, and was up the tree again so quietly none of the leaves slipped off into the autumn stillness.

He fell asleep once or twice that night but he did not dream.

 

In the morning the boy woke first, even before the bird, because he willed himself to. He watched as first the falcon shook herself into awareness, then the man below stretched and stood. If the boy had not seen them both sleeping, had only now wakened himself, he would have thought the two of them had not changed all the night.

The man was about to swing the lure above his head again when the falcon pumped her wings and took off from the tree at a small brown lark. The lark flew up and up, the hawk sticking closely behind, and soon they were on the very edge of sight.

The boy made slits of his eyes so he could watch, as first one bird and then the other took advantage of the currents of air. It almost seemed,
he thought, as if the lark were sometimes chasing the hawk. He would have laughed aloud, but the man was too close beneath him.

The birds flew on, one above, one below, then circled suddenly and headed back toward the clearing, this time with the lark cleanly in the lead. The boy's hands in fists were hard against his chest as he watched, silently cheering first for the little bird, then for the following hawk.

Suddenly the lark swooped downward and the falcon hovered over it, a miracle of hesitation. Then with one long, perilous, vertical stoop, the hawk fell upon the lark, knocking it so hard the little bird tumbled over and over and over until it hit the ground not fifty feet from the man. Never looking away from her dying prey, the falcon followed it to earth. Then she sank her talons into the lark and looked about fiercely, as if daring anyone to take it from her.

The man walked quickly but without excess motion to the hawk. He nodded almost imperceptibly at her, speaking all the while in a continuous flow of soft words. Kneeling, he put one hand on her back and wings and with the other, the ungloved hand, hooded her so swiftly, the boy did not even see it till it was done. Then, standing, the man placed the bird on his gloved wrist, gathered up dead lark and lure with his free hand, and walked smoothly toward the part of the forest he had come from.

Only when the man had disappeared into the underbrush did the boy unwind himself from the tree. Man, falcon, and dead lark were all so fascinating, he could not help himself. He had to see more. So he ran to the edge of the woods and, after no more than a moment's hesitation, rather like the hawk before beginning her stoop, he plunged in after them.

THE MAN'S PATH THROUGH THE TANGLE OF UNDERBRUSH
was well marked by broken boughs and the deep impression of his boot heels. He was not difficult to follow. That should have made the boy suspicious, but he was too caught up in the hunt.

In his eagerness to track the man, the boy neglected to note anything about the place, though this was a caution he had learned well over his year in the wild. Still, he knew he could always track back along the same wide swath. So perhaps his hunter's mind was working.

The thorny berry bushes scratched his legs,
leaving a thin red map from hip to ankle, but he was used to such small wounds. Once he trod on a nettle. But he had done so before. It would sting for a while, then slowly recede, leaving only a dull ache that would disappear when his attention was on something else.

Nothing—
nothing
—could dampen his excitement. Not even the tiny prickle of fear that coursed wetly down his back, between his shoulder blades. If anything, the fear sharpened his excitement.

He walked a few feet, stopped, listened, though it was a blowy day, clouds scudding across a leaden sky. Mostly what he heard was wind in trees. He relied, therefore, on his eyes, and followed the man's passage through fern and bracken, and the prints alongside a fast-running stream.

Several hours passed like minutes, and still the boy remained eagerly on the man's trail. Only twice did he actually glimpse the man again. Once he saw the broad back, covered with its leathern coat.

Coat.
That was a word suddenly returned to him. Right after, he thought,
jerkin.
He didn't know why the two words came together in his mind. So dissimilar and yet—somehow—peculiarly the same. He stopped for a moment, giving the man plenty of time to move on, out of hearing, then whispered the two words aloud.

“Coat.” The word was short, sharp, like a wild dog's bark.

“Jerkin.” He liked that word better and said it over and over again several more times. “Jerkin. Jerkin. Jerkin.” The last time he said it loud enough to become instantly wary. But when he looked around there was no sign of the man, and he relaxed. Going down into the stream, he bent over to get a drink, lapping at it like an animal. But when he lifted his head out of the water, he smiled and said the two words again. “Coat,” he said. “Jerkin.”

He found the man's easy trail again and ran a bit, to make up for the lost time.

 

The second time he saw the man, the man had turned on the path and looked right at him. The boy froze, willing himself to disappear into the brush the way a new fawn and badgers and even red foxes could. He closed his eyes so that they would not shine, so that the blinking of his eyes would not reveal where he was.

It must have worked, because when he peeked through slotted eyes at the man, the man looked right at him and did not seem to see him at all, but kept on stroking the falcon's shoulder and whispering something to the bird the boy could not hear. The man cocked his head to one side as if considering, as if listening, but the boy remained absolutely still. Then the man turned away and walked on.

The boy followed, but more carefully now, stopping frequently to hide behind a tree or a bush or kneel down in the bracken or lie in the furze. He did not actually have to see the man to know where he was. They were on a well-worn trail now, a path packed down by many years of use. The boy could read the faint boot marks as well as a sharp impression of deer feet, the softer scrapings of badger, even the scratchings of grouse. A dog pack had left its scat, and recently, too. That made the boy nervous, and he remarked the tallest trees in case he had to climb quickly.

His slow reading of this worn pathway occupied him, and he was not paying attention to what lay ahead. So he was surprised when the road turned and opened onto a man-made clearing. A farmhouse squatted near the center of it.

The farmhouse explained the new scents he had been ignoring. For a moment, he hesitated by the last trees and stared.

“House,”
he whispered, afraid and yet not afraid. “House.”

THERE WAS A TRAIL OF SMOKE FROM THE HOUSE
chimney and for a long time the boy watched it dreamily. He could almost smell a joint of meat roasting. He could almost remember the crackle of the skin.

Then as the man neared the house a chorus of dogs began to howl. The boy remembered the yellow mastiff and its pack all too well. He stepped into the shadow of the trees and ran back down the road.

As soon as he was too far away to hear the dogs, he forgot them, for his stomach was growling. He had had nothing to eat all day.

It was growing dark, and foraging had to be a quick and careful matter. He found a walnut tree and gathered nuts, as well as late-growth bramble berries. Then, picking up a rock to help him crack the nuts open, he chose a sleeping tree and scrambled up it for the night.

The nuts and berries were enough to stop the fiercest of the hunger pangs. When he fell asleep, the moon hanging over him orange and full, he began to dream.

At first he dreamed of food. Food cooking on a large, open hearth. Then he dreamed of dogs scrabbling on the hearthstones for their share of the cooked meat. The dogs were enormous, with eyes as great as saucers, as great as dinner plates, as great as platters. They stared at him and through him and—in his dream—his skin sloughed off. He watched, skinless, as the dogs ate his skin. Then they turned and stared at him with their big eyes and growled.

He woke in a sweat, shivering, and threw the nutshells down from the tree. He touched his arm and his leg to assure himself that he was whole, skin and all. Then he promised himself he would not fall asleep again.

But he did.

This time he dreamed of women in black robes and black wings who fluttered around him. They opened their mouths, and bird sounds came out.

“Cause!” they screamed at him. “Cause!”

He held out his hand in the dream and was surprised how heavy it seemed. When he looked at it, it was encased in a leather glove with thumb and fingers stiff as tree limbs.

Only one of the black-robed women alighted on his hand, her nails sharp as talons, piercing right through the glove.

The pain woke him, and his one hand hurt as if something had pierced the palm. He licked the hurt place and there was a thin, salty, blood taste.

This time he did not fall asleep again but waited, shivering, for the dawn to finally come with its comforting rondel of birdsong.

HIS USUAL MORNING INCLUDED A DRINK OF
water from the stream and a casual hunt for food. But this morning he saw, through the bare ligaments of trees, the thin line of chimney smoke.