River Marked (9 page)

“Finally, I came up to this car—an old Model T Ford buried up to its axles. It was so sad, I could feel its sorrow weighing down my heart, distracting me from whatever had caused me to cry in the first place. I put my hands on it, but there was no way to dig it out or fix it. I explained that to the car, as if it could understand what I was saying because I felt as though it could. I told it I was sorry I couldn’t do more.

“Then, under my fingers it began to vibrate, shaking until I couldn’t hold it anymore. I had to close my eyes against the sand it stirred up, and when I opened them, I was alone in a forest.”

I remembered how frightened I had been in the forest. My pulse picked up, and goose bumps covered my forearms. The forest should have been a relief from the dead grayness I’d been in. The forest had been my second home—but the forest of my vision had hidden watchers, dangerous watchers who didn’t approve of me.

“It was a dark forest. Although all the trees were conifers, they’d formed a thick canopy over the top of me—like in a rain forest. I could feel that I was watched, but no matter how hard I looked, I never saw them. My watchers followed me as I walked. Eventually, I started running, and I panicked like a rabbit. It seemed as though I ran for hours. Every time I slowed down, I could feel them closing in on me. So I didn’t slow down.” Remembered fear had me sweating, and the muscles on the back of my neck were tight. “I never saw anything while I ran. Never knew what was chasing me. I just knew I was the prey in this race. I knew absolutely that if they caught me, I was dead.

“I looked over my shoulder as I ran full tilt through the forest, and my foot caught a downed tree. I tumbled down a hill and landed at the foot of a La-Z-Boy.”

“A what?” Adam asked.

“I told you it was weird. A La-Z-Boy, one of those big recliners. This one had a big tag on it that said ‘La-Z-Boy.’ It should have felt out of place in the forest, but instead it was I who didn’t belong.” The recliner had been orange and blue plaid. Ugly.

“At first all I saw was the chair, then I could tell it was occupied by a tall, handsome Indian man who looked not at all impressed by me.”

Funny. I could remember the color of the chair as if I’d just been staring at it, but I couldn’t really remember the Indian man’s face or what he was wearing. I don’t think I noticed anything except his eyes.

“I got to my feet. My jeans were torn, my shirt was ripped, and there was a long, painful scratch on my side. There were sticks in my hair. I felt as if I were someplace I didn’t belong, somewhere no one wanted me. I raised my chin and met his gaze, eye to eye, though I knew in my heart it was a stupid thing to do.” The panic had been gone, replaced by a hollow emptiness that felt like nothing could ever fill it.

Adam’s hand tightened on my shoulder.

“As soon as I began the stare-down, a fox, a lynx, and a bear came out of the woods. A huge bird that looked like a giant eagle dropped out of the sky, and they all stared at me, but I kept my eyes on the man in the chair.”

It had been unexplainably horrible, knowing that I did not belong in that forest with the Indian man and the animals. I was an outsider, alone.

“Steady,” murmured Adam.

“The man finally said, ‘Who are you who walks in my forest, half-breed?’ I could tell he didn’t mean that he wanted to know my name. He wanted to know what I was.” I couldn’t explain it right. “The essence of the person I was.”

“What did you tell him?” Adam asked.

“I told him that I was coyote.” I cleared my throat. “He stood up. And up. He was a lot taller than I was, as tall as the trees around us and somehow more real than they were. I know that’s an odd visual picture, but it was just the way it was. Without dropping my gaze, he said, ‘
I
am Coyote.’ He sounded pretty offended.”

I sucked in a breath. “I probably should have given him my name. It wasn’t the right answer—but it wouldn’t have been the wrong one, either. So I said, ‘Okay. You can be Coyote. But I am
a
coyote.’ He considered my answer, then he bent down to whisper in my ear.” I felt stupid about this last.

“What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Okay. You can be a coyote, too. But you’re a silly little thing, and I am a silly old thing.’ And then I woke up.”

“Do you know what it meant?” Adam asked.

I laughed and shook my head.

“That’s a lie,” he whispered, pulling me closer.

“It meant that I’m not Indian enough,” I told him. “I don’t belong anywhere.”

He burned another hot dog while we sat together and watched the flames.

“I think you’re wrong,” he told me, finally. “It didn’t sound like Coyote was rejecting you.”

“He was talking about my coyote half,” I said.

Adam smiled and rocked me a couple of times. “How confusing it must be to have a coyote half, a human half, an Indian half, and a white half.”

I snickered and felt better. It was seldom a good idea to take myself too seriously. “All four halves are pretty happy about being married to you right now. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it meant that we should get matching La-Z-Boys.” Though I would pick better colors. “If you don’t pull that hot dog out pretty soon, you’re going to go to bed hungry.”

“Mmm,” he rumbled into my ear. “I thought that being married meant that I never go to bed hungry.”

WE CAME BACK OUT AFTER A WHILE, STOKED UP THE fire, and cooked the rest of the package of hot dogs.

THE NEXT DAY, WE LEFT THE TRAILER IN THE EMPTY campground—Adam had been responsible for setting up the security, after all—and drove back across the river, on past the oddly named town of The Dalles and the less oddly named town of Hood River to Multnomah Falls. Someone once told me there is about a ten-mile stretch where the annual rainfall increases by an inch a mile. Truth or not, not far west of Hood River the scrub is replaced by lots and lots of trees and other green stuff. A few miles farther on, the waterfalls begin.

Multnomah is the most impressive, but there are dozens of waterfalls on Larch Mountain, and we spent most of the day hiking the trails that webbed the mountainside from one falls to another. Since it was a nice day in the middle of summer, there were a lot of other people doing the same thing.

I didn’t mind the company, and I didn’t think Adam did, either. It felt like we were a friendly party of strangers, drawn together by the extraordinary beauty of water dropping in white sheets from rocky cliffs. There was a sense of awe that connected us all, bringing us together. The ties were not as real as the pack bonds, but it felt like the beginnings of the same thing. It was magic, just a little of it, built of fair weather and joy.

That feeling of belonging to something greater than myself was the gift Adam gave to me.

My whole life I’d been an outsider: first a coyote raised in a pack of werewolves, then a supernatural outsider in my mother’s mundane household, finally an outsider who had too many secrets to really have friends. I was good at appearing to fit in, so no one really took notice of me.

Until Adam. With Adam beside me, I felt like I belonged, like he was my connection to the rest of the world. And because of him, I could be just one of these happy hikers who were out to enjoy themselves. I shook off the faint shadow that recalling my vision had left upon me. Indian or not, coyote or human, I wasn’t alone anymore.

Some of the trails were easy, even handicap accessible. Not too far from Multnomah, those all went away, and the fun started in earnest. The top of the mountain is a little more than four thousand feet above the trailhead, and not much of that climb is gentle.

I HEARD THE CRYING BEFORE I SAW THEM. THINKING someone was in trouble, I broke into a jog up the trail, and Adam ran behind me.

“Honey, I can’t carry you.” The woman’s voice was on the edge of tears. “I just can’t. You have to be a big boy and help me, Robert.”

There followed a boy’s voice, unintelligible to me and interspersed with sobs.

Around a bend in the trail we came upon two very upset people. A frazzled woman in her forties and a boy with a tear- and dirt-streaked face.

“Hey,” I said. “Sounds pretty rough. What can we do to help?”

She started to refuse help—and then her eyes fell on Adam and lit up with avarice. I sympathized with her entirely—but was happier when I realized it was the strength of his back she was excited about and not his pretty face.

Her son was not nearly as excited as his mother. Robert, his mother informed us, was eight, but he had Down’s syndrome and was as wary of strangers as most two-year-olds. He wasn’t happy about the idea of Adam hauling him down the mountain to the parking lot.

While his mother tried to reason with him, Adam got down on one knee and looked the boy in the eye. He didn’t say anything at all. But after almost a full minute, the boy nodded, and when Adam stood up, he climbed onto Adam’s back without another protest. He still wasn’t happy about it, but he knew who was in charge.

“Well,” said Robert’s mother, flabbergasted.

“Adam’s good at giving orders,” I told her truthfully. “Even without saying anything.”

So Adam carried one very tired and cranky eight-year-old boy who had a sprained ankle down the trail while the boy’s even-more-tired mother thanked him all the way.

“I didn’t know it would be so steep,” the boy’s mother said to me, when Adam stretched his legs a little and got ahead of us. I thought it was to stop her incessant thanks, but maybe I was being uncharitable.

“Robert was so tired of being in the car. Eugene is still a long way, and I thought it might be nice if he ran off some energy; then he would sleep the rest of the way. I hope your young man doesn’t hurt himself. Robert weighs almost eighty pounds.”

“Don’t worry,” I assured her. “Adam was in the army. He can carry an eighty-pound pack down the mountain. That’s also why he knows the difference between a twisted ankle, a sprained ankle, and a break.”

I wasn’t going to tell her that he was a werewolf who could probably carry us all down if he could figure out a good way to make a manageable bundle of us. Adam was out to the public, but neither Robert nor his mother looked like people who could deal with werewolves at this point in their trip. The army part was true—they didn’t need to know that his army life was back in the Vietnam era.

“Get his ankle X-rayed anyway,” advised Adam, who’d had no trouble hearing us. “I’m not a doctor, and sprains can be tricky.”

By the time we made it down to the parking lot, Robert had recovered except for an exaggerated limp. His mother had lost the desperate edge to her voice. She thanked us again, and Robert gave Adam a wet kiss on his cheek.

“My hero,” I told Adam, as they drove away. “You done here? Or would you mind going back up again?”

To my intense pleasure, Adam and I hiked for another couple of hours, then ate in Hood River. I’d never spent so much time with him without interruption. Here, there was no other demand on either of us.