Tsuga's Children (28 page)

In the midst of the grazing cattle was a slightly smaller animal with a smoother, browner coat, with a large white spot on the side of its neck.

Jen grabbed Arn’s arm and pointed. “It’s Oka!” she said. “It is! Oka! Oka!”

The cattle raised their heads to look for the new sound. Their wide black muzzles all turned, slowly, their hairy ears alert, black eyes glittering beneath curls of shaggy hair. One large bull stamped his forefoot into the ground as a warning, and all the cattle came closer together, ready to run or to make their circle of defense. Oka stood still in the hock-high grass, making the children remember how often they had seen her standing this way in the small summer pasture at home, grass sticking out from each side of her wet, slowly chewing jaws.

Jen started toward Oka but Arn held her back. “Wait a minute,” he said. “We don’t know what the others will do.”

“I must go to Oka! Let me go, Arn!” Jen struggled with him, trying to pull her arm away.

“Jen! Wait a minute!” He turned her around toward him to try to talk to her, but her face was wild and disorganized, her blue eyes not willing to see him. All she did was struggle to get away. Her unreasonableness made him so angry he let her go, knowing that he shouldn’t have. He felt in his mean places the words
serves her right!

He watched her run through the high grass, a small child growing smaller as she approached the bulky black cattle. As she stumbled forward through the grass the big bull lowered his head, his thick curled horns directed toward Jen. He snorted and pawed up chunks of grassy turf that tumbled into the air along his sides. Suddenly Arn was running too, shouting as loudly as he could. He was scared and concerned for Jen and still angry. She had made a terrible mistake this time because she was not listening, not to him or to the animals the way she could when she opened her mind to them.

She fell in the tall grass and disappeared for a moment, then got to her feet again. He was beginning to catch up to her, but he had no plan at all. He just ran after her as fast as he could. He did what he thought he had to do, knowing that the bull would charge and if it did neither of them would get away. They would both be gored and trampled in the open field.

But as they came up to the cattle the bull saw them more closely and smelled them. It raised its head and stared; all the cattle stared—curious, a little nervous, but not really afraid. Jen, no longer running, went up to Oka, who gazed at her calmly and continued chewing the long stalks of grass. The other cattle went back to their grazing.

Arn came up beside Jen; she felt him at her shoulder, but all she could do was look into Oka’s soft dark eyes. Oka blinked and went on chewing, slowly, evenly, her lower jaw sliding in the rich creamy green of grass and saliva. The thick odors of cow and sweet grass surrounded her. The evening light shimmered on her glossy hide.

She was a cow in a field, ingesting the richness of the world, making sustenance, content among all the natural dangers. The wolves lolled over there in the same dying light, and would again turn hungry.

“Oka?” Jen said. When she tried to put her hand on Oka’s warm neck, the cow shook herself and moved away.

“Oka?” Jen asked, hurt and puzzled by her old friend’s skittishness. “I’ve come to take you home.”

Oka masticated the creamy grass; a green-white, foamy run of drool slipped from her lips and fell into the lush grass below. Jen could not hear her friend’s thoughts, just the one contented hum of life from deep within her chambered body.

Why should Oka want to go home to the dark barn, to that hungry winter of ice? Perhaps here she might have a dark calf, bony and strong, with shaggy black hair. At home, back through the mountain, in that other world, she would be protected from the wolves and the winterkill, but she would be a prisoner there, no matter how much she might be respected and loved. All this Jen heard in Oka’s deep, basal hum.

She turned to Arn with hurtful tears in her eyes. “She won’t come back with us.”

“It’s all right, Jen.”

“We’ll never see her again.”

“We had that choice too—to stay or try to find our way home,” Arn said.

Oka lowered her head and took another mouthful, smoothly wrenching the grass from the earth. The other cattle, sensing some change in the weather or the wolves, or the distant presence of some other stalking carnivore, moved off toward the woods, and Oka followed. The largest bull took up the rear in order to guard the cows as they slowly moved away.

Ganonoot waited for them on the trail, holding Arn’s bow that he had dropped when he ran after Jen. “I presume the cow was an acquaintance of yours,” he said. His old eyes watched them brightly, but he said nothing more.

They camped that night in a spruce grove, near a spring of dark water that emerged from beneath a granite boulder, flowed silently for a few feet and then sank back into the earth. Ganonoot was still with them, still greedily appreciating their food. After he had eaten he pulled his ragged, stained old buckskin tunic around him and began to snore, whistling and grunting and making drowning noises, each of which sounded like his last breath in this world.

When they had wrapped up in their sleeping-skins on the soft spruce needles, Jen whispered,” Do you think Tsuga meant Ganonoot when he said we’d have someone to help us?”

“Someone to help us eat our food, anyway,” Arn said. One of Ganonoot’s snores might possibly have been a chuckle just then, but they weren’t sure. They were certainly tired, though, and soon were asleep.

When Arn woke up, at the first light, something was wrong. His sleeping-skin was so tight around him he couldn’t move. What he first thought he saw was two of the spruce trees that grew near him, but he followed these two trunks up and they were the heavy legs of a big man who stood with a foot on each side of him, the feet holding his sleeping-skin tight to the ground. High above was a red face, and near the face was the glinting blade of a broadax. It was Gort, smiling a cruel and triumphant smile.

“Now I’ve got you, you little viper, so breathe your last!” Gort said, gritting his teeth.

“Run, Jen!” Arn shouted. He struggled, but couldn’t move. Jen was waking up and didn’t understand.

“She can run up a tree like a squirrel, for all I care,”
Gort said. “You’re the little snake that gave me a limp for life and stuck me full of holes, that skewered my poor carcase till my life’s blood filled my boots!”

All Am could do was stare up at the big man’s face, seeing in it revenge, a strange hard joy. He knew he was going to be killed. Jen couldn’t help him. There was no help now.

Except that the broadax didn’t come down; it stayed on Gort’s shoulder while he went on talking. “Days and nights I’ve been waiting to get hold of you—nights of pain and days of hurt, and when it wasn’t hurt, it was the itch you can’t scratch, or the pain in the gizzard you don’t even know where it’s coming from. And now I may walk with a gimp and a lean, but I’ve got you where I want you, you nasty little stabber, so say goodby!”

Arn just stared at him. What could he do? Jen was struggling out of sleep, now, but it was too late even if she could have done something.

“Say something!” Gort said. “Say something!”

When Arn said nothing, Gort cursed and said, “I’m going to slice you thin as a jerked deer—make one piece out of you sixteen yards long and half an inch thick!”

Arn could only stare up at the big man who stood over him, now raising the broadax from his shoulder.

“Gort,” a voice said. It came from the direction of Ganonoot, but it was low and clear, the one word moving surely into their attention with an authority that altered everything—the slight wind of the forest, the presence of the dark trees, the violent stance of Gort and the helplessness of the children.

“Gort,” the voice said again. Jen had cried out once, when she had first seen Gort, but now she looked over at Ganonoot, and so did Arn and Gort. From under Gano-noot’s ragged tunic where it was spread over his knees a long arrow protruded, nocked to his strung bow and half drawn. But it was the old eyes that drew theirs; no longer were they the shifty, somewhat vague eyes of Ganonoot, though the face was the same, with the long yellow tusk sticking down.

Then an old hand came up, took hold of the long tusk and carefully removed it. The bent old neck straightened, and next the bent body rose to its feet, to straighten and grow tall.

“Well, Gort,” Tsuga said. “Is revenge worth an arrow through your middle?”

Gort stared at the tall old man who had been Ganonoot. Not moving, his ax still poised above his shoulder, he stared with an expression of wonder that seemed far beyond the threat of Tsuga’s long arrow. He seemed paralyzed in place, unable to attack or to surrender. Finally he shook his head as if to clear his vision, then tossed his broadax aside.

“Ganonoot!” he said. “Ganonoot!”

“Yes,” Tsuga said, glancing at Jen and Arn. “Tsuga is old Ganonoot, whose stories no one really believes until they come true.” Then to Gort, “You can step off Arn’s sleeping-skin now and move over there.” He made a quick gesture with his arrow.

Gort looked down at Arn and said in a surprisingly calm voice, “You don’t happen to want to reach for your knife, now, do you? I mean I don’t feel like getting sliced open again.”

“I never wanted to hurt anybody,” Arn said.

Gort, still keeping a wary eye on him, stepped aside and let him up.

Then Tsuga did a strange thing. He laughed, unnocked his arrow and unstrung his bow. “Gort,” he said, “I knew you years ago as a good man, and I saw just now you could not bring yourself to kill a child.”

Perplexed, Gort scratched his head with both hands but said nothing.

“The boy was just trying to protect himself,” Tsuga said.

Gort thought for a long time, looking at each of them in turn. Finally he said, “I guess he’s brave enough, at that.” Then he sat down cross-legged and rubbed his head, staring at the ground. After a while he said, “I never should’ve joined up with Mori’s guards anyway. I used to be a hunter and a woodsman, not like those types that left me bleeding there at the river crossing. It was the pain that wouldn’t let me think.”

“All right,” Tsuga said. “The time of hatred and murder is over—for a while. So let’s have breakfast and do some thinking for a change.”

Both Tsuga and Gort brought food out of their packs and pockets and they ate well. Tsuga told Gort, who had been alone in the woods during the battle at the Tree, most of what had happened, how Mori had died and the guard been disbanded.

“Well, that’s good news to me,” Gort said. “I wanted to quit that outfit, and now they won’t come after me as a deserter and remove my tender skin.”

“Go back to the Chigai, Gort. You can help them.”

“All right, but first I’ll help these children find their bat cave. I was there years ago. There’s a trail along the rim that skirts the beaver dams and the blueberry bogs.”

When they had finished eating and packed their gear, Tsuga said to Jen and Am, “I’ll leave you now. When you reach the bat cave, Ahneeah will provide you with a guide. She called you here, Jen and Am, and you were worthy of what she asked of you. You lost a cow, but what you’ll bring back to your mother and father may make up for that. Remember that Ahneeah is not all-powerful, but she is grateful, as all the animals are grateful.”

He reached into a pocket of his ragged tunic and brought out two small leather bags, which he put in Arn’s pack. “These are for your father, Tim Hemlock. No one can cure his sadness or his seeking, but in one bag is the powder of the needles, medicine for the sickness of his body, and in the other are seed cones of his name tree, which is the Great Tree on the meadow by the Cave of Forgetfulness. Plant them in your world, and when he sees them grow he will feel more at home. And tell him …” Here Tsuga laughed and shook his head ruefully, “Tell him that his great-great-grandfather sends him greetings.”

“You, Tsuga?” Jen asked.

“Yes, you are all my children—the children of old Gano-noot, the buffoon. Tell your father to think on that.”

Then Tsuga took Ganonoot’s warped old bow, waved, and strode back along the trail. He turned once and waved again, a tall old man with white hair to his shoulders, dressed in stained and ragged clothes. Then he was gone.

Gort took them in a day, a night and a day to the entrance of the bat cave. “Jen and Am,” he said, “I’m sorry I scared you out of a year’s growth back there in the spruce, but I was still out of my mind with pain and anger. Now I’ll leave you. Ahneeah’s guide won’t show himself or herself or whatever it is to me, because I’m just an ordinary man. But here you are, and there are your funny-looking iron shoes the like of which I never saw before, so this must be the place.”

They thanked Gort and said goodby. He waved and left them, walking, Arn was glad to see, with less of a limp than he’d had before.

When Gort was out of sight in the trees below, Jen and Arn looked back across the mountain-rimmed valley. Far to the south they could see the meadow and the warm lake. From here they couldn’t make out the Great Tree, the hemlock that was the name tree of their family whose ancestors had left this world so many generations before. Only Tsuga Wanders-too-far had ever been allowed to return, went Ganonoot’s story, and the others would forever be haunted by their loss.

Somewhere in the blue haze of the distance, beyond the forests and rivers, beyond the warm lake, was the river of the shandeh, and the winter camp, where their friends, the only ones they’d ever had, would now be going about their lives.

Behind them a pebble ticked against another, and they turned. Standing there was a large and handsome doe of the white-tailed deer, its coat a glossy reddish brown blending into pure white at its chest and belly. The large ears, as well as the deep brown eyes, were directed toward them with a great attention that held no fear, just calmness and sadness.

Jen looked deep into the doe’s wide eyes. “It’s Ah-neeah’s guide,” she said. “I know her from before.”

One morning in March, Eugenia awoke to find the air in the cabin different. She could breathe more easily. Tim Hemlock, at her side, seemed to breathe more easily too. There was a moist warmth in the air she hadn’t felt for the weeks and weeks of the iron ice. Maybe the cold had broken. Maybe spring would come again.