Tsuga's Children (7 page)

At dawn he came to the same icy knoll where Jen and then his mother had faced the clamor of the falling water. He knew at once that it was the same falls, the same black rock and spruce-topped cliffs he and Jen had seen in the old woman’s eye. It all looked evil, but the old woman could not be all evil. Hadn’t she taught him, in the strange language he now also knew, how to make the soothing medicine for his father? Yet he knew that the greatest evil is not easy to read, for it gives a little in order to take away more. It is patient, and waits, speaking in convincing ways. He knew this through all the old stories, where death is real and comes to the good as well as to the bad. He had hurt himself before, and had been in pain; he knew what happened to all living things—trees, animals, the pig they had butchered and eaten, the tall grass cut down in summer and fall. But even so he found the tracks along the narrow ledge, read them as his father had taught him, and went on.

He never thought his body would betray him and make him fall; if the ledge held, he would hold. He was tired and hungry, but he was nearly a man, the only man in his family who was not sick, and he would go on until he saw for himself what had happened to his little sister—or until what had happened to her happened to him.

He came to the narrow shelf of rock and found, behind the hurtling columns of water, the same dark entrance Jen had found. With the water hissing past him and the roaring from below, he held on carefully and looked around. Yes, there on the rock were small scratches that must have been made by Jen’s crampons. His mother, from her tracks and what she’d said, must have come just this far, and he wondered why she hadn’t seen, or mentioned, the cave entrance. For a moment he thought he must be in the wrong place; but then he remembered his father having told him that tracks are as sure a sign as the thing that made them, even though they tend not to stick in the memory as well. He must believe the evidence of his eyes, and never forget. Jen, Oka and a deer had come here, as had his mother, and only his mother’s tracks had returned. He knew that he was logical and practical, especially compared to Jen, who tended to hear odd voices and do things without thinking them out beforehand. Like the night she insisted on looking into the old lady’s eye. She tended to do things like that, for reasons she could never explain.

What, he wondered, had made her go into this dank cave all alone, searching for a cow? What could have made her care so much for a cow? She had reasons, unreasonable reasons. He knew that he was going in because he had to find his sister and bring her back home. For a little while, even in his fear, he thought proudly of himself. But then a small voice said to him, Yes, but partly it is Jen’s authority, her unknown reason, which lets you be brave enough to enter here. She went in first, alone; you go in second, with the possibility of finding company in that darkness.

He took off his crampons and tied them to his pack, tightened up all the straps so the pack rode high and easy on his shoulders. There at his belt was the knife with its bright, slightly curved blade his father had forged for him and he had filed and polished. He had selected part of a deer antler, taking care that it curved the right way for his hand and was the right thickness, and fitted it with rivets through the tang. Then he had carved a scabbard from two thin pieces of cured spruce, two pieces that he fit together and bound with buckskin, sewn while it was wet so that it shrank around the scabbard taut and hard.

He undid the thong and pulled the polished blade from its scabbard. It was sharp, honed and stropped sharp as a razor, and it gave him, through his pride in having helped make it, a feeling that he was ready, that this fine tool might help him in whatever he had to do. He turned as if to say goodby to the light. He did have flint and tinder in his pack, if it became necessary. But he knew that Jen hadn’t any, and he would save the fire for dire need. Then he entered the cave.

The roar of the falling water receded as he felt his way deeper into the mountain, until it was only a faint sigh, farther and farther behind him. He could tell by the echoes of his cautious, sliding steps that the passage was narrow, so at least he wasn’t worried about getting off the track. Several times he was startled by turns, descents, and once by his own cough and its strange, hard echo. His hand would go to the hilt of his knife. His eyes remained open, staring, searching for light. Sometimes he would shut them hard and see little star-flashes, but these, he knew, were only inside his head. He must make himself stop imagining monsters, dead things that still lived, pale organisms with tentacles that might wait to reach for his blind face. He made himself think of his purpose, which had nothing to do with monsters or old legends; he was to find Jen and, if possible, Oka, and bring them back home. He wasn’t hopeful about Oka because it seemed such a crazy thing to have left the comparatively warm barn to go off into the ice. The cow must have lost her senses, or been let out, or led away, maybe by the old lady. In any of these circumstances other forces than mere cow stupidity were involved, and he didn’t see how he could fight against them. But Jen could be talked to—if he could find her.

He kept going forward, and after a long time he smelled the same rich, autumn smells Jen had. Finally he came to the cavern and immediately recognized the odor of bats, because he had once explored a small bat cave—a deep crack in a ledge, not far from his father’s westernmost field. If there were bats here, there had to be an opening to the outside so that at dusk they could fly out in search of their food. He could see no light at all, and he couldn’t feel the presence of bats, so it must be night. Beneath his feet was tangible evidence, a soft coating of bat dung. Now would be the time to use his flint and tinder—but then, much as he craved light, any kind of light, he knew that if there was an opening ahead, some light would show even at night, even from behind deep clouds, and if he looked at fire his eyes would not be sensitive enough to see it.

So he moved forward across the cavern floor, feeling ahead with each foot in case there was a crevice or a stumbling stone. Finally, after crossing the cavern in several directions, not knowing whether he might have been going in circles or zigzags, he did see just the faintest deep blue haze, and climbed toward it, over rocks and up a gradual incline of rubble, hoping desperately that the faint haze was not just some trick of his head. Then he saw a star. It blinked on, then off, but it was a star and it was as if he had been suffocating and could breathe again.

He hurried through the cave entrance and stood in calm air, yet after the closeness of the cave it seemed moving and alive. He could feel distance in it, and freedom. The clouds moved high over his head. An occasional star winked through. He couldn’t follow Jen in the dark, so he moved some distance away from the cave and found some ground juniper, under whose prickly branches he could rest until morning. He thought of calling for her, but he didn’t want to disturb the night, or to reveal his presence in this place he couldn’t see. He was hungry. The thought of the bannock in his pack made his mouth water, but he’d brought that for Jen. Instead of thinking about food he would try to get some rest, even go to sleep.

When Eugenia awakened, back in the cabin, the fire was nearly out. Once again the gray light of dawn filtered wanly through the ice-covered windows. The cabin was cold—too cold, near to freezing. Immediately she felt its emptiness. Jen was gone, lost forever. Arn must be hungry; he wouldn’t have eaten enough. She had failed to take care of her children. Her husband slept on his pallet, his breaths faint puffs of mist above his thin nostrils.

“Arn,” she called softly toward the loft. “Arn, come and I’ll make you some breakfast.”

There was no answer.

Arn woke with the feeling that time had passed. He’d had a dream, a strange dream, but then, most dreams were strange. He dreamed he’d seen hundreds of people all at once, standing, talking, cooking over small fires, some of them going in and out of small log buildings and tents. He’d never seen more than five or six people together in his life, and those were his family and the Traveler and the old lady and a visitor he just barely remembered and Jen couldn’t remember. That had been, he’d been told, when he was just three years old. All he could remember was that the visitor had been a big man dressed in brown, with a brown beard. But in the dream all the people were together, in what must have been a village, and none of them thought it strange.

Light rose in the eastern sky, slowly outlining the mountain ridges from behind, then bringing into its glow the snowy western cliffs on the other side of the deep valley. As the light grew his dream faded and he examined the valley in its bowl of mountains. Although the pale winter sun was the same, it was a different season here. The sun rose at a shallow angle that showed it would scarcely rise above the cliffs before it began to descend, but the valley was warm, as if this were the month of September or October instead of February. The leaves of the small birches were yellow, just about to fall, and the high-bush cranberries down along the rock-slide were ripe, their small globes glowing red. Across the forest of spruce and balsam below was an unfrozen blue lake and a green meadow, and beyond another dark forest of evergreens a cloud of mist rose in slow swirls from what must have been a swamp or a pond. Here and there around the perimeter of the valley white water splashed and fell in streams from the snowline, across gray rock, to disappear into the trees below. The valley was alive, not hibernating like the frozen wilderness from which he had come.

He went back to the cave entrance to see if he could find any sign that Jen had come this way, and there upon a rock were her iron crampons, the small crampons his father had forged for her. Jen was nowhere in sight, but right there on the rock was the hard evidence that she had been here. He called for her, but got no answer, his voice thinning out across the distance. A mild wind moved the tops of the trees below, and the mist rose silently from across the valley. He untied his own crampons from his pack and put them beside Jen’s, so that she’d know he was here if she came back to the cave. Remembering what his father had taught him, he looked for more signs before making up his mind where she might have gone. He found vague smudges of bat dung that might have been made by her boots; he found a spot of drying blood, which scared him until he found the dead bat folded in upon itself like a small gray glove and saw that the blood had come from its wounds. Two broad-tailed hawks circled far above, riding the air and watching.

Finally he decided that Jen would have gone down toward the far field by the lake. She would be following Oka, or hoping to find Oka, and that meadow would be a good place for a cow. Maybe he could pick up a trail farther down in the soft ground among the trees. He would find berries and water down there too, for he was hungry and thirsty and he would need energy to go on.

As the sun rose above the mountain wall the air grew warmer, so he took off his parka, rolled it as tightly as he could and roped it to his pack before climbing down the rock-slide. The cranberries were bitter, but he ate some anyway, and put some in his pocket.

When the trees rose around him like dark towers and the air dimmed into the cool green rooms of the forest, he thought again about the ancient gods that were supposed to inhabit Cascom Mountain. This valley itself must be part of the mountain, or in the mountain, if his sense of direction was right. He was certain his father had never been here. The valley was beautiful, with its strange warmth and fall colors. It was so easy to walk again, as he had last fall, on spruce needles instead of ice.

After a while he came to the same bog Jen had found. He saw where a large animal, probably a bear, had crushed the blueberry plants. Here, as in the woods, the ground was so fibrous and spongy no tracks could possibly show. In the opening of the bog he could see the shadows cast by the low sun, so he got his bearings again. The meadow and lake should be due south, where the sun would be by the middle of the day.

Before entering the gloomy corridors of the spruce he thought of home. He could turn around right now and find the bat cave, then, using fire, follow the passage back toward the waterfall and the world he had left. It was cold there, but only in that world would he find his mother and father and the cabin where he had been born. He would rather be shivering in front of a meager fire in that familiar room than here in this autumn warmth. He could turn around right now and go back. But then he saw in his mind Jen’s iron crampons upon the rock. In his fear and loneliness he had begun to forget them, but they were there and they were Jen’s and she was his little sister, who would also, in spite of her mad affection for a cow, be hungry and lonely.

He could turn around and go back. He could make his body do it, but in a strange deep way the most important part of him, what he thought of himself, would still be here, left here forever in this alien valley. It seemed to him that when he came to this conclusion and could not escape it, something free and selfish and innocent left him forever, and he felt loss and sadness. Yet while he felt that loss and sadness he was a little less afraid. In a few months (if he lived that long, a new voice within him said) he would be ten years old, growing toward manhood. Ten was old, an age when tools began to stop being toys. The knife on his belt, though small, was not a toy, nor was his pack and the things it contained.
They’d better not be toys,
the new voice said.
Your father is not here.

A small wisp of gray smoke came from the Hemlocks’ cabin chimney. The cabin was set deeply in the ice, as if the ice around it were a clutching hand, cold rigid fingers curving over the roof and around the log walls.

Inside the cabin the air was dead cold except for a small space in front of the fire. Tim Hemlock lay sleeping on his pallet, covered with a bearskin robe, his thin dark face calm but not aware. Eugenia, bundled up in her parka, poked the fire carefully and fed it slowly from the last of the wood. She could do little else. She had gone once again onto the ice to follow Arn’s trail, but came again to that blank wall behind the terrifying falls.