Tsuga's Children Read online

  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.

  6. Toward the Meadow

  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.

  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.