Tsuga's Children Page 9

  He knelt by a pool of the brook to dip water into his pot. Something below the moving surface took his eye, just beyond the rim of the ice he’d had to break, and made his eyes go deeper, into the water depths. A long dark green thing moved away from his shore, deeper, then disappeared. The wind paused for a moment, and as the ripples lessened he saw it again, down by a boulder, lying in its moving element behind its holding stone, its fins barely pulsing for balance. He could just make out the red, green, blue and yellow spots on its sides, dimmed of color by the water. It was a brook trout, a squaretail at least a foot long. There would be others, too, alive down there, waiting for the current to bring their food to them.

  He took the pot of water back and hung it over the fire on its propped, forked stick. If only he had a fishhook, some line and bait. But he didn’t, so that was that. Then, later, as they drank the tea made from purselane, dock, dried red mushroom and the brown powder from the box marked with the curved hand, he began to get ideas. He had his knife; what couldn’t a man do with a knife, a sharp, tempered blade he kept always by his side? His knife was his faithful tool, all he needed in the wilderness if he knew how to use what was there to use. If he kept his wits about him and didn’t get scared and turn into a baby, he ought to be able to survive and to provide for his little sister as well.

  So he began to think. Jen sat with the pot of tea in her hands, pensively staring at the fire.

  As he thought, he took the piece of flint from his pack and with one of its facets carefully honed the cutting edge of his knife where the edge had touched porcupine bone. His knife wasn’t really dull, but he could just make out along its edge the slightest burr. After lightly honing it he stropped the blade on the side of his boot until it was so sharp it faded at its very edge into invisibility.

  He would make a hook and line. He might make a spear out of a thin maple wand, but the brook was too deep where he’d seen the trout, and if he got wet his clothes would be a long time drying. So he must let his bait go alone across those depths, counting on the hunger of the trout to fasten themselves to his line so he could pull them out onto the bank. He went over in his mind every possible thing he and Jen had between them that he might use. The hemp rope, though narrow, was too large. He might possibly untwist some of its strands and use only a few of them, but that seemed too lengthy a job. Then he noticed the decorative border at the bottom of Jen’s parka, a strip of red fox fur that had been sewn on by her mother, either with thin buckskin rawhide or with the linen thread the Traveler brought.

  “Jen,” he said, “I saw trout in the brook and I’m going to catch enough for breakfast.”

  “How?” she asked. “Did you bring fishing gear?”

  “No, we’re going to make some. But I need some line.” He wondered how she’d feel about unstitching part of the band of red fox fur from her parka because he knew how proud she’d been of it. “Would you mind taking the bottom stitches out of the fox fur on your parka?”

  She thought about it for just a second. “No,” she said, looking at it. “It’s just decoration, so it doesn’t matter.” She took his knife and started the thread loose on the end, and he whittled her a sharp stick she could use as an awl to loosen each stitch in turn. The thread was the strong, waxed kind the Traveler brought, which would make good line.

  Now he had to have a hook. As he considered this, strange visions and alternatives began to come into his mind, pictures of hooks quite unlike the steel ones his father made, with their curved shanks and small barbs. One he thought was just a straight piece of bone or wood sharpened on both ends, with a hole in the center for the line. Sticky bait of some kind kept the hook parallel to the line until the fish swallowed it, and then a pull on the line caused the sharpened ends to go crossways in the fish’s throat or stomach. He seemed to see a man in brown buckskin peering into the water, watching this device with patient eyes. But then other hooks appeared, carved from jawbones, from the spines of animals and fish.

  He had been looking at the porcupine quills the lynx had left scattered on the ground. “Nothing of you will be wasted,” he’d said to the grandfather, the porcupine, not knowing why he’d said it. Gingerly he went through the piles of quills and picked out some of the strongest, sharpest ones. Then he found a piece of dry, unrotted pine and carved out a small shank, tapering it at the bottom so that the porcupine quills, cut off short at their tips and lashed with thread to the wooden shank, would stick back up at an angle. At the top of the shank he carved a groove all the way around to tie the line to. It was close, careful work because the hook had to be quite small, less than an inch long. He made several of the shanks. Jen had freed a long piece of thread by now, and he took enough of it to wind and tie two quill barbs to each shank.

  It was Jen who suggested that he try a small fluff of fox fur, stuck with spruce gum and then tied, on each hook. She remembered what some of her father’s trout and salmon flies looked like.

  “But what will the trout think they are?” Arn said.

  “I don’t know, but I think they’ll try to eat them. They’ll think they’re some kind of a bug,” Jen said with such conviction he knew it was that strange talent she had for knowing deeper things than he about the thoughts of animals.

  Jen managed to free a good six feet of the strong thread, and while he looked for a straight pole among the hard-wood brush at the edge of the field, she found a spruce that was leaking gum. They finished the trout flies, which did look like a strange sort of insect. Arn tied on one of the flies, then tied the line to the end of a good pole, and they went to the brook, keeping low and quiet as they crept up to the head of the pool.

  “Charr, charr, you will eat,” Arn whispered. Charr? he thought. Why did he say that? He remembered then that his father had once used the word for trout.

  He and Jen hid behind a boulder and Am let the fly down on the water with hardly a ripple. It floated a few feet, turning slowly in the eddies of the pool, before something swirled excitedly down in the water, then shot up toward the fly and took it with a rounded swirl of water and a splash. Then came the tug on the line, that wild thing turning away toward safety, but caught, struggling, zigzagging, pulling with its water strength. Though his arms were shaking from the surprise of his sudden connection with that desperate creature of the water, Arn held the pole as steadily as he could and backed away from the boulder to the more gradual bank of the pool. Then, with a smooth motion because he wasn’t sure of the strength of his hook and line, he pulled the trout out over the thin rim of ice to the dry pebbles and grabbed him with both hands.

  The trout was beautiful in his dark green and bright jewels of red, blue and yellow along his sides. He was about a foot long, plump and muscular. “Charr,” Arn said, “nothing of you will be wasted,” then took his knife and hit the trout just behind its head with the back of the blade. The trout quivered and was dead. He took the hook from its mouth to find that one of the porcupine quills was bent over, so he tied on a new fly.

  He got three more good fish from the pool before the trout grew suspicious of the red-fox fly and would try to eat it no more. “We’ve got all we need for breakfast anyway,” Arn said. He cleaned the fish beside the brook and they took them back to the fire, where they roasted them lightly over the coals, the fish impaled on green sticks. They ate the trout down to their pearly skeletons. They ate the crisp fins and even the round buttons of muscle in their cheeks, the muscles that closed the trout’s jaws upon their prey. Then, full and feeling the borrowed strength coming into their arms and legs, they had some more of the tea made from the powders.

  Arn drowned the fire down to its last hiss with water from the brook, coiled his narrow hemp rope and arranged everything in his pack, and they were ready to resume their search for Oka.

  Arn had put the line and the hooks carefully away in his pack. They might need them again, of course, but what he wanted so badly to do was to show them to his father. His father would be proud of him, and of Jen for thi
nking of the fox-fur dressing on the hooks. But there was sadness and uncertainty in that feeling because he didn’t know how his father was, if he was getting better or worse. He worried about his mother, too, knowing how little food was left at home—except for the animals and the seeds they would need to get through another year.

  But how proud he would be to show the clever hooks to his father, and see his father’s big, craftsman’s hands holding the tiny hooks and admiring them!

  As they crossed the meadow toward the big evergreen tree, Jen saw in her mind only that far animal she had seen, or thought she’d seen, the day before. The one that was stockier than the deer, with the white spot on its neck. It had to be Oka.

  “If we don’t see Oka from the height of the land, or find her tracks, we’re going to go home,” Arn said.

  “We must find Oka!” Jen cried.

  “Look, Jen, I’m worried about Mother and Dad. They’ll think we’re lost.”

  Jen heard in his voice that he had made a decision. She didn’t know how to change his mind. He seemed bigger and more decisive than he ever had at home. He’d stopped, and looked at her sternly as he spoke. “We haven’t seen one of Oka’s tracks in this valley.”

  “She went along the ledge to the falls! You saw her tracks there!”

  “Oka and a deer,” Arn said. “Maybe the deer led her away. How do you know she’d even want to come back?”

  “We have to find Oka!” Jen heard tears in her voice, knowing with just a little shame that she was using them to try to change Arn’s mind. In the past her tears hadn’t always affected him that much, but she felt that he had changed.

  “Think of Mother and Dad,” he said. “Think how they must feel.”

  Arn was right, and he knew it. He didn’t have to listen to Jen at all because if he started back for home she would have to follow, and it didn’t matter how much she cried, either. He was in charge and he’d saved her life and that was that. “We’ll go up where the big tree is and look around, but that’s all. Then we start for home.” He felt his power, one her tears could not change.

  But he looked at her tears, and as he did he remembered something he had done, once, something powerful and shameful. His father had made him a bow of ash, with a waxed string, and four spruce arrows. While alone near the river he saw a toad upon a clay bank, where the clay would receive and not break his arrow. A brown toad. No matter how he tried, and tried afterwards, he could find no harm in a toad. Yes, it had been a lucky shot, but that was no excuse for the harmless toad impaled and in agony. He had withdrawn the bloodied arrow from the clay and the dying toad and shot it away, across the river where he would never find it. He told no one what he’d done.

  “Arn!” Jen was crying. “Please, Arn!”

  “We’ll look for a while,” he said. “But if we don’t find any sign of her, we’ll go home.”

  “Thank you,” Jen said, rubbing her eyes with the backs of her mittens. “Thank you, Arn.”

  Then Arn seemed to be fading out before Jen’s eyes. Everything about him whitened, faded. He seemed distant from her even though he hadn’t moved. “Arn!” she called.

  He moved toward her and took her hand. “It’s fog,” he said.

  The air had grown moist and warm. They looked around them, but beyond the crisp brown grass stems at their feet the whole valley had faded out until everything was as white as paper. They could move their hands into the white and it didn’t resist them, but it was blank, quietly opaque. Its warm dampness was already beading on their skin and clothes. They could just make out each other. Even their feet were almost lost down in the whiteness.

  “Now we can’t move at all,” Arn said.

  “But we have to,” Jen said. The silent fog made them keep their voices low, as if it were a presence they must not disturb.

  “We’ll just get lost,” Arn said.

  “You don’t care about Oka!”

  “Well…” he said, listening as if to the fog. There was a distant thrumming, felt through the ground, through their feet. Arn said, “We belong at home, Jen. I don’t understand this place.”

  The thrumming grew louder, but seemed to come from no one direction. For a moment the fog around them lifted as a space of clear air the size of a room opened upon them and passed, moving swiftly though they felt no wind. Jen saw how Arn’s face was shiny with the beads of warm water, as were the arms of her parka and the backs of her mittens. She took off her mittens and put them in her pocket, feeling the damp warmth on her hands. The ground began to shudder with the drumming sounds.

  “The boars,” she said, taking Arn’s hand again. “It sounds like the boars!”

  “Stand still,” he said.

  The fog passed them in white waves with openings in between, so they felt hidden and then not hidden, though the fog’s blankness was ominous because in it everything else was hidden from them. The drumming grew louder. The earth shook beneath them until they were certain they would be run over by the power that came toward them. The fog still moved, fading and thickening. When the drumming grew so loud they knew they must be caught beneath a thousand hooves, they held their breaths and saw dark hunched shapes go by them, several yards away. The dark shapes, made gray and insubstantial by the fog, drove on by and faded in the fog as the rumbling lessened.

  “It was the boars,” Jen whispered. “It was the boars.”

  “If we could find the tree, we might climb up in it,” Arn whispered back. He was shivering. “We were downwind, so they didn’t get our scent.”

  “Yes, they didn’t know we were here,” Jen said.

  “Could you feel them thinking?”

  “About other things, maybe.”

  The rolls of fog, according to Arn’s memory, came from the direction of the tree, so they went forward carefully into the unfelt but moving air, trying as best they could not to stumble. After a long while the fog began to thin, and finally they found themselves just at the edge of it, where it swirled from a lake or pond of hot water, rising up in whirls from the water’s surface. On their right the field was clear in colder air, but down to their left was the water from which the warm steam boiled soundlessly. An odor came from the water, the same odor that had been barely evident in the fog that had surrounded them. Arn recognized it now as something like a faint whiff of gunpowder, or the way his father’s rifle smelled after having been shot, before his father cleaned it. The stony edges of the pond were stained bright red, yellow and a mineral-green. The winter sun, just now coming out from behind high clouds, made the swirling mist pure white. To their right the winter meadow turned from green grass near the heat of the pond to sere brown hay as it rose to the northwest. The great evergreen tree was nowhere in sight, though halfway up the slope of the meadow were some piles of granite stones, some as regular and angular as walls.

  Without a word Arn and Jen climbed the slope toward the piles of stones. They would have to reach the height of the land in order to see the whole meadow and find the tree. Arn wanted to see the stones, too, in spite of his desire to get home as quickly as possible. He thought of the dream he’d had the first night in the valley, of all the people together among log huts, and tents made of animal skins. Those people all together had seemed, in the way of dreams, to have a powerful meaning; they had caused a yearning in him. The dream had been of this valley, he was certain now as they came up to the stones. Though they had been tumbled by time and weather, there was a regularity in their patterns that nothing in nature could have caused. There were four squares, each several yards across, each about the size of his father’s stone-walled forge house.

  “People lived here,” he said to Jen.

  Nothing was left but the tumbled walls. The brown meadow hay was as smooth as a lake up to the stones and between them, just the lonely walls keeping nothing in or out. The people who had lived among the walls were gone, all traces of their pathways gone, yet Arn felt their presence in this valley as if his own eyes, seeing the white snow fields an
d the far stone cliffs, made their eyes alive again. The valley was once their world, familiar to their eyes.

  He and Jen climbed on toward the top of the slope. All the meadow they could see was deserted. Not even a bird flew. Near the height of the land they began to see the top of the great tree, first its highest green branches, then more and more of it as it grew up into their sight. They were still far from the tree; they’d had no idea of its great size. As they approached, it loomed above them, its gray-brown trunk ascending, its long branches and short green needles like great wands extending to a hundred feet over their heads. The trunk grew out of jumbled gray rocks and an outcropping of granite, the muscular brown roots extending like huge clenching fingers over the ledge and down into the earth. They had never seen a tree like this one. It was an evergreen and bore small cones, but its great trunk and random branches had the clean separate-ness and strength of hardwood. The bark was grooved in random patterns, dry to the touch. The trunk was at least six feet in diameter and the first broad branches were far above their heads, much too high for them to climb.

  A light wind sighed through the tree, or the tree itself used the wind as its voice. They could hear no words but they felt at once another presence, a calm, distant strength that almost seemed to be aware of them.

  Suddenly Jen went to the tree and put her arms around one of its great arched roots. “I love this tree,” she said.

  Arn stood looking up into the tree. Thin winter clouds passed over the valley; the sturdy tree in its height seemed to stabilize the earth itself against their passing, keeping the ground where they stood firm against the turning of the sky. He had not been surprised by Jen’s sudden feeling for the tree, yet he wondered why she hadn’t surprised him. She nearly always came to such sudden conclusions, skipping whatever steps he might have to take. She always leapt into new things, attitudes, actions like her mad journey to rescue Oka. It was up to him to look carefully, to figure out what had to be done.