The Oblate's Confession (14 page)

The hermit sat up as if stung. “Where?!”

I nodded toward the tracks.

He looked that way uncertainly and then, after a moment’s hesitation, smiled. “No,” he said, his voice relaxing, becoming again Father’s voice at ease. “Not Cumbrogi. Something better I think. Something you’re going to like.”

I started to ask another question but the hermit just shook his head. For once this didn’t bother me. Something good was going to happen, something I was going to like. And there would be no
Cumbrogi, no knives, no axes. Father had said so. Obediently, like a good child, I leaned against the old man and waited, enjoying his warmth, the smell of his smell.

A little later on something made me aware again of my position. Reluctantly, like someone pulling himself from a good dream, I pulled myself up from Father’s side and looked out over the top of the log. There was nothing there. The path sat as empty and dull as before. I settled back down again and was about to close my eyes when, once more, the hermit poked me. Annoyed now, I sat up and in the same instant saw something move at a little distance from us up the trail. I glanced over at Father and he smiled: this was what we’d been waiting for. I looked back at the place where the movement had occurred and once more a slip of color—vague, indecipherable—passed between two trees.

As the animal drew near, a peculiar rustling sound began to reach us, a sound such as chickens make when they scratch at the earth, and it was as I was trying to turn whatever was down there into a kind of large ground bird that the animal came momentarily into view, grew suddenly monstrous, the head too wide, the body too long, for anything that could ever hope to perch upon a branch, take wing, fly away. I threw a desperate glance up at the hermit, hoping that now we might fly, escape whatever it was his strange craft had conjured up, but Father continued to stare down at the path, inured, it seemed, to the grotesqueness of the thing that walked there.

And it was then, as I looked down that way one last time, that the animal came most fully into view, became, quite simply, what it was. A fox. A very old fox but a fox nonetheless, the poor thing feeling its way cautiously down an otherwise unexceptional forest path.

I looked at the hermit and he nodded, this was what he had been expecting.

I looked back at the trail, the animal just then drawing even with us. For a moment it seemed to hesitate, a patch of light touching the side of its face—ears up, whiskers black and alive, eyes wondering—and then, as if we’d committed some offense,
the beast turned its back on us and leapt into the underbrush on the far side of the trail, its rear-end hanging in the air just a moment longer than seemed necessary.

Though I watched the open spaces along the line of flight indicated by that leap, I did not catch sight of the animal again. Still I had seen it. And despite its having been so old and ill, it was fun having seen a fox so close. I felt we had outwitted a very clever beast.

“Did you like that?"

I looked up at the hermit and smiled.

The hermit looked back at the place where the fox had been and I could tell that he had liked it too.

“Where did he go?”

The hermit shrugged.

“How did you know he was coming?”

Father smiled and, without saying anything, stood up and began to walk back down to the path. By the time I got down there, he was already on his knees, studying the dust.

“You see these here?” The hermit indicated the tracks I had mistaken for a dog’s.

“The fox?”

“Yes, very good. Now what can you tell me about them?”

“Was he after this bird?”

“The thrush? No, that was earlier, you see how its prints start up again over here?”

Oh.

“But it was good you noticed that, it could have been that.” The hermit’s smile made me feel better. “You see how the fox’s tracks go right through here without stopping, as if it were in a hurry, and then again over here?”

I nodded. “So he’d been here before?”

“Uh-huh, and do you see here, where the fox came back up the path?”

“Yes.”

“Now why do you suppose it would do that? Why would a fox who’s supposed to be so crafty keep coming up and down this

path like that, when it could just as well travel through the wood?” “Because it was old?”

Father looked at me.

“I mean, because it was so old, maybe it was easier for him to walk on the path than in the forest.”

“What makes you think the fox was old?”

“Or sick. Maybe it was sick.”

Father just looked at me.

“Well, because its undersides hung down like that? I mean that didn’t look right. And it was so thin. He just didn’t look right.” “Right. Good. Well, that’s a good idea. So the fox is too old to walk through the forest, the path is easier, so what can you tell about these tracks?”

“That he came through here more than once? That he liked going up and down here?”

“Right...and what else? Look closely.”

I was already on my hands and knees but now I put my face close enough to smell the dust.

“Careful, don’t disturb the tracks.”

I pulled back a little and looked again. The things appeared all the same to me, small dog tracks, some going down the mountain, some coming back up.

“What about this here?” Father pointed at a print that looked a little whiter than the others.

“Yes?”

“Notice the raindrops?”

“They’re all crushed from where he stepped on them?”

“Right, and over here?”

“These must have fallen after he walked through here.”

Father looked at me, waiting.

I had to think about it for a while—seeing the raindrops falling on the footprints, seeing other footprints falling on the raindrops—but when it finally came to me the solution seemed so obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it before: “You can tell when things happened!” I cried. “You can tell when he passed through here by the raindrops!”

“Yes!” said the hermit, and I could see that he was proud of me. “Yes, that’s very good. I believe you’ve got a talent for this, Winwaed,”

I smiled. He was right. I
was
good at this.

“Now see these here?” Father pointed at a set of the whiter prints. “When we first got here, only these prints going up the mountain had tread upon raindrops, all the others going up and down preceded the rain. So that was how I knew the fox was coming. It had gone up and down the mountain several times, and now it was clearly up again. The likelihood that it would come down once more was good.”

“What about these?”

“That’s the set it just made, coming back down past us. See where it takes off there when it caught our scent?”

I smiled. I liked this. It was so easy. I was amazed I hadn’t seen it all before.

“So I still don’t understand though. Why’s he keep using the trail when he could be going through the wood?”

“A good question.” Father looked back down the way the fox had gone. “It’s off and running now but maybe if we follow its tracks back up the mountain we could see where it’s been.”

I nodded.

“You lead. You’re good at this.”

Of course I wasn’t, not really, and it wasn’t long before I found out just how little I actually knew. At first, as we went along, the path remained dusty, the tracks, like little pictures of fox feet, easy to follow, but after we had gone only a short distance we came to a stretch of ground where the surface was hard, the dust almost non-existent. Here, except for the occasional claw mark or scratch, the animal had left little trace of itself. Sunlight made matters worse. Whenever we came to open ground, the few marks that did exist faded before the sun like shadows. I began to get frustrated. When, inevitably, I came to a place where, no matter how hard I tried, I could find no more prints, I looked at the hermit as if it were his fault.

The hermit just smiled. “Sometimes,” he said, “you have to
get down on the ground like the animal you’re following.”

I looked away. When I looked back again, the hermit was on his hands and knees, studying the ground carefully. When he saw that I was looking at him, he raised his leg like a dog.

I laughed.

The hermit smiled and went back to studying the path.

“What do you see?”

“Not much. You were right, this is a smart fox.”

I smiled.

Then the hermit did something that surprised me. Quite deliberately, like a man eavesdropping at a wall, he placed his ear to the ground, held his hand up as if signalling for silence, then became entirely still. For a moment I was sure that he could hear the fox, that, somehow, he listened for footsteps long after they had been made; but then he switched ears and I saw that he wasn’t listening so much as looking: examining the surface of the path from the lowest possible angle so that no mark or scratch, no matter how small or insignificant, could be missed. I was a little disappointed.

After so many months it would have been nice to see a miracle.

Presently the hermit’s expression changed. “Look,” he said, “a sort of cave.”

I was beside him in an instant. All my life I had wanted to see a cave. “Where?”

The hermit pointed at the base of the bramble bordering the trail.

“Where? I don’t see anything.”

“There, see how the bushes are pushed apart there. The fox forced its way up through the thicket, making a sort of tunnel as it went.”

For a moment longer I saw nothing and then, quite suddenly, I saw what the hermit was talking about. Beneath the green roof of the bramble there was a weaker understory of stems and dead brush. It was up through this underlying tangle that our fox had gone, snapping and breaking canes as it went but creating, in the process, a sort of fox-sized passageway. I looked at the thing—like a cave but not a cave—and wished I could enter it. Bending down
I could see that, further back, it rose with the ground up into the body of the bramble. The cave I sometimes imagined Lot and his daughters living in rose at a similar angle as it climbed back up into the earth. And it was quite possible I would never see a real cave. Father Prior said the mountains around here held few of them.

“I don’t think I could fit in there, do you?”

I looked at the hermit and smiled. Though he was as thin as the rest of us, he liked to complain I was making him fat.

“But maybe you could.”

Again I stared at him, this time expectantly.

“Would you?”

“Of course, Master,” I said, assuming custody of the eyes and trying to look serious. We both knew he had just provided my excuse should Baldwin complain of the state of my knees.

“Be careful ”

I nodded and then, fearing he might change his mind, lay down quickly and reached up into the hole.

The first thing I touched pricked me. I drew my hand back and licked the finger, trying not to let the hermit see I’d been hurt. Then I reached up into the hole again and this time found something smooth and firmly rooted in the ground. Grabbing this, I pulled myself halfway up into the fox’s tunnel, the bramble heaving around me like an animal disturbed in its sleep. It was a tight fit. Briars caught at my woolens and scratched the top of my head. With my body now blocking the entrance, the light became poor, like dusk, and the air smelled of dog. After taking a moment to assure myself that nothing terrible was going to happen, I began to work my way further in, using elbows and toes. The light grew poorer still and I felt my feet join me in the tunnel as a sort of coolness. After that the world grew quiet, but I wasn’t afraid. I pushed with my toes and pulled with my elbows. Every now and then, from somewhere behind me, the hermit called advice, “Watch for the thorns!” “If you get stuck, it’s all right. I’ll get you out.”

If truth be known, I pretty much ignored him. There was
something about this I liked, something about pulling myself along on my belly like a snake, the hermit so close I could hear him but not see him, nor he me. I was hidden yet known, on my own but not unprotected. Except for Father’s calls, which became more and more muffled the further I went, nothing reached me. There were only the sounds of my own exertions and the musty odors of fox and berry and something not quite identifiable. It was like being somewhere both familiar and strange, a fever in the comfort of your own bed. And of course there was the adventure of it. As I pulled my way along I couldn't help pretending I
was
the fox, mute and savage, working my way toward who knew what, answerable to nothing and no one, neither Abbot nor Rule, nor good Brother Baldwin.

After going what seemed a considerable distance (though it could not have been much more than that between the bottom of the abbey path and the kitchen gate), a strange noise began to filter down to me through the bramble. By now the hermit was no longer calling out instruction and I was able to concentrate on what I was hearing. It sounded a little like the note a bird makes when you get too close to its nest and a little like the squeaking of mice. Whatever it was that was making these noises, there was something in their nature that struck me as essentially harmless, and, bravely, I soldiered on. It was shortly after this that the passage I was following took a sharp turn to the right and, negotiating this curve, I found I could now make out individual branches and briars in the space around me, see the scratches on the backs of my hands. Ahead of me a circle of light—and what I took to be open air—beckoned.