Tsuga's Children (11 page)

“Eugenia, you must tell Jen and Arn …” His face turned perplexed. “You must tell Jen and Arn …”

“But they’re gone, Tim. They’re gone!”

He didn’t seem to understand. “You must,” he said weakly. “You must.” Then he slept, but later as she raised a cup of soup to his lips he drank and his eyes opened upon her face again.

“How long have I been sick?” he asked in his dry, unused voice.

“For a long time. For weeks.”

“Where are the children?”

She had to tell him they were gone, how Jen had followed Oka and Arn followed Jen, about the falls and the narrow trail along the cliff, and how the trail ended behind the falling water. He made her tell him everything that had happened, how Arn had learned the old lady’s sign language and made the medicine for him, and how it had seemed to make him breathe easier.

“What did they take with them?” he asked.

“I don’t know. All I know is they’re gone. Our children are gone!”

“You must look carefully and tell me.” He tried to get up, but hadn’t the strength in his arms to push the bear-skin robe aside. He sank back with a groan. “I can’t help them. But please, Eugenia, you must tell me what they took with them.”

“Jen wore her warmest clothes and her crampons. She took Oka’s bridle, but nothing else.”

Tim Hemlock groaned. “And what did Arn take?”

Eugenia looked through Arn’s things, at the clothes-pegs near the door, everywhere in the cabin. He, too, had worn his warmest clothes and his crampons. He had also taken flint and tinder, a coil of narrow rope, his pack, his knife, a piece of bannock and one of the birch-bark boxes from the mantel.

“He could make fire, then,” Tim Hemlock said.

“But, Tim … I went to the end of the trail. They didn’t come back, so they must have …”

“We can’t be sure. And the old lady? She never came back?”

“Yes, she’s gone. They’re all gone. Am and Jen fell into the chasm! My poor children!”

“I know that place,” Tim Hemlock said.

“But I thought you never went to the mountain!”

“I’ve gone farther than I’ve told you.” He struggled to get up, but he had no strength. “My arms are like lead. Where is my strength? But I
must
find them!” He lay back, his eyes staring, his face slack with despair because he could not go to find his children.

Morning came to the strange valley—cold, gray, with a mean wind and a mist that swirled over the ashes of the fire and up Arn’s legs and into the spaces between his mittens and his sleeves. He wanted to sleep but the wind teased him cruelly. If he pulled up his legs, it got in around his ankles; if he rolled up in a ball, it laid its icy touch on his back. Finally he knew he had to get up and build up the fire again, as he had twice in the night. Then he and Jen would at least be warm on the side they turned to the fire.

His maple spit was gone, and with it the roasted carcase of the porcupine. The head was missing too, as were the innards and the skin; only the quills still lay there in a ragged pile. Something had come in the night—and there were the tracks, one of them very clear in the blown ashes at the edge of the fire—the wide, fuzzy, clawless paw print of a lynx.

He built up the fire, and when Jen woke up he told her that a lynx had taken the rest of their food. Then he went to the brook with the iron pot to get water so they could at least have tea from the powders for their breakfast. There was strength in the tea; he had felt it the night before and seen the change in Jen, how the hot tea had brought her back from the cold. It had given him the energy to skin and roast the porcupine. No, more than
that, it had given him the will to do it.

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 thinking 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.