The phone receiver crackled ominously.
“But why not, Davy? I think your Uncle Dale is pretty neat, and I’ve never even seen any ginseng, and I think this would be a good time to combine both—kinda kill two birds with one stone.”
“It’s a matter of tradition, Liz. The men in my family have always been the ones who know the secret places where the ginseng grows; only now am I allowed to find out, and no Sullivan male has ever,
ever
taken a woman along.”
“Except your Aunt Hattie.” Uncle Dale sauntered into the kitchen.
David covered the phone with his hand and looked skeptically at his great-uncle.
“Who is it?” Uncle Dale asked.
“Liz Hughes,” David answered hurriedly. He spoke back into the receiver, “Just a minute, Liz.”
“What’s she want?”
David lowered the receiver to waist level. “Oh, she wants to go hunting ginseng with us tomorrow.”
“She does, does she? I think what she’s huntin’ don’t grow in the ground, though.”
“Uncle Dale, come on! I don’t want her goin’!”
David could hear Liz calling his name from down by his hip. “Better talk to her, son; don’t want yore hikin’ partner mad at you. Bad luck. I ’spect she’ll be wantin’ to go deer huntin’ next, and it wouldn’t do to be on her bad side—might get shot.” Uncle Dale’s voice was pitched a shade too loud, deliberately so, David suspected.
Reluctantly David raised the phone to his ear again.
“What was that?” Liz asked, slightly irritated.
“Uncle Dale thinks it’s all right for you to go,” he said glumly. “Seems Aunt Hattie used to go with him.”
“Good! When do we leave?”
“
Early,
Liz. Before daylight. It’s supposed to rain again tomorrow afternoon, and Uncle Dale wants to get an early start.”
“So why doesn’t he just wait till the weather’s better?”
“That’s what I asked him,” David sighed in some annoyance, “and all he’d say was something about having to do it when the moon was in the right phase. You can find ginseng anytime, apparently, but only certain times are best to harvest it. And it’s supposed to be most potent if you get it early in the morning while the dew’s still on it, or something like that. So it’s gotta start before sunup. Still want to go?” he added sarcastically.
“I’ll be there when I need to be,” Liz replied firmly, “and I’ll be dressed right and I’ll have what I need, and I bet I find some ginseng before you do.”
“Maybe you will and maybe you won’t,” David said, hanging up the receiver before she could reply.
“That’s some gal,” Uncle Dale said wryly as he helped himself to a cup of the morning’s coffee. “She really does remind me of yore great-aunt Hattie, rest her soul. Fine woman. Got up at four o’clock every mornin’ of her married life and sent me off to the copper mines to work. Damn fine woman, though, and a sight better with a gun than I am, too, if the truth was known. You know that ten-pointer I got over my fireplace that I always said I shot?” He took David by the shoulder conspiratorially. “Well,
she
got it, really—but I never told, and she let me have my glory. But why you reckon that Hughes gal wants to go huntin’ ’seng with us?”
David contemplated the floor. “I dunno. Just being pesky, I guess.”
Uncle Dale looked straight at him. “I think you do know.” David leaned up against the wall and folded his arms. “Well, she’s into this back-to-nature thing and all—survival skills, wilderness living, herbs and all that. She’s a walking
Foxfire Book
.”
“That may be true,” laughed Uncle Dale, “but there’s some things to a woman’s nature she’s never far from. Trouble is, us menfolks are usually too late in findin’ it out.” He laughed again.
“I can run pretty fast,” said David.
“Can you outrun one of Cupid’s arrows, though? That what you was runnin’ from the other day?”
David rolled his eyes. “You know that I don’t want you to go, either, for that matter.”
“Why, Davy boy! Why not? I been trompin’ around in them woods for sixty-odd years. I ain’t gonna quit now.”
“That’s a good reason: them sixty-odd years. You ain’t as young as you used to be.”
“I’m not? Well, that’s a fact—but them woods is a lot older’n I am, and they can still show a man a good time.”
David considered this unexpected piece of philosophy.
“But, Uncle Dale, suppose something happened to you out there?”
“What can happen? I know every rock and tree and stream for ten square miles back where we’re goin’. Been there every season and every weather. They ain’t nothin’ there can hurt me. Bears’ll run, what few there may be; ain’t no cougars no more; snakes you just gotta watch for; Indians gone a hundred fifty years; what else is there?”
“Oh, things like broken legs, sprained ankles…”
“Heart attacks?”
“Now that you mention it, yes.”
“Look, Davy, us Sullivans’re long lived folks; takes a lot to kill us. You ought to know that yoreself, considerin’ how busted up you was just two days ago. That even put the wind up me, if you want to know the truth. But look at you now. Just a scab or two to show for yore trouble. Few of us are ever sick more’n an aspirin’ll cure, and when we die, it’s usually ’cause we think it’s time for us to die—none of this lingerin’ in the hospital business. Shoot! Wars get more of us than anything else, and at that it takes some shootin’ to catch a mortal spot.”
David recalled how Uncle Dale had been wounded a couple of times in World War II, and he wasn’t a young man then. He glanced out into the yard and saw the red Mustang, recalled how another war had claimed David-the-elder and nearly unleashed a bitter retort, but restrained himself.
Uncle Dale was looking intently at him. “So what else is there to be scared of?”
“Maybe there’s things in the woods that you can’t see.”
“You been at them weird books again, ain’t you, boy?”
“They’re not weird; they were written by learned people.”
“As learned as you’ll be one day, I’ve no doubt. But look, David, I know they’s things in the world besides what we know; I’ve been too close to some of ’em to disbelieve entirely, like when I seen yore grandpa’s ghost that time, and I know you believe a darn sight more than I do, but
I
believe I’m gonna be all right, and that they ain’t nothin’ to be scared of this year that ain’t been there for sixty years before.”
The old man poured himself another cup of coffee and buttered a cold biscuit. “Now you tell me somethin’, boy: What’re
you
scared of—or is it ‘who’?”
“I’m not scared of anybody,” David replied sulkily.
“You’re the first man alive who ain’t, then. That’s part of your life—that, and facing up to it. But just remember who you are and what you are, and what you believe in. That’s all it takes.”
“Right-makes-might is easy if you’re six-foot-two and one-eighty.”
“Shoot, size don’t matter none. Why, when I was yore age I was littler than you. I did all right.”
“Oh, it’s not that, Uncle Dale,” said David, drumming his nails against the wall by the phone. “I can fight okay, if I have to. It’s just the hassle that bothers me, having to put up with things that I can’t control, but that try to control me. I’ve got a whole lot bothering me right now, and I’m gonna have to start back to school real soon, and that’ll only make it worse. I can’t stand this being in a bunch of worlds at once, like at school, where half the town kids won’t associate with me ’cause I’m too country, and half the country kids won’t ’cause I’m too town, and they all think I’m weird, and the girls…”
“Go on.”
“Oh, nothing! I just wish I could go off and not come back.”
“Do it, then. Nobody’s stoppin’ you.”
“You know I can’t.”
“I know you
won’t.
There’s a difference.” The old man’s voice softened. “Look, David, you are
you:
smart as a whip, good lookin’, healthy as a moose, well brought up, honest. You’ve got a good turn, an’ I don’t know what else—you’re everything I’d want in a
son…
and you sit there talkin’ like you ain’t worth nothin’. That’s a bunch of crap, boy. Now tell me, what’s got you so bothered?”
“I’m afraid of words, I guess, of being hassled and made fun
of…
and of something else I can’t tell even you.”
“There ain’t never been much you couldn’t tell me.”
“This is one of those things, though; this is one of those things I can’t even tell Alec.”
“It’s about that ring, ain’t it?” Uncle Dale took a sip of coffee, but his gaze never left David.
David didn’t say anything, but he could feel the weight of that stare.
Uncle Dale nodded knowingly. “That’s it, ain’t it? I thought so. Just remember one thing, boy: You ain’t the only one in the family that’s ever lived here, and that’s ever been up in them woods of a summer night.”
David looked up incredulously. “You?”
Uncle Dale shook his head almost sadly. “I told you, we didn’t
dare…
but my pa did. He seen something not of this world, and, you know, that light in his eyes was just like the one I been seein’ in yores lately, and it was there till the day he died.”
“Uncle
Dale…”
“Now’s not the time, boy; you’d best be seein’ to gettin’ your gear together for tomorrow. Won’t be no time for it in the mornin’.”
* * *
Fog filled the lowlands the next morning, hiding the farms, the lakes, even a good part of the mountain. Ragged bits lingered higher up, too, hanging eerily among the oaks and maples. An unseasonable cold front had moved into north Georgia during the night, bringing with it record-breaking low temperatures, even scattered reports of frost. David had had to get up in the middle of the night to turn on the heat in his bedroom.
But it was still a splendid morning. Or would be when the sun rose, David thought—even allowing for Liz, who had been on time, and dressed right, and had brought everything she was supposed to bring, and had even helped his mother make coffee. And David wished he had another cup as the three ginseng hunters pushed through a patch of rhododendron and paused for a rest atop a rock outcrop twenty or so feet high from which they could look both out and down.
David sank down on his haunches with his runestaff braced across his knees and took in the view, huddling himself up in his electric orange nylon hunting jacket—the same color as the jaunty cap Uncle Dale was wearing. He could see his breath floating away in the morning air, reminding him of the fog down below. To the east the sun still hid sleepily just out of sight behind a fold of mountain.
“That sure is a pretty view,” Liz commented.
“It is for a fact,” agreed Uncle Dale, “and I shot my first deer from right up here, too—back before Davy’s pa was born.”
“Was that before or after the Flood?” David teased offhandedly as he continued to contemplate the view. The first ray of sunrise cast a glitter into the air, and David found himself gazing across the fog-muffled lake that filled the valley below to the nearly symmetrical cone of Bloody Bald, now completely ringed by fog. Would it happen? he wondered. Would he see what he expected to see? Funny how nearly two weeks could pass without him ever getting time to catch Bloody Bald right at sunrise or sunset.
But David had his chance now, and even as he looked, his eyes took on the expected tingle, and he saw that same mountain rise into an impossibly slender peak, saw it crowned as well with towers, battlements, windows, and arches—and dimly thought he could make out men on those battlements, and dimly, very dimly hear horns ringing in his ears to welcome the sun. And then David blinked and it was gone, replaced by the fuzzy gray bulk of the ordinary mountain.
There was a rustle among the trees to their right just then, and the ginseng hunters turned to see three ravens take wing among the dark trunks. They watched the birds fly out into the open air, wheeling and circling above the fog.
David raised his runestaff to his shoulder like a rifle and aimed experimentally, oblivious to the slight pain that still lingered in his shoulder.
Uncle Dale laid a hand on the smooth wood and slowly but firmly pushed it down. “Don’t even think such things, boy. Shootin’ ravens is bad luck.”
“Just playing around,” David said testily.
Uncle Dale bent over to sight down the face of the rock, and as he bent the brilliant orange cap fell from his white hair and floated down to land amid the brown leaves and moss at the bottom. It rolled to a stop at the base of an ancient, gnarled oak tree.
“I’ll get it,” said David.
“I’ll get it,” said Liz, who was already on her way down the gentler slope to the left of the cliff.
“
I’ll
get it,” said Uncle Dale. “I was the fool who lost it.”
“Why don’t we
all
go,” David growled irritably.
Uncle Dale cuffed him gently on the shoulder, but there was warning in the glance he shot his nephew. “And be quick about it. No sense wakin’ up the whole woods arguin’.”
So they all went—Liz down the western slope, David and Uncle Dale down the steeper eastern one. Uncle Dale picked up his cap and paused, peering at the ground where it had lain. Something showed in the soft earth there, the unmistakable print of a cloven hoof, pointed at the front. The old man bent to check it.