Cloven Hooves

by Megan Lindholm

  “It will be all right,” he assures me, crouching by my feet. But the worried look on his face put the lie to his words.

  “Then why am I so tired?” I demand. “I couldn’t be more than a few weeks along, if that. I shouldn’t even be able to tell I’m pregnant yet. But I’m so damn tired.”

  A wave of calming musk flows up from him. I feel I will drown in the scent. My intellect is warring with my instincts. This faun smells like safety, my body tells me he is protection and shelter, but my mind sees the deep worry in his eyes. The conflict agitates me, and I can almost see him quiver as his body responds to the scent of my worry. I rise, intending to move away from him, but he leaps to his feet.

  “No. You sit still and rest. I’ll move away.” He circles out from me, stops about twelve feet away. For a few seconds he looks at the ground. When he lifts his eyes to mine, they are shining.

  “Perhaps you understand, now, what it was like for me that day when I came upon you in the grasses, and suddenly you smelled like a mature female. Not fertile at that moment, but matable. And there was I, only beginning to remember the concept of male and female.” He shakes his head, looks back at the ground. “It was like someone blowing a whistle right by my ear when I’d been deaf all my life. I had to run away.”

  I can’t think of anything to say. He looks back up at me. “Who knows? Maybe that was when the bond was first formed. I only know you are not a fat ewe or a tall doe to be tamed and turned to my uses. You are my friend, Evelyn, first and always. And if I have used you, it was with your body’s permission. It has always known why we were coming together. I thought …” he pauses, changes his words. “You always smelled as if you understood. I didn’t realize you would need the words as well.”

  “Liar,” I say flatly.

  “Yes,” he admits easily. “But only a little. I knew that sooner or later, we would have to talk like this. But as to bearing my child—I never thought you would object to that. Or fear it.”

  “You fear it.” Strange, how easy the directness comes. These are more words than we have exchanged in our time together, but there is no hesitancy. We are too close to mince words between us.

  “Yes, I do.” He paces a few short steps, turns as if to come toward me, but then stops. “These pregnancies. Between our kinds. They are never easy. Bearing a faun’s child is never easy for whoever does it. Whatever.”

  “Why?” I demand.

  He lets out his breath raggedly. “Conflicts. Between the ways of your own kind, and the needs of what grows within you. A human baby takes nine months to grow within its mother. My child will take but six. Yet it will be fully as large as one of your own kind, sometimes larger. The growth rate is greater than your body is designed for. So you are tired sooner, hungrier, and often uncomfortable.” His voice lowers on the last words. “My child will grow faster than your body can adapt to it.”

  The silence is long, but only between us two. The life of the forest goes on. A bird calls somewhere nearby, two notes. There is a light wind in the upper branches of the trees, the muted shush of the river behind us.

  “It’s going to kill me, isn’t it?” I ask him. I know he will tell me true.

  “No,” he says in a low voice, but I hear that it is a plea, not a denial. He looks at me, sudden anguish in his eyes. “It cannot. I will not let it. Sooner would I die myself than wish harm on you.”

  “And your child?” I ask.

  He does not understand my question.

  “Would you sooner see your child die than me?” I ask him simply.

  He stares at me, dumbly. Then he wets his lips, swallows. “I do not know, my love,” he whispers. He takes a deep breath. “Would you?”

  I blink my eyes free of his stare, and look at him anew. See him whole, standing there where the path splits the ceiling of the forest. The satyr, standing in the slanting sunlight of the morning forest, gilded by the sun’s touch. Ruddy lips, dark skin, glistening eyes, hair atousle beneath his proud horns. His skin gleams with health and the sweat of pursuing me. Sleek pelted legs, strong hooves splayed on the beaten earth. He is too far away for his scent to affect me, but as I stare at him, love floods me. Not for Pan, for this particular one, but for what he is. Tag end of a myth, strange species, companion to my own for generations beyond telling. I had read of you before I knew you, had loved you, had worshiped the forest god in my own savage heart, beyond the reach of any civilized teaching. I had known you had to be. No amount of common sense could have dissuaded me from believing in you. I love you as I love wolves howling and whales blowing, as I love all that is wild and dwindling. How many of you can there be left in this world? Would I die to increase your numbers by one?

  I suddenly know it is true. My body gave consent to this long before my mind did, but my heart is not far behind. I would do this thing. Not just for my Pan, but for what he is. On one level it is a payback of sorts. Ask not what your forest can do for you. He is smiling at me. I don’t have to lift my eyes, to nod, to open my arms, I don’t even have to smile. He knows. And he comes to me, not just a faun, the companion of my childhood, my friend. My mate.

  TWENTY-ONE

  * * *

  We travel only four miles or so downriver before our path is slashed by a two-lane highway. A concrete bridge spans the river. After checking for traffic in both directions, we quickly cross. I jog, wondering if I can truly already feel the slosh of a child in my belly, or if I am imagining it. “This is new,” Pan tells me, hooves ringing on the pavement as he trots hurriedly beside me. “I don’t remember this bridge or this road.”

  As we leave the bridge, I nod wordlessly at the 1944 date graved deep in the concrete.

  “Well,” he shrugs. “It wasn’t a personal memory. Let’s just say it wasn’t here the last time any of my ancestors came this way.”

  I roll my eyes at him, and we leave the highway’s edge, clambering over riprap, then sliding down a gravel bank to regain the river’s edge. We are working our way upriver on the grassy bank when we hear the whoosh of an approaching car. Pan pauses, turns, brazenly waves at a Volkswagen bug. An instant later we hear the screech of its brakes, but before it can back up, we have regained the edge of the forest. We stand in the masking trees, holding our giggles back behind cupped hands, eyes as wicked as children’s. We stand still until the car moves slowly on. Then we stamp and laugh and gasp until we choke.

  After we catch our breaths, he pauses. He lifts his head, regal as any stag, and slowly turns it as if homing in on a signal. “This way,” he tells me, and starts off surely through the forest. I follow.

  The pattern of our days changes even more. Now we walk more slowly, and pause more often for me to rest. He makes love to me only if I instigate it, and even then he is maddeningly careful with me. And often I am too tired to instigate it, for he has told me true. This pregnancy weighs heavy and soon upon me. Instead of scavenging or hunting as we go, he now does all the hunting while I rest in the evenings. Once this would have hurt my pride. Now it seems natural and right. When I think about it, I feel only relief.

  Once I ask him how many miles we are covering a day. The question seems to have no meaning to him. I decide it doesn’t matter to me, either. We do not travel in a straight line, but across the lower skirts of the mountains. There are waters to ford, and towns to circle, and natural obstacles to avoid. It is no longer north that we travel, but a zigzag course of his choosing. Pan becomes my compass, and it is he I follow, trusting.

  Each night I fall asleep, wondering what tomorrow’s weather will bring. Never has the color of the evening sky meant so much to me. But winter seems to hold back her hand. The days are mostly fine, if brisk. Cold I can fight, with steady-paced movement during the day and Pan’s body heat by night. It is the rain that I dread, for it pierces me through with its icy silver arrows. When the downpours come, they are drenching, dragging the warmth from my body and ladening my clothes with its wet weight. My sneakers are worn and they slip on the steep we
t paths. By the end of the day, the knees of my jeans are caked with mud from my frequent stumbles. On rainy days, we make but a few miles, and they are torturous ones, scarcely worth the extra effort. Snow is what I fear, but fortune favors us with a slowly dwindling fall. Almost I could believe it is the will of the woodland god I follow.

  I only become aware that we have entered Canada when we brush the outskirts of a small town, and all the license plates on the parked and sleeping cars are Canadian. He takes me through a campground that night, and plunders someone’s Styrofoam cooler left out on a picnic table. Milk, fruit, and roast beef with lettuce sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper. That night I eat it all and he watches me, smiling. From the same campground, he has taken an old woolen blanket, probably someone’s picnic blanket. We bundle under it gratefully, for the nights grow ominously colder.

  That night before we sleep, I ask him how much farther we have to go. Again, it is a question he cannot answer. He can only turn his head and stare off into the trees and shrug. His eyes grow distant as he ponders. I sense he is like a migrating bird, following some beacon of his own. I believe that he himself will not truly know we are there until we arrive.

  But if he cannot answer my questions about miles and days, he has at least become delightfully open about all else. In the evenings, after we have eaten, he plays the pipes for me, or tells me stories. I come to prefer the stories. Few of them are from his own lifetime. Some are immeasurably ancient, and these are sprinkled with words I do not understand, for ideas he has no English for. Others are as recent as his father’s time. His father, he proudly tells me, attended a school once. He took biology classes. From his father’s classes comes his understanding of what he is in biological terms. When I dispute it, he launches into a complicated tale of two old-timers in a cabin, wintering over on their homestead outside Nenana.

  “They were too old and they should have known better,” he tells me. “I think they did know better, but they didn’t want to admit they were old. The old man walked his trap line and cut the wood, while the old woman kept the fire going and cooked the meals and prepared the skins the old man brought in. They had an old truck, and a few times a year the old man would take out his wrenches and persuade it to run, and they’d go to town, to sell furs and bring back supplies. I suppose they had been doing it for years. My father had lived in that area for a while, and thought of them as his neighbors. Summers he helped himself from their garden and smokehouse, winters he raided their cache and the back-porch pantry where the old woman kept her preserves. Never too much, mind you, and only to get himself through hard times. He always suspected they knew of him, but they never seemed to mind what he took. Are you comfortable, my love?”

  I shift against him, not answering. I am not comfortable. My belly feels swollen and tender already. If I lie on my side, its weight drags forward on my spine. If I lie on my back, I cannot breathe. Lying on my stomach is unthinkable. So I lean against him, cradling my belly in my hands. He strokes my hair and goes on with his tale.

  “My father was in a habit of shadowing the old man as he walked his traps. Not on his trail, of course, but flanking it. On this particular day, the old man had a wolverine in one of his jaw traps. He shot it, it dropped, and he went forward to retrieve the pelt. But the thing was only stunned and it came up at the old man, trap and all, and tore into his legs.

  “The old man managed to stagger back and luckily for him, the chain on the trap held. He shot the wolverine a few more times, killed it, and then collapsed himself. When it became clear to my father that he wasn’t going to get up again, he went to the old man, lifted him, and carried him home.”

  He pauses, staring into the fire. I let him. I have come to know that he has to stop, to remember before he can go on with the story. Things seem to come to him in pieces.

  “He didn’t go in. Not that first time. He only opened the door and set the old man inside. He was gone before the old woman could get there and see him. But the next day there was a vacuum bottle of hot stew left for him on the back porch. So my father kept watch on the cabin, and as the old woman’s wood pile dwindled, he worried, for he had not seen the old man for some days. Then one day he saw the old woman outside, trying to split some of the frozen log sections the old man had stockpiled all summer. She cut some, but barely enough to take her through the night. So that night my father went down, and took up the maul and split wood for her. And halfway through his chopping, she opened the door of the cabin, and a great finger of yellow light reached out and lay upon my father. And the old woman called out, ‘It’s a cold night tonight, and too dark for working. Beast or man, you’re welcome at our hearth as friend. Come inside and be warm.’ So my father went inside, and that was how they became friends.”

  I stir sleepily in the circle of his arms. “It still doesn’t explain how he went to school,” I protest. His fingers walk lazily down my spine, finding the aching spots and soothing them.

  “The old man’s legs were ruined. My father helped them through the winter, and spring breakup, and did his best to care for them until friends came to find out why they hadn’t brought their furs to town. The old man had to go to Fairbanks to see what could be done for his legs. They were gone some time. So my father stayed in their cabin, and planted their garden, and even tended the old man’s trap line while they were gone. When the old people did come back, the old man was on crutches. He only lasted a year or two longer. When the old woman had to sell the place and move up to Fairbanks, it was her idea that my father go with her. They used the old man’s wheelchair to pass him off as her invalid nephew. He studied at home with her for a few years, to regain his reading and math skills …”

  “Regain?” I ask sleepily.

  “Of course. Living alongside your kind for so many years, we have to learn your skills. Languages and letters change slowly, but change they do, especially so when we travel long distances during one lifetime. The skills have to be kept up. Don’t you think we use your road signs and posted warnings?”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway. A neighbor of the old woman’s took an interest in her crippled nephew, and encouraged him to follow his interest in biology. The neighbor arranged for my father to attend some classes at the college, and he did quite well there, until he took to disputing some of their information about the natural habits of the local flora and fauna. Of course, my father felt he was in a better position to know than the professor. It was all downhill from there, and culminated unhappily when my father one day abandoned his wheelchair and ran away with a large Suffolk ewe from a nearby farm. He never saw the old woman again, but trusted her to understand that he had lived among humans as long as he could.”

  “A ewe,” I ask sleepily.

  “My mother. Go to sleep, now, love, I’ve kept you awake long enough.”

  I giggle and drowse off in his arms.

  It is days later before our talk eddies around to that subject again.

  “Whatever became of your parents?” I ask him. It is a subterfuge, really. We are on an uphill trail. A few weeks ago, I would have said it was not too steep. Now I feel as if I have been climbing an endless ladder. My calves are sore, my back aches, and I cannot seem to pull enough air into my lungs. Pan is walking effortlessly ahead of me, back straight, hooves digging easily into the black soil of the path. It is a cool grey day, mist is swirling through the upper branches of the great cedars that roof us, but I am sweating and hot. But I do not want to ask him to go slower. Lately he has seemed driven. He looks often at the sky during the day, and at night he seeks clearings to study the stars. Time or direction, I cannot tell what worries him, and my questions only bring soothing nothings from him. So I ask my question, hoping he will slow down as he considers it. “I mean, I never saw any sign of your father or mother when we were kids. Had you left them already?”

  “My mother was killed by a lynx when I was still very small. Luckily, I was nearly weaned already. My father … well, it is not the way of
my kind to keep their children close by for long. By the time I was four or five, I was ready to be on my own. My survival memories were almost fully awakened, and I could draw on what I needed to survive. It was time for me to have my own territory. As the adult, it was up to my father to move on. To have too many of us in one area swiftly becomes dangerous. Especially since the area around Fairbanks was fast becoming settled. But for you, I would never have stayed there as long as I did.”

  I halt, putting my hand on a tree trunk to steady myself as I breathe. “A lynx killed your mother?” I don’t know if it is the cool way he says it, or the sudden idea of a lynx being bold enough to bring down a human.

  “Um,” he agrees. He halts, and glances back to where I am. He comes back down the trail to me, takes the canteen from the bag that he now carries every day. “My father had put her to graze in a clearing. I suppose I was fortunate that I was not with her at the time. He had taken me to a stream to bathe me. It was quite a shock to me when we returned. Not much left of her but wool and hooves.”

  “Your mother was a sheep,” I say inanely.

  He nods gravely. “I’d wondered if you were really listening the other night, for when I told you, I expected some reaction.” He takes the canteen from my hands, drinks sparingly, and then slings it back on the pack. He keeps his head turned aside, fussing with it, as he speaks. “My father was birthed from a white-tailed deer. I remember that my grandfather caught her when she was scarcely more than a fawn, and raised her to trust him. Before him, sheep for several generations. They are easily turned to our purposes, as human shepherds well know.”

  I feel slightly ill to hear him speak so. It shows in my face, but I cannot mask it.

  “Almost any large mammal,” he answers my unspoken question. He is staring up the trail, as if assessing the path we must follow. “But we feel the greatest kinship with those with cloven hooves. And with humans. It is easiest, of course, to take a dumb beast. It asks no questions, and it makes few demands. Easy to provide for. And if it dies in the process, or not long after, the loss is easier to bear.”