* * *
—
It was late afternoon when she stopped. The shadows were long and it made it easy for her to know which way was west so she kept the sun at her left shoulder and moved steadily northward. She passed the place where she began her solo walk and pressed onward. The walking was easier, though her leg muscles complained bitterly. She had to stop less often to reclaim the wider peripheral view. She saw more naturally. When she crested a small hillock of trees and saplings she saw them sitting on a rock, whittling at lengths of saplings. She saw the stripping of bark at the base of the rock they sat on and smiled at her ability to see detail in this new way. It was a few hundred yards to where they sat and she pressed her lips into a grim line and moved intently in the stalk and edged closer. They kept whittling. She crept closer and closer, using trees as a blind and leaning forward from the waist and hunching her shoulders. She could feel the tightness of her breath and fought to relax it at the same time she focused on each placement of the foot and as the distance shrank and Starlight and Winnie remained locked on their knife work she wanted to giggle at her control, agility, and quiet. She felt as though she flowed toward them. She was a dozen feet away when he spoke.
“Wind is at your back. You smell like last night’s fire,” was all he said and kept whittling.
“Shit,” she said. “I thought I did well.”
“You did. For a first-timer.”
“Anything else I should know?”
“Everything rustles. Out here, where there’s nothing to cover sound, you have to choose what you wear.”
“But I found you.”
“The birds tipped me off first.”
“How did they do that?”
“They stopped chirpin’.” He stood up and handed her the shaved sapling. It was split at one end into four prongs and the prongs were whittled down to nubby points. “Hard enough to learn to walk proper,” he said. “It’s lots for one day. But I’ll teach you how to fish. We’ll finish this when we get to the creek. Did you know that fish choose?”
She twirled the stick in her hands. “Choose what?”
“Where to hang out. There’s a lot of water to choose from but they pick what’s best and easiest for them. The old man taught me that ninety per cent of the fish live in ten per cent of the water. If you can read water, you’ll never go hungry.”
Winnie slid off the rock and held up the stick she’d been working on. It looked like his but rougher, less articulated. “Look what I done, Ma.”
“That’s wonderful, “Emmy said. “What else did you do today?”
“We walked. Then we sat in some places. I was real quiet. We got animals to come out so I could see them.”
“You did? How did you do that?”
“By bein’ quiet. I saw squirrels, some cool birds, a snake, rabbits, and a bobcat.”
“You saw a bobcat?”
“Yeah. Frank told me she was out there. He showed me her tracks. Then we did the cougar prowl so we could get close and laid down behind a tree and breathed. That’s when she came outta the bush. She stood almost right in front of me!”
“Were you scared?”
“No. Frank said as long as I breathed and stayed quiet she wouldn’t be bothered by me. He was right!”
“Did you learn anything else?”
Winnie turned serious. “Yes,” she said. “I learned that everything works with rhythm. If I stay quiet, I can feel it. Then, if I can feel it I can start to hear it, and then I can start to see it if I really want to. That’s how come the bobcat came.”
“Because you wanted to see it?”
“Yeah. But I felt the rhythm first. And Frank said I could learn to smell it too an’ even taste it! I wanna be able to do all that. What was that other word again?”
“Sense,” he said. “You get so you can sense things.”
“Yeah. It means you know without seein’. We’re gonna come out lots so I can learn how to sense things.”
Emmy looked at Starlight. He met her gaze. She offered a small grin and played with a strand of her hair.
“That’s beautiful,” she said.
* * *
—
When they reached the creek he handed Emmy the knife and directed her to find and cut two twigs half as thick as each of the prongs on the sapling. When she came back with them he showed her how to insert the twigs crosswise so the four prongs were spread apart. Then he took the sapling and thrust it at a stick lying on the ground. When the crosswise sticks snapped the prongs came together and he lifted the captured stick off the ground and held it out to her. “That’s a fish,” he said.
“Yummy.”
He pointed at the creek where it bent before straightening behind the cabin. “You want to look for places where the current slows some but the water isn’t too deep. Like coming off that bend there. Can you savvy which side a fish would put up?”
She squinted at the water. “Well, the current would cut the water deeper on the inside of the bend. On the outside it would be calmer and a fish wouldn’t have to fight so much to grab any food that was drifting in the current.”
He nodded. He took his knife and cut two more twigs off a dead branch of willow by the stream and inserted them between the prongs and motioned for them to follow. He strode around the outside of the bend. There was the humped back of a sandbar in the middle of the stream and he waded out to it in the knee-high flow and climbed up onto the far end. He pointed to a spot about eight feet beyond it. The water deepened slightly and the current had been split by the sandbar so that it seemed a lazy, translucent green. He stepped into the current slowly and turned to look at them.
“Watch me,” he said.
He walked carefully into the slight depth with the stick held above his waist. He turned into the flow with it and switched his grip so that he held the stick at an angle slightly outward from his body. Then he peered into the water and stood stock-still. He barely seemed to breathe. They sat in the sand, watching him. Emmy could feel the breeze in her hair and she practised her peripheral vision so that in his stillness he seemed to anchor the whole sweep of territory and she could almost feel the intensity of his concentration. The swish of the water. Birds. The sun throwing cloud shadow across everything. When it seemed like nothing was ever going to change or move he drove the stick down so fast and sudden it shocked her but left barely a ripple on the surface of the water. When he lifted the stick there was the silver flank of fish gleaming in the sunlight. Winnie laughed and clapped her hands.
He carried the fish to the sandbar and laid it on the ground and cleaned it. Then he carried the offal to the water and laid it gently in the flow and let it go and then looked up at her. “Saavy?” he asked.
“Maybe not the gutting part.”
“Your turn then. Both of you.”
He handed her twigs to separate the prongs and she took them and waded into the stream with Winnie right beside her. The girl’s eyes were ablaze with light. When they reached the spot where he had stood they turned into the current and raised their sticks in the same manner as he had and squinted into the flow and tried to remember to breathe. There was that curious feeling of time losing its value. To Emmy it seemed that she existed only for her breath and the power of her intention. She felt as though she were willing a fish to appear. It didn’t. Not for the longest time. She could hear Winnie breathing deeply beside her. They stood there for what seemed like hours. They could hear the water and the sough of the breeze in the trees on the shore, the twitter of birds and the far-off bawl of range cattle. Neither of them broke their concentration. Then, slowly, the fish appeared like lines of shadow, wispy, buoyant, and hung in the current like idle thoughts. They both raised their sticks carefully. She risked a glance at Winnie. The girl had her lips clenched, staring deep into the current. Neither of them moved. They drove the sticks down in the same instant. Emmy could feel hers press against the bottom and when she raised it there was a fish thrashing silver at the end o
f it. Winnie was laughing out loud. She brandished her stick triumphantly and they ran, stumbling in the current, toward the sandbar. They fell to their knees but kept the fish raised in the prongs. He laughed and they stood and laughed too and clambered out onto the sandbar and held their sticks and the fish out to him. He took his knife out of its sheath with one hand and took the sticks and fish with the other and handed her the knife.
“I can’t,” she said.
“Part of it,” he said. “You become responsible for this life soon’s you agree to hunt it.”
“But I didn’t think I would actually do it.”
“You still gotta finish the deal.”
“I can’t,” she said again.
He stared at her with steely, unwavering eyes. “You asked me to teach you this way. Well, this is a part of it. Whether you know it or not you’re parta everything. Including that water and this fish. You took it and now you need to honour it. It’s going to feed you. You need to clean it. That’s the deal.”
“Will you show me?”
“Just once.” He took the fish in one hand and laid it on the ground. He knelt beside it and eased the tip of the blade at the vee in the gill case. He looked up at her. She nodded. He drew the blade down the length of the belly and the split let the guts ease out and she swallowed hard. He pulled them out with one hand and cut them off the body with the other. He met her gaze. He held them out to her and she reached for them queasily. The slime made her want to retch but she carried them to the water and knelt and laid them carefully in the current like he had and then stood and watched them slip and slide and twist away into the depths. She rinsed her hands in the stream and walked back to him, wiping them on her jeans.
“That was good,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said with an exhale. “I get it now.”
“Okay,” he said. “Your turn, Winnie.”
The girl took the knife and brandished it clumsily but he guided her hands and she pressed on with clenched lips. When she reached in and yanked out the innards she was grave and he admired her intensity. She carried the offal to the shore and laid them in the water. She knelt there and watched them spin lazily in the current and drift away.
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
* * *
—
Roth had set out on horseback with the packhorse that morning to organize the camp. As the afternoon had lengthened he lit the fire, and after they reached the camp they ate the fish with rice Starlight wrapped in broad leaves and steamed along with mushrooms over the fire. It was simple, plain, bland, but tasted like an ornate feast to her and when she washed it down with water she was amazed at the degree of her fullness, her contentment. She sighed. She scrabbled down and lay with her back against a rock and looked up at the purple-swaddled world. Roth added wood to the fire and they felt the darkness ease down around them and in that quality of silence she could hear the land and it was the only language she needed then. Winnie lay down at her side with a blanket and she wrapped an arm around her and together they took in the parabola of stars. It was deep night when Starlight rose and strode into the bush.
“Where’s he going?” she asked.
“You ever get to figure that out you tell me,” Roth said. “He finds himself out there.”
“More’n on the farm?”
“Farm’s where he lives. This is home.”
“I don’t know how he can just get up and walk out there. Without a gun, I mean.”
“Sometimes I sat here days before he come back. Couple times I just packed it all up an’ headed in alone. He come out after a few more days. Walked out. Right to the farm.”
“He ever say what he does all alone all that time?”
“No. But I heard a word when I was growin’ up an’ they forced us to go to church. Communion, it was. Never found a place for that word to sit rightly in my head. Not ’til I met Frank least ways. It seems to me that communion means gettin’ right with somethin’, gettin’ close to it. Feelin’ like every part of ya fits with it all. That’s what he does out there. Communion.”
She stared at him across the fire. Winnie slept with her forehead against her ribs. She breathed lightly to not disturb her. “I never felt right with nothin’ all my days,” Emmy said.
Roth nodded and poked at the fire. “Might be that’s how come you’re here.”
“You think?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Frank’s the one who can figure things. Deeper things. But me, I guess that there’s a mystery to things, to life, and sometimes it just takes charge, ya know? Sometimes it brings the right people to the same place at the same time. Brung me to Frank. Life ain’t been the same since that day.”
“You think it’s God?”
“Can’t say. Me an’ the notion of God parted company some time back. But somethin’s goin’ on and that big jasper strollin’ around out there in the dark? I kinda often feel he’s the one meant to lead me to some notion I can live with.”
“I never known no man like him,” she said.
“You’n me both,” Roth said.
THE ENSUING DAYS BECAME JOURNEYS of enrichment and Emmy felt the first bloom of love in her like the first tendrils of spring in the air. She learned to walk into the land fully open and it entered her and she felt tearful and joyous at the thrum and current of it coursing through her being. For days they simply walked. Every step they took in that great wide open was another entry they made together, another passage she made to that odd sense of fullness and emptiness that occupied her belly at the same time. The land. It welcomed her, filled her, and she felt lonely for it when they returned to the farm.
Winnie blossomed before her eyes.
She marvelled at Starlight’s patience with the girl as much as she shook her head in wonder at Winnie’s capacity to trust him so easily. She wanted to weep at that. Men had never treated Winnie as a little girl. They’d treated her as an inconvenience, something to be endured in their pursuit of her mother, something to be suffered through in exchange for what Emmy could give them as a woman. Winnie had never known a man who asked her questions and then listened to her answers. She’d never been shown things in a way that she could understand. All she’d known was aloof, cold, and distant men who shunted her aside, discounted her, ignored her, and treated her mother as a body, a possession, a commodity right in front of her. She’d seen things that no little girl should ever have to see and it was from a deep well of shame that Emmy watched Starlight move Winnie gently toward a sense of herself framed against the context of the land.
“Did you know that we’re movin’ even when we’re sitting down?” she asked one evening.
“I’m pretty sure I didn’t know that,” Emmy said.
“Frank told me. He said if I look up at the stars long enough I can see ’em move. It’s because the earth is spinning they seem to move. But really it’s us.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Yeah but what’s real interesting is that we’re spinning way fast an’ we don’t even feel it.”
“I don’t feel like I’m spinning over here.”
“That’s cuz we don’t think about it. It just happens. Frank said it’s the same as when we’re on the land an’ we stop and sit an’ breathe. We’re movin’ then too but we don’t know it.”
“How are we moving then?”
“ ’Cause everything else is.”
“I don’t get it.”
Winnie giggled. “Me neither at first but Frank’s real good at tellin’ things. He said everything is alive. So everything is movin’. We just think things are still. But if we learn to sit with things we can get so we can feel them movin’ even if it’s just in a small way at first. If we learn to be real still an’ quiet we can feel like we’re parta all that movin’ and it’s a part of us.”
“Do you feel that?”
She shrugged. “Only a little. But I’m gonna sit on the land or walk it like Frank does so I can feel it more. You know why?”
“No,” Emmy said. “Why?”
Winnie looked at her and her eyes were so clear and brilliant they were like the sky and she felt as though she could fall into them and keep right on falling endlessly.
“ ’Cause when I get so I can feel it all the time, I’m gonna feel like I’m a part of everything and everything is a part of me—and I won’t ever feel lonesome no more.”
* * *
—
Within a week Emmy could walk more quickly. Soundlessly. She could close her eyes and feel the faintest breeze on her skin and move into it. While Winnie was at school, Starlight taught Emmy to crouch deeper and still make good forward progress. The muscles at her thighs and knees and lower back complained but she crept for hours that way. He taught her to waddle. The back of her heels were right at her butt and she duck-walked through bush and grass and dry rock and tinder until she could do that soundlessly as well. Then he taught her to crawl. She learned to use her elbows and knees for purchase. She learned to use the tips of her toes, her forearms, the insides of her knees, and the bottom edges of her fists to clamber forward. She learned to do it backwards and forwards without disturbing the ground, without leaving sign of her movement. He taught her how to move through all of these positions and movements and still retain a rhythm, a tempo, and through all of it to maintain an acute awareness of everything around her.
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