Wild Mountain

by Nancy Kilgore

  “Poor little guy,” Frank said.

  Mona rolled her eyes. Just when she was feeling comfortable with him, he said some typical bleeding-heart New Yorker thing. “It is the season.”

  “But red foxes are such cute little guys. And they’re almost on the endangered list.”

  “Yeah? I thought that was just mountain lions.” “There’s a whole list: mountain lions, bald eagles, rattlesnakes, bats. Red fox isn’t on it yet, but they’re becoming rarer, especially when people shoot them for sport like that.” He waved back toward the house they’d just passed. “What do you think they’re going to do with that fox, anyway? It’s not like anybody eats them.”

  “If you’ve ever had chickens, you might not feel so warm and fuzzy about foxes.” She stuck her chin out. “I grew up on a farm, and I’ve shot a few of those cute little guys myself.”

  “Touché.” He was smiling again, and she smiled back. He was a little naïve, but he was good-natured, and seemed to want to please her. Maybe she didn’t need such a crust with this guy, but it was so automatic. Could she imagine a relationship in which she didn’t have to defend herself?

  The car was climbing the mountain now, and the road became steeper and the turns sharper. Frank slowed down. The pavement had ended, and ice and snow were thick-packed on top of the frozen dirt surface. Up here, nothing had melted, so the deep ruts that would transform this road into a treacherous mud hole hadn’t yet appeared.

  They wound up and around through a dark forest thick with drooping hemlocks, then came out into a clearing. Frank pulled over and stopped in a sunny lay-by on the downhill side. A hawk circled out and above the valley beneath them.

  “This is where I feel the presence of God,” he said.

  A warm smile seemed to permeate her body, and it occurred to her that this was another first—a man talking about God. “I know what you mean,” she said. “I don’t think of it as God, but there is something special, maybe sacred, about being up here.”

  They watched the hawk until it disappeared into the trees. She turned and saw that Frank’s face was drooping. In spite of his bragging, he must have been worn out from the accident and trauma injuries. She felt a sudden empathy, an urge to hold and comfort him, and even started to reach out before she caught herself and pulled back. She hardly knew him, after all.

  “Have you heard the legend of Wild Mountain?” she asked.

  “The legend? No. What’s that?”

  “There’s a woman, supposedly, who roams around up here.”

  “A ghost?”

  “Yes. She lived up here in the 1700s, and was hanged for witchcraft. As revenge, she put a curse on the whole town. If you live in the town, you’ve got the curse. But if you live up here on the mountain, apparently, you’re okay.”

  “So, since you live in the valley, you are cursed?”

  She laughed. “I don’t believe that. But some people claim they’ve seen her.”

  “And that’s the legend of Wild Mountain? That sounds more like a ghost story.”

  “Actually, there’s more to the legend.”

  He shifted in his seat and leaned back against the door, facing her. “Tell me.”

  “Okay.” She turned in her seat, too, and faced him. Did he really want to hear it, or was he just being polite? No matter. She felt a surge of bright energy, as she always did when she talked about local history.

  “It was around 1790 or so. Vermont was just a mishmash of tiny, isolated towns, and had only recently become a state. Most of the Indians had been driven into the north toward Canada, and the European colonists, English and French, had taken over. They were living in small communities that had originally been land grants, and they could only get around by horse and carriage on dirt tracks that became pure mud in the spring—or by river travel.”

  “The witch trials had occurred mostly in the 1600s, and the witch-hunting fever had pretty much cooled down by the1700s.” She paused as a gust of wind whipped up the mountainside and howled over the car. “But maybe some of these little towns in Vermont hadn’t cooled down yet. In any case, there was this woman, Ann LaMere, an ancestor of mine, I think. She was half Indian and half French, and, as far as I could tell, she was sort of a country doctor/midwife. She used herbs and incantations and things that sounded like witchcraft to the ordinary people. At one point, she was delivering a baby, and it died. Someone accused her of killing the baby. Since they hadn’t trusted her or liked her to begin with, especially that half-Indian side, they decided she was a witch.”

  “And hanged her?”

  “Yup.”

  Frank’s eyes widened. “Pretty grim.” “Yes, but the irony was that they all believed her story that the mountain was a magical place. And people still believe it. Some folks think of it as a holy mountain, and others are still scared of the witch and her magic.”

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know about the witch story, but to me Wild Mountain is a holy place.”

  Frank was staring at her in a googly-eyed kind of way. He was probably surprised by this serious side of her, this woman he’d only seen chitchatting at the cash register.

  She blushed. “Hey, shall we get out of the car?”

  Frank looked over at the trail sign across the road, a small brown plank with letters burned onto it: South Trail, 0.4 mi. “Usually, I snowshoe from here to the top,” he said, “but I don’t think the ankle would like it today.”

  Mona glanced at the equipment in the back seat. “I like to snowshoe, too. But I agree, you don’t need any more strain on your body.”

  Frank followed her glance. “Why don’t you take those and go on up?”

  Just to be alone, she thought—and the trail did look inviting, with sunshine streaking through the trees and onto the whiteness of the snow, the energy and new growth of spring pulsing invisibly all around. “But,” she said, “I don’t want to leave you here waiting.”

  “I’ll put my foot up and take a nap. They told me to do that anyway, so you can consider it part of my care plan.”

  She looked down at her hiking boots and jeans. It wasn’t that cold, even up here, so she didn’t need warmer pants, and the boots should do fine in a little snow. “Well, if you really don’t mind?”

  “Just go.” He laughed and got out of the car, limped around to the back door, and opened it, taking out the snowshoes. She got out and went around to the driver’s side. Frank handed them to her and winked. “Watch out for the ghost.”

  She strapped on the snowshoes, took the poles he handed her, and stepped across the road and into the deep snow. At this elevation, the snow was soft and light, the same precipitation that had become freezing rain and created such havoc down in the valley. But here, she could forget any of that had ever happened. Here, it was quiet, with just a woodpecker hammering far above, and the soft snow under her big, web-like feet.

  Mona set her stride and found her rhythm, making huge tracks like Bigfoot, in tune with the snow and the woods. The trail steep-ened, and she began to climb. She could hear the smaller birds now, chickadees flitting back and forth, and a vireo somewhere on a branch overhead, its rich trills and warbles infusing the air with the sound of early spring.

  She lifted one foot after another, each step sinking into the silence and the fresh smell of snow…feeling her muscles just climbing, just stepping, woman alone, woman on mountain. A larger bird called, a branch snapped, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw a dark form moving. She searched the trees and the undergrowth of hemlock saplings, but nothing was there. She must have spooked herself with the ghost story.

  How long had it been since she’d been up here? That time with Johnny when the trees were in leaf and the blueberry bushes full of plump berries. That had been at least ten years ago. She’d wanted to show Johnny where she used to go with Dad when she was a kid, those hunting trips for deer. Just being up here with Dad was a special treat, and she beamed, remembering how he bragged about her at town me
eting when she got a four-pointer, his daughter providing for the family. And Johnny had actually enjoyed that hike—one of the last times they’d enjoyed anything together.

  What would it have been like, she wondered, if she’d met Frank years earlier, maybe when they were in their twenties? Would she have been less cautious, back then? Would she have liked this scraggly, jolly guy with his violin in the back seat and his tales of scuba diving in Australia? Or would she have dismissed him as a hippy? Back then, she was pretty straight-laced and uptight, and she definitely wasn’t attracted to men who were nice and kind. Case in point, that world-class heel, Johnny O.

  Mona came out onto Bell’s Meadow, a level clearing, and the view opened up, down into the valley and across to the Green Mountains in the west and north. From here, the town of Wild Mountain was a winding stream and a tiny church steeple—just one spot in this vast magnificence, these mountains and hills and valleys of Vermont.

  9

  FRANK WOKE TO THE SOUND OF HIS OWN SNORING. He moaned. His leg was twisted, and his shoulder and hip were sore as hell. He tried to straighten out his leg, but then had to lift it gingerly and turn his body so he could sit up again.

  Across the road, at the trailhead, something was moving. Something dark. Was Mona back? No—but it did look like a woman, a woman in a long, black cape with a hood, a costume from colonial times. But then the figure moved, and it seemed to be a man. Maybe this was one of those isolated mountain dwellers who were scattered all across the state, the people who managed to eke out a living up here, somehow. He rubbed his eyes and looked again, but no one was there.

  Mona appeared outside the car window, wisps of silvery hair curling around her forehead, her face flushed and smiling. Nothing like the shape he had seen, Mona was tall and straight in her redand-black-checked lumber jacket and pants. She held the snowshoes up, clapped them together, and laughed as the snow powdered her face, jacket, and jeans. Frank rolled down the window.

  “Hi!” She leaned the snowshoes against the car and brushed off her jacket. Frank noticed that his mouth was gaping open. Mona was radiant with energy and cheer, an astounding transformation from when she had left the car.

  He closed his mouth. “Have a good run?”

  “Beautiful.”

  He handed her the keys, and she took the snowshoes around to the back of the car and opened the trunk. Should he mention that person he had seen? Had it been a woman? And was he so suggestible that as soon as he heard a ghost story, he saw the ghost? He turned to look at Mona. Ouch. That turn was not a good idea. He sank down into the seat, trying not to move, looking ahead through the window.

  And there, along the road, came a white dog, trotting briskly beside a scruffy-looking man in beat-up hiking boots. They advanced down the hill, the man’s feet pounding the snow-covered earth with heavy thuds. In baggy jeans and a shabby army jacket, the man was of indeterminate age—but he wasn’t untidy, Frank saw, because his long hair, hanging almost to his waist like a cape, was clean and perfectly brushed. The man stared straight ahead, and when he came within a few feet of the car, his gaze shifted to Frank with an expression Frank could only describe as shiny. He himself had quit smoking weed some years back, but he recognized the aura around this guy. Focused. Loose. Ethereal.

  He rolled down the window. The guy had approached Mona, and was talking in a loud voice. “About nine feet high, right in front of me,” he said with his arms outstretched. “She was snorting so loud I could feel the breath.”

  “So, you think that was the ghost?”

  “No, no. That was a moose.” The man’s strange appearance contrasted with his erudite-sounding speech, and there was something familiar about that voice, Frank thought. Maybe it reminded him of a professor he’d had in college.

  “Of course,” the guy went on, “Anu can appear in different manifestations. It’s called shapeshifting. You’ve read Carlos Castaneda?” Mona shook her head no.

  Frank turned sharply as his shoulder screamed. He’d read Carlos Castaneda, and he used to believe all of that shapeshifting stuff, too. But hadn’t Carlos Castaneda been exposed as a charlatan? He’d have to look it up.

  “There’s a hawk owl that visits me, too,” the man said, “and I sense that these creatures are angry.”

  “The creatures are angry?” Mona’s voice was quiet. “Well, more like sad, I guess. I think the whole mountain is in mourning. It’s as if the earth itself is sad.”

  “Sad about what?”

  “About the way people live. The people in Wild Mountain, specifically.”

  Mona smiled a sad smile and glanced back at Frank. She exuded a sense of calm and compassion—a patient woman, he guessed, like Granny MacFarland. Granny had lived on Cape Cod when Frank was growing up. Every day, she would walk the sandy beach at the end of the path, then sit outside the house in the sun on her lawn chair, with her coffee and her New York Times. White hair shining, brown-speckled legs stretched out, she radiated both calm and energy. He could bring her anything he’d picked up along the shore, and she would be enthralled with it, or seem to be. She was always ready to put down her paper, look, and listen.

  “What do you mean, the way people live?” Mona asked.

  “Glued to the Internet, satellite TV. Do you have any idea what all that does to the brainwaves, when it’s beamed from a satellite or piped directly into your brain from the Internet? The airwaves are distorted and compromised, and then, when you bring violence and pornography into the mix, the whole world becomes a cesspool.” He lifted his face to the sky. “And the natural world suffers, too. Look at what happened to the bridge.”

  “Are you saying that the collapse of the bridge was because of satellite TV?” Mona sounded incredulous.

  Frank stuck his head out the window.

  The man turned his gaze to Frank, then up to the sky with a benevolent smile. “Well, maybe, maybe not.” He turned, snapped his fingers to the dog, and walked away, slowly and deliberately, the dog trotting beside him.

  Mona came around to the passenger side and got in. Frank turned on the engine.

  “A friend of yours?” he asked.

  “That’s Gus.”

  “I didn’t see any car. Does he live up here?” “He lives somewhere up there, off the trail. Won’t let anybody know where. He calls it living off the grid.”

  “Living off the grid. That’s something I always wanted to do. And he has a point about the media violence. It is pretty toxic.”

  Mona raised her eyebrows and looked at him without saying anything.

  “And who is this Anu he talks about?”

  “I’m not sure. She might be the woman who was hanged. But Gus is really into Anu, thinks of her as his spiritual mother.”

  Frank started the car and winced as he depressed the brake.

  “You look like you’re hurting.” “Yeah. I’m glad I’m not living off the grid right now. I’m ready for a hot bath and a warm fire.”

  They drove in silence, and when they rounded the last bend, the store appeared on the hill to their left. He pulled into the parking area.

  “Thank you, Frank. You got me away from the chaos.” Mona’s face was rosy from her snowshoeing, and her smile was open, relaxed.

  In spite of the pain, Frank felt his whole body smiling. “Anytime. In fact, let me give you my phone number.” He fumbled in his pocket, and out spilled his keys, a pen, and a white business card embossed in bold red lettering.

  Mona gasped, looking at the card. “Where did you…what’s that?”

  He picked it up. “Oh, some guy gave it to me the other day down at the bridge. I didn’t even look at it yet.” He held it up and read aloud, “John O. Duval,” then looked at her in confusion. “Duval? A relative of yours?”

  “Oh, God!” The rose of Mona’s cheeks turned a flaming red, and her face went through a rapid series of expressions so intense that Frank felt stunned.

  “Was that your—” Frank had completely lost his cool. “I didn’t know�
�”

  “Never mind,” she said, “Thanks again.” She stepped out into the light. As she closed the door, Frank waved, but she didn’t see. She was somewhere else. He pulled the car out of the lot and drove back to the cabin.

  10

  APRIL

  THE MOON SAILED ABOVE THE SCHOOL, a blustery April moon that blinked and winked as the clouds skittered by and Mona loped across the parking lot. Six o’clock and not yet dark. The town was meeting at the elementary school.

  Here came Edson Perry and his father, Charlie, with the long beard and stooping shoulders and hunched back. Here was bright-eyed Sierra Lavelle, singing and dancing beside her boyfriend, then Leo Bailey and his wife Sue. They skirted mud puddles at the edge of the lot and lingered on the sidewalk as if waiting, expectant—as if expecting her, Mona, to do something, say something.

  Had Johnny O. been in town? Had any of them seen him? She wouldn’t ask. She walked briskly and swung her arms. Her braid bounced on her black fleece jacket, and her chartreuse scarf swished to the side. She started to whistle, a few jaunty notes that sidled into a strident Marseillaise, the song her Mémé had taught her. The song for courage. For entering battle. If Johnny O. showed up here, she would blow him away like the three little pigs in their house of straw. If he tried any of his tricks, if he tried to rendre her à l’antique esclavage, send her back to slavery, she would arm the ramparts, she would fortify the gates, she would… Marchons! Marchons! she sang.

  The people on the sidewalk stopped and looked. Sierra’s a teenager, they seemed to think, but why is Mona so jaunty at town meeting? Was there something on the agenda they didn’t know about? Did Mona have an ace up her sleeve?

  As she reached for the door, Mona noticed that her hands were trembling.

  “No food in the gym, sir,” said Edson Perry to Frank MacFarland, who was standing in the doorway with his daughter Erica. Edson, a stocky man with large hands dangling at his sides, glanced officiously into the hall behind Frank, as if searching for other offenders.