Joseph Bruchac

by The Dark Pond

  I listened for the sound of growling, the sound of something breathing hard as it fed. I knew that last cry must have come from the throat of one of the panicked deer when it blundered into whatever awful creature was out there. But all I heard were the sounds of the other deer as their flight took them farther and farther away, until they could no longer be heard. I strained to listen.

  I wasn’t sure that I really heard it. It might have been nothing more than my imagination filling in my expectations. But I thought I could hear the soft sound of a body being dragged away through deep snow.

  9

  FIRE

  I KEPT LISTENING. Now even that whisper-soft sound was gone. Had I really heard it? I was sure of only two things. The first was that I was not going to go out there and investigate.

  The second was that it was time to light my fire. Way past time.

  When I was six years old Mom taught me all the old ways to make fire. I made my first bow-drill kit when I was seven. It took me a whole day to make the fire board and the spindle and the hand piece using nothing but a lock-blade knife. I cut my thumb doing it, and I had blisters on my palms when I was through, but I had done it all by myself.

  “Stubborn as a little bulldog,” my dad said.

  But when he shook his head it was in approval. The only time he’d interrupted me was when he checked to make sure the cut on my thumb wasn’t too deep and gave me a Band-Aid.

  By the time I was nine I was a total expert on fire making. I could do it with a hand drill, a bow drill, a fire plow. I’d learned the more modern ways, too, from flint and steel to a piece of steel wool and a six-volt battery. More than anything, though, I’d learned that being prepared was the most important part of successful fire making. Without dry tinder and a proper base, it didn’t matter how many coals you got from your bow drill.

  I reached out in the darkness and felt the piece of canvas that I’d taken from my pack to lay over the sticks and tinder hours ago. Having laid the base for my fire, I hadn’t wanted the moisture in the air to get at it and make it hard to light should I finally decide I needed it. The deer, in their frantic attempt to escape, had somehow missed it.

  I lifted the canvas off. Then I pulled out my butane lighter.

  A lighter? After all those years of learning how to make a fire the old way? All I can do is repeat what Dad always says: “If you’ve got it, use it.”

  Or as Mom puts it, “Being Indian doesn’t mean being dumb.”

  The dry pine twigs and the larger dead cedar branches turned into red-and-yellow flames with only a quick swirl of whitish-brown smoke. I fed more branches in, piling them carefully so that the heat in the center of the fire would be concentrated. Soon I was in the middle of a comforting circle of light and warmth.

  I sat there the rest of the night. It must not have been long until dawn because I still had a good-size pile of wood left when the sun rose and the clouds that had hidden the moon drifted apart like blue hands letting go of the night.

  I don’t remember much except concentrating on that fire—that fire and the one long pole I had sharpened with my hatchet and then hardened by placing its tip in the fire until it was blackened. I might have been one of my long-ago European or Indian ancestors, alone with his fire and his spear, waiting out the cold of the night, back against an old tree, hands ready to lift his weapon. I wasn’t thinking what or why. I thought only of feeding the fire and being ready.

  One other thing I remember about that wait was feeling something warm running down my face. The deer must have grazed me with a hoof. I had a small cut just below my left eye. I moistened the tips of the two long fingers of my right hand with that blood and then drew two parallel lines across my forehead and two more under each eye. I’m not quite sure why. Maybe someone told me once that warriors would do that so that they could see their enemies more clearly. Maybe I read it. Or maybe I just knew it.

  When the daylight finally came, I could afford the leisure of thinking about something other than basic survival. I looked down the slope as I stood in the rising sun and saw a drag mark in the snow. It started only a short distance from my shelter.

  Still holding my spear, I walked over and crouched down to look closer. There were no footprints to be seen. Just the wide furrow in the snow made by the heavy body of a deer. The drag mark led straight downhill. I didn’t intend to follow it.

  There was so much mist that I couldn’t even see the valley, much less the dark pond. Was it a trick of the change in temperature, the result of the warm air that had drifted in with the dawn touching the cold surface of the pond? Or was something hiding itself? I felt as if a cold wind had swept over me. After putting out my fire, I took the trail that led back to the safety of modern buildings and electric lights, dorm rooms and telephones.

  10

  HANDOUTS

  THE NEXT DAY was a normal one. It had to be. If it was normal, a day like always, I could keep myself from thinking about what had happened the night before. I wasn’t about to discuss it with anyone. They’d either think I was even more of a whack job than usual or, if it was someone crazy like Devo, offer to help me.

  Could I call my parents? There was no way I could talk about something this strange over the phone. Even if I skipped out and took the bus to D.C., by the time I got there I probably wouldn’t feel the way I did now. I’d doubt that any of it had even happened outside my own imaginings. Besides, when you are my age, you know there’s a world of things you can’t talk to your parents about, even great parents like mine. How could I tell them about this indescribable feeling I still had? Even now, when I was doing my best to forget it, I could still feel that pull. It was like a hook stuck in the back of my head. This crazy certainty that I was going to go back to the dark pond. I just had to.

  But I couldn’t think of it now. This had to be a normal day. A normal day. I ground my teeth so loud as I thought about everything being normal that a chickadee turned to cock its head at me in startled amazement.

  “Sorry,” I said to the chickadee.

  I readjusted my backpack and started toward the gym. Maybe I could work out some of my frustration in the weight room. I’d deliberately skipped breakfast to avoid people. As a result, my stomach was growling. My feet thudded against the ground, reverberating in my head like the beat of a drum. I was a walking sound effect.

  I was so tense that I vibrated like a guitar string every time someone spoke to me. Even though I am generally feared and despised, people still—probably out of self-preservation, because they are afraid I’ll flatten them if they ignore me—make it a point of greeting me when I walk around the campus.

  Fortunately, my usual all-purpose response, a deep-throated grunt, was both what they expected in response and appropriate to the way I was feeling.

  “Yo, Armie, whazzup?”

  “Garrrrhhhh.”

  “Hey, Armie.”

  “Garrrrhhhh.”

  “Armie, my man.”

  “Garrrrhhhh.”

  “Hi, Armie.”

  “Garrrrhhhh.”

  “Cool crow.”

  “Hunh?” Though I didn’t stop walking, Hester’s words made me turn my head. She’d been looking at my backpack.

  “What are you doing there?” I said in a quiet voice.

  “Ganh-ganh,” answered the crow that had quietly drifted down to perch on my pack.

  Even though they are usually looking for a handout, whenever a bird lands on me it always makes me feel kind of nice. Even if I know it just eyes me as an easy mark.

  The crow turned its head, studying me first with one eye and then the other. It was going to be disappointed. I’d nervously eaten the last box of raisins in my pocket while I was sitting around my fire the night before. I probably burned the box in the fire, but I didn’t remember. For all I know I might have eaten it, too. Like I said earlier, I wasn’t really thinking. I was in some ancient survival mode where words seem to vanish from your mind.

  Anyhow, havin
g missed breakfast, I hadn’t yet secretly restocked the front pocket of my camo jacket with the usual half dozen or so boxes of raisins and bags of peanuts I carry around for avian handouts. You have to be careful taking things out of the mess hall like that. The food ladies watch you like hawks. You can get demerits if they catch you stuffing your pockets. Somehow I always manage to elude them.

  “Ganh-ganh?” the crow said.

  “You going to feed it?” Hester said

  The crow eyed my empty front pocket. I’m surprised he didn’t hold a Styrofoam cup with one foot and shake it in front of my nose.

  “Ganh-ganh!” More insistent this time.

  Someone came up in front of me and shoved a box of raisins in my hand.

  “You feed her, Armie. She probably won’t accept it from me,” Devo said.

  I opened the box and spilled a dozen little dessicated grapes out onto my palm. The crow hopped down onto my wrist and began to pick them up, one by one.

  “You weren’t at breakfast, bro. So I brought you this stuff.” Devo held out a handful of fruit. Two apples, a pear, a banana. I shoved them into a side pocket.

  Devo smiled down at me. “Oh, no problem at all. I love risking demerits by taking food from the mess hall. I’m not the darling of the mess-hall ladies, like certain people I could name.”

  Hester giggled. I turned to glare at her, but she just smiled back at me.

  “In any eventuality,” Devo continued, “Mary, the one whose hair makes it appear that she is wearing a white poodle on her head, pulled me aside and proffered this.”

  He pulled out a small paper sack stuffed with bags of peanuts and raisin boxes and placed it in my hand.

  “‘Armin isn’t in today,’ she says, ‘but we know he’ll need these for feeding his birds.’ You can stop thanking me, Grateful One. Oh, and I almost forgot these.” He produced half a dozen granola bars—my favorite flavors.

  This time I didn’t even glare as I took them from him. It was one of the rules of our friendship—if you could call it that. Devo liked to do things for people but preferred not to be thanked. Then he could needle you about not showing enough gratitude. Real thanks seemed to make him uncomfortable.

  I started off again toward the gym. Seeing he’d gotten all the grift he was going to pry out of me for now, the crow flapped off. Hester followed the crow. Devo walked with me.

  “You okay today?” he said.

  That wasn’t like him. He knew I didn’t like being asked that kind of thing. Clearly I was showing too much of my emotions.

  “You want to get flattened?” I asked.

  Devo nodded. I’d reassured him. Armie was okay, as mean and despicable as usual.

  “I’m fine, too,” he said. “Thank you for asking.”

  We were almost at the door. Devo stopped and looked back toward the bare branches of a maple tree where the crow now sat. There was a little wind blowing and the crow had both its wings spread, letting the breeze rock it back and forth in the high branches. He looked kind of like a wind surfer out on a lake. Hester was standing under the tree, her arms held out as if she was being a crow too. She didn’t mind if anyone saw her doing it. At times, I had to admit, she was mad cool.

  “Guess what?” Devo said. “I think there’s someone else like you around.”

  The image of another broad ugly Armenian Shawnee on campus was too much for me.

  “What the hell do you mean, Devo? Another kid who looks like me?”

  Devo laughed. “No, I mean another chap who’s chummy with chickadees. I spied him for the first time this morning with the ground crew. He must have just been hired. They were trimming dead branches out of that large birch tree. When he descended from the ladder, he just held out his hand and whistled. A whole flock of sparrows flew in to land upon it. Then he opened his lunch bucket and began feeding them bits of bread while the other chaps just stood around in amazement. An old Indian…I mean Native American. Cool, huh?”

  I turned my back on Devo and shouldered my way through the doors into the gym. Why is it that everyone always seems to think that every Indian in the world is interested in every other Indian? Like when you meet someone, after figuring out what you are, they right away have to start telling you that THEY have an Indian friend and you have just got to meet him. Like all Indians are magnets automatically attracted to each other. Like I even cared. And, anyhow, why would some old Indian guy be interested in a half-Armenian Shawnee kid?

  11

  HIDING OUT

  YOU KNOW HOW crazy it gets in a boarding school when you are getting close to vacation? Imagine being in a herd of caribou at the start of migration time. Or maybe in one of those holding pens just before they open the gates to let the maddened bulls go rumbling down the streets of some little Spanish town. No matter what you do or say, every conversation, every thought, every impulse keeps coming back to one thing—lemme outta here!

  When you leaving? Who you riding with? Where you going? When does your mother/father/stepparent/guardian/chauffeur get here to pick you up?

  To avoid that irritatingly mindless litany I had taken sanctuary in one of the places I knew I wouldn’t be bothered the night before the week and a half of spring break. Tomorrow was Thursday. Break Day. Or as Devo called it, Bugout Day. I never have much to say to people, and in these last few hours before vacation break I felt even less talkative than usual. I guess it was because of the phone call from Dad.

  He apologized. Of course. They would make it up to me. They couldn’t help it. They both had to go to Geneva (in Switzerland, no less!) for this unexpected conference. They knew I understood how important their work was. Some things just couldn’t wait. (But, of course, I always could.) I could come home if I wanted. But wouldn’t I be happier just staying up there at the school over the break? It was already worked out with the headmaster if that was okay by me. Dad knew how I loved hiking in the mountains. He’d heard from my counselor, Mr. Grayson, that I’d been getting out into the woods. Now I’d have plenty of time for that. We’d have other times together. Quality time. (He actually said that!) They’d see me this summer.

  I used up more than my quota of Unhs and Yups and Yeah, sures in that conversation. Nothing else I could say. I almost varied my menu of responses by asking “Summer in what year?” at the end. But I didn’t. I really did understand. I really was proud of what they were doing. I really knew how unimportant my life was compared to the lives of the people they were trying to help. I also knew, trying not to feel too self-pitying, that they both really loved me.

  So when Dad said, “You know how much we love you, don’t you son?” I just added one final round of my all-time parent replies. “Yeah, Dad. Yeah. Sure.”

  And that was it. And now I was here, all by myself, in the one building I knew no other kid would venture into the night before B-Day. The school library.

  Even though I seem as well suited to them as a bull in a china shop, I love libraries. Next to being out in the woods, reading is my favorite thing to do. I’ve been that way ever since I was really little.

  Mom says it is because she’s always read to me. Dad read some too, but with Mom it was part of every day’s routine. She read to me before I could walk. She even read to me before I was born.

  It is part of the old Shawnee way, she explained. Talking to the not-yet-born. Both the mother and the father talk to their unborn child all the time. That way the child knows it is loved even before it takes its first breath. It is more ready to come into the world. You never have a long and difficult birth with a child who has been talked to before being born.

  Mom should know about that. It took her all of ten minutes from the time she got into the delivery room to the moment when the doctor, with some surprise in her voice, said, “Well, here he is already!” Then the doctor handed my father what he said looked like a big blue log to him.

  I weighed almost twelve pounds.

  Fast as I was, it wasn’t easy. I had shoulders like a lumberjack. Mom wa
s so happy when I came out that she says it made her laugh. “Giving birth to you really had me in stitches,” is what she still says. I don’t know why she thinks that is so funny.

  Dad had taken Lamaze with Mom—coaching her on how and when to breathe. So when I was born, the three of us were right there together. Because Mom’s doctor was a woman, Dad was the first man to ever hold me. He told me he loved me and then handed me to my mom.

  That is how it used to be before my parents began doing the really important things they do now. We were together. The three of us lived in a little apartment with no yard in a bad neighborhood because that was all they could afford. We didn’t have the big house in Arlington like we do now.

  I know it is selfish, but I miss those times. In my memory, that “ratty little dump” as Dad calls it, that first apartment where we lived, seems as big as the whole world. That great big house in Arlington with all its neat trees and flowers seems so small when I am in it alone and my parents are gone.

  Dad was right. I would be happier staying here at the school.

  I suppose I didn’t have to. Devo overheard my phone call. He offered to let me spend spring break with him and his mom and stepdad in Boston. (It was their turn for him. Summer would be Telluride with his dad and stepmom.) I declined his offer. Then I went to seek sanctuary in the stacks, knowing that Devo would tell everybody he knew that I was staying here over the break. I knew that, just so they could get on my good side, other kids would start asking me if I wanted to go home with them.

  As it was, I barely made it through the library door in time. Sure enough, looking like some preppie rescue party, Devo and Pits and Hester were standing in the middle of the quad engaged in deep discussion as they looked toward my dorm. Luckily I had slipped out the back and circled around.

  Here in the library up on the second floor, I thought, I was safe. Then I heard the downstairs door open.