The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  Myrtle rolled her eyes and Comfrey swallowed hard, thinking of all the things that could go wrong with this plan. But Mallow’s pride had been stirred up. He wanted to prove just how fast and darting and clever a leveret he could be. In fact, he was quivering with excitement at the thought. Myrtle sniffed at her twin.

  “I can do it,” said Mallow. “It’s as good a plan as any, and this Grizzly-witch here is providing us the perfect chance.” He glanced at his sister. “Oh come on,” he cajoled. “Two’s better than one – much more confusing!”

  Myrtle feigned disinterest, cleaning at her paws, which were muddy and damp. But even Comfrey was looking at her now in expectation. “All right, all right!” the hare said. “We are quick as a flash, you know…”

  It was true. When the leverets burst at once from a lupine bush not ten metres from the oblivious Grizzly-witch, they moved so quickly and suddenly in the rain that they looked like lightning flashes, golden and fast. The Grizzly-witch dropped the roots from her fingers in surprise, left her basket, and lunged after the hares, for no bear can resist a hare when it’s so close at hand. She skidded with her bulk in the mud, but was gone in an instant down the hill in pursuit.

  Meanwhile, Tin and Comfrey crouched behind the same lupine bush, trying not to pant with fear at the nearness of that bear-woman and her rooty bear-musk smell. Clearly, the granite shoes worked. They’d been able to creep so close to the Grizzly-witch that they could see the rise and fall of her chest as she calmly dug and gathered, dug and gathered, murmuring loving words to each root. But the children were also very careful to keep low and out of sight, for it was better not to take any chances.

  The moment the Grizzly-witch bounded out of sight, thrilled by the chasing of hares, but thoroughly confounded by their criss-crossing, zigzagging movements, Tin and Comfrey moved in as fast as they could to the place where the Grizzly-witch had been digging. Several thick, green wild parsnip stalks were scattered across the ground. Comfrey fumbled the cork out of the purple glass bottle and with a shaking hand dripped a few drops onto the roots lying there in the basket. The rain had lessened to a mist, but still she hoped the water wouldn’t wash the oil away. Then, just in time, they shuffled back in the stone shoes behind a distant bush, to watch.

  The Grizzly-witch had given up on the chase rather quickly. She was an older bear, and at their best bears aren’t endurance runners. Her hands and feet were covered in mud. She shook her shaggy head. Tin and Comfrey stared. It was uncanny to see that furred human face in the body of a bear, and those fingered hands and feet with human toes padding the ground like paws. She was breathing heavily through her nose. When she reached her basket full of parsnip roots, she paused for a long moment, sniffing at the ground, at her basket, at the roots. Comfrey grabbed Tin’s hand in alarm and they both held their breath.

  But after all, the oil only smelled of poppies, and there were many clumps of them nearby, their seeds having dropped and grown for thousands of generations in that dirt. And the strange sharp smell of granite? Well, thought the Grizzly-witch, perhaps her nose was getting old too. She sighed and began to gather the fallen roots into her basket. Annoyed at the energy she’d wasted tearing after those silly young hares, she began her ambling way back home for the evening feast, muttering to herself. She looked back once over her shoulder, feeling something strange, some sense of eyes on her shoulders, but she saw only a kestrel, his tail tacking through the lessening rain as he flew past her and towards the pine trees where she too was headed.

  When the Grizzly-witch was almost out of sight, Tin and Comfrey stood, letting out a sigh of relief. The leverets burst from a nearby lupine bush to join them, making Comfrey almost shriek with surprise. Tin clapped his hand over her mouth and stifled the noise.

  “That was amazing!” the boy whispered. “Faster than anything I’ve ever seen!”

  “Yeah, you should have seen her face!” chimed Comfrey. “She was so exhausted, she could hardly catch her breath!”

  Mallow puffed his chest out for a second time, and Myrtle kicked him playfully. “No time to waste!” she said, grooming at her whiskers, trying to hide her own pride. “It won’t matter how fast we were if the Grizzly-witch doesn’t share those roots with all of her sisters! C’mon, we can hide outside the barn until dark.”

  They walked quietly along the wet trail created by the Grizzly-witch, grateful for the lessening rain. They prayed that she wouldn’t eat a root and fall fast asleep in the middle of a hillside before she reached the barn-den of her sisters.

  But she didn’t. She carried the roots all the way back to a wind-battered, peeling white barn beyond the row of pines where, half an hour earlier, the kestrel had settled to roost. Through a narrow barn door the children briefly glimpsed a flare of warm firelight and smelled a waft of delicious stew, simmering away.

  They settled in to wait beyond the pines for an hour longer, until the sun was all the way down. As the first stars came out and the windows of the barn began to glow from the fire within, first the leverets, then Tin and Comfrey, crept up to a series of cracks and holes in the sides of the barn and peered inside. The wooden floors inside the Grizzly-witch’s old hay barn were strewn with animal skins of all varieties – elk, bobcat, rabbit, fox. The gnarled roots of myriad plants hung from the rafters, drying. One whole wall was full of shelves and drawers, each labelled with the name of a different root medicine or berry jam.

  When Comfrey and Tin looked more closely through the crack between the boards, they saw that each lantern was in fact the skull of an elk calf with a beeswax candle glowing from its eye sockets. In the middle of the room, a Grizzly-witch, with many silver streaks in her fur, stirred a pot. She did not rise up on her back legs to do this, just reached out with a furred hand, which presented such a strange union of human fingers and bear’s body that the sight made Tin dizzy. The Grizzly-witch they’d followed back from the wild parsnip patch came forward with her roots and dropped them one by one into the stewpot.

  Inside the barn, the boiling soup released the hint of bitter poppy oil into the air, and several of the Grizzly-witches – there were nineteen in all – sniffed suspiciously, then shrugged. Poppies did, after all, grow everywhere across the hills.

  “Tell us about the bones you read today,” said the Grizzly-witch who stirred the pot to one of her sisters, the one grooming at her fur with a delicate bird-bone comb. She lounged with several other Grizzly-witches, some of whom were grooming each other, but the one addressed combed only herself, and her eyes were milky. Comfrey almost gasped aloud when the bear seemed to look up and right at the place in the wall where she was crouched, peering.

  “She’s blind,” said Mallow in the smallest voice he could muster.

  “I smell hare,” said the blind Grizzly-witch suddenly, not answering her sister’s question. The leverets stiffened.

  “Yes, Amurra, there’s hare in the stew,” came the reply. Myrtle moaned.

  “No, living ones, young ones – leverets,” replied Amurra, setting down her comb.

  “Must be Sorr,” said the Grizzly-witch at the pot. “She caught several this morning, the smell is on her hands still. Come, tell us what you read. The signs have been so unclear to us of late.” There was a tone of impatience in her voice, and in the postures of the other Grizzly-witches – several of whom were passing round elk-skull bowls – as if they were used to Amurra’s rambling ways.

  Amurra sighed and shifted her weight, letting go of this conviction about leverets. “The reading, yes…” she said, trailing off again. “Perhaps I spoke of hares because I do not like to speak of what I read in the elk bones today.” She paused once more and smoothed at her fingernails. The barn had grown very still. The Grizzly-witch at the stewpot held the steaming ladle in mid-air. The fire popped and sighed under the soup. Several Grizzly-witches laid down their grooming combs.

  “It was the big fellow who died last winter, just beyond his first mating season. I left his bones up by the granite stone
s at Raven’s Tor. They were clean and smooth under my hands for reading today. I honour his life and his fast hoofs and his strong heart.” Amurra said these last words in the same tones Comfrey used when saying the Offering words, like a prayer.

  “We honour his life and his fast hoofs and his strong heart,” repeated the Grizzly-witches in a great chorus of low voices, no longer impatient.

  Comfrey and Tin, however, only grew more so as they listened, curious to hear this bone-reading, this fortune-telling – whatever it was. The sound of Amurra’s voice sent chills down their spines and rumbled low as the soil and roots and stones. As she spoke, her milky eyes became as beautiful as the starlight.

  “The curious thing, my sisters, is that no matter how I felt those bones, no matter how I sang to them, asking for their oracle, all that they shaped under my hands was the story of the Elk. Our Creatrix, the one we guard. This was strange to me. The Elk the Elk the Elk, the bones whispered and clattered. And yet it was not a soothing sound, not a hymn of peace and wholeness, as her mention usually is. It frightened me, my sisters. It sounded like a warning, a premonition. For a time, I could hear no more. I tasted ghosts on my tongue. I tasted blood and metal and death. The Elk, whispered the bones beneath my hands. The Elk.” Amurra’s voice rang out now, as if she were reciting an ancient piece of poetry.

  A low rumbling filled the room. Mallow took cover in Tin’s coat, and Myrtle buried herself further into Comfrey’s cape. It was the sound of a grizzly’s growl, deep and resonant and terrifying. The walls themselves vibrated slightly.

  “I’m afraid it gets worse, sisters,” continued Amurra after a moment. “Imare, why don’t you serve the soup, so our bellies may be full and quiet, better able to digest what is before us. It is hard to think calmly on an empty stomach.”

  Comfrey and Tin shared a look of anticipation mixed with disquiet – the soup would soon lull all the Grizzly-witches into a heavy sleep, yet they both wanted desperately to hear the rest of Amurra’s bone-reading. Had she seen two human children in the bones? Did she suspect that someone might be coming for the Elk? Did she know more about the fate of Farallone, something that might help them all? Comfrey shuddered with fear and hope.

  Imare, the Grizzly-witch by the pot of soup, ladled generous helpings into each of her sisters’ bowls as they came, one by one, to the fire. When everyone had settled back into their places, Amurra took a delicate sip of her soup, grunted with contentment at its rich and bitter flavours, and continued. Around her, the other Grizzly-witches slurped hungrily.

  “I was about to set the bones down for good and leave them, but something compelled me to cast them once more across the ground. This time they did not tell of the Elk. Oh no. They fell in a grid. They fell in the form of the City. Only the City had no Wall. Touching that pattern made pain sear through me. Then it was gone. I do not know, my sisters, what it means. But we must prepare ourselves, we must guard our Elk more carefully than ever before.” Amurra sighed heavily and lifted her soup spoon a second time to her furred lips. There was no growling reply from her sisters, no outrage. Her ears pricked. “I know it is hard to hear of the City,” she said, taking their silence for the stunned horror she too felt in her chest. “For what happened Before carries great grief.”

  But suddenly, Amurra found herself unbearably tired, heavy, yawning. Her head nodded onto her chest. Her soup bowl slid to the floor, spilling, and Amurra too fell asleep like the rest of her silent sisters.

  Myrtle and Mallow emerged from their respective hiding places in the children’s coats, ears moving with triumph, golden eyes bright with satisfaction.

  “It worked, Mr No Plan!” exclaimed Mallow, nudging Tin’s hand with his nose.

  “It took two very fast, brave hares,” replied the boy quietly, grinning.

  “Well, come on then!” said Myrtle, flicking her ears against Comfrey’s arm. The girl’s eyes were still trained on the crack in the barn.

  “But does she know we are here? Should we be doing this?” she said. “And what she saw, or read – does it mean the City will succeed?” She turned to Tin, her volume rising. “Your people will bleed every last Wild Folk for their stupid Star-Breakers, and turn Farallone to a Wasteland again!”

  The boy’s face changed when Comfrey said “your people” with such hatred in her tone, like she was spitting those words at him. They didn’t feel like his people at all, but he had been a piece in the great machine of the Cloister for his whole life, without knowing there was any other way to live, and so somehow, he felt complicit. The thought made Tin feel sick.

  “They’re not my people,” he retorted, angry and hurt. “I have no idea who my real people are. I’m an orphan, remember? I got left on the Cloister doorstep like the Strangelings your Village people ditch on the hills.” Now there was venom in Tin’s voice too, and a red heat at his cheeks. Comfrey snorted and opened her mouth to reply.

  “All right, all right, you two, time enough to argue later. Right now, we have to be quick!” interjected Mallow. “This is our only chance. The Grizzly-witches are asleep. By tomorrow, they will have noticed our tracks, we’ll never be able to get close again! We have no idea how long this poppy oil will work, nor where the Elk is at all, so we’d better hurry up and get looking!”

  With that, both Mallow and Myrtle bounded around the barn and off into the darkness, towards the pale hint of a trail that led through the grass. They sniffed furiously as they went. The rain had stopped for good, and the cover of cloud made the sky lighter, but it was still difficult to see.

  “How are we going to get anywhere in the dark?” groaned Comfrey, choosing to ignore Tin and speaking instead to her feet as she tromped off, one foot heavy with that granite shoe. Avoiding one another’s eyes, they followed the white flashing of the leveret’s hind legs as Myrtle and Mallow bounded ahead, sniffing at every trail junction, pile of elk scat and patch of grass torn by elk teeth.

  A cold wind picked up from the west off the ocean. Coyotebrush swayed in the foggy dark. A barn owl screamed, passing high overhead and the leverets froze. Now that they wore the granite shoes, the children didn’t provide the same blanket of protection from hare-loving predators as usual. But the barn owl was out searching for its regular prey – the numerous slow-moving voles, or unsuspecting gophers. The leverets remained still for several minutes after the owl was gone. Then Myrtle, who’d hidden herself amidst a very big patch of iris leaves, began to smell at a torn patch of grass near her nose very intently.

  “I think I smell her,” breathed the leveret.

  Mallow emerged from his hideaway in a lupine bush and joined the sniffing.

  “How can you know?” asked Tin, amazed, watching those quick-moving noses.

  “Should I use my spectacles?” asked Comfrey, ignoring Tin.

  “No, no,” said Myrtle, raising her head again from the grass. “We can smell her well enough. There are a hundred nuances to an elk-smell. We’ve been picking up scent-threads all along the way, Mallow and I, of dozens and dozens of elk. A large group of females. Several smaller groups of wandering bulls. They’re separate again, now the courting season is over. The females travel around mostly together, in one big group, led by the oldest matriarch elk, because she knows all the trails, all the sweetest food spots and the safest calving grounds. She is the star at the centre of their constellation. And she, the old matriarch, is also the Elk of Milk and Gold, Creatrix of Farallone.”

  Tin and Comfrey both stared at the little leveret.

  “You know all this stuff just from the smell?” whispered Tin, incredulous.

  “Why of course we do!” interjected Mallow, not wanting Myrtle to get all the credit. “There are whole books, as you would call them, written in smell across the earth. This is how many of us four-leggeds talk to each other across time and space. Anyway, as Myrtle was saying, the Elk of Milk and Gold moves always at the centre of the female herd. She has a very different smell though. It’s of stars, of gold and of milk. She seems
to have been grazing here, not at the grass but at the granite underneath.”

  “But, how can you be sure it’s really her?” pressed Comfrey, crouching to look at the torn grass and bits of stone in the dark.

  “Look closely.” Myrtle gestured her nose towards an imprint in the grass beside the iris patch. It was a hoof impression edged with glinting gold flakes. Its light was visible even in the darkness.

  Comfrey touched the hoofprint reverently, her mouth falling open.

  Tin crouched too, though he waited until Comfrey was finished to place his fingers against the indentation. When he lifted his fingers, there was gold dust at their tips. His heart skipped with excitement and he felt a strange shiver through his whole body, as if the tracery of stargold that lived in his blood was responding.

  The four set off again, the leverets slowly following the scent trail that matched the smells of that gold-edged hoofprint. Comfrey took the Baba Ithá’s strand of three hundred pearls from her damp pack and held them wound round her hand, in case they came upon the Elk unexpectedly. She wondered what would happen when the Elk saw them. The feather seemed to weigh very heavily upon her again, like there was a lump of iron in her pack. How could she, Comfrey, have anything to do with something so grand as a Creatrix of Farallone? But the voice of the Bobcat-girl rose up in her memory then, speaking her name, and a spark of new resolve kindled in her. She didn’t understand why, but she’d known from that very moment that an unfathomable destiny awaited her. The basket of her own fate burned to ashes and all its spokes pointing towards this Elk.

  The fog parted, revealing a waning gibbous moon. Below, the moonlight illuminated a female elk on the far hillside. She was pale as cream and her hoofs were golden. She rested in the tall green grass. As the leverets, and then the children in their heavy granite shoes, approached, she stood slowly – first her back legs, then her front. She was very, very old and her creamy fur clumped here and there with age. Her spine was an elegant but knobbed line. But once she had risen fully to her feet, her power and beauty cast their own light. Her eyes were the same purple as the wild irises when they bloom. The pale cream of her fur matched the moon. Slowly, with the grace of many ages, she turned her head and looked right into Comfrey’s eyes.