The Collected Stories of Carol Emshwiller, Vol. 1

by Carol Emshwiller

  This has been a part of our lives for as long as even our oldest can remember. We can’t think back to when The Project was not our main concern. Nor conceive of such a time. And why would we want to? Those days must have been useless days.

  We are a strong people. You can see it in our noses. None but the strong could have stayed and lived here. Our hair is bleached by altitude. Our legs are stringy. Even our old ladies still jump from stone to stone. Our songs, unlike those of any other peoples, are full of hohs. Some say we don’t sing at all, but only shout and growl.

  First we built a fortress. This was so long ago we no longer understand it’s purpose. (We live within its crumbling walls.) Except for the mountain lion we have no enemies. And who but us would want land such as this with hardly a single flat spot larger than a split boulder?

  That lion took our baby daughter. That’s why my wife keeps saying, “What? What!” She blames me. “Had you been… ! Had you but been… ! Had you!”

  I say, and I say it slowly, “As. It. Is. We’ve hardly enough men for the Project.” There are but eighty. We need every single one on the ropes. The stone we raise now is the largest so far. Couldn’t be done, they said and said, but we are doing it.

  The evening our baby was taken, the owl flew low, looking huge in the moonlight. I thought I could reach up and touch its white underbelly. First I heard the flap of wings. First I thought it was a ghost. Then I thought, It’s just an owl, not knowing that it really was a ghost, or soon would be.

  As to the lion, my baby daughter must have made but a single mouthful.

  I’m not the only one who has lost a child. This happens when game is scarce. It had been a dry winter. The pine nuts were few, so rodents are few. Grouse, hares, the sweet, gray foxes, few. Our wild mountain sheep, eaten to the last of them. We have to depend on our goats for everything now. (Would that my daughter had been penned up with the kids.)

  (The blanket my wife was knitting is now for someone else’s child.)

  Since we lost our little girl my wife has been blaming me even for the lack of radishes.

  “Not even trim the wicks,” she says. “It’s little enough,” she says. “Do I shout?” she says. “Do I sit? Tired as I am, do I sit?”

  I say, “Tired as I am. Look how my eyes are shutting.” I say, “Until you work at raising boulders, you will never understand such a tiredness as this.”

  Radishes! Wicks! Who would care but somebody’s wife?

  They said the stones are too big, the mountain top too high lightning will strike, boulders will turn red, glow, and then crack as if to deafen. I say, “Yes, yes! Of course!”

  Say what they wish, but it’s easy to see all paths lead to our village. One has only to climb to our highest places and look down to see how true that is. We’re not a way-station alongside some path that goes someplace else. Therefore it’s clear there is no need to go to some lower place and look for other happenings, so we have never gone.

  Our catamount prowls wherever she wishes. Sometimes at night, I see her eyes shine. Disembodied. Steady on. Then a sudden freezing along the backbone, as if I saw a child on the brink of the brink.

  The lion is young. We think she’s only recently left the den of her birth. She’s thin. It’s the young ones, don’t yet know what they’re about, so all the more dangerous. She’s the color of our boulders. She belongs—as much as we do. In fact more.

  I’m a strong man. A big man. The biggest. Except for me we don’t look like the people of the valley. We’re smaller and wirier. I have never been down there, but now and then one of them climbs up here. We recognize them right away and not just because we know everybody who lives up here, but by their cheekbones and their wide open eyes. We know they’re used to shadows because when we look down there, into their valley, we see how, every afternoon, our mountains shade them. We wonder what they’re up to here in the up instead of down in their the down.

  Down there they call us, “The people of the goats, or of the mountain sheep.” They even call us, “The people of the catamount.” We are more likely the people of the dinner of the catamount.

  My wife says, “Shouldn’t the project be the lion? Shouldn’t the lion be first so our little ones can sleep in peace or play capture the peak? If you’ll not make the lion your project, then I’ll make it mine.”

  How can she? She can’t even draw the bow. And as to the spear…. Women use spears as canes to steady themselves as they climb over rocks.

  (One evening I saw our house cat leap up and pull a bat out of the air. I know what my wife will have to deal with.)

  “If you don’t go, I go. What do I have to wait for here waiting and waiting? For the cabbages to grow?”

  Is she really going out to hunt lion, small as she is and always cold without me to warm her?

  “Go,” I say, “I’m busy with the project. There will always be a beast, if not this one then another.”

  Yet I will follow. Even though I’m not only the foreman, but the most important puller and checker and the finest fitter of all, and my voice echoes out over the canyons louder than any, I will follow. My pock-marked face has made her my one and only. Even my size was against me with the women.

  We men of the mountains are not like me. I’m teased that my father was not my father but that my mother was raped by some valley man and never confessed it. “Out picking berries, one can not only come across a bear.” Though they also say my father was a bear—a bald-headed bear. I’d rather that than some valley man.

  My wife… even she would hardly be a mouthful for the lion. She’s as small as I am large. Her name is Wren and she’s like a wren.

  Our women are named Lark, Titmouse, Towhee, Quail, Redstart, Killdeer…. (Killdeer because we so admire the broken wing trick and hope to see the same in the mothers of our children.) Our men are named for raptors: Vulture, Eagle, Hawk, Goshawk, Kestrel, Falcon, and such.

  (Not Owl. We would never name anyone Owl.)

  My name is Harrier. We named our baby, Sparrow. Now I can hardly think that word.

  I say, “It’s the lion that will be stalking you.”

  “I will be adoing.”

  Always…. Always the women take our time from what’s important. The Project will last for generations. Centuries. Perhaps forever. Even as long as our mountain remains a mountain. Women’s thoughts are on the everyday. I want to say, “What about the monumental? Have you ever thought of that?” And I would say it except I already have and more times than I can count.

  What I think as I follow my woman down and then up, and then and down and down and up again, is: How fortunate to be alive so far! The turkey vulture soars. One tiny cloud. For a while a raven family keeps one step ahead. I’m thinking how the milky way is still up there shining all across the sky, there, even though you can’t see it in the daytime. I’m needed elsewhere, but I will enjoy the day as it is right now, though my wife, my wren, hurries away from me with all my weapons.

  Whenever I top a rise and look back I see them struggling. My group at the top—all the strongest pullers. I see skids and ramps and wedges, pulleys…. They won’t make much headway without me. (I didn’t ask leave to come, I just came. Who would want a wife out here in The Nowhere much less in The Down?)

  Did Wren look back and see I wasn’t there? I would have been easy to spot because of my bulk. Now, as I look I can see that all are, just as they are, mountain men and small. No wonder they joke that I’m the bastard of a bald-headed bear.

  She’s easy to follow. We wear red, the mountain color. The better to be seen. She wears a red bonnet and her fuzzy red sweater. She has her boots and her mittens tied on the back of her pack. She wears moccasins, but crosses the streams barefoot and wipes her feet with a red towel. But I wear the color of the lion and stay well behind. The black straps of my pack across my chest, my wide black hat, imitate the cracks of the mountains and make me even more like a piece of half split rock.

  She goes lower, then climbs up again
into a cozy pass, cozy black basalt cliffs on one side and tawny, more rounded granite on the other. Behind the black side, an iron oxide peak looms orange. There’s several patches of frazzle ice to chew on. There are overhanging rocks. I’m thinking this is a good place for a lioness. Then I know this is the place. I don’t know how I know but I can almost smell her.

  Here is where my wife, my lion’s mouthful, decides to spend the night. I guess if the lion finds it inviting, everyone would.

  She doesn’t look frightened as she settles in. I suppose one who has just lost a baby doesn’t feel any fear for a long time afterwards. Perhaps never.

  I stay close. Then I come closer. I watch my wife sleep in the moonlight. All the nights since the baby died she hasn’t slept much but now she does. As if the very danger is comforting. As if what has eaten our baby might eat her so the owl would fly again.

  I take back my weapons, dress myself in a leather apron. Surely the lion will come. Surely the lion is here already.

  I see her—first just eyes reflecting moonlight, then a shadow. She comes out from a low overhang, exactly where I thought she’d come from. I’d never have seen her if I hadn’t suspected she’d come from there. She stands still and looks at me. Even though I knew… even though I hoped she’d be there, I feel that edge-of-a-cliff feeling, myself, about to fall. Or the project about to come loose and crash down on us.

  I want to lure her away from my wife, so, like the killdeer, I limp. Down from the cozy pass, down into the switchbacks below, behind boulders, away and lower. I don’t want even the sounds… neither my sounds nor cat sounds…. But if we’re this far down, why would my wife think they had anything to do with me? Many’s the times we’ve awakened to the lion’s midnight yowls, howls, screeches, caterwauling, up there near our village, and turned to each other, and said, “It’s only the young lion, fresh out of her mother’s den.”

  Why would my wife think anything of it except to reach for me and find me not there?

  When we’re far down, lioness and I, and in a flat clear place where trees are few and the moon shines through and I can see clearly, I turn.

  It’s this leather apron between me and claws that saves me. And, of course, the inexperience of the lioness.

  She had a look in her eyes of wondering about the world. My daughter had the same. And when I killed her she had a look as if to say: I can’t be, and already, dead. No doubt my daughter had the same when that moment came to her. When I saw that, I hesitated, but it was too late.

  I carry her carcass to the side of the clearing. No doubt about it, she was starving. No doubt about it, she’d have come after my wife. Perhaps my wife wanted her to. Warmth to warmth, fur to skin, as lovers. Or herself as gift. Or simply to close a circle.

  I limp back—this time the limping is real. I expected worse. I brought herbs and bandages in case. Back under the lionesses overhang, I bandage myself. I stow my weapons and the leather apron in a corner.

  Then I go lie down, again not far from my wife to guard her. As I had told her, there will always be a beast somewhere out there at the edges of our lives.

  Pain keeps me from sleeping. One can’t get close to any sort of cat without having wounds.

  I had thought my wife would turn around and go back, but she goes on. She doesn’t know the lion is dead. Should I stop her? Try to? Tell her the lion will be gone to the buzzards before midday? Show myself? But one look at me and she’d know all there is to know. I’ll not yet show myself.

  I chafe with all this hithering and thithering. I regret every minute I spend away from The Project. We say, “What’s worth the doing is worth dying for or why be adoing.” I might well have died here in the middle of nowhere. I had always thought to die for the Project, not from cat scratchings.

  My wife goes on down, not knowing she’s stalking nothing. Might as well be following her own stepped-on mosses. Might as well look up and back and over her left shoulder for the special place where dead babies congregate for each other’s company—all the dead babies who have just smiled their first smiles.

  None of us know anything about The Down, and proud of it. There’ll be bear. There’ll be snakes and bugs and goodness knows what. Things we never heard of. Trees and bushes are already changing. And they grow closer together.

  From here I get a good view of this flat land. Flat as far as you can see. We know nothing about it nor care to. We don’t ponder fields, or horses or cows or ploughs. We say, “That which is highest is it’s own reward.”

  Those big ugly men, hunking around down there. Altitude makes them puff. Their lips turn blue. We offer them our best food knowing they’ll refuse. Always half way along that last and steepest climb to our fortress, they throw up.

  If they can’t see the importance of The Project then there’s no explaining it, neither to them nor to our women who keep saying, “What in the world!” and, “Why! Why ever!”

  I told her and I told her, you can’t stalk a cat. Where does she think she’s on the way to? Does she want to see for herself all that we are proud not knowing? Or is it that, (curious as a wife) she simply wants to find something different?

  And she already has. I never saw flowers as large as these. I see her peer and sniff. I see her stroke the velvet of the petals. She leans as she leaned over our baby.

  I do. I do love her.

  I climb a mound and look back (mound is all one can call these lumps of The Down. These silly hills make me even more proud to be a mountain man.) I can’t see my men anymore, nor pulleys nor ropes, but The Project is clear, bright white against the sky. Exactly as we planned it. When we cap it with that last and largest boulder, we’ll have done the impossible.

  My wife stands and looks and listens. She imitates the call of a bird I never heard before. (She can imitate all the bird calls in the mountains, but this is a new sound to us.) I see she’s here for whatever she can find that’s different. There’ll be no stopping her. She studies the ground and then steps carefully so as not to crush anything, even something small.

  I’m beginning to feel as she must be feeling, that this is to be seen and known about. I look around as she looks around. The sky is flatter than I thought. Distances are different. I’ll have to walk it to understand it.

  And there the horned cows. Without them I’d not have had a leather apron tough enough to save me.

  But this is our water. It all comes from us. As we climbed down, always we heard rushing water sounds and thought nothing of it because, up in our village, it is the sound of our daily life. Here they’ve forced it into straight lines all across their land. Until now, I had wondered what those straight lines were. Nothing is as straight up there except split rocks. When the sun shined all the way down here, I had thought the waterways were of silver and that that is where our bracelets came from.

  My wife has hurried on as though to reach some new thing before some other new thing, but it’ll be dark soon. She will have to find a bedding down place even here in this pasture land. Once away from the mounds, there’s not a single boulder. None have rolled this far. But now and then there are trees and sometimes bushes, especially along the ditches that tame our water. My wife finds a place to hide. She has already taken off all her red, back in the lower hills.

  What will they be thinking of her here, where everything is large? And what will they think of her trousers and her fine bleached hair? I, being the size I am, could hide as one of them, whereas she could never. Except I wouldn’t know how to live here. What do you say to a horse? What do you whistle to send a dog off and around? And what of bulls? I’ve heard things of bulls.

  They say time is different down here. It goes at a faster walk. In The Up our steps are slower because the ground is rough. But even these people of The Down can’t walk away from time.

  Before she goes to hide in her bushes she studies the moon. I see that she sees as I do—how life depends on water and on sky. She gestures, one palm up. She seems to make a wish. We say to childre
n, catch a moon beam, make a wish, but you need a pinch of mountain aster for it to come true.

  I lie down, next bush to her. This time I do sleep. Though I wonder, what of bulls? And what of dogs and how large do they grow down here?

  This time, when I finally wake, she’s stepping away from the shelter of the trees. She’s in red again, showing herself on purpose. Nearby, at the edge of the field, there’s what I know is a plough. We have none such. She stands beside it. I’m so stiff and sore I can hardly get up but I do.

  Here, already, there’s a flatland man coming straight towards her. The man is riding sideways on one of those horse things. I had no known there’d be so much hair at the ankles. All kinds of straps hang down. So many one wonders how he knows to hook them up. He jumps off and leads the horse to the plough and to my wife.

  They stand one to one. They speak. He, with the swallowed Rs of the Down and no clicks on the Ks. He calls her, Little Lady. “Little Lady of the mountains.” He reaches out his fingers. Is it as if to be smelled? Does he think she’s an animal?

  I can see he looks like me. Except no pock marks. (I could never grow a decent beard because of that. His is decent.) For a moment I see myself as if a long time ago when I hated my size as everyone else did, and said so to my face. There came a time, though, when I won every fistfight. Then they hated me even more, but that all changed when I was old enough to work on The Project. I was foreman at seventeen. This man would scare every mountain man but me. He’s even larger than I am, but my muscles are the muscles of those who lift boulders.

  He and my wife reach out slowly. Touch hands as if the other is a miracle of strangeness. Then he reaches as if to touch her bleached hair. Reaches but doesn’t touch, though almost. Her hair has hardly any color, not enough to call it yellow.