He didn’t answer, just turned and started walking. Dawn gazed after him uncertainly. Then she felt Ewan’s damp, dirty hand grip hers, tug her forward, and she followed.
The moon rose just when it got so dark that the bright hair always just ahead of them seemed about to disappear. Dawn stopped, stunned. It was a storybook moon, immense, orange as a pumpkin, the face on it as clear as if it had been carved out of crystal. Surely it couldn’t be the same little white thumbnail moon that she noticed now and then floating above the city, along with three stars and a dozen flashing airplane lights. This moon loomed over the planet like it had just been born, and she, Dawn Chase, was the first human to stand on two legs to look at it.
She felt Ewan pulling at her. “Come on. We’re home.”
Home under that moon? she thought confusedly. Home in what universe? He dragged her forward a step, and she saw the light beneath the moon, the lantern that Uncle Ridley had hung on the deer horns nailed above the cabin door.
She looked around, dazed like an animal with too much light. “Where’s—where did he go?”
Ewan was running across the little clearing, halfway to the cabin. “Come on!” he shouted, and the door swung open. Uncle Ridley stuck his round, hairy face out, grinning at them. The old retriever at his knee barked wildly with excitement.
“There you are!” he shouted. “I knew you’d find your way back!”
“But we didn’t,” Dawn said, her eyes flickering through the moonlit trees. They cast moon shadows across the pale ground; the air had turned smoky with light. “There was someone—”
“I’m starving!” Ewan cried, trying to wriggle past the dog, who was trying to lick his face. “What’s for supper?”
“Bambi!” Uncle Ridley answered exuberantly. That was enough to make the deer Dawn saw at the edge of the clearing sprint off with a flash of white tail. She stepped onto the porch, puzzled, still trying to find him. “Someone brought us home,” she told Uncle Ridley, who was holding the door open for her.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. He never said. He hardly talked at all. He looked—he was only a couple of years older than me, I think. He had really bright red hair.”
“Sounds like a Hunter,” Uncle Ridley said. “There are Hunters scattered all through these mountains, most of them redheads. Ryan, maybe. Or Oakley, more likely. He never uses one word when none will do.”
“He didn’t even let me thank him.” She stopped at the threshold, her stomach sagging inside her like a leaky soccer ball at the smell of food. “Where’s Dad?”
“He took the truck out to go searching for you. He was pretty worried. There’s always some idiot in the woods who’ll take a shot at anything that moves. He’s probably lost himself now on all those back roads. I told him there’s nothing out there to hurt you in the dark. Even the bears would run.”
“Bears?”
“But it’s best if you don’t roam far from the cabin during hunting season. Come in before the bats do, and have some stew.”
“It smells great.”
He shut the door behind her. “Nothing like fresh venison. Shot it last week, four-pronged buck, near Hardscrabble Hollow.”
“Venison?” she asked uncertainly, her throat closing the way it had when he talked about bears.
“Deer.”
When she woke the next morning, she was alone. They had all gone hunting, she remembered, even the dog. Earlier, their whispers had half-wakened her. Coffee burbled; the wood stove door squeaked open and shut; bacon spattered in a pan, though it had to be the middle of the night.
“Shh,” her father kept saying to Ewan, who was so excited that his whispers sounded like strangled shouts.
“Can I really shoot it?”
“Shh!”
Finally, they had all cleared out, and she had gone back to sleep. Now, the quiet cabin was filled with a shifting underwater light as leaves fell in a constant shower like colored rain past the windows. She lay on the couch watching them for a while, random thoughts blowing through her head. She could eat deer, she had found, especially if it was called venison. She hoped Ewan wouldn’t kill anybody. He had never shot a rifle in his life. Uncle Ridley had invited her to come with them, but she didn’t really want to be faced with the truth of the link between those wary, liquid eyes and what had smelled so irresistible in her bowl last night. The eyes in her memory changed subtly, became human. She shifted, suddenly finding possibilities in the coming day. She hadn’t seen his face clearly in the dusk, just enough to make her curious. The stillness in it, the way it revealed expression without moving.... She sat up abruptly, combing her short, dark hair with her fingers. If she stayed in the clearing in front of the cabin, no one would mistake her for a deer, and maybe he would see her there.
She sat for a time on the lumpy ground in the clearing pretending to read, then for another stretch of time on a rock at the edge of the stream that ran past the side of the house, swatting at bugs and watching the falling leaves catch in the current and sail away. She was half asleep in the sagging wicker chair on the cabin porch, feeling the sun pushing down on her eyelids, when the boards thumped hollowly under her. She opened her eyes.
He didn’t speak, just gave an abrupt little nod. Even close, she couldn’t see the pupils in his eyes; they were that dark. Again she had the impression of expression just beneath the surface of his face, like a smile just before it happened. She straightened in the chair, blinking, then ruffled at her hair and smiled at him. His skin was the warm brown of old leaves, the muscles and tendons visible in his throat, around his mouth. The sun picked out strands of gold in his fiery hair.
“Ryan?” she guessed, remembering what Uncle Ridley had said. “Or is it Oakley?”
“Oakley,” he said in his husky, gentle voice. “Oakley Hunter.”
“Everyone’s gone,” she explained, in case he wondered, but he seemed to know; he hadn’t even glanced through the screen door. He sat down on the edge of the porch, his movements quiet, neat, like an animal’s.
“Dawn,” he said softly, and she blinked again. No one had ever said her name that way; it seemed a word she hadn’t heard before. “I stopped by to ask,” he continued, surprising her farther by stringing an entire sentence together, “if you’d like to take a walk with me.”
Her feet still felt yesterday in them, that endless hike, but she stood on them promptly without thinking twice. “Sure.”
He didn’t take her far, but it was far enough that she was lost within five minutes. This time she didn’t care; she rambled contentedly beside him through the wood he knew, listening to him naming grackles and nuthatches, elderberries, yarrow, maples and birch and oak. She told him about the ungainly turkey; he told her the name of the nut she had thrown at it.
“They only fan their tails for courting,” he explained. “Like peacocks.”
“How long have you lived here?” she asked. “I mean, your family. You were born here, weren’t you?”
He nodded. “There have been Hunters in these mountains for forever.”
“Do they ever leave? Or are they all like you?” He turned his dark eyes at her, waiting for the rest of it; she felt the warmth of blood like light under her skin. “I mean—I can’t see you taking off to live in the city.” She paused, laughed a little. “I can’t even see you buying a slice of pizza in the village deli.”
“I’ve eaten pizza,” he said mildly. “There are Hunters scattered all over the world.” He took his eyes from her face then, but she still felt herself in his thoughts. He drew breath, took another step or two before he spoke. “Every year, in autumn, we have a big gathering. A family reunion. They’ve been coming for days, now. It begins tonight, when the full moon rises.”
“I thought that was last night.”
“It seemed that way, didn’t it? But one side lacked a full arc. You had to look carefully.”
“It was beautiful,” she sighed. “That’s all I saw.”
She felt his eyes again, lingeri
ng on her face. “Yes.”
“It doesn’t seem possible that there could be that many people back here in the hills. Yesterday we didn’t see anyone for hours, not even a car. Until we saw you.”
“Oh, they’re here,” he said mildly. “Most of them live in a wood or a forest somewhere in the world. They’re used to being quiet. Noise scares the animals and trees; we hate to see them suffer.”
“Noise scares the trees?”
“Sure.” She looked for his secret smile again, the one he kept hidden in his bones, but she missed it. “You can hear them chattering when they’re scared. They get shot, too, along with deer and birds, in hunting season.”
“Anything that moves,” Dawn quoted, remembering what Uncle Ridley had said. It sounded like a fairy tale: the old trees aware and quaking at the hunters’ guns, unable to run, their leaves trembling together, speaking. Oakley had led her into a different wood than yesterday’s wood, she realized suddenly. She was seeing it out of his eyes now, a mysterious, unpredictable place where trees talked, and deer lived peacefully among the Hunters. She smiled, not believing, but willing to believe anything, as though she were Ewan’s age again.
Oakley gave her his opaque glance. “What’s funny?”
“Nothing,” she said contentedly. “I like your wood. What do you do, all you Hunters, at the family gathering? Have a barbecue?” She winced at the word after she said it; given their love of animals it seemed unlikely.
But he only answered calmly, “Something like that. After the hunt.” She stared at him incredulously; he shrugged a little. “We’re Hunters; we hunt.”
“At night?”
“Under the full moon. It’s a family tradition.”
“I thought you said you hated to see animals suffer.”
“We don’t hunt the animals. It’s mostly symbolic.”
“Oh.”
“Then we have a feast. A big party. We build a fire and eat and drink and dance until the moon goes down.”
She tried to imagine a symbolic hunt. “You mean like a game,” she guessed. “A game of hunting.”
“Yes.” He paused; she saw the words gathering in his face, his eyes, before he spoke. “Sometimes we invite people we know. Or friends. We were thinking of maybe asking your uncle. Because he likes to hunt so much. You could come, too. Not to hunt, just to watch. You could stay for the party, watch the moon set with me. Would you like to come?”
She didn’t answer, just felt the answer floating through her, a bubble of happiness, completely full, unable to contain a particle more of the sweet, golden air. They wandered on, up a slope, down an old, overgrown road into a dark wood, hemlock, he told her, where an underground stream had turned stones and fallen trunks above its path emerald green and velvety with moss.
She could hear water falling softly nearby. They lingered there, while Oakley showed her tiny mushrooms on the moss, ranked like soldiers, with bright scarlet caps.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he reminded her, and she looked at him, let him see the answer in her face.
“Yes,” she said. Her voice sounded small, breathless among the listening trees. “I’d love to come.”
The world exploded around her.
She screamed, not knowing what had happened, not understanding. A crack like lightning had split the air and then a deer leaped in front of her, so close she could smell its scents of musk and sulphur, so close it seemed immense, its hooves the size of open hands, its horns carrying tier upon tier of prongs, some flying banners of fire as though the lightning had struck it, and all of them, every prong, the color of molten gold. She saw its eyes as it passed, so dark she could not see the pupils, only the red flame burning deep in them.
She screamed again.
Then she saw three faces at the edge of the wood, all pallid as mushrooms, all staring at her. Behind her, she heard the great stag as it bounded from the moss onto dead leaves. And then nothing: the wood was silent. The stag left no other sound of its passage.
She heard her father shout her name.
They stumbled toward her, slipping on the moss, Uncle Ridley reaching out to take the rifle from Ewan as he began to run. She couldn’t move for a moment; she couldn’t understand why they were suddenly there, or where Oakley had gone, along with all the fairy magic of the little wood. Then she saw the stag again in her mind, crowned with gold, its huge flanks flowing past her as it leaped, its great hooves shining, and she began to shake.
Ewan reached her first, grabbing her around the waist, and then her father, holding her shoulders, his face drained, haggard.
“Are you all right?” he kept demanding. “Honey, are you all right?”
“I’m sorry,” Ewan kept bellowing. “I’m sorry.”
“We didn’t see you,” Uncle Ridley gasped. “That buck leaped and there you were behind it—thought my heart was going to jump out of me after it.”
“What are you talking about?” she whispered, pleading, completely bewildered. “What are you saying?”
“How could you get so close to it? How could it have let you come that close? And didn’t you think how dangerous that might be in hunting season?”
“It was Oak—” she said, still trembling, feeling a tear as cold as ice slide down her cheek. But how could it have been? Things tumbled in her head, then, bright images like windblown autumn leaves: Oakley under the tree, the deer watching at the edge of the wood, the great, silent gathering of Hunters under the full moon, Hunters who loved animals, who hated to see them suffer, who understood the language of trees. She saw Uncle Ridley among them, on foot with his gun, smiling cheerfully at all the Hunters around him, just another one of them, he would have thought. Until they began to hunt. “It was a Hunter,” she said, shivering like a tree, tears dropping out of her like leaves.
They weren’t listening to her; they were talking all at once, Ewan still shouting into her sweater, until she raised her voice finally, feeling on firmer ground now, though she could still feel the other wood, the otherworld, just beneath her feet. “I’m okay,” she managed to make them hear. “I’m okay. Just tell me,” she added in sudden fear, “which one of you shot at the deer?”
“It was standing there so quietly,” Uncle Ridley explained. “Young buck, didn’t hear us coming. Gave us a perfect shot at it. I couldn’t take it; I’ve got my limit for the season. We all had it in our sights, but we let Ewan take the shot. Figured he’d miss, but your dad was ready to fire after that. So Ewan shot and missed and the deer jumped and we saw you.”
Her father dropped his face in one hand, shook his head. “I came within an inch of shooting you. Your mother is going to kill me.”
“So no one—so you won’t go hunting again. Not this season. Uncle Ridley?”
“Not this season,” he answered. “And not until I stop seeing you standing there behind anything I take aim at.”
“Then it will be all right, I think,” she said shakily, peeling Ewan’s arms from around her. “Then I think you’ll all be safe. Ewan. Stop crying. You didn’t hurt me. You didn’t even hurt—You didn’t hurt anything.” He raised his red, contorted, snail-tracked face. You rescued us, she thought, and took his hand, holding it tightly, as though she might lose her way again if she let go, and who knew in what ageless realm of gold and fire, of terror and beauty she might have found herself, among that gathering under the full moon?
Some day, she promised the invisible Hunter, I will come back and find out.
Still holding her brother’s hand, she led them out of the wood.
Oak Hill
Maris wrote in her book:
“Dear Book, You are my record and my witness of the magic I learn in Bordertown. I have chosen you because you are silver and green, which seem to me magic colors, though I don’t know why. Anyway, as soon as I learn some spells I will write them in you. As soon as I find Bordertown.” Squatting on the dusty road, the blank book on her knee, she looked up at a distant growl of gears. She stuck her thu
mb out, hopefully. A woman in a pickup with a front seat full of what looked like the brawling body parts of fourteen children, all under six, gave Maris a haggard look and left her in a cloud of gold. Maris blinked dust out of her eyes, and picked up her pen again, which was also silver, with a green plume. “I hope to get there soon. That woman did not look as though she knew the way, nor does this road look like it knows the way to anything but worn-out farms and diners. But. You never know. That, I believe, is the first rule of magic.”
She stopped there, pleased, and put the book and pen into her backpack.
Much later, after an endless ride in a slow truck towing a full hay-wagon that kept wanting to ramble off by itself into the fields, she sat in a diner at a truck stop just off the interstate and alternately chewed French fries and the end of her pen as she wrote. It was quite late; the nearest city, she guessed from the newspapers in the racks, seemed to be Oak Hill. From the size of the newspaper, there was a lot of it. “Bordertown could be there. It could be anywhere,” she wrote. “Which is just as well, since I have no idea where I am. Did I cross a state line in that hay-wagon? Anyway, it gives me some place to go toward. Oak Hill. It sounds magical, a great city within an ancient forest of oak overlooking the world.” She paused, seeing it instead of the lights flashing in the dark along the interstate, instead of trucks grinding and snorting their way to the ranks of fuel pumps beside the diner. “But possibly it has no more to do with oaks than Los Angeles has to do with angels. Expect the unexpected. Which is another rule of magic. Except in this case, I think the expected is more—”
“You want something besides fries, hon?” the waitress asked her. The waitress was tall and big-boned, with a heavy, placid face and skin as clear and smooth as silk. Yes, Maris said silently, intensely, I want your skin. Your beautiful milky skin. I will give you anything for that.
“No,” she said aloud. “Just another coke, please.”
The waitress hovered. “It’s kind of late, isn’t it? For you to be out here by yourself?”
Wonders of the Invisible World Page 10
