The Waterstone

by Rebecca Rupp

  “It’s perfect,” she said wistfully. “I wish we had a wagon like this.”

  “Eh, and so you should,” Branica said, nodding approvingly. She was cutting thick slices of pungent sausage with a curved knife. “You Fishers stay too close to roof and doorstep. We Hunters, now — we live in all the world at once and sleep beneath new stars each night. It keeps the mind easy and the spirit free. To stay in one place, then that place comes to own you, no? When you find a place you can no longer leave behind, that is not to be whole.”

  She handed Tad a wooden plate piled high with sliced sausage, and laughed at his puzzled expression.

  “You do not understand me, little pond-dweller, no? You Fishers are like the rocks, who sit-sit-sit, and let the world pass by them” — she made a little crouching movement, then froze, rocklike, flashing dark eyes at Tad —“but we Hunters are like the wind in the grasses, touching all, seeing all. You should spend a summer with us in caravan. Then you see how it is to live.”

  Tad wanted to protest that that wasn’t what Fishers were like at all — even though, secretly, he had sometimes thought so himself. We don’t just sit like a lot of stickmud turtles, he thought resentfully. He opened his mouth to argue, but before he could speak, Ditani interrupted with a question.

  “Is that your frog?” Ditani asked curiously — and then, when Tad nodded —“I’ve never seen anyone keep a frog as a pet before.”

  Pippit, hovering at the edge of the campsite, croaked and rolled his eyes at her, which was his way of looking endearing. Ditani leaned closer to Tad.

  “They’re really good to eat,” she whispered.

  Pippit gave an outraged croak and vanished into the shrubbery.

  “To eat?” Tad repeated incredulously. “Frogs?”

  Ditani nodded. “Their legs,” she said.

  Tad stared at her in horror.

  “Nobono!” Branica shouted over his shoulder. “Talk later, man! We need meat for the supper!”

  Nobono, shaking his head, broke away from his conversation with Uncle Czabo and Pondleweed and walked toward her, soft-footed, unslinging his bow. He smacked Branica on the bottom. “No need to screech like a huntercat, woman,” he said. He grinned at Tad, teeth flashing white in his dark face.

  “Have you been on the hunt before, young Fisher?” At the shake of Tad’s head, Nobono crooked a finger and jerked his head toward the dimness of the forest. “Time that you were then. Follow me and try not to set those webby feet to break twigs.”

  Tad looked anxiously toward his father for permission; Pondleweed shrugged resignedly and gave a little nod. Torn between anticipation and resentment, Tad hurried behind as Nobono slipped into the underbrush.

  Tad had never seen anything like the Hunter’s skill in the forest. Nobono was as swift and silent as a brown shadow, sliding from tree root to tree root, slithering through dead weeds and bracken, light as a dried leaf. Motionless, he became invisible, and Tad felt his heart give a nervous beat at the thought of losing him, of being abandoned in the forest all alone. A hand gripped his shoulder and Tad jerked with alarm.

  “Softly.” It was Nobono, speaking in a breath of a whisper. He crouched, pulling Tad down beside him, and pointed. “There. Can’t you smell it? Blood.”

  Tad squinted in the direction of the pointing finger, sniffing the evening air. He couldn’t smell anything. At least not anything different. Just leaf mold. And he couldn’t see anything either. He turned to ask Nobono a question, but the Hunger impatiently jerked his head, gesturing for silence. Tad looked again. Was that something moving — there, beneath that shaggy clump of ferns? He couldn’t be sure. Then he heard a faint rustle and a sound of scrabbling claws, and caught, just for an instant, a glint of beady eyes.

  “Deermouse,” Nobono murmured. He barely moved his lips.

  Moving slowly, the Hunter reached behind his back, slipped an arrow from his quiver, and nocked it to the string of his bow. In one silent, fluid motion, he drew the bowstring back, took aim, and let fly. There was a whispered rush of air and a sharp cry. Tad winced.

  Nobono stood up, nocking a second arrow. “Be wary yet. Deermice are dangerous, wounded,” he said. “Behind me now.”

  He moved forward, soundlessly, and Tad followed. No matter how carefully he set his feet, they still made tiny crackling sounds. He wondered how Nobono did it.

  The deermouse was dying. It lay on its side, Nobono’s arrow buried deep in its chest. Its muzzle was dark with blood. As Tad watched, it twitched once, convulsively, and went limp. Its bright eyes glazed over and turned dull. Tad felt sick. Nobono reached down and gripped the haft of the arrow, then pulled it sharply out of the deermouse’s flesh. He bent to clean the stone point on a withered blade of grass.

  “Never leave your arrows,” he said. “A good arrow”— he reached back to pat his quiver affectionately —“a good arrow, he is a friend. Faithful like your greeny frogs, eh?”

  His teeth flashed at Tad, bright in the dimness. Then he pulled a knife from the leather sheath at his belt, knelt, and with a sharp downward slash cut off the deermouse’s front paw. Blood dripped sluggishly onto the dead leaves.

  Tad gasped.

  “It is the way of the Hunters,” Nobono said. He was scooping a shallow hole in the dusty forest floor. “It is the Honor of the Hunt. To prepare the weapons, to stalk, to take blood. And then, always a part of the kill to Great Rona. To show our gratitude.”

  He placed the bloody paw in the hole, covered it with earth, and tamped it down. Reverently, he drew a circle around the spot with the point of his knife, muttering soft words under his breath.

  Then he sprang to his feet, flashing his white grin again at the gaping Tad.

  “Now we skin the kill and prepare the meat.”

  In the following quarter hour, as he struggled to help Nobono, Tad became convinced that he could never be a Hunter. Nobono, with quick skillful cuts, skinned the mouse, sliced the meat of its haunches into slabs, and directed Tad to stack them on a fallen birch leaf.

  “We drag the meat home, eh? Easier than carrying it,” he explained. “Though this mouse, he has not much meat on his bones. It is the Dry. The eating is poor.”

  His arms were red to the elbows. Tad felt sicker than ever. It must have showed in his face, because Nobono paused in his cutting and slicing and sat back on his heels.

  “You do not like the Hunt, eh?”

  Tad felt guilty and awkward. He averted his eyes from the stripped remains of the mouse carcass.

  “It’s just different,” he said haltingly. “It’s not . . . I’m just not used to it, I guess.”

  “To eat is to kill,” Nobono said. “To survive is to spill blood, little Fisher. It is the way of the world. The fox kills the squirrel; the hawk kills the sparrow; the owl kills the mouse. Even you, you hunt your watery fish.”

  “But . . .” Tad stopped, confused. It wasn’t the same, he wanted to say. Fish were different. Not warm and furry like the deermouse. What Fishers did was different. More natural.

  Nobono bundled the mouse pelt into a tight roll and fastened a loop of twisted ropegrass to the stem of the meat-loaded leaf.

  “You see how you like the kill when it is roasted, eh?” He seized the ropegrass loop in both hands and jerked his chin back over his shoulder. “That way toward camp, little Fisher. You’ll feel better for some supper. And me, my stomach is beating against my backbone.”

  Roasted deermouse, Tad had to admit, was awfully good. They sat in a circle around the campfire, passing wooden plates and bowls from hand to hand. The Hunters ate with their fingers, piling slices of meat and fish with shredded swamp cabbage and scooping it into their mouths, while Pondleweed, Tad, and Birdie used carved forks and spoons. Tad and Birdie had never tasted anything like the Hunters’ food. The sausage, smelling more strongly than ever of onion grass and wild mustard, made their noses tingle and their tongues burn. Tad bit into a tiny round red berry and gasped. His mouth was suddenly on fire. His eyes filled
with tears. He reached, panting, for his mug of mint tea, and found Ditani laughing at him.

  “It’s a firepepper,” she said. “You’re not supposed to eat them, silly. They’re just for flavoring.”

  Uncle Czabo, squatting on the opposite side of the fire, gave his bullfrog bellow of laughter. “Give the boy some drink or we see smoke coming out ears!”

  Flavoring! Tad thought furiously, gulping cold tea and reaching out his mug for more. The things were hot enough to melt your teeth. He tried surreptitiously to cool his tongue by breathing through his mouth.

  “I’ve eaten hotter peppers,” he said defiantly. “Back home we eat them all the time.”

  Birdie, caught by surprise, snorted. Ditani looked impressed.

  “It’s been many moons since we have seen Hunters in these parts,” Pondleweed said. His plate was empty. He reached for another helping of Branica’s sausage. Tad noticed that he avoided the firepeppers.

  “It is a bad year for Hunting,” Nobono said briefly.

  “The forest is dry and the feed poor,” Branica said. “The animals grow few and thin. Like this skinny mouse, eh? In a fine year, our wagon now would be heavy with pelts, but we have only these small bundles. You, too, have seen it, no? The Dry?”

  “It is the Drying Time then?” Pondleweed said.

  Nobono threw a fish bone into the fire, where it flared and sparked.

  “A Dry and perhaps more,” he said. “We Hunters in our travels hear many stories, and the tales these days are dark and feary.”

  Branica nodded, pursing her lips and glancing quickly at the children. Kelti had her head in her mother’s lap and seemed to have fallen asleep. Birdie and the Hunter boys, giggling, had scraped a smooth spot on the ground and begun a game of pebblehop. Tad stared down at his webbed toes and tried hard to make himself invisible. The olders always seemed to have something important to talk about that the youngers weren’t supposed to hear. Well, he’d had enough of that. He was going to stay right where he was. Now that he’d been given his first spear, it seemed to him that he was old enough to be told what was going on.

  Uncle Czabo spoke with lowered voice.

  “Weasels,” he rumbled. “A whole warren, by the paw marks. They fell upon a Hunter camp seven sunrises ago at the north side of the Piney Forest. When the camp was discovered, naught was left but toppled wagons and chewed bones.”

  Ditani, her eyes enormous in the firelight, edged closer to Tad. She really was the prettiest girl he had ever seen. For a moment Tad almost forgot to pay attention to the conversation.

  “My cousin Vico came upon a stone circle,” Nobono said, “and in the center of it were charred marks as of a great fire and an altar stone smeared with dried blood.”

  Tad’s heart gave a huge lurch in his chest. A stone circle . . .

  He heard Ditani, startled, say his name. He turned to answer, but before the words could pass his lips, the scene before his eyes shifted and changed.

  He felt as if he were falling backward, whirling down and away through a long dark tunnel. His head spun dizzily and his vision blurred. He squeezed his eyes tight shut. What was happening? The Remembers hadn’t felt like this before. Or maybe this wasn’t a Remember. This felt . . . more real. The very air felt different — cooler, sharper, redolent with pine. When he opened his eyes again, he was in darkness. Pondleweed and the Hunters, the campsite by the honeysuckle bush, were gone. A voice — a familiar, somehow furry-sounding voice — spoke softly in his ear.

  “There, just ahead. I can smell them. Go easy now.”

  His bare feet stepped cautiously on dry evergreen needles. Far ahead, a pinpoint of yellow shone in the darkness, then flared and blossomed. Someone had lit a fire. He and his companion moved forward together, setting their feet down carefully, barely daring to breathe. The stone circle rose above them — twelve great rough-cut rectangular stones, set on end, and in the center, lying flat, the thirteenth. The altar stone. Hooded figures moved around it, their shadows leaping, black and gigantic in the yellow firelight. The ground beneath Tad’s feet felt suddenly cold.

  Is this real? Tad thought. Where am I?

  He looked back over his shoulder at his companion and saw, with a shock, a narrow humorous bright-eyed face covered in short red fur. The creature wore a tight leather cap with earflaps and a leather jerkin stitched all over with tiny rings of bronze. In one hand it carried a polished longbow, a yellow-feathered arrow notched in the string.

  “We can take them, Burris,” he heard his own voice — gone deeper — say. “We’re a match for her lackeys, you and I.”

  A strong hand gripped his shoulder briefly, then withdrew.

  “I am ever with you, Sagamore,” the fur-soft voice said.

  Sagamore . . .

  “Are you all right?” Ditani was saying. “Are you all right, Tad? You were making the funniest faces.”

  Tad grinned at her weakly. “Sure,” he said. “I’m fine.”

  Inside, his thoughts were in turmoil. Whose lackeys? What’s happening to me? And who is Sagamore?

  On the other side of the fire, Pondleweed and the Hunters talked on.

  “This is more than a Dry,” Branica said. “Some evil is afoot. Danger is to all of us, and all should meet it together. It is time for a Gathering of the Tribes.”

  “What of the Diggers then?” Pondleweed asked.

  Tad pricked up his ears in curiosity. He had never seen a Digger. The Digger Tribe had left the forests long ago — long before he was born — to live like moles in burrows beneath the far mountains. There were all kinds of strange stories about them, none of which agreed. “Wise as a Digger” was a common saying among the pond folk, but even commoner was “mad as a Digger,” which meant really crazy, and “twisty as a Digger,” which meant clever but not to be trusted.

  Branica shrugged.

  “Who knows what they think under yon stony mountain?” Uncle Czabo put in. He shook his head, making his silver nose-ring flash and glitter. “Perhaps with all their cleverness they make water out of rocks.”

  “Best to leave Diggers alone,” Nobono said repressively. “They do not know the Honor of the Hunt.”

  “The Hunters, we have sent out word,” Branica continued, “calling all to meet for council at the Wide Clearing in the Piney Forest on the ninth day of the Shrinking Moon. Perhaps the Tribes together can discover why this strange Dry has come and decide then what to do.”

  Pondleweed nodded slowly.

  There was a whoop of delight from Birdie as she hopped Bodo’s last two pebbles, winning the game. Bodo clapped a hand to his head and moaned.

  “Another match!” Griffi shouted.

  Nobono laughed. “I see the luck is with the Fishers tonight,” he said.

  “It is too late for more playing.” It was Branica, summoning her children. “Bodo and Griffi! When you are ready for sleeping, then we will have some music. Go and wash your faces, all. And unroll your sleeping furs.”

  It was clear that there would be no more talk of menacing weasels or terrible stone circles that night — or at least not until every child was fast asleep. Tad snuggled into his silkgrass blankets next to Birdie, his head toward the fire, resolving to stay awake, just in case.

  “Now I show you my magic, eh?”

  It was Uncle Czabo. He wiped sausage grease off his mustache and stepped forward into the firelight. Then he bowed deeply to the right and the left, flexed his fingers once or twice, and held out his hands, empty, palms up. He showed them all that there was nothing behind his back, nothing hidden up his sleeves. Then suddenly, out of nowhere, there was an orange bittersweet-berry ball — then two, then four. He juggled them expertly, throwing them high into the air. First they circled in front of his face, then behind his back. Around and around they went, faster and faster, until — the children gasped — they were gone again, all in an instant, and his hands were empty. Then he produced a shiny pearlstone from behind Tad’s ear; and then, stepping back, Uncle Czabo pulle
d a scarlet bandanna out of his mouth that grew longer and longer until it was impossibly long, and then — whap! — he clapped his hands together and the bandanna somehow knotted itself up and turned into a butterfly. Tad and Birdie stared in amazement. Uncle Czabo bowed again, chuckling, and sat down.

  “Enough tricks for now, eh?” he said. Tad didn’t think he’d seen nearly enough tricks. He could have watched all night.

  Then Pondleweed told stories, pointing out all the people and places in the clear night sky overhead: the thick hazy band of stars that was called Rune’s River (the Hunters called it Rona’s Path), the long-handled Fishing Net, and the enormous Swimming Frog. Then the music began. Nobono played a wooden flute and Uncle Czabo strummed the strings of a painted lutegourd while Branica and Pondleweed sang. They sang a song that Tad had often heard his father sing around the family campfire at home.

  Keep the floating stars alight

  In the River of the Skies.

  Make the midnight moon shine bright,

  Make the morning sun arise.

  Make the rain around us fall,

  Nurture lake and pond and stream,

  Keep the forest proud and tall,

  Keep the world forever green.

  Tad had always thought of it as a happy song, but tonight somehow it sounded heartbreakingly sad. He tried his best to stay awake, to listen longer, but he just couldn’t. Before he knew it he had fallen asleep.

  He awoke sometime far into the night with a pointy rock digging into his left shoulder blade. The campfire had burned down to ashes. He could see the dark heaps that were the sleeping bodies of his family and the Hunters — Uncle Czabo was snoring — and, glittering in the moonlight, the bulging eyes of Pippit the watchfrog, hunched beside them. A little wind rustled dry leaves and chimed the hanging bells on the frame of the Hunters’ caravan.