Tsuga's Children

by Thomas Williams

  Jen didn’t know if she’d heard anything at all but the movements of penned animals and the creaking of frozen timbers, but she had to go toward where the moon would set, toward where it was forbidden to go. Cascom Mountain was dark, sacred to the Old People, and only the Old People, if there were any of them left, could go there. It was said that the gods of the Old People could never die, and without their people they had grown mean and vicious.

  But Oka knew nothing of this. If only she could catch up with Oka before she got to the forbidden place, she could lead Oka home to the warm barn. With her crampons she could cross the ice better than Oka on her slippery hooves.

  Hooves, the goats said from behind her. She turned, not sure she had heard a sound. We are all hooved here, split-hooved, even the one murdered and the ones gone away. The goats shivered their manes and stamped their hooves on the board floor.

  “But where did Oka go?” Jen asked, expecting no answer. Suddenly the nanny goat bleated—a loud, meaningless caw in the dim barn, and the male goat knelt and as quickly rose again to his four feet. They both seemed amused. Jen could not understand, was not sure she had heard anything at all, but she knew the unfriendliness, the cold distance between the animals’ thoughts and her own.

  4. The Mountain and the Waterfall

  Jen took Oka’s rope bridle from its peg and tied it over her shoulder. As she left the barn, carefully closing and latching the door upon its warmth, the frozen windless air came into her nose, into her chest. She knew she shouldn’t go alone into the forest, across the crackless ice that was as smooth as the ice on a pond yet frozen into hills and waves.

  Her crampons squeaked, complaining of the hardness, as she entered the frozen, silent trees.

  As she left the barn, the cabin and the sheds, it was like going away, away, like diving into deep water away from the familiar light and air she could breathe freely. Her home passed far behind her, growing smaller, and only the trees, silver on one side and black on the other, kept moving toward her to pass behind. The sound of her steel crampons on the ice was the only sound in the forest, and even those small squeaks seemed to grow dimmer and more lonesome in the cold. The only colors were silver and blue-black, the spaces moving only as she moved through them. She stopped to call, “Oka? Oka?” but her voice was so small and helpless and alone, it frightened her. The trees, standing frozen, made no answer. They were mostly spruce, forming a black mesh overhead, where their silence, without any wind at all, was unnatural. It was there that they had always whispered, even just a little, to each other. But the wind itself was dead. She would look down a long aisle of trunks to see moonlight at the end, the aisle so long and even, she thought it must be a road or path, yet when she came to the end there would be no end, just random spaces of ice and silent trees, which would again re-form to make other aisles going in any direction.

  She followed the moon as it went across the sky toward Cascom Mountain, the black bulk of the mountain appearing only now and then through the boughs, but she felt it as a terrible weight pressing upon the world. She was going where her father and mother and brother had never gone. The dead air, which she had to breathe, took her inner warmth and sent it out, lost forever, in thin clouds of breath. Her feet were growing colder. She was tired from being hungry for so long. Oka’s rope bridle, which had weighed so little before, grew heavy and hard, dragging her thin shoulder down.

  “Oka! Oka! Where are you?” she cried, but her voice was lost. Nothing had ears to hear the small cry except herself, and all the name did was to make her think of Oka’s brown eyes and kindly warmth—if the cold hadn’t taken it all away. Oka could be as dead and stiff as the butchered pig, whose pink flanks had become so still and cold it didn’t matter when the knives cut them into pieces of other things—pieces with other names that were not part of a living thing, like hams and bacon and chops. The pig was as quiet, then, as these hummocks of ice, but where had his life gone? Oka could die as easily, or any living thing. The frozen world wouldn’t care.

  “Oka? Oka?” she cried, and listened. There was no answer, none at all. It was as if her small voice stopped at her chilled lips, but she continued to place one foot forward, carefully so as not to fall, and then the other, going deeper and deeper, alone into the strange woods.

  All the rest of the night she followed the moon’s path. Sometimes, climbing a long slope through scanty trees, the moon’s glare on the ice almost doubled its light. Then the trees would gather close again and crowd darkly around her so that their brittle lower boughs, like dry skeleton fingers, touched her as she passed.

  Gradually the moon dimmed as it neared the icy rock of Cascom Mountain. Daylight began to rise in the east, behind her, and with that strange other light, at first dimmer but more vast than the moon, she began to hear a long and continuing sigh, as if the gods of the Old People were lamenting the disappearance of their race. The sound was at first a hushed sigh, but as she came nearer and nearer to the mountain, climbing its lower hills, the sigh grew into a more angry sound, then to a hiss like a high wind, then to a heavy roar, the deep sound of power.

  She was afraid; she had never heard anything like this before. It seemed to come from a great mouth, the mountain itself roaring out of pain through a cleft or canyon. Finally, climbing slowly in her tiredness and fear, she came up over an icy knob where the trees parted and she found herself looking down and across a deep chasm toward the thunder itself—a great descent of rolling, folding white water that poured slowly over rock high above and fell, too slowly for its continuing roar, down the cracked ledges into the chasm below. Above the falls tall spruce writhed in a wind, against a black sky, the wind caused by the falls itself, all that thudding, hissing weight of the water descending into the chasm, where its roar was heard behind clouds of mist and spray that boiled up and coated the ledges with glittering ice.

  It was the falling white river, the mountain, the twisting trees against the ominous sky she had seen, all silent then, in the old lady’s sleeping eye.

  It made her dizzy to see the immense falling of the water and she held tightly onto a small spruce, trying not to think of herself falling, down, down into that depth. After a while she noticed that it was slightly warmer here. Maybe the friction of the water itself had warmed this place. Then she saw what looked like a path, a narrow ledge that led along the cliff toward the center of the falls. Cautiously, her ears filled with the roar of the water, she climbed down to the narrow path. She thought she saw tracks there. Yes, there in the melting ice was a deer track, its delicate wedges, and beside it the prints of larger hooves that might have been Oka’s, they were so much broader than any deer tracks could be.

  “Oka!” she called, but nothing could be heard over the rush and boom of water. She must go on, though the path, if it really was a path, was so narrow on the side of the cliff she felt hands, as if they were inside her, wanting to pull her over the sharp edge to fall into the chasm far below. The trail was as narrow as a shelf, and she could hardly believe where it seemed to lead. It could barely be seen as it followed the cliff’s side, appearing and disappearing until it finally disappeared altogether into the swirling mist at the edge of the falls. Oka, if the tracks were really Oka’s, and a deer had come this way and not come back. She had to go on.

  Never before had she been so far from home, not even with her father, and he would never have come this close to Cascom Mountain. She was afraid, yet inside her fear was another thing, hard as stone, that said she would never give up no matter how terrible this path. Her father was sick, they were slowly starving, Oka was lost. She had to go on even if the whole world had changed to evil and would kill her. “I’ll go on anyway,” she said, not hearing her own voice over the deep roar of the water. She could feel her small voice but not hear it. “I’ll go on anyway.”

  Maybe Oka was now a battered wet cow-corpse tumbling over rocks in the rapids below. In places the ledge was only a foot or so wide, sheer rock above, sheer cliff below. Y
et here and there she could find the broad print of a hoof. “I’ll go on anyway,” she said again, the small silent voice all she could set against her fear.

  Jen crept along the narrow rock shelf, the falling water booming louder as she approached the falls, the bulk of the water so great that for one awful moment it was more substantial than the rest of the world; while the water seemed to stop falling, she and the cliff hurtled skyward. She grasped the mossy rock with both hands and shut her eyes tightly, waiting and hoping for that terrible motion to stop. When, after a while, she thought that the cliff had grown steady, she opened her eyes and once again it was the gray-green water that fell. And right in front of her, in the moss, was the large print of one of Oka’s hooves. Oka had passed this way, yet the shelf of rock here was so narrow, Jen couldn’t see how Oka could have kept her balance. Her wide cow sides must have had to scrape against the cliff.

  She shivered with cold and fear. Though it was warmer here than back in the frozen forest, the dampness of the mist came through her clothes. Oka’s rope bridle, heavy with the wet mist, pulled down on her shoulder.

  The falls were green in their depths, heavy as falling glass, but she kept on until the shelf of rock led behind the long columns hissing on their way to the roar below, and came to a narrow black hole in the wet rock directly behind the falls. Ahead of her, mist churned across the dark opening. She hesitated, trying to overcome her fear. There was no other way Oka could have gone but into that hole, unless she had fallen to the rocks and water below.

  That blackness in there was almost too much; to go into a hole, a cave of blackness, was against everything she had ever been taught. But now she examined that fear, as if she were Jen who was seven and also another Jen, older perhaps, who knew or had long theories about the animals and their voices, a Jen who had looked into the old lady’s eye and seen this very place before and was too deep for the simple fears of childhood. No, she was not too deep for those fears; maybe they were the deepest of all—but something pulled her toward this opening into the unknown. She unstrapped her crampons, tied them to Oka’s bridle, and began to feel her way in. The floor of the passageway was smooth, as if it had been polished by water or feet, and led slightly downward. She felt with her hand along the smooth wet side, her other hand feeling the damp air in front of her. As she felt her way along, the roar of the falls lessened, the retreating boom and roar sounding again like a long moan, now at her back and growing sad and low.

  “Oka?” she called, but her voice came back to her strange, constricted by the rock into a high, piping noise that sounded as if it hadn’t gone anywhere.

  So she didn’t call again, but saved her strength, feeling her way along. The passage turned sometimes, sometimes climbed and then descended. Her open, staring eyes ached to see any kind of light, as if her sight tried to breathe through them and they were being suffocated by the blackness. It seemed she had gone miles and miles in that blackness darker than night, darker than any void she had ever stared into before in her life.

  She felt her way forward for so long a time, she began to believe that she would never get out of the black tunnel, that it would never end but just go on, deeper and darker with the dank cave smell into the under-parts of the mountain. But then, little by little, before she could identify what it was, the smell changed. It seemed at first wrong, and then very sad and nostalgic, for she was smelling, faintly in the stagnant air, the rich odors of leaves and earth, the warm, alive smell of autumn. But she knew that outside it was February, the frozen month; she had entered the stone passageway from a world of ice.

  In that world she had left behind were her family and her home; with every small step she took she was leaving them. If the warm smells and the increasing warmth of the air were now more kindly to her, it was all too strange and distant from the land she had left behind. She wanted to turn back, feeling that at any moment it might be too late ever to find her family again.

  Then, far ahead, she saw the faintest gleam of light. She had begun to wonder if her eyes worked at all, they had been straining so hard in the utter blackness and finding nothing, but now came that faint gleam of light, some kind of daylight, certainly, so she went on a little faster. She began to hear strange noises, small squeaks and soft flutters that grew in intensity as she felt her way toward the light. It was almost as though she felt the high squeaks rather than heard them. Something else was happening, too; the cool wall of stone she had been feeling as she went along turned away from her, away from the distant light where she wanted to go, and as the million piping squeaks grew louder, she knew by the echoes of her footsteps, and by the soft velvety flutters that were an invisible cloud all around her, that she had entered a great room.

  She could see nothing, just hear the high clamor and feel a puffing sort of wind that came from above. She went on, trembling, one foot feeling ahead, then the other. The light grew larger and began to have shape. It must be a hole in the stone, a tunnel; it must be a way into daylight. Something soft was under her feet now, like an inch of soft mud, and a smell rose that reminded her of the chickens they had last year, before the red fox got into the coop one night and stole them all.

  Then, as if the distant hole of light were a great eye, it winked out, glimmered, opened again and winked out, till it was black as the rest of the space she teetered in, with nothing to hold on to. She grew dizzy and nearly fell into whatever the soft stuff was beneath her feet, and when she got her balance back, in that vast absolute dark, she had no idea where the light had been. It was like a game she and Arn used to play, where one would shut his eyes and twirl and then not have any idea where anything in the room was. But now she thought of Arn and her mother and father, all of them together in the warm cabin, with the fire blazing orange and silent, and here she was, lost in the mountain she had been told never to go near, surrounded by blackness and a high clamor of noise. If she tripped, or fell or gave up, she would fall into something soft and gooey that smelled like the earth beneath the chicken roost. She could not stand there, teetering on the edge of the unknown. She would be lost forever.

  The light came slowly on again, not where she thought it had been before, but then her mind said no, that was where it was before. The whole black world turned gradually around, remorselessly, making her feel sick. The squeaking and the fluttering were less intense, now, and she realized that those sounds had been draining away in the darkness all the while the hole of light was black, as if they had drained out through the hole itself. This was still going on as she walked as fast as she dared toward the light. The sounds swept by her, flutters and squeaks and puffs of air. She could see them now, black specks against the light, thousands of them flowing out through the hole, dimming it, letting it wink open when their flowing numbers thinned, then closing off the light again. She came closer, to where the wind grew into a high rush and the piping became one constant myriad vibration in the center of her head. The specks were clearer now. Leathery wings beating, and black bodies; she was in a bat cave, but there was the way out, and she was getting closer.

  As she began to be able to see the rocks around her she climbed faster toward the light. The bats still flowed all around her, none touching her with anything but the wind from its wings. The light grew and at first hurt her eyes. She saw blue sky and the tops of green trees, and she was stumbling, crying with relief to see daylight. Finally she got through the entranceway and ran to the side of the cloud of streaming bats. She was in a new warmth full of autumn smells, looking down across a mountain valley to a blue, island-studded lake, tall trees, a mountain meadow, all surrounded by mountain walls reaching up into glinting white.

  The bat cloud rose above the cave entrance, swirling into a confused whirlwind in the brightness. Above the dark cloud and beside it, two great hawks turned and then fell into the cloud, which received them and let them plummet straight on through, each of the thousands in the hawks’ way swerving aside from the arched talons at the last moment. But then ther
e was a bump in the air. She could almost feel it. In all that flowing and falling there was ajar, a stoppage somewhere up in the swirling cloud, then another and another, before the two hawks broke out below the cloud to brake with their broad wings and cupped fan-shaped tails. Each had a broken bat in its grasp.

  Another bat fluttered down and landed near her feet, one of its soft wings splayed out, blood on the dark furry body. It tried to fly, but one wing was broken, the fragile wrist of the bat’s wing. She felt sorry for it, and bent down so she could see its clattering little fangs, and its nose, which was bare and pink and flat as a pig’s snout. Large pointed ears stood out from its head, full of little white hairs. It was ugly, but she knew it was ugly only to her and not to itself. She wanted to help it. The bats in the cave were like a nightmare to her, and had frightened her badly, but really she had frightened them and caused them to fly out into the daylight where the birds of prey had an advantage they wouldn’t have had at twilight or at dawn. In a way, she had caused this little animal to be hurt. But when she bent nearer to him he felt her presence, or saw from his pinhead eyes, or heard her in the echoes of his squeaking, and opened his mouth, coughing with hatred and fear, to display his white fangs. He couldn’t fly any more and was doomed to die, but he didn’t yet know it. Jen knew it, and knew that she couldn’t help.

  The bat cloud turned once more above the cave and then, as if sucked like smoke into a flue, came down toward the cave entrance. She scrambled away and hid in some ground juniper as the cave received its thousands and thousands again into safe darkness. The air was clear, warm in the low sun that was about to go behind the white rim of the mountains. The hawks were little specks now as they climbed toward the cliff’s behind her. The wounded bat was gone. No, there he was beside a stone, not moving now, lying there in that extra kind of silence that meant he had suffered other wounds, and he was dead.