Tsuga's Children

by Thomas Williams

  Jen thought she was never going to get around the beaver swamp. It went on and on, each part looking like the last. The channels of dark water might have been getting a little shallower but they were too wide to jump and they were certainly over her boots. The bottoms of the channels looked mucky too; she might sink in to her waist if she tried to wade them, even get mired there. So she kept trying to get around the swamp, stumbling more and more because of weakness. Several times she fell down just trying to step over branches she knew she could have avoided if she were stronger. She had the desire to give up, to lie down on the damp earth and cry, but she knew the swamp had to end somewhere and she had to get out into the sun and dry off before nightfall. It didn’t help to know that the swamp was home to the beavers, who made it comfortable for themselves. They loved its clutter of edible branches and bark, its dank water channels. She could feel in the musty air their pride in their work, which meant life and comfort to them. But to her it was like a trap.

  And always before her was the vision of Oka, large and kind, who might be in the meadow waiting to greet her with a soft moo of recognition. She could lie down next to Oka and be warm.

  Finally the ground began to rise and the watery troughs grew farther between. The weeds and brush changed, and the trees were bigger. As she came around the beaver swamp, pines and juniper took over. Great thickets of naked blackberry stalks, their berries all gone, grew here and there among the juniper, so she had to choose between the springy juniper and the clasping barbs of the blackberries that hooked into her sleeves and pantlegs, an occasional barb going all the way through into her skin. It was almost impossible to climb over the juniper, which let her down and then pushed her up and made her lose her balance. She tried crawling below the branches of the pines, but those passageways always ended in juniper and clusters of blackberries that were like toothed arms wanting to gather her in.

  She was trying to climb over a patch of juniper as high as her head when suddenly she fell right through its rough branches, the small juniper berries turning like tiny blue stars as she fell, and she was down on her hands and knees beneath the branches in a sort of tunnel. The ground was trampled by sharp hooves, and she smelled pig, the bitter-sweet, biting odor of pig, just like the pigpen in the barn at home, but here it was fiercer, more alive and wild.

  She had a feeling she had never had before, only heard about in stories, that she was trespassing. It was not her fault; she had fallen down into this passage by accident. But that didn’t matter. She tried to climb back up through the juniper, but the branches that had let her fall were bent the wrong way and wouldn’t let her get back out. By bending way over she could walk down the tunnel. Boars, she thought; this must be wild boars’ property. Along the side of the tunnel the juniper trunks were slashed to the quick as if by scythes. As she moved along the tunnel she heard, or felt beneath her feet, a thudding like thunder heard behind a mountain, far off over the rim, but advancing. She tried to find a way out, up or to the side, but the branches and trunks were too thick, so she began to run, bent over, though she was not even sure which direction the thudding came from. She might be running toward it, or the sound might not be what she thought it was—wild boars’ hooves shaking the earth.

  The odor of pig was thick around her and as she ran she couldn’t help thinking of the pig they had eaten, his long pink flanks and sparse yellow bristles, and the dense expression in his small eyes. Then had come the sledge hammer and he turned all to something else, not himself any more.

  The thudding in the ground grew nearer. From weakness and tiredness she stopped; it would do no good to run on and on. And then, clear and sweet above the rumbling, came the cool song of a chickadee. She looked up to see the little bird perched above her head on the branch of a pine tree. The spreading lower branches of the tree had shaded out the juniper, which couldn’t grow in the constant shadow of the pine. The chickadee looked at her and turned its head, its little black cap and bib nodding at her. “Chicka dee dee dee,” it sang, and hopped to a higher branch. She could climb out of the tunnel on those same branches. The thudding grew louder, and with all the strength she had left and a little more given to her by her fear she pulled herself up onto the first branch and then climbed higher up the black trunk of the pine until she was as high above the boar trail as the loft at home was above the cabin floor.

  The thudding grew, but now she was not in its path. The tree shivered but was strong; she’d always liked white pines because of their soft green wands of needles and their sturdy quietness. The chickadee hopped and danced from one branch to another as if it had no weight, not bothered at all by her or the approaching thunder.

  Below her the first boar came by at a thumping, heavy trot. He was brownish black, with long coarse hair—nothing at all like the pig she’d known. He was four times as big as their own pig. His shoulders were huge, and from the long snout came four gleaming yellow tusks, two above and two below, as if he held in his mouth long curved blades that came out both sides. Other boars followed him, their shoulders high and their rear quarters sloping back down. Their smell rose from them, their hairy ears flopped as they trotted by. She seemed to hear in their huffing, grunting breaths a song or a chant made half out of words, though maybe the words were hers. Root, root, the thoughts said. Food, food, mast, meat. We shall go where we may eat!

  The words, or the meanings of the words, came up from their panting travel as if the words, the smell and the thudding of the hooves were all one thing. She held tightly to the tree and did not move.

  The last boar stopped short, his hooves sinking into the ground, and snuffled with his round flat pig nose to the right and left; then, slowly, as if he knew what he might find, he raised his big head toward her. His eyes glowed blood-red and his tusks gleamed with saliva—yellow-brown, bright ivory along their sharpened edges. She could not hear his thoughts at all as he stared at her, but the blood-red eyes seemed to reflect the blood she felt pulsing in her own veins. She felt small and unprotected; even the tree seemed to grow thinner as the eyes looked at her. She shut her eyes and held on as tightly as she could, and when she opened them again the boar was gone. He hadn’t made a sound.

  She wondered if he could have known that she had helped slaughter a pig, and eaten its flesh. Whatever he had thought had been too dark and secret for her to understand.

  The sun was getting low, now. Its rays were dim and pale as they came through the branches over her head. The chickadee had gone and only a bluejay flew past, high above the tree, swooping and calling as it went on toward its destination. Another jay answered from far off. The air was colder. When she put weight on her wet foot she found it had grown just a little numb at the heel. She had to get moving. The boars had been traveling south too; she would have to follow them. She was worried about Oka. What would they do if they found her? Pigs ate everything they could find, but would they kill a cow?

  Maybe the tunnel opened out after a way. The boars probably used it just to get through the juniper and blackberry thickets. If she was to move at all, she would have to go through the boar tunnel; there was no other way.

  Just as she got out of the tree and dropped back into the tunnel she heard, from far away, a long high whistle. She couldn’t think what bird or animal would make such a long whistling call. She would have thought about it more, but she had to get to the end of the tunnel as quickly as she could and find the green meadow she knew was there somewhere to the south.

  If only she could reach the green meadow. The woods and brambles, the twisted branches, the swamps and blowdown were all against her. Boars could come along again and she didn’t know what they might do. She was trespassing on their ground. Maybe the meadow didn’t even exist, was just a mirage she’d seen from the bat cave. Or it could be nothing but muskeg, or sphagnum moss floating on a wide water hole.

  Finally she came to a place where the boar tunnel did end in more open woods, where she no longer had to fear that something might be comi
ng up behind her. Past the woods she came to a wide brook with waterfalls over rocks, and deep pools. She heard it first, coolly splashing and sighing ahead of her, and when she got to it, there just on the other side was the meadow, sloping upwards to the south, smooth with real grass. Clumps of trees were scattered across its smooth, undulating surface, green except in lower places where it had been touched into brown by frost. Several animals, maybe deer, grazed far out beside a great evergreen tree that stood alone. One of the animals was larger, shorter in its body. It had a white spot on its neck. At that distance she could just make out the white spot. It was Oka.

  “Oka!” she cried, but of course the splashing brook was louder than her voice. She had to get across, to go to Oka, but the brook was too deep and wide. Rims of ice had formed on the boulders from the spray. But there, downstream, a tree had fallen across. She might be able to cross the brook on that tree. It was a big maple, rotten in its center and split all the way down to its upturned roots, but it would surely hold her if she could hold on to it. The trunk was icy in places from spray, but she went to it and carefully began to inch her way out over the brook, holding on with her arms and legs. She got almost all the way across before a rotten section of bark, punky wood and the sawdust of wood-boring insects gave way and rolled her off into the water.

  Because of her clothes the shock wasn’t immediate, but by the time she thrashed her way to the shallows and stood up, her clothes were numbing cold and so heavy they might have been made of stone. Icy knives enclosed her everywhere. She tried to walk but had to get down on her hands and knees and crawl to the bank, where she managed to stand up again. “Oka! Oka!” she cried as she searched the broad meadow. But the animals that had been there had disappeared, along with the stockier one she had thought to be Oka. Nothing moved across the distance but several crows, far away, rowing across the air on their slow black wings, so far away she couldn’t hear their cawing. They were in the sun, but it had left her and the meadow. The top of the tall evergreen tree near where she thought she’d seen Oka was touched with golden light, but now it faded into a somber green full of darkness. She must try to move her legs toward that tree. If she stopped now, she would surely freeze. She would fall into that terrible sleep she had been warned about, in which cold pretends to be warmth and takes your life.

  With the sun gone the air in its blank stillness pressed against her; her sleeves were touched with white frost. Her pantlegs rattled as she took the first steps, already beginning to freeze solid. She walked in her freezing clothing as if she were in armor, fighting her own clothes at each step. The rope bridle, still looped around her shoulder and under her arm, might have been made of wood. Her feet were numb; the numbness was creeping up her legs, creeping in from the tips of her fingers to her palms and wrists. Though she staggered toward the tree as fast as she could, it seemed as far away as ever. Once she’d had a dream in which something she loved fled from her and her legs and arms were in molasses, so slow, so slow. But after that dream she’d awakened; this time it was real.

  From far away to the west came a long, whistling call, and another, from some bird or shrill animal she was too tired even to think of identifying. She was lying on the ground, stalks of field hay sticking without pain into her cheek. She couldn’t remember falling, or hitting the ground. Inside her chest she was still warm, in a small round warm center there, but the warmth was growing weaker, wanting only to rest, to sleep. Against the stubble and the folded stalks of grass, her ear received a faint hum as if from the earth itself, or from all the tiny living things within it, all the plants and animals sleeping their winter sleep in the earth below the field. They were all merely sleeping, but the sleep she fell slowly toward was not the sleep from which one ever wakes. Alarm! Alarm! part of her said, a small voice within her crying out against the false warmth. The hum from the earth was like a lament, but it was indifferent toward her, as though it mourned the ending of life while knowing that other life would go on. But she heard the small cry of alarm and with her last strength got back to her knees and cried “Oka! Oka! Oka!” before she was taken back down toward the warmth of that false sleep.

  7. Fire and Food

  Arn blew a long note on his willow whistle, then wiped it dry. The air had grown colder when the sun went behind the mountains, and his saliva tended to freeze inside the whistle so that it would give only a mousy squeak. He had seen no tracks or signs that could have been made by Jen or Oka. In patches of freezing mud he had seen deer tracks, doglike prints that must have been made by wolves, and splayed prints sunk deeply into the ground that looked like pig tracks. He had heard of wild boar but had never seen one. The wolves and the possible boar gave him a shiver and made him cautious. He kept noticing trees that he might climb in an emergency, and as he passed through the woods he seemed to be going from one climbable tree to another.

  Now he stood at the brook and looked across it to the meadow, relieved to see that it was a real meadow, not just a bog. Several deer browsed upon it, far out near a large evergreen tree. When he blew his whistle again the deer looked up, freezing to stillness. Then, after a long look, they went back to browsing again. He scanned the whole meadow, all that he could see of it, but there was no sign of Jen or Oka.

  It took him a while to find a way across the brook. By going upstream he finally found a place where all the rushing water had to flow within a deep crack in the ledge and he could jump across, being careful of the ice forming from the spray. He did slip as he landed, but he was ready and went down on all fours and held on.

  Soon it would be dark. He whistled and called for Jen as he went into the meadow. If he could get to the rise near the big evergreen before dark settled in, he would have a better view, but he was tired and weak from hunger and it seemed so far.

  He heard a strange call from the east. At first, before he could stop walking, he thought it was a night bird’s faint scream. It repeated itself several times. He tried to think what bird would be calling in this freezing dusk. It might have been a goose, but all the geese must have gone south long ago. No, it had more urgency to it, more desperation. And then, as if the idea were very strange and he hadn’t really believed that he would find Jen at all, he wondered almost with fright if it was Jen, and the call, that strange double sound, was the name Oka.

  It had stopped, but before he went toward it he took a sighting on a tree that stood higher than the others there to the east at the woodline bordering the meadow. The call seemed to have come from just that direction, and even if it was dark by the time he got there he could still pick out that tree against the sky.

  As he approached the eastern edge of the meadow, the woods loomed up like a black wall. Ahead of him on the ground was a grayish bundle that might have been an animal or a rock. He called, “Jen?” but the thing gave no answer and didn’t move. Cautiously he moved closer, then closer still, until he could begin to see its shape. An arm there, silver with frost, a leg and a boot. It was Jen. He knelt beside her and felt her face, which was as cold as glass. When he rolled her over she was like a piece of wood, encased as she was in her frozen clothes. But she was breathing, very faintly. He saw at once she must have fallen in the brook and she would soon be dead unless he got a fire going and made some shelter against the night wind. She was too close to death now, so close he almost called out for his father. He wanted to call for him. His father would know what to do. Dad, Dad; he could hear the words forming in his throat.

  But then he remembered that no one else was here and that he alone would have to try to save Jen. No one else could help him or tell him what to do.

  First he got her under the arms and dragged her toward the woods, where he could find protection from the wind and from the frost, which was falling as the light faded. She was heavy from the frozen water in her clothes, but finally he got her beneath the trees, next to a tall pine tree and another, fallen one, where the two made a shelter of sorts from the wind. It was even darker in the woods, but by
feeling around in the trees he found brittle dead lower branches which he broke off and carried back in armfuls to the place where Jen lay against the blown-down tree. From the edge of the field he gathered dry stalks of hay. By feeling the ground in front of Jen and kicking the woods soil and the rotting damp wood away, he made a place for a fire, then crumbled up the field hay into a pile. From his pack he got the flint and the tinder, a box of shaved, carefully dried, partly powdered wood that should begin to burn from just a spark. In the dark he arranged some of the tinder as best as he could, then held the jagged piece of flint over it and struck the flint hard with the back of his knife blade. Little sparks fell, jumped in arcs, spluttered and burned out before they could reach the tinder.

  He kept trying. Maybe the cold air and the falling frost had dampened everything more than he knew. His hands, out of his mittens, grew numb and awkward, but he kept hitting the flint, getting small sparks that died too quickly. But then, finally, after a hundred tries, two sparks at once fell into the tinder and a tiny flame rose, no larger than the head of a pin. He held his breath, knowing that until it grew and gained color, any wind could put it out. It did grow, even giving a little light, now, so that he could see enough by it to carefully, carefully offer it a stalk of hay. Please take this, he prayed. Take this small offering, little flame, and don’t go out. The flame grew until it was nearly an inch high, with a small wisp of smoke swirling above it. It must grow. It must. Carefully he fed it stalks of hay—not too much at once or it would smother. It had to be fed just enough, not too much, just enough to let it gain warmth and confidence. He could just feel its warmth now in his cold fingers; soon it grew large enough to think of taking twigs, then larger twigs, which he arranged like a tepee over it. And then branches, the fire’s cheerful, hungry glow growing until it lit a warm circle in the woods among the standing, overhanging trees.