They thanked Gort and said goodby. He waved and left them, walking, Arn was glad to see, with less of a limp than he’d had before.
When Gort was out of sight in the trees below, Jen and Arn looked back across the mountain-rimmed valley. Far to the south they could see the meadow and the warm lake. From here they couldn’t make out the Great Tree, the hemlock that was the name tree of their family whose ancestors had left this world so many generations before. Only Tsuga Wanders-too-far had ever been allowed to return, went Ganonoot’s story, and the others would forever be haunted by their loss.
Somewhere in the blue haze of the distance, beyond the forests and rivers, beyond the warm lake, was the river of the shandeh, and the winter camp, where their friends, the only ones they’d ever had, would now be going about their lives.
Behind them a pebble ticked against another, and they turned. Standing there was a large and handsome doe of the white-tailed deer, its coat a glossy reddish brown blending into pure white at its chest and belly. The large ears, as well as the deep brown eyes, were directed toward them with a great attention that held no fear, just calmness and sadness.
Jen looked deep into the doe’s wide eyes. “It’s Ah-neeah’s guide,” she said. “I know her from before.”
20. Home
One morning in March, Eugenia awoke to find the air in the cabin different. She could breathe more easily. Tim Hemlock, at her side, seemed to breathe more easily too. There was a moist warmth in the air she hadn’t felt for the weeks and weeks of the iron ice. Maybe the cold had broken. Maybe spring would come again.
But then, as she had to at every waking, she remembered the loss. Her children were dead. They could not have survived the cruel cold, or the falling water. They were gone forever. The day turned bleak again, her life empty. Some mornings she would get up, weak from hunger and sorrow, and pick up the children’s clothes, holding the small garments out before her to remember how the warm and solid little limbs had filled this shirt, these summer pants, that deerskin skirt of Jen’s. Or how Arn’s sturdy hands had flexed the leather of those gloves.
She would go on living as long as she could help Tim Hemlock, but the seeds for planting were nearly all gone now, even if they could survive until planting time and growing time. If the ice did break she could dig for wild roots, but she might not have the strength for that. She would have to kill the goats, and after that, Brin.
This very day she would have to kill the male goat, for she and Tim Hemlock were slowly starving. She would do it now, though the thought filled her with horror: the goats would know.
She got out of bed and dressed, then raked the ashes and put piece of a chair on the fire. The rope and sledge and sticking knife were there on the table. Quietly, so as not to wake her husband to his own weakness and hunger and loss, she took the instruments of slaughter and left the cabin.
The cold had broken. A bright sun had risen in a hazy sky, causing a broad glare on the melting ice. She was halfway to the barn when she happened to look up, half blinded by the glare, to the northwest, past the barnyard toward the woods. She looked back down again, but even in the glare spots in her eyes, or between those streaks of light, had she seen something—two small dark things—moving out of the woods? She looked again, rubbing her eyes with the back of her hand. At first she thought of animals—what kind could they be? But then the small figures came faster, running now, and calling. There was the clink of crampons on the ice, two small figures in ornately decorated parkas trimmed in white, running toward her with cries that seemed glad. Strange cries in another language she couldn’t understand. “Matoneh! Matoneh!” she heard. But then they were upon her and the faces were those of her children, full of joy and tears. She wept as she held them against her.
“Tim!” she cried. She couldn’t see through the glare and her tears, but Jen and Arn led her back to the cabin, where Tim Hemlock woke to find his children again and sorrow gone.
Jen and Arn unpacked the food they had brought with them. They made their father a rich broth from the powders Tsuga had given them—the same powders the old woman had brought so long ago as a gift. They made Eugenia sit down and watch as they prepared a nourishing meal. And they answered questions—a thousand questions once the first joy had changed into a real belief that they were home. Occasionally Jen or Am would lapse into the language of the people for a few words or phrases, but that happened less and less as they told their story.
But the Hemlocks would have a struggle to survive until late spring brought new growth from the earth. Now that the ice was going they might survive on wild roots and tubers, saving what seeds they had for planting. They scattered the seeds from the hemlock cones at the edges of the cabin clearing. There was the moist, receptive earth; the seeds of their name tree would grow in their world, too.
By day they gathered food and wood, and at dusk, after eating what little food they had, they settled by the fire while Jen and Arn told the story of their journey. Their father asked many questions. “You must remember everything,” he said again and again. And they saw their father learning, his old sadness leaving him, his questions being answered in ways they sometimes didn’t understand. But in the intense warmth of his interest they never grew tired of telling the story, its terrors as well as those parts they remembered with nostalgia. They never grew tired of telling the tale of the sacrifice, of Mori and Lado, and Aguma and Runa and Amu. And especially of Bren and Arel, though it made them sad with longing for their friends.
One night after the children had gone to bed on the loft, Tim Hemlock said to Eugenia, “The old woman was Ahneeah herself, and she came for Jen and Arn. For Jen and Arn, our children.”
“The story tells me how lonely Jen and Arn are for their own kind,” Eugenia said.
“Lonely! But all my life I looked for my own kind,” Tim Hemlock said.
“And you were among them all the time,” Eugenia said.
He turned from the fire and looked at her in a way she had never seen him look at her before. He had always been gentle with her and the children, but in some ways he had been a stranger. “You knew that all the time,” he said.
“Yes,” she said. “I always knew that.”
In the days that followed they waited for the sun and its changes to warm the spring soil for planting. They were hungry, so hungry and weak they found it hard to do those things they must to find the wild food. Soon they would have to kill the goats, their source of milk and cheese. But then one morning while they were searching for edible roots near the alder swamp below the western field, a graceful white-tailed deer, a doe, stepped from the woods in front of them all, its deep eyes dark and sad, to wait while Tim Hemlock picked up his rifle. The one shot cracked in the morning air and the doe fell heavily to the ground.
They ran up to the deer, Jen and Arn getting there first. Jen looked at the deer and cried, “But it’s Ahneeah’s guide! She’s dying!”
It was then they looked into the deer’s wide eye and saw beyond. They saw a waterfall, a dark mountain rising, and black stormclouds moving. Then they saw a narrow trail along a ledge, the falling water on one side, and a black hole in the rock that now slowly, silently shut until it was solid stone, stone worn by centuries, with no seam or crack in the cold basalt.
The vision faded and the deer was dead. They would eat the deer’s flesh and survive until the sun’s gathering strength gave them other food. Though the doe’s quick death seemed cruel, Ahneeah’s last gift to them had been the gift of life.
Epilogue: Other Smoke in the Valley
It was in the month of May, when the spring freshets had subsided and the river was no longer a froth of white water, when Jen happened to look down toward the landing.
“Mother! Dad! Arn!” she cried, running to find them, for coming up the near side of the river was a long canoe.
They met the Traveler at the landing, the man with the large arms and shoulders from paddling and poling his canoe.
“Thank
God you made it through the winter,” he said. “I couldn’t come in the fall, so I came to see how you were and bring supplies!”
The Traveler tied the canoe’s painter to a bush beside the landing, and looked downriver, where another canoe was coming into sight around the first bend, long poles moving up and slowly back. “And that’s not all I’ve brought you,” he said. “There’ll be some other smoke in the valley, if you don’t mind, Tim Hemlock!”
They all watched as the second canoe came up the slack water at the edge of the river. A man stood poling in the stern and a sturdy boy in the bow, their poles moving in a steady rhythm as the canoe surged forward at each double stroke. In the center of the broad canoe, between boxes and bales of cargo, a woman and a young girl paddled, one on each side.
“They’re good folks and they won’t crowd you. Fellow says he means to settle on the other side of the river somewhere. He was by here years ago, he says.”
“We remember,” Tim Hemlock said. “He seemed a good man.”
Arn remembered the man in brown, with the brown beard, but of course Jen couldn’t remember because she was just a baby then.
When the canoe came up to the landing the boy held out his pole to Arn, who took the end of it and pulled them in to an easy stop alongside the Traveler’s canoe. The boy jumped out with the painter and tied a quick bowline to a rock.
“That’s a good knot,” Arn said. The boy looked up and smiled as they judged each other. His eyes were dark brown, slightly fierce, though willing to be friendly.
The little girl put her paddle down and smiled at Jen, then drooped her shoulders with a humorous shrug, to show how tired she was.
Their parents and the Traveler were laughing and talking as they walked up the hill toward the cabin, but the children looked at each other with a sudden and mutual gravity. Will we be friends? they all asked in silence.
It seemed they might.
About the Author
Thomas Williams was born in Duluth, Minnesota, went to New Hampshire when he entered high school and, except for army service in Japan and graduate work at the Universities of Chicago, Iowa and Paris, has been living there ever since. One of his short stories was awarded an O. Henry Prize; others have been included in Best American Short Stories. Of his novels, Town Burning was nominated for the National Book Award in 1960, Whipple’s Castle was called “a masterpiece,” and The Hair of Harold Roux won the National Book Award in 1975.
Mr. Williams has been a Guggenheim fellow, and was awarded a Rockefeller grant for fiction in 1968 - 69. He now lives in Durham with his wife and two children.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1977 by Thomas Williams
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