The Land Breakers

by John Ehle

  Only one shot, she thought. One shot would not kill the bear.

  She put the baby in the crib. “You can sleep down here tonight,” she told the boys.

  They got their pallets, brought them down and put them near the fire. They lay down on their bellies at once and propped their heads in their hands. Nearby were the pups, and in the crib was the baby. The floor was covered over with her possessions, she thought.

  She left on her dress and lay down on the bed, listening anxiously every minute to hear a shot from the mountainside.

  “When is he coming back?” Verlin asked her.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  The chickens began to cackle in their coop. A weasel, perhaps, had made a hole inside. She closed her eyes, but listened still. “Do the sparks go out the chimney top?” she asked the boys.

  “Yes,” Verlin said.

  “He needs to see them to find his way.” Let him come on home now, she thought. If he is ill, I’ll cure him. If he is torn, I’ll heal him. If he is broken, I’ll mend him.

  When morning came, she walked to the top of the clearing, hoping she might see him. She came back to the yard and let the sheep out. She told Fate to watch them carefully, for there was no grown dog about to scent a beast now. She let the pigs out to root and told Verlin to watch over them.

  She went back to the top of the clearing and walked along the edge of the woods; she came to the bear path and followed it a short ways and called for Mooney, then went on until she came to the place where the pig had been killed.

  She heard Fate call and she hurried back to the clearing. She saw him near the cabin, his hands on his hips, looking about, frightened.

  “I’m here,” she said to him, not at all reproachfully, grateful that he was frightened for her.

  Verlin had come up the hill, too.

  “I’ll fire a shot,” she said. “Maybe he’ll hear me.”

  She carefully placed the gun against her shoulder and aimed into the air. She fired. They listened, but only the echo came back.

  “He’ll be along soon now,” she said, and went down to the cabin and closed the door.

  22

  It was Fate who ran the way to Jacob’s house and told him what had happened. Jacob and Florence straightway penned their stock and, leading the horse and bringing Jacob’s old dog, followed Fate home.

  When they were close to the clearing, Jacob tied the horse, left it in the woods. Florence hurried to the cabin, but he went down to the pens and considered the bear’s tracks and the damage that had been done. “He seemed to want to tear it all down, didn’t he?” he said.

  “That’s what he said,” Fate answered, meaning Mooney, not knowing how to call him by his name or call him as his father.

  Jacob followed the tracks. He saw the place the dog had been cut and the place Mooney’s tracks had begun to follow. “Your father is barefoot by now,” he said. “You see there.” He stooped over a footprint in the ground and studied it. Fate studied it, too, but didn’t know what was the matter.

  When they got back to the cabin, they found Harrison in the yard talking with Lorry. He was scratching at his belly and darkly considering what he heard. “Well, he’s probably over in the next valley, if he’s hunting,” Harrison said.

  Fate saw the German coming up the path, his rifle resting on his shoulder as he walked uphill. “Hallooo,” he called, and waved, and Jacob waved. “I heard shots,” Nicholas said.

  “Lorry was sounding out where Mooney is,” Jacob said.

  Fate waited near his mother, listening to the talk, which was too casual, he thought. They let too much time go by, and he wondered what was in their minds, for each man was different and each had a relationship with Mooney that was different.

  “I wouldn’t mind tracking that bear myself,” Jacob said after a pause. “He’s the big one.”

  “I wouldn’t mind,” Nicholas said quietly, glancing up to see what Jacob thought about having company. Both men then paused politely to see what Harrison would decide.

  “I’ve got bacon enough for us all,” Jacob said, coaxing him.

  Harrison said nothing.

  “We could take that dog of mine with us,” Jacob said.

  Harrison said nothing even so, even though he had a pack of hounds.

  Lorry stood nearby, but off to herself, as a woman most often stood apart from a group of men. Her arms were folded, her bonnet was on, her dress was buttoned close at her throat; she was looking at them and at the mountain, and Fate thought how pretty she was, and how firm, how unhurried she was, as she waited for the men to get their decisions in.

  Harrison walked apart and looked down at the flock of sheep that Verlin was watching. He cleared his throat a time or two, but said nothing.

  “We might meet Mooney up there,” Jacob said quietly, and Fate looked up at him, studied his face. In nothing he or Nicholas had said had there been even a hint that Mooney might need help, or that Lorry need be beholden to them for going up there.

  When silence had lengthened and nobody had said anything else, Jacob turned and walked straightway along the path past the sheep pen, and Nicholas went up the same path, almost in the same steps, following him. Suddenly Fate started up the same path, too, almost in the same footsteps, walking not running, as the men were doing, and he heard his grandfather say, “You’re too young to go hunting, boy,” but he went on, anxiously listening to see if his mother said anything. She didn’t, so he went on, knowing she might even want him to go to help, for his eyes were sharp, sharper than the men’s, and it was proper for a member of the family to go.

  He caught up with them in the woods where the horse was tied. Jacob gave Nicholas the dog leash and led the horse himself. They said nothing to the boy. They led the way around the clearing, not through it.

  They’re going to bring him back on that horse, Fate thought; they don’t want Mama to see that horse. The thought made him colder than the wind, for he had never known Mooney to need help of any kind, except that he might send Verlin to fetch an ax or to fetch a pail of water or to get the sheep, but never to do anything which Mooney couldn’t do himself if he had the time and wanted to; never had he faced any task in which he needed to say to another man, Help me, and never had he said to any man, Protect me. He had even built the cabin by himself, he and the woman he had buried that first winter.

  “There’s where they went,” Nicholas said, stopping on the hillside above the clearing. He patted the dog and watched as Henry sniffed about. Nicholas knelt by him and patted him again. “You want to let him go?” he said to Jacob.

  “No, best to keep him with us,” Jacob said. The dog was straining at the leash and once more bayed. “Henry don’t smell nothing,” Jacob said simply. “He sniffs, but he don’t smell. If he got a scent, it’d be on the bushes, not on the ground; he’s trying to fool us into thinking he can smell.”

  “We can follow the trail by sight,” Nicholas said. He led the way up the path, the dog anxious in the leash, straining forward. The boy followed Jacob. It was not that they had told him he could go; it was that they knew he was there and had not told him he could not go. They had let him come along, he decided, not because they thought he was old enough to come, or even to make a decision about coming, but because they did not want to make it themselves and they knew the decision must have been made. They would not ask him if it had been made, for that would be unfeeling; the boy was old enough, they knew, to know if it had been made, though he was not old enough to make it.

  Soon after Harrison left, Mina walked into the clearing. She asked about Mooney and seemed to be surprised that he wasn’t home yet. She told about Lacey being up there, maybe being up there yet, and she let the meaning come to them slowly and tried not to look at Lorry’s face.

  Grover came by. This was some time later. He ate a bowl of food that Florence served up to him, and he and Mina talked. Lorry, whose worry was set on Mooney and Lacey, on each and on the two of them, went outdoors
to get off to herself, went up to the top of the clearing and waited near the path Mooney and Fate had gone along. Soon she came back to the cornfield and pulled up corn stalks, working steadily. The energy which normally she expended in a day of work sought release now all at once.

  Florence came up and stood nearby. Mina came up and stopped nearby, but soon she sneaked off into the woods. She went to the pond and sat down at the edge of it, letting the gentleness of the place soothe her. Far off she heard Florence calling her, but she didn’t answer. She sat there as evening came on and watched the pool as it reflected the moving limbs of the trees and the wall of rock close by. She waited, still and quiet, thinking about being there the day before with Lacey.

  Night deepened and she watched the pool as it reflected more gently and dimly the moving limbs of the trees.

  At last she went back down the path, and she felt so lonely and afraid she wanted to weep for all that she had lost in her life and all that she had seen, and she began to sing softly to herself and was singing when she reached the clearing and saw Grover standing in the cornfield, looking for her.

  Grover said he would walk her home, but she said she would stay the night. Verlin said he would bring down one of the pallets from the loft for her, but she said to leave it be. “It’s no trouble for me to walk up a ladder to go to bed,” she said.

  Lorry gave her a bowl of food, and Grover ate, too, and said he was going home but would come back, and Lorry said they would be all right alone, that she had a gun. Grover said good-bye to Mina, and she, with her mouth full of food, said good-bye to him, and he said good-bye to Lorry at the door. “He’ll be all right,” he said.

  “I know he will,” she said.

  “I’m going to come back tomorrow.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, Grover.”

  “No, I want to. I’m going to bring that pack of hounds over here and set them on the trail.”

  “Papa won’t let his dogs run up there,” she said.

  “What’s he got them for then?” he said

  She put her hand on his arm, the first time she had touched him in many years. “You’ll get yourself in a world of trouble with him.”

  “I don’t care,” he said.

  She watched him carefully and decided he was sure of himself, after all. “Well, then,” she said, “do as you think best.”

  She locked the cabin door after him. The three women and Verlin sat by the fire. Florence began to yawn; she went over to the bed and stretched out on it, lying close to the wall. Soon she was breathing deeply. Lorry lay down on the bed, too.

  Verlin sat by the fire, staring into it, not even looking at Mina. He went up to the loft soon, and Mina heard him undressing. She woke up one of the pups and played with it, then laid it back next to its kin. She gazed into the fire and poked at it and wondered where Lacey was. It was late when she climbed into the loft.

  She crawled onto Fate’s pallet and cradled her head on her arm.

  She wished she were a man and on that mountain with Lacey and Mooney, with Jacob and Nicholas and Fate, instead of here, cabin-caught. She was lying there thinking about that when she heard a sniffing sound, which she knew was Verlin crying. He was such a big boy, so big-muscled, that it surprised her that he would cry.

  She started to reach out, to comfort him, but she decided that would be unfeeling, so she started breathing deeply as if she were asleep. She breathed that way for a long time, and all the while she heard him sniffling. He’s deeply caught, too, she thought, for if Mooney didn’t come back, the boy would lose his own life hopes early, just as she would lose hers if Lacey didn’t come back.

  When Verlin stopped whimpering, she acted as if she were waking up. She stretched and yawned and sat up on the pallet. “Verlin, you awake?” she whispered.

  He said nothing, but she knew he was listening. She shook him gently. “I just had the finest dream,” she said. “I dreamed the men were on their way back now and would be here by morning.”

  “Did you,” he said.

  “I saw a white horse in the dream, riding through the air, its hoofs striking sparks of silver. That’s a sign, I’m bound and certain, that the dream’s so.”

  She lay back down, and soon she heard his heavy, regular breathing of sleep.

  The dream’s so, she told herself, repeating it to herself. The dream’s so.

  Fate lay by the campfire, his feet near the heat, his head in the coldness, and listened to Jacob and the German talk. It was solemn talk, for they were as weary as he. They had walked all that day, up the mountain and across into a broad valley, then around a range, and they had ended up on the side of the mountain, high above the settlement. They had come at nightfall to this bare-ground rocky place, where Jacob had tied the dog, and had flopped down on the ground, exhausted and hungry.

  Nicholas was broiling chunks of pork on sticks held over the fire and Fate was watching them, worrying about his near-starved hunger and about the frustrations of the search.

  “A bear can travel fifty mile in a day,” Jacob was saying, “and like as not end up where he started.”

  Sparks leaped from the wood, leaped out to where Fate’s head was resting on his arm.

  “You ready to eat, boy?” Jacob asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “You didn’t care much for that slick, did you, boy?”

  “No,” he said.

  “That was a big delay. A bear goes through one of those slicks fast as a gopher. How a bear as big around as a horse can go down those paths, I don’t know.”

  “A bear can crawl on his belly for half a day,” Nicholas said, “then go on as if he had been resting.”

  Jacob crouched before the fire and smelled of the bread. With a hooked stick he lifted the pone off the fire and broke it. “Go on and eat,” he told the German.

  Nicholas took a piece of bread in his hands and bit into it. He took a pork stick off the fire, too, and blew on the meat, and when it was cool, he began to pull it from the stick. Fate’s eyes watered and he chewed on his tongue.

  “You hungry, boy?” Jacob asked, not looking at him directly, only glancing at him. He gave Fate a piece of bread and the second pork stick. “Yes, we’ll have bear worries till Christmas comes,” Jacob said. “The mast is so slight this year they’ll be on the prowl till they go to sleep.”

  “Where do they go?” Fate asked. He was feeling more interested in talk now that he had something to eat.

  “Under bresh,” Jacob said. “Or in a cave. It’s a wonder how they live like that.”

  Nicholas grunted.

  “The bearing-she will cub in February, like an old ewe, some’ers around February, and she nurses them from her tits. She does it all in a hole in the ground or in a cave, and she don’t come out except for water.”

  “What she eat?” Fate asked.

  “She don’t. She has a layer of fat on her, and that supplies her for the winter. The he-bear don’t move, don’t come out at all. He lies still in a bed of ivy and twigs.”

  “You can see their tracks in the wintertime,” Fate said. He had heard Jacob say as much.

  “You see the sow tracks,” Jacob said. “She’s gone to get water, and maybe stretch her legs.”

  “I trailed a sow in one winter,” Nicholas said, “and she went half a day’s traveling, then ended up where she started, under the same pile of brush, and not a time had she stopped except twice for water. The rest of the distance she was strolling.”

  “Sleepwalking,” Jacob said easily, and Fate blinked at him. “She had a bad dream and she was acting out.”

  “Must not of dreamed of much except walking,” Fate said.

  “Maybe she was trying to get away from worrying about her cubs,” Jacob said, “and them so unpromising. Did you ever see a bear cub, boy?”

  “No,” Fate said.

  “Little things. They got no hair on their hides, and they ain’t much bigger’n that hunk of pork I’m roasting.”

  “I saw fo
ur in one litter once near the Yadkin,” Nicholas said.

  “Four?”

  “I counted four.”

  “She must a had a time to feed that many.”

  Nicholas ate another piece of meat, then Fate ate again. His stomach was full by now and he was sleepy, but he was worried, too, and cold. He was worried about Mooney. Twice during the day Jacob had fired off two shots, and they had not got an answer.

  Fate lay back on the ground. He didn’t want to go to sleep, but he couldn’t keep awake, so he fell between sleep and wakefulness. He could still hear the men talking. They were talking about how a bear could eat anything, whereas a cat could not, because the bear’s teeth were different. Fate heard every word they were saying, but the voices faded sometimes, then they would come back again. It was as if he were on a ship, rolling on waves; the ship was rocking on the waves, but the waves were of sound, not of water.

  Five toes on a bear, the German said. Left-handed, he said. Bears can’t see well, he said, but can smell a long distance.

  Jacob got to talking about how loyally a sow-bear protects its young. Somebody in Watauga had shot a sow-bear and her two cubs, he said. “That sow-bear and her cubs had been eating of a bear bait of horsemeat. The cubs died first, and she crawled with some of the meat over to where they was dead, and tried to make them eat. She was weak as could be herself, but she tried to raise them, and not being able to do it, she went past them, making cries so mournful, calling them to her, but the cubs couldn’t hear.”

  Fate wished he could get warm. His feet were warm, but the rest of him was cold.

  “Draw that fire away from that boy’s feet,” he heard Jacob say. “Did you ever see a boy crawl in his sleep afore?”

  “I’ve seen men do it.”