“The first time we met I was up in a tree, but I don’t suppose you’d remember that.”
“Nope. Now let’s put some miles behind us.”
“Why did you want to know if I can climb?”
“Man or bear, he’s going to be looking for sign or following your scent on the trail,” the fox said. “But if you take to the trees like a squirrel and stay up there, he’s not going to find either. We just need to find the right place.”
Before long, T.H. found what he was looking for. He had Lillian wade into the stream that ran alongside the path until she came to a large, low-hanging bough. With the stones slippery underfoot, it took her a couple of tries to jump up and get enough grip on the branch to pull herself out of the water. The bough dipped under her weight, almost putting her back in the stream, but she was able to hoist herself around and scramble up its length.
“The wind’s from the east,” the fox called up to her. He pointed his long nose toward the west. “So go that way.”
The trees grew close to each other here, their branches overlapping, making it easy for Lillian to move from one to the other. T.H. called for her to stop when she was a good distance west of the stream.
“What now?” she asked.
“Now you find yourself a comfortable crook in that tree, and we wait.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll keep out of sight. He’s not looking for a fox.”
Lillian climbed a little higher, to where a fat branch split off from the main trunk. Once she’d settled in with her back to the trunk, she found she could still see a small stretch of the trail through the branches. Below her perch she could just make out T.H. lying amid a stand of tall ferns.
“I can see a bit of the trail from here,” she called down to him. “Doesn’t that mean Joen might see me?”
“Only if he’s looking up. Now shush. We can’t be talking, or the noise of our yapping will make all this hiding pointless.”
“But I don’t see why—”
“Shush!”
Lillian sighed. What seemed pointless was hiding, and the longer they did it, the more pointless it seemed. They should be putting as much distance between themselves and LaOursville as they could, because the sooner they got to Black Pine Hollow, the sooner all of this would get fixed. Yes, she’d be a cat again, but Aunt would be alive.
Aunt would be alive.
She was about to call down to T.H. again when a barn swallow flew by her tree, crying, “They’re coming, they’re coming!”
The swallow wasn’t alone. She could see other small birds flying about the forest, passing along the same message. The barn swallow made an abrupt turn in the air and came back to Lillian’s tree, where it landed on a branch just a foot or so from her face.
“There you are!” it cried in its high, piping voice. “Be careful, be ever so careful. The bears are coming!”
“The bears? What do you mean, bears?”
But the swallow had already flown off. It didn’t matter. Lillian knew exactly what it meant: Joen had brought some of the others to help him.
“Will you shush up there!” T.H. called in a hoarse whisper.
“I know, but…”
Her voice trailed off. She pressed herself into the bark of her tree, wishing she could disappear, because there they were. Big brown shapes loped along the forest path, moving quickly and silently for all their bulk. She caught only fleeting glimpses of them through the thick network of branches, but that was enough to show her that they weren’t bear people from LaOursville. They were bears. Real bears. Fast bears.
Though they were out of sight now, she held her breath, waiting, straining to hear. What were they doing? Had they guessed the trick that had been played on them? Were they sneaking toward her right now?
She supposed that they’d reached the spot where she’d stepped into the stream, because suddenly she could hear their quarreling voices.
What were those bears arguing about? She could almost make out the words….
Leaning away from the tree to try to hear better, she slipped and scrabbled at the bark with her fingers until she regained her balance. She waited, biting her lip, to see if she’d been heard.
There were fewer voices now, and when she looked in the direction of the path she saw a brown shape go by, heading back in the direction of LaOursville. A moment later it was followed by another, then more, all of them only briefly glimpsed as they moved along the limited view she had of the trail.
She had no idea if they’d all gone back or not. Maybe some had stayed. Joen would have stayed.
It seemed to take forever before T.H. finally returned. He looked up with a grin.
“It worked,” he said. “They’ve gone back to their valley.”
“All of them?”
“Each and every.”
“What were they arguing about?”
The fox shrugged. “Just over Joen’s insisting that they keep trying to find your trail.”
“But he’s gone, too?”
“Yes. Joen’s got quite a limp on him, but I saw the look in his eyes. He’ll be back.”
“So we should go as quick as we can now.” She started to come down the tree.
“Hold on,” T.H. said. “Before you come down, why don’t you see how far you can go squirrel-style? The branches seem pretty close still, and the farther you can go before you put your scent back on the ground, the better it will be.”
“I guess I could do that.”
The fox nodded. “I’ll scout ahead. I’m sure there’s got to be another trail over on the far side of the mountain. If we’re lucky, the bears won’t know anything about it, or maybe they won’t go looking for us there.”
“You go ahead and find that trail,” she said. “I’ll follow along as best I can.”
T.H. slipped away. At first she could see the plume of his tail poking up through the underbrush, but then branches got in the way and he was lost to sight. Lillian gave a last look back to the trail, hoping there wasn’t a bear sneaking along after them. She edged her way along the branch until she could grab a limb of the next tree over and swing herself into its canopy. She repeated the maneuver from tree to tree and, while she wasn’t nearly as fast as a squirrel, she made progress at her own slow pace.
Eventually she ran out of branches growing close enough to each other. It was time to come down, anyway. The last light of the setting sun disappeared just as she made her way to the ground.
She wanted to call for T.H., except that might bring Joen to her rather than the fox, so she sat down on the roots of the big tree and waited for him to return.
Although Lillian was expecting him, she jumped when T.H. suddenly appeared out of the brush.
T.H. grinned. “Good job. You came much farther than I expected. It’ll take the bears forever to pick up your scent all this way from where they lost it.”
They shared some of the food Lillian had taken from Mother Manan’s kitchen. Lillian would have liked to go on, but there was no moon, and the pale starlight couldn’t make its way down through the thick canopy. She didn’t have T.H.’s night sight, and it was too dark for her to see. So she sat against the tree trunk, cozy in her blanket, T.H. curled up at her side.
“What do you think?” Lillian asked dreamily. “Could that story the Creek boys told me be true?”
“It’s a good story.”
“But is it true? Are those stars really the holes left behind by spiders who dropped down to rescue their kin? Or are they just specks of light up in the night sky?”
“Why can’t they be both?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, when you were a kitten, you were also a girl, weren’t you?”
“I suppose.”
Lillian sat for a while, listening to T.H.’s breathing start to even out.
“I have a bone to pick with Aunt Nancy,” she grumbled before he was completely asleep.
T.H. sighed. “Why’s that?�
�
“Why? Because she sent me on a wild-goose chase.”
“But if she hadn’t sent you to the bear people, you’d never have gotten the potion from Mother Manan, and we wouldn’t have been able to talk to each other and figure it all out the way we did.”
“Aunt Nancy wouldn’t have known anything about that potion.”
“But maybe the spirits who told her to send you to the bear people did.”
Lillian frowned. “I don’t know. I wish people would just say what they really mean instead of getting all tricksy about it. Both Aunt Nancy and Mother Manan tricked me. It wasn’t any fun being a slave.”
“Just think of it as something that builds character.”
“I’ve got plenty of character.”
The fox chuckled. “That you do.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Back to
Black Pine
Hollow
Lillian woke just before dawn from a nightmare in which the bears had captured her and were about to cook her up in a big pot in Mother Manan’s kitchen. She’d tangled herself in her blanket. Wrenching her arms free, she sat up to find T.H. sitting on his haunches a few feet away. He studied her with a curious gaze.
“You’re a restless sleeper,” he said.
“I had a bad dream. The bears were cooking me up for supper.”
“I’d be surprised if that hasn’t made you lose your appetite.”
Lillian smiled. “Are you offering to have my share of breakfast?”
“It’s what a friend would do.”
“Maybe, but I’m hungry, so I don’t think so.”
The sun began to rise while they were eating. By the time they were finished, the morning twilight had given way to the sun, so they started back across the mountains.
Eventually they passed the tree where the hunter had been hidden.
“I wonder if he ever got that panther,” Lillian said.
“I doubt that. They’re wily—almost as wily as foxes.”
“And probably not as humble.”
“Probably not,” T.H. agreed.
T.H. told stories along the way, and Lillian taught him some of the songs that she’d learned from Aunt. After the horrible weeks Lillian had spent in LaOursville, the day felt like a special outing.
The time passed quickly, and the distance with it, since much of the trail was downhill. By late afternoon they were back in the familiar hills around Aunt’s farm. They tromped through the marsh to just within sight of the big pine tree that marked the possum witch’s home.
“This is as far as I go,” T.H. said.
“I know. Because you ate her husband.”
He gave her a sour look. “He was already dead.”
“So you said.”
“Well, he was. Truthful and Handsome, remember?”
Lillian nodded. She stood there looking at the dead pine. Even though she’d already met Old Mother Possum, or maybe just dreamed they’d met—it was all a bit confusing—she was still nervous.
“I wonder what will happen,” she said. “What if I’m wrong? What if she can’t help me? What if it was just a dream?”
“I don’t know,” T.H. said. “I just know there’s only one way to find out.”
Lillian nodded. Shouldering her blanket and pack, she picked her way through the soggy marsh to where the tall dead pine rose from a small hillock ahead of her. As twilight turned into night she could see all the little medicine and tincture bottles tied to the branches of the pine. When she reached the hillock the ground firmed under her feet.
She stood for a moment, remembering the last time she’d been here. It couldn’t have been a dream. How could she remember it all so clearly?
She cleared her throat, then called into the deepening shadows that surrounded the pine.
“Hello hello? Are you there, Mrs. Possum?”
The tincture bottles clanged lightly in a discordant song as Lillian waited for an endless moment.
The figure that finally stepped quietly out of the tree’s shadows was just as she recalled. Old Mother Possum was still some strange combination of woman and possum, but whereas before she’d towered over the kitten Lillian had been, now she was a good head and a half shorter.
She leaned on a staff that reminded Lillian of Mother Manan’s. Braided strips of leather encased the top, then longer strands with tiny bottles tied to their ends swung freely. The bottles on the staff echoed the song of the tree, and the possum witch’s small black eyes studied Lillian intensely.
“This is interesting,” she said. “I don’t get many human visitors, and never one so young as you. Have you come for a potion, girl? Something to make some boy love you? Or maybe you’re looking for wealth or power—a piece of magic that can take you out of these hollows and into the wide world beyond?”
Lillian shook her head. “I’m the kitten you met at the beginning of the summer.”
“I see. And the reason we met was?”
“I was a kitten. You turned me back into a girl.”
“That seems unlikely. I can’t stop the tales they tell of me, but the truth is I don’t have the kind of mojo something like that would take. And if I did find a way to do it, I’m fairly certain I’d remember it.”
Lillian shook her head. “I’m not saying this right. You didn’t so much change me from a kitten to a girl as send me back in time so that it didn’t happen in the first place—my being changed from a girl into a kitten, I mean. By the cats.”
“You’d think I’d remember that as well.”
“Well, it’s true.”
But even as she spoke the words Lillian realized that she hadn’t thought this through. When she’d gone back to that time before the snake bit her, not only had she not been bitten by the snake anymore, but so far as Old Mother Possum was concerned, Lillian had never met her before, either.
Old Mother Possum nodded. “I can see that you believe what you’re telling me, but it’s not so clear for me.”
She studied Lillian again for so long that Lillian began to fidget. Old Mother Possum tapped her staff lightly on the ground and the bottles sang once more. The old woman listened intently, then appeared to come to a decision.
“My bottles sense some familiarity about you, otherwise I’d send you on your way. Come inside,” she said. “Let’s see if we can get to the bottom of this.”
Lillian gave the tree a dubious look. She didn’t see anything that looked like a window, never mind a door.
“You didn’t come inside the last time?” Old Mother Possum asked.
Lillian shook her head. She wasn’t one bit sure about this, but at least the possum witch was starting to believe her.
Old Mother Possum motioned toward the dead pine. “The trick,” she said, “is to simply walk forward and expect there to be a door to let you in.”
“Really?”
“Just do what I do.”
Lillian watched as the old woman walked forward. Just when she was about to walk smack into the tree, she vanished.
Lillian stared at the tree. She didn’t think she could do that. But then she thought of Aunt, remembered her still, gray features the last time she’d seen her, lying in her coffin before they nailed the lid on. Straightening her shoulders, she took a breath and walked toward the tree.
There’s a door, there’s a door, there’s a door….
She flinched as she was about to walk into the tree, but then the tree wasn’t there and she stumbled forward. A bony hand caught her and helped her regain her balance. She blinked in the light, though it wasn’t bright, then looked around in wonder.
Where there should have been, at most, a hollow tree, was instead the interior of a cozy cottage with a stone floor and wooden walls. A small fire burned in a hearth with two chairs in front of it and a carpet under the chairs. There were candles on the mantel, and more on the wooden table in the center of the room. She spied a small bed in a corner with a chest at its foot. On the opposite wall, a cluttered counte
r ran the length of the room, filled with all kinds of little jars and boxes and bottles. Drying herbs hung from the rafters above.
Lillian looked up. Why would there be rafters inside a tree? How could any of this even be real?
She turned back to where she’d come in. Framed by the doorway, she could still see the marsh out there.
“Is—is this magic?” she asked.
Her hostess smiled. “No, it’s simply my home.”
The old woman led Lillian to one of the chairs by the fire. “I was about to pour myself some tea when you came calling,” she said. “Would you like some?”
“Yes, please.”
Old Mother Possum fussed with a teapot, cups, saucers, and honey at the long counter. Taking some biscuits out of a small crock, she set them on a flowered plate.
“Would you mind?” she said, holding the plate out to Lillian.
Lillian got up and carried the plate over to a small table between their chairs. The biscuits smelled just like Aunt’s—heavenly.
The possum woman handed Lillian a cup of tea, then returned for her own. Picking up a small handloom, she made her way back to her own chair. She took a sip of her tea and a bite of biscuit and smacked her lips in appreciation before setting both back on the saucer.
“Now, let’s see,” she said, holding the loom on her lap.
She bent down to examine the unfinished tapestry, and Lillian leaned closer to look at it as well. It appeared to be an endless flurry of leaves, eddying in a breeze so that they floated one over the other. Lillian didn’t know much about weaving, but she didn’t need to in order to know that the workmanship was exquisite. Color and shading gave the leaves the appearance of having fallen onto the cloth, rather than being woven into it.
Old Mother Possum sifted through the loose wool that hung from the end of the loom, her thin fingers deftly separating one strand from the other until she finally pulled one free.
“Here we are,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Let’s see. A night early in the summer. A kitten in the marsh, spraying mud and water onto my bottles to make them sing. And then… ah, yes…”
The Cats of Tanglewood Forest Page 11
