Navigating Early

by Clare Vanderpool

  Early smoothed the paper bull’s-eye and reached to attach it to the tree, stabbing it through with my pocketknife. He paused, looking at me expectantly.

  I glanced around in a panic. The first shot was fired, the bullet hitting the center of the bull’s-eye, right between Early and me.

  “Let’s go that way!” I yelled as Early and I ran in the direction opposite MacScott. We started off as the day turned to dusk, and as MacScott raised his gun and took his second shot.

  There was no right or wrong way to go. We simply tried to run away fast. Still, you can’t just run around like a chicken with its head cut off. I’d seen a chicken with its head cut off, and it didn’t get very far. Within seconds we heard two more shots, one after another. The sound echoed in the woods, but Early and I had plotted our course and we stuck with it, tacking this way and that, heading in what we thought was a northerly direction.

  It would have been a good course, too. A kind of grand steeplechase that consisted of jumping through bogs filled with wet, rotting leaves, dodging low-hanging branches, crawling under a fallen tree, and scaling a treacherous and rocky slope. But that last part landed us in trouble.

  We’d been running hard, our heavy breathing seeming to echo all around us, when I realized we’d run into a steep and rocky incline. Turning back, we heard a loud thrashing sound not far behind us. We’d had the advantage of youth, and with it speed, but MacScott had the greater advantage: experience in these woods. It dawned on me then that he’d pointed us toward the sycamore tree for a reason. He knew these woods better than anybody and knew how to steer us into a trap. Now it was too late.

  “We’ll have to climb it.” I knew it wouldn’t be a problem for Early. He’d proven himself to be a nimble climber back at Gunnar’s place. And sure enough, he clambered up and reached the top before I’d gotten halfway there. I stuck my feet carefully here and there, struggling for footing while dirt and rocks skittered down the slope. I grabbed for any root, branch, or handhold I could find.

  Panting and perspiring, I reached for a sturdy-looking tree root jutting out from the rock wall. If I can just get a good hold there and then hoist myself the rest of the way … I reached into the open space beneath the exposed root when I saw a wet clump of leaves move. Before I could react, a snake clamped down on my hand, and I fell down, down, down, landing with a thud on my back at the bottom of the rocky incline.

  30

  In a flash, Early was at my side. “Jackie, are you okay? I thought we were going to climb up.” He must have slid down the hill as fast as I had fallen down it.

  “That was the plan.” I groaned, looking at the bite marks on my hand. “Do you think it was a poisonous snake?”

  “No, it wasn’t poisonous.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief—until he continued.

  “Poison is something that is swallowed or inhaled. So, no, it’s not a poisonous snake. It might be a venomous snake, though. The timber rattlesnake is a venomous snake. It’s venom that gets into your body when a snake bites, and that can kill you. Or it might only destroy the muscle and tissue in your arm, and then you’d have to amputate it.”

  My heart was pounding, probably sending snake venom racing throughout my body. I tried to calm down. He was already applying some of his lavender-scented snakebite ointment.

  “Shh, listen,” I said.

  “I don’t hear anything,” said Early.

  “Exactly, so let’s get out of here. Maybe MacScott cut around to grab us at the top of the hill. Now we can go back the way we came and hopefully—”

  My hopefully was interrupted just short of the hopeful part when MacScott arrived, blocking our escape. I tried to inch away in the dirt, but I could only scoot a few feet off to the side. There was nowhere to go. MacScott had us trapped, and he knew it. He walked slowly toward us.

  “I hit the bull’s-eye four times. So I have two bullets left.” He cocked the gun. But suddenly MacScott’s expression changed. His jaw went slack, and the gun barrel lowered a couple of inches.

  Early and I turned our heads to follow the pirate’s gaze. It was the bear.

  Black as night and bleary with sleep, it lumbered out from a recess in the stone wall behind us. Its massive body swaggered and swayed as if it were shaking the sleep from its back. We’d never actually seen the bear before, just its tracks and droppings. But here we were, face to face. There was no question that this was the Great Appalachian Bear—its left eye was mangled where MacScott said his bullet had ripped into it. Tit for tat, as MacScott had said. There was nowhere to run, even if we’d had any running left in us. My hand was screaming with pain, and Captain MacScott did not seem inclined to let us quietly take our leave.

  But he was in just as much danger as we were. And this was the bear he’d been tracking for so long. So why was he just standing there?

  His face twisted in a pained expression. He stared at the bear with his one eye. And the bear, with its mangled face, seemed to hold an equally pained expression as it stared back, its hackles raised. I wondered if each beast saw something familiar in the other.

  We would never know, as MacScott raised his gun, aiming at Early or me—I’m not sure which—and fired. A second later, pain still coursed up my arm, but not from being shot. Had he hit Early?

  I was frozen with fear.

  The great black bear, awesome as Ursa Major, wagged her head from side to side, and her bellow shook the nearby passage of the Appalachian Trail. I say her, but the truth is, we had no way to tell. There were no female markings. No cubs in sight. But I knew. I knew her like I knew my own mother. It was in her bearing—her absolute authority over us two boys locked in her gaze. And it was in her unwavering will to keep us alive.

  She raised her body upright, to her full height. MacScott shot again, hitting the dirt just in front of the bear’s massive paws. He must’ve been shaken—he’d missed. He cocked the gun one more time, took careful aim, and pulled the trigger. It only clicked. Empty. Then she was on him. I would have looked away, but I couldn’t. It was a sight, like a violent lightning storm, that demands to be witnessed. Mesmerizing and terrifying all at once. Then it was over and the bear was gone. All was still.

  Too still.

  My head was spinning, and sweat ran into my eyes. I turned my attention away from MacScott’s mauled body. Martin Johannsen’s gun rested in his upturned palms as if he were presenting a gift.

  There was Early, lying on the ground.

  The next few minutes played out like a kind of dream, blurry and warped. I made my way over to him. Had he been shot? I checked for blood. There was none. And he was breathing. But his eyes were rolled back in his head, and his body was twitching. He was having a seizure, but this one was worse than any I’d seen before. I tried to lift his head. Maybe he needed water. I ran over to MacScott’s pack to see if he had a canteen.

  “No, Early …,” I said, maybe more to myself than to him.

  I was still trying to wrest the pack open when I heard a rustling in the bushes and a grizzled figure emerged from the trees. At first I thought it was the bear returning, but it was a man. A hairy, grizzled woodsman.

  He walked over and knelt down, lifting Early’s head and cradling him to his chest. I knew I was not seeing things clearly. I could feel the heat of a fever emanating from the bite on my skin, and my body was racked with chills, so I wasn’t sure if I was having some kind of dream or venom-filled hallucination. The man tilted Early to the side. After a few more seconds, the jerking stopped. Early’s body relaxed, and he opened his eyes. Then he reached out his small white hand, placing it on the woodsman’s bearded face, and said one word.

  “Fisher.”

  31

  My vision was a little blurry, and I squinted to see if I could find a resemblance to the youthful face from the trophy cabinet, Number 67. To see why Early would think this was his brother. But all I could make out were the gaunt features and hollow-looking eyes of the bearded man. A lumberjack who’d felled
his last tree and hadn’t another swing of the ax left in him.

  Early smiled a distant smile at me. “See, Jackie? I told you we’d find him. We found Fisher.” His words sounded as if they were coming down a long tunnel, and it seemed that by the time they reached my ears, his mouth was already saying something else.

  “Jackie, you don’t look so good. I knew there were some timber rattlers left in these woods. I just knew it.”

  After that, I only had snapshots in my mind of the events that followed, and they didn’t make a lot of sense. First, the lumberjack picked me up, but then he changed into a great bear carrying me through the woods. I knew my feverish mind was playing tricks on me, but which was crazier—being carried by a great black bear, or by the dead Morton Hill legend and soldier Fisher Auden? Great breaths of air heaved and puffed against my face from whoever or whatever was carrying me. I could hear Early talking in hushed tones as he walked along beside.

  “I knew you were alive, Fisher. They said you were dead and that the numbers were all disappearing, but I didn’t believe them. You were just lost. But you’re not lost anymore, Fisher, because I found you.” Early continued, and I heard snatches of his tales of skeletons and caves and waterfalls and bears.

  More snapshots of trees and rocks and creeks—then I was in a house tucked back in the woods. Eustasia Johannsen’s house. I was in a quilted bed but dreamed of the bear and Early. They were sitting on a bench outside my window. The bear was thin, as if he were on the starving end of a long hibernation. He lowered his shaggy head and shed heavy tears. His shoulders heaved as he cried, and the only sounds I heard were from deep, ragged breaths.

  Early put his arm around the bear’s sagging shoulders. “You can come back,” he said. “Just like Superman did after the kryptonite almost got him. And like Pi did when he kept his eyes on the bright star named for him.”

  That was when the bear spoke. His words were slow and dreamy, all running together, as in a song on a record playing at slow speed. They made Early cry.

  Then Mrs. Johannsen was there in the room with me. She put a hot poultice on my hand. It burned, and my hand felt like it was on fire. Then she brought me tea. It was too hot. She clucked and shushed until I drank it. It was bitter, but I kept it down. She said that I was a good boy and that she had missed me. She had gone back to thinking I was her son, Martin.

  “I was by the waterfall. Looking for Early.” My mind floated and bobbed like a bottle drifting at sea, but the message inside was unable to get out.

  “Don’t worry, now. You just need to concentrate on getting better. You know how you get when you don’t get enough rest. Cranky as a bulldog.”

  Her voice sounded so much like Mom’s. I blinked, trying to make my heavy eyelids stay open, to focus on her blurred face.

  She put a cool cloth on my forehead, and I saw her eyes gazing into mine. She held her hand to my face. It was so familiar. Her look. Her touch.

  “Mom?”

  I blinked. It couldn’t be her. It was the fever playing tricks on me again. It was just Mrs. Johannsen talking to her long-lost son. But it wasn’t. Maybe it was the way she held my hand. Maybe it was the way she smelled of talcum powder. Maybe it was her voice—a mother’s voice.

  Which was crazier—Mrs. Johannsen talking to her dead son, or me hearing my mother’s voice?

  “Mom?” Just saying the word, I no longer felt like I was adrift. The listing motion I’d felt inside subsided. I could see myself stepping onto Dinosaur Rock on Fisher’s steeplechase, the current of water surging beneath me.

  “I got lost.”

  “I know, but you found your way back. Finding your way doesn’t mean you always know where you’re going. It’s knowing how to find your way back home that’s important.”

  I ventured out further.

  “And then I was mad. I shouldn’t have gone off like that.” Another step.

  “It’s all right. Sometimes boys have to stretch their wings a bit. That’s hard for mothers.”

  “But I wasn’t there. I was gone.”

  “We all lose our way once in a while. I knew you’d come back. It wasn’t your fault.”

  I hadn’t realized how much I wanted to believe that. To hear those words of absolution. They washed over me with as much force as a great waterfall, cleansing me from head to toe and carrying me away in a peaceful current.

  “I miss you, Mom.”

  “I’ve missed you too. But, you know, I’ve been here the whole time. Just a hop, skip, and a jump away.” She smiled and kissed my forehead, her hair brushing my face. “Now, you get some rest. You’re tired as the day is long. And it’s been a long day. Sleep well. You’re not lost anymore.”

  “Good night, Mom,” I whispered as the door shut, and I knew she was gone. And I slept a deep, motionless sleep.

  The next morning my hand still hurt like a son of a gun, but the sweating and chills were gone, and my head was clear. I knew in the light of day that it was Mrs. Johannsen who’d put a cool cloth on my forehead, whispering words of love and forgiveness to her son, Martin. I knew I had chosen to see her differently. But how had her words meant so much to me, when she was speaking them to the son she thought had returned? Because she let me hear them as if they were being spoken to me. And, I guess, in a way I let her speak to me as if I were her son. Neither of us was fooling the other. But if a soothing balm is administered by someone other than a doctor, does that make it any less soothing?

  I put on my shoes and went into the main room of the cabin to find Early. There he sat, at the kitchen table. I knew what he was going to say as sure as if I were saying it myself. Early was going to say he’d found Fisher. He probably had the woodsman tucked away somewhere, ready to be displayed as proudly as the picture in the trophy case back at Morton Hill Academy. I could see it all.

  So when Early did open his mouth to speak, I was struck dumb by what he actually said.

  “Mrs. Johannsen is dead.”

  “What?” I said, even though I’d heard him loud and clear.

  Early didn’t elaborate. That’s when I noticed he was sorting his jelly beans. I walked over to the table. I’d been around Early long enough to know that his sorting meant different things. If he sorted in groups of ten, that meant he was trying to organize his thoughts or solve a problem. If he sorted by color, that meant he was upset and trying to calm himself.

  I watched as he took each jelly bean and scooted it with one finger into its place. Today he was sorting by color—red, yellow, green, blue, orange—and grouping them in columns of ten. He was upset and trying to figure something out. It had to be about Fisher.

  “Early,” I said, avoiding any mention of Fisher or the woodsman from the previous night, “what happened with Mrs. Johannsen?”

  “Last night, after she got you settled, she was beaming like a lighthouse.” He studied his columns of jelly beans as if they were magic beans that held the secrets of life. “Not really. That’s just an expression. No one really beams like a lighthouse. Most lighthouses use five-hundred-watt lights, so that would be very bright. She was beaming more like a candle. A candle set in a window, but a closed window, so there’s no breeze to make the candle flicker. It was a steady glow like that.”

  “What did she say?” I asked, keeping my voice low and calm to match Early’s, but his had a hint of pain in it as well.

  “She just hugged me to her bosom—that’s what ladies call their chest—and she thanked me for bringing you to her. Then she blew out that lantern she keeps up in the window and went to bed. This morning I went in to ask if she’d like me to put some coffee on. And there she was. All laid out, so peaceful and still. It was just like she said. Her body had done the work of living, and then it did the work of dying.”

  “And that man?” I asked tentatively. “The one who carried me here last night?”

  “He’s gone,” Early said quietly, staring at his tidy rows of colored jelly beans, all sorted neatly by color. Everything was in order. E
verything should have made sense. But I could tell by the look on Early’s face that it didn’t make sense. For what might have been the first time in his life, he couldn’t figure it out. Just then, a tear rolled down Early’s face, and in one motion he swept all the jelly beans onto the floor in an explosion of color and chaos.

  32

  I knelt down, gathering the jelly beans, wishing I could put them back in some order that would make sense. But I couldn’t, so I just dropped them in the jar, one after another after another, and screwed the lid back on.

  I found Early on the porch steps, tears streaking his dirty face. He had papers and news articles from his journal strewn about. Early must have realized that the woodsman wasn’t Fisher. I opened my mouth to say what he’d already figured out. That his brother wasn’t coming back. That he was gone, lost forever near a bridge in France. But instead, I kept quiet, because I didn’t want it to be true. Besides, who was I to tell Early anything? He said we could build a boat, and we did. He said that Martin Johannsen’s death was an accident, and it was. He said there were timber rattlesnakes in Maine, and even with the swelling and redness gone from my arm, I knew that there were. Of course, he could be wrong about some things. He had thought I was Mrs. Johannsen’s son. He had thought there was no color in Kansas. He had thought he could trust me before the regatta. There were times when Early was wrong.

  But I of all people understood the need to believe that a loved one is alive, standing in front of you, loving you.

  Early was surrounded by his array of articles and notes. His arsenal of reasons why Fisher was still alive. He stared at a particular newspaper clipping as if he were looking right through it. It was the picture of the bear hunter from Early’s bulletin board at school—the bear hunter I now recognized as Archibald MacScott when he still had two eyes. He was standing proudly by his prize, smiling a big smile, thinking he had killed the Great Appalachian Bear and won the bounty.