Legends of the North Cascades

by Jonathan Evison

  “We already had this,” says Bella.

  “You liked it this morning.”

  “That’s because it’s breakfast.”

  “Touché,” said Dave. “How about this, how about for dinner we have something different?”

  “Like what?”

  “How about kitty?”

  “Ew. Daddy, gross!”

  In the afternoon, Bella watched from a stony perch as Dave split wood. He set, swung, split, and tossed like a machine, outrunning his thoughts until the wood was piled three feet high. Together, they stacked the quarters neatly beneath the natural overhang at the mouth of the cave. When they had completed that task, they rang the fire pit with stones.

  “Not too close,” he said. “They get too hot and they can explode.”

  The constant engagement, the clear and urgent sense of purpose these tasks provided Dave were a blessing. This was what control felt like. Here, Dave knew what outside forces were at work, and what perils were lying in wait. Weather, and famine, the kind of forces Dave could prepare for, and protect against. Not like the forces they’d left behind; those political and financial and social and emotional forces that conspired against them daily.

  By the fire, Bella sat rapt late into the evening, green eyes aglow, reflecting the flames, as Dave told her of the forces that shaped these mountains, of the glaciers and volcanoes, and the mighty sheet of ice, a mile thick, that once covered the region farther than the eye could see.

  “It looked like the north pole,” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess it probably did—if you mean white and frozen and flat.”

  “It wasn’t all flat,” she said. “There were mountains. And it was colder than now.”

  “Much colder,” he said.

  “There were people.”

  “Yes, there were.”

  “They looked different, but they were pretty much like us,” she said.

  “It’s true,” he said. “They had the same brain as us, the same capacities.”

  “What’s ‘cacapities’?”

  “Capacities means they could do the things we can do; problem solve like us and also think abstractly.”

  “What’s ‘abstrackely’?”

  “It means thinking about things that don’t exist physically. Like ideas, or stories.”

  “The people were hunters,” she said, matter-of-factly.

  “Yes, they were.”

  “But the girls didn’t get to hunt,” she said. “The girls took care of the children, and prepared food, and made clothes, and stuff like that. Why do the girls always get the boring jobs?”

  “It’s a fair question, baby. It’s not like that anymore. Especially not for you. You can do anything you want.”

  “Can I hunt?”

  “Of course, and you will hunt, you’ll need to hunt out here,” he said. “When you’re older.”

  “Aw,” she said. “Why do I gotta be older to do anything good?”

  Smiling, Dave reached across the fire and mussed her hair.

  “That’s not true,” he said. “Look around. You get to live in the most beautiful place in the world. Look at these mountains all around you.”

  “Duh,” she said. “I can’t exactly see them in the dark.”

  “But you can feel them, can’t you?”

  “I guess so,” she said.

  Bella sipped her licorice tea, turning her attention to the glowing coals, her little mind apparently working on something.

  She will thrive here, Dave thought. A natural life will offer her all the right challenges to keep her engaged, to keep her spirit connected to all that was wild and wholesome. There were books to be read, adventures to be had, there was all the bounty of nature. What cause for loneliness? They had each other, they had the cats, and they had the town at their disposal when they needed it, which wouldn’t be often.

  “The people from back then lived in caves,” said Bella. “Or shelters dug in the ground.”

  “Did you learn all this from Mrs. Rundgren?” he said, impressed.

  “No,” she said. “It’s just stuff I know.”

  “Mmm,” he said.

  My God, who was this child? If only Dave could summon an ounce of that curiosity, that sense of possibility, or that childlike certainty, he might feel alive again. Where along the line had his child cobbled together such poise? When Dave was seven years old his curiosity revolved mostly around things and experiences he wanted: toys, and video games, and Seahawk jerseys. His knowledge consisted mostly of sports trivia and Spiderman comics. But not Bella; her mind had scope. Her imagination was seemingly boundless. Her facility with language alone was astounding. Think of the potential, in ten and twenty years.

  Another pang of guilt prodded Dave at the irrefutable knowledge that he was limiting Bella’s possibilities by forcing her to live in exile.

  “Daddy, what do you think happened to the ice people?”

  “The world changed.”

  “How did the world change?”

  “The climate, mostly,” he said sleepily.

  “I hope it got warmer for them,” she said.

  “Eventually, it did.”

  “Maybe they left,” she said. “Maybe they found their paradise behind the hole in the sky. What do you think?”

  Dave yawned. “I really couldn’t say, baby.”

  “That’s what I think,” she said. “But how could there be a hole in the sky?”

  “Aw, baby, it’s so late, it’s time for bed,” he said. “We can talk about it more tomorrow.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Can you carry me to bed?” she asked.

  “You’re so dang heavy these days, do I have to?”

  “Please, please?”

  “Fine,” he said with a sigh.

  Hefting her fifty pounds, he wrapped her up and held her close. He could barely fathom how big she’d gotten, seemingly overnight. To think only yesterday, Dave could cradle Bella in one arm, a wobbly-headed little tub of adipose, helpless and drooling. Now, look at her: lean and poised, and fully awake to the world.

  “Daddy?” she said, as he ducked into the candlelight of the cave.

  “Yeah, buddy?”

  “Why did the world change?”

  “I wish I knew,” he said.

  Dark All the Time

  Living in a cave wasn’t so bad, really, once you got used to the low ceilings and the hard, lumpy floors, not to mention the fact that it was dark all the time, and the space was so crowded with supplies you couldn’t do a somersault if you wanted to.

  Her dad was always busy those early days, which left Bella to herself a good deal of the time. Sometimes she read by the fire. Not her old favorites so much, but books her dad brought along about geology, and weather, and survival in the wilderness. Not that she understood a lot of what she read. There were words she couldn’t even begin to pronounce, words whose meaning she could hardly guess at. But there were big words, too, that she was starting to recognize, and Mrs. Rundgren said recognition was the first step in learning a word.

  Sometimes she played with her Hello Kitties, who had taken up residence in the woodpile. But somehow Kitty and Mimmy and Pachacco and Dear Daniel and Mr. White didn’t speak to her like they once did. Her dad still wouldn’t let her play with the real kitties, because he said they were too fragile. Betty didn’t want anything to do with her, and Tito wasn’t much of a playmate, always coming and going as he was.

  Although the impulse to handle the kittens almost got the better of her a few times, Bella contented herself by shining the flashlight into the crowded carrier to watch them wiggle and squirm and suckle at Betty’s teats. She wanted so badly to name them all, but as it was, all crowded into the carrier like one big, furry blob, she could hardly tell how many there were. One of them, the one with the white spot on his forepaw, she would call Sugarfoot, she decided, and another one, all black, Boris. She knew her life would feel much fuller o
nce she named them all, and her dad would finally let her play with them.

  “How much longer do I have to wait?” she asked him daily.

  “Just another week, baby.”

  “When is that?”

  “In seven days.”

  “I know that. But how many hours?”

  “Quite a few, baby. But they’ll go quick, I promise.”

  It was hard to tell how long anything was anymore. Time didn’t pass the way it used to in her old life. There was hardly anything to give her days shape; no 6:45 alarm clock, no 7:25 bus pick-up, no first recess, no lunch recess, no final bell, no 2:55 bus drop-off, no waiting for Daddy to get off work, no 6:00 dinner, no thirty minutes of TV, no storytelling with her mom in bed before lights out.

  Instead her days were broken up only in the most basic of ways: day or night, asleep or awake, bored or not bored, reading or not reading. In the darkness of the cave, sometimes she couldn’t even tell if it was night or day. Sometimes she couldn’t tell the difference between awake and dreaming. Sometimes it was like Bella was living outside of herself, or actually more like the outside was living inside of her.

  A Very Brief History of the Clan

  And then there was Ek’lil, who dropped her baby on the ice, and carried it around for many days, refusing to believe it was dead.

  And He’pa, who could not see, and did not last long in the world.

  There was A’kai, the old man. He went slowly, but none too gracefully; devoured by wolves, as the rest of us fled to safety.

  A’kai was surely not the first martyr in the history of our clan. Nor the last.

  Then there were Yq’mat, Kt’ak, and Ok’eh, wolves themselves.

  There were the elders, Ee’tsa, and O’qu’a, weak-eyed and fading with every moon, a cold, white fate nipping at their heels.

  There was the child never named. Many children never named.

  There were the sick left behind.

  There were stories going back too far to remember, kept alive like sacred flames, out of habit and vulnerability as much as anything else.

  They clung to the familiar; they clung to all that they could control.

  They buried their dead in the ice, never guessing that their bones would be scattered far and wide in some future epoch, to be ground to dust.

  S’tka was swollen with baby when the elders decided that the clan would leave the mountains for good. Destiny they called it. As if it were some plan hatched from behind the sky, and not the desperate design of shortsighted mortals. The elders assured S’tka and her people that their destiny lay somewhere out of sight, beyond the mountains, and beyond the ice. They told them if they listened, they could hear it on the frozen wind. Oh, how they dazzled with their hyperbole, how they hypnotized the people with their vagaries, all their grand promises of a new home, somewhere unknowable, someplace more kindly and promising beyond the far-flung horizon.

  But such delusions were not for S’tka, who dreamed of meat; fresh, pink meat she could sink her aching teeth into, meat that she could gnaw until her jaw was sore. S’tka dreamed of blood dripping down her chin. And a bed made out of something softer than ice. She dreamed of safety and security, and shelter from the cruel elements and bloodthirsty giants of the frozen world, forever vying for her flesh. Safety seemed like a practical purpose given the world they lived in. So why tempt the elements? Why risk the unknown?

  In the end, it was not for S’tka to decide. What choice had she but to follow them? And follow them she did, with tiny, hard-won steps, her aching bulge out in front of her, but not before looking back one final time at the mountains that had been her curse and savior.

  Signals

  Out on the bluff after meals, when the fire was not quite enough to warm them, Dave and Bella found themselves leaning into the transistor radio for warmth. Depending on the atmosphere, the weather, the interference, and which way the antenna was pointed, sometimes they were lucky enough to tune in the lonesome strains of a pedal steel guitar on the classic country station out of Blaine, or maybe some Patsy Cline, singing about the wayward wind, or Ray Price, singing about the glow of city lights.

  And how far the city lights seemed from up there on the bluff, surrounded by the enormous cathedral of the North Cascades in all its green and white and gray wonder, not a soul within miles. With some additional tweaking and a little luck, maybe Dave could tune in the chunky chords of a rock ballad out of Vancouver, BC, playing “classic rock from the sixties to the nineties and beyond.” Maybe some Thin Lizzy, or some Pink Floyd, or some Pearl Jam.

  Feeble though the signal was in the high country, tinny and crackly as the strains sometimes arrived to Dave and Bella’s ears, the music was a revelation. A few notes rendered with feeling cut through the frigid air like a heat source. The simple act of humming a chorus went a long way toward thawing the frozen silence, toward shrinking the immense wilderness around them. Dave was forced to wonder why he’d maintained barely any music in his life since he was in high school, back when Weezer and Bush were in heavy rotation on his bedroom boom box, or blaring on the sideline at VFHS, while he ran his morning drills in the dewy grass. Or on the stereo of the ’86 Buick Century sedan he inherited from Coach Prentice, with Nadene Charles riding shotgun, their hands intertwined, their unknown futures gleaming pink and golden somewhere beyond the horizon.

  Back when his life had a soundtrack.

  So, why did the music die? What did it say about Dave, about what his life had become, that in all the endless hours of planning, listing, and anticipating every conceivable human need, it never once occurred to him to bring a guitar up the mountain, or even a harmonica to learn how to play? If ever the opportunity to learn an instrument presented itself to someone, here it was.

  But it was more than just the music. Over the course of two decades, Dave had all but given up on his faith, his country, and his marriage. That Bella even existed was practically a miracle.

  Sometimes Dave and Bella could tune in a high school basketball game from Bellingham, or a junior hockey game from British Columbia, and Dave got a vicarious thrill, remembering the excitement, the adrenaline, the immediate promise of competition, the triumph, and frustration, and grace of it.

  Unfortunately, the easiest signal to access on the transistor seemed to be some form of news. News! Ha! More like propaganda in the post-truth age. What did that even mean, post-truth? Dave had not brought Bella up here to shelter her from the outside world, so much as to avoid the toxicity of it altogether. Though she ought to have had the benefit of his knowledge, he evaded her frequent questioning as long and as far as possible.

  “What’s a terrorist?” she wanted to know.

  Dave’s mind went about eight different ways before it arrived at the vaguest destination he could apprehend.

  “It’s just a label the they like to throw around in the media and politics,” he said.

  She worked on the information for an instant, knitting her brow.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  “Aw, honey, it’s all so confusing,” he said. “It’s not even worth explaining. See if you can tune in some music.”

  “But, Daddy—”

  “Just hand me the radio,” he said irritably.

  “But, Daddy!” she scolded. “It was you who told me I should always ask questions.”

  Dave sighed. As usual, she had him in a vice.

  “Okay, let’s see,” he said. “A terrorist is somebody who does something violent, or something meant to scare people or intimidate them for the sake of a belief, which is usually religious or political. What a terrorist looks like depends on where you’re standing.”

  “Like how?”

  Dave wrung his hands. How to tell his daughter that many would consider him a terrorist, sanctioned by the United Nations to violate a people he knew nothing of, with whom he had no connection or particular disdain for, owing to reasons he was never given to fully understand?

  “Well,” he said
at last. “Like if you’re on the side of the person doing the violent act, you wouldn’t consider yourself a terrorist. But if somebody was doing something violent to you because of something they believed in, then they would be a terrorist.”

  “What if you agreed with them?”

  “I suppose that happens to some people. A lot of times the violence happens to innocent people, and it doesn’t really matter what they believe. I guess in that case, you’d still have to call the person a terrorist.”

  “Okay, I get it,” she said. “You can change the station now.”

  Gordon “Gordy” Prentice; Football Coach

  “Dave played varsity as a sophomore, and that’s when we started stringing those titles together. It was Jerome Charles who brought Davey to my attention. Kid couldn’t have weighed a buck-thirty, but he was tough. Bulked up after his sophomore season, and after that I could literally put Dave Cartwright anywhere on the football field at any given point in the game. Offense, defense, special teams. I could put him at wideout, in the slot, put him in the backfield. Hell, he kicked a couple field goals senior year. On defense, I could put him in the middle, or anywhere in the secondary, for that matter. Not that I did, but I could have. Probably could have put him at nose tackle and he would have held his ground against guys sixty and seventy pounds heavier than him. He was the ultimate Swiss Army knife in terms of matchups. Not because of his size or his athleticism, but because of his will and his field awareness and his football instincts. And on top of all that, he was very coachable.

  “Personality-wise, he was damn near unflappable—until he wasn’t. You weren’t going to get inside Dave Cartwright’s head, you weren’t going to take him off his game. He kept an even keel. Until he was angry. And look, I’m not gonna lie to you, I liked him angry. It took a long while for him to get there, but when he got there, it was a focused anger. And if you were the unlucky SOB that was the focus of that anger, lookout.