Though it shamed S’tka to admit it, she had never much cared for U’ku’let before he’d inexplicably come to her defense and attached himself to her. Why had he not made his intentions known at the edge of the wallow, upon the occasion of their one and only coupling? There had been nothing in the reckless thrust of his hips, nor the panicked look in his eyes, no tender utterances on his hot breath that had made S’tka think that U’ku’let felt any more deeply than the others. She was not at all sure they were even capable of emotional expression beyond the blunt theater of fear and anger, beyond the hooting and yammering of the hunt, or the grunt of carnal release. Throughout time, while the men trifled to perfect their hollow spear points, their crude carving implements, and their tasteless jokes, the women were left to grieve and remember. And what was the product of all this grieving and remembering if not the story of the people? Who was more qualified than a woman to tell the story of humanity?
The grave was not quite waist deep, but it would have to suffice, for soon the sun would sink below the ice, and S’tka must get N’ka back to the cave before dark. The best she could do was roll the body shoulder over shoulder into the pit, where it landed face down with a thud.
Climbing in after him, S’tka turned U’kulet over on his back, and straightened him as best she could, brushing the dirt from his face, and wrapping his hide snugly about him.
Climbing back out of the pit, she looked down at the bloated shell of U’ku’let, leering stupidly up at the slate gray sky, eyes bulging, gums swelling around his soft, yellow teeth. Surely there was nowhere to go from this world, thought S’tka, but at least the wolves wouldn’t get him.
“Goodbye,” she said.
And that was all.
Just as N’ka began to fuss, S’tka dropped to her knees and started pushing dirt into the grave.
Don’t You Even Care?
The days ran into weeks without any word from Bella’s dad. Every day, Bella enjoyed school less. It didn’t help that Hannah B, without warning, went to live with her mother in Blaine. Nobody but Bella missed her, apparently, because everybody started calling Hannah G just plain Hannah, like there never was a Hannah B. Miss Martine seemed to want less and less to do with Bella, whom she began sending to the specialists in the other building for part of the day: Mrs. Dunwoody, who was really fat, and Mr. Caruthers, who had breath like garlic and fish. It’s not that Bella minded either of them so much, it’s just that they sometimes smothered her with their attention. Always wanting to know what Bella was thinking, or how she felt, or trying to get her to focus on stuff in tricky ways. She liked it better in the classroom with the others where she could feel more invisible, and everybody just left her to herself.
“Do you think about your mom a lot?” Mr. Caruthers wanted to know.
“Sometimes,” said Bella.
“Is that what you’re thinking about when you’re losing your focus?”
“No,” she said.
“What are you thinking about?”
“Stuff that happened a long time ago.”
“Anything you want to talk about?” said Mr. Caruthers.
“No, thank you,” she said. “Not if I don’t have to.”
“Can you tell me how thinking about those things makes you feel?”
“It all depends,” she said. “Different ways. It depends what’s happening.”
“Do you ever talk to your mom?”
“How would I do that when she’s dead?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “Just pretending she’s there.”
“No,” said Bella. “I never do that.”
“There’s nothing wrong with doing that, you know.”
“I know,” she said. “I’ve seen my dad do it.”
“Do you miss your dad?”
“Very much,” she said.
“How does it make you feel when people say things about him that aren’t nice?”
“I don’t listen,” she said. “They’re stupid, anyway.”
Bella’s home life was a fruit salad of mixed signals. Sometimes it seemed like Auntie Kris and Uncle Travers wanted her to stay, then sometimes it seemed like Bella had stayed too long already. Sometimes they talked about Bella’s long-term future like they were already planning it, and sometimes they talked like it might end soon. The spaces between her and Bonnie seemed to grow wider by the week. As little as they had in common, Bonnie did not hesitate to make Bella do things to serve her.
“I need you to get something out of Mommy’s purse,” she said.
“What?”
“Twenty dollars.”
“Why do you need twenty dollars?”
“Because she won’t give it to me.”
“But what are you gonna use it for?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
As often as not, Bella complied with Bonnie’s directives, and when she was resistant, Bonnie could be very persuasive.
“Since you’ve lived here,” said Bonnie. “I’ve had to give up half of basically my whole life. The least you can do is help me once in awhile.”
And Bella supposed her cousin was right, though she was beginning to despise her.
From this remove, life in the mountains seemed refreshingly simple to comprehend.
“Uncle Travers,” she said one day at the breakfast table. “Can we go visit my dad?”
Uncle Travers glanced up from his real estate papers, then quickly back down again.
“He’ll come down soon, Bella. Don’t you worry.”
“But he won’t,” she said. “You keep saying it, but I know Daddy, and he won’t come down. He’s too afraid of the world.”
“He’ll come down,” said Travers without looking up.
“She’s right,” said Bonnie. “Uncle Dave won’t come down. He’s too crazy already.”
Bella glared at Bonnie with the first flash of real hatred she’d ever felt for her.
“Finish your breakfast, you two,” said Auntie Kris.
“But we should at least see if he’s okay,” said Bella, her tone pleading.
Uncle Travers looked up from his papers and held Bella’s gaze this time.
“Bella,” he said. “Your dad will come down when he’s ready. If he wanted to see us, he would have come down already.”
“I know he wants to see me,” said Bella, a little more forcefully than she intended. “You’re lying.”
“Bella,” scolded Auntie Kris.
“Don’t you even care?” said Bella.
“Of course we care,” said Auntie Kris.
“Then, why won’t Uncle Trav take me to visit him?”
Auntie Kris appealed to Uncle Travers with a meaningful look.
“Bella,” he said. “I know you miss your dad. I know you’re worried about him. But I’ve known him a lot longer than you, and I know he’s fine up there.”
“How?”
“Because he’s been through a lot harder things.”
“He needs us,” said Bella. “It’s not fair.”
“You’re right, Bella. He does need us. But see, sweetie, that’s something he has to realize on his own. Trust me, I know.”
Bella left for the bus even earlier than usual that morning, abandoning her half-eaten cereal despite Auntie Kris’s protests. Bella preferred getting to the bus stop before the brothers Tyler and Kyle who were invariably obnoxious in all the ways boys are usually obnoxious: clowning, bragging, hitting, spitting, and making factual claims and observations about stuff that obviously wasn’t true. If she got there early, Bella could prepare for them in her head. Sometimes, only one of them showed up, and of course, like all boys, they were easier to endure when they were alone. The younger one, Tyler, was actually reasonably polite in the absence of his brother, though not very interesting.
Some days, neither Tyler nor Kyle showed up, and as far as Bella was concerned, those were the best days of all. The world was a noisy place, full of Tylers and Kyles. It was always a relief to get on the bus and p
ress her face to the window and watch the world roll by.
Most days Bella had a hard pit in her stomach as she walked to the bus stop, a sort of nervous dread attached to the day ahead. But this morning, foggy and cold, as she ambled along the broken sidewalk, Bonnie’s brown backpack from last year slung over her shoulder, Bella was seized by a sense of clarity. For the first time, it occurred to her that nobody could control her, that no matter who tried to plan her life, or tell her what to do, no matter how good, or how misdirected their reasoning, no matter how convincing their argument, Bella would always be in control of herself. They could boss her around, and they could ask her questions and try to correct her, but they could never change what she wanted.
When she got to the bus stop, she walked right past it and crossed the street. She kept walking south past the gloomy streets at the edge of town, and past the gray middle school, until she reached the highway, where she walked east along the shoulder for a quarter mile as the occasional car whizzed past. She walked until she arrived at the familiar spot past mile marker 62 where she proceeded to jump the guardrail and the culvert, and picked up the soggy trail into what her daddy called the bottomlands.
Where I Should Be
Alone, the same old hike felt longer than it ever did with her dad, and a lot scarier. All the way through the wooded flats, Bella was certain somebody, or something, was following her, a sensation that hurried her progress and kept her glancing over her shoulder at every turn. Had Bella known when she left the house that morning that she was making this journey, she would have worn rubber boots, but instead she was putting her brown hand-me-down shoes to the test.
Following the trail was easy enough through the forest, despite two small washouts along the river. It wasn’t until partway into the canyon that things got confusing, and Bella began second-guessing her progress. She couldn’t decide whether certain things—a grove of cottonwoods, a steep rise, or a bend in the river—were familiar or not. In places, the trail was broken and hard to follow. Halfway into the canyon her concern nosed toward panic, as she was quite sure she had arrived at an unfamiliar place.
Before panic could get the best of her, Bella remembered what her dad told her: That in a crisis, the most important thing is to stay calm and rational. Because she would be making very important decisions, maybe even life or death decisions.
In a sunny portion of the basin, out from under the cover of the forest, Bella halted her progress. Standing on a stony rise, she surveyed the landscape in every direction, taking inventory of the peaks she had named herself, as she tried to calculate the position of the bluff accordingly. This exercise only served to confuse her more. The distances were too hard to measure. And no trail would offer a straight path. But she stayed calm, reasoning that the best course of action would be to backtrack to the last place she recognized without a doubt, a trek that took her a mile-and-a-half back down canyon to the point at which the trail departed the river and began to gain elevation. Near the bottom of the rise, she arrived at a fork in the trail and recognized immediately where she’d lost her way.
With renewed confidence, she started up the right path, and within two hours reached the butt of the canyon. Once she was up and over the final hump, everything was once again familiar in spite of the season: the wide canyon behind her, and the meadow before her, its waist-high grass brown and rain-trampled. When she drew within a couple of football fields of the bluff, Boris appeared suddenly to welcome her, and on his heels came Boots.
Bella arrived at the bluff five minutes later, where she found her dad sitting by a dying fire to no apparent purpose.
“Daddy . . .?” she said.
He swung around jerkily, looking like a ghost of himself, skinnier, paler, a gray-tipped beard drooping halfway to his collarbone.
“Baby, wha—what are you doing here?”
“I came back,” she said.
He looked stunned.
“Where’s your uncle?” he said.
“Working, I guess.”
“Baby, is something wrong? Why are you here? You came all by yourself?”
“Yeah,” she said.
That’s when he bent down and squeezed her so tightly she could hardly breathe.
“Did something happen?” he said. “Talk to me, baby.”
“I missed you,” she said.
“Bella, baby, does anyone know where you are?”
“No,” she said.
He squeezed her tighter, and Bella pushed herself against him as if her life depended on it.
“Baby, we gotta take you back to town,” he said. “This isn’t good.”
“No,” she said. “I want to stay here.”
“Bella, I gotta take you back,” he insisted. “They’re probably already looking for you.”
“I’ll be with you,” she said. “That’s where I should be, right?”
He held her at arm’s length and looked at her sadly, and Bella’s heart sank at what looked like his uncertainty.
“Baby, I’m not so sure anymore,” he said.
“Don’t make me go back, Daddy.”
“They’ve gotta know you’re okay, baby. Everybody’s gonna be worried. Imagine how Nana must feel.”
“Make them find me,” she said.
“We can’t do that, Bella.”
“Then, I’ll hide.”
“You can’t do that, baby, it wouldn’t be fair.”
“Then, I’ll go somewhere else,” she said.
“Bella, slow down,” he said. “You’re not going anywhere.”
“That’s what I’ve been telling you,” she said.
In a single breath, his expression slackened, and he seemed to give in, though Bella could still see the distress and indecision in his knitted brow, as he mentally took stock of the situation.
“It won’t be long before they come for you, Bella.”
“Don’t let them take me, Daddy,” she said.
“Why, baby? Why do you want to stay?”
Her eyes began to burn, but no matter how she tried, she couldn’t keep the tears from filling them, which only made her angry with herself.
“Daddy, I don’t like it down there,” she said.
He wrapped her up in an embrace once more.
“I don’t either, baby,” he said.
S’tka
Finally, the blistering winds out of the north abated. The stunted spruces studding the mountainside had at long last shed their snow and stood straighter and prouder, shimmering green in the sunlight. Down in the long, broad valley below the bluff to the northeast, the frost had lifted. Everywhere life pushed itself through the ice; grasses and sage stirred in the breeze, poppies and buttercups rimmed the basin where soon the giants would come to graze, as they always did.
S’tka, too, felt as though she was pushing herself up through the ice. For many days and nights after U’ku’let left the world, S’tka retreated into her cave and deep into herself—so deep she could hardly see her way out. The very prospect of a future was beyond her reach. For days on end, she did not eat. Her ears had been deaf to all but the most plaintive cries of her infant son, who, watching her in her moments of abject despair, looked up at her with perplexity and a hint of concern in his brown eyes. But like all things, her grief ran its course, and the blood in her veins began to warm once more.
N’ka was her constant passenger, wrapped in hide and lashed to her chest, as she hunted ground squirrels and collected roots, and scoured the forest for firewood. In her busy state she no longer felt alone. As long as she had an immediate objective in front of her, the dark thoughts did not crowd in on S’tka. But in the quieter moments, as when the day was drawing to a close, and S’tka squatted in the dusky cave with N’ka sleeping soundly beside her, swaddled in fur, the pangs of isolation still visited her.
People were not equipped to live alone, not among this barren landscape, besieged by monsters, beset by fang and tusk and savage claw. Only in their numbers did people enjoy any kind
of advantage; only in cooperation could they ever thrive. So how was S’tka to thrive if she had nobody with whom to conspire, nobody to carry the other end, or to hold the other side fast when she was bereft of allies with whom to surround her prey? How was she supposed to maintain her humanity with nobody to hear her voice?
S’tka ached for N’ka to come of an age when he could speak to her and share his thoughts. Even now, as a matter of course, she talked to him as though he could understand her. She would not let the frigid isolation penetrate the warmth of her child as it had penetrated her. So she populated N’ka’s life with stories, implanted his burgeoning awareness with memories that were not his own, memories across time and space.
“We were not always alone in these mountains,” she told him. “There was a time when our people thrived and struggled here in accordance with the great cycle of life. It was a hard life, but a good one. But the people grew impatient with struggle, and they broke the cycle, and left their dead behind in this place.”
And the boy took it all in with his curious brown eyes, though it was far beyond his comprehension.
“The people, they fled these mountains at the behest of their elders, leaving it for the promise of a new world. It was a foolhardy plan, destined to failure.”
The infant would tilt his head in wonder.
“So your father and I returned to this place to preserve the old ways,” S’tka told him. “For we knew in our wisdom that the season of bounty would always follow upon the heels of the long, cold winter, such was the great cycle of life. The ice would recede, and the bison and the mammoth would return to the valley. This is why we stay, child. And we are not alone here, we live amongst the ghosts of our ancestors.”
But no matter how S’tka populated her stories, no matter how she attempted to embellish the connectivity of the clan across time, she was still haunted by an emptiness that even this bountiful season of life could not fill. She thought she might die of loneliness.
Legends of the North Cascades Page 14
