Legends of the North Cascades

by Jonathan Evison

  “Are you just going to sit around all day?” she said.

  “Why not? What am I missing?” he said. “Shall I go hunt some more squirrels? We’ve already got more than we can eat. The more I kill them, the more they breed.”

  He was right. At present, there was nothing terribly pressing to demand their energy. But somehow, S’tka still found it hard to forgive her teenage son his recent and uncharacteristic lack of industry, his growing disinterest in their survival, as secure as it seemed.

  From his earliest youth, N’ka had demonstrated his overconfidence in a hundred ways, from his casual sure-footedness in navigating the high country, to his certainty of achieving desired outcomes, to his unwavering convictions about things with which he had no experience, the brutality, fickleness, and disloyalty of other people, for instance.

  Perhaps S’tka was wrong to doubt his confidence; maybe N’ka was more of a man than she was ready to admit. Maybe after all these years she still wanted to view him as helpless. Maybe she needed to see him as dependent. But why? After all the years she had single-handedly accounted for their survival, shouldn’t her son’s blossoming manhood have been a welcome development? Wasn’t this what she’d been working toward all along?

  It was true from very early on that N’ka possessed surprising strength for his stature, and an undeniable physical grace. It was also true that his tact and prowess as a hunter was already far superior to his father’s. And for all N’ka’s apparent carelessness of late, he had been nothing if not decisive and resourceful in the past. Were these not the qualities of leadership?

  No wonder he was restless.

  What would become of her son, once she could no longer regulate him, once he refused to live under her dominion? She was beginning to suspect that they were already beyond that stage.

  Maybe S’tka had it backward all this time. Maybe it was she who had become dependent upon N’ka. Maybe her welfare was the very reason why the boy didn’t follow his appetite for the unseen out into the white world. Because he felt obligated to protect her. Because he couldn’t leave her alone, and he knew she would never go along. The thought was at once a comfort and an annoyance.

  Never had S’tka felt dependent on anyone. Since she was a little girl, since the day the mountain swallowed her mother, she had made her own way in this world, a world that had shown her nothing but hostility, granted her little in the way of kindness, bequeathed her nothing but a legacy of fear, and solitude, and anxiety. The Great Provider had strewn her path with obstacles at every turn, burdened her with worry, starved and raped and forsaken her long ago.

  “Perhaps you are right,” he said, tending the fire one night. “It’s possible our people have been erased. Then we should seek out a different clan or start our own.”

  “We already have,” she said.

  He stared sullenly into the flames.

  “But what about the others?” he said. “We’ve seen them, time and again, passing through. Why couldn’t we join them?”

  “Pssh,” she said. “They’d just as soon kill us as join us.”

  “How do you know?”

  She shot him a look so pointed that he was forced to avert his eyes.

  “Experience,” she said. “That’s how I know.”

  Still unsatisfied with the explanation, N’ka resumed his moody gaze into the fire.

  “Two people are not a clan,” he said bitterly.

  “And what is so great about a clan?” she said. “What do you know of clans? What do you know about anything beyond what I’ve taught you? What have you experienced that I have not shown you? You’re not yet a man. So what makes you so smart?”

  She could see him clenching his jaw in the glow of the flames.

  “Boy, you must understand that in a clan you are nothing,” she explained. “You are beholden to the will of others. You have no choice but to do as you are told, to eat what you are given, to accept the responsibility you never asked for.”

  “How is that any different than my life?” he said.

  “What did the clan do for me when I was starving to death with you in my belly?” she said. “Where was my clan to protect me when your father had his head staved in?”

  “But you said yourself,” he said, looking her in the eye, “the Great Provider made us small.”

  “Yes, she did. Then, she abandoned us here among the giants. In a place where you can’t trust anybody, in a place where your own people will throw you out onto the ice just for trying to stay alive.”

  Precious Oil

  It was dusk when Bella returned from the ridge, clutching U’ku’let’s bleached cranium. Apparently her father was not overly concerned about her prolonged absence because she found him asleep in the cave, his chin on his chest, a book still open in front of him. Beside him, the lantern was still burning precious oil.

  Bella paused a moment to see whether her presence would rouse him, and when it failed to do so, she squatted down and dimmed the lamp. When she gently touched his shoulder he awoke with a start and looked up at her, momentarily befuddled.

  “Oh, hey, baby,” he said in the half-darkness. “I fell asleep.”

  “I noticed.”

  He rubbed his neck groggily.

  “Where’ve you been?” he said.

  “The usual places,” she said.

  “Baby, you gotta check in more often.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  He neither inquired about the skull in her hands, nor seemed to even notice it.

  “Man, I’m bushed,” he said, snapping the book shut before rolling over onto his sleeping bag.

  He didn’t used to be so tired all the time. He used to wear Bella out. It was hard to see how he was getting so tired.

  “Are you feeling sick, Daddy?”

  “Nah, baby, just tired. It’s cumulative, I think.”

  “What’s ‘cumatalive’?”

  “It means things add up. Like, maybe I was pushing a little too hard before, so now the tired is catching up with me.”

  “I get it,” she said.

  “I love you, baby. I’m glad you’re back,” he said, covering his head with a pillow. “Could you turn the lantern off all the way if you’re not gonna use it?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Goodnight, Dad.”

  “Goodnight.”

  Turning off the lantern, Bella retreated to the bluff as the last vestiges of daylight faded. She set the skull aside and gathered kindling, then began reviving the fire just as the stars came out to keep her company. The night was windless, and eerily calm. The thin air seemed to hold no life. Below, the canyon seemed bottomless in the darkness. Sitting there under the night sky, the cold, uncaring stars wheeling above her, Bella was visited by a profound, almost absolute loneliness, which she understood to be eternal, the loneliness of separation. Not separation from her mom, nine months in the grave, nor from her father, an apparition of his former self, nor from Nana or Uncle Travers or Hannah B., but the unmitigated state of being separate from everything. For the first time, Bella comprehended with aching clarity the ultimate estrangement of being human.

  And she began to weep, not for herself, but for all of humanity.

  When her grief was finally spent, Bella sat by the fire, the bleached skull cradled in her lap as she ran her fingers over the ancient wound as though she might somehow heal it.

  N’ka

  N’ka could not help but notice his mother growing weaker and more passive as the weeks went by. She no longer moved about with her former urgency. Every task seemed a chore. She slept late in the day, sometimes even later than he did, and often she nodded off in the evening around the fire, where once they had cheerfully made conversation. His mother also had grown thinner and more fragile. At times she was forgetful. She no longer scolded N’ka for his pride or ignorance, no longer ordered him about day and night, or sought to exercise any influence over his actions whatsoever. It was as though she’d given up. It was this passivity that was most unfam
iliar, and frightened him the most.

  His mother was growing old. Yet many times she had told him of men and women living past the age of fifty winters, their hair grown white, their teeth falling out of their head, their eyes clouded blue like glaciers. N’ka had seen with his own eyes a strange little hairless man shuffling across the ice, draped in furs, muttering and hissing to himself. Surely he must have lived too many winters to count.

  This place, it haunted you. It froze the life out of you. It wouldn’t allow you to grow but one way, and that was older.

  “Mother,” he said, as she was about to nod off in front of the fire. “This place is stealing your future. If you stay here, you will only become a white-haired ghost. Or shrunken, like the little nightwalker.”

  “I shall never lose my hair,” she said.

  “Really, Mother. This place, this changeless existence, it’s draining the life out of you. You need a challenge, you need purpose.”

  Though N’ka expected to be met with his mother’s customary resistance, this time she did not dismiss him with a wave, but stared fixedly at the coals, a hint of a smile playing at the corners of her mouth.

  “I have already outlived my purpose,” she said. “My purpose was your survival, and your development. Apparently that’s all the Great Provider had in mind when he created a woman—to carry men. Carry them in their wombs, and on their backs, and in their hearts, to carry their burdens, and bear their disappointments until such time that a man no longer needs them. And you, you are a man now. You no longer have any need of me,” she said.

  “That’s not true.”

  “Go,” she said. “Like you’re always talking about. Go test your fortune on the ice. Go find your new land of promises. Maybe you’ll find the giants there. You can ask them why they abandoned us. Maybe you’ll find our clan, and you can ask them the same.”

  The next morning, as they were huddled around the fire, his mother stood without a word of explanation and wandered off into the snow to the north.

  “Where are you going?” he said.

  But she paid him no mind, and continued on her way, trudging deliberately but purposefully through the ankle-deep snow.

  N’ka went after her, following her tracks across the bluff, and down the slight incline, and into the forest. He meandered through the trees, until the terrain opened up on a familiar vista where he found his mother kneeling at the edge of the great snowy ridge overlooking the Valley of the Giants.

  “What are you doing here?” he said. “They are gone, Mother. They’re not coming back.”

  But she did not answer. Instead, she looked straight at the snowy ground upon which she was kneeling.

  “This is where I buried your father.”

  How long since N’ka had even thought about his father as anything more than a name, a word, an abstraction? For the formative years of N’ka’s life, his father had hung over their lives like a shadow, an invisible third person in their otherwise unpopulated world. For the first half of his life, it seemed like this invisible father was the standard by which N’ka had been measured. But now he was a specter, a legend. Until that moment, which N’ka knew to be significant, though he was not at all certain as to why.

  “Why did you never tell me he was here?” said N’ka.

  “Would it have made a difference?” she said.

  They withdrew into silence, as the wind moaned through the valley.

  Looking at his mother kneeling in the snow, N’ka could only guess at her sacrifice.

  “You didn’t make a peep,” she said. “With all the hooting and hollering and excitement. Not a peep. Even when they ransacked the cave, you stayed silent, though you were awake when I came back for you. I sometimes think you were awake all along.”

  N’ka knelt beside her and draped his arm about her.

  “I can’t remember.”

  “Of course you can’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, too,” she said. “The world is sorry.”

  She plunged her hands into the frozen earth and clutched two handfuls of snow, which she sifted through her fingers.

  “He has never left us,” she said. “He’s still here in this place. If only we could reach him.”

  “You’re afraid to leave him,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “So, this place really is haunted.”

  His mother stood and dusted the snow from her knees.

  “The whole world is haunted,” she said.

  This Time

  His clothes were beginning to hang funny, like they belonged to somebody else. His beard, which now hid his neck completely, came to a pronounced point shaped by his endless fussing. His every movement was jerky, mannequin-like. It seemed like his hip was bothering him more than usual. But mostly he seemed like someone who might be going crazy. Yesterday Bella found him standing wild-eyed over the fire, ripping the pages out of a book and burning them one at a time.

  “Daddy, you can’t do that!”

  “It’s all rubbish,” he said. “History is a fairy tale.”

  “It’s the principle,” she said, snatching the remainder of the book from his hands.

  “We stick to our principles,” she scolded. “That’s a library book. You can break the rules if they’re dumb, but stick to your principles. You told me that.”

  He looked up at her, his eyes softening in recognition.

  “Yeah, baby, you’re right,” he said.

  The next morning, Bella awoke before him for the third day in a row, a development impossible to imagine even a month ago. Out on the bluff, Bella started the fire and made them a breakfast of rice mixed with a precious spoonful of brown sugar, wishing she’d had some raisins. Though she expected her dad to appear at some point once he smelled the fire, she had to go in and shake him awake, at which point he lashed out at her reflexively.

  “What the—?”

  “Daddy, it’s morning,” she said. “I made breakfast.”

  It took him a second to get his bearings, as he squinted up at her in the dim light.

  “Aw, baby, you scared me.”

  “Sorry,” she said.

  With a little encouragement, he limped out to the fire, where, to Bella’s relief, he inhaled his rice, and even seemed to relish it for the first time in days. The minute he set his tin aside, his foot started tapping.

  “Should I make more?” said Bella.

  “No, no, baby, I’m good, I’m good.”

  But it wasn’t long before he began twisting at his beard, crossing and uncrossing his legs.

  “Let’s go fishing,” he said, at last. “We can’t live on rice.”

  What a relief to hear him say it.

  “Okay,” she said brightly.

  After they rinsed their plates, they gathered the tackle and the rods, and scrambled down the steep bluff to test their fortune. Soon they were crunching through the meadow over a half-inch of fresh snow. The peaks all around them were already frosted with snow, surrounding them like a giant crown, so near, yet so far away. The sky was blue, the bluest it had been in weeks.

  Her dad was talkative in that nervous way. He didn’t even seem to notice how big and crystal clear and beautiful the world was all around them.

  “Plenty of trout still in the high lakes,” he said. “Not to mention they stock the reservoirs, not that we’ll need to go that far. And once spring comes, well, there will be food everywhere.”

  He kept talking like he was trying to put Bella at ease, but really she figured he was trying to put himself at ease. If he wanted to put Bella at ease, he’d start shaving, and stop sleeping so late. If he wanted to put her at ease, he could start inspiring her confidence again.

  When they reached the east fork of the river, they meandered south for a half-mile or so along the banks, navigating snags and deadfall. When the bank became impassable, they cut through the alders and into the evergreens, leaving the river as they gained elevation.

  �
��Where are we going?” said Bella.

  “I know there’s a little lake out here somewhere,” he said.

  “What’s it like?”

  “It’s bluer than the sky,” he said. “And sort of diamond shaped, as I remember.”

  “The river is closer,” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” he said.

  After a half-mile of gaining steady elevation, they found themselves straddling a green saddleback, dappled with snow, the river far below to the west, its roar barely perceptible.

  “Gotta be down there,” he said.

  They descended to the south, opposite the river, her dad offering intermittent commentary. Bella could sense his creeping anxiety. The more he talked, the more unsure he sounded.

  “You sure this is the way?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It ought to be.”

  Bella grew less confident with each stride. Though she was pretty sure she knew where they were, it was troubling that she simply couldn’t trust her dad unconditionally like she once could. Especially the way he twisted his beard to a point and muttered half the day. It was a relief when twenty minutes later they arrived above a little oblong lake, desolate, and impossibly blue.

  “Boom,” said her dad.

  “Um, it’s not shaped like a diamond,” said Bella. “It’s more like a peanut.”

  Her dad was giddy scrambling down the hillside to the shoreline, more like a boy than a man in his eagerness, When he reached the edge of the lake, where the scrubby brush gave way to a strip of silty marsh, he immediately set his fly and readied himself to cast.

  Bella picked her own spot along the marshy shore, thirty yards north of her dad, where she cast her line into the shallows, a little less than hopeful. A half hour later, when nothing had bitten and the temperature began to drop, as a frigid wind started blowing down from the north and the sky darkened, her dad still held out hope, or at least pretended to.

  “This here is the spot,” he said, a hundred feet south of where he started.

  The temperature continued to drop, and the wind picked up, flecked with snowflakes.