Legends of the North Cascades

by Jonathan Evison

  “I’m not feeling so lucky, Daddy,” said Bella.

  “It’s not about luck, baby, it’s about probability.”

  “Well, I’m not feeling so probable, either.”

  “Hang tight,” he said. “Be patient.”

  And Bella tried. But she couldn’t quite escape a sinking feeling, any more than she could escape the chill that took hold of her bones. Still, with each cast she went through the motions, watching him out of the corner of her eye.

  Eventually, his optimism began to wane, long after Bella’s had begun to edge toward panic.

  “They’ve gotta be in here somewhere,” he insisted.

  “Maybe we should have tried the river,” said Bella.

  “Too late,” he said.

  “Maybe we could try tomorrow,” she said.

  “We could,” he said.

  Finally he agreed to give up, and they started back up the incline empty handed, Bella glad to get her blood pumping again.

  “I have a good hunch about the river, Daddy,” she said. “Tomorrow we’ll catch a bunch.”

  But she was just saying it. Tired, famished, and sick with worry, a tin of rice and a campfire never seemed so good. A cave never sounded so cozy. When they reached the saddle, they descended back toward the river, the light snow turning to sleet. When it seemed Bella couldn’t possibly be more miserable, the sleet turned to rain as they reached the bank. They wended their way along the bank of the river, over and around the deadfall, around the snags, until the shoreline all but disappeared, and the narrow bank became impassable. They proceeded for several minutes, ankle deep in the river.

  Bella was sopping wet by the time they took to the shelter of the woods again, blazing a trail through the cluttered understory. After a mile or so, something began to feel wrong. It felt like they needed to be up higher, over the ridge to the east, and maybe a bit farther south.

  “Daddy, I don’t think this is the way,” she said at last.

  “This is east,” he said.

  “It feels wrong,” said Bella. “The first time we were on the other side of this hill. We need to go back.”

  Even as she said it, she hoped she was wrong. She wanted her dad to be right, as he so often was. But the instant she saw him question himself all the warmth drained from her body.

  “I think you’re right,” he said. “Maybe we did come a little too far north.”

  The concession did little to warm Bella.

  “Let’s head back toward the river,” he said, turning as though to lead.

  “The river is that way,” she said.

  And suddenly she knew without a doubt that they were lost. Her dad had finally failed them.

  “Actually, yeah, I think you’re right,” he said. “Good work, scout.”

  Funny how those words and that encouraging pat on the head emboldened Bella. What started as an intuition now unfolded clearly in her mind as a course of action, a route home. She knew the way back. After backtracking a mile, they arrived at the cut they’d missed at the bottom of the hill.

  “Now, we go that way,” she said.

  “You’ve got this, baby,” he said.

  Various Discomforts

  Aside from the various discomforts—the swollen ankles, the pressure on her lower back, the irritable bladder—Nadene claimed that she liked being pregnant. She slept well. She said she felt more relaxed, more hopeful, and more purposeful from the moment she awoke every morning. Even when she wasn’t doing anything, she felt productive and content. There was no denying she had a glow about her, a slight flush in her cherubic cheeks, a light in her green eyes, at once playful and self-assured. And the bigger Nadene got, the more she radiated. Dave thought her most adorable late in her third trimester, as she moved laboriously around the house with diminutive steps, her cumbersome belly jutting out in front of her, a constant hindrance. He could not resist stopping her occasionally to set his hands upon her precious cargo.

  “Who’s in there?” he would say. “Are you a little boy, or a girl?”

  “She’s a girl,” Nadene would say with perfect conviction.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “I just am,” she would say.

  “Is that right?” he would say to the bulge. “Are you a little girl?”

  In those moments, it seemed certain that the precious little life taking shape inside of Nadene would save them and would keep their marriage whole.

  Dave was helpful throughout the pregnancy. He did most of the dishes. He baby-proofed the kitchen, and the dining room. He did the laundry, and folded it as best he could. Sometimes he rubbed Nadene’s aching feet at the end of the day, as they sprawled on the sofa in front of the television.

  “I still think it’s a boy,” he would say.

  “It’s a girl,” she assured him.

  And when the day arrived at last, and Dino began her labor in that very spot on the sofa, they barely had time to get her to the birthing center before the baby began to crown.

  “It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay,” he assured her in the car.

  “I know,” said Dino.

  Dave pulled right up to the front entrance to the center and double-parked. Circling the Dodge in a mad rush, he helped her from the passenger seat and led her in by the hand.

  Dave was a wreck through the delivery, pacing wildly about the birthing suite, too anxious to remember his breathing prompts, while somehow Dino managed to remain calm in the face of her agony.

  “It’s gonna be okay, it’s gonna be okay,” he assured Dino.

  But really he was assuring himself.

  And when the child emerged, pinched and blue, and he heard her phlegmy cries, Dave nearly fainted.

  Six hours later, they brought Bella home, swaddled in a terrycloth blanket.

  As during the pregnancy, Dave was helpful through the first year of infancy. Not that he changed too many poopy diapers, or took too many night shifts with the baby, but he held Bella frequently, and gave her the bottle, and strapped her to his chest, and pushed her for hours on end in the stroller so Nadene could catnap or catch up on laundry, or spend a precious few minutes in the greenhouse tending her peppers. Dave loved taking Bella on errands, to Vern’s, or Ace, or Red Apple, or the post office. People sometimes commented on his fatherly glow. Indeed, Dave beamed when people pointed out the resemblance between him and Bella. Times like those, parenthood felt like a noble calling.

  Dave and Nadene were happy for a while with their new family. Their lives were like their finances, small and a little strained, but they made do. In the evenings they would watch TV together on the couch, while the baby nursed, or slept in Nadene’s arms. They still had time between them to cook a decent dinner with the baby sleeping so much. They even managed to have something of a sex life.

  But once the baby stopped sleeping so much, and started requiring more and more of Nadene’s attention, their sex life evaporated, their intimacy got pushed aside. Looking back, Dave was ashamed to admit that he might have grown a little sulky. It felt like Nadene had run out of time and energy for him, and for a lot of other things, including herself. The laundry piled up. The dishes were stacked next to the sink. The garbage was overflowing with dirty diapers. Often as not, dinner was frozen. Evening conversation, once playful, was limited to practical concerns.

  Eventually, Dave started sleeping on the couch.

  As bad as it got those first couple years, as much of a blur as it had become looking back on it, Dave never regretted having Bella, not ever, not even for an instant. Though he regretted the world he brought her into, regretted that he couldn’t provide better for her, regretted that he had trouble controlling his temper, and his impulses, and could do little to deter the dark moods that fell upon him without warning, any more than he could control the ringing in his years, Bella had always felt to Dave like his greatest accomplishment. There were moments of crystal clarity when peering down into her bottomless gaze, Dave was filled with a sense of wond
er that he’d managed to help create something so pure and perfect and innocent.

  Still, there were times when Nadene went to town and left Dave alone with the baby, when Bella’s crying became so urgent and inconsolable as to be disconcerting, times when he felt so frustrated by his own helplessness that he was visited by the momentary impulse to throw the child out the window. But he didn’t, of course. Instead, he laid her in her crib and walked out of the room long enough to gather the wherewithal to go back and scoop her up, and attempt once more, with varying degrees of futility, to calm her.

  N’ka

  In the spring, after two years of pleading and hectoring with his mother, two years of all-you-can-eat squirrel but little else, two years in the same ragged hides, N’ka finally persuaded his mother to leave the mountains behind. And much to his surprise, she acquiesced calmly, albeit against her better judgment.

  “We will not find them,” she said impassively. “But you’re right about one thing: there’s nothing left for us here.”

  And so, on a chill, clear morning, the air so crisp and alive with possibility that it caused his skin to tingle, N’ka and his mother set out on their journey, crunching over a fresh blanket of snow. To the west, the wind was stirring up an icy vapor that hovered inches above the ice, stretching on for untold miles toward the horizon. Suddenly the world was boundless and full of mystery.

  With their spears lashed to their backs, five pounds of charred squirrel, a satchel of roots, and all the furs they could shoulder, they left behind the only home N’ka had ever known.

  The young man thrilled at their prospects, as they moved steadily across the white expanse, the saw-toothed mountains receding in their wake. Finally he was determining his own future. As they trudged over the blinding ice toward the edge of the earth, it was as though his mother could hear N’ka’s thoughts.

  “Well, at the very least, perhaps this new world will provide us something to eat besides squirrel,” she said.

  “There will bison in great numbers,” he assured her. “Like it used to be. And the giants will be there, too, lazing about in the meadow.”

  “And where among all this ice will we find such a place?”

  “Farther than the eye can see,” he said. “But it will be green where we are going; everywhere grasses, and rivers, free of ice.”

  “Mm,” she said. “A paradise.”

  “Yes, a paradise.”

  “Will there be no death there, no starvation, no brutality?”

  “Those things I cannot promise, Mother.”

  “How can you make promises at all?” she said, the old bitterness creeping into her tone. “Certainty is the game of fools. Ask the Great Provider. What promise has she ever delivered on?”

  “You will see, Mother. This new place will save us.”

  “Bah,” she said, embracing the fullness of her gloomy nature. “I’ll more likely be eaten by wolves.”

  N’ka smiled. “What a dreary old woman you’ve become.”

  “And you,” she said. “What a foolish dreamer.”

  “You’re wrong,” he said.

  But he knew, as they slogged across the eternal ice, encountering no sign of life along their way, that it would take a long time to convince her. Though nothing about the barren expanse surrounding them seemed to hold any promise, nothing about the blistering wind that assaulted their faces hinted at paradise, N’ka’s hopefulness could not be tempered.

  In the waning light, they made camp near a clutch of stunted trees at the edge of the ice, where N’ka constructed a fire destined to be small.

  When the cloak of night descended, and they were awash in the light of the stars, spattered cold and white across the bowl of night, the world seemed all at once larger and more mysterious.

  “It will be a good life for us,” N’ka said aloud, mostly to reassure himself.

  But his mother, exhausted, had already succumbed to sleep, head bowed, hands tucked under her arms for warmth.

  N’ka covered her in furs, then bundled himself up, and resumed huddling over the pale flames. A vein of ice ran the length of his spine, as the distant baying of wolves shattered the silence. All of his newfound confidence and swagger drained from N’ka in an instant, as he huddled even closer to the weak fire, pulling his fur snug across his shoulders, a half dozen spears near at hand.

  The Right Thing

  Bella never thought she’d miss fish skins and rice, or the weak broth that barely sustained them through the latter part of fall, but here they were at the beginning of winter with no more raisins, no more nuts, no more fish skins. No oats, no honey, not a scrap of meat. Not so much as a bouillon cube. And yet her dad seemed unconcerned. But why should he worry? He hardly ate anymore. God, but Bella would have given anything for a frozen pizza. She knew better than to complain, but midway through yet another breakfast of lightly salted rice, eaten in the weak winter sunlight puddled near the mouth of the cave, she could no longer help herself.

  “Daddy, we need to go to town,” she said.

  “We can’t do that,” he said.

  “But Daddy, it’s hardly even snowed.”

  “Baby, we just can’t. There’s things th—”

  “Don’t call me ‘baby’ anymore,” she said. “I’m not a baby.”

  “Honey, there’s things that—”

  “Stop parentizing me,” she said.

  “Well, I’m your parent!” he exclaimed. “What else am I supposed to do?”

  “Just because you’re my parent doesn’t mean you have to talk to me all the time like I don’t understand anything.”

  He almost managed to smile.

  “Baby, you mean patronizing—stop patronizing me,” he said.

  “See, you’re doing it again.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, running his fingers through his beard. “Fine, you win. You’re right. We could use some stuff.”

  “So, then, we can go?” she said. “We can go see Nana?”

  “We can run for supplies,” he said. “And maybe the library. But that’s it, baby.”

  “Why can’t we go to Nana’s?”

  “Because if we do,” he said, “one of us is not coming back. And it’s not me.”

  “I knew it,” said Bella. “It was your plan all along. Why did you even bring me here, if you just wanted to get rid of me?”

  “No,” he said. “Never, baby. I’d never want to get rid of you.”

  “Well, I don’t believe you,” she said. “I’m not going.”

  “Fine,” he said. “We won’t go.”

  “Fine,” she said, folding her arms across her chest.

  “Baby,” he said. “Listen to me: I don’t want to get rid of you, okay?”

  While there was a ring of truth to it, Bella feared that it was only because he’d come to rely upon her. For two weeks, it had been she who had prepared the rice, and stoked the fire, she who had straightened up the cave and kept the camp tidy and the tools dry. Even this change in routine seemed to be lost on her dad, who lived in a nearly unreachable state of preoccupation. It was Bella who kept daily vigil at the edge of the bluff, scanning the canyon for intruders, a task her father once committed himself to with determination. Now, when Bella scanned the canyon, she actually hoped she would spot somebody. If only for a little company, another voice, for something to disrupt their isolation.

  Thus it was a relief to see Mr. Moseley crest the lip of the bluff shortly after breakfast.

  “Daddy,” she called out. “It’s Mr. Moseley!”

  When her dad shuffled out of the cave, shielding his eyes from the sunlight, Bella’s relief edged toward anxiety. Had she known Mr. Moseley was coming, she would have made her dad shave.

  When he crested the hillside, Mr. Moseley brushed off his knees and stood upright. The instant his eyes fell on her dad, Bella could see the concern written on Mr. Moseley’s face.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  “If you say so,” said her dad.

&nbs
p; Moseley extended a hand, which her dad left hanging in mid-air.

  “Been a spell,” he said, withdrawing the hand.

  “Has it?” said her dad.

  “Did you bring honey?” said Bella, brightening.

  “Sorry, buddy, not this time. But I brought you some chocolate,” he said, producing a Hershey’s bar from his pack. “Okay with you?” he said to her dad.

  Her dad consented with a nod, even as Bella snatched the chocolate greedily.

  Once Sugarfoot, Boots, and Boris converged on the bluff, Mr. Moseley’s arrival was officially an event.

  “I brought you something too, Dave,” he said, fishing a card out of his wallet.

  “What the hell is this?” said her dad.

  “My cousin Randall, he did six tours between Iraq and Afghanistan,” said Moseley. “Special forces. It really messed with his head, nearly ruined his life. His wife left him, his kids stopped talking to him. He almost lost his house.”

  “And?” said her dad.

  “Dr. Pete is great,” said Mr. Moseley.

  “Says right here he’s an LPC,” her dad said. “Last time I checked, that wasn’t a doctor.”

  “Everybody just calls him Dr. Pete,” said Moseley.

  “You mean, like Dr. J?” said her dad. “Or Dr. Scholl’s?”

  “He really did wonders for Randy,” Mr. Moseley said. “He totally turned his life around.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” said her dad. “That why you came up here? To try to save me from myself?”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” said Mr. Moseley. “I just thought that maybe—”

  “I don’t need saving,” said Dave. “And we don’t need your gifts, either,” he added, snatching the chocolate out of Bella’s hand and tossing it at Moseley’s feet.

  “Sorry, if . . . look, if I overstepped my bou—”

  “Thanks for dropping by,” said her dad, cutting him short.

  “Daddy, you’re being rude,” scolded Bella, who promptly retrieved the candy bar out of the dirt and began dusting it off.

  “Would you like to come inside, Mr. Moseley?” said Bella. “We could play Uno.”