The Cats of Tanglewood Forest (12 page)

I
told
you not to go talk to her,” Davy said as he and John walked Lillian along the dappled trail to the edge of the rez. The sun was high and the air crisp, making it a perfect day for hiking.

Lillian carried a blanket roll on her back, plus a canteen and a small shoulder bag with some food that Mrs. Creek had packed for her: apples and cheese, a couple of fresh fry breads. The boys walked on either side, plying her with questions, while lanky rez dogs ranged ahead under the canopy of the trees. Lillian had tried to satisfy the boys’
curiosity as best she could with a shortened version of her story.

John nodded. “I’ll admit that’s one crazy dream of yours, but I don’t see how it could be real. And all because of that you’re going off to get eaten by a bear.”

“I’m not going to be eaten by a bear,” Lillian said, feigning a courage that she didn’t feel.

“Seems like it to me,” Davy said, “which makes me wonder why Aunt Nancy’s sending you to them. I used to think she had a soft spot for you and your aunt.”

“It’s not really Aunt Nancy’s doing,” Lillian told them. “The spirits told her I should go.”

“Sure, but—”

“Anyway, they’re supposed to be some kind of bear
people
. Not bears for real. They wouldn’t just up and eat me.”

“Well,” John said, “I guess we never told you the story about how stars are the holes left in the sky from when the spiders dropped down.”

“I guess you never did.”

John stopped in his tracks and dropped down to the ground, sitting cross-legged in the grass. Davy
followed suit. Lillian hesitated, then sat down in front of them. The dogs came back and sprawled in a loose circle around them.

“This happened a long time ago,” John said, “back when the bears lived more like bears than like people. That might seem a strange way to put it, but back then there weren’t many humans, so the animal people mostly just walked around in their animal skins. Anyway, they were going about their business when along comes this little girl.

“The bears didn’t know what to make of her, so they put her in the bottom of a natural well out in front of their caves while they figured out what to do. It was a deep, deep well, dark down there at the bottom where the little girl was stuck, with smooth sides going all the way up so she couldn’t climb out. But
she could see a little circle way up that she knew was the sky, and she could hear the bear people talking. When they finally decided that they might as well just eat her, she knew she was in real trouble.”

“What did she do?” Lillian had to ask.

John smiled. “Well, what the bears didn’t know was that the little girl was the daughter of the great spider spirit. When Old Man Night finally rolled his big black blanket across the sky, she called out to all the little spider spirits that make their homes in the dark, dark wool of Old Man Night’s blanket. Answering her call, they dropped down from the sky in the thousands, and every place they dropped from, there was a little hole left behind that we still see in the night skies to this day.

“But that night they wove their webs and made a ladder so that the little girl could climb out of the well, and they wrapped all the sleeping bears in their webs so that they couldn’t move. They couldn’t even breathe.

“Then the little girl ate them, one by one.”

“She ate them all?” Lillian asked.

John nodded.

“Oh, she was mad, mad, and she would’ve eaten
every one, except for a couple had been off hunting and spent the night in a cave. Imagine coming home to
that
.”

He looked around carefully, as though he was afraid of being overheard, then leaned in closer to Lillian.

“I’ve heard tell,” he said in a soft voice, “that Aunt Nancy was that same little girl, and she’s still mad at those bears.”

Lillian’s eyes opened wide. “Really?”

“Did you ever see all those spiderwebs up in the rafters of her cabin?”

“Yes, but—”

Then she caught the flicker of a smile in the corner of John’s mouth.

“Oh, you!” she cried, and punched him in the shoulder.

John and Davy fell back on the grass, laughing. The dogs jumped up and ran around in circles, barking.

“I still don’t see what any of that’s got to do with me,” Lillian said when things had calmed down.

Davy’s eyebrows rose. “You mean besides being a little girl walking up to a cave full of bears and asking them for their advice?”

“You can try and scare me,” Lillian told him, “but Aunt Nancy was mostly pretty nice to me. She’s stern and kind of spooky, but she’s not really mean.”

“I suppose that’s true,” John said with a grin. “Especially the stern and spooky part.”

Lillian ignored his tease. “Talking to these bear people’s the only thing anyone’s said might help me,” she said. “And when was the last time you heard about a bear going after somebody unless they got between a mother and her cubs? It’s not like the bears in these hills are all fierce the way grizzlies are supposed to be.”

“Maybe so,” Davy said, “but I still wouldn’t be doing it.”

They hiked on for a while, kicking up fallen pine needles as they followed the trail through a section of sprucy-pine forest. Cantankerous squirrels scolded them from the safety of tree boughs, but the three paid them no mind.

Once Lillian thought she caught a glimpse of Big Orange watching them from the top of a ridge, but John said it was just a fox, adding, “He’s lucky the dogs didn’t catch wind of him.”

After a while they came out from under the woods
into a wide meadow that stretched to the far tree line in waves of golden-brown grass and purple asters. A crow croaked from the trees behind them before it sailed over the meadow. Lillian watched it vanish into the tops of the tall sprucy-pine.

When they reached the far side of the meadow the boys stopped. The dogs came back, pushing muzzles against their legs as if to ask, What’s the holdup?

“This is as far as we can go,” Davy said.

“We’d come all the way,” John said, “but when
Aunt Nancy lays down the law, you do what she says or she’ll tan your hide.”

“That’s all right,” Lillian told them. “Thanks for taking me this far.”

John nodded. “Keep going north till you come to a rocky ridge, then follow it down to the creek below. If you stay near the creek, it’ll take you back up into the hills again. You’ll see caves under a big overhang, and I guess that’s as good a place as any to start looking for bears.”

“It’ll probably take you most of the day to get there,” Davy added, “so you’ll maybe want to hole up somewhere before the sun sets. If you’re going to meet a bear, I expect it’ll be more comfortable in the morning than at night.”

“I expect it will,” Lillian said with a tremor in her voice.

She thanked them again, then set off before she lost her nerve completely. When she looked back a little later, the boys and dogs were gone. In their place was a row of cats, sitting on deadfalls and stumps and the ground, watching her.

A
t any other time Lillian would have been delighted to be exploring a new stretch of woods. But today she was aimed right smack up against something that she felt was maybe too big for her. Bear people. The very idea made her tummy flutter, but she couldn’t help feeling a little excited at the same time, never mind John’s stupid story.

She followed a deer trail through the autumn woods, admiring the colorful foliage and thinking about having crafted grapevine-and-leaf wreaths
with Aunt last fall. She hoped that the bear people would be able to set things right.

It felt good to have a sense of purpose. It had been a long stretch of whenever since she’d felt she was doing more than just getting through a day. Maybe she ought to have gone to see Aunt Nancy a lot sooner.

The land rose slowly toward to the ridge that John had told her to look for. Oak and beech gave way to sprucy-pine. Under their tall spreading boughs there was less undergrowth, and her lone footsteps crunched noisily on the carpet of needles. Mushrooms sprouted from deadfalls, alone and in clusters: red and white, bright yellow, mustard yellow. The bare granite bones of the land pushed up out of the ground in ever-larger formations.

It was only when she reached the top of the ridge that she realized she was being followed.

At first she thought it was one of the Creek boys, planning to play another trick on her. Davy or John, or maybe both of them. She kept turning casually, hoping to catch them at their game, but they were good at hiding. Then she thought it was the cats again, except they never bothered to hide from her. When she finally did catch a glimpse of her pursuer,
it was a flash of russet fur darting behind a stone outcrop.

She stopped in her tracks, staring at the place where the fox had disappeared. A memory popped into her mind, and for a moment she couldn’t remember if it was a real memory or if it had come from the strange dream she’d had the day Aunt died. But then she had to laugh at herself.

T. H. Reynolds, the
talking
fox? Of
course
he was from her dream. But it was confusing the way the idea of impossible things kept tumbling into the real world. Once upon a time she would have been delighted with the idea of talking foxes or bear people, but she wasn’t the little girl chasing fairies in the meadow anymore. And never mind what Aunt Nancy had told her, she suspected that the bear people would just be some hermit clan living deep in the hills. Strange, to be sure, but quite human.

She set off again, following the ridge, picking her way around the stone outcrops and tree roots. And while it made little sense, she kept catching glimpses of the red fox sneaking along behind her. She knew that sometimes wild critters just got curious. And sometimes they were sick. Rabies could make even a
squirrel do things it would never do otherwise—like follow a girl much bigger than itself.

Whyever this fox was following her, it was creepy. And she was fed up with it.

Picking up a good-sized stick, she held it in a tight grip and glared at the last place she’d seen the fox dart out of sight.