The Cats of Tanglewood Forest (19 page)

“The wind’s from the east,” the fox called up to her. He pointed his long nose toward the west. “So go that way.”

The trees grew close to each other here, their branches overlapping, making it easy for Lillian to move from one to the other. T.H. called for her to stop when she was a good distance west of the stream.

“What now?” she asked.

“Now you find yourself a comfortable crook in that tree, and we wait.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll keep out of sight. He’s not looking for a fox.”

Lillian climbed a little higher, to where a fat branch split off from the main trunk. Once she’d settled in with her back to the trunk, she found she could still see a small stretch of the trail through the branches. Below her perch she could just make out T.H. lying amid a stand of tall ferns.

“I can see a bit of the trail from here,” she called down to him. “Doesn’t that mean Joen might see me?”

“Only if he’s looking up. Now shush. We can’t be talking, or the noise of our yapping will make all this hiding pointless.”

“But I don’t see why—”

“Shush!”

Lillian sighed. What seemed pointless was hiding, and the longer they did it, the more pointless it seemed. They should be putting as much distance between themselves and LaOursville as they could, because the sooner they got to Black Pine Hollow, the sooner all of this would get fixed. Yes, she’d be a cat again, but Aunt would be alive.

Aunt would be
alive
.

She was about to call down to T.H. again when a barn swallow flew by her tree, crying, “They’re coming, they’re coming!”

The swallow wasn’t alone. She could see other small birds flying about the forest, passing along the same message. The barn swallow made an abrupt turn in the air and came back to Lillian’s tree, where it landed on a branch just a foot or so from her face.

“There you are!” it cried in its high, piping voice. “Be careful, be ever so careful. The bears are coming!”

“The bears? What do you mean,
bears
?”

But the swallow had already flown off. It didn’t matter. Lillian knew exactly what it meant: Joen had brought some of the others to help him.

“Will you shush up there!” T.H. called in a hoarse whisper.

“I know, but…”

Her voice trailed off. She pressed herself into the bark of her tree, wishing she could disappear, because there they were. Big brown shapes loped along the forest path, moving quickly and silently for all their bulk. She caught only fleeting glimpses of them through the thick network of branches, but that was enough to show her that they weren’t bear people from LaOursville. They were bears.
Real
bears. Fast bears.

Though they were out of sight now, she held her breath, waiting, straining to hear. What were they doing? Had they guessed the trick that had been played on them? Were they sneaking toward her right now?

She supposed that they’d reached the spot where she’d stepped into the stream, because suddenly she could hear their quarreling voices.

What
were those bears arguing about? She could
almost
make out the words….

Leaning away from the tree to try to hear better, she slipped and scrabbled at the bark with her fingers until she regained her balance. She waited, biting her lip, to see if she’d been heard.

There were fewer voices now, and when she looked in the direction of the path she saw a brown shape go by, heading back in the direction of LaOursville. A moment later it was followed by another, then more, all of them only briefly glimpsed as they moved along the limited view she had of the trail.

She had no idea if they’d all gone back or not. Maybe some had stayed. Joen would have stayed.

It seemed to take forever before T.H. finally returned. He looked up with a grin.

“It worked,” he said. “They’ve gone back to their valley.”

“All of them?”

“Each and every.”

“What were they arguing about?”

The fox shrugged. “Just over Joen’s insisting that they keep trying to find your trail.”

“But he’s gone, too?”

“Yes. Joen’s got quite a limp on him, but I saw the look in his eyes. He’ll be back.”

“So we should go as quick as we can now.” She started to come down the tree.

“Hold on,” T.H. said. “Before you come down, why don’t you see how far you can go squirrel-style?
The branches seem pretty close still, and the farther you can go before you put your scent back on the ground, the better it will be.”

“I guess I could do that.”

The fox nodded. “I’ll scout ahead. I’m sure there’s got to be another trail over on the far side of the mountain. If we’re lucky, the bears won’t know anything about it, or maybe they won’t go looking for us there.”

“You go ahead and find that trail,” she said. “I’ll follow along as best I can.”

T.H. slipped away. At first she could see the plume of his tail poking up through the underbrush, but then branches got in the way and he was lost to sight. Lillian gave a last look back to the trail, hoping there wasn’t a bear sneaking along after them. She edged her way along the branch until she could grab a limb of the next tree over and swing herself into its canopy. She repeated the maneuver from tree to tree and, while she wasn’t nearly as fast as a squirrel, she made progress at her own slow pace.

Eventually she ran out of branches growing close enough to each other. It was time to come down, anyway. The last light of the setting sun disappeared just as she made her way to the ground.

She wanted to call for T.H., except that might bring Joen to her rather than the fox, so she sat down on the roots of the big tree and waited for him to return.

Although Lillian was expecting him, she jumped when T.H. suddenly appeared out of the brush.

T.H. grinned. “Good job. You came much farther than I expected. It’ll take the bears forever to pick up your scent all this way from where they lost it.”

They shared some of the food Lillian had taken from Mother Manan’s kitchen. Lillian would have liked to go on, but there was no moon, and the pale
starlight couldn’t make its way down through the thick canopy. She didn’t have T.H.’s night sight, and it was too dark for her to see. So she sat against the tree trunk, cozy in her blanket, T.H. curled up at her side.

“What do you think?” Lillian asked dreamily. “Could that story the Creek boys told me be true?”

“It’s a good story.”

“But is it true? Are those stars really the holes left behind by spiders who dropped down to rescue their kin? Or are they just specks of light up in the night sky?”

“Why can’t they be both?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, when you were a kitten, you were also a girl, weren’t you?”

“I suppose.”

Lillian sat for a while, listening to T.H.’s breathing start to even out.

“I have a bone to pick with Aunt Nancy,” she grumbled before he was completely asleep.

T.H. sighed. “Why’s that?”

“Why? Because she sent me on a wild-goose chase.”

“But if she hadn’t sent you to the bear people, you’d never have gotten the potion from Mother Manan,
and we wouldn’t have been able to talk to each other and figure it all out the way we did.”

“Aunt Nancy wouldn’t have known anything about that potion.”

“But maybe the spirits who told her to send you to the bear people did.”

Lillian frowned. “I don’t know. I wish people would just say what they really mean instead of getting all tricksy about it. Both Aunt Nancy and Mother Manan tricked me. It wasn’t any fun being a slave.”

“Just think of it as something that builds character.”

“I’ve got plenty of character.”

The fox chuckled. “That you do.”

L
illian woke just before dawn from a nightmare in which the bears had captured her and were about to cook her up in a big pot in Mother Manan’s kitchen. She’d tangled herself in her blanket. Wrenching her arms free, she sat up to find T.H. sitting on his haunches a few feet away. He studied her with a curious gaze.

“You’re a restless sleeper,” he said.

“I had a bad dream. The bears were cooking me up for supper.”

“I’d be surprised if that hasn’t made you lose your appetite.”

Lillian smiled. “Are you offering to have my share of breakfast?”

“It’s what a friend would do.”

“Maybe, but I’m hungry, so I don’t think so.”

The sun began to rise while they were eating. By the time they were finished, the morning twilight had given way to the sun, so they started back across the mountains.

Eventually they passed the tree where the hunter had been hidden.

“I wonder if he ever got that panther,” Lillian said.

“I doubt that. They’re wily—almost as wily as foxes.”

“And probably not as humble.”

“Probably not,” T.H. agreed.

T.H. told stories along the way, and Lillian taught him some of the songs that she’d learned from Aunt. After the horrible weeks Lillian had spent in LaOursville, the day felt like a special outing.

The time passed quickly, and the distance with it, since much of the trail was downhill. By late afternoon they were back in the familiar hills around Aunt’s farm. They tromped through the marsh to
just within sight of the big pine tree that marked the possum witch’s home.

“This is as far as I go,” T.H. said.

“I know. Because you ate her husband.”

He gave her a sour look. “He was already dead.”

“So you said.”

“Well, he
was
. Truthful and Handsome, remember?”

Lillian nodded. She stood there looking at the dead pine. Even though she’d already met Old Mother Possum, or maybe just dreamed they’d met—it was all a bit confusing—she was still nervous.

“I wonder what will happen,” she said. “What if I’m wrong? What if she can’t help me? What if it
was
just a dream?”

“I don’t know,” T.H. said. “I just know there’s only one way to find out.”

Lillian nodded. Shouldering her blanket and pack, she picked her way through the soggy marsh to where the tall dead pine rose from a small hillock ahead of her. As twilight turned into night she could see all the little medicine and tincture bottles tied to the branches of the pine. When she reached the hillock the ground firmed under her feet.

She stood for a moment, remembering the last time she’d been here. It couldn’t have been a dream. How could she remember it all so clearly?

She cleared her throat, then called into the deepening shadows that surrounded the pine.

“Hello hello? Are you there, Mrs. Possum?”

The tincture bottles clanged lightly in a discordant song as Lillian waited for an endless moment.

The figure that finally stepped quietly out of the tree’s shadows was just as she recalled. Old Mother Possum was still some strange combination of woman and possum, but whereas before she’d towered over the kitten Lillian had been, now she was a good head and a half shorter.

She leaned on a staff that reminded Lillian of Mother Manan’s. Braided strips of leather encased the top, then longer strands with tiny bottles tied to their ends swung freely. The bottles on the staff echoed the song of the tree, and the possum witch’s small black eyes studied Lillian intensely.