Tsuga's Children (10 page)

But it must be bigger if it was to thaw Jen’s clothes and dry them out. It would have to roar and to singe the trees; its strength would have to make the branches above it move and toss in its rising heat.

He gathered branches, breaking off the dead ones that were small enough to break off, using his knife as an ax to hack the larger ones until he could break them off, until he had the fire roaring as high as his head. Parts of the fallen tree had broken off, and these he dragged around so their butt ends could lie in the fire. Then he made a high pile of whatever wood he could find, so he could feed the fire in the night.

Jen lay propped against the fallen trunk, still breathing, her eyes closed. The surface frost had melted from her parka and pants, and he could just begin to move her arms and legs within the frozen clothes. He pulled off her mittens, then the rope bridle, which creaked in its ice, then her hood, and finally managed to open her parka. She faced the fire and would be getting its warmth while he made a shelter.

He went farther into the dark woods until he found a grove of balsam firs, broke off the lower boughs and carried armfuls of the green and aromatic boughs back to the fallen tree. Weaving them together with dead branches propped against the standing pine and against the fallen trunk where Jen lay, he made an overhanging shelter, enclosed on the sides and in back, open to the fire in front. He was warm now from all this activity, so it was time to get Jen out of her wet clothes and into his parka. First he took the forty feet of narrow hemp rope from his pack and strung part of it between two trees on the other side of the fire to make a clothesline, then got Jen, who was now mumbling to herself, out of her clothes and wrapped in his parka. She seemed so small and fragile as he pulled the dank wet buckskin from her. Her hands and feet were still like ice, but the fire would warm them. He hung her clothes on the clothesline, where they began to steam, clouds of white mist rising from them into the trees above.

While her clothes were drying he found a flat rock and rolled it on its edge to the fire, went to the brook in the darkness, its rushing sound overcoming the crackle of the fire as he left the circle of warmth, and filled his small iron pot with water. Back at the fire he set the pot on the flat rock next to the flames. Then all he could do was gather more wood, tend the fire and hope that its heat would enter Jen’s skin and blood and bring her back to life. Each time he came back from the darkness with a load of wood he stopped to feel her hands and feet.

And then one time he came back with an armload of dry pine branches for his woodpile and saw that she was coming awake. When her blue eyes opened, they seemed blind. Her face was always pale, but it glowed in the firelight as if light came from inside it, palely gleaming from her round child’s face. Her eyes were round, too, staring at him but not knowing who he was for just a moment, then opening wider and turning gleamy with tears when she saw who he was.

“Arn! Arn!” she said.

Arn was suddenly so tired he had to sit down on the balsam boughs he had spread on the floor of the shelter. Jen finally stopped her crying. She was trying to move her fingers, rubbing her hands together in the fire’s heat.

“Arn, I’m so cold,” she said. “But you found me.”

“I heard you calling.”

“You came after me!”

“Well, sure,” he said. He got the piece of stale bannock out of his pack and handed it to her. “You won’t warm up enough if you don’t eat something.”

She took the bannock and bit a piece from it. “But you’re weak too,” she said. “I can tell. You’ve got to eat too, Arn. I’ll bet you haven’t had anything to eat. I can tell.”

“We’ll have to find something to eat soon,” he said. He watched her avidly eating the bannock. His mouth watered and his stomach moved, constricting, wantingfood so badly it seemed to cry out from down inside him. He shut his eyes so as not to see Jen eat, but as soon as he did she pressed the last piece of bannock against his lips. His will said no, but he couldn’t help himself and took the bannock in his mouth. It felt like life itself, but it was so small, like the part Jen had eaten, that it would do little good.

The water in the pot was steaming, so he put some of the powder from his birch-bark box into it and they drank the hot tea, careful to hold the pot by its bail and to drink from the side that had been away from the fire. Immediately they both felt more awake but even hungrier than before. Arn knew he had to find food. They hadn’t had much to eat at all for weeks and they were both thin. The bones in Jen’s wrists looked as if they would come through the skin at any moment. When he turned his head to look at the fire and to see how Jen’s clothes were drying, his weakness made him dizzy and he had to put his head down between his knees so he wouldn’t faint.

They told each other what had happened to them since the night Jen left the cabin. “I had to find Oka, Arn. I just had to,” she said, almost crying again.

“All right,” he said. “What’s done is done.”

“And I think I saw her just before I fell in the brook. She was out there by a big tree with some deer. I’m sure I saw the white spot on her neck.”

“Didn’t you hear my whistle?”

“I think I did once, but I didn’t know what it was.”

“We’ve got to find some food,” he said.

“I thought for a while I was getting used to being hungry,” Jen said. “But I’m not. My teeth hurt I’m so hungry.” She held the iron pot in her hands, warming them.

“We’re starving,” he said. In spite of the fire he shivered with sudden cold.

Then he heard a sound not made by the fire. It was a scratchy sound, as if made by claws, and it came from a yellow birch sapling within the fire’s glow. His eyes went up the sapling, up its golden bark that shone in the firelight, until they came to a dark, thick shape bigger around than the tree. The scratching came from there. It was a porcupine climbing backwards down the tree with the careful, ponderous slowness porcupines never varied from, no matter what.

Food. Here was food given to them. In the legends the Old People ate porcupines when they were hungry and out of food. They called the porcupine “grandfathers’ meat.” Anyone could catch them because they depended too much on their long quills for protection and never bothered to run very fast.

Arn got up and picked a club from among the branches on his woodpile. The porcupine kept coming down, scratching the bark with his nails, slowly coming down toward the ground. When he got down even with Arn’s head he stopped and turned his snout toward Arn, his black eyes knowing. His quills rose along his back, shiny black spears with white bands on them.

“I’m sorry, porcupine,” Arn said. He’d never said anything like that before and didn’t know why he said it. Then he went on, hearing the words but not knowing where they came from. “I need your fat and meat. Nothing of you will be wasted.”

He hit the porcupine as hard as he could on the end of its black nose, and it dropped with a thud to the ground, bounced and quivered. Some of its quills stuck in the ground and were held there by their barbed tips. It lay on its back, dead now, the soft dark gray fur of its belly exposed.

Jen had been watching without making a sound. She had heard the porcupine and had been the first to see it as it came down the tree. She heard its dull wish to leave the tree where it had been eating the rich inner bark. It was full and didn’t understand the fire nearby but was protected by its quills, so it just came down. She heard its alarm, then its resignation when it saw the boy with the club.

Now Arn worked over it with his knife, slicing into its center through the soft belly, peeling away its skin so that finally the skin came off inside out, the quills covered. One quill did stick into his wrist, but he just pulled it straight out, with care that it didn’t break off. He put the liver and heart on the flat stone next to the fire, cut the yellow fat from the meat and put pieces of it into the iron pot, then cut off the porcupine’s naked head. He was making food. He looked expert, busy, knowing exactly what he was doing. He left the firelight for a while and came back with some long green maple branches. Two of these had forks in them, and these he cut shorter, sharpened and pushed into the ground on each side of the fire. A longer, thicker branch he sharpened on one end and ran it through the porcupine’s empty body, then cut off some of the narrow rope and bound the body to the branch, which he placed in the forked sticks so the meat would roast over the fire. On another notched stick propped over the fire he hung the iron pot with the fat in it, and it began to hiss and fry. On a narrower stick he impaled the liver and heart and set them to cook.

Soon the liver and heart were done, and he let them cool a little before offering them to her. She had wondered at first if she could eat that meat, but now her body told her that she must have it, that it was life itself she was being offered. Arn cut both liver and heart in two and put half of each into her hand. As she ate the meat she could feel warmth and strength gathering in her. This food was good beyond preference or taste, good beyond good.

After a while Arn turned the roasting meat on its spit and poured some of the melted fat on it. Drops fell from the dark red meat to the fire, where they burned with orange flashes. Arn had let the fire die down to coals, and he fed it on one side, just enough and not too much, so the meat browned without burning. He turned the spit, basted the meat with fat and tested it every once in a while with the point of his knife. Finally, when he thought it was done, he propped the spit next to the fire, cut off a haunch for each of them and served hers to her on a stick. Then they ate the dark meat, each thanking the porcupine for this gift of strength.

Jen’s mind changed, gradually, with this bounty, toward hopefulness once again. No longer was she about to cry or to feel lost or lonely. She would find Oka, with Arn’s help. He wasn’t like her brother any more, her brother who was just a little boy whom she had known to cry and to be spiteful at times, but more like her father, with her father’s certainty and confidence in what he knew how to do.

“Thank you, Arn,” she said.

He turned away, a little embarrassed by her admiration, to build up the fire again. “Your clothes are dry now,” he said. “Your boots aren’t yet, but they will be by morning if it doesn’t snow or rain.” He tossed her her buckskin trousers and shirt, and her fur parka, which were warm and soft again as she put them on.

“If it weren’t for you I’d be dead,” she said, handing him his own parka.

“I guess so,” he said.

He went to the brook to wash out the pot and get water to make some more tea from the powders.

Before they were ready to go to sleep he built the fire up high again. It would burn down in the night and the cold would wake him so he could build it up again. He took off his inner shirt and wrapped it around Jen’s feet, then put his parka back on. They lay on the soft boughs, other boughs surrounding them on three sides, the sweet scent of the drying balsam all around them.

“It’s cozy here,” Jen said. “I’m not afraid of the boars any more. I was, because I couldn’t tell what that one thought of me. I just couldn’t tell.”

“How can you tell what an animal thinks?”

“I don’t know. I just seem to.”

“Could you tell what the porcupine thought?”

“Yes. And he knew what you thought. He knew what you were going to do.”

“Did he know that I didn’t want to kill him, but I had to?”

“All he knew was that you were going to kill him.”

Arn was silent.

“We had to eat,” Jen said.

“Yes.”

“And now I’m warm and I feel more hopeful.”

“But it’s not like home,” he said, and all at once they thought of Tim Hemlock and Eugenia alone in the cabin, the cabin locked in ice, and how they would be worrying about their children. Arn told Jen about how their mother went behind the waterfall but couldn’t find the passage through the mountain, and how it was right there, wide open, for him.

“Do you think it’s Tsuga’s black gate?” she said.

“I don’t know. It scares me to think about that.”

“It’s all so strange, Arn. Poor Mother and Dad. They’ll think something awful’s happened to us. Maybe that we’re dead. If we can only find Oka and go home again.”

Before Arn went to sleep he thought about the words that had come into his mouth without his thinking. He had echoes in his mind, deep inside him, as if things were trying to be remembered there.

And Jen, staring up at the balsam boughs Arn had made into a shelter for them, with the firelight flickering, then looking out into the woods where the firelight brought out the standing trunks of trees from the deeper dark where all the night wilderness was—she suddenly trembled with fear of their aloneness here. It was wrong of them to have left their home, wrong of her to have run away without telling anyone. And now she and Arn were so small in this strange night within the mountain.

Back at the Hemlocks’ small farm, through the mountain and over the miles of ice, the cabin creaked in the cold. Eugenia had gone out with an ax and though it exhausted her, chopped the rails from the pig’s pen, dragged them inside and was building up the fire in order to make some potato soup from the precious seed potatoes. She looked old, now, pale and tired. She went through the motions of keeping the small fire going, but much of her reasons for living had gone with her children. After getting the fire blazing under the kettle she looked down at her sleeping husband to find that he was twisting his head, straining his shoulders and neck as if trying to escape from bonds. She put her hand on his cheek, which calmed him, and then was startled by his open eyes. They were not the eyes of hallucination he had opened before, those staring eyes that saw whatever they saw far beyond the room, even beyond the earth. These were her husband’s dark brown eyes looking right at her.

“Eugenia,” he said in a dry, unused voice.

He had been gone so long. He had not really been here with her, and now she knew how lonely and near despair she had been.