Tsuga's Children (12 page)

“Arn!” Jen was crying. “Please, Arn!”

“We’ll look for a while,” he said. “But if we don’t find any sign of her, we’ll go home.”

“Thank you,” Jen said, rubbing her eyes with the backs of her mittens. “Thank you, Arn.”

Then Arn seemed to be fading out before Jen’s eyes. Everything about him whitened, faded. He seemed distant from her even though he hadn’t moved. “Arn!” she called.

He moved toward her and took her hand. “It’s fog,” he said.

The air had grown moist and warm. They looked around them, but beyond the crisp brown grass stems at their feet the whole valley had faded out until everything was as white as paper. They could move their hands into the white and it didn’t resist them, but it was blank, quietly opaque. Its warm dampness was already beading on their skin and clothes. They could just make out each other. Even their feet were almost lost down in the whiteness.

“Now we can’t move at all,” Arn said.

“But we have to,” Jen said. The silent fog made them keep their voices low, as if it were a presence they must not disturb.

“We’ll just get lost,” Arn said.

“You don’t care about Oka!”

“Well…” he said, listening as if to the fog. There was a distant thrumming, felt through the ground, through their feet. Arn said, “We belong at home, Jen. I don’t understand this place.”

The thrumming grew louder, but seemed to come from no one direction. For a moment the fog around them lifted as a space of clear air the size of a room opened upon them and passed, moving swiftly though they felt no wind. Jen saw how Arn’s face was shiny with the beads of warm water, as were the arms of her parka and the backs of her mittens. She took off her mittens and put them in her pocket, feeling the damp warmth on her hands. The ground began to shudder with the drumming sounds.

“The boars,” she said, taking Arn’s hand again. “It sounds like the boars!”

“Stand still,” he said.

The fog passed them in white waves with openings in between, so they felt hidden and then not hidden, though the fog’s blankness was ominous because in it everything else was hidden from them. The drumming grew louder. The earth shook beneath them until they were certain they would be run over by the power that came toward them. The fog still moved, fading and thickening. When the drumming grew so loud they knew they must be caught beneath a thousand hooves, they held their breaths and saw dark hunched shapes go by them, several yards away. The dark shapes, made gray and insubstantial by the fog, drove on by and faded in the fog as the rumbling lessened.

“It was the boars,” Jen whispered. “It was the boars.”

“If we could find the tree, we might climb up in it,” Arn whispered back. He was shivering. “We were downwind, so they didn’t get our scent.”

“Yes, they didn’t know we were here,” Jen said.

“Could you feel them thinking?”

“About other things, maybe.”

The rolls of fog, according to Arn’s memory, came from the direction of the tree, so they went forward carefully into the unfelt but moving air, trying as best they could not to stumble. After a long while the fog began to thin, and finally they found themselves just at the edge of it, where it swirled from a lake or pond of hot water, rising up in whirls from the water’s surface. On their right the field was clear in colder air, but down to their left was the water from which the warm steam boiled soundlessly. An odor came from the water, the same odor that had been barely evident in the fog that had surrounded them. Arn recognized it now as something like a faint whiff of gunpowder, or the way his father’s rifle smelled after having been shot, before his father cleaned it. The stony edges of the pond were stained bright red, yellow and a mineral-green. The winter sun, just now coming out from behind high clouds, made the swirling mist pure white. To their right the winter meadow turned from green grass near the heat of the pond to sere brown hay as it rose to the northwest. The great evergreen tree was nowhere in sight, though halfway up the slope of the meadow were some piles of granite stones, some as regular and angular as walls.

Without a word Arn and Jen climbed the slope toward the piles of stones. They would have to reach the height of the land in order to see the whole meadow and find the tree. Arn wanted to see the stones, too, in spite of his desire to get home as quickly as possible. He thought of the dream he’d had the first night in the valley, of all the people together among log huts, and tents made of animal skins. Those people all together had seemed, in the way of dreams, to have a powerful meaning; they had caused a yearning in him. The dream had been of this valley, he was certain now as they came up to the stones. Though they had been tumbled by time and weather, there was a regularity in their patterns that nothing in nature could have caused. There were four squares, each several yards across, each about the size of his father’s stone-walled forge house.

“People lived here,” he said to Jen.

Nothing was left but the tumbled walls. The brown meadow hay was as smooth as a lake up to the stones and between them, just the lonely walls keeping nothing in or out. The people who had lived among the walls were gone, all traces of their pathways gone, yet Arn felt their presence in this valley as if his own eyes, seeing the white snow fields and the far stone cliffs, made their eyes alive again. The valley was once their world, familiar to their eyes.

He and Jen climbed on toward the top of the slope. All the meadow they could see was deserted. Not even a bird flew. Near the height of the land they began to see the top of the great tree, first its highest green branches, then more and more of it as it grew up into their sight. They were still far from the tree; they’d had no idea of its great size. As they approached, it loomed above them, its gray-brown trunk ascending, its long branches and short green needles like great wands extending to a hundred feet over their heads. The trunk grew out of jumbled gray rocks and an outcropping of granite, the muscular brown roots extending like huge clenching fingers over the ledge and down into the earth. They had never seen a tree like this one. It was an evergreen and bore small cones, but its great trunk and random branches had the clean separate-ness and strength of hardwood. The bark was grooved in random patterns, dry to the touch. The trunk was at least six feet in diameter and the first broad branches were far above their heads, much too high for them to climb.

A light wind sighed through the tree, or the tree itself used the wind as its voice. They could hear no words but they felt at once another presence, a calm, distant strength that almost seemed to be aware of them.

Suddenly Jen went to the tree and put her arms around one of its great arched roots. “I love this tree,” she said.

Arn stood looking up into the tree. Thin winter clouds passed over the valley; the sturdy tree in its height seemed to stabilize the earth itself against their passing, keeping the ground where they stood firm against the turning of the sky. He had not been surprised by Jen’s sudden feeling for the tree, yet he wondered why she hadn’t surprised him. She nearly always came to such sudden conclusions, skipping whatever steps he might have to take. She always leapt into new things, attitudes, actions like her mad journey to rescue Oka. It was up to him to look carefully, to figure out what had to be done.

Around the ledges from which the tree grew, tall thin stones were set at intervals, making a circle on the meadow with the tree as its center. The gray stones were all about the same size, each about as tall as his father. Carved designs, worn by time, circled the waists of the squared stones. He climbed down from the ledge and went to one of the stones.

“Arn!” Jen called.

“Come here,” he said, “but be careful getting down from the ledge.”

The stone was mute, an unmoving sentry. It was headless, but around its middle was a carved band, like a wide belt, with what was obviously a sheath hanging from it, all in deep relief in the gray granite.

The sheath was exactly like his own; the knife handle that protruded from it, though worn smooth, resembled the final curve of his own knife’s stag handle. He undid the bone buttons of his parka and drew his knife from his sheath to look at it. Jen had gone to the next stone in the circle. “Look, Arn,” she called. He went to her. This stone sentry’s sheath was empty, but his arm, carved in relief across his chest, held a stone knife whose curved blade, choil, hilt and pommel were exactly the same design as Arn’s. He held the smaller knife against the stone one and they were just alike, one in ancient worn stone, the other bright and sharp. His living hand grasped his own knife’s handle just as the rugged stone hand grasped its stone one.

They could only wonder. The sentry stones, mute in their grainy age, ringed the great tree.

“Look!” Jen said. She had turned back toward the tree, and now pointed to the ledges.

At first Arn saw only tumbled rocks and granite with the tree’s brown roots arching down across them. But then he saw that here, too, was a design that could not have been accidental. At one place the roots formed an arch above a platform of smoothed stones, and behind the living arch was another, made of stone, surrounding darkness.

“Come on,” Jen said, but Arn held back.

“Let’s be careful,” he said, knowing they would go there, to the center. Jen, not listening to him, ran back toward the tree. From the corners of Arn’s eyes the stone sentries seemed to stand straighter as he followed Jen.

They climbed up to the level place, where each stone was smoothed and fitted to the next. It was like an altar, or a place to be watched by people standing like the sentries, within the sentries’ circle. Thin echoes of their own footsteps sang in their ears, as if the small sounds rebounded from the walls of the whole valley.

“This place is very old,” Jen whispered. “There’s no end to it. I can feel it going back and back, like there’s no bottom or end to it.”

They both thought of the old stories but neither wanted to say so out loud. The valley had been neither kind nor unkind to them so far.

The roots, thicker than the trunks of most trees, came down like the fingers of a giant hand on either side of the dark entrance, which was much larger than they’d first thought. It was an arch of fitted stones, higher and wider than their home cabin back in the frozen world.

It had turned cold. Light snow sifted past the high column of the tree, coming from a graying sky where the pale sun was only a lighter gray place beyond the mountains to the southwest. As they looked, shivering, the mountains faded into the gray-white of swirling snow.

They held hands as they moved slowly toward the entrance, each of them in dread but as if in a dream unaware of any other thing to do. At the living arch Jen stopped to put her hand to the thick root. She started, then took Arn’s hand and placed it where hers had been.

“Do you feel it?” she asked.

“I feel the bark,” Arn said.

“It moved,” Jen said. “It moved, Arn.”

“It was the wind moving the tree,” he said.

“No, it wasn’t like that.”

The dense flesh of the tree had moved under her hand, in response to her touch. She knew it had moved, but she didn’t know what that strange convulsion of the wood had meant, whether it was a welcome or a warning.

They turned to the dark entrance beneath the tree where the gray stones arched against the black. Something moved in the half-light—a small brown figure glided toward them and stopped at the edge of daylight. It was the old lady, one arm held up, the fringes of her tattered buckskin blouse hanging down. The wrinkled brown hand was palm-forward, telling them to stop, to not enter. Her ancient face was stern, her small eyes glittering. For a moment no one moved or spoke.

Jen gave a little cry, and said to Arn, “Ask her where Oka is!”

Arn’s hands moved in the language. For “cow” he made the gestures of milking; the question part was his open hands, palms up, empty and asking.

The old lady’s arm came down and pointed behind them, so they turned away from her, toward the east.

At the eastern edge of the meadow several large animals grazed, moving together slowly, one or two raising their stocky heads to look around. They were dark, heavy beasts.

“What are they, Arn?” Jen asked, but he didn’t know.

Suddenly the animals were in alarm. They jumped and came down with all four hooves together, then ran on a curving course toward the center of the meadow. Jen and Arn felt the heavy thudding of hooves before they heard it. Behind the large animals smaller gray ones bounded through the winter grass, gray backs appearing and disappearing like the backs of salmon going upstream.

“Wolves!” Arn said, with an excitement in his voice not all caused by fear. Jen was frightened; Arn’s excitement seemed wrong, strange to her.

The large animals were driven closer to the ledge, running side by side, touching each other as if for comfort in their fear, their eyes showing white and their mouths slobbering. They had short horns and looked like cows except for their long shaggy hair. One of them had dropped behind, an older, slower one. It turned desperately, fighting its own great weight, and tried to hook the following wolf with its horn. A white spot flashed on its sweating neck.

“Oka!” Jen cried. “Oka!”

But it couldn’t be Oka, with that long shaggy coat now suddenly flecked with blood as a wolfs fangs raked it. Silently running, the other wolves caught up. One bounded in from the rear and cut a hamstring with one audible clack of its white teeth. The cow thudded down on its side and the wolves went in to its belly, slashing and ripping until they had pulled its insides out in long ropes while it was still dying, groaning out its last sounds in the deep grass.

The other cattle had formed a ring, back to back, with their heads down and horns menacing the wolves that circled them. After a few feints toward the closed circle of horns the wolves went back to feed upon the dead cow.

Jen and Arn stood absolutely still, Jen crying silently, while the wolves snarled and tore at their meat. After a long while the wolves, gorged, lay down in the last light of the winter sun, their bellies plump. The other cattle had gone quietly back to grazing, tails swinging, their muzzles methodically wrenching the brown grass loose from the roots before they slowly chewed. Red and white ribs arched over the carcase of the dead cow, its torn coat folded back over the grass like a shaggy robe with a red and yellow lining.