Tsuga's Children (3 page)

The winter never let up at all; it seemed to the Hemlocks that it had already lasted for years. The jerky, the smoked and pickled venison, the smoked salmon from the river and the frozen pork were soon gone. All the nourishment had been tried from all the marrow bones. They had flour, some cornmeal and some dried vegetables, a few potatoes that had sprouted and were wrinkled and punky. Oka’s and the nanny goat’s milk were terribly important to them. Tim Hemlock had to spend most of his days out searching for game because he didn’t want to think of slaughtering Oka or Brin or the goats. They all knew he would, though, if he had to.

“I don’t know where the deer have gone,” he said to Eugenia one night when the children were asleep. “They haven’t yarded up this year in any of their regular places. They’re just gone. Nothing seems to be out this winter—not a moose or a fox, not a rabbit, not a red squirrel, not a white-footed mouse, not a partridge. All the animals seem to have gone from the forest.”

As he spoke, the old woman’s eyes were upon his tired face. Tim Hemlock hadn’t tried to speak to her with his hands for a long time, and now he just shrugged hopelessly, as if he could think of nothing to say. Eugenia could see how tired he was.

The firewood corded beneath the eaves was getting low, too, so they burned the wood sparingly now, and the cabin was not cheery and warm as it was most winters. There was never a fire in the forge next to the barn. It seemed the forest they had known so well had forsaken them. It was their home and it had always been stern but bountiful to them, but now it was barren, nothing but cold snow and mute frozen trees.

In December the paths between the barn and the storage cave did become tunnels, cold blue light filtering down through the snow ceilings. While this protected the paths from the harsh wind, they were breathlessly cold inside, like the middle of a block of ice.

It wasn’t the happiest Christmas that year, though they tried to make the best of it. Tim Hemlock cut the top from a balsam fir, just the top that stuck up out of the snow, and brought it into the cabin, but they couldn’t decorate it with candles because they had no tallow. Jen and Arn got the parts of the manger scene from the loft and set it up at the left of the tree, the baby and his parents carved from wood, as were the goats and cows. The little dolls looked cozy and warm in the hay-filled manger. To the right of the tree they set up the small circle of carved wild animals with the deer and the smaller tree in the center, the tree a branch cut from the balsam fir. But they had no saddle of venison, their traditional Christmas dinner. All they had was potato and corn soup with dried chives in it, and some bannock.

After dinner, when they sang “Silent Night, Holy Night,” Eugenia could not keep the tears from her eyes. Tim Hemlock, as he always did on Christmas Eve, went into the back sleeping room and put on the cape of deerskin and the deer mask with the antlers, then entered the main room walking slowly and sedately like a deer. He silently looked around the room, then took a place at the table. Eugenia took the maple-sugar doll she had made that morning, holding it carefully on the wide blade of a knife, and presented it to the deer, who tasted it, then removed his costume and divided the candy doll among them all. The old lady watched all this with her bright old eyes, and accepted her piece of the candy with a nod.

They were gathered around the fire and it was time for a story, so Tim Hemlock told them a story he had heard from his grandfather, about Tsuga, a great hunter of the Old People, whose other name was “Wanders-too-far.” Jen and Arn knew the story by heart, but they always liked to hear it because while telling it their father changed. His eyes grew brighter, and an excitement came into his voice and gestures that made him seem more like them.

“It is said,” Tim Hemlock began, “that the Old People never saw their gods, only heard their voices in water, wind and thunder.” He went on with the old story, telling them how Tsuga, hunting far into the wilderness, came upon a strange mountain and climbed up into its valleys, where he came to a gate of black stone. The deer trail he was following stopped at the stone. Some versions of the story, Tim Hemlock’s grandfather had told him, said that the stone was hung on great hinges, others that it was a teetering stone that could turn on its fulcrum. Tsuga reached forward to touch the stone and heard the voice of thunder, so he drew back, afraid, because the thunder was all around him though the sky was blue.

In spite of his fear, Tsuga was still curious, for he had always gone over the next ridge to see what was on the other side, crossed the widest rivers, followed his quarry until he found it. He stood trembling before the stone gate, then reached forward to touch it. To his wonderment it turned slowly, opening into blackness from which a deep voice came. “Where are your children?” the voice asked in the sad tones of the wind. “Where are your children?”

“They are safe at home,” Tsuga managed to say, though his voice trembled.

“There is no safe place,” the windy voice answered.

“Why can’t I see you?” Tsuga asked, his curiosity overcoming his fear.

“Your eyes see only that which you must kill. Where are your children?”

It was more wind than voice now, and it faded into the sound of an autumn wind in the trees as the black rock slowly turned shut again.

Tsuga returned to his home place, a journey of many days. He read the sun for direction by day and the stars by night, not stopping except to eat cold jerky and bannock when he grew weak from hunger. Bear, deer, wolves and all the animals of the wilderness showed themselves to him without fear, as if they knew that he would not stop to hunt them. He neither strung his bow nor unsheathed his knife on the long journey, and when he reached his home he found that all his foodstores had burned and his family was near death from hunger. Although he was so weak himself he could hardly string his bow, he knew that he must find food for them. Just as he turned from the entrance to his hut a dry wind came through the trees with a long sigh, and a graceful white-tailed deer, a doe, stepped from the forest, its eyes sadly upon him, to wait for his arrow.

“All the rest of his life,” Tim Hemlock said, “Tsuga sought to find the Black Gate again, for it was the one passage he hadn’t traveled through, but he could never find it. When his children’s children were grown and he was an old man with white hair and wrinkled skin, he went alone on a long hunt from which he never returned. The people said he must have found the Black Gate at last.”

Wind cried at the cabin’s small windows, and a puff came down the chimney so that the fire hesitated for a moment in its climbing. Tim Hemlock was silent, his eyes staring thoughtfully beyond the warm room. Arn wondered where his father’s thoughts had gone, and just for that moment felt lonely.

After they were in bed, where all of them except the old lady went early in order to save firewood and keep warm, Eugenia said to Tim Hemlock, “But why is that old woman here? She just sits there and never says a word and eats what little food we’ve got. Why did she have to come this winter?”

“She eats very little,” Tim Hemlock said. “And we couldn’t turn her out into the cold to die.”

“Of course not. I didn’t mean that! But if she’d only gone away in the fall! Why did it have to be this terrible winter she came here?”

“I don’t know. When I try to ask her who she is and where she came from, she won’t answer. She doesn’t seem to understand the questions. But they’re simple questions in that language. Maybe she’s just an old wanderer who’s survived all the rest of her family. If she lives through the winter, she’ll go on to somewhere else. She believes that she’s paid for her keep with those boxes and mushrooms, you know.”

Eugenia sighed. “Yes, I know, but what good are all those powders?”

“Found things,” Tim Hemlock said. “Wild greens, mushrooms, tubers and herbs. There’s so much we don’t know.”

“But what do you talk about with your hands? Couldn’t you ask her?”

“She tells me riddles. She won’t answer my questions.

I’ll have to find them out some other way.”

“What questions?”

“I hardly know the questions, and you wouldn’t know the answers,” Tim Hemlock said. He seemed so weary and sad, Eugenia tried not to show how his answer had hurt her.

But the children, on the loft, heard their mother and father talking, not the words but the unhappiness and danger in their voices. Their mother and father were unhappy and it was not just because the Traveler hadn’t come and the winter would be long and hard. They had both wondered why they hadn’t told about what they’d seen in the old lady’s eye. The reason, they both knew, was that they didn’t want to upset their mother and father in any way.

“Arn,” Jen whispered, “are you awake?”

“Yes,” Arn whispered back.

“It wasn’t a very happy Christmas, was it?”

“No.”

“I wonder what Tsuga’s children were like,” Jen said.

Arn thought awhile. “Maybe they were like us. But I guess not. They were Old People. And maybe the story’s just made up anyway.”

“Maybe the old lady is one of the Old People,” Jen said.

“Did you ever see her tracks in the snow?” Arn said. “They’re funny-looking. They’re moccasin tracks, but they point in, sort of, and don’t look right.”

Jen said nothing for a while, and then she said, “We’re the only children we’ve ever known. Maybe other children aren’t like us.”

“When you were just a baby a stranger came by here. I was five and I can remember. He said he had a little boy just like me.”

“I can’t remember,” Jen said.

“He was all brown, all dressed in brown deerskin and he had brown hair and he was brown all over, that’s all I can remember except what he said about me.”

“Did he say anything about me?”

“Not that I remember. You were just a baby anyway.”

“I don’t know what a baby looks like, except maybe the little Jesus, and he’s just a wooden doll.”

They were silent for a while.

“I wonder if Tsuga had a little girl my age,” Jen said.

It was on the first day of February, the coldest month of all, that disaster struck the Hemlocks, and struck twice on the same bitter day. Oka’s milk began to dry up. She gave less than a quart that morning, and soon after milking time a weakening sickness had come over Tim Hemlock, with a high fever. He was suddenly so weak he could barely stagger back through the tunnel from the barn and slump down sweating and shivering before the small fire.

“Something strange is happening to the air,” he said.

“There’s a change coming.”

“What kind of change?” Am asked.

“I don’t know. Everything seems heavier,” his father said.

Eugenia, Jen and Arn couldn’t feel anything strange, so they worried about him even more, thinking that it was his illness. They wrapped him up in the great bearskin robe, heated water to put his feet in when he shivered, put cool damp cloths to his forehead when he grew hot. No one paid any attention to the old woman, who sat still as a carved wooden statue, always watching.

Later, toward noon, they began to notice something strange too. First it was a tiny noise that seemed to surround them, the kind of indistinct noise you think might be in your head, so you shake your head and it seems to go away, but while you’re not thinking about it, it sneaks back into your ears and there it is again. As it grew, each of them began to wonder if the others heard it, a small, watery sort of noise, a trickling noise such as they hadn’t heard since the cold closed in upon them in late fall. Louder and louder it grew, until all at once they asked each other, “What is it? What’s that noise?” It seemed to come from all around them.

Arn went to the door and opened it. He was met by a wave of heat. Warm, balmy air pushed in upon him from the open doorway, air as warm as a hot summer day. The roof of the snow tunnel had fallen in, and bright blue sky and sunlight flashing on the snow—light he hadn’t seen for weeks—hurt his eyes and made him blink. The trickles of melt water were almost a roar as they cascaded from the cabin eaves and the roofs of the forge house and the barn.

“It’s like summer!” he said. The warm air came flowing into the cabin, coating the table and chairs with a fine mist when it touched their colder surfaces.

“It’s the false spring!” Eugenia said. But they had never seen the false spring so warm. Soon they were sweating in their heavy winter clothes.

“It won’t last long,” Tim Hemlock said. In his father’s low, weak voice Arn thought he heard some dread, and he shivered for a moment in spite of the warmth.

But the sudden summery air was glorious to the children, who had been cold and even colder because they were a little hungry all the time. Jen hadn’t been to the barn to see Oka for several days, so she put on her waterproof boots—the ones with the spruce pitch on the seams—and waded out between the walls of snow in the mud and slush of the path to the barn. She opened the door upon the barn’s cold air, glad she was bringing in the warmth to the animals.

“Oka?” she said, her eyes just beginning after a minute to get used to the hay-smelling dimness. She felt her way along a wooden railing until she could see again. “Oka?”

She was at Oka and Brin’s stall. She heard the heavy movements of the large animals. The floor creaked, the warm smells surrounded her, stronger as the summery air poured into the barn. There was Oka’s broad wet nose, her wide cow face and bent-over ears, her brown eyes that seemed so kind. Oka gave a deep sigh and a low humming sound in her throat to let Jen know that she was welcome in the dim dusty winter home of the animals. Brin, who was always calmer and quieter than Oka, gave a smooth moo that was half breath, half voice, but he remained back in the square stall, lying down in the hay with his thick forelegs bent in front of his great broad brisket.

Sometimes Jen thought she could talk to Oka, but sometimes she wondered if they ever really understood each other. Maybe she made up Oka’s words in her own mind and Oka hadn’t really said them at all. As for Brin, he never really felt like saying much. She never heard the thoughts of the goats. They seemed so quick and neat and clever, but she never could understand them.