Read Online The Healer of Harrow Point by Peter Walpole - Free Book Online

bordered the highway, I realized, vaguely, that we were headed back toward my home, but not directly. Anyway, we were still miles away.
    “Where are we?” I asked Emma.
    “Up near Harrow Point. That was Highway 12, you know, where I live. We don't have far to go, just a mile or so.”
    We walked on in silence. It felt good to be out in the woods again. This was something I was used to. I started to feel a little more like myself, to feel less the wonder and strangeness of what had happened in Emma's cabin.
    “Okay,” she said. “We're almost there. A little more quietly, now.”
    We were at the edge of a large natural pasture, ringed with trees, covered with tall grass and low shrubs and bushes. We crept forward. An orange and black monarch butterfly batted along in the bright sunshine.
    “Hello-o-o!” Emma called softly.
    I could see nothing. We waited. It seemed impossible to me that the air could be so still. Then, from behind a clump of bushes some twenty yards away, walked a large, beautiful, reddish-brown doe, her head held high, sniffing the air. As I smiled with delight, Emma's hand came up and rather snugly squeezed the back of my neck.
    “So you can hear,” she whispered.
    “What?” I asked, and then I did hear, or felt, or saw, smelt a soft, thick, mumbly voice.
    “Danger? Danger?” it said.
    “It's me,” Emma said. “You remember. I've brought someone.”
    “Danger?” the voice asked, and I realized in a breathless flash that I was hearing the doe.
    Or not hearing. It was the strangest thing: another new sense, similar, adjacent to the other I had experienced that day. It was not that I was hearing the doe, but that I knew or felt something from her that came to me as words, thin and high, that flowed from the deer and echoed, clear and simple and strange, somewhere in my chest.
    “I wouldn't bring you danger,” Emma said. Her voice was quite ordinary and direct, like she was speaking to a friend who was just a bit hard of hearing.
    “You bring strength,” came the reply; and then, “What is it? What is it?”
    “A boy, a man-child. He is not danger.”
    The doe walked forward in halting, uncertain steps, looking always as if she were just about to flee. With each step she stamped at the ground with her forelegs.
    “She's letting the others know that someone's here,” Emma said. “They can hear and feel it when she stamps like that.”
    “Wowwww,” was all I could think to say.
    The doe's nose twitched nervously as she stood just six feet from us. She turned her head all the way to the left, eyeing me with care, then slowly turned her head all the way to the right, her eyes never leaving mine.
    “Food?” she asked.
    “Why yes,” Emma said. “I brought some apples.” She opened the sack she had been carrying and showed the food inside to the doe. “I brought them for you, and for the family, and for Reggie.”
    She said the name slowly, as if it held some significance, and in a moment the deer had bolted away to the far side of the pasture, and into the trees. Emma relaxed the grip on my neck.
    “Ahh,” I said, disappointed, thinking we had lost her. “Who's Reggie?” I asked.
    “Her buck,” Emma answered. “He's the king of these woods, in his way. I named him Reggie.”
    I drew my breath in sharply. From across the meadow I saw the largest deer I had ever seen. A huge, majestic buck with a vast rack of antlers stepped slowlyfrom the edge of the trees, and seemed to drift, rather than walk, toward us.
    “He scarcely needs a fool like me to give him a name,” Emma said quietly.
    He seemed the pure embodiment of strength and stately grace. In spite of myself, of Emma, of everything, I thought: “God, what a trophy.” His antlers, I meant: an incredible prize for a hunter. I shook the thought away angrily.
    “Emma,” I said urgently, suddenly desperate to confess to her that I was supposed to go hunting in little more than a week.
    “Shhh,” she said. “He's