Read Online Tsuga's Children by Thomas Williams - Free Book Online Page B

then, most dreams were strange. He dreamed he’d seen hundreds of people all at once, standing, talking, cooking over small fires, some of them going in and out of small log buildings and tents. He’d never seen more than five or six people together in his life, and those were his family and the Traveler and the old lady and a visitor he just barely remembered and Jen couldn’t remember. That had been, he’d been told, when he was just three years old. All he could remember was that the visitor had been a big man dressed in brown, with a brown beard. But in the dream all the people were together, in what must have been a village, and none of them thought it strange.
    Light rose in the eastern sky, slowly outlining the mountain ridges from behind, then bringing into its glow the snowy western cliffs on the other side of the deep valley. As the light grew his dream faded and he examined the valley in its bowl of mountains. Although the pale winter sun was the same, it was a different season here. The sun rose at a shallow angle that showed it would scarcely rise above the cliffs before it began to descend, but the valley was warm, as if this were the month of September or October instead of February. The leaves of the small birches were yellow, just about to fall, and the high-bush cranberries down along the rock-slide were ripe, their small globes glowing red. Across the forest of spruce and balsam below was an unfrozen blue lake and a green meadow, and beyond another dark forest of evergreens a cloud of mist rose in slow swirls from what must have been a swamp or a pond. Here and there around the perimeter of the valley white water splashed and fell in streams from the snowline, across gray rock, to disappear into the trees below. The valley was alive, not hibernating like the frozen wilderness from which he had come.
    He went back to the cave entrance to see if he could find any sign that Jen had come this way, and there upon a rock were her iron crampons, the small crampons his father had forged for her. Jen was nowhere in sight, but right there on the rock was the hard evidence that she had been here. He called for her, but got no answer, his voice thinning out across the distance. A mild wind moved the tops of the trees below, and the mist rose silently from across the valley. He untied his own crampons from his pack and put them beside Jen’s, so that she’d know he was here if she came back to the cave. Remembering what his father had taught him, he looked for more signs before making up his mind where she might have gone. He found vague smudges of bat dung that might have been made by her boots; he found a spot of drying blood, which scared him until he found the dead bat folded in upon itself like a small gray glove and saw that the blood had come from its wounds. Two broad-tailed hawks circled far above, riding the air and watching.
    Finally he decided that Jen would have gone down toward the far field by the lake. She would be following Oka, or hoping to find Oka, and that meadow would be a good place for a cow. Maybe he could pick up a trail farther down in the soft ground among the trees. He would find berries and water down there too, for he was hungry and thirsty and he would need energy to go on.
    As the sun rose above the mountain wall the air grew warmer, so he took off his parka, rolled it as tightly as he could and roped it to his pack before climbing down the rock-slide. The cranberries were bitter, but he ate some anyway, and put some in his pocket.
    When the trees rose around him like dark towers and the air dimmed into the cool green rooms of the forest, he thought again about the ancient gods that were supposed to inhabit Cascom Mountain. This valley itself must be part of the mountain, or in the mountain, if his sense of direction was right. He was certain his father had never been here. The valley was beautiful, with its strange warmth and fall colors. It was so easy to walk again, as he had