Echo Mountain: Chapters 11–24

But I knew I would soon be raising her dander again, so in the meantime I was the girl she wanted me to be.

I helped with the meal, thanked her for it, and cleaned up afterward, my voice quiet, my smile steady, until I thought perhaps she and even Esther had forgiven me for dousing my father that morning, though I knew they still blamed me for much more.

Since it was, in some ways, mine, I reckoned that I had the right to spend it as I wished.

“Oh, how spry you are!” I said to Maisie when I crept into the woodshed and found her on her feet, her tail wagging a little.

She gobbled the venison as I fed it to her on the flat of my hand, piece by piece, not just the gristle but soft meaty bits, too.

Raccoons, masked for plunder.

And skunks, hunting for grubs and worms and frogs too young to be quiet on a spring night.

A nice big one from Mrs. Anderson’s Rhode Island Reds, who feasted on marigolds and wheat berries and laid hearty eggs for all of us who lived nearby.

There was still light enough in the sky to coax me across the yard again toward the path that led to the balsam tree.

And I turned instinctively toward her voice.

So I said, “Just walking.” Something I did often. Something I had once done with my father, who also liked an after-supper ramble and the softness of dark air.

But I knew she would notice when I spread it on my father’s scar. The place where the tree had struck him. Which was as close as I could get to what ailed him.

Working with my mother to build the soap-fire, stirring the tallow into the kettle of lye water that hung over the flames, made me sorry for the silence between us, so I broke it.

The only hags I knew were in storybooks. Gnarled old creatures who cast spells and ate children for supper.

I had your mother lance it instead. It bled so bad I thought we’d made a mistake doing that, but the pus came with it. And then I recall we did put some honey on the open cut, and it healed right and quickly.

The tree broke just then. Began its fall. Began its great arc toward Samuel, its branches thrashing, slowing as it snagged on the branches of other trees, spinning heavily, and I charged beneath it, grabbing Samuel as I ran, both of us shoved from behind to land hard, just out of harm’s way.

But we all, together, finally managed to pull some of it off him, and then I bent away the thinnest branches until they bowed, taut and difficult, in my arms while my mother and Esther tugged him away inches at a time, Samuel crying “Daddy!” again and again but too small for anything else, my mother reaching through the branches, feeling my father’s neck, feeling for his pulse, finding it, and then with a mighty surge pulling him from the last of the tangle and onto open ground...

From somewhere up-mountain, an owl sounded lonely. Forlorn.

“I'm making some medicine," I whispered to Maisie as I lay down next to her, the puppies a muddle of dark softness against her belly.

There were many things that tempted me as we went down the mountain: a fresh-green meadow where fire from lightning strike had cleared a few acres of trees before rain had put it out; a vernal pool where peepers sang so loudly at twilight that we could hear them even far up-mountain; a granite ledge big enough for me to sit on, like a turtle in the sun.

"Git!" I suddenly yelled, waving an arm, and the dog loped off through the brush and out of sight, the rabbit flopping in his mouth, and I thought it odd that the dog had not eaten it right away, as most hungry dogs would, while it was still warm.

“Find me some bait,” I said to Samuel, who would have been happy to hunt crickets in September when they were thick on the ground but was less eager to forage for April slugs.

From my pack I took what looked like a bird’s nest: a ball of oak bark I’d shredded into coarse wood-thread and molded into shape.

When we reached the yard, we found my mother and Esther taking turns at the butter churn.

I knew that it would writhe and coil in my hands if I picked it up.

But I pictured the bedlam when Esther found the snake, and I imagined coming back to something besides reading and writing and arithmetic.

At the turn to the Andersons’, I paused and looked up the path to where it dwindled into the undergrowth.

“I’ll follow. Go on.” Which he did, heading along what was surely his own trail, fewer trees up here, patches of green moss, gray moss, humps of rock everywhere, lichen and mushrooms, stray feathers, and, suddenly, an antler like a hard white flower blooming in a nest of ivy.

A little farther along, the dog and I came through the stunted trees into a clearing, nearly flat, tucked against the topmost ledges of the mountain.

And I was suddenly filled with a terrible sadness and such longing that I felt empty and stricken and poor.

There was plenty of dried grass and moss and leaf litter near the cabin, all of which I gathered for tinder, carrying it inside to pile near the cold hearth.

There was a mangy dog, a tick as big as a lima bean hanging above his eye.

I went to the tools hanging above the workbench and chose a big chisel.

The maggots rolled and roiled as they feasted on the dead flesh around her wound.

I wanted to ask something else, but before I could she craned her neck and said, “I would be obliged if you would bring me some water.”