The Bitching Tree

by Scott Hungerford

“Is this it?” he asked. The place didn’t seem like a repository of sacred knowledge. He couldn’t imagine any two-in-ones getting their teaching here.

  “This is my father’s old hunting shed. What we want is around back.” Getting out of the truck, she slammed the door, and Cobb was quick to follow her lead, backpack slung over his shoulder. In the back, a small, rickety metal shed was tucked up against the house, alongside a long pile of cut firewood under the eaves. Taking her ring of keys, she chose an oddly shaped one and opened the padlock on the accordion door. Inside was a strange little red vehicle, with four wheels and two seats, one behind the other.

  Within a few moments Hawna had wheeled it out of the shed and was handing Cobb a helmet, a strange, claustrophobic device with a flip-down plastic visor. At first sight, Cobb decided he’d never hated something so much in his life.

  “Put it on,” she told him. “We have a ways to go yet.”

  “Do I have to?”

  “There’s good odds we’ll hit something on the way, like a rock or a tree branch. I don’t want you getting your skull split open.”

  Cobb looked up at what little sky he could see through the trees and wished he could fly, just this once, just once more, so he wouldn’t need to wear the helmet or have to ride the smelly, dangerous contraption to get where he was going. Holding his breath, he put the helmet on, then let Hawna fasten the straps beneath his chin.

  Hawna got on first, swinging her leg over the seat before sitting down. Then she had him sit, grabbed his hands and put them around her waist, then told him to hold on tight. She throttled up and got the weird little vehicle moving, and Cobb clung tighter to her as she purred the vehicle around the edge of the cabin and back to the paved road—where she gunned it fast enough that all the trees and bushes turned into a green blur. She cried out in glee; Cobb closed his eyes and clung tighter, and hoped that the terrible engine roar wasn’t going to make him lose his breakfast.

  They followed the road for a while, then turned off onto a dirt track, this one racing through stands of trees, across open meadows filled with grass and flowers, then dodging along the edge of a fall of giant boulders and streams amid a river of spilled rocks and shale. A giant beast fled from them at one point, a huge rack of antlers standing out from its brow. Its hoofed feet kicked up clumps of moss and dirt in order to get away from the noisy mechanical intruder.

  They went up one hill and down the next, turning past a pond, then around a toppled tree longer than most buildings his human had lived in. As they drove and drove and drove, Cobb tried to remember the path, to get a sense of where they were going, of where they had been. But the helmet effectively blocked most of his peripheral vision, and Hawna’s back blocked the rest of the view. Every ten minutes led to a new path, a new winding route through the backcountry, leading him farther and farther away from the hunting house and the road he knew to Hawna’s home. He knew he was badly lost, and could never find the way back even if his life depended upon it.

  After driving up and down a series of ridges and zooming along nondescript bog-trails for another half hour, Hawna finally slowed and turned off the trail into a stand of impossibly tall trees. Looking up as best he could, Cobb could see a touch of blue through the riot of green leaves and silver bark above, the wind-brushed canopy blotting out most of the sky. Hawna drove slowly through the cathedral of primeval growth with a kind of reverence, looking this way and that, as if she were trying to find the best way to navigate through the crowded pews of log and stump and fallen branch.

  When they came to the top of the hill, she stopped the ATV and killed the engine. Relieved to finally have stopped moving, Cobb took off his helmet—and was struck by the rush of fragrant, wet smells lingering in the air all around him. He’d lived through storms in Seattle on more than one occasion. The mingled scents of this place were a lot like that, rich and loamy and touched with an undercurrent of green and needle that made the air taste rich and clean.

  As Hawna got off the bike, took off her helmet and stretched, a little bird flew off, crying alarm. Cobb watched the bird go, wondering what it was saying in this alien place, this sacred grove of green light and whispering trees.

  “We’re here,” she told him.

  “Where do I go?” he asked.

  “Just down this ridge here,” she said as she pointed toward the gentle slope leading down into the trees. “At the base is a river, and my father’s summer lodge is on a rock in the stream. That’s where you’ll find him.”

  “Thank you,” he blurted out, too quickly for his own liking. Cobb had wanted to say something appropriate, something meaningful before Hawna gave him back the reins to his life again.

  I would nest with you, he suddenly wanted to tell her. I would spread my wings and fly with you, beat for beat, breath for breath, until Mother Death takes us to our final place, together. But it was too quick, too soon, madness in the face of all he had to go through now, especially since his training was about to begin. Hawna didn’t even know him, and he didn’t even know Hawna. But the words were true, even if unsaid, and that was the worth of the matter.

  “You’re welcome,” she replied. “Be quick, little crow. If daylight runs out, you’ll have a much harder time of it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Too much,” Hawna said, as she took her seat on the ATV again, lashing down his helmet on the seat behind her. Cobb came up to her, wanting to ask her more questions. But she kept him at bay by putting on her helmet and keying the engine, loud and uproarious, its mechanical din echoing among the close-knit trees. “Tell my father hello, okay?” she shouted.

  “I will!” Cobb shouted back, sad to see her go. She nodded, then accelerated forward in a large semicircle, slow and purring, leaving deep tracks in the needles and the loam. He waved, even though he knew she couldn’t see him anymore. He watched as she made her way back the way they’d come, down through the trees until she was only a red speck against green, a mote of color under the midday sun. After a while, that was gone too, and all he could hear was the drip-drip of water droplets spattering onto the leaves and ground around him.

  Then, silence. Just the wind, his heartbeat, and the discordant wind chimes of his own regret.

  Cobb went down the hill, keeping his ears open for wolves and worse, knowing full well that he was out of his league in this ancient place. Within a hundred steps he caught a glimpse of the serpentine river through the trees below him, impossibly blue and quite wide. As his path was funneled downward by cliffs falling away along one side, he soon came onto a low plateau of sorts, a flat place covered by trees, just another hundred steps away from the river’s edge. There wasn’t much brush underfoot, just lots of tall, old trees overhead, gnarled and heavy under the weight of their own wood.

  He caught the scent of woodsmoke; he knew he had to be close.

  Continuing forward over the uneven ground, Cobb started rehearsing in his mind what he was going to say to the teacher, how he would introduce himself and his cause and tell him about Old Thom and the Red Crow and the Bitching Tree and everything in between. But a strange clacking sound stopped him, both in mind and body. He paused midstep, frozen in place, trying to identify it. After a few seconds, he forced himself to look up, to see what was making the dreadful clatter.

  Bones. There were bones and sticks and metal hanging from the trees above by long bits of string and twine, all clacking against one another with every twist and turn of the wind. Something in him, something primal and deep, didn’t want to take another step. But he’d come this far, and the sound of bleached bones striking against one another wasn’t going to deter him. They were too far above the ground for him to reach, and he was too far down for them to leap out and attack.

  One of everything was up in the trees; shattered ax handles, empty soup cans, bones and sticks and skulls of animals of a size he couldn’t even fathom. He kept walking toward the river, warily keeping an eye above him, knowing that just a few days before,
he couldn’t have come anywhere near this place. But today it was different. The clackers couldn’t hurt him, not in this form, not at this size. He resolved to not let their clamor bother him.

  Then the wind came up for a moment, setting the entire symphony of sticks and bones and cans in play, the eerie percussion causing shivers to crawl up his spine. A low droning whistle sounded as well, lasting only as long as the wind ruffled Cobb’s hair. The noise reminded him not of ghosts or other human haunts, but the rush of a coming train on the tracks, wheels big enough to crush him into meat and gristle if he strayed too close.

  When the wind completely subsided Cobb continued on, gladly leaving the clattering behind. Up ahead, he noted a different color through the trees. At first glance it was tan, with straight black lines and reflective bits. As Cobb got closer, he could see that it was a large tent, at least thirty feet long, with windows on the sides, tarps on the roof and a zip-up door on the front, perched on a giant slab of rock sticking up from the flowing water. Smoke rose out of a makeshift chimney, a metal tube poking up through the roof. Cobb could hear a radio playing, a solemn tune played on some sort of instrument, without words or complex chords.

  Sitting about ten feet out from the bank, the rock was a perfect castle against the wilds of nature. With a deep channel of water cutting between the rocky shore and the natural island, and the wide river flowing beyond the island at speed, the teacher had chosen a very defensible spot. Cobb was amazed to see firewood stacked and cut down on the lee end of the rock, right above where a little boat with an oversized engine bobbed at its tie-up.

  In the clearing where Cobb stood were two anomalies; a firepit stacked with dry firewood, and a large, rusty metal barrel with a few holes poked in it. Investigating, Cobb saw that the green firewood was freshly cut, still bleeding sap. When he went over to the barrel by the tree, he saw that the old container had a thick, heavy metal grating welded onto the open top of the barrel, with a perfect square cut in the middle. The barrel itself was bolted into the tree roots at its base.

  Circling the barrel, trying to decide what to make of it, Cobb finally peeked down through the metal grill and saw three white tubes laying on a bed of old pine needles and other debris. Trying to reach the tubes, he tried first with one arm, then the other, and then with a short stick he picked up from the ground. But he couldn’t even get close. Even if he had a tool or a rock heavy enough to damage the heavy barrel, Cobb suspected it would take him a very, very long time to batter a hole big enough to pull the tubes through. He stared at the objects for a while through the grating, thinking, but came to no conclusion that would help him understand the puzzle.

  Turning his attention back to the tent on the rock, he was surprised to now see someone sitting in a camp chair just outside the door. Dressed in a warm plaid jacket, heavy brown pants, a wool cap and brown boots, the very tall man looked like he was in his sixties. Wrinkles, time-weathered skin and shoulder-length gray hair were the next things Cobb noticed, not to mention the intense eyes that watched his every step. Across the man’s lap lay a shotgun, black and polished, one hand resting carefully on the stock.

  Cobb stepped up next to the black water, water so deep and fast he could barely see the bottom of the channel. While his edge of the riverbank sloped down right to the water’s edge, the cliff of rock that the tent sat on made him peer up a bit, so he was craning up to see the old man in the chair.

  “Hello!” Cobb finally said. In silent response, the old man waved back slowly, one-handed, not taking his other hand off the weapon.

  Cobb waited to be called onto the rock, looking this way and that for a bridge or a log or some way he could get himself onto the island. He didn’t see any way to do it, save for one spot where he might be able to leap from the shore to the rock if he had a really good running start.

  “Hello!” he called out again, and earned only the same polite little wave in response. Frustrated, he got right up to the river’s edge, cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “Excuse me! Old Thom sent me! He said I should see you!”

  The old man nodded, then got up out of the creaking, snapping chair. He shuffled across the stone until he was right across from Cobb, black shadow against bright sky.

  “You here to learn?” the man asked.

  “Yes,” Cobb replied, trying not to squint against the glare. “I need to learn to fight like a human, so I can keep my flock safe.”

  The old man nodded, as if pondering what Cobb was saying. “Then when you find your way over here, I’ll take you in.”

  Cobb looked left and right again, trying to figure out just how he was going to do that. “There’s no bridge. You have the only boat.”

  “I’ll tell you only one thing,” the man said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Crows can’t swim, and men can’t fly. Fucking figure it out.” Then he turned and went back into his tent, letting the fabric door’s magnets click shut behind him.

  “What?” Cobb said, looking around a final time. “But I don’t see any way—”

  The music turned up louder inside, drowning out Cobb’s outcry.

  Cobb sighed and shook his head. This was going to be harder than he’d expected. But he wasn’t beaten yet. Looking first upriver, then downriver, he walked along the bank, looking for some way he could make it over to the island. But the floodplain had little to offer in the way of bridges except spindly branches, giant logs too heavy for him to lift, and head-size rocks that would never fill up the fast-moving waterway between the shore and the island.

  Heading upriver, Cobb traveled for about fifteen minutes before the cliffs swooped in, cutting him off, leaving him no alternative but to return the way he came. Downriver just opened up into a wider expanse of trees. While he went farther this time, he didn’t stray far enough around the bend that he would lose sight of the old man’s camp.

  Nearly an hour after he had started his search, Cobb was back sitting on a large rock near the stack of firewood pondering what he had to do. He thought again and again about whether he might be able to jump to that slightly low point at the middle of the island. Then, if he could scrabble his way up the stone to safety atop the isle, he would be fine. But if he missed, or mistimed his jump, he would most certainly end up in the fast-moving water below.

  He made up his mind. After placing his backpack next to the rock, Cobb moved up to the river’s edge until he was facing the door of the tent, toward the little lip in the rock. Cobb then stepped backward, one step two step, three step four, until he was forty steps back from the river, enough so that he could make a great running start. Rubbing his hands, without knowing why he was rubbing his hands, Cobb prepared himself to run and jump, to use the desperation of his cause to hurl himself onto the island, to crawl to the old man’s feet. He knew that Hawna would want him to make this jump, to do this impossibly human thing so he could begin his training.

  Cobb started, one foot in front of the other, a rushing locomotive of speed and sound, his senses becoming a blur of green and water and bellowed breath. His timing was good, his doubts were gone, and he could see the ledge coming toward him. He knew that one foot would go here, one hand would go there, and he would climb up onto the rock like a champion.

  Twenty steps to go and Cobb is at a full run. His human has done this before when he was younger, when he was in school, and he feels like his limbs are working perfectly. Ten steps, then eight, and he sees the old man coming through the tent door, shotgun in hand, raising the barrel to the sky. Six steps, then four, then two, his entire body reaches, yearns, strives for that point of liftoff, strives for that line where he will leave the earth and fly, fly across the black water and land victorious on the far side, arms outstretched—

  The old man fires the shotgun, an explosive, terrible, shocking sound. A sound like the world coming apart, a thunderclap right up close, the world’s fury contained within a single startling moment.

  Cobb freaks out midstep, midleap, an
d flails straight into the black current. When he surfaces, spinning downstream, his skin burning with the cold, he spits and coughs out most of the water he just swallowed. There is nothing beneath his feet. He is flailing in the liquid, trying to find purchase where there is none to be had. Looking up through water-blurred vision, he sees the old man standing on the edge of the rock, shotgun barrel resting on his shoulder, silently waving goodbye to Cobb with his free hand, a playful smile on his face.

  “Fuck you!” Cobb yells, shaking his wet fist at the mean old bastard. “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” he calls out again and again, before the current pulls him away from the island and out into the open river beyond.

  Five minutes later, Cobb came to rest on a wide sandbar sticking out from the bank, his heavy body forced into the shallows by the cold current. Kneeling up, coughing out the last of the water he’d swallowed during his journey, he managed to get up, then stagger and trip his way along the mucky, muddy outreach to the safety of the shore.

  He threw himself down on the ground, laying on his back and shivering with cold. Beyond frustrated, he just stared up at the impossibly wide blue sky above. He has the urge to swear some more. But deep down, he is just too cold and too tired to care. He decides that he’ll save it until the old man is close enough that the foul language would actually do some good.

  After a minute or two, when Cobb realized that he was just going keep shivering if he lay there, he roused himself, water draining out of his clothes onto the stony ground as he got to his feet. He pondered what it would take to distract the old man, to give him the chance to try the run again. That’s when he realized that he wasn’t going to make the jump. That even without the blast he probably would have made it little more than halfway across the stream. Then he’d be here again on the sandbar, with even less time and less idea of what to do.

  Looking up, Cobb saw spots of color in the trees, unnatural hues among the brown and green. Turning his head quizzically, he saw buckets hanging from branches, at least a dozen of them. Approaching the strange foliage, he saw that half of them were old, rusted buckets, painted in reds and blues. The other half were plastic, with both thick and thin shells. But all of them had their handles looped over low branches that were within reach. All of them also had at least a few holes in them, where someone had opened up their skins with a nail or a knife, making holes big enough for Cobb to put his thumb through.