Now that he was safe, Cobb began to shiver from something more than just the cold. Exhaustion, he supposed. His nerves felt like they were on the brink, on the edge of shutting down as he trembled from head to foot.
“Take off those wet clothes,” Torvo ordered as he stooped to zip up the interior tent door against the cold. “You’ll find wader boots and clothes that should fit you in the trunk next to your bed. If your hands are too cold to undo the laces on your shoes, warm your fingers by the woodstove first.”
Cobb watched the old man go over to the stove where a burned-black coffeepot perched atop a piece of wire metal grill, the same kind that covered the rusty barrel outside. Torvo smelled like deodorant to Cobb, sharp and strong, but didn’t have any smell of must or sickness. Taking a pair of metal cups from a stack at the end of the table, the old man grabbed a protective mitt hanging off the woodstove’s smokestack, picked up the pot and poured them each a cup of something that smelled very good and quite awful all at the same time.
Cobb’s shoes were the first to go, followed by his socks, which left him standing on the prickly patchwork throw rug by his bed, the tough fabric itching at his toes. Putting his shoes and socks right up next to the stove, he was about to reach for the cup of coffee when Torvo cleared his throat.
“Yes?” Cobb replied, shivering even more now.
“Left shoe on the left, right shoe on the right. If something happens and we can’t get to the lights, you’re not going to lose valuable seconds trying to put on the wrong shoe.” Cobb nodded his acknowledgment and adjusted them, appreciating the advice. “And not so close. If you put them too close to the fire, it’s possible that your shoes will shrink and won’t fit your feet anymore.”
When his actions met his teacher’s satisfaction, Cobb gratefully took the cup of hot coffee with both hands. He sipped at it and it tasted terrible, but instantly warmed his insides.
“You like that?” Torvo asked.
“Yes,” Cobb replied. “Very much. But it’s very …” He tried to find the word. “Bitter.”
“Wait for tomorrow,” Torvo said after his own slurping sip. “Then you’ll know what bitter really tastes like.”
As Torvo turned to do something at the table, Cobb went back to his bunk and emptied out the pockets of his wet coat. Putting down the flashlight, the radio, the nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniels, the dead cell phone, and his still-damp wallet at the foot of the bed, he took off his jacket and draped it over the chair closest to the fire.
The chest at the foot of the bed contained a bunch of different clothing options, from thick, gray, musty-smelling sweatshirts to sweats to loose-fitting jeans with patches on the knees. Peeling off his own clothes and putting on a thick gray sweater and soft gray sweats, he had to resist the urge just to lie down on top of the covers and close his eyes. But he managed to change clothes, and following Torvo’s instructions, laid them across the camp chairs to dry—rather than across Torvo’s rocking chair. The rocking chair was Torvo’s, just as the top branch of the Bitching Tree always belonged to Old Thom. Back home, while all the other crows screamed and yelled out their displeasures and grievances from the lower branches, the crow on top was the one that made the decisions, who deemed whether this bitching or that bitching was worthy. That was why Old Thom was their king.
“So, when do we begin?” Cobb asked.
“We already have,” Torvo responded. “Days ago. When you first decided to come here.”
“But what—”
Torvo raised his hand to stop Cobb as he sipped hot coffee out of the mug held in the other. After the old man swallowed and cleared his throat, only then did he answer Cobb’s question. “Tomorrow. Tonight, you sleep and recover. Tomorrow after breakfast we’ll get you set straight.”
“I have a lot of questions.”
“I have a lot of answers. But to get the right answer, you’ll need the right question.” Setting the empty cup down, Torvo reached over and tossed him a couple of trail mix bars from the table, followed by a plastic bottle of water from a cardboard container by his feet. “Eat those. Drink that. If you have to pee or scat, do it in the little tent down on the back side of the island. If I catch you going past the flap into my tool room without permission, I’ll throw you in the river and be done with you. I’ll be up when dawn comes, stoking the fire and making breakfast. Until I have breakfast ready, you’re welcome to sleep and get your strength back. If you get up and ask questions, I’ll put you to work that much earlier. Are we clear?”
“Yes,” Cobb said, swallowing back his questions. While there were a hundred things that he wanted to ask that would help him with the Red Crow, most weren’t productive. As he methodically unwrapped and ate the sticky nuts-and-twigs bars and drank stale water from a plastic bottle, he couldn’t stop thinking about Hawna. Now that he was so close to her father, the unfamiliar thoughts made him feel awkward and even less like talking.
When Cobb’s makeshift meal was finished, Torvo took the wrappers and the bottle from him. He stowed the first in a sealed metal bin, and the second in a cardboard box labeled RECY. Cobb didn’t know what RECY meant, but it sounded menacing somehow.
Cobb yawned. Tugging the sheet and heavy blankets on his bed loose from the corners, he crawled in without bothering to take off his clothes. Even before he could adjust the pillow, both of the lanterns clicked off all by themselves, like magic, leaving the tent illuminated only by the firelight spilling from the grill at the front of the stove. As Cobb lay back, looking up at the gently rustling tent ceiling, listening to the night breezes blow by outside, he heard Torvo sit down in his chair and begin to rock, back and forth, in front of the fire. The snapping pops of firewood were accented by the low murmuring song Torvo sang under his breath, just barely loud enough for Cobb to hear. Tones and notes and words that made no sense, but seemed familiar nonetheless.
Cobb lay there for a time, not afraid of the dark, his nose full of woodsmoke and coffee and the river. Now that he knew the trick, Torvo’s method to wade out to his island was deceptively simple. But Cobb wondered how he would have handled it on the very first day he’d started to become human, when he still stalked the gutters for bugs and couldn’t stand the sight of his own reflection. The bones and sticks clattering in the trees would have frightened him senseless—not to mention that he never would have gotten on the back of the wheeled vehicle with Hawna or dared board a plane to Cordova. So much had changed in so little time.
He felt he was adapting quickly enough that he suspected he would be able to do his job, to save his flock from the Red Crow. But at what cost, he wondered? Was it possible for him to go too far, to lose the qualities that made him a crow and not a man? Thumbs were great and all, and he liked coffee and fire and plane tickets and all of the other things that humans took for granted. But Cobb wondered if there was a line that he shouldn’t cross, one that would tip the balance between his new self and the feathers he’d lost forever.
As he pluffed up his pillow and rolled over onto his side, he saw a glimpse of a familiar orange light through the flap to the tool room. It was a radio, just like the one that Hawna had, the one that Torvo used to receive his daughter’s messages. Cobb smiled at that as he drifted to sleep. As he’d trudged through the forest this afternoon, soaked to the skin, last night steaming with Hawna had seemed like a lifetime away. But now that he was safe and warm, the little orange glow gave him comfort, that she wasn’t as far away as he’d thought.
Morning.
Birdsong, unfamiliar. There was no smell of garbage trucks on the air, or the bustle and crush of early morning traffic in the streets below. Just the rustle of the tent ceiling above him as the wind made its way with the tide.
Cobb sat up slowly, not sure where he was at first. The woodstove, cold and dark, was his first clue, gave him reference to everything that had happened. Hawna, the ATV, and far too many buckets. While last night the tent seemed like a palace, now it seemed cramped and just high enough for him
to stand in. Daylight didn’t reveal much more than he’d seen last night, save that Torvo’s bed didn’t look like it had been slept in—or had been remade in such a way that Cobb could never tell that the two-in-one had lain there at all.
When he got out of bed Cobb was shocked at how cold it was. Even more than that, there was no sign of Torvo. There was no fire in the woodstove, or food waiting on a plate. Wanting to get dressed again, to put on even more layers of clothes over the clothes that he’d worn last night, he settled for taking his oddly crunchy socks and putting them on with his shoes, left-then-right, followed by his fire smoke–infused coat. While it was a bit of a production to get everything assembled, in the end he was glad to be warm enough to not be shivering anymore.
Stopping by the table, Cobb’s stomach growled at the sight of the box of nuts-and-twigs bars. He had the urge just to take three or four and stuff his face, and even started reaching toward the box—but then stopped himself. That was Torvo’s food, he decided. It was Torvo’s food to share and not his. It took a moment for him to pull his eyes away but he managed to do it. He unzipped and let himself out of the tent before temptation could win over his grumbling stomach.
Outside, a gray, foggy morning presented itself, with mist hanging low in the trees. In the distance a raven quorked, once, twice, three times, its reverberating call sending a shiver up Cobb’s spine. In front of the tent, down on the bank, he could see the firepit, the bottle barrel and the fast-moving stream between him and the shore. Everything was still there from last night without any change. But now, like the inside of the once palatial tent, everything seemed so much smaller, so much plainer now that he had gained another layer of human familiarity.
As he walked around the right side of the tent, careful not to trip over the fabric camp chair, he could see for nearly a quarter mile before the river curved around the edge of a steep hill covered with giant trees. Beyond that, the vast painting of the sky was starting to shine through the gray mist, patches of color against the morning fog.
Chock.
Cobb heard the noise and turned his head to look—and saw there was a lot more of Torvo’s island than he had expected. When he faced out toward the wide river rather than toward shore, the rock face gently sloped down to the river’s edge, where a wide, flat rock shelf ran the full length of the isle, its lip only a few inches higher than the swiftly flowing current. At the downriver tip of the island, right where Torvo’s motor boat was moored, rough-hewn stairs were chopped out of the stone right beside the scat tent, providing a well-worn path between home and the bathroom.
Chock. Then an odd wrenching sound as Torvo pulled the axe free. Curious, Cobb made his way down the slippery stone steps as Torvo stepped back, raised the tool with both hands over his head and swung down at the stick of raw wood once again. A solid strike—the long-handled axe-head bit deep, cutting the piece squarely in two. Confused, Cobb looked over to the water’s edge, where rows and rows of wood sat stacked, each pile nearly four feet high.
“Morning, Cobb.”
“Good morning, sir.” The smell of the raw wood made Cobb want to sneeze, sharp and crisp against the morning air.
“Drop the sir. Address me by my name or don’t address me at all.”
“Yes, Torvo.”
As Torvo kicked aside the pieces he’d chopped to a growing pile, Cobb let his eyes follow up to an outcropping on the isle, where a huge pile of logs and tree branches sat tangled together, carried there by the power of the water. Near the pile of dead trees, resting on an outcropping of rock, was a battered yellow tool of some kind, with a rounded blade and a pair of heavy-looking handles.
“I thought you were going to wake me up,” Cobb said. A few seconds passed before Torvo answered, giving Cobb time to listen to the river flowing past them.
“Humans are very unreliable creatures. They say one thing and do another, all the time.”
Cobb wasn’t sure what to say to that. “It’s very cold inside.”
“Then you had better get to work cutting some firewood for the stove.”
Cobb blinked. “Me?”
“You.” Torvo tossed him the axe; Cobb barely caught it by the handle. It was heavy, heavier than he had expected. The large metal head was covered with grooves and scratches. Going over to a pile of split wood, Torvo picked up a hefty chunk with both hands and brought it back. Placing it carefully on a knee-high round of wood, he stepped back and gestured at the chunk. “Let’s see what you can do.”
“I’ve never,” Cobb stammered, the tool feeling unfamiliar in his hands. “I’ve never done this before.”
“You haven’t. But it’s possible that your body has. Just like everything else, you need to learn what it has onboard. What it can do and can’t do. That means trying everything, at least once.”
Cobb nodded. Stepping up to the piece of wood, he looked at the axe and judged its length against his distance from the target. Raising the tool over his head in a rough imitation of how Torvo had planned his swing, Cobb took a breath then slammed it down. Part skill, part luck, the blade cut right through the shaft of wood, sending the pieces flying left and right with the force of his blow.
“Good job,” Torvo said. “I think you’ve done this before.”
“Thank you,” Cobb replied, then tried to yank the axe-head from where it had bit deep into the round. Eyebrows furrowing, he yanked two or three more times as he grew red in the face.
“You’ve got to learn your own power, though,” Torvo added. “But that will come in time.” With one hand the old man reached down and lifted the ax handle just right, so the head came out easy. “This morning I want you to cut me twenty pieces of wood before breakfast. Twenty pieces that will comfortably fit in my stove and keep me warm while you’re out here chopping later this afternoon.”
“Twenty?!”
Torvo gestured to the fallen sticks by the cutting log. “That’s two.”
“That was luck.”
“Then figure it out. I’ll answer just about any question you’ve got, as long as it’s about firewood. But you need to give yourself time to get used to your body, to learn how it moves, what it knows, how it thinks. Get me twenty pieces and I’ll cook us breakfast and we’ll talk about cutting as we eat.”
Cobb nodded, sensing he wasn’t going to get anything more out of him. “But you already have all that wood up by the tent. You need more?”
“Much the same way that crows hoard things, humans need to be prepared. You’ve seen a winter or two, not that Seattle gets winters of any real repute. But the more wood I have, the more work I do to save up for the future, the better the chances are that I’ll survive the storms to come. Out here in the wilderness it’s pretty much you and you alone.”
“I understand. But what if I can’t get it done in time?”
“Then you’re going to learn what it is to be real hungry.”
“But—”
Torvo clicked his tongue with irritation against the roof of his mouth. “You should get to it, then.”
“How long would cutting this much wood take you?” Cobb asked.
“That depends on the person,” Torvo replied. “Some folks could do that in twenty, thirty minutes. Other folks could never do it at all and would spend the day hungry and cold.”
Cobb nodded, then went over to look through the pile of wood pieces. By the time he’d found his first cutting candidate, Torvo was already making his way up the far stairs, his knees crackling like sticks as he mounted each step. Cobb was only three, but he suddenly felt very, very young by comparison.
The next couple of hours flew by quickly. After first making an awkward, smelly stop in the scat tent to relieve himself into the bucket, Cobb set himself to the task of choosing the chunks of wood that would be the best for his morning’s labor. To his surprise, it took him longer than he’d liked to assemble an army of wood pieces by his side, some large, some small. Once he started swinging, on his first good strike one piece spun off the b
lock, skittered across the stone embankment and splashed into the water out of his reach. Cobb resolved to try to check his swings a bit more at that point, both to keep his wood on the island as well as to preserve the strength he could feel ebbing out of his body.
By the time he was done with his twenty pieces, the sun was rising high. He set his ax down well away from the water, not wanting to lose it in case a rogue wave came up on the ledge. Carrying the first armload of wood up to the tent was easy. But the second load left him gasping and dripping with sweat. The third load left him trembling and picking splinters out of his palms. The fourth and fifth loads were pure torture, including having to go back down the steps to pick up a piece that had fallen and bounced and tumbled all the way down to the bottom.
When he arrived back at the top of the steps with the final piece, Torvo was waiting for him outside. Torvo nodded slight approval, took the final stick from Cobb and walked through the mesh flaps into the tent. Inside he opened up the front of the woodstove and tried to stick the log in—and Cobb’s shoulders shrunk as the end of the piece of wood stuck out of the opening.
“That’s not going to do it,” Torvo said. “Did you ever think about coming up here and seeing how long the pieces had to be? How big the interior of the stove is?”
“I am now,” Cobb replied sadly.
“Well, go fetch me some wood from the pile under the tarp, just behind the tent, then I’ll teach you how to build a fire. Then we’ll have some breakfast, we’ll talk for a little bit. Then I’ll send you back down to cut me forty more. Deal?”
The Bitching Tree Page 9