“Where are we going?”
“Upriver.”
By the time the two of them came out of the tent it had started to rain, a light mist, but nothing that Cobb would want to fly in. Going down to the boat, barely hampered by the giant plastic wader pants that hooked on straps over his shoulders, Torvo pulled the vessel in as easily as a feather. He then held it steady while he told Cobb how to get into the tippy vessel, and how to sit and stand. Cobb followed his directions as best he could, and managed to take his seat after only one short windmilling of his arms.
Torvo untied the anchor rope, splashed in after him and took his seat by the motor in the back. Without explanation he inserted a key into the device and pulled on a handle with a quick, strong motion. After three tries of whipping the rope and handle in and out of the motor, it finally roared to life. Cobb barely managed to fight the urge to scramble off the boat back to shore, away from the loud noise and the bitter smell of exhaust. But it wasn’t much worse than Hawna’s little vehicle. The best he could do was sit rigidly with his eyes tightly closed, trying to ignore the fact that he could feel the growling sound reverberating through the wooden seat beneath him.
When Torvo put the engine into gear, the sound abruptly quieted a bit. It was still noisy, but now it provided more of a constant roar rather than a noise that echoed off the far bank of the river. When Cobb felt the boat start to turn, with water ga-lunking under the boat in a strange, metallic fashion, he finally managed to open his eyes. Torvo sat looking at him with a big smile on his face, one hand on the motor, the other holding a beer from a small chest at his feet.
“You want one?” he asked.
“Yes,” Cobb said, wanting a beer-induced fog to try to quiet his nerves. He caught the tossed can, and without thinking about it opened it with a sharp crack-hiss.
“You like boats?” Torvo asked.
“I seem not to mind them. But the motor is very noisy.”
“It’s like the chainsaw; it’s just a tool. I steer with the rod, and we turn left or right. If something goes bad, you can press the emergency shutoff button here and the motor will stop, just like that. The oars are down by your feet; I’ll teach you to row some day when it’s not raining so much.”
Cobb turned his head this way and that as Torvo drove the boat around in a slow arc, until the pointed prow was facing upstream and Cobb was facing downstream. From down here on the water, the rising mountains above, covered with majestic green trees on the march, seemed even larger than when he had been on dry land. The river stretched northward, wider than a highway up toward where the trees obscured the first curve. Already Torvo’s tent on the rock looked small from here, now more like a tiny shelter than the castle it had seemed when he crossed over last night.
“If you want to face upstream, now’s the time to turn around before I gun it.”
Cobb nodded, and managed to turn himself around by sheer force of will. It took a moment to do it in the tippy craft without spilling himself or his beer, but he eventually faced out into the rain, thick droplets dripping off the brim of his hat onto his plastic overalls. When he was settled he nodded—and the boat lurched forward at speed, the clattering whine of the motor echoing off the trees that grew next to the water’s edge.
They drove upstream for long enough that Cobb finished his beer, and without thinking about it, crushed the can and set it by his right boot. He tried to look behind him a number of times, to see what Torvo was doing, but that would require turning all the way around again. He missed the flexibility of his black-feathered neck and decided that human eyes were very inconvenient.
While he saw a fish jump and a group of large forest animals make their way up a steep hillside, seemingly oblivious to the terrible noise their tiny watercraft was making, it was the wide-winged eagle flying overhead that nearly made Cobb wet himself. He had to remind himself over and over that he was human and that giant birds didn’t eat humans, even to the point of muttering it like a mantra until the king of the skies was safely past.
What was “human,” he wondered to himself as they started to navigate around another wide bend, skirting a part of the river littered with rocks, boulders, and small bumpy rapids. Here in the quiet, his brain seemed to be filled with more and more noise, with incompatible flashes of his human life and his crow life running into one another. He fidgeted, wanting something to do, wanting something to concentrate on that was new and interesting, something to take him away from thinking about the fact that this wasn’t his body, that he was no longer what he was.
Hawna, he decided. That was as good a topic as any. He settled into remembering the smell of her hair, her skin, of what it had been like when she kissed him good night Moments later he was shocked by the level of arousal in his pants that the stray thoughts caused. The rumble of the motor and the chop-chop of the low waves didn’t help things at all. As best he could, he started to think about anything but Hawna, something that would distract his suddenly impassioned loins.
Thinking about the Red Crow took all that away nicely. Then thinking about Old Thom and his flock in mortal danger brought him back to a state of relative calm. But he questioned what he was doing up here in Alaska, on a river in a boat miles and miles away from civilization, learning what it was to be human. Beer? Love? Chopping firewood? He didn’t understand any of it, and feared by the time he finally did understand, it would be too late for any of the ones he cared about in the roost.
Cobb closed his eyes, his body cold and his cheeks numb from the chill rain and wind. He just let it all run through him, a whole hurricane of thoughts that came and went of their own accord. Hawna, Torvo, Old Thom, the Red Crow, cabs and planes, bags of bread and sour beer.
Kory.
That was her name, he realized with a start.
Kory. The one that the human didn’t want to think about, but still had a picture of in his trashed apartment like some kind of shrine. Kory, whom he had sketched naked pictures of and tumbled with into bed afterward. Kory, with the bright blue eyes and blonde hair and—
Throwing up over the edge of the boat, losing his lunch, losing the beer, not knowing why, Cobb heaved and heaved until he was done, and then cried over something that he couldn’t grasp. He just knew that something had happened to her, something bad, and that she was lost to the human Cobb forever. Death, he decided as he wiped his mouth with the back of one hand. Death would do the trick.
“You okay, son?” Torvo shouted.
Cobb nodded, wishing he had more beer to wipe the taste of beer out of his mouth, something that he found very odd after having just thrown up all the beer he had in his stomach.
“You want me to pull to shore?”
“No,” Cobb shouted back. He didn’t want to walk around or risk get eaten by the giant four-legged horned animals. “It was a memory. Something that happened to Cobb when he was—“
He realized with no little horror that he was about to say the word “alive.” Cobb didn’t know if the person he wore was dead or alive, whether he was somehow sleeping down there in the dark or gone into the darkness forever. “Younger,” Cobb finally said with respect.
“Good.”
“Good?” Cobb said with no little shock.
“It means you’re starting to get into each other’s heads. The important stuff always comes like that. You’re incorporating your host very quickly.”
“Is that good?”
“Honestly, it might be too quick. It usually takes weeks, and you’ve only been at this for a few days.”
“Am I going to die?” Cobb said. He thought that the hurt in his heart at learning Kory’s name might just burst it. More than Hawna, even more than his own flock. Tangible. Real. Bleeding and raw.
“No,” Torvo shouted. “But it will probably feel like hell while you change.”
“Being human sucks,” Cobb yelled after a second, finding it was the most appropriate thing to say.
“Tell me about it,” Torvo yelled back, then gunned the engine toward
the north.
Over the next hour the rain slowed and stopped as the river started to narrow. Within another few minutes the sun came out and was warming Cobb’s face. With another beer drunk, Cobb was feeling better now, his mind nicely blank against the waves of thoughts that threatened to capsize him. Both he and his brain were tired of fighting, he thought to himself, and the muzzy feel of the beer was muffling any further outbursts by his psyche.
Torvo carefully drove the boat onto a long sandbar at the center of the river, high enough to include a set of house-size boulders amid a tumble of gray and red rocks. Following Torvo’s instructions, Cobb hopped out, then used the rope tied to the front of the boat to pull them up securely on shore. He got it right on the first try and wrapped the rope around a waist-high cylindrical rock that reminded him of a fat little dog.
“What are we here for?” Cobb asked once Torvo was safely out of the boat. The old man didn’t answer at first, but made a few extra loops and knots in the tie rope to make sure the boat wasn’t going to wander off. Cobb looked around at the ten-yard-long spit of sand and rocks they were standing on but saw nothing of interest save for jagged chunks of stone. About a hundred yards upriver, a wide, flat rockface spread out into the river from the shore, driving the water around its jagged edge. The rock outcropping led up to a steep vertical cliff that climbed and climbed up and up toward one of the mountain peaks above.
“We’re just going to sit and wait until something happens,” Torvo finally replied as he came up to Cobb, his boots crunching the river rocks and gravel beneath his feet.
“What’s going to happen?” Cobb asked, but was only handed one of two remaining beers.
“You just find somewhere to perch and drink that. It’s getting on toward dusk. We’ll be blessed soon enough.” Cobb did what he was told, and spent the next little while drinking his third beer. He wasn’t as cold anymore, and the sound of the water flowing past, ruckling across the rocks around them, was strangely soothing. He got up a couple of times, once to pace around the island looking for interesting things, and once to unzip and pee when he thought Torvo wasn’t looking from where he was perched cross-legged on one of the flat-topped boulders.
Just as he zipped up, Cobb heard a raven taw in the distance, followed by a begrudging croak-croak that echoed through the trees. A whir of feathers from overhead made him look up, to see a black-feathered raven with a shiny black beak and giant wingspan glide right past them toward the wide rock outcropping. Cobb watched, enraptured, as the bird flapped a few more times, then dove down toward the plate of stone, skimming the surface of the rock like a daredevil pilot—then abruptly soared up along the cliff, spiraling upward on the updraft, tawing and croaking its joy for the wind and sky.
Another raven quickly joined the first from a patch of trees a hundred yards upriver, wheeling up, spiraling up behind its friend in the afternoon updraft, the two playfully engaging each other in a wheeling midair game of tag. Even for all the time that he had flown himself, he had never seen anything like it. He just sat and stared at their aerodynamic feats with his jaw open, each turn and toss taking them up higher into the sky.
Then other ravens began to show up, all coming through the trees or from further upriver, now ten, now twenty, and then more than Cobb could count, until the entire pillar of air was filled with joyous feathered flight. Ravens who reached the top of the sky-game dropped down a thousand feet to re-engage the game of aerial tag with the new visitors just starting their ascent by the river’s edge. For nearly twenty minutes Cobb just stood there, beer forgotten in his hand, watching flight like he had never seen it before, and play, and joy, and flock, and—
All of it. It was everything he missed about his own people and missed in himself. As the ravens steadily ascended, climbing up to the very top of the updraft until they were just distant specks in the sky, Cobb could barely keep himself from crying for something between joy and self-pity.
When the last one was gone, gliding downriver over the trees toward their evening roosting spot, tawing out their goodbye to the sun, the old man came down off his rock, joints crackling and snapping in the cold. As he neared, Cobb could see that Torvo had been crying as well, his face wet with tears.
“What was that?” Cobb asked.
“That is where I came from, Cobb. Before I was chosen to be a two-in-one some forty years ago, that was my flock. The ones we saw today, those are likely the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of my flockmates. I know I’ll never fly again. Hell, I doubt I’ll even be able to even walk a couple of winters from now with the way my joints are going. But out here on the rock I can dream of what I once was, remember what it was like to fly, to be up there with the sun and my brothers and sisters and to … to belong. To belong to the sky, rather than just looking up at it like a dumb stump with feet.”
“So, you do get it,” Cobb said, thunderstruck.
“More than most,” Torvo replied. “More than you. The sacrifice you’re making, I understand it every time I take a step. There’s joy in being human, in what they do and how they do things. They can sing as well as we can, and mate and eat and drive fast on the highway. But nothing we do will ever get us flying back up there again. In the heavens. In the firmament where it all began. So when you feel pity for yourself, know you’re not alone. Lots of us have made the sacrifice to come across, to trade feathers for feet, and it’s generally worth it for those who survive long enough to make a difference.”
“When I left Old Thom and the roost,” Cobb said in return, “when the magic of the Bitching Tree put me into the young man lying at its roots, I knew I was leaving. But I thought I could get back when it was all done. Now I understand … that there is no going back. But the journey, the sacrifice I made. It has to be completed to mean something.”
“Hawna talks a lot, doesn’t she?”
“Too much,” Cobb said.
“You like her?”
“I do. She’s very nice. Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“Why did you name Hawna ‘river’?”
Torvo guffawed. “You think her name means ‘river’?
“That’s what she told me.”
“She steered you wrong, but not by much. Her name doesn’t mean river.”
“What does it mean?”
Torvo smiled widely, the mischievous joy barely contained by his face. “Hawna doesn’t mean river. It means ‘torrent.’”
Cobb started to laugh at that, and soon Torvo joined in, the two of them laughing together until Cobb’s sides hurt.
“I guess that makes a lot of sense, now that I think about it,” Cobb said when he could get enough air.
“She’s a wild thing, so I named her right,” Torvo replied. “But I still don’t know if she came out of the womb ready to be the torrent, or whether my magic shaped her into one. But I can tell you that everyone she meets gets swept away, or taken to strange places if they can manage to swim to her shore.”
Cobb nodded, not really getting it.
“Come on,” Torvo told him. “The show’s over. We’ve done enough brooding for the day. Let’s go back home again before night falls. I’d really like to take a shit sitting down rather than crouching over some mossy log in the dark.”
“You’re very poetic,” Cobb told him, trying to not think about his own grumbling bowels.
“It comes with the territory. I’ll play flute for you sometime if you don’t mind the sound of two screeching cats in a wooden box. Do you think you play any instruments?”
“I think I can draw,” Cobb said, surprising himself. He made a little smile, an odd one that kind of warmed his cheeks. “I guess Cobb draws.”
“Good,” Torvo said, slapping him on the back. “That kind of thing draws women like flies to honey.”
“I suppose so,” Cobb said, thinking of Kory, thinking of Hawna—and how lost he was between them.
[Sticks.]
By the time they got home from the river,
the fire in the woodstove was out and the rain was starting up again in earnest. Feeling cold and hollow, Cobb carried enough wood in from the tarp pile so Torvo could start a fire and the two of them could work together on dinner. With the rain came wind, and Torvo assigned Cobb to go around the outside of the tent and make sure that the ropes tying the tent down were not frayed or in danger of coming loose. Bracing himself against the cold spatter, he quickly made his way around the structure, checking at each of the pitons hammered into the rock cracks to ensure the tent wasn’t going to blow away in the night.
Dinner was warm stew out of cans and more beer, but it suited Cobb well enough. They ate together, talked sparingly about the weather, then cleaned up the bowls and the pan. Still trying to process everything he’d seen and done during the day, Cobb was ready for bed—but was surprised when Torvo went into the tool room and came out with a battery-powered lantern and a book.
“Are you going to read?” Cobb asked.
“No, you are,” Torvo replied as he set the lantern down behind them, then handed him the book.
“This is a … children’s book?” Cobb asked. It was a battered book about a boy inventor that had seen better days. Weirdly, Cobb felt that he recognized the cover, as if he’d read it long ago. But he knew little else about what was inside.
“It is a kid’s book. You’re going to read it to me tonight. Out loud.”
“This is part of the integration, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Torvo replied, expecting protest.
Cobb simply sat down and opened the book, riffling through the pages and the pictures to get an initial sense of the thing, to get a hint what it was all about. The book smelled like books should, he decided, though it also had a touch of river-must to it, as it if had been sitting in a box down here for a long, long time.
Torvo sat down in his rocking chair, beer in hand, and waited for him to begin. Cobb, turning to the first page of the story, began to read to his teacher, fumbling through any word that had two or three syllables. The shorter words he quickly remembered, but he didn’t know if he was pronouncing them correctly. Torvo didn’t make any effort to correct him, but simply sat with his eyes closed. He would tap his finger insistently on the armrest of his chair if Cobb stopped talking for too long, or would take lingering sips from his beer if Cobb read all the way through a passage without stopping.
The Bitching Tree Page 11