The Bitching Tree

by Scott Hungerford

  Cobb nodded, his shoulders already feeling the strain of the weight.

  “If you drop it, there are good odds that it is going to spin and come after you—and you could lose a foot. I don’t have any spare feet in my boxes but I can carve a mean gravestone when I put my mind to it.”

  “That’s not funny,” Cobb told him.

  “I’m not being funny,” Torvo said with an expression on his face that clearly showed he was not being funny. “Now let’s get this started up. Put it back down on the stump, get a good grip on it and pull back on this handle here with your other hand, with a strong but steady motion. Don’t lift it but just keep it right there.”

  It took Cobb a couple of tries, but on the fourth one the chainsaw roared to life. When he realized what he was doing he let go of the chainsaw and was already ten feet away and backpedaling fast. As the chainsaw choked out, Torvo gave him a disapproving look. Cobb felt himself shaking from head to toe; he felt like he was going to spray his breakfast out of every hole he had.

  “Get back here and try that again,” Torvo insisted. “This time don’t run.”

  Cobb came back, his hands feeling paper-light, his heart hammering in his chest. “There’s a reason crows don’t have chainsaws,” he muttered under his breath.

  “There’s a reason crows don’t have kitchen matches, either,” Torvo snapped. “Now do this and just have the wherewithal to stay put and lift it up off the cutting stump by an inch or two. Don’t do anything. Just let it run. Feel it purr in your hands.”

  Cobb nodded, and came up and took his grip. Preparing himself, he took hold of the starter handle and gave it a strong, swift yank—and again the chainsaw roared to life. As it revved and rattled, Cobb managed to keep a hold of the tool, to keep his place by the stump without running—but soon realized that he was screaming in near-perfect pitch with the chainsaw.

  But a few moments later he stopped yelling and started to smile, power-mad, king of the roost, especially when Torvo showed him how to rev the engine, to gun the blade for short periods of time. By the time Torvo had hoisted a large round of wood onto the cutting stump, they were laughing together and making jokes. A few minutes later, after a couple of aborted tries, Cobb made his first cut deep into the waiting trunk, slicing a sizable chunk off the side, the piece of splintery wood clattering to the ground at his feet.

  After Torvo had him finish splitting the remaining round into four remarkably useless parts, he had Cobb kill the engine and put the chainsaw down again. Shaking, exhausted, but thrilled to still be alive, Cobb immediately went over and sat down by his wall of wood. With creaking bones Torvo sat down next to him, cross-legged, calmly watching the river flow while Cobb gasped for breath.

  “It gets easier, doesn’t it?” Cobb asked as he took the goggles off his head.

  “Not entirely,” Torvo replied. “But you do get used to it. After a while you won’t jump or start anymore at the sound, but it will just be one more noise. Like the wind or the sound of the river.”

  “An exceptionally angry river,” Cobb added.

  “I’m going to cut you a few more rounds today for splitting. But you can count on that every morning we’re going to do this exercise. While we only have a few logs left in the pile that are worth splitting, I’m going to have you do some of my work every day. The first snows of winter aren’t all that far off. Deal?”

  “Deal,” Cobb replied, taking and shaking Torvo’s hand, still feeling like he wanted to hurl.

  True to his word, Torvo pushed Cobb into taking up the chainsaw every morning—and by the end of the week Cobb was starting to cut rounds off the ends of the pile of dead trees under Torvo’s strict supervision. When they cut off the last piece of workable wood in a final spray of noise and wood chips, Torvo told him that they were done with the chainsaw until spring, something that gave Cobb great relief. Every night in his dreams he imagined he was being chased through the trees by a chainsaw demon, a giant mechanical monster he couldn’t see or hear. But he had learned to run very fast through the dream forest and to keep an ear out for the metal beast, especially when it was prowling with its motor running low.

  All of the newly cut rounds gave Cobb a sizable mountain of wood to split, especially against the threat of the first snows of winter. Even Cobb, who had lived on the tiny island for only a little while, started to notice the signs. Colder mornings, patches of ice, even the hiss-rattle of sleet on the tent’s roof late at night. White snow like dust had started to accumulate on the higher peaks. But he continued to learn, to read, and to do all kinds of things under Torvo’s instruction.

  While freehand sketching oatmeal containers, the woodstove, and even Torvo’s rocking chair on a notepad gave his mind a chance to relax at night, working with needle and thread to patch clothes, boiling laundry, carrying buckets back to the bucket tree, and fishing out the stones he put into the barrel weren’t quite as nice. But it was work that needed to be done, and Cobb understood that if he and Torvo didn’t do it, nobody was going to do it for them.

  At the end of the second week, during an afternoon when a crisp wind was blowing out of the west, Torvo had Cobb bundle up in extra layers. Together, they headed up through the notch at the top of the ridge out into the rolling hills beyond. Populated with trees, bushes, deadfalls, marshy ground and stagnant pools of bug-laden water, it wasn’t Cobb’s favorite thing. On top of that, the care and attention that Torvo took in showing Cobb sets of tracks, whether small rabbits, a fox, or a bird that came in for a quick landing—it honestly bored him to tears.

  He did his best to learn the lessons, to identify the kinds of tracks, to follow Torvo and his walking-stick as he hunched over the ground for minutes at a time, evaluating minute patterns of scuff and overlay. Cobb was bored, cold, and incredibly tired of being bitten by insects both large and small, but Torvo never seemed to get weary of the lessons. Cobb didn’t say anything about it, but he kept catching Torvo looking at him sideways, as if the old man could hear the treasonous rattletrap of thoughts banging around in Cobb’s head.

  Cobb wondered again and again whether he should be learning skills that would help him to survive in the city. There were dogs and cats aplenty in the city to follow, as well as seagulls, robins, sparrows and crows. But he didn’t know what this knowledge would do for him when he was facing his mortal enemy or trying to track his foes across a sea of unyielding concrete.

  The tracking lessons went on for four days, until one late afternoon session when Cobb finally reached the end of his patience. They had been traveling in the path of a bull moose, the lumbering beast no more than a few minutes ahead of them by the way its stinky droppings steamed in the cold air. But when the skies let loose with another squall of cold, stinging rain, Cobb let out a great, tired sigh—and Torvo whipped around on him.

  “Are you bored?!”

  “Yes,” Cobb said honestly, glad to have it out in the open.

  “Does what I’m teaching you bore you?”

  “Tracking, yes. Everything else, no.” Torvo didn’t say anything in response, so Cobb continued. “I can recognize the signs left by all kinds of creatures now. I can follow trails. But I just don’t see what this has to do with Red Crow. Or Seattle.”

  Torvo turned his head to the side, just a little bit, as if sizing Cobb up. It was a very predatory motion, and Cobb suddenly realized that he’d done something terribly wrong.

  “I’m sorry,” Cobb stammered. “I shouldn’t have said anything about the Red Crow. That’s for mealtimes only. Not out here.”

  “Apology not accepted,” Torvo hissed. “So, you think you’ve learned everything about tracking that you need to know?” In the distance, lightning flashed—and thunder rocked the heavens a few seconds afterward.

  “Yes,” Cobb gambled. “Yes, I have.”

  “We’ll see about that.” With a fluid motion Torvo pulled out a can from his pocket, aimed it at Cobb’s eyes and pressed the nozzle—and stinging, spraying hell took root in Cobb
’s nose. As he staggered up against a dead, rotting tree, screaming at the pain in his suddenly swollen eyes, he rubbed at the spray coating with his gloved hands, unable to stop the terrible burn. His nose was starting to run, to pour gunk down his face and lips even as he coughed and wheezed phlegm with every breath.

  Cobb heard Torvo’s canteen land at his feet with a watery ka-clunk sound, bouncing off his boot. Dropping to his knees, Cobb grabbed the container, manually spun open the lid and gurgled some of the contents on his face. Unzipping his jacket, he took the hem of his flannel shirt and tried to wipe off as much of the burning oil as he could. Within a couple of minutes, by using all of the contents of Torvo’s water bottle, he was finally able to open his eyes again, though the feeling of hot, burning sand under his eyelids made him constantly tear up.

  That’s when he realized that Torvo was gone. That Cobb was alone in the rain. He looked around the trees, around the rot and the wet and the mossy green to see if his teacher was anywhere in sight. But he wasn’t. Looking up at the sky, he tried to let the cold rain run down his face, occasionally bending over to cough and hack up more snot. Using the contents of his own canteen now, he spent twenty minutes clearing the worst of the effects from his eyes by splashing himself again and again, all while doing his best to rub and blink away the irritant.

  Thunder crashed again, this time closer. Cobb knew that sound well from his training—he had to get in from the storm. He was mad at Torvo, mad at himself for not being a good enough student. But he knew that if he was still out in the storm after it got dark, he could die out here very easily.

  Looking down, Cobb found their paired tracks and started following them backward out of the clearing, back the way they had come, noticing for the first time the stride of his own step and the slightly off-kilter stride of Torvo’s boots, punctuated by the regular stab in the ground from his walking stick. Their prints mixed with the bull moose’s hooves, but Cobb could easily read the human footprints from the animal’s.

  Breaking into a sprint, he moved up the trail through the wet brush as fast as he dared, knowing that the rain would start to wash away their footprints. He knew that they had come onto the moose trail and turned right, so he would need to look for where their prints broke left at some point. A few minutes later, when he saw that the bull moose’s prints were now without any of his own prints, he had to double back, slow down and find where he and Torvo had intersected the trail in the first place. More rain was coming down now; the branches on the trees dripping with wet, drops spattering off his jacket and hat as he slogged forward through the rain.

  Now that he was deep in the trees, he didn’t know where the cut down to the river was. He knew from Torvo’s lessons that it was easy to get disoriented in the forest, especially when there wasn’t any sunlight to help you keep your bearings. So he kept his head down and moved along, following the trail of two clunky humans making their way through the brush. He didn’t try to imagine or guess where the proper way was to go but instead just focused on the tracks—because one mistake could leave him out here to freeze until morning. As puddles began to form up in his old boot prints he scurried faster, following their trail up one hill and down another—until thunder roared and the rain opened up like a waterfall.

  While his face felt better under the cold, stinging rain, it felt to Cobb like he was drowning in a sea of water. The definition of the prints was fading and soon the only truly identifiable thing he could find was the round imprint of Torvo’s walking staff that pierced the ground like clockwork every five feet or so. Within another ten minutes the rain abated, reducing down to a misty drizzle. But Cobb was already moving up the slope toward familiar ground, out of the bogs and up toward the trees that he knew were close to Hawna’s cathedral.

  A few minutes later, breathing a sigh of relief, he came up over the rise and saw the river and Torvo’s tent down below. With smoke already rising up the chimney from the freshly stoked fire, the interior lit by warm light, it looked safe and like home. Cobb was pissed at what Torvo had done to him and knew that the rage wouldn’t lessen anytime soon. But he knew now that everything Torvo taught him, large and small, would keep him alive. He decided to redouble his resolve to learn everything he could. Being sprayed in the face with burning hell was overkill in his mind, but if he could navigate his way through the bogs of Alaska in a pouring rainstorm half blinded, exploring human cities should be significantly easier by comparison.

  Cobb trudged down the hill, boots squishing with every step, then cut through the area beneath the rattling sticks and bones. He just wanted more than anything to get in out of the rain and the cold. Coming up to the island, he walked right out onto Torvo’s clever plastic bridge—

  —and fell straight down into the water. No bridge. No bottom. Just the fast current of cold water eating away the last of his warmth. Flailing, gasping, shouting, he screamed as he was dragged, tossed and tumbled down through the narrow channel, his heavy boots and pants threatening to drag him down to the bottom. He managed to splash to the surface only through sheer willpower. A few minutes later, after swearing at the sky and Torvo and everything he hated right now, he washed up on the rocky, muddy spit by the bucket tree, half climbing, half dragging himself out of the drink onto the rough stones.

  “Fuck you, Torvo,” he coughed when he finally got enough air to swear. “You can go fuck right off.”

  “Fuck you, too,” Torvo said vehemently from somewhere up ahead of him, a voice in the darkness. When Cobb looked up, he could see the old man decked out in foul weather gear sitting underneath a branch laden with buckets. He was smoking a pungent cigarette of some kind, its burning coal the only source of light in the fading dark.

  Getting himself up, Cobb struggled and stumbled up the bank and came right up to Torvo. Not sure what else to say, he slopped himself down next to the old man and put his back to the tree, the rain on his face warmer than the river water still draining out of his shoes.

  “That was pretty shitty, sir.”

  “You can never take anything for granted in the human world,” Torvo replied. He dragged on the cigarette, intensifying its burning glow. “Every step has to be measured, taken with intent and grace. Just because you think the ground beneath your feet is solid doesn’t mean it actually is. Just because you think you can trust a person doesn’t mean you actually can.”

  “Humans and crows aren’t that much different.”

  “But crows can fly,” Torvo stated.

  “And humans can swim. Right. Whatever.” Cobb coughed up some more river water, more than sure now that he was going to be sick in the morning.

  “In the future, are you going to dismiss me again so easily?” Torvo asked.

  “Maybe,” Cobb said honestly, feeling that some of their trust was broken. “The bridge you took away? I could have died. Spraying me in the face with whatever that was—”

  “Pepper spray. Store-bought.”

  “That really wasn’t necessary. I would have listened to you if you had just yelled at me.”

  Torvo took out a flask from his inside pocket and handed it to Cobb. “Do you think your enemies are going to be any nicer to you? Do you think they are going to yell at you if they catch you off-guard? If they catch you making a mistake, even mouthing off at the wrong time because you’re irritated or bored, you’ll be dead. You might feel in your heart that it’s right to bitch and moan and not pay attention. But you’ve got to swallow that crap down, do the mission, and get done what needs to get done. Because losing everything you’re fighting for by giving into petty emotions is humanity’s greatest weakness. It’s why they’re never going to be a great race. An amusing, difficult, ornery, opinionated, inventive, loving, hateful, spiteful race. But nothing that the gods will ever look back on with familial pride. You get me?”

  Cobb took the flask, opened it and drained half the contents, the raw whiskey a blessing on his throat and his stomach. “I get you. I have to learn to live with both the advan
tages and the flaws.” He handed the flask back to Torvo. “But taking the bridge was still a really shitty thing to do.”

  “I was mad,” Torvo told him. “The longer I’m out here in the wild teaching you kids how to think, how to work and walk and survive, the more of you I see die. The more of you I see fail. Every time one of you fails, I feel like I’ve failed. Every time that happens, the world is that much worse off because I didn’t do right by you. Going easy on you, Cobb, that would be an easy thing to do. I honestly like you and I think you have a lot of potential. But I learned too late as a two-in-one that I have to trust my instincts. That I can be kind when I feel like it and I have to be damned hard on you when I think it might keep you from getting killed. I’m not going to change what I’m doing, not with the stakes that you’re facing. But if you dismiss me again so easily, over something so small … I honestly don’t know what I’ll do.” Torvo inhaled off his cigarette, then let the smoke exhale out his nostrils. “I’m still me.”

  Cobb, already feeling drunk, managed to find the strength to stand, though it took holding himself up by a bucket branch. “I’m still me, too. I’m still going to learn from you. I’m still going to save my people. But we need to move on. Could we go back home and get some dry clothes on and talk about it then? And get something to stop my face from hurting?”

  “If you think you can find the way.”

  Cobb laughed and shook his head, catching the old man’s wide grin in the near darkness. “Fuck you, Torvo.”

  Torvo laughed in response and levered himself up off the ground with his walking stick. “Fuck you too, Cobb. Fuck you, too.”

  The next morning, the rain was still pouring down. Cobb, feeling battered from the previous day’s adventures, was assigned a list of chores that weren’t quite as physically demanding. Sharpening Torvo’s tools, repacking plastic boxes, taking inventory of what little canned goods remained from the summer stocks. After that was all done, they played cards together in the afternoon. First Cobb learned to play War, then Hearts, speaking little but saying much with toasts of beer after a good play.