The Bitching Tree

by Scott Hungerford

  The next day was bright and sunny. Torvo set him to work on the pile of rounds, asking him to work through the day if required. Cobb agreed and set himself to the task, taking care not to overexert himself but maintain a steady pace. Throughout the day his wall of wood continued to grow, by one rail length, then two. But after lunch, when Torvo was fiddling with things up in the tool room, Cobb heard a ruffle of feathers come down behind him.

  Turning quickly, fearing it might be an eagle on the dive, he saw instead that it was a raven, trim and petite with very attentive eyes. Smiling, he watched it for a time as it strutted around the rocks at the southern end of the island, then hopped onto Torvo’s boat, pecking around between the seats looking for anything interesting to eat or carry off.

  Carefully, Cobb approached so he could get a better look at the way the raven’s talons clenched the rail, balancing perfectly against the unsteady waves that continuously rocked the craft. When he noted the red band fastened onto its leg, he wondered how a human could have got it on there.

  “TAW!” the bird cried out when Cobb got too close, flying back a bit and landing with grace on top of the gas-powered motor.

  “It’s alright, I’m not going to hurt you,” Cobb told the bird. He had no idea what sex it was. Before he’d changed, he used to be able to tell just by looking at another crow. But as a human he had no idea what to look for. “I’m just trying to see what you’re like, that’s all.”

  “That’s Judy,” Torvo called out from the top of the hill. “She’s an old friend. She’s been a visitor for about ten years now, ever since I started coming to this part of the river.”

  “She’s beautiful. Are you related?”

  Torvo ignored the question. “Give her one of your treats, she’ll come right up to you. She’s not afraid.”

  Cobb sat down on the ground and took out a crunchy bar from his pocket, instantly earning Judy’s attention. “Come on,” he told her. “You’ve got nothing to fear from me.” Ripping a chunk off the treat he tossed it out a few feet in front of him onto the stones, well out of arm’s reach. With a great flurry of feathers she was on the morsel in an instant, gobbling it down with a snap of her shiny black beak. Then she gave him a brave look right in the eye, telling him that she expected the rest of the treat as well.

  He fed her then, bit by bit until the bar was gone—at which point she tawed her indignant protest. When Cobb raised his hands up to show that he didn’t have any more, she flapped up onto the top of his wall of wood and quorked a few times, then made this amazing sound that reminded him of splashing water.

  “She’s a good one,” Torvo said, coming down the stairs to him. “She comes and gives me a ration of shit when two-in-ones are doing stupid stuff, or when the first snow is due to arrive. I give her fish when I’m fishing, and she gives me warning if anybody is snooping around.”

  “I like her,” Cobb said.

  “I like her too. Up here, she’s my only real friend.” Judy chose that moment to flap and fly off toward the south, following the river for a time before she flew around the bend and out of sight, her every flap and flight adjustment a vision of grace.

  “How long do ravens live?”

  “About fifteen years at most.”

  “And crows?”

  “That’s enough questions. You should get back to work,” Torvo told him. “Any day now we’re going to have to leave for winter camp. That may have been Judy warning me that snow is on its way down the mountain.”

  “Alright,” Cobb said. “I’ll finish up by dinner.”

  “Good, good,” Torvo said as he turned and headed up the stairs.

  “I wonder how long crows live,” Cobb thought to himself as he pondered the piece to split in front of him, resting on the splitting stump like a condemned man. Raising the ax, he swung down and cut the stick cleanly in two with a perfect blow, the sound from his strike echoing through the trees.

  Over the next two days, even in the drizzling rain, Cobb finished off the wood and completed his wall. Nearly twenty feet long and four feet high, he felt pretty good about what he had accomplished. That there would be enough wood to fuel the firebox next summer, to keep Torvo in heat and oatmeal long after he was gone.

  Going back up the stone stairs, he tramped his feet at the front door of the tent before letting himself through. Taking off his soaked coat and waterproof overalls, Cobb went about the normal routine of getting everything cleaned up, dried, and put away. Torvo didn’t take well to even a trace of mud getting inside, complaining that it would get into everything, even the food if Cobb wasn’t careful.

  That’s when he heard Hawna’s voice, just a trace of it through the thin wall of the tool room. The door was zipped up but Cobb could hear Torvo talking quietly inside. Not loud enough to make out the words, especially because the language he was talking in wasn’t English.

  Cobb did his best to ignore it, to give the old man his privacy. But the idea of talking with Hawna again after all this time thrilled him. He doubted that Torvo would allow that even if he asked.

  A few minutes later Torvo came out of the tool room with his face an unreadable blank. Cobb nodded a greeting as he continued to take care of putting the last few things away in his trunk.

  “We’re going to eat well tonight,” Torvo told him. “We’re leaving tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Hawna confirms that the beginning of winter is coming for this part of the country. We’re going to go down to our winter camp. It will take a couple of trips to shuffle everything downriver.”

  “What’s it like? The winter camp.”

  “Very hard. Harder than here. There’s less to do, especially once the snow sets in and the river freezes over. But we’ll make do.”

  “So what are we eating tonight?”

  “Anything you want,” Torvo said. He gestured toward the tool room. “Go in there and get the big box of canned goods right by the door. Then we’ll see what we want to eat, to celebrate the passing of the season.”

  Cobb did as he asked, marveling as he got to take a few steps into the tool room without supervision, grab a box and come right back out again. He couldn’t see anything different within the little space than he could normally see from the unzipped door—but the permission gave him a bit of a thrill.

  Together they decided on too much beef stew, and cracking open a special package of chocolate cookies that Torvo had been saving. While Torvo put together a brimming pot of food and tended to it with a slightly charred wooden spoon, Cobb sorted the last two dozen cans into meals and sides.

  “What kind of food do we have down at the winter camp?”

  “You ask a lot of questions. Food is food. Water is water. We’ll have enough to last the winter, for both you and me as long as we don’t get greedy. If spring comes late, we’ll need to do some hunting for whatever we can find. I’ve got a thing for making gravy out of just about anything with four legs and a tail. It might not be good and it might taste like buckshot. But it will keep us alive.”

  “I’m not looking forward to any of this.”

  “It won’t be any harder than here.”

  “It just sounds so … terrible. How long have you lived up here in the wilds, during the winter?

  “All of them. Now, are you done yet or do you have any more stupid questions?”

  “Nope, no more stupid questions.”

  “Come on then. Let’s eat.”

  Taking up bowls, they served themselves giant portions of meat and carrots and potatoes with a beer or two besides. Settling in front of the crackling fire, they ate together in silence, Cobb enjoying this meal more than anything else he’d ever had.

  That’s when he heard it—the recognizable crash of wood falling down somewhere below them.

  “My wall!” Cobb got up, well aware that he was going to need to get completely suited up in his rain gear again if he was going to go back outside.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Torvo said, not loo
king up from his stew. “It’s fine.”

  “But it’s being knocked down.”

  “A lot of things get knocked down. Leave it be.” Another crash of wood followed the first, this one sounding significantly louder.

  “I have to go look.” Cobb hesitated for a moment, wondering if this was a test. But the old man just focused on his food and kept eating. Setting his own bowl down Cobb went over and unzipped the front door, catching a buffet of rain right in the face. Going out into the wet, he walked around to the stairs on the low side of the rock—and saw something that took his breath away.

  The river had risen by a good foot, and the entire space where he and Torvo had worked for the last few weeks was now covered in inches of fast-moving water. Section by section his wall of cut firewood was succumbing to the force of the water. The current was tearing it down, carrying off bobbing pieces into the river.

  “Torvo!” he called out, but the old man was already there standing next to him, squinting through the wind at the disaster taking place down below. “My firewood! It’s all being taken by the river!”

  “It is,” Torvo said, as if this was nothing new.

  “All that work,” Cobb stated, shocked by the calamity. “All that work is just … gone.” Even a few trees in the logjam at the northern end of the island were starting to pull free by the strength of the current—but Torvo’s motorboat moored down below would be safe even if the monster was pulled into the river’s flow.

  Putting two and two together, Cobb turned to Torvo, hands on his hips. “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?”

  Torvo nodded sagely. “It’s the last lesson of fall for you.”

  “What lesson is that?”

  “Everything you do will fade away in time. Everything humans do is temporary and can be easily washed away. So don’t count on anything you build being there after it’s all said and done.”

  Cobb just stood there, infuriated at the old man. “What does that even mean?”

  “You have to be smarter than the river,” Torvo replied with a wink, then tugged on Cobb’s sleeve, gesturing for him to come back in the tent. But Cobb pulled away, wanting to stand in the rain, to witness his accomplishment fall to entropy. Torvo shrugged and went up the stairs even as Cobb stepped down to the top of the steps, watching as the last standing pile of wood collapsed and splashed into the water.

  As all his hard work was pulled out into the river’s current, he considered wading into the torrent and saving what he could. But he knew that it was too late. Torvo had told him to put the firewood there, and now it was just another object lesson. Beyond frustrated, Cobb went back up the stairs and unzipped his way into the tent, dripping puddles into the interior. Torvo, already changed into dry clothes, was back in his chair and was picking at his bowl again, his bony feet covered by a pair of thick gray socks.

  Not knowing what else to do, Cobb started to change clothes himself all while trying to figure out what he was going to say—and was surprised when Torvo came up behind him, with a chocolate chip cookie in one hand and a bowl of warm stew in the other. As Cobb took them, Torvo hugged him, like father to son, just long enough for it to weird Cobb out. Then Torvo let go like nothing had happened and settled back into his rocking chair in front of the fire.

  In silence Cobb ate his stew, nibbled his cookie, and drank his beer—and wondered just how crappy the rest of the winter was going to be.

  [Ate.]

  The next morning, it began to lightly snow as Torvo and Cobb started the process of packing up. While Torvo was boxing up the last of the pans and dishes, Cobb took a moment to go outside to look at the snow drifting down over the river. The trees across the water were already dusted with white. The whole world had rendered down into an odd kind of silence, a perfect quiet that left Cobb not wanting to breathe for fear of disturbing the universe. In Seattle when it snowed, there were still people and cars and noisy humans throwing balls of the stuff at each other. Here, there was a kind of peace to everything, as if the whole world was on the verge of closing its eyes and going to sleep.

  The water below had receded some, lapping now only halfway across the stone plateau. But the chopping block and all the rest of his wood were gone. A few new snags had been added to the logjam at the island’s point, but Cobb doubted they would be staying long by the way they were fishtailing back and forth in the fast-moving current.

  Cobb didn’t want to leave. He knew they had to, that the exposed rock by the water would not be a good place to roost during a real storm. But he would miss the little island fortress, just big enough for two. Wherever they were going next was still an unknown. But they would have their tent and their stove and their sleeping bags to keep them warm at night.

  “Come on,” Torvo said through the tent flap. “We don’t want to get caught in the storm. We have a lot of work ahead of us today.”

  “Coming,” Cobb announced as he took one last look upriver, wondering if he would ever see this place again.

  Over the next few hours Cobb was amazed at how everything in the tent compacted and folded down. The sleeping bags rolled up into tight balls, the cots folded down into neat packets, and the plastic table legs folded flat to make the tables easier to carry. Cobb helped lug the plastic storage containers out into the main room, two by two, until there was a stack of at least twenty of the things, some of them full, some of them half full, others totally empty and nested together. The four metal lockers were the hardest to carry. The one by the foot of his bed was reasonably light, but the three in the tool room—including the one into which Torvo carefully had laid away the cloth-wrapped guns—were almost heavier than he could lift.

  When everything was assembled, Torvo began the process of putting away the last odds and ends. The lanterns had their own special boxes to protect them during travel. The radio was taken apart and inserted into squeaky pieces of white foam. Within an hour all was ready to go.

  Following Torvo’s lead, Cobb took the boxes down to the boat through the light, fleecy snow, where the higher level of river water made it significantly easier to get into the vessel. While balancing himself in the boat was still difficult with the boxes in hand, it would have been impossible for him to fill the boat with supplies when the water level had been so much lower.

  At that point they broke for lunch, standing around the lonely stove in the nearly empty tent, eating the last couple of crunchy bars Torvo had kept out of the boxes. Washing them down with a bottle of water, Cobb did not feel especially full, but had enough sustenance to get through the day to come.

  “What about your chair?” Cobb asked, gesturing to the hand-carved rocker.

  “It lives out in the trees during the winter, under a tarp I have out there. Same thing for the tables. They’re too big to take in the boat, as there’s too much chance they’ll make us tip. So they stay here until spring.”

  “You seem … grumpy about it.”

  “I am. It’s my favorite chair. One of the reasons I hate winter camp is because I don’t have it. But there isn’t anything to be done about that. We’ll have to make do with what we’ve got.”

  When they were done with the meal, Torvo had Cobb take one of the two tables and follow him down off the island, splashing across the plastic bridge into the trees. Just off from the firepit, now empty and black and filled with old ash, Torvo pulled the concealed tarp from under a pile of pine needles and forest debris. As Cobb made the last couple of trips back inside, once for the remaining table and once for Torvo’s chair, his teacher arranged the plastic sheet and stones so the wind would have a very hard time ripping the protective cover away.

  As they finished their work, the snow began to blow harder through the trees, causing Torvo to give a low whistle of concern. “We should get moving.”

  “What about the tent? And the stove?”

  “I’ll come back for those. They should make it through the night. I can carry the tent in the boat, but then there won’t be any roo
m for you. It would just be you on the rock with the cold firebox for company. I don’t think you would like that very much.”

  Cobb shook his head. “No, I don’t think I would either.”

  A few minutes later they were ready to go. Torvo had Cobb take his usual place at the front of the boat, wedged in with the supplies, then managed to squeeze himself back in by the motor. The water was closer to the rail than Cobb would like, and all the extra weight made the boat feel heavier, even sluggish in the water. But when the engine caught and Torvo untied the anchor rope, they were soon on their way out into the wide water.

  Downriver was much the same as upriver, but with fewer turns and more straight stretches running between the trees and the rocks. Out on the open water, it was colder and the snow did its best to sneak into every nook and cranny in Cobb’s coat. Riding into a gray world of drifting snow, with Torvo motoring slowly enough to not raise much of a wake, Cobb closed his eyes and tried to imagine the world before there was people. Before there were machines and words and chocolate chip cookies. Was it any better, he wondered, with people than without?

  When he opened his eyes again, he saw that the land to their right was sloping up, the trees marching upward until they were lost in the mist and snow. At the base of that rocky wall, a cluster of interesting rocks and boulders jutted out into the river, making a shape that reminded him of a gruesome giant he’d read about in one of Torvo’s storybooks. He watched that landmark go by until he couldn’t strain his neck anymore, then returned his gaze to the featureless river in front of him, the banks getting wider and wider the closer they got to the sea.