The Bitching Tree

by Scott Hungerford

  After giving Cobb a chance to catch his breath, Torvo chose a second tree on the far side of the clearing, this time thicker and taller with ragged sections of bark. They worked it together, Torvo choosing the lines, Cobb cutting the wood until that tree also went down with a tremendous crash.

  The third tree Torvo chose was even more of a challenge. This one was twice as big as the last one, and was probably one of the tallest trees remaining in this section of the forest. Instead of requiring only a couple of blade cuts to reach the interior, Cobb would need to make a series of careful cuts, then would have to make sure that the tree’s weight didn’t settle down and pinch the blade.

  The work on the third tree took almost an hour, with the two men working together to evaluate their work and to try to figure out which way the tree was going to fall—and whether there might be a chain reaction of other trees that would be knocked down as the monster came to rest on the forest floor. But it finally fell, with Torvo shouting a word in a language that Cobb had never heard before. Barely stilling the chainsaw before the tree landed, the loud, earthshaking impact actually bounced Cobb off his feet. Torvo managed to stay upright by sheer luck, but nearly fell over afterward laughing at the stunned look on Cobb’s face as he lay in the loam.

  “Now we can go home,” Torvo told him, once he could get air again. “We can go home and get some lunch.”

  “Is this all for more firewood?” Cobb asked, gesturing at the carnage he’d wrought. “It’s a long way from the house if you want me to chop and carry all of this over there …” The look on Torvo’s face told him otherwise. “This isn’t about firewood, is it?”

  “No,” Torvo told him as he knelt down in front of Cobb, his mood changing just as quickly as the wind. “This is about being prepared.”

  “Oh …” Cobb replied, suddenly getting it, as a rush of cold horror spread down his spine. “This isn’t about firewood. This is about cutting down our sacred tree, isn’t it?”

  “If you have to, yes,” Torvo told him. “It should be your absolute last resort. But if you cut down the sacred tree, the Red Crow will be denied its power. Whether your flock or Old Thom can be saved or not isn’t really part of that decision. This is a final act, a matter of not allowing the Red Crow’s evil to spread. To deny him any further power in the world.”

  Cobb tried to imagine what it would take to cut down the Bitching Tree, to cut down the heart of his roost and home. But he understood Torvo’s lesson. If he had to do it, if it became the only option, now he knew how to do it. It was one more weapon in his arsenal. He looked at the trees he’d felled and wondered what they felt when he cut through them. Whether they could feel pain now as their roots were cut off from the earth.

  “I understand,” Cobb said, then accepted Torvo’s hand to help him to stand. Looking upon the waste he’d created, he shook his head at the cost of such knowledge .

  “Come on,” Torvo told him. “I’ll make you pancakes for lunch.”

  “No oatmeal?” Cobb quipped.

  “I’m saving that for a special occasion.”

  Lunch was very good, with pancakes drenched in too much maple syrup. As they sat at the little table, Cobb remembered that pancakes normally had butter on them, yellow squares that ran down the sides of the cake as they melted. But Torvo didn’t have anything like that, nothing perishable that couldn’t stay for six months at a time in the cupboard.

  After lunch they went back down to the cellar again; this time, Torvo led him over to one of the long metal trunks that they had brought from the rock.

  “This is your gun box,” Cobb said with respect.

  “Today you learn to shoot.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. While I hope you don’t have to use it, knowing how to use a gun is going to be important for you. Have you ever held a gun before?”

  “I don’t think so,” Cobb said as Torvo put a hunting rifle into his hands.

  “It’s unloaded, so just get a sense of the weight. Of how it sits in your hands.”

  “I like the feel of it,” Cobb said as he balanced the unfamiliar heft.

  “Then we’ll start there.” As Cobb watched, Torvo buckled an extra belt around his waist, one with a holster for a handgun and belt pouches for prefilled magazines of ammunition. Taking up a heavy looking black pistol out of the metal box, Torvo slapped a magazine into the handle, slid the weapon into his holster, then picked up a red-and-white-striped box of rifle ammunition as well.

  They went out again into the afternoon sunlight, but not out into the trees. Instead, Torvo drew a line in the melting snow with his foot. “You stand here, behind this line. You see that dead tree up a ways, over by where those two trees come together like a tent? That’s what you’re shooting for.”

  “That’s a long ways away.”

  “Thirty yards. But it’s far enough that a bullet hopefully won’t ricochet back here and take one of us out. There shouldn’t be anyone back behind there either, as we’re miles from any other house.”

  “How will we tell if I hit anything?”

  “By the sound the bullet makes when it strikes the wood, mostly. If you hit a person, he’ll make a different kind of noise, a noise that he can’t easily fake in order to trick you.”

  Cobb wrestled with the heavy rifle, following Torvo’s instructions on how to slide open the chamber and insert the single brassy bullet that the old man gave him. Pushing on the lever, he chambered the round, following Torvo’s careful instructions to point the barrel only toward the ground until he was ready to fire.

  “It’s going to make a loud noise, isn’t it?”

  “Not as loud as you think,” Torvo responded. “Now lift it to your shoulder and get your eye lined up through the sights. Yes, just like that. Now breathe, in and out, slowly. Measure your breaths by the count and count up when you breathe out. At the end of four, just before you take a breath, pull the trigger. The rifle will have a bit of a kick, but I think you’ll survive it.”

  Cobb was aware his hands were shaking. Following Torvo’s instructions, he tried to get a line on the dead tree, but he was trembling enough that it was difficult to take careful aim.

  “Now breathe, count to four—and pull before five.”

  “One,” Cobb said as he breathed out, wondering just how loud the gun was going to be.

  “Two,” Cobb said as he breathed out again, wondering what it would be like to shoot or kill a human.

  “Three,” Cobb said as he breathed out a third time, a little more relaxed this time, wondering what it would like to be shot himself.

  “Four,” Cobb said, anticipating the shot, his finger squeezing the trigger.

  He fired, the pull on his shoulder and the bang! loud enough to rattle him, but not enough to send him running in a panic. “Five,” he said, finishing the count. Bringing the rifle barrel down, he looked out toward the dead tree. “Did I hit it?”

  “I didn’t hear anything strike. So I’m going to guess that the answer is no.” Torvo handed him another long bullet. “But we’ve got a whole box here to go through. So take your time and take shots until you feel good about the gun. If your shoulder starts to smart, we can stop for a while.”

  “I want to do this,” Cobb replied. Loading the next bullet, he levered it home. Raising the rifle, he went through his count again from one to four and fired—and this time heard the smack as the bullet struck the dead tree.

  Torvo patted him on the back as Cobb smiled widely for the second time that day. “Good shot. You might be a natural.”

  “Thanks,” Cobb said and took the next bullet that Torvo gave him. Over the next two hours the men took turns firing the rifle. They went through the entire box of cartridges, the snowy ground around them littered with spent shells. When the box was empty, Cobb proudly thought he might have hit the tree a total of twenty times. Torvo, however, was a very good marksman, striking the same thick dead branch over and over again until he shattered the thing off from where it con
nected to its stump.

  “That was fun,” Cobb told him, ready to go back inside where it was warm.

  “We’re not done yet,” Torvo replied, taking the rifle from him with his left hand. Reaching into his pocket, Torvo pulled out a little box of sweetened breakfast cereal and gave it to his student. “I want you to go out there toward the trees and sprinkle this on the ground, just in front of the tree line. Then you come back here, quiet as a mouse. Understand?”

  Cobb’s stomach sank. He didn’t like the sound of this. It seemed to him like this was about to be another lesson. But he did as Torvo asked, then returned to his side. He stood there silently, saying nothing as they waited.

  Twenty minutes went by. The only sounds were the wind creaking the trees and the occasional slide-splat of snow falling to the ground. Another ten minutes and Cobb was starting to tense up. He hoped nothing was going to be hungry enough to enter Torvo’s line of fire.

  But a squirrel eventually did, bushy-tailed on scampering feet. Coming out of a tangle of roots, it scanned the offering of cereal that Cobb had dropped as if trying to figure out which tidbit to investigate first. It looked up, looked around, then looked right at Cobb and Torvo as if trying to measure how far away they were. Satisfied that they weren’t coming any closer, it approached the food, taking a mouthful of the chewy—

  BOOM!

  Cobb hadn’t even realized that Torvo had drawn his pistol from the holster—but watched with horror as the squirrel was struck directly by the bullet. The furry thing was knocked back a few feet back from where it had stood, its mangled corpse twitching against the root of a tree.

  “What did you do!” Cobb exclaimed before he could help himself, white-hot angry at what the old man had just done.

  “Fetch it,” Torvo told him, his voice filled with glacial chill. He wrested Cobb’s rifle from him and dropped it into the snow.

  “Fetch what? The bullet?”

  “My kill.” Before Cobb could ask, Torvo shoved him forward, Cobb nearly tripping over his own feet and falling into the trampled snow. “And be quick about it.”

  Cobb, dumbstruck, headed toward where the squirrel had met its end. Step by step he got closer to where spots of bright red blood spattered the slush. Then he was standing over the creature, its sightless eyes staring upward toward the sky. Its insides were ripped apart. Its head was nearly torn from its body. Cobb dropped to his knees, helpless at seeing death so close, looking in its face. As a crow he’d seen corpses like this countless times, even fed on them with tugs of his strong black beak. But through the lens of his human psyche it was something else entirely, an emotional weight, a moral responsibility rather than one directly tied to hunger and survival.

  “I’m sorry,” he told the creature, told Mother Death herself, apologizing for the waste of such an innocent life. Bracing himself, he picked up the still-warm corpse of the squirrel in both hands, cradling its tiny head on his fingertips. Even as blood dripped through his fingers, he stood and made his way back to Torvo.

  “Is this what you wanted?!” Cobb shouted when he got there. “Is this what you wanted?”

  “Yes,” Torvo said as Cobb came up to him. “The only way you can understand the responsibility of a gun is by soaking yourself in blood. If you use your rifle on a man, you’ll core him through, making a potentially crippling or lethal wound. If you use this kind of pistol, you’ll make an even bigger hole and can blow a man’s guts right out his back. If you use a shotgun up close, you’ll do to a man far worse than what I did here. All of these weapons have consequences. All of these weapons take lives. It’s their purpose, their nature.”

  “What about his life?” Cobb said angrily, holding up the body, wanting nothing more than to put the thing down, to wash his hands and feathers of all of it. “What about honoring him?”

  “If you want to do that, then follow me,” Torvo said. He set off toward the back side of the house, toward the trees. Cobb stood there for a moment, not sure what to do. Whether to ignore his command or follow Torvo blindly to whatever sick thing he wanted to teach next. But when Torvo turned, his face soft, his eyes touched by honest grief, Cobb nodded and followed him.

  Beyond the woodpile was the tree line, and through the tree line was another little path that wound through the forest. Warm streaks of blood dripping on his pants, Cobb kept pace with Torvo, barely able to take his eyes off the ruined creature in his hands. But when he finally looked up he saw they were in a snowless clearing as big as the house’s living room, clean-swept, devoid of boughs or needles.

  “We bury him here,” Torvo told Cobb, as Cobb noted the round river rocks placed in a semicircle at the end of the clearing. Each one of nine stones were marked with dribbles of candle wax from years past, with a name scrawled on the front of each in heavy black marker.

  Torvo reverently took the squirrel’s body from Cobb with gentle hands. Singing over it, the same way he had sung the first night that Cobb had stayed in the tent, Torvo moved to the last stone on the right and knelt on the wet ground. With one hand he started to solemnly dig, to make a hole big enough for the tiny creature to be buried in.

  Following his lead, Cobb knelt down next to Torvo and helped him dig with both hands, the two of them sharing the same dirt and blood. When it was deep enough, Torvo gently placed the squirrel’s body in the hole and smoothed the top of the pile of dirt over it, still singing under his breath, his eyes closed in prayer. Cobb knelt, watching and waiting until his teacher was done pushing dirt into place, then put a couple of small sticks on the grave in a way that seemed right, beak to tip, palm to place.

  When they were finished, Cobb took a breath to break the silence. “What is all this?” he asked. He gestured at the semicircle of stones. His hands were still stained with a bit of blood, but the dirt had wiped most of it away.

  “It’s my shrine. It’s my remembrance for those who have fallen,” Torvo replied.

  “They died here?”

  “Only one. The other two-in-ones I have markers for finished their training. They went to where they were supposed to go, to try to get vengeance for what was lost. To take retribution for what was taken. All the ones named here died trying to make their sacrifice mean something.”

  Cobb felt hollow inside; he didn’t know what to say. He got up and went to look at the names on the stones, some faded by years of sun and rain. He felt that he could sense each of them now, as if their souls were here looking up at him from beneath the ground. He shook off the shivers and tried to think about respect, about honoring the dead. He knew that if he wasn’t careful, his own name could be on one of these stones one day.

  “Who is buried here?” he said as he gestured to the smallest headstone. “It’s Clara, isn’t it?” Cobb knelt in front of it, resisting the urge to touch the smooth stone with his fingertips.

  “It is Clara. Hawna talks too much.”

  “How old was she?”

  “She was barely two crow years when she made the shift. Her body was ten human years, if that.”

  “What could you teach her at that age? She would have been so small.”

  “I taught her everything I could. She would have been like Old Thom to you, a ruler of her flock, of many flocks. She took trains all the way out to Alaska, all the way to me after her parents and siblings were killed. She came to find me, to learn from me. But she never made it home.”

  “What happened?”

  “She drowned. She’d been with me for weeks on the rock. One day while I was cutting wood she left her chores to go play and … she drowned.” Torvo dropped his head. “I found her body downriver. Just down from the bucket tree, caught on a snag. I still don’t know how she got in the water or where she fell in. If she cried out to me for help, I didn’t hear it because of the chainsaw.”

  “I’m sorry, Torvo. It isn’t your fault.”

  “Humans always say that,” Torvo said calmly. “But it is my fault. She was my student and she was the last hope of her people. She
didn’t follow my rules to stay away from the water and I didn’t pay enough attention to her when she needed me. She was the last one with the magic to use her sacred tree before the city folk cut it down. I suspect those flocks are gone now, lost, their bond broken when Clara didn’t return. They’ve lost themselves, become something less than before. All of that is on my hands,” he said, holding up his bloody palms. “Nobody else’s.”

  “I’m not going to fail you,” Cobb told him, standing up. “I’m going to win.”

  “I don’t suspect you are,” Torvo said, offering him the compliment. “Though I have no idea how the hell you’re going to do it.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” Cobb said, with what he felt was false confidence. “You’re a good teacher, Torvo. You freak me out sometimes, and sometimes you make me really angry. But your lessons … they make sense. They’re true.” Cobb came over to Torvo and held out a hand to help him up, and Torvo took it.

  The old man suddenly looked gray around the edges, as if a dark cloud had passed over his soul. It worried Cobb, more than a little, as he’d never seen Torvo look that way before.

  “Are you alright, Torvo?”

  “I’m fine,” his teacher said, waving him off. But it seemed to Cobb like something was wrong.

  “Come on, then. Let’s clean up and get everything back inside before it gets any colder. We’ll wash up. I’ll make dinner and we can eat something together. Maybe we can share a drink from your flask afterward?”