Water Witches

by Chris Bohjalian

  There is no sound on the mountain but the low hum from the motors that steadily pull the chairs upward. Although there is an occasional breeze, each is insignificant, silent. On the seat between Miranda and me is a small red ice chest I have filled with frozen Peacesicles, a miniature picnic of sorts for the top of the mountain or the ride home in the truck.

  I touch Miranda's shoulder, and point at the area of thick wood to our left. "In there," I tell her, "will be one of the new trails. Good and long. Really wide in some places."

  She turns to face me and raises an eyebrow suspiciously. "Will they let snowboards in?"

  "I don't know."

  "They better." She looks back at the base lodge, which any moment will disappear from view. "Is this where the gondola will be?"

  "No. The gondola will be on Moosehead."

  She twists forward in the chair, holding on tight to the armrest on her side, and lowers her head back onto the safety bar.

  I ask her, "Doesn't that hurt? Don't the vibrations feel weird on your chin?"

  "Nope."

  The chair lift glides over a lengthy spot on the mountain where mogul fields form every winter, then an open space that stretches for hundreds and hundreds of yards where two trails intersect.

  "Peacesicles at the summit?" I ask Miranda.

  "Okay."

  We fly over a ravine it's impossible to ski, the ski trails themselves veering off to our right and our left, then a thick patch of evergreens, so close to our feet that it almost appears we could reach down and touch the highest branches. Any second now the peak of Mount Republic will come into view

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  the wide, flat summit that is recognizable in profile by almost every Vermonter by the age of six or sevenand then the tips of the White Mountains to the east.

  Some of the leaves on the mountain have already begun to turn. Republic, which offers a magic display of color every fall, will this year become a kaleidoscope of reds and yellows and greens in August.

  I motion toward the evergreens. "I love to look at those trees in the winter," I tell my daughter. "Sometimes, there's so much ice on them they look like they're made of crystal. They look like they're made of glass."

  "I like it when the snowballs sit on the branches," Miranda says.

  "Me too," I agree, reminded of the cat we once had named Snowball. She died two years ago.

  "Someday, I'd like another cat," she continues, the word snowball resonating for her too with memories.

  "You know I'm allergic to them."

  "I'd keep it downstairs."

  I nod. "I know you would. Maybe for your birthday."

  The chair lift lurches a tiny bit, as if there were a burr on one of the wire cables that caught for a moment in the pulleys at the summit, and Miranda's head bounces once on the safety bar.

  "Ouch!"

  "Bite your tongue?" I ask.

  "The inside of my cheek," she says, disgusted with herself.

  I reach over and rub her back softly, as the lift settles down and we float to the top of the mountain.

  "Mindy Woolf once ate four Peacesicles in a row," Miranda tells me as we begin our descent down the mountain. She still holds the wooden ice cream stick in one hand, occasionally bouncing it off her lower lip like a tongue depressor.

  "Carob?"

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  "Nope. She hates carob. Rainforest Bridge Mix."

  "Gross."

  She rolls her eyes and shakes her head in disgust. "Tell me about it."

  We watch the sun fall below the mountains to our west, disappearing into the horizon as if it were sinking aflame underwater. Red sky at night, sailor's delight ...

  "It's supposed to rain tomorrow afternoon," I tell Miranda, as much to reassure myself as her. And then, afraid I have gotten her hopes up, I add, "At least that's what the weathermen are saying. And we know how often they're right."

  "Not very."

  Certainly that has been true this summer. At least a half-dozen times that I can recall we have been told that rain is imminent. And then, those few days or nights that storm systems actually visited Vermont, all they left behind were short bursts of inconsequential sprinkles. I wish I could convince myself that this time will be different.

  I rest my elbow on the ice chest, and close my eyes. I try to clear my mind of the image of the weatherman on the six and eleven o'clock television news, folding his arms across his chest as he apologizes for the lack of rain. As if he were responsible. I try not to think of Ian Rawls, telling me with a straight face today over lunch that a small group of Powder Peak employees had approached him last week, concerned that the drought was a sign meant for them: Perhaps, they had told their managing director, the expansion and all it involvedtapping the Chittenden, cutting down acres of trees on Mount Republicreally was going to damage the local aquatic and forest environments.

  Ian admitted to me that he had been spooked. And I admitted to him that his story spooked me. It is not so much that either of us is superstitious, or believes for a second that the drought is an event meant solely for us, for the resort, for the industry; rather, it is the idea that the drought may actually be an indication of great climatic changes over which we at one

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  Vermont ski resort have little control that we both find disturbing.

  Quickly I remind myself that before global warming there was global cooling. It was only twenty-five years ago that many scientists were panicked by a series of annual decreases in the temperature of the earth's atmosphere. Global cooling they called that, and told us all that a second ice age was approaching.

  Miranda's small hand grabs my elbow, her thumb and her fingers digging through my shirt and squeezing my arm. I open my eyes to see her staring out toward the forest, the woods where someday soon will be the beginning of a new network of trails.

  ''What?" I ask, and she shushes me, bringing a finger from her other hand to her lips.

  Blinking, I follow her eyes, trying to see what she sees.

  "What?" I ask again, whispering so softly that I can barely hear the word myself.

  With the finger that only a second before had silenced me she points, raising her arm slowly as she straightens her finger. "There," she murmurs.

  At first they look like house cats, three of them, one that is huge and two that are smaller. Kittens. Except even those two smaller animals are each as big as a good-sized dog. Perhaps a full-grown springer spaniel. Their fur is the color of wheat.

  "Look," Miranda says, her voice tiny but filled with wonder. "A mom. And her babies."

  The babiesthe cubsare covered with spots the color of pine cones, and there is a series of black bars along their tails.

  As the chair lift continues toward the animals, sliding on cables at least twenty-five feet off the ground, the mother cat looks up at us, studying us for a brief moment. Her tail rises into the air, her ears go back, and she bares for us her teeth: Even at this distance, I can see her bottom fangssharp, white obelisks that look almost as long as my fingers.

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  "Catamounts," Miranda says, drawing her arm back inside the chair lift. "Right here."

  The mother turns toward her cubs, nudging them with her mouth. When she turns, her full size becomes clear. She must weigh seventy-five, perhaps one hundred pounds. The cubs finally notice us, and become excited, jumping upon each other's backs and swatting each other with paws the size of my daughter's fists. One of the two animals tries to roar or hiss at us, but the sound that comes out is little more than a squeal.

  "Have you ever seen one?" Miranda asks me.

  I shake my head no, never. "Hardly anyone has," I mumble.

  The mother starts to race toward the cliffs above the ravine, away from Miranda's and my chair, the cubs following close on the big cat's heels. As they pick up speed they disappear into the evergreens, and then, only seconds later, emerge on one of the boulders that ring the steep-sided hollow. From that rock they can watch us at our lev
el, but at a safe distance. They must have covered one hundred and fifty wooded yards in about fifteen seconds.

  "They're beautiful," Miranda says, unwilling to turn away from the family, receding further and further behind us. "I think they're the prettiest things I've ever seen."

  Lulled by the white noise around me, mesmerized by the wildcats on the rocks, I nod. Although my daughter cannot see the gesture, I know she's aware I agree.

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  20

  Catamount. The word, I have been told, is French for mountain cat. Cat of the mountain.

  A mountain lion. That's what a catamount is. It is northern New England's wildcat. Our bobcat. Our panther, our cougar, our leopard, our lynx. No one is quite sure how many remain in northern Vermont, but the general feeling among naturalists is that there are either few or none. There are three or four sightings reported every year in the Green Mountains, always by people without cameras (like Miranda and me), or by people who are unable to photograph the elusive animals before they disappear from view.

  Consequently, most people believe that development has driven the animals north into Canada and west into the Adirondack Mountains, despite the signs that hunters sometimes find in the woods: a tree used as a scratching post, with gashes

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  four or five feet up on its trunk; a round track or a paw print that is four inches long; a stride that measures easily two feet.

  Despite these signs, despite the occasional sightings, most people believe that catamounts no longer live in Vermont.

  And until last night, I was one of those people.

  No longer. Now, even as I drive the winding hill up to the Powder Peak base lodge, and the executive offices in its west wing, I find myself glancing out the truck's side windows, half expecting to see a catamount staring at me from atop a boulder or fallen tree. The road twists and turns through deep wood, climbing up through the mountains that form the resort. There is little traffic on this road in July: If there are catamounts awake right now in any one spot in Vermont, I would not be surprised to find that spot here.

  Ian Rawls sits behind a circular table, facing a wall of windows that stares up at Mooseheadthe three-peaked mountain that once must have looked vaguely like a moose's long head and wide antlers to the person who named it.

  "Must be pretty important to get you up here before nine o'clock in the morning," Ian says, today's Sentinel buried underneath the wax paper from a bakery donut, and two empty paper cups browned by coffee. "I didn't see any crisis in the newspaper. Did you hear something from Reedy McClure? About his group's appeal, maybe?"

  "No. Nothing like that."

  "Then what?" he asks, his voice suddenly nervous.

  "There are catamounts up there," I tell him, and motion with my eyes up at the mountains. "On Mount Republic."

  He reaches for one of the paper cups, and when he sees that it's empty he grabs the other. "What is this?" he asks, trying to smile, "Some sort of asinine joke? If it is, I don't get it. I must have missed the punch line."

  "No joke."

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  With the empty cup in his hands he stands, and wanders out of his office. He then puts his head back in the doorway. "You want some coffee?"

  "No, thanks. I'm fine."

  He nods. "I'll be right back."

  There is not a soul on Moosehead, at least on the part I can see from Ian's office. It's hard to believe that on any given Saturday or Sunday afternoon in January there might be five or six hundred people in view.

  When Ian returns he has refilled his paper cup, and he takes a long sip. He sighs. "Catamounts, huh."

  "Catamounts, right."

  "How do you know? Who told you?"

  "No one. I saw them myself."

  He rubs his chin, thinking. "Them."

  "Three of them. Miranda and I were riding the lift last night, over on Republic, and we saw three of them. A mother and two cubs. They were at the edge of the ravine, not far from the top of the mountain."

  "Where the new trail network starts?"

  "Well, where it's supposed to start. Right now there are only evergreens there."

  He sits back in his chair, and then allows himself to slump down into it. "Are you absolutely positive that what you saw wasn't a fox? Maybe some deer?"

  "I'm positive. I know a catamount when I see one."

  "I gather you've seen a lot of them?" he snaps at me, irritation creeping into his voice for the first time.

  "No. But I can tell the difference between a mountain lion and a deer, for God's sake."

  He takes a deep breath. "Who have you told?"

  "Laura."

  "Your friend, Reedy?"

  "No."

  "Your sister-in-law?"

  "No."

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  "Did you get a picture?"

  "No."

  "Okay," he mumbles. "Okay. There's no proof.

  "What the heck does that mean?"

  Ignoring my question, he continues, "Have you spoken to Miranda?"

  "About?"

  "About keeping this ... quiet."

  "Oh, I see where this is going," I tell Ian, trying to keep my tone light. "Laura and Miranda are able to raise one eyebrow at a time. At times like this, I wish I could too."

  "You're avoiding my question."

  "Because it's a stupid question, Ian. I'm not going to muzzle my daughter, I'm not going to muzzle my wife."

  "You don't even know you saw a catamount! There's no proof!"

  "I know what I saw. My daughter knows what she saw. There are catamounts on Mount Republic. That's a fact we have to deal with."

  "If word gets out"

  "Word will get out. That's why I'm here," I explain, cutting him off. Keeping my voice as even and reasonable as I possibly can, I continue, "We need to manage the flow of information. We need to make the appropriate development decisions, and then take charge of the communications process ourselves."

  "Why are you doing this to me? Why are you doing this to yourself?"

  I push the door shut. "First of all, if Miranda and I saw the catamounts, other people might too."

  "No one has yet."

  "They might. And even if no one else does, ever, Scott and Miranda Winston know they're there. You can't cover that up, it just won't happen."

  Pushing against the sides of his chair with his elbows, Ian sits forward and leans over his table. "Well, we couldand I

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  don't like the words 'cover up'keep this issue quiet. But it doesn't sound like we'd get much cooperation."

  "No, you wouldn't."

  "So what are you proposing?"