by B. B. Wurge
“Quite understandable,” she said, smiling at me. “And it certainly worked. I am curious. Do you live in Ipskunk?”
“Oh no,” I said. “We’re looking for Leonardo da Vinci.”
“Of course,” she said, politely. “I should have guessed. Under what circumstances did you hope to meet him?”
“In a cave,” I said. “Not him exactly. Well, maybe his skeleton.”
“Jem!” Dad sputtered around the door handle. “You’re getting at it from the wrong direction. Tell her from the beginning, and maybe she can help. She might know.” So I told her the whole story, starting with my dad turning himself into an orangutan and us getting kicked out of our home. She shook her head at that part. I told her about our quest, and how we had traced Leonardo across the Atlantic to North America, and realized that he must have taken up with the local Indians. Then I told her about the legend of the cave, and her eyes glittered and she had an odd smile on her face as she drove.
When I was done, she said, “What a beautiful story. I’m so glad I stopped to give you a ride. And now you want to know if I can help you? I certainly know about the legend of the cave.”
“ You do?!” Dad sputtered. “Do you know the right cave?”
“I might,” she said. “But that’s hard to prove. There’s more than one cave that might fit the legend. Six or seven, I believe. But the one that I’m thinking of is special. It’s the only one that nobody has been able to reach. Ever since I was a little girl I wanted to explore it, but it’s quite inaccessible. When I was fifteen I broke my leg trying to climb the cliff face, and when I was thirty I broke my wrist. I’m afraid I rather stopped trying after that. I’ve seen a few rock climbers shake their heads and give up because the cliff is too full of rubble.”
“I bet that’s the one!” Dad said. “I bet that’s Leonardo’s cave!”
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “The legend of the cave always seemed, well, legendary to me. Merely an excuse to explore a new cave. I’d hazard a guess that my special cave is filled up mostly with old bird’s nests.”
“Bah!” my dad said. “It has an ornithopter in it.”
“All the same,” she said, “I wish . . . I still do wish I could see the inside of it. I admit, however, I’m a little old for spelunking. Do you know, when I was little, I used to look up at that cliff and think, if only I were a monkey, I’m sure I could climb it. If I had four hands I could climb anything. Carl Martin, I will make a deal with you. I’ll show you where my cave is. In return, if you can reach it, throw me down a rope. I’ll tie it around my waist and you can pull me up.”
“It’s a deal!” my dad roared, sticking his hand forward between the two front seats. Noma’s hand was so small and fragile that she could only manage to grasp one of Dad’s fingers, but she shook the finger, and the deal was made.
We drove four hours along that icy road at a creeping rate, up into the Catskills through a tangle of back roads, onto a gravel lane that seemed more like a rutted driveway, and reached Ipskunk late in the evening. The sun had long gone down, and there was no point trying to climb anything until the next morning. Noma drove us to her house. I got out and pulled on my dad’s arm to help him slide out of the back seat. He had to lie on the ground in the snow for a few minutes to expand to his proper size, and then he could stand up all right.
Noma’s house was a little one-story cottage that she said her father had built. It was on a saddle in the mountains, several miles from any town. It was made out of old gray weathered boards, and had a front porch about big enough for a single chair, and one window, and a metal pipe sticking out of the roof that must have been the chimney. My dad could never have fit through the door. She said we could set up our tent in her yard, if we wanted to, and stay for the night. Or, if we liked, we could sleep in the barn.
Her house was in a clearing in the trees, lit up by the moonlight so that the slate roof seemed to glow. Away from the house, just under the branches of the woods, stood a spooky dark barn. The front window was covered over in wire and looked like a snarling mouth with braces. She said the barn used to have goats in it, but hadn’t been used except by barn swallows for about thirty years, and was probably good protection against the wind. Dad would have slept in it, but I didn’t want to. I wanted our warm, comfortable tent.
Dad unhitched our wagon from the car and put up the tent in the moonlight beside Noma’s house. Noma watched him, standing in the snow and clutching her shawl around herself to keep warm. She must have been amazed at how good he was with his hands and feet. He set up the tent in record time. I bet it was less than two minutes.
“If you can’t climb up to that cave,” she said, “I don’t think anyone can.”
“How far away is it?” Dad said. “Can we get there early in the morning?”
“As early as you wish,” she said, smiling at him and pointing. “It’s right there. Didn’t you realize?”
About hundred yards from the house, a giant rubbley cliff rose up out of the trees and slanted up in the moonlight. It was just far enough from the house that if a boulder fell off the cliff it probably wouldn’t smash through the roof.
“Now you know why it’s my special cave,” she said. “I’ve been looking at it all my life. Good night, Carl Martin. Good night, Jem Martin!” She turned around, hobbled to her little house, and went inside.
Dad and I crawled into our tent. I wanted to go to sleep, but Dad lit some candles, sat down and clutched his head between his hands. “Jem! How can we sleep? That might be the cave up there! I think I saw it. A kind of a dark spot. What if we find something that belonged to him? My god! I don’t know if I can wait. Maybe I should try it now, in the moonlight.”
“Dad, don’t be ridiculous!” I said. “It’s just starting to snow. Anyway, do you know what night it is?”
“No. What?”
“It’s Christmas eve. I think. Tomorrow is Christmas day.”
“You’re right! I totally forgot about it! Good thinking, Jem. Merry Christmas. I suppose I should be good and wait till morning to unwrap the present.”
He blew out the candles and curled up in his blanket. During the night I woke up a few times, and in the faint glow of moonlight through the tent roof I could see his massive furry back rising and falling with his breathing. But he wasn’t snoring. He was probably lying awake thinking about that cave.
11
“Good morning, Indians!” Noma said, knocking on the metal surface of the wagon that made up a wall of our tent. “I thought you wanted to get up early?”
My dad and I woke up together. We had had an exhausting few days, and had overslept. Dad must have dropped off finally in the early morning. He sat up bleary and stared at his watch through the tangles of hair over his eyes. “Jem!” he groaned. “It’s ten thirty.”
We crawled outside. Noma had made hot pancakes for us, and I sat on her front steps and ate them with maple syrup. They were delicious, but Dad couldn’t digest them, so he ate three cabbages.
After breakfast, we walked to the barn. Noma thought that some of the old farm equipment might be useful for climbing a cliff. I didn’t see how anything in a goat barn would help us. But it turned out that the barn had been used as a garbage dump and a storage shed, and was piled up to the ceiling in places. It was a good thing we hadn’t tried to sleep in it the night before, because we would have walked into about six rusty circular saw blades, and a roll of wire fencing, and a broken tractor engine, and an old fashion car that had been taken apart so it could fit in through the front door, and shovels and picks and saws and screwdrivers and wooden boxes of roofing nails, and lots of old furniture, and a stack of newspapers from about fifty years ago, and the dried up skeleton of a ground squirrel that had crawled in there in the distant past, and I don’t know what else was buried in that pile.
“Oh dear,” Noma said standing in the doorway, the sun shafting in behind her and lighting up the jumble on the concrete floor, “I had forgotten how f
ull it was.”
Dad rummaged around, climbing over the teetering piles of junk into a back room, and after some banging and crashing sounds, he came back out with a big wooden spool of rope. When the rope from the barn was tied onto the rope from our wagon, we had about four hundred feet of it, and that seemed like enough.
We walked along a path through the snowy woods until we reached the cliff. The bottom part of the cliff rose up jumbled and broken out of the forest. The slant was shallow enough that we could climb up quite a long distance. Noma seemed to have an easy trail worked out; she stepped from one rock to the next without a lot of strain. Then the serious part of the cliff rose up out of the rubble, and that’s where we had to stop.
Probably that cliff had been straight up and down once, a thousand years ago, but a giant wedge of the front surface had fallen off. That must have been where all the rubble came from. The cliff face was slanted the wrong way. It didn’t slant back away from us; it slanted out over our heads. If you climbed it, you would be hanging out over empty space most of the time. Maybe if you had sticky pads on your feet and hands you could climb it, but even then I wouldn’t have wanted to try, because the rock all along the cliff looked brittle and full of shards that might break off as you grabbed them.
“There it is,” Noma said cheerfully, pointing up. “There’s the cave.” About three hundred feet up the cliff the sunlight poured into a gaping hole. From underneath we could see a bit of the roof of the cave, but that was all. It looked like a good-sized opening.
“Right,” Dad said, looking up and around and inspecting the cliff closely. I couldn’t see how he would succeed, but he didn’t look discouraged. He scratched at his head and then limbered up his fingers and toes, and then wound the rope around his waist so that he could lower it down to us once he got to the cave. I mean, if he got to the cave. For the first time, I began to worry about him.
“Right,” he said again. “ This should be easy. Should take a minute. Three minutes, tops. I tell you. Look at it. I can go from here to that spot with the crack there, and then to that other spot with the twisty plant growing out of it, and then to. . . . Well, I’ll figure it out once I get to that spot. Here goes.”
He crouched on all fours and then, as if he had springs coiled up in his arms and legs, Boing, he leaped into the air about fifteen feet. I had never seen him do that before. It was incredible. He was so heavy that I didn’t think he could leap very high. But he didn’t look heavy now. He looked as light and agile as a spider. He turned over in mid air and landed splayed out against the rock face, clutching on by his hands and feet. Then he paused for a moment, looking around for the next hold.
“Dad!” I said. “That ’s amazing! How did—”
“Jem,” he said, “don’t talk. I need to think.”
I closed my mouth. Noma and I sat on some comfortable smooth rocks that were lying nearby. I think maybe Noma had put them there a long time ago as seats. It was a nice place to sit in the morning, the sunlight on our faces, the rocks and the snow sparkling around us, but I couldn’t enjoy it while Dad was clinging above us and might fall any second.
He seemed frozen to the spot, only his head moving, swiveling around like a giant bug searching for prey. Then one hand let go and moved two inches to a new spot. That was all. Then he was still again for about five minutes. I thought he had given up and was about to jump back down. I thought he had finally realized how impossible the cliff was. But suddenly his arms and legs went into motion, and he zipped up the cliff about another ten feet. He seemed to know exactly where to put his hands and feet. I suppose he had worked out the whole sequence in his head. Then he stopped again for another three or four minutes.
I could see that having four hands was useful, but I could also see that he was climbing mostly with his brain. After every little bit that he climbed, he would pause and think very carefully for minutes. Sometimes, after a pause he would climb back down to a previous point, and try again in a different direction. Sometimes it seemed like he was climbing sideways more that up. A few times, after five or ten minutes all he did was move one hand. At other times he might go fifteen or twenty feet all in one spurt. It was horrible and shivery to watch, but fascinating too. I never once saw him lose a hold on anything. He seemed to choose carefully, and nothing broke under his hands. Every now and then I saw him hang on with three limbs and pick the loose bits of rock off the cliff with his free hand, just to make sure that they didn’t get in his way. The rock pieces fell down and smashed on the ground.
After about an hour he came near to the cave mouth, but it was no good; he couldn’t reach it from that angle. Even I could see from below that the cave had a lip that stuck out. He couldn’t get over it on one side of the cave and would have to try the other side. So down he came, about one hundred feet, backing off of the cave entrance to try another approach. That one didn’t work either. But the third time he did better. I could see he was about six feet below the cave near the easiest corner. But the last bit shelved out from the cliff so steeply, and so smoothly, I didn’t see how he could climb over it. He stayed in that one place just below the cave, perfectly still, looking tiny and black against the gray stone, hundreds of feet up. That was his longest pause. He stayed there for about fifteen minutes. Then suddenly those springs in his arms and legs let off again, and he boinged off of the cliff face, jumping out and up, and I screamed. I couldn’t help it. I said, “Ack!” because if he missed his hold, he would fall a long way onto a hard ground and smash like a tomato. But he got his fingers over the cave ledge, and in another half a second had pulled himself up and disappeared in the cave.
“He did it!” I sang out. “Look at that! He got up there!”
Noma was smiling so hard she couldn’t talk. Her eyes had disappeared in the wrinkles on her face.
Then, way up the cliff, my dad’s head stuck out from the cave entrance and looked down at us.
“Ahoy!” he said, his voice faint from the distance. “Hello! What a view! Wow! Jem, you look like a bug! And Noma, your house looks as small as a sugar frosted mouse house! Hey! Watch out! Stand by! Get ready! Rope coming down!”
Slowly, the dark snake of the rope dangled down and down, until the end came down right in front of our faces and touched the ground at our feet.
“Noma first!” Dad shouted down. “Jem, you make sure she gets tied on securely.”
Noma knew all about ropes and knots, and she made a kind of rope swing that she could sit in while holding tight. She also tied a safety loop around her waist, in case she lost her grip on the way up. “Oh my!” she said, when she started to rise up into the air, and then she was too far up for me to hear her brittle voice. Because the cliff was slanted out over our heads, she rose straight without bumping into anything. She had a cloth bag in her hands full of supplies that she had brought along, and it dangled beneath her and swayed. Dad pulled very fast, and I saw her disappear over the lip of the cave.
Then the rope came back down again. “Your turn, Jem,” Dad called down. “Be careful!”
I sat in Noma’s swing, held tight to the rope, and felt my feet lift off from the ground. I tried not to look down. I spun around on the rope as I was jerked upward, and a bird flew past me and glared at me out of its little shiny black eye as if it was outraged at the sight of a person flying. Before I had time to relax or get used to the motion, I was up, and Dad had lifted me over the lip of the cave and into the entrance.
“I told you it’d be easy,” Dad said.
The view really was amazing. I could see out over the woods and hills for miles. The morning sun poured down onto everything, and I saw a stream far away shining from reflected sunlight as if it was a light bulb filament. I could see Noma’s house practically under us. If I had thrown a stone, I might have gotten it down her chimney. The gravel road snaked away from her house and disappeared here and there under the snowy trees, until it reached a paved road, and the paved road stretched on down the hillside like some bla
ck paint that had run down the slope. Much farther away I saw a collection of roofs sticking up like mushrooms. It must have been Ipskunk, New York. Even farther away I saw a lake that was a dull white, and I wondered if it was frozen over. I saw a car driving around the lake, and the car was only as big as a flea.
The mouth of the cave was about forty feet wide, and had a flat place in the front like a landing pad that was cluttered with sticks and dried up leaves. Birds must have brought them up there. Noma’s whole house could have fit nicely into that front entrance. Farther back, the cave narrowed and turned into shadows and darkness.
Noma was standing with her hand on the cave wall to steady herself, peering over the edge at the humongous landscape. The wind blew around a few strands of gray hair that had come loose from her ponytail. The look on her face was eager and focused and alive. She took five or six deep breaths and then turned to us and said, “Now I’ve done everything, and I’ve seen everything. Carl Martin, you have made me happy.”
Dad grinned at her, his orangutan mouth wide open and all his giant pegs of teeth showing.
12
“Let’s explore,” Dad said. “I can see there’s enough room here to land an ornithopter. But he wouldn’t have left it exposed. I’m sure it’s in a back chamber of the cave somewhere. Jem, we should have brought candles. How silly of us!”
“Very silly,” Noma said, smiling. “Luckily you brought someone less silly.” She reached into her cloth bag of supplies, brought out three flashlights, and handed them around.
“Fantastic!” Dad said. “ Thank you! You’re brilliant! This is it. Jem, I can hardly breathe. Might be the altitude, but I think it’s the excitement. I swear I thought it’d take us years, and here we’ve found the place already. Wow.”