Engrossed one day in these practical chores, he was shocked to see the owl again, up on a branch in a tree near his house. It was asleep, but its erect posture, like that of a sentinel of hell, its eyes, which even shut seemed to stare, the tight grasp of its talons on the bough, and the bloody sunset in the sky behind it, filled poor Abel with wintry dread. He hurried home, his heart tripping. What should he do? Could he possibly kill the obnoxious creature while it slept, so it would die as if in a dream? How? With a rock on the end of a rope? With fire? With a burning javelin of wood?
So many birds had gone south. Why not the owl? Was an owl really a bird? What an odd, unheavenly bird! Abel, back in his log, knelt in prayer and asked a question he had asked before, though never so urgently: Why did God make owls, snakes, cats, foxes, fleas, and other such loathsome, abominable creatures? He felt there had to be a reason.
12
In December, Abel began talking to himself. He had done it before, but only internally. Now he spoke out loud, and the sound of his own voice vibrating in his body felt vital. Addressing himself by name, he would give advice, or ask questions and answer them. Sometimes he argued back and forth, Abel with Abel, and even got quite angry when he disagreed with his own opinions. He often found himself hard to convince.
He talked aloud to Amanda too, addressing her statue. He assured her that he would see her again, and the others he loved. There was no question he’d be getting off the island, though as yet he had no idea how. He was patient; that is, he considered himself patient. Because what other love-longing, wife-craving, homesick creature would remain so pacingly calm, so nervously resolute, so crazily sane, as long as Abel had?
The first real snowfall was a tail deep. Abel made himself snowshoes and went to his book with a homemade shovel in one arm, his spear in the other. He dug the book out of the snow and read Chapter XIX.
By Chapter XIX, the bear war was at its worst; many had been killed or wounded. It made Abel wonder about civilization. But, come to think of it, the owl, who was not civilized, was pretty warlike too. The hero, Captain Burin, was writing home from the battlefield to the one he had waltzed with in the first chapter, the one he loved. It was also winter in the story, and a drunken sergeant was saying things that were foolish and wise and funny—he wished he were hibernating instead of warring. Some of his statements made Abel roll around on the page, his cloudy breath exploding in spasms of laughter.
It was hard to cover the book when he finished his reading for the day, because the leaves stuck together in frozen sheets. His paws got icy cold. At home, he had to drink some of his wine to dispel the chill in his bones.
On his way home from Chapter XXI, he had a perilous encounter with the owl. But he wasn’t caught off guard. Whenever the spear was in his paw, the owl was on his mind, as he, apparently, was always on the mind of the owl. Each one kept a sharp eye out—the would-be killer, and the intended victim.
Hoping to catch Abel napping, the owl swept down from an old decayed tree—it seemed at home in rotten trees—but Abel had his spear at the ready the moment the owl reached him. The owl swerved off as Abel thrust at it, and pretended to fly away defeated, but immediately it swooped down again. This time Abel slashed sideways and thrust viciously upward, and he could feel the point of his knife penetrate the owl’s flesh, though the owl made no sound.
It only winced, and fending off the spear with one claw, it ripped off Abel’s cape with the other. In a fit of fear and rage, Abel thrust again and again, desperately, without plan. His fury so upset and bewildered the owl that it flew upward and roosted on a dead limb of the tree, staring down in disbelief.
Instead of making off while he had the advantage, Abel cocked his spear and challenged the owl to descend and fight. The owl continued to stare.
“Coward!” Abel screamed, the veins swelling on his neck. “Come down and do battle—bird, reptile, fiend, or whatever kind of villain you are!” If the owl was offended at Abel’s insults, it didn’t show that it was. Solemnly, it blinked and stared.
“Down with unsightly devils! Down with evil of any sort!” Abel yelled, and with all his might he foolishly flung his spear at the bird of prey. It struck the branch where the owl stood, and fell to the ground. As Abel ran to retrieve his weapon, the owl dived. Abel dodged and raced around the trunk of the tree. The owl couldn’t fly in circles any faster than Abel could run, so there was always the tree between them. The chase went on and on, sometimes reversing direction.
This mad carrousel so offended the owl’s ancient sense of decorum that it grew confused and crashed into the tree. It had to go off somewhere to sit in a huff, unruffle its feathers, and regain its ruthless composure. Abel grabbed his spear and cape and scampered home.
By now, Abel owned three of the owl’s feathers—he was quite sure they were the owl’s. Without waiting to catch breath after his heroic skirmish, he began uttering, over these detested feathers, the most horrible imprecations imaginable.
Heaven forfend that the owl should have suffered a fraction of what Abel wished it. Abel wished that its feathers would turn to lead so it could fall on its head from the world’s tallest tree, that its beak would rot and become useless even for eating mush, that it should be blind as a bat and fly into a dragon’s flaming mouth, that it should sink in quicksand mixed with broken bottles, very slowly, to prolong its suffering, and much more of the same sort.
December grew steadily colder. Abel began tearing margins from the pages of his book and using this paper to fill the chinks in his doorway whenever the stones were set in place. Even so, the cold lanced through, especially when it was windy.
13
Abel spent most of January and February, and part of March, indoors. In January there was a great blizzard. The snow descended from the bleary sky in thick, heavy curtains, through a long night. Curled up in his bed, Abel listened despondently to the howling and yowling, the lashing and whistling of the wind.
His log was buried deep, and though a dim light penetrated the snow, almost none got in through the tightly shuttered windows. Even by day, he had to probe his way around. Fortunately, some air filtered through the tightly packed crystals.
Hardly knowing day from night, Abel slept and kept no schedule, and the days came and left, uncounted. His chief occupation when awake was finding his food in the groping dark of his storerooms and eating it, which was a sort of tiresome ritual, a solemn munching. Otherwise, he yawned, oh how he yawned, turned over time and again, thrashed around, ever so much, scratched, over and over, pushed the shells of acorns, hickory nuts, and sunflower seeds out of his way, and thought of nothing.
Meanwhile, the sun, and occasional thaws, kept lowering the level of the snow, so that eventually Abel had the thrill of seeing the light that had long been denied him slice through the edge of a wind-struck shutter. He woke up one day and there it was—things were visible!
“Abel,” he shouted, “do you hear me? I can see!” He flung the shutter open. How beautiful everything looked after the prolonged darkness. How unspeakably beautiful even the shells on the floor. How vividly actual and therefore marvelous!
Abel opened his doorway and let the light flood in. The day seemed confident of its own splendor. The icicles hanging in the open entrance glittered. One was as big as Abel himself. He ate, and drank cold water from a clay pot. Then he shoved the great accumulation of shells out of his house and went to stand before Amanda’s statue, which was chest-deep in snow.
“Dear heart, I love you,” he exclaimed. “What a lovely day! It’s February, isn’t it? I need to be moving.” He flexed his arms, bent backward and forward, and felt foolish before his wife. He didn’t know what to say.
He put on his snowshoes, got his shovel and spear, and went to read his book. Captain Burin had been wounded, he remembered. Was he going to live or not? He was going to live; his wounds were healing, thank God. And spring was coming. The talk of spring filled Abel with unbearable longing. How deeply one felt when a
lone!
It was February, as Abel had surmised, and now winter really took hold. January had been only the prelude. Abel came in from his book one afternoon, unable to keep his body from shaking. His teeth chattered and clacked, and nothing would make his frigid shuddering stop. His snout ran, his eyes teared and grew dim, his head pounded and pained.
It was a time when even the most stalwart of mice would wish to be an infant again in his mother’s warm embrace. He tottered about, shivering, and stuffed every open chink as well as he could with his palsied paws, until no light came through anywhere. The only source of warmth was his own heat-hungry body.
How wonderful a fire would be, but if he made one, he realized, he could burn himself out of his home, or anyway use up the oxygen. He donned his entire wardrobe, got all his mats together, all the paper he had torn from the novel, whatever milkweed fluff he could find in his storerooms, and half sitting, half reclining against a wall, he quilted himself all around with these paddings and buried his face in Amanda’s scarf. Gradually his shivering subsided and his tired muscles relaxed. He tucked his head under his coverings and his breath helped warm his body.
Thus began another long month of sad sequestration inside the log. Whenever Abel was convinced it couldn’t get any colder, it got still colder. The wind tore wildly around the world, whipping up the snow in mountainous drifts, breaking frozen branches off trees, sending icicles clattering to the glassy ground. Abel listened and it lasted so long he stopped hearing it. But still it went on.
He was sick. He was weak; merely to turn over took great effort; and he was wretched. One day he found himself wondering, with dull resentment, why Amanda hadn’t tied her scarf on better, so that he wouldn’t have had to chase it out of the cave. If she were less dreamy, more attentive to reality, if she had tied her scarf on tighter, he would now, this moment, be at home, wearing his velvet jacket and satin-lined pantofles, ensconced in an easy chair among plump pillows, reading a good book, or perhaps merely looking out his window at the snow. There’d be a fire in the fireplace, lentil soup with an onion in it simmering on the stove, Amanda would be at her escritoire correcting a poem, or better still, she’d be in his lap covering him with warm kisses. The cold and the wind outside would only set off the indoor coziness.
But he wasn’t at home, nowhere near it. He thought of his loved ones, his faraway friends. Amanda was his mate, yes, and would always be. His parents, sisters, brothers, and friends would always be his parents, sisters, brothers, and friends, but his feeling for them all had become shadowy. How could he go on having warm, alive feelings for merely remembered beings? Living was more than remembering, imagining. He wanted the real Amanda at his side, and he tried to reach out to her. His messages, it seemed, could not travel through the icy air.
He became somnolent in his cold cocoon. In his moments of dim-eyed wakefulness he had no idea how much time had passed since he was last awake—whether an hour, a day, or a week. He was cold, but he knew he was as warm as he could get. The water in his clay pot was frozen solid. His mind was frozen. It began to seem it had always been winter and that there was nothing else, just a vague awareness to make note of the fact. The universe was a dreary place, asleep, cold all the way to infinity, and the wind was a separate thing, not part of the winter, but a lost, unloved soul, screaming and moaning and rushing about looking for a place to rest and reckon up its woes.
Somewhere out there, in the night sky—and it could only be night—were the glittering stars, and among them his, the one he had always known. This star, his, millions of miles away, was yet closer than Amanda, because if he had the will and the strength to get up, uncover his window, and look out, he could see it. He knew, therefore, that it existed. But as for Amanda, father, mother, sisters, brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and the rest of society and the animal kingdom, he had to believe they were there, and it was hard to have this faith. As far as he really knew, he himself was the only, lonely, living thing that existed, and in his coma of coldness, he was not so sure of that.
14
Sometime in March, Abel felt he was thawing out. More wakeful than he’d been, he realized that winter had become less cold, and he bestirred himself to be up and around. He went outside feeling weak, but as he moved about under the wide, blue sky, breathing the clear air and exercising his limbs, he grew stronger.
There were two crocuses in the snow, sure harbingers of spring. Enlivened by this miracle, the dainty flowers braving the cold, he bustled about outside his log, setting things in order. He wound his watch, listened in rapture to its steady ticking, and went to read his book, really more to be back in his old routine than for the sake of reading.
The sun seemed full of plans, less bored with the world than it had been, less aloof. But after a pleasant day, it turned terribly cold again at night, and Abel crawled back under all his coverings, disappointed. Yet the very next morning it was again spring.
Snow melted, revealing the earth. The river, swollen with freshets from the thawing, was swifter than ever, exultantly rushing along. Abel finished reading his book in a few more visits and he was glad to be finished, because what was happening around him was a lot more exciting than any book. Now he liked to lie in the warm sun on the open patches of ground and be part of the world’s awakening.
He visited the birch, sat in his favorite roost, and admired the birch’s buds as one admires a friend’s babies. At night he found his star in the sky and was happy—in case the star had missed him—to show he was still alive. All this time of burgeoning life and joy, he hadn’t failed to carry his spear and watch out for the owl. He never saw it, and concluded that it must have gone away, if it hadn’t died during the deadly cold months.
Of course Abel took to communing again with Amanda, and by April he was rather sure they were in touch with each other. By then there were many bright birds about, setting up house in the north after their season in the south, expressing delight at being back. Fresh grass pushed through the old, dead stubble, buds embroidered the trees. Abel saw his whole world suffused with green.
When the flowers appeared in May, he went crazy. Violets, dandelions, pinks, forget-me-nots bedecked the island. Abel ate grass and young violet greens, fresh food with the juice of life. He drank large draughts of his wine and ran about everywhere like a wild animal, shouting and yodeling. How it would surprise his family to see him now! A group of geese passed overhead, honking. He waved a greeting. They passed on. At times he felt he had no need of others.
He bathed in the fresh cold water at the river’s edge and lay on his back under the sun, trying to fathom the firmament. One day, as he was sunning this way, with wine in his belly, who should come huffing and puffing and staggering out of the stream but an obese, elderly frog. Drunk as he was, Abel wondered if he was seeing things. But the frog began to talk.
“Ho! Wow! Whoosh! Whoa! Goshamighty! I never thought I’d make it.” He flung himself down on the bank, flopped over on his back, legs and arms outstretched, and spluttered some disconnected words.
Overjoyed at hearing civilized speech again, Abel ran over to the recumbent frog and looked down at him, beaming with candid delight.
The frog blinked. “Hi!” he said. “Wow! Did I have a time with that river! And that waterfall! I thought I’d drown!”
“What happened?” asked Abel. The frog sat up. Abel sat down beside him. Having come from the busy world of society, the frog was less surprised to see Abel than Abel was to see him.
“Gower Glackens is the name,” said the frog. “Who might you be? Where am I?”
“On an island,” Abel answered. “You are talking to Abelard Hassam di Chirico Flint—for short, Abel.”
“Pleased to meet you,” said Gower, extending a cold, clammy hand. Abel had never enjoyed shaking hands with his frog friends, but he enjoyed grasping Gower’s. “Imagine someone my age, with all my years of experience, letting himself get into that kind of water! Spring fever, I guess. I’m always
a little batty after lying in the cold mud all winter. The sun made me think I could navigate anything. The river can’t handle all those freshets pouring in. It goes wild. Where is this, anyway? Is there a town here? A post office? Any boats?”
“No,” said Abel. “There’s only me. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” said Gower. “I’d rather find you than find no one. Why are you here?”
“I came the way you did,” said Abel, “against my will.” And for the next half hour he told his story.
“Wow!” said the frog when Abel was finished. “I was sure I was dead after that waterfall. I must have hit the bottom, filled my big mouth with sand. I didn’t know where I was going after that. I just went. Gosh! My family must be worried. They’re all asking, Where’s Gramps?”
He told about his big family and where he came from. Abel had never heard of the place. And the frog had never heard of Mossville.
“Let’s go to my house,” Abel said. “It’s over that way.” He helped Gower to his feet and conducted him back to the log, where he gave him a big drink of wine.
Gower drank in glugging gulps. “I needed that,” he said. Then he went into a trance. He squatted on the ground, as frogs do, blinked in what seemed to Abel a smug way, and remained motionless. Abel saw him as crude, but utterly charming.
He prodded him. “Gower?”
“Who? What? Where am I?” said Gower. “Oh, it’s you.” He did this often, as Abel was to learn.
15
They remained together till June and became fast friends. Gower said he would be leaving as soon as he regained his strength and the swiftness of the stream had sufficiently subsided. “I wish I could carry you off the island,” he told Abel, “but I’ll have enough trouble making it by myself. I’m not what I was in my mating days.”
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