by Lauren Wolk
* * *
—
If I needed another reason to love where I was, I got one on a morning in May when the whole world hummed and the air was sweet with the first of the lilac.
I found it in the pocket of my jacket, which I’d hung from a tree branch and forgotten.
My father had made that jacket in his shop before the crash, stitched it with spring flowers, carved the buttons from hardwood, made it with plenty of room for me to grow. And I wore it whenever I could, through work and weather and mess, while Esther and my mother kept theirs packed in brown paper, safe from harm, and scolded me for every new rip and stain.
When I plucked my jacket from the branch and slipped it back on, I found in the pocket a perfectly carved snowdrop sprouted from a bulb, so fine and delicate that I lifted it to my nose, expecting a whiff of meadow.
This time, I didn’t turn to search the woods around me.
This time, I let my eyes look past the carving and into the trees.
And there, just in that thicket there: a face.
Framed by leaves, as if it were part plant itself.
And then gone.
I blinked. Looked harder.
“Hello!” I called, but no one answered.
So I slipped the snowdrop back in my pocket and spent the rest of the day wondering about that face. Those eyes. Watching me.
* * *
—
After that, I looked more closely at the faces of the others on that mountainside, peering at them thoughtfully until more than one said, “Is there something in my teeth?” Or, “My wife has an old pair of glasses that might suit you.”
But none of the faces looked like the one I had seen. They were all too old. And none of them had enough . . . loneliness in them. So I went on as before, working hard, learning so much every day that I thought I might pop like corn in a kettle, and watching the woods to see who might be watching me.
* * *
—
When the first room was done, we moved out of the tent and into the cabin.
I remember: It was June and we were no longer cold except at the very darkest part of night.
For me, that was enough.
But my mother and Esther made my father put a bolt on the cabin door, so they could lock us in each night and sleep, finally, in peace. Dry. Safe. A thick wall between them and the wilderness.
By the time our first mountain winter came, we had a snug, safe home with four good rooms—one for us children, one for our parents, one for our kitchen, and one for everything else. A root cellar for what we’d grown the whole summer long. A place where we could start again. The know-how to make our way in this new world. And, for some of us, the blessing of knowing that we were blessed.
But that was before my father’s accident changed everything.
Chapter Four
“Mr. Peterson shot a doe,” my mother said as we lingered over our tea on the morning when Quiet was born. “Ellie, after breakfast you and Samuel go on up and get our share.”
Once the winter ice had melted, none of the five families who lived on the western slope of Echo Mountain had a way to keep meat fresh, so we’d come to share our kills, eating the best parts in short order and drying the rest for jerky.
Everyone knew that our next kill probably wouldn’t come anytime soon. My mother was a terrible shot, and she didn’t have time to lie in wait for a doe. Esther was gun-shy. Samuel at six was still too young and quite small for his age, besides.
I myself was two opposite things at the same time. One: I was now an excellent woods-girl who could hunt and trap and fish and harvest as if I’d been born to it. Two: I was an echo-girl. When I clubbed a fish to death, my own head ached and shuddered. When I snared a rabbit, I knew what it meant to be trapped. And when I pulled a carrot from the sheath of its earth, I, too, missed the darkness.
There were times when this two-ness made me feel as if I were being stretched east and west, my bones creaking and crying as they strained back toward one.
But hunger has a way of getting what it wants. And the hunger of a brother or a sister or a mother or a father is a very strong hunger indeed.
Before his accident, my father had provided plenty of meat, firewood, river fish, furs, and sometimes honey. But I was now the one who caught fish. And I snared rabbits. And if we grew hungry enough, I knew I would be the one to shoot a deer.
If I had to.
I hoped I wouldn’t have to.
One more reason for my father to wake up.
While he slept, we paid for our venison with cream and butter and things the other families didn’t grow: potatoes mostly, but carrots, too, and beets. Onions and turnips. Parsnips and rutabagas.
And my mother gave the best haircuts to be had. And she made soft shoes from deer hide lined with rabbit fur and traded them for things we needed from town: stove and pump parts, sewing needles, other things we couldn’t make for ourselves.
Since Esther and Samuel and I were the only children among the five families, my mother could not offer schooling in trade for meat or metal. And although she could sing like an April breeze and stun angels with her mandolin, she refused to think of those things as currency. “Music is not something you keep in a wallet,” she said. “I can’t just open my purse and pull it out.”
“People would trade anything to hear you,” I said soon after my father’s accident, when we were still learning how to pay our way without him.
But she had sung very seldom since coming to live in the woods. Not at all since my father had been hurt.
I was amazed that such a wild, beautiful thing could be silenced, especially in a place as wild as a mountain.
I missed that voice. That mother.
And other things, besides. When she stopped singing, she stopped teaching the three of us how to play her mandolin as well. In town, our lessons had been as much a part of our lives as church and school. But though she continued to teach us our letters and numbers, she left both prayer and music to us now, though we knew better than to touch the mandolin that my mother had set aside.
I missed Capricorn, too, who had died a year after we’d moved to the woods, soon after giving birth to a litter of four scrawny pups.
She had seemed to let go too easily, as if she were less afraid of dying than of living in the wild, and I had cried long and hard when she’d gone to her grave. And I had been the one to feed cow’s milk to her puppies until they were old enough to be traded away (which also broke my heart). And I had been the one to choose the pup we kept, though my father had decided she should be Esther’s dog, not mine.
“Maybe having a puppy will help her be happier,” my father had whispered when he took the little dog from my arms. “You and I are all right here. But Esther needs something more.”
So I had handed over the puppy I’d bottle-fed for weeks, watching sadly as my sister changed her name from Willow to Maisie and made her into a new doll of sorts, tying a strip of rag around her little neck like a ribbon, brushing her soft fur until it gleamed, and training her to sit. To stay.
Just as Esther and my mother tied their hair back, and polished their shoes, and did everything they could to keep Samuel, too, from growing up wild.
Chapter Five
By the time Quiet was born, I had found many more of the strange and marvelous gifts left by the stranger I’d glimpsed in the trees, each of them tiny, each of them enormous, like shooting stars.
One of them I found next to Maisie’s water bowl, in the yard near the cabin door.
It was a little dog, the spitting image of Maisie, right down to the perk in her tail, the tip of her head. So wonderfully done that I held it gently, as if it were made of sugar.
And then I looked up carefully. Turned slowly in all directions, as if I were a lazy clock, looking for a glimpse of who had left the tiny dog fo
r me to find.
This time, I saw something move in a grove of birches. And I burst toward it like an arrow from a bow, straight and fast, intent on only one thing: to see more than a face this time.
But when I reached the birch grove, there was only a place where some twigs were freshly broken and, on the ground there, a few pale curls of wood, fresh from someone’s blade.
I was disappointed. But I was also worried that running into the woods like that might have ruined everything.
* * *
—
Sure enough, the next few days were empty ones: no new carvings, no glimpse of anyone among the trees, and I was sorry all over again that I’d been so impatient.
I told myself that I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. That I would wait, and be careful, and do what I could to prove that I was worth another chance.
But at the end of a long week of waiting and wondering, I decided that the next move would have to be mine.
So I left my jacket hanging from a branch as I had before and went into the cabin for the night.
I thought doing that might seem like an invitation. A sign of friendship. A bridge. But in the morning, when I went out to fetch my jacket, I found nothing in its pockets.
And I wondered whether perhaps the jacket had felt too much like a trap.
Or whether I had indeed ruined everything by running into the woods, like a hunter chasing her prey.
* * *
—
Finding another gift a month later was like a yellow sunrise after days of rain.
It was a full-moon face, left by the brook where I always went first thing to wash the night from my eyes.
This time, I didn’t even look around. I simply kissed the face of that moon, smiling, and hoped that someone was watching. That someone would see how much I loved such a beautiful gift.
And then I called out, “Thank you!” and “Whoever you are, thank you!” before I turned and went back toward the cabin again.
* * *
—
My church shoes weren’t big enough to hide more than the lamb and the snowdrop, so I had long since dusted off a high shelf in the woodshed and lined the carvings up at the back of it, where no one could see them without standing on a stool.
I couldn’t see them either as I traveled through my days, but I knew they were there, the way I knew the sun was in the sky. And I knew that the friend I had not yet met was close by, too.
If Maisie suddenly stood at attention and barked at the woods, I figured I was being watched, but all I ever saw was a shadow of a shadow. If she barked in the night, I lay in bed and thought about what I might find the next day when I searched the cowshed, the woodshed, the root cellar, the trail through the woods. All the places that anchored my days like the points of a compass.
I thought of those little gifts as clues because they told me things about the carver and myself, too. Whoever had made them was sweet and clever. And I was someone who noticed things that others missed. There was a reason I was the one who found the little creatures before anyone else did. Most eyes would have passed right over a little wooden treasure tucked among the leaves at the edge of the brook. But not mine.
And there was another clue, too. The most important one. Those gifts had been meant for me. I was sure of it. Which meant that whoever was making them knew me and understood that I was the kind of girl who would love finding them tucked in the corners of my world, all of them carved from good hardwood, all just short of alive: a milk cow with one ear up and one ear down; a hunchbacked inchworm; an acorn with a tiny feather in its cap; a chickadee as round and fat as a plum.
And then, soon after my father’s accident, I found another one.
This time, it was a carving of me.
I found it perched on the stump of the tree that had nearly killed him.
And I wondered whether there had been a witness to what had happened on that terrible day.
Whether I was not the only one who knew the truth of it.
Chapter Six
The months after my father’s accident were every kind of dark and cold, but on the morning of Quiet’s birth I felt three kinds of light, three kinds of warmth: from spring itself, from Quiet, and from the flame growing inside me.
But my mother still seemed as cold and dark as the January day when he’d been hurt.
“Go on now and finish your chores,” she said after we’d had our breakfast. “And don’t forget the venison. Mr. Peterson will be done with the butchering by now. He’ll have our share ready.”
“How come Esther never fetches the meat?” Samuel groused, though he loved venison and visits to the Petersons, too.
“How come you never darn your own socks?” Esther said.
“Or make your own cakes?” my mother said, and by that she meant corn cakes or fish cakes or potato cakes. It had been a long time since we had had the kind of cake that wore candles in a crown.
“And how come Ellie gets a puppy?” Samuel said.
My mother cast him a baleful eye. “Where were you when Ellie was helping me with Maisie last night?”
Samuel sighed. “Sleeping.”
“And where were you when Ellie saved that puppy from being buried too soon?”
“I would have saved him if I’d been there,” Samuel said.
“If,” said Esther. “Such a word.”
“You know the rule.” My mother wrapped her hands around her mug, warming it as it warmed her. “One puppy at a time. When Maisie has another litter, it’ll be your turn, Samuel.”
“But Ellie already has Maisie,” Samuel said.
And he wasn’t really wrong. Esther had lost interest in Maisie as soon as the cute had worn off, so I was the one who fed her and made sure she was locked in the woodshed at night, safe from coyotes and bears. And I was the one who sometimes snuck her into my bed on cold nights, where she warmed my feet and soothed my sleep no matter how high the wind.
And now I had a pup of my own, too.
Quiet.
“Nonetheless,” my mother said to Samuel. “You’ll get your turn when it’s your turn, and not a minute sooner.”
After I’d washed up under the kitchen pump and filled a pail for Maisie, I said, “I’m going out to the woodshed to check on the puppies.”
My mother nodded, the tea still cradled in her hands, while Esther tidied the table and Samuel said, “I’m coming, too,” close at my heels.
Since my father’s accident, Samuel had taken to following me around, watching me work, asking me questions, and I tried to teach him some of the things my father had taught me, though he often didn’t want to do the work or listen the way he needed to listen.
Even so, I stopped him on the way to the woodshed and reminded him about what happens to a dog when she has a fresh litter. “Maisie growled at me a lot last night,” I said. “She even showed her teeth when I got too close.”
“At you? Maisie?”
I nodded. “Something takes over when babies are new.”
At which Samuel made a face. “You’re twelve, Ellie. What do you know about it?”
So I let him go ahead of me into the woodshed.
Let him see her fangs when the door opened.
Let him step back so fast he tripped and went down hard on his butt while I waited for Maisie to get used to the idea of us. And then I went forward slowly, murmuring soft words, careful to reach out the back of my hand until she calmed and licked my knuckles, crooning a little.
“There, there,” I murmured, stroking her ears. “That’s my good girl. That’s my good Maisie.”
When I poured water into her bowl, she raised her head enough to lap some up and then lay back down again.
The puppies were sleeping, their tummies fat with milk, and I didn’t want to upset Maisie, so I didn’t touch them, though the sight
of Quiet made me long to hold him against my neck.
Samuel eased up behind me, murmuring as I had, reaching down slowly to run his hand along Maisie’s neck again and again. “How was I supposed to know she would get so mad?” he whispered to me. “First time you’ve ever been right about anything.”
Which I ignored.
Being a middle child had made me good at turning the other cheek. But being good at something didn’t make it easy.
While Samuel was looking at the puppies, I stepped silently onto the stool in the corner and reached up to touch each of the carvings I’d hidden on the highest shelf.
There was no reason for them to feel warm, though they did.
The carving of me looked calmly back into my eyes, and for a moment I wanted to be that little girl with her solemn face and her steady gaze.
“They’re pretty ugly,” Samuel whispered.
I turned to look down at him kneeling by the birthing nest. “So were you when you were born.” I stepped off the stool and pushed it back against the wall. “Much uglier.”
“Was not.” He peered at the puppies more closely but leaned away again when Maisie raised her head. “What made you dunk the dead one?”
To that, I replied by leading him out of the woodshed, leaving the door open so Maisie could come and go.
“I just did.”
Samuel huffed. “No, you just didn’t, Ellie. Nobody just dunks a dead puppy for no reason.”
Which was true, but I wasn’t sure how to explain what had happened without getting it wrong.
So I said, “I remembered how it feels when you stuff snow down my neck.” Something he did too often but which maybe had led to some secondhand good. “I guess I wanted him to gasp.”
Samuel nodded grudgingly. “The second time you’ve been right. Probably the last time.”
Which deserved no answer.
Instead, I listened to that voice, that flame in my chest as it suddenly rose again, bright and wordless as the sun, as it had that morning when I helped Quiet find his way back to life.