by Lauren Wolk
I spent a moment looking at that, thinking about that, and then I pulled the blanket slowly down, past the hem of her nightdress, and saw that one of her thighs was swollen and purple but also oddly white and . . . almost moving, though her leg was still.
I leaned closer in the dim light and realized that I was looking at a clot of maggots feasting on her leg.
I dropped the blanket and stepped back, gasping.
Ran out into the yard.
Bent over, my hands on my knees, and swallowed hard, again and again, but I couldn’t shake off the sight of that leg. The smell of it. The idea of her lying alone in that bed while her leg softened with rot and those hungry worms.
When I could, I stood up straight and wiped my face with my hands. Pushed my hair back and away. And went into the cabin again.
Into the terrible, raspy fizz of the flies.
I stood staring at the old woman. At the rabbit on her pillow.
What was I going to do?
I wanted her to wake up, but to what? The sight of her own leg rotting?
The dog lay down next to the bed and put his head on his forepaws, his eyes on me, his brows twitching.
“What am I supposed to do now?” I said to him.
But he didn’t answer.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Fire, I thought. I would make a fire.
There was plenty of dried grass and moss and leaf litter near the cabin, all of which I gathered for tinder, carrying it inside to pile near the cold hearth. I made a nest of the best bits, tucked it between some cooking bricks, and went to work with my knife and flint until the sparks caught.
I had fire in moments.
Carefully, I blew on the small flame until it consumed the nest and easily lit the thin twigs I fed it, then the larger twigs, then a stick and another and another and then a small log until I had a strong fire burning.
I was as aware of the woman in the bed as I was of the mountain itself.
The dog watched me steadily.
The smoke from the fire fought off the smell of that leg, but I knew I would have to face it again soon.
I had once watched my father use a hot knife to seal a wound in the palm of his hand. It wasn’t a very big cut, but it had begun to fester. “Best to kill a germ before it spreads,” he had said, heating the blade of the knife on the kitchen stove and then taking it outside before pressing the tip of it hard against the wound.
He had bellowed like a moose, and I had cried at how much it had smelled like food cooking.
My mother had scolded him for doing that when he could have gone to the doctor instead. She had scolded him, too, for letting me watch.
But he had kissed her and told her that doctors cost money, that he’d heal faster this way besides. And that I’d be better off knowing such things.
Esther had wanted no part of it.
Samuel had been napping.
And I had been the one to learn that lesson.
But this was not a small cut on the hand of a strong and healthy man.
This was a serious wound, caked with maggots and pus.
I thought about how else to help her.
I could go get my mother. But what could she do?
Some things, she could do . . . and do well . . . without a second thought. And she was brave, too. Brave enough to give up town. To go with my father to the mountain. To start over in a place with no roads. No doctors. Almost no people. But her kind of courage had very little wild in it. Very little of the mountain. Which was all I had—wildness—though plenty of it. And of several sorts: not one vast thing, but as varied as trees. As flowers.
I looked around the cabin. There was a mangy dog, a tick as big as a lima bean hanging above his eye. There was an old woman lying in her bed, senseless, crawling with worms, in a fog of blowflies. And there was me. No one else.
I would begin. I would do what I could. And then I would do what I thought I couldn’t do, before I went for a different kind of help.
The fire was starting to settle down, so I added more wood until the heat pushed me away.
The knife I carried with me wasn’t big enough to do much good.
I went to the tools hanging above the workbench and chose a big chisel.
It would do.
I wedged its blade between the burning logs.
While it heated, I went to the old woman and had a good look at her.
Her skin had the lines and spots of a life spent in the sun.
Her hair was long and gray and tangled.
“I’m going to hurt you terribly,” I whispered. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t want to look at the wound again, but I knew I had no choice.
When I did, it took my breath away.
The maggots rolled and roiled as they feasted on the dead flesh around her wound.
I turned to fetch the hot chisel.
But that, right then, was when she woke.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“You didn’t knock,” she said. Her voice was dead-tree dry, but her eyes were so blue that for a moment I forgot she was old.
I gasped at them, at her, at the sound of her voice. It was weak and pale . . . but with a strong echo in it. Something that ignited a spark of memory.
“The door was open,” I said as the echo faded and the spark winked out. “Your dog invited me in.”
At which her eyebrows went up. “Him?” She looked around but stopped, wincing. It clearly hurt her to move.
I stepped aside so the dog could take my place.
“Ah,” she said. “There you are.” She reached out and laid her hand on his head. Closed her eyes. Sighed. And then grabbed the tick on his face and ripped it off with one quick jerk.
He yelped, pawed at his face for a moment, and then sat still again.
She held out the tick. “Put this in one of those jars over there. One of the empty ones. There, on the bottom shelf.”
I had no idea what to say to that. So I fetched a jar, opened the wire bail, took off the lid, and held it out so she could drop in the tick. It bounced like a blueberry.
I put the lid back on and was about to lock the bail when she said, “Leave it loose. Air enough and all that blood will keep her for some time.”
She hadn’t even asked me my name, nor I hers, yet we were talking about ticks.
“But why do you want to keep her?” It was the first time I’d called a tick her.
“I might need her.” She closed her eyes again.
I imagined her squeezing the blood from that tick. Making a potion with it.
Witch, I thought. She’s not a hag. She’s a witch. I took a step away from the bed.
“Don’t be a ninny,” she said, without opening her eyes.
As if she’d heard what I’d thought.
I put the jar on the shelf and then edged closer again, more curious than afraid. I had a hundred questions. Maybe more. I started with, “What’s your name?”
She paused, as if to think. As if no one had asked her that question for a long time. “Cate,” she said.
“Short for?”
“Cathrine. With a c and only one e.” She spelled it out. “After my mother, though she was never Cate. And you?”
“Ellie,” I said.
“Short for?”
“Nothing. Long for Leigh.”
“Leigh.” The old woman nodded. “That’s a good, strong name. Simple. With nice round edges. Like a pear.”
We ran out of things to say about our names, so I said, “Why do you have a doll?”
She looked confused for a moment and then felt for the little doll and pulled it against her chest. “Why shouldn’t I have her?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t say you shouldn’t. I just asked why you did.”
She didn’t answe
r, but I thought I understood. I had long since given my own doll to Samuel, who had lost it in the woods, but I still remembered how it had felt to hold her in my arms as I settled toward sleep.
“How did you hurt your leg?”
She gave me a hard look. “It’s not good manners to come into my home and look at me while I’m sleeping.”
Much of this situation was odd and surprising. That she would talk about manners was more of the same.
“I tried to rouse you. You wouldn’t wake up. You have fever. There’s a dead rabbit next to your head. Of course I looked at you.”
She turned her head. Saw the rabbit next to her. Saw the flies. “Oh Captan, my Captan,” she whispered, reaching for the dog again.
I watched him relax under her hand. Watched his tail sweep the floor.
“Is that his name? Captain?”
“It is. But not Captain. Captan. No i.”
I wanted to ask about that, but dog names and bottled ticks and everything else could wait. She still hadn’t answered my question, so I asked it again.
“How did you hurt your leg? Did you cut yourself?”
She huffed. “I didn’t get this old by cutting myself.” To my great surprise, a single tear gathered itself in the corner of each eye and followed the map of her face. “It was a fisher cat. A big one. It went after Captan. Got me, instead.”
I had seen a fisher cat only once, but once was enough. Far too many teeth for a critter not much bigger than a groundhog. And sharp. Like white knives.
Again, as if she could hear me thinking, the woman said, “Can’t blame it, really, seeing as how it was not even half Cap’s size and cornered, against a rock face. Nowhere to go.”
“And you got between it and the dog?”
She stared at me. “Wouldn’t you?”
I thought about Quiet, a dog I had known for only two days. Not even two days. “I would.”
She nodded. “I thought so.”
As if she knew me.
She peered down at her leg. “What a mess.”
I nodded. “I was about to burn it.”
She looked at me, startled. “Burn my grubs?”
Which startled me, too. “Your grubs?”
“Them!” she said, pointing at her leg.
I made a face. “I know what grubs are. But yours? You put them there?”
She closed her eyes. “They eat only what’s dead.”
“But there’s pus, too. Can they stop the festering?”
She shook her head. “A fisher cat will eat something dead and get its mouth full of germ and then spread the germ into something else. Like it did to me. I tried burdock root. Pepper. I need honey. To kill the germ.”
I thought of the hive I’d meant to raid.
“And witch hazel?” I said.
She looked at me sharply. “And witch hazel, I suppose. Though that alone won’t make much difference. It’s honey and grubs that will save my leg. Maybe save me. If I’m to be saved.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
I rubbed the spot on my face where the bee had stung. “How much honey?”
“As much as you can get.”
There. She expected me to get it. But I expected that, too. It was something I could do, so I would do it.
“I shouldn’t burn it? Your leg?” And I confess that I was relieved about that.
She shook her head. “We open up the wound and pack it with honey.”
I did not see any we about it. She could barely lift her head.
Her face suddenly changed. “Something’s hot,” she said. “What are you heating?”
“The chisel,” I said. “For burning you.”
She struggled up onto her elbows. “What chisel?”
“From over there,” I said, pointing at the workbench.
“You put it in the fire?” She pushed herself up farther. “Get it out!”
Which I did, quick as I could, my hand wrapped in a hearth rag.
The blade was black with smoke and heat.
“Hang it so it doesn’t warp,” she said quickly. “Don’t lay it down. Hang it.” She sounded like she might cry.
I did as she said, careful not to burn myself.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was trying to help you.”
“I know,” she said, dragging one thin hand over her face. “I know. It’s all right.”
I watched her settle, settle, sigh herself calm.
“What do you make?” I said. “With all those tools?”
“They aren’t mine,” she said. “I don’t make anything with them.”
I wanted to ask something else, but before I could she craned her neck and said, “I would be obliged if you would bring me some water.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” And I was. It must have been some time since she’d had anything to eat or drink.
“There’s a spring just past the biggest spruce at the far edge of the clearing. Coming out under the rock there. Not much to it, so high up, but enough.”
I took an empty jar from the shelf and went out into the yard, where I was surprised to see that the day was still just an ordinary spring day—night still waiting far beyond the curve of the world—that the trees were no taller than they’d been, that nothing much had changed while I was inside that cabin.
Such a lot had already happened on this one ordinary spring day—so much of it extraordinary—that I felt a little dizzy and unreal as I crossed the yard and went in search of the spring. And found it, just where she said it would be.
She was right—it wasn’t much of a spring. But when I pushed the jar flat in the moss where the water bubbled out of the rock, a pool rose and flowed into its mouth, as if the jar were the thirsty one.
The water was cold and clear and, as I sampled it, delicious. Like poured winter. Fresh. Perfect.
I carried the jar into the cabin.
“Good,” she said. “A girl who can tap a spring.”
“Any girl can do that.”
She looked at me for a long moment. “I know.”
With one hand, I cradled her head and lifted it high enough so she could drink from the jar without choking.
Her tears came back as she drank, as if the well of her had dried but was now full again. And I felt some light in her now, too, where all I had felt before was darkness.
“So good,” she said, sobbing a little, when it was all gone.
I laid her head back down and smoothed the hair off her hot forehead.
And asked her another of my hundred questions. “Did you carve that fawn? Or that squirrel?”
“Oh, child, if I could do that, I most certainly would. But I can’t. And I didn’t.”
“Then who did?” I said.
She looked at me for another long moment, as if trying to decide something. “If you’re lucky, he may come this way in time for you to see for yourself.”
He. So my carver was a he. I had thought maybe so. “Come this way from where?”
“From somewhere else,” she said, suddenly sharp.
So I asked something different. “Why do you have so many books?”
She squinted up at me. “Let me guess. You think an old woman living on a mountaintop can’t possibly read.”
I wasn’t surprised by the bitterness in her voice, but I didn’t much like it. “I don’t think that. I just don’t know anyone who has so many. Have you read them all?”
She looked past me at the books on their shelves. “Some of them many times. I don’t know if I could have stayed here otherwise.”
I thought about why she would choose to stay in such a place, books or not, though it was better than what we’d had when we first came to the mountain.
I figured any refuge could be a home if that’s what it felt like.
“Do you want m
e to help you to the privy?” I said.
She huffed again. “Haven’t got one.”
Which startled me. “Everyone has a privy.”
“Not up here. Not for me. Animals make water. Animals make dirt. So do I. Just like they do. In the woods.” She lifted her chin. “And a person who says anything about that is a person I don’t care to know.”
She sounded queenlike.
“Do you want me to help you outside, then?”
“No need. I’ve eaten nothing. And that’s the first I’ve had to drink since yesterday.”
“You have fever.”
“I know. My bones hurt with it. But it’s no mistake and does more good than harm. Until it’s high enough to kill me.”
“Then I’ll go get you the honey. And I’ll come back as quick as I can.” I looked at the rabbit alongside her head. “I can cook that up for you before I go.”
She nodded. “For me and him both.”
The dog smiled for the first time.
“And I brought you a fish,” I said, remembering the trout.
She made a face. “Why would you come up the mountain with a fish for someone you’d never met before? And how did you even know I was up here?”
“My father told me about you. You saw him once, with a bad ear.”
She squinted thoughtfully. “I remember him.”
“And your dog. I thought he might be trying to tell me something.”
“Good.” She nodded briskly. “A girl who can understand dogs.”
“Any girl can understand dogs.”
This time, she shook her head. Closed her eyes.
For a moment, I thought she had more to say about that. But then she opened her eyes again and said, in a harder voice, “That rabbit’s not going to cook itself, you know.”
So I picked it up by its hind legs and carried the poor thing into the clearing, the trout along with it.
* * *
—
I’d butchered a rabbit before. My father had taught me how. And how to scrape the skin and stretch it in the sun to cure.
This one was no different, except I was alone. And the rising wind on the mountaintop spoke a different tongue than the wind down below. And that woman, Cate, was in terrible trouble.