Joseph Bruchac

by The Dark Pond

  “Why, hello,” I heard Mrs. Phelps, the librarian say. “What can I do for you young people?”

  I peeked over the railing. It was the rescue party. There was no way the three of them would have come in here unless they were looking for me. I didn’t wait for them to mention my name or take the chance that Mrs. Phelps might not have seen me as I slipped in. Librarians are second only to eagles as far as observing anything entering their domain. I moved toward the stairs. There was one last place to hide—the special-collections room.

  Special collections is a room about the size of a small classroom at the very back of the building on the third floor. The door, which doesn’t have a window in it, is kept locked. I hadn’t been given the combination, but had learned it by watching Mrs. Phelps’s fingers as she opened the door for me one time. I punched in the numbers, turned the handle till it clicked, then went inside. I closed the door very slowly behind me so that it made no noise.

  I looked around at the shelves of books and file cabinets filled with the stuff that makes up the North Mountains Adirondack Collection. Everything in the room, from rare and limited-edition books to copies of articles and newspapers, had to do with the north-country region, the history and folklore of these mountains.

  I went to the Native American section. Mom always told me that whenever I was confused about something, there were always two places I could look—one was to the earth and the other to the ancestors. Then she would tell me one of the old stories.

  Maybe it would be a story about how Buzzard ended up with a bald head, or a tale about a boy who always listened to his elders and learned so much that he was able to help his people. She told me how the earth was brought up from under the waters by the birds and animals and then placed on the back of a great turtle. That is why we call North America the Turtle Continent. She would also tell me more recent stories about our great people of the past. A lot of times she would tell me about Tecumseh.

  Tecumseh was one of the greatest warriors of all the people. When he was born in 1768, a huge green comet streaked across the sky. Shawnees call the comet the Panther of the Sky, and Tecumseh’s name means something like that in the Shawnee language. He tried to bring all the different tribes together in a great confederacy to save us from the white settlers who wanted to kill all the Indians or drive us all out. He never gave up, and he always tried to find a way to protect the people and our land. He wanted to live in harmony with the white people, and he only fought when there was no other way. He lived for his people, and he died for them.

  Thinking about Tecumseh is a great way to put your own little problems in perspective. I never feel so sorry for myself when I remember how he always tried to find a way to help. I thought of that now.

  Three weeks had passed without anything happening. Winter had started to loosen its grip on the mountains, but whatever had hold of me hadn’t let go. The memory of that awful night was still burned into my mind like the embers of the fire I huddled over till dawn. Whatever it was that was out there under that dark pond wasn’t going to leave me alone. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew I had to do something. Maybe if I looked in the right place, I could find an answer.

  I knew a lot about Shawnee stories, but I didn’t know much about the stories from this part of the Turtle Continent. If there was something out there besides my imagination, I’d bet that it would be in the old stories.

  Some white people claim that nobody lived in the Adirondacks before the Europeans settled here. I knew that couldn’t be true. In fact, I’d already read an article about Indians in the Adirondacks in a copy of Adirondack Life magazine that they had on reserve downstairs for the local history class. The Iroquois and Abenaki were here. I needed to find some of their stories and see if they talked about water monsters. Because after what happened that night, I knew that it wasn’t something normal in that pond that had killed the deer.

  Hours later, surrounded by the books I’d pulled from the shelves, I was feeling overwhelmed. The Iroquois and Abenaki didn’t just talk some about underwater monsters—they talked too much about them. There were giant beavers and strange creatures all covered with hair that lurked in the springs and pulled in unwary people. There were huge horned serpents that lived in the big lakes and could be either dangerous or friendly, depending on circumstances. There were sucking monsters that pulled people in like the undertow in the ocean, and great fish that swallowed people whole. There was Toad Woman, who lured children into the swamps, then drowned them and stuck their bodies under a rock till they rotted so she could suck the flesh from their bones.

  There was too much to choose from. None of them, though, seemed quite right. But one story gave me an idea. It was from a book by an old guy named Don Bowman. He wasn’t Indian, but he’d learned lots of stories from Indian people hereabouts. This one story told about a deep pond that was formed when a falling star struck the earth. Animals became scarce and people began to disappear from around that area. Finally some hunters were walking around the pond when a giant fish jumped right out of the water, grabbed one of them, swallowed the man, and jumped back in. The hunters who survived went and got some dynamite and dropped it into the pond so that the giant fish blew up underwater. Big pieces of flesh came floating up to the top and the giant fish were never seen again.

  Hmmm.

  But where could I get dynamite?

  I looked up at the window. I’d not only forgotten that my friends were looking for me, I’d lost track of time. It was completely dark outside.

  12

  NIGHT WALK

  MRS. PHELPS NODDED at me as I walked past her desk. It made me realize that she probably knew where I was all along. It was half an hour past the usual closing time and no one else was in the building. She’d been waiting for me. I was glad I’d taken the time to put all the books and articles back in their proper places. As soon as I walked through the front door of the library, I heard her lock it behind me.

  Before I went down the library steps, I looked around the campus. I could see a few people moving inside the buildings, shapes passing in front of lighted windows, but I seemed to be the only one outside.

  I lifted my head to the sky and took a deep breath of the clear mountain air. It was a cloudless night. The faces of the stars glittered down at me. The Shawnees say those stars are ancient beings, watching the earth below. There was a half moon in the sky, so bright that I cast a shadow on the snow.

  I zipped up my coat, even though it was not that cold and I was only going to walk to my dorm. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my gloves, and put them on. I slid my hood over my head and tightened the drawstring.

  Then I realized what I was feeling. That pull, like a compass needle being drawn toward the north. The dark pond was calling to me. Maybe it was because my mind had already been turned toward it. For the last six hours I’d been utterly zoned out. I had completely forgotten about time, about going to dinner, about everything else.

  I do that sometimes. I get so involved in something that I go into a kind of trance. It’s like nothing else exists in the world except what I’m focused on. Devo has seen me like that. Spooky is his word for it.

  Spooky is how it felt. Here I was, in the middle of the school campus, surrounded by the safe, familiar architecture of buildings and walkways and benches, miles away from the dark pond. But those human-made things were only shadows. A part of me felt as if I could just close my eyes and be right next to that deep, hungry water.

  I’d felt that pull before, but only when I was within a hundred yards or so of the pond. This time, though, it was like the force of some giant magnet was reaching across the intervening miles, through the hills and trees. I was nothing more than a pile of iron filings.

  This is ridiculous, I thought.

  Then I noticed that I wasn’t standing in front of the library anymore. I was on the other side of the quad, heading straight for the trail that led through the field and into the woods.

  What am I
doing? I thought. I was feeling more annoyed than scared.

  I reached out my hand, placed it against the big birch tree in front of me, and looked back over my shoulder. There were my footprints in the snow crossing the field. The lights of the campus were now small in the distance.

  I wrapped my hand around the branch. If I just held on to it, I wouldn’t be able to go anywhere. I closed my eyes, feeling the way you do in a disturbing dream when you know you are dreaming. You just have to convince yourself to wake up.

  I can resist this, I thought.

  Then I opened my eyes. The branch was still firmly held in my hand, but it had been broken off the tree. I was at the top of a hill, no glimmer of lights behind me. I was half a mile into the woods. I dropped the branch and wrapped both my arms around a pine tree, pressing my cheek against the round metal trail marker that was tacked onto its trunk. The metal was as cold as ice, and it made my eye ache.

  Good, I thought. Maybe pain will wake me up.

  The light from the half moon was visible even here under the trees. I’ve never been taught to be wary of walking in the woods at night. Aside from your imagination, there’s usually nothing to be afraid of in the northern forest—except for other people. These days there’s nothing more dangerous than other human beings. Long ago, when there were animals that hunted human beings—those giant animals, cave bears, lions and saber-toothed tigers that lived here on Turtle Island ten thousand years ago—we had good reason to worry about what was out there beyond the safe glow of our campfires and the doors of our lodges. Maybe the deep memory of those creatures makes some people still feel afraid, so afraid they have to make up new monsters that live in the night. Then they fill their scary stories and movies with them.

  Tonight, though, I knew there was no need to create any new monsters. The ones our old stories remembered were bad enough. They were so bad that long ago our heroes had to fight those monsters and destroy them to make the earth safe for their children’s children.

  I no longer believed that all those monsters had been destroyed. But I knew that unless I could stop this whacked-out, half-asleep journey through the forest, I would find out all too soon whether or not at least one monster was still on the job and, tonight at least, working overtime.

  Strangely enough, I still wasn’t really afraid. I didn’t feel weak or panicky. Instead, I felt really pissed off. I get that way when anybody—or anything—tries to force me to do something I don’t like.

  I was still holding on to the pine tree. I hadn’t gone any farther on my stroll toward being something’s midnight snack. I carefully released my hold, turned around, and faced back down the hill. I took one step, and another.

  Then a dark shape loomed up out of the darkness and grabbed me.

  13

  SABATTIS

  THE GRASP WAS hard as iron. Two big hands held my shoulders as a tall man thrust his face toward mine. Even in the moonlight I could see that his shoulder-length hair was jet black. His deep-set eyes glinted just as dark from under heavy eyebrows. His face was dark and looked worn like the wood of an old barn—weathered, but still strong.

  “Hunh,” he grunted. Then he shoved me backward and let me go with his hands—even though his eyes still held mine.

  The moonlight was bright enough for me to take in the rest of him. He had on a red-and-black plaid wool jacket with wool pants to match, the kind of clothing lumberjacks and hunters used to wear before fleece and all those new space-age artificial fabrics took over, and he wore heavy calf-high black boots.

  Then the moonlight reflected off the long canine tooth of a bear that hung from a silver chain around his neck. I knew who he had to be. He wasn’t as old as Devo had made him out to be—probably just in his thirties—but he had to be the other Indian. He was the new grounds-crew guy who’d been feeding the sparrows.

  Aside from that initial disgusted “Hunh,” he didn’t utter a word. He just stared at my face like he was either trying to memorize it or look below the skin and bone. I didn’t say anything back.

  For one, I was still getting my breath back after the way he materialized out of the dark like somebody beamed in on Star Trek. Of course, I knew he had to have just been sitting there by the path waiting. It is hard to see anyone at night in the woods if they stay down and stay still, even when the moonlight is bright. It had been a shock. But it was also a relief to realize it was a person grabbing me and not something else.

  I also kept quiet, because I was embarrassed. I mean, what could I say? Hi, my name is Armie. I’m out at night walking like some hypnotized zombie toward my certain doom. Heh heh heh.

  Finally the man sighed.

  “Darn,” he said. Then he gave me a hard push. “Go.”

  I stumbled a few steps down the hill. The hand pushed me again, this time on my right shoulder. “Not that way.”

  I turned off on the trail that cut to the right. I could feel him close behind me. This way was narrower than the main trail that led toward the campus, but I knew it well enough to move along at a brisk pace. It looped around the school and came out half a mile below at a parking lot used by hikers and cross-country skiers.

  Maybe somebody else would have asked why we were going that way, where we were going, and what the hurry was. I didn’t. Even though this Indian guy whose name I didn’t know yet had spoken no more than five words, I realized that he knew what he was doing. Plus I knew I’d been in danger until he had suddenly appeared.

  As the trail became wider and more level, I felt another soft push on my back. I didn’t look back, I just started going faster, trotting now. It is stupid to run headlong through the forest at night, but you can go at a pretty brisk pace if you know how to do it. It is always lighter over the top of a path through the woods at night, like a second trail of light where you can see the ribbon of sky. You sort of feel the trail with your eyes and your feet at the same time, and you glide along.

  A thin, harsh cry cut through the night. It was long and ululating and totally weird. Even though it wasn’t that close, it startled me. I stumbled, but I caught myself with my hands and kept going without slowing up. I’d heard that cry before, far too close last time.

  We came out into the clearing. It was so much brighter outside the forest that it was almost like stepping out into daylight. A single truck was parked there.

  “Get in.”

  I went around to the passenger side and climbed inside. He slammed his door, jammed the key in, cranked it, slid the truck into gear, and we spun out of the lot. I didn’t turn back to see if anything came lumbering out of the forest into the clearing. I looked at my hands and then pressed them between my knees. It was time for them to stop trembling.

  He slowed down after we drove out onto the main road. We kept going until we came to the place where the road starts in to Heart Lake, right in the middle of the high peaks. We drove half a mile; then he pulled over and stopped. The snow-covered mountains were there ahead of us, their folds and ridges perfectly outlined by the light of the moon, their tops sharp against the deep velvet-blue of the sky behind them. The place where we had stopped was one of my favorite spots. I liked to walk here from the school, to sit and look out at the peaks.

  I looked over at the guy, sitting there with both hands on the wheel. Thus far he had spoken a grand total of seven words to me. I figured I owed him at least that many in return, so I’d better get started.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  He didn’t turn his head, but he sighed. “Shoot,” he answered, easily matching my own conversational brilliance. Clearly I needed to take up a little more slack in our dialogue.

  “My name is Armie,” I said, holding out my hand.

  For a minute he didn’t move. Neither did I, stubborn being my middle name. Finally he shook his head and sighed again, a little deeper this time. Without turning his head to look at me, he held out his own right hand and grasped mine in a soft handshake.

  “Sabattis,” he said.

  14<
br />
  WORMS

  SABATTIS.

  That was all he said, and it seemed as if that was all he was going to say. We sat there in silence, both of us looking at the mountains. As if saying his name said it all.

  Well, in a way it did. Among Indian people, giving your name to a person you’ve just met is a big deal. A name is a powerful thing. Giving someone your name means that you trust them with something precious to you. It may even mean that you are making yourself more vulnerable.

  Sabattis. That name meant more to me than I think he knew. It meant more now, in fact, than it would have meant a day ago. I’d just read about someone named Sabattis in the library’s special collection. He was an Abenaki Indian, one of the most famous Adirondack guides more than a century ago.

  “Mitchell Sabattis, the Adirondack guide?” I said.

  Sabattis didn’t stir, but his lips moved as he spoke softly. “My grandfather’s grandfather. I’m named after him.”

  I waited, but that was it. I was beginning to understand how frustrated people get when they try to pry more than a handful of words out of me. I was still pumped with adrenaline from our flight through the darkness. I couldn’t take the silence anymore.

  “I have an Indian name too,” I said. “At least there is this Shawnee name my mom calls me by sometimes. I’ve never told any of the kids at school about it. My mom is Shawnee and my dad is Armenian. The name that she calls me is Quoshtoki. She says that means like cataract or waterfall. But there are also times when she says she probably should have called me Wannisucka instead. That sort of means idiot.”

  “Right,” Sabattis said.

  I could feel my ears getting red the way they do when I am angry or embarrassed, I wasn’t sure which. Who was I trying to talk with? I mean he was Indian, sure, but he was just a member of the grounds crew. Here I was, a kid with a good education, going to this exclusive outdoor prep school trying to force conversation out of this poor guy who had probably never even read a book. I should be ashamed of myself.