“For my thirteenth birthday,” she’d declared, “I want an elephant.”
What’s an elerphant? he’d asked.
“Huh?” she’d said, but sure enough he had no idea what an elephant was. For that matter she’d never seen a live one herself, but she’d seen pictures of them, and she certainly knew what they were and what they looked like. Poor Adam really had a lot to learn.
And the thought of that gave her a worry (she was to discover throughout her twelfth year that she spent entirely too much time worrying, about all kinds of things): if Adam stayed twelve forever and she kept getting older and older, wouldn’t she become—what was that word? condescending—wouldn’t she look down upon him? How long could they remain friends before she started thinking of him as just a kid? She certainly wasn’t a kid any more. Not only could she wear Sugrue’s clothes, but her hips and thighs were fully developed, almost like a grown woman’s. Although she was spreading out down there, her face, neck and shoulders were slimming, losing the last vestiges of baby fat. Her breasts kept growing and the nipples were darkening, and she was only mildly disturbed by the hair that was sprouting in her armpits and around her poody. She remembered that her mother had had hair in those places, although she could hardly remember what her mother had looked like, or her teachers, and she really wanted to see other women so she could confirm or disprove her suspicion that she was turning into a very beautiful woman. Her fingernails were dirty and needed trimming badly (although she chewed off the ends of her thumb-nails, possibly a bad habit), and she sometimes was tempted to cut her long, long hair but had taken a vow never to do it.
What she really wanted was a brassiere. Although she thoroughly enjoyed the freedom to run around naked in warm weather (and even in the winter when the living room stove was hot), she liked the idea of having a bra, something that she and her girlfriends in the second grade could only distantly aspire to. She considered that she might look kind of funny, running around in a bra and nothing else (she had no similar cravings for a pair of panties), and since it was highly unlikely that a bra would come wandering into the pasture like a cow, she ought to put the thought out of her mind, which was too crowded with other thoughts anyhow, although most of her thoughts were just as useless or senseless as having a bra. For instance, she gave too much thought to the fantasy of going to college eventually, which was completely stupid in view of the fact that she’d never be able to finish high school. She wasn’t exactly sure what “college” was, but Miss Moore had told the class what to expect when they finished twelve grades. Robin liked to have fantasies (which were harmless enough even though they wasted brain energy) about using a chunk of her money, if she ever got out of here, to go off to some nice college somewhere, maybe even—what was the name of that best one which Miss Moore used to talk about? yes, Harbard—going to Harbard and wearing smart college clothes and learning all kinds of fabulous stuff, especially about her chosen subject, wildflowers. She adored imagining college. It would be so different from elementary school. Everything she learned would be worth learning.
In her twelfth year she began to have an intense hunger for knowledge. She wanted to get ready for college, somehow. If she’d been home in Harrison she would have gone to the public library and read each and every book in it until she’d read them all. She had nothing to read except the Bible (which she’d already read all the way through twice and was now on the third reading) and the Cyclopædia (which she could cite or recite from memory, even the parts on rural architecture, live stock management, the dairy, and Ladies’ Fancy Work). When February came and Paddington woke up and smacked his lips and grunted what sounded like a bunch of cusswords, she took him out to watch the daffodils blooming. He promptly ate a few. She led him off into the woods in search of nuts and acorns. There weren’t many; other animals had already got most of them. She saw some pig tracks, and realized that sometime soon she was going to have to try to find, and kill, and butcher, and smoke, another hog; it had been so long since she’d had bacon she couldn’t even remember what it tasted like.
Often that spring she took Paddington out and away from the house, telling the other animals to stay behind because she was teaching Paddington the things his mother would have taught him, how to recognize what was edible and what wasn’t. Their hikes deep into the woods in search of food for Paddington also turned into nature walks for Robin; the beginning of her realization that books weren’t the only source of knowledge. Paddington would never leave her side, except to chase and swat at a butterfly, or to wander off while she was down on her knees looking at some liverwort or tiny wildflower. Often he would look at her quizzically and snort a noise that sounded like he was asking her a question, “Ma, what’s that there little critter with those stripes down his back?” Robin realized that whether he thought of her as his mother or not he was expecting her to teach him the ways of the world or the ways of the wild, and she couldn’t explain to him that she herself was just as woods-ignorant as he was when it came to naming things. If he or she wanted the name of something they’d have to ask Adam, but she knew that there was an area called the “haunt” that limited the space Adam could traverse (she almost thought to call it “reach”) and she had already taken Paddington beyond the haunt.
The main difficulty she had with Paddington was that often she found a wildflower or plant of some kind that she wanted to study, but he wanted only to eat it. Once, in a crevice on the side of a gorge, she found a really marvelous little flower that looked like an elf’s penis standing under a hood to protect it from the rain. Beetles were crawling into it, and gnats were being caught by it and swallowed inside the chamber in which the elf’s penis was standing. The idea of a plant that could eat bugs really captivated her attention, but then Paddington came along and ate the flower before she could stop him. “Hey, that had bugs in it!” she protested. Whether it was the bugs or something else—maybe the plant was trying to teach him a lesson not to eat any more of them—he immediately got a stinging pain in his mouth and all the water he could drink wouldn’t make the sting go away. He was miserable for a long time. “Did you learn anything?” she asked him.
Whenever they went on a nature walk after that, she searched and searched for another one of the flowers, which she had come to think of as “elfsdick,” but it was a long time before she found another one, and she watched to see if Paddington would recognize it without any word from her, and sure enough when he saw it he made a big show of leaving it alone. She carefully dug it up (it had a big root like turnip) and took it home to show it to Adam and ask him if he knew if elfsdick would be a good name for it. He laughed and said, Sure, but we allus called ’em jack-in-the-pulpit.
She became fascinated with all the wildflowers and even had visions of sitting in a classroom at Harbard listening to a very smart man giving lectures about wildflowers. In her restless search for more and more varieties that she had not found before, she took Paddington deeper and deeper into the woods, in every direction from the house, but she always made sure to remember things that they passed, a big rock here, and a lone pine tree there, so that she could find her way home. But on one of their nature walks, Paddington flushed some kind of large rodent, maybe a woodchuck, and began chasing it, over hill and over dale, with Robin following as fast as she could. By the time Paddington had chased it into its den or burrow, she had neglected to observe any landmarks along the way, and when she tried to get her bearings after persuading Paddington that he’d have to give up the critter for lost, she herself was lost. She realized she didn’t know where they were, or which way to turn. She had a very poor sense of direction.
“Paddington, do you have any idea how to go back the way we came?” she asked. “Do you know which way we should even turn?” But his reply, a kind of growling which sounded sort of like the way Sugrue used to snore, was not much help. “Well god damn it,” she said, and began walking just to see if he might make any attempt to correct her direction. He did not, but just f
ollowed along. She tried to run away from him, but he snorted sounds that were clearly the bear equivalent of “holy shit” and “smoley hokes,” and caught up with her and knocked her down. One of his claws raked her back and drew blood. “Now look what you’ve done!” she said, showing him the blood. She wiped at it and slapped him with the wiping hand. “Bad bear!” she said. He whimpered and hung his head.
She walked on, not even able to see very well the direction she was going, because of her poor eyesight. She began to feel panicky, having no idea which way to go. The afternoon came and passed and it began to get dark. Although the day had been very warm, as darkness fell it grew cold, and her bare body was chilled. She kept on going, although the woods seemed to get deeper and darker. She never found any sign of an old trail or path, although she wondered if maybe she walked long enough and far enough she might come eventually to some path that might lead to a road, or even to somebody’s house, and she might finally find a way to get home, home meaning her old home in Harrison. But the thought of that gave her a bad scare. She couldn’t take Paddington with her. She couldn’t take any of her animals. She had a flash image of a possible scene where she tried to introduce Sheba to her mother, and her mother screamed.
No, she didn’t want to find her way home, not to that home. She wanted to find her way home to her home.
Paddington caught a chipmunk and ate it for his supper. She had nothing for hers, and she was getting very cold as well as hungry. But she kept on walking, hoping that she might find something familiar, or any of the landmarks she passed earlier. She did not. And then it was full dark. She was afraid of stepping over a bluff, and her fear of falling made her stop. She was so tired. She lay down and pulled Paddington to her and they snuggled up. His fur kept her from freezing. “I guess we’ll just have to try to sleep,” she said to him. But he didn’t seem to be in the mood for sleep. He snarled a few of his cusswords and was restless, and when she tried to hold him close to get warm he pulled away from her and stood up and began to growl. He sounded like a grown-up bear might sound. And she realized there was another animal nearby that Paddington was growling at. The other animal made a hissing and then a distinct “WOO” sound that she recognized.
“Robert!” she said. “Is that you, Robert?”
It was a bobcat, but it wasn’t Robert. It was a bobcat who wanted to eat Paddington, and was getting ready to pounce. Robin grabbed a stick and clubbed the bobcat over the head. The first blow stunned it, and while she couldn’t see very well in the dark, she kept swinging the stick down where the bobcat had fallen, and kept on hitting with the stick and hitting with the stick and finally she must have killed the bobcat. The thought of having killed it made her sad, because it was one of Robert’s cousins, but it was either Paddington or the bobcat and she was not going to let anything harm her cub. He was making a kind of woofing sound that expressed his thanks to her for doing away with his enemy. They settled into sleep.
She was starving the next morning, and when Paddington caught a rabbit for his breakfast she was tempted to take a few bites of it herself, but did not, and of course had no matches or anything to start a fire to cook the rabbit. But for his breakfast dessert Paddington found in a glade a patch of wild strawberries, and she picked as many as he did, or more. They were delicious.
With something in her stomach, she had the energy to resume the aimless search for a way home or a way off the mountain, whichever came first, she really didn’t care, although she hoped it would be home. She hiked determinedly onward. Eventually she came to a small creek, and Paddington slaked his great thirst, and she decided it would be okay to drink the water too. Then she made another decision: using her head, she figured out that the force of gravity made creeks continue downward from the source, and therefore if she just followed this creek she might come eventually to a larger creek and then to a river, and if she followed the river she was sure to come to a town or a place where people lived.
So she followed the creek, even as it tumbled down boulders and meandered through the forest. Her eyesight was not good enough to detect the place the creek suddenly disappeared, and she was on the verge of disappearing with it when Paddington swatted her, knocking her down again, and again drawing blood. “You bastard bear!” she hollered at him, but the she saw why he had knocked her down. She had almost stepped over the edge of a high bluff, where the creek turned into a waterfall that fell a long way down. She had mistaken the gurgling sound of the waterfall for Paddington’s constant babbling comments on the world. She peered over the edge but her weak eyes could scarcely see to the pool far down below where the waterfall splashed. All around the pool in every direction was a great glen or holler, with caverns opening into the bluff-faces. It was a magnificent woodsy place, and she looked for some way to get down to it. She crept cautiously all along the top of the bluff, first in one direction from the creek and then in the other direction, but she could not find any way to get down…except, finally, she discovered a kind of vertical gorge that looked as if human beings had cleared away the brush in order to make a descent. Was this possibly the place where Adam had fallen and broken his bones? Was this the same place where, every day from the first to the fourth grades, he had to climb down to get to school and then climb back up to get home from school?
It was an awesome drop…and an even more awesome climb if there were any way to get down. Studying it, and realizing there was no way she could possibly get down there, at least not without a rope, she had a renewed respect and admiration for Adam, and she began to be more determined than ever to find her way home, so that she could tell his in-habit what a wonderful boy Adam had been.
It occurred to her to back away from that drop and search for any signs of the trail that had once led from here all the way to the house, the so-called South Way that Braxton Madewell had once blazed for the benefit of the doctor who would come for the birth of Adam’s father, Gabe. Sure enough, there were places where Adam’s daily hiking of the trail had left a faint but discernible indentation in the earth: a path, a way.
With Paddington eagerly following her, as if he too sensed that they were finally heading home, she happily climbed that South Way on and on, up through the hickory forest, up a long and slippery slope of some kind of gray slatey rock, up through a crag of boulders to a towering lone pine tree. At that pine tree she lost the path and a long search would not reveal any further trace of it. She walked this way and that. She saw wildflowers of every color and every shape but could not stop to study them, and Paddington saw butterflies of every color and every shape but could not stop to swat at them. She found no more evidence of the trail.
And that day too waned and the dark came and they were lucky to find a kind of cavern to shelter them from the cold.
Chapter thirty-nine
She didn’t even notice the first night Robin failed to return home. She knew that Robin and the bear were in the habit of going into the deep woods almost every day, and for a while it had given her some unshakeable feelings of jealousy that Robin was paying so much attention to the bear and neglecting her other animals. When was the last time Hreapha had received a pat on the head or even a kind word? But after a while it no longer bothered her. She knew that it was a phase Robin was going through, not just of getting through her crucial twelfth year but also of pretending to be Paddington’s mother and teacher, just as Hreapha herself had been mother and teacher for her brood. It had been a long time since any of Hreapha’s offspring had truly needed her or even asked her a question, and the last time she had even been made to feel useful was when they’d gone out to locate the bear cub and Hreapha had given some important advice, especially about getting Dewey to absorb the dead bear sow’s scent so that the cub would ride home on his back. At the same time that Hreapha could feel worthwhile for having made the coming of the bear cub possible, and thereby having discharged her birthday duties to Robin for this year, she could understand that the more animals were on the premises the less ti
me Robin would have for Hreapha. It didn’t matter. Hreapha was happy as long as she could find something to eat. The fact that Robin had not been able to feed her anything for a long time, except occasional scraps from the table—a leftover biscuit or the dregs in some canned goods (and Robin was down to her last few cans)—was also part of the reason Hreapha was slow to notice that Robin was no longer around the house, nor was Paddington.
Still, she didn’t do anything about it, not until after Robin had been gone overnight for two nights. And then she simply remarked to Hrolf, Have you seen Mistress?
Come to think of it, not lately, he answered. I’ll ask around.
She was proud of Hrolf that he had become practically overseer of the demesne. He was not only Top Dog but also Top Critter save for Robin herself. And Hreapha wasn’t envious to admit that Hrolf was probably the smartest of them all, smarter even than herself. Robert was craftier, Ralgrub had more manual dexterity, Dewey was faster, Sheba was more cunning, and Hroberta was sexier, but Hrolf possessed not only brains but leadership qualities.
Thus when he reported back to his mother that nobody, not even Adam, had seen Robin or the cub for two nights, she asked him, What would you suggest?
Let’s see if we can’t pick up their scent, he suggested. Hreapha gladly accompanied her son as he went off sweeping his handsome nose over the ground (she reflected that the older he got the more he looked like his father) for quite a distance around the haunt until finally he stopped and said, There, take a whiff of that.
It was the faintest trace of the bear’s odor, and they followed it for a long ways off into the woods, far from the house, catching along the way a few traces of Robin’s scent too. But their quest eventually played out, and they changed their direction and went for a long distance without picking up any further smells of Paddington or Robin. They continued into the afternoon exploring the southern and eastern flanks of Madewell Mountain. Hreapha was pleased to note that they encountered no traces of the coyotes, who had probably deserted the environs entirely during the great drought. She wouldn’t have minded seeing her son Yipyip again, but she was glad to know that they didn’t have to share the mountain with the wild dogs.
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