The Wild Folk

by Sylvia V Linsteadt

  For a long moment, the fire cracked and popped. A golden-crowned sparrow sang outside, followed by the chortle of crows and the more distant rush of creek, filling the silence inside the Baba Ithá’s bone house.

  “How did you know?” whispered Comfrey at last. “How could the tasks make just the gifts we would need?” The girl peered closely at the Baba Ithá, confounded by the old woman’s mix of dark ferocity and this generosity, these perfect gifts.

  The Baba Ithá only chuckled and sighed, spreading her warped hands in a shrug. “One should never know the answers to all of their questions,” she said. “But suffice it to say, sometimes the gift is made by the task and the way that task is carried out. Perhaps I had nothing to do with it at all. Perhaps, in completing each task, you made what you needed, and I am only telling it back to you now. Perhaps if a different four – not Comfrey and Tin and Myrtle and Mallow – had sifted poppy seeds and gathered pearls and made shoes of stone, their uses would be entirely different. Isn’t it said, that the medicine you seek is already within you? And didn’t I say, someone had to make sure you were up for the job?” The Baba Ithá looked down her nose at them, as if over a pair of spectacles.

  “You seem to know so much about the forest, the land, all of its ways,” blurted Tin, thinking suddenly, wildly, of his Fiddleback and the Coyote-folk. He ignored the stomach-thump he received from Mallow. “Maybe you can tell us where my Fiddleback is! And if it is safe?”

  “That’s no proper thank you,” growled the Baba Ithá. The whole hut seemed to darken, and Tin wanted to kick himself. Her neck, though hunched and heavy with hair, bristled. “Out of my house! I’m sick of the smell of you, human and soft. Too many questions! I do not like questions!”

  The old woman stood and made to yank the bobcat skins out from under the children. They leaped to their feet and stumbled towards the door, grasping for their packs, which hung there on twin antler-hooks. The leverets darted between their legs, knocking ears and paws at the children’s ankles, for the Baba Ithá’s face suddenly looked very much like a hawk’s, hooked and bright with hunger. Myrtle and Mallow jumped from the porch to the ground, despite the distance created by those raised spotted-owl legs. Tin and Comfrey followed as the Baba Ithá chased them to the door. The children’s feet smarted with their hard landing.

  “Don’t forget these!” came the Baba Ithá’s voice from the doorstep. The owl legs lowered so that the bone house was level with the ground, and the old woman placed the purple vial of poppy oil, the long strand of pearls and the granite clogs on top of a freshly dug molehill. Then, with a nod of her head that was brusque and sharp, the hut lifted up again, took two large owl-legged steps, and was gone through an opening in the firs.

  Though the children couldn’t see it, the Baba Ithá peered back once at them through the thick trunks with a look of sorrow, but did not look back again. Already her mind turned to other things. It turned to the slower, deeper whisperings of the firwood and all of its woven lives – mushroom, doe, newt, fir sapling, young fern.

  In particular, her attention was caught by a peculiar new spider who had moved into a crevice in an old fir log, a small fiddleback who seemed to have walked a great distance carrying a heavy, golden sac of eggs on her back.

  Had the children and the leverets followed the main old road, which they could have picked up again down the far side of the Vision Mountains, it would have taken them four days of steady walking to reach the tip of Olima. But the leverets insisted that they continue on deer paths and rabbit runs to stay out of sight. And so the journey took seven days zigzagging through coyotebrush and coffeeberry and cow parsnip; through scrubbrush and forests of alder and maple along creeks; on old cow trails across low grassy hills; down huckleberry and hazel-lined trails on the eastern slopes of the peninsula near the bay; and hugging that bay shore itself, with its soft lapping water and little sandy coves.

  The children and leverets came upon no Wild Folk at all until the third day. Before that, they saw only brush rabbits (with whom the leverets exchanged haughty foot-thumpings and nose-sniffings); tiny chorus frogs; orange-bellied newts crossing the path for the creek; a bobcat walking down the path away from them at dusk (Comfrey gasped with delight, thinking for a moment it was the Bobcat-girl); too many deer peering up through tall grass at them to count; the early monarch butterflies; a hundred jays and ruby-crowned kinglets; juncos and spotted towhees calling from the bushes.

  The Wild Folk they encountered on the third day were only the gentle Bombus Folk, small velveteen people not much larger than the little granite man, who flew around on bumblebee wings and tended to the ground-nesting bumblebee hives and the flowers they pollinated: bearberry and huckleberry flowers like white bells, the calypso orchids getting ready to bloom in the fir duff.

  Comfrey and Tin were startled by the Bombus Folk’s kindness. They’d assumed that every last Wild Folk would automatically hate them, but the Bombus Folk seemed to have little capacity for hate. Instead, they begged that the children each sing them a song. They loved nothing more than a song, given that the bumblebees themselves often had to hum and sing against the bell-shaped flowers in order to shake that hidden pollen free. Both Tin and Comfrey blushed in turn, fumbling to remember the words and embarrassed to be made to sing in front of one another. Tin sang the morning hymn from the Cloister because it was the only tune he knew, disliking it more than ever with its words of progress and conquest and cogs-in-wheels, while Comfrey sang the Offering Song in a sweet, surprisingly clear and deep voice, like lake water. The Bombus Folk were thrilled – Like birds, like birds with such sweet voices! they exclaimed over and over. They pressed pollen-bundles the size and shape of teacakes into the children’s hands, following the four of them for some way across an open hillside, singing their own strange, humming songs.

  Besides this encounter, the children and the leverets didn’t cross paths with any other Wild Folk, nor any large mammals, such as the mountain lions which Tin kept asking Comfrey and the leverets about in tones of fascination that masked a streak of fear. Comfrey wasted no time telling Tin everything she knew about mountain lions – their hunting habits, their social habits, how to tell them apart from bobcats at a distance. (It’s terribly obvious, she explained, because mountain lions are so much bigger and have very long black-tipped tails, but as a City Folk, you never know what you might mistake for a mountain lion!). She told him the story from Black Oak, the village over the hill from north of Alder, about the man named Ben Catseye, called thus because his left eye was blinded by a mountain lion when he came between her and her two spotted cubs. She told him how they’d probably already been seen by at least one mountain lion – and maybe even the one whose paw prints she’d spotted through the moonlight moss while wearing the spectacles.

  A sort of traveller’s rhythm emerged in those days of walking. At dawn, when the sky changed colour and began to lighten at the edges, Comfrey gathered sticks and lit the fire. Tin, a little bit shy, asked her to teach him on the second morning, and so for the next two they did it together – Comfrey demonstrating how to layer the sticks just so, and coax the hottest flame, Tin watching earnestly, and fumbling a bit with his first try, mostly because he was nervous to have Comfrey looking on with that little amused smile and the gleam in her eyes.

  “It was my father’s flint,” she said on the fourth morning, allowing Tin to strike it on his own. He’d made the whole Fiddleback, and the granite shoes; lighting a fire was hardly a challenge in comparison, and yet it took a delicate, patient precision that surprised him. And to make a spark this way! It was nothing like the Cloister’s coal burners, and it never ceased to make him laugh with delight. “He taught me when I was very small. Before he went away.” There was an edge of bitterness in her voice, and she realized for the first time that part of her was angry at her father for choosing the City, and his visions, over her and her mother. Hearing about him from Tin, his life underground with the Mycelium pursuing his noble cause, had cl
arified the anger which had smouldered in her since she was small. It was selfish, she knew, but all the same she was angry with him for never once sending word to them, for never coming home. Tin understood something of that anger in her voice.

  “He saw something like what you saw in the feather, Comfrey,” he said, trying to make her feel better. “He did it to protect you; to protect us all.” His voice swelled with admiration, and Comfrey felt her anger turn to guilt and sadness. After all, she had run off and left her mother alone now too, just as he had done.

  “Well,” she snapped. But she didn’t finish her thought, because she was finding it hard not to cry, and turned back to the fire instead to blow it to life.

  That night, as Comfrey lay on her bedroll in the cold February air, huddled close to the fire, what she had seen in the Fire Hawk’s feather when she first picked it up came back to her very clearly, smouldering on her closed eyelids. Had her father too seen the Country on fire, and the Wild Folk bleeding gold across the earth? Had he too seen the hordes of armoured men descending upon their wounded bodies? She remembered Salix’s words. How the Elk was the centre of the wheel of the basket of Comfrey’s fate, the Elk whose milk made the stars, the Creatrix of Farallone itself. What would happen when she gave the Elk the Fire Hawk’s feather? Comfrey sat up with a jolt. Her hands and feet felt cold with dread. She slept at last, but fitfully.

  On the morning of the seventh day, they reached the beginning of Tamal Point. It was marked, the leverets explained, by an ancient cattle grid across the old road and the sudden narrowing of the land into a long-tipped peninsula, with ocean on one side and bay on the other. The sky darkened quickly as they passed over the grate, and a chill came in on the wind. Fat raindrops began to fall. Comfrey loosed her blue cape from its bundle at the bottom of her pack and flung it on. Tin did the same with his patchwork coat. The leverets shook themselves, making their own fur more water repellent.

  “At least the rain will dampen our smell and sound from the Grizzly-witches,” said Mallow, doing all he could to remain cheerful in the face of the task before them. “Quite a bit more difficult to smell specifics in the rain. It just brings up the smell of everything more vividly. But of course that also means it’s hard to distinguish the scent trail of a Grizzly-witch from this morning, or three days past.” Mallow lowered his nose and whiskers to the earth and sniffed intently at the grass and a few protruding granite stones.

  “You mean, you can smell Grizzly-witches already, right here?” said Comfrey, feeling a little sick.

  She and Tin had discussed a hundred different plans backwards and forwards about how they would get the Grizzly-witches to eat the poppy oil, but they didn’t know very much about the Grizzly-witches to begin with, and Myrtle and Mallow could only provide a few scraps of description and story that they’d learned from the Greentwins. Now, with a cold, wet wind picking up from the ocean, and Tamal Point stretching before them, windswept and sparse, the Grizzly-witches seemed as big as the very slopes and knolls around them. By comparison, Comfrey and Tin felt woefully small and unprepared.

  “Why yes,” answered Mallow after a few more moments’ sniffing. “Naturally. We have reached their territory, and that of the elk whom they tend. What concerns me most is that I fear the prints I smell are quite fresh, not an hour old. But it’s impossible to be certain in the rain. Myrtle, what do you think?”

  “Only an hour old?” exclaimed Tin. He fumbled at the buttons on his pack, his hands already growing stiff from the cold, reaching to pull out his granite clog.

  “Oh yes, at most!” replied Myrtle after a long moment.

  “Why didn’t we assume they’d be out and roaming? Of course they are!” muttered Comfrey. “What did we think they did all day?” She looked at Myrtle.

  “Don’t look at me,” retorted the leveret. “We could hardly follow the hundred strands of your outlandish plans! How could we have helped? All we ever told you, true now as it ever was, is that the Grizzly-witches always gather at dusk in the big ruined milk barn of the ancient ranch called Pierce, and share stew, and root tea, and the stories they found as they hunted and foraged throughout the day.”

  “Yes, but how far is that barn from here?” exclaimed Comfrey, wiping rain from her cheeks and chin with a cold hand.

  “No idea,” said Mallow cheerfully.

  “So,” interjected Tin, impatient. “We put the shoes on now, one each, and lock arms so it’s like we’re one creature. Then the Grizzly-witches will hear us as rumbling granite, slow like the earth, not people.”

  After a moment’s consideration, the girl nodded agreement. She pulled the other stone shoe from her pack.

  “This is it,” she whispered, hooking her arm through Tin’s, elbows locked. “You two lead the way!” She nodded to the leverets. “I can hardly believe we’re doing this: walking headlong into the barn of the Grizzly-witches!”

  “Not quite headlong, I hope!” exclaimed Mallow.

  “I say we leave the vial on the doorstep, like a gift,” offered Mallow as they began to move slowly through the windy rain. “For Grizzly-witches are part bear after all, and bears love gifts, especially sweet delicate ones. And that bottle is just the colour of a berry.”

  “But isn’t that suspicious?” said Tin, wishing he had a hat. His curls were heavy, dripping water repeatedly into his eyes. “I mean, why wouldn’t they be wary and wonder if it’s poison? No, I like the idea of putting it in the stew, or the lanterns.”

  “But how will we get in, Tin, without them knowing?” said Comfrey, stopping to pull her cloak further over her head.

  “No stopping now!” shouted Mallow. “This infernal rain is getting in my ears, and if you two dilly-dally for too long, the cold will set in. I say we use our instincts, stop thinking so much. Imagine being a bear. What would fool you?” The leverets bounded off deeper into the rainy scrubbrush prairie, weaving between the budding lupines, then doubling back to the children’s heels.

  Comfrey and Tin fell into a rhythm of stone-footed walking, trying to sync up their legs and feet so that their gaits were fluid and matching. Comfrey had put the granite clog on her left foot, and Tin on his right, so that their impact on the earth was balanced. They didn’t speak more than a few words, following the leverets quietly and carefully, hoping the thud and swish of the stone shoes was enough to fool the Grizzly-witches, at least for the time being.

  After half an hour’s steady tromping through the thickening rain and wind, Tin exclaimed that he could taste salt from the ocean in that wind. Comfrey said, “Why do we need to make the Grizzly-witches fall asleep at all? With these shoes on, why can’t we just sneak past and find the Elk, offer her these pearls, give her the feather, and be done with it?”

  “Oh no,” said Mallow. “It doesn’t matter what shoes you’re wearing. If any of the elk of Tamal Point are disturbed in any way, the Grizzly-witches know. Only the deepest of deep sleeps will keep them from coming straight to us. Their ears and hearts are so deeply attuned to the elk herd. They know each time something out of the usual order occurs.”

  “Besides,” added Myrtle, “you’re convincing only so long as you’re just passing through, like migrating birds. Not stopping to talk to the Elk of Milk and Gold herself!”

  “Shh,” hissed Mallow suddenly, stopping stiff with ears raised and tail quivering. “Look.”

  On the crest of the next hill, so far away that at first she looked like just another rock, was a Grizzly-witch. Everything about her was grizzly-bear-like – her shaggy gold-silver body, the hump of her shoulders, her short tail. Only she had hands and feet in the place of paws, even though she walked on all fours. And her face was an older woman’s, beginning just past the ears. It was furred but flat and delicate and human; no long muzzle, no dark wet nose. Her teeth, however, were still a bear’s, plentiful and sharp. She was digging with long fingernails for wild parsnip roots, and hadn’t noticed the children or the leverets. She hummed as she did so. The sound didn’t carry t
o the children’s ears, but it did to the leverets’, who shivered. Comfrey and Tin looked at each other in alarm. In the rain, the Grizzly-witch’s silhouette looked entirely bear, and a massive one at that.

  “I don’t think we can fool such a being,” whispered Comfrey, her voice shaking slightly with fear and awe and cold.

  “But at least the shoes seem to work,” Myrtle whispered back, nudging Tin with her nose. The boy blushed with pride. “Without them, that Grizzly-witch would have been upon you already. They aren’t fond of humans. And that’s putting it mildly. As for hares, we’re a dime a dozen, and clearly she’s got an appetite for roots this afternoon.”

  “Mallow,” hissed Tin suddenly, with a wild look in his eyes. “Can you outrun a Grizzly-witch?”

  The leveret regarded the boy through the rain with a look that was equal parts horror and pride.

  “Why – yes, I suppose. That is, if I got a little head start, I think so. I think I could,” replied the leveret, puffing up his chest.

  “Mallow, you’re nuts!” said Myrtle. “Tin – no. Whatever you’re thinking – no.”

  “But just listen to my plan,” said the boy, holding up a hand. “There’s no way we’re going to slip some oil under her nose. She’s probably digging those roots to bring back for the evening stew.”

  “Perhaps,” sniffed Myrtle.

  Indeed, even from such a distance, it was clear that the Grizzly-witch was placing roots into a basket, not right in her mouth.

  “So, Mallow, if you go dashing past and tempt her out of sight, Comfrey and I can run over, pour some of the oil onto the rest of the roots in her basket, then hide. Then, once she’s given up chasing you – because of course you’re too fast for her! – we can follow her back, at a safe distance that is, and see if they eat the roots for dinner! Then, under the cover of night, we’ll find the Elk of Milk and Gold, show her the feather, and ask for her help. Simple!”