Mountain Solo

by Jeanette Ingold

  And then, just as Amy starts to say something, I hear a soft snap like a twig being stepped on. "Listen!" I whisper.

  "To what?"

  "I'm not sure."

  Once more, a shape near the tree line seems to move, and this time I recognize the up-and-down lines of legs. And then I make out the dark silhouette of a head and neck.

  Amy clutches my arm as a large doe steps from the sheltering forest. Hie doe stops to listen and then moves farther into the meadow. Again she halts, and this time she makes a hoarse noise: a raspy sound like wind whistling up her throat.

  And, suddenly, another doe and three fawns are in the clearing with her.

  Oh... I'm sure I just thought the word, but the lead doe looks my way alerted, ears cocked forward.

  She takes a few stiff-legged steps toward us, stamps a hoo£ and takes another step.

  She blows air out her nostrils in a breathy snort, and the other deer lift their heads. And then the big doe turns and bounds into the forest, moving so quickly she seems to just disappear.

  Right away, the others follow, all but the littlest fawn.

  Confused, it steps this way and that and then runs toward us, halting a few feet away. It looks right at me.

  I see its frightened eyes and its muscles too tense to move, and I hear the little animal make a sound of its own: a tiny, high-pitched bleat.

  And then from the woods comes that snorting, breathy call again. The fawn leaps toward it, and the last glimpse I have is of the white underside of its small, flagging tail.

  Amy whispers, "I was afraid he was going to get left. But did you hear him, Tess? Did you hear?"

  "I heard," I answer not trusting my voice to say more. I think of that scared bleat and picture how the little guy stood too frightened to move, too little to be alone. Tears fill my eyes.

  They spill over and in the damp, cool, mountain morning, I begin crying.

  "What's wrong?" Amy asks.

  "I don't know," I answer choking a little laugh into the words. "I just need to cry."

  "Okay," Amy says, and she sits with me while I cry and cry and cry.

  AS WE WALK bade to our tent, Amy asks, "Why were you so sad? The fawn went back to its mother."

  "I know it did. But for a moment it was so lost and so scared."

  "And that's all?"

  "I was thinking about some other things, too."

  "What?"

  "Mostly stuff I wish I could do over again. Do differently."

  "The concert?"

  "That's one of them."

  "You're still glad you came here, aren't you?"

  "That's been the best thing to come out of it."

  Amy looks pleased. Then she asks, "But what was worst?"

  "I guess the people I let down. In Germany and afterward. When I got to New York I didn't even call my violin teacher or Ben."

  "You just left? You didn't say good-bye? How come?"

  "I was ashamed. And also I knew if I was around them, I'd be around music, and I thought I wanted to get away from it. Only ... Amy, I miss it so much." I try to make my voice light, but I'm only partly successful. "Sometimes I feel as lost as that fawn looked."

  Amy studies me solemnly. "I knew you were crying for it."

  She thinks awhile, and then she announces, as though she's just made a major decision, "If the fawn had needed me to, I'd have helped it. I wouldn't have let it down."

  "I know that, sweetie," I tell her "I don't doubt it for an instant."

  How about striking out on cross-country travel?" Dad asks after we're all up and packed. He and Meg are scrutinizing a trail-less section of topo map, looking for a shortcut that might regain us the day we lost to rain.

  Meg answers, "One of my older maps shows a footpath. It's some distance away, but we could shoot for that."

  The bushwhacking is rough going, with some hard climbing in places. We skitter down grab-onto-whatever-you-can descents knowing we're just going to have to go uphill again, and we lose an hour working our way around a large area of avalanche-downed pines. And when we do finally spot an ax-cut blaze high on a tree, we still have to look hard to find the trail it once marked.

  All in all, it's one long, hard day of hiking that doesn't even allow a chance to talk. The payoff, though, is that by ten o'clock the next morning, we're above the gulch where Meg thinks the Bottners had their homestead. The upper end of it tapers out of sight into the high country, and where the gulch widens at the lower end, its floor appears to be an impenetrable mat of densely packed trees and dark undergrowth.

  "What a place to try to live," Meg murmurs, as we begin our descent. Gesturing toward a rock outcropping on the somewhat barren hillside opposite, she adds, "That must be the rock ledge that the Randalls climbed up to."

  We stow our gear at a camping spot a couple of hundred feet from the bank above Rattlesnake Creek, and Meg checks her vest pockets for her topo map and compass, pencils and notebook, tape measure, and camera. I'm wondering if she's going to do her exploration alone—feeling disappointed, because that's what it looks like—when she asks, "Tess, want to go along? I'd love some help."

  "Sure," I answer "I'll do whatever you want."

  "I can help, too," Amy says, but Dad's ready with a different plan for her.

  "I've got some plaster of paris for casting animal tracks," he says. "I thought you and I might set out along Rattlesnake Creek and see what we can find. Though I ought to warn you, we may need to wade right in."

  Conflict races across Amy's face, and I hide a smile. I know exactly how she's feeling It is so frustrating to want to do two things and have to pick one. The bag of casting material that Dad pulls from his pack wins her over.

  MEG AND I head into thick growth along a runoff stream that funnels water into the gulch from the mountains. I ask what I should be looking for.

  "Anything unnatural," she answers.

  "Like apple trees or poplars?" I ask, remembering what she told me our first day out.

  "Exactly. But also look for any kind of nonnatural debris—metal scraps, fencing, a can pile. Sawed lumber or shaped logs, of course. Leather—sometimes that survives a long time. And especially keep an eye out for odd ridges or depressions."

  Meg rattles the list off so easily that I expect it will be just a matter of moments before we spot one thing or another.

  We don't, and we're not successful when we climb to the rock outcropping hoping, as the Randalls did, that from up there we might notice some irregularity in the landscape.

  Traversing our way down, we do come across a rusted can riddled with holes in a rough pattern, but there's no way of knowing if it was ever connected to any homestead in the gulch.

  And Meg vetoes checking out a brush-filled, caved-in section of hillside that could be the remains of an old mine. "Too dangerous," she says. "It'd be nice to know, given Katharina's story about injuring her hands, but it will have to wait until a team can investigate in a way that won't risk a cave-in."

  Back down in the gulch, Meg and I knock off for a midafternoon snack. Sounding disheartened, she says, "I really thought we'd come across something by now. I was so sure all the evidence pointed to this being where the Bottners lived."

  "MEG?" I CALL. "Does rhubarb grow wild?"

  "No!" Meg shouts, hurrying to me. "It does not!"

  Leaning down, Meg peers at the plant's big leaves and scraggly stalks as though they're the most gorgeous things she's ever seen. She says, "In the old days this plant would have provided jellies and pies, protected against scurvy..." She pauses, looking around. Assuming the Bottners did live here, then we're probably standing in their kitchen garden, which certainly would have been placed handy to the house."

  She points but the area she thinks most likely to have contained the homestead buildings. "Let's work it in a grid, you taking one side and me the other We'll walk up in one direction, return a couple of feet over and so on."

  "What about trees?"

  "Go around them, but do
your best to keep to the grid. And if you see anything... anything..."

  I find the first confirmation that we really have found the homestead when my shirtsleeve snags on a twist of barbed wire protruding from a tree trunk. "Over here!" I yell. "Meg! I think I've found part of a fence!"

  And thirty minutes later still looking for more fence remnants, I trip and fall into a shallow depression hidden by rotting vegetation.

  Meg gives me a hand up. Then, being careful not to move anything but leaves, we uncover the extent of the hollow. It's a square, roughly four feet on a side.

  "What do you think it was?" I ask.

  "It's too small to have been a root cellar" Meg answers, "so my best guess is that you've found the Bottners' outhouse!"

  "You're kidding!"

  "Hey! That's an important find!"

  After that, the discoveries come quickly. We find mossy lines that Meg says are probably the cabin itself and that we'll come back to. She points to a spot where vegetation is particularly thick and guesses that's where the barnyard was. "I bet that if we dug under the sod, we'd find a rich layer of humus," she says. "Think cows, horses, chickens, mud, cow pies..."

  And not far from that, a bed-sized rise covered with pine duff turns out to be a can pile. Junk pile, actually, where somebody threw stuff they didn't want. I ask Meg if she wants to go through it.

  "Not now. Maybe when I come back with a follow-up team, but we'll probably just finish documenting the site and then leave things the way we find them."

  "Why?"

  "Because you destroy when you dig Some future technology might let us learn something from all this that we couldn't now, and meanwhile, the site will be here to offer other people the thrill of discovery."

  "And you just hope they won't cart things away," I say.

  "You just hope," Meg agrees.

  We trace the rest of the cabin's outline and then take a last break, sitting close to where Meg figures a porch might have been.

  "I'm glad we'll be able to tell Katharina that we saw where she lived," I say. "Maybe, if you've got extra film, we could take some photos for her? Maybe of the way the mountains look from here? That must still be the same."

  "That's a good idea," Meg says.

  "I kind of feel like I know the Bottners," I say.

  She nods. "A good day in the field often leaves me feeling as though I've met somebody. The thing is, no matter how much you study and investigate, when it comes to individual lives there are always things you just won't ever know."

  I understand what she means. We know some of the facts of the Bottners' lives, and we've met Katharina, and I've even held Frederik Bottner's fiddle. But we don't know what he thought about or talked about. All we even know of his music is that Katharina liked it and that it was good enough he could play for a country dance. Living out here, he probably never got a chance to study music seriously. I wonder if he ever wanted to.

  I nudge a rock with my boot, uncovering a black bit of shaped wood that's different from the debris around it. Picking it up for a closer look, I notice how hard it is, and the way it's smooth and a bit concave on both sides...

  "What do you have there?" Meg asks.

  "I'm not sure," I say, showing it to her "But I wonder ... It almost looks like part of a violin peg."

  Then I remember the violin Katharina showed us. How it had one peg different from the others.

  "Meg," I say, "do you think...?"

  As we leave the gulch, Meg asks, "So, how have you liked your foray into archaeology?"

  "I've liked it," I answer.

  "Enough to consider a career change?"

  Laughing at her teasing tone, I answer "No. But any summer you want help, you've got it."

  She glances over at me. "So you've come to a decision?"

  "Yeah."

  "Have you told your dad?"

  "That's next."

  "No time like the present," she says, and when we find the others setting up tents, she tells Dad, "Amy and I can finish this. Why don't you and Tess fill the water bottles? You can get enough both for dinner and for our hike out tomorrow."

  Filtering water is a slow process, and an extra set of hands makes it less awkward but no fester Which, of course, is what Meg had in mind. She's okay, I think, wondering how I could have ever worried we might not get along.

  I take a deep breath. "Dad, you said that when I wanted to talk..."

  "I'd be ready to listen. I remember."

  "I've been remembering, too, and thinking Somehow I never put it all together before, how much you and Mom have done to give me a chance to become a really great violinist."

  Dad makes a little dismissive motion with his hands. "Helping their kids is what parents do."

  "Not all parents. Not like you have. Mom likes her museum work, but I need to know—if you didn't have my school expenses, would you cut down on your regular clinic work so you could do more rehab stuff?"

  "And maybe let down that Lab pup the next time he needs patching together?" Dad says. "No way!" He sounds a little amused. "But surely all your thinking hasn't been about your mother and me?"

  "No, but it was a starting place, and it's still important. But what I really want to tell you ... I think I've finally got the concert figured out. What I didn't realize before is that even if I had no business being in it, it might have turned out okay if I'd remembered the real reason I was there."

  Dad looks at me questioningly.

  "It's something Mr. Stubner and I talked about once. About music being a whole that's part composer part musician, part listener Only, when I got onstage, I forgot everybody but myself. I let down a entire hall full of people because I thought they'd come to hear me. They'd come to hear, and I was too wrapped up in myself to remember the difference."

  "You probably didn't play nearly as badly as you think."

  "No. Just not good enough."

  Dad doesn't argue. He says, "You'd be the best judge of that."

  "Which brings me to another thing," I say. "I think it's time I started making my own decisions. Because sometimes I do know what's best for me. And even if I can't be sure, I'm the one who has to live with the consequences." I glance at my father who raises his eyebrows. "Of course," I add, "I may have some trouble selling that to Mom."

  "Yep."

  "So," I say, "what do you think?"

  Dad caps off a filled water bottle and attaches the filter to an empty one before answering "I think I'm about to learn that I'm going to lose my daughter again."

  "It's not that I want to leave," I tell him. "I love being with you and Meg and Amy, and I love this place, too."

  "But?"

  "But I don't belong here the way I do in New York. The way my violin and I do. And if I don't go back, I may spend the rest of my life wondering about what might have been." I pause. "Are you disappointed?"

  "I'm a little sad," Dad says, his voice thick. "But disappointed? No. I'm proud of you. "

  MEG IS PULLING out food when we get back. "Last-night-out menu," she announces. "I've set aside tomorrow's breakfast and lunch, and the rest is up for grabs."

  It's a super meal, and the only bad thing is that this is our last night out. I'm not ready for our camping trip to end, and I don't think the others are, either We drag out eating while Amy gives a detailed description of casting mink tracks, and then nobody moves to clean up.

  We're drinking the end of the hot chocolate—Amy's is mixed with orange drink and lemonade—and talking over the day when we're startled by a harsh, felling scream. Alarmed, we look toward Rattlesnake Creek, where the sound came from. We hear it again, this time closer by.

  "A mountain lion?" Meg asks, reaching for a canister of pepper spray.

  "I'd say a hawk," Dad answers.

  There's a sudden commotion in the brush just beyond us, and then we see that Dad was right. A big red-tailed hawk bursts out, flying right at us, and I duck. But then it hits the ground as though jerked back, and one wing splays out awkwardly
.

  We all move back, out of range of the bird's fury as it tries to get back in the air and fails. It tries and tries again and then makes one more, mighty effort. This time it manages to take off half flying, half lunging into the forest, where it disappears.

  Dad goes over to the torn-up ground where the bird struggled and picks up a length of fishing line. He swears, just one word. "It must have this stuff tangled around its wings."

  "Do you think you can do anything?" Meg asks.

  "It's worth a try," Dad says. "Although unless the bird injures itself too much to fly, I'll never be able to catch it."

  "Do you want us to go with you?"

  "No, you all stay here." Dad glances at Amy, who has her back to us, and I realize that he's thinking that if he does find the hawk, it's likely to be in bad shape.

  After Dad leaves, Amy goes some distance away and sits down on a large boulder.

  Meg, looking after hex, says, "Poor kid. I wish she hadn't seen that."

  We go about cleanup chores quietly, listening for sounds of Dad moving through the woods. Before he goes beyond earshot, we hear him skirting along one side of the gulch rather than going up its middle as we did. We also hear the hawk scream again, a loud cry that starts high and falls in pitch like a creature giving up.

  We dry the dishes and are bundling up the food bag when Meg asks, "Tess, did you see where Amy went?"

  I shake my head.

  Meg calls, "Amy? Amy!"

  When she doesn't get an answer Meg calls again, more loudly. Then she tells me, "Start after your father I'll check the creek and then catch up."

  I take off at a run, calling out as I go. The forest is much more open up against the sparsely treed hillside, and I make such good time that soon I hear Dad yell back from above me.

  I shout, "Do you have Amy?"

  He shouts, "What?"

  And then I hear Amy call from someplace off to his right, "I'm up here! I've got the hawk!"