The Mount

by Carol Emshwiller

  He waits. He doesn’t think we’ll turn and run away, and we don’t. Little Master’s ears are so far out in front I see the tops. I can read his curiosity right from here, underneath.

  I’m being calm, too. I walk right up and sit down on the wall. Not too close, though.

  We sit. All he says is, “Charley.” No, it’s “Ch . . . Ch . . . Charley,” as usual. He’s glad to see me. (I think he is. I wish he had a face that showed more. He’s like a statue.) And I feel . . . well, not exactly glad, but relieved to see him. Little Master’s ears are still way, way forward. He’s not worried, he’s wondering. Which is funny: He was scared of his own kind going by, but he’s not scared of my great big lumpy father, even though my father tried to kill him.

  Everything is getting so mixed up, I don’t ever want to think any more at all. And I’m not.

  I look sideways at my father. Kind of out of the corner of my eye so he won’t notice. I’m imagining him as one of those guard mounts. I can see that in him—that kind of perfection, glitter and all. I’d like to ask him about it, like what did he have in his mouth, exactly? But maybe he wouldn’t want to be reminded.

  After a while I ask, “Did you see them?” That can’t hurt him to answer.

  “I saw.”

  I guess that’s all he’s going to say about it.

  We sit. Just sit. Little Master and I are thirsty, but we don’t drink. It’s as if we’re still scared, but in a different way, like nothing bad is going to happen, but we don’t dare move around too much.

  But pretty soon along comes Jane. At a trot. She has a lot to carry. I don’t know why my father let her have all the bundles.

  First she says, “Charley!” And then, “I was worried,” and then, “about all of you.”

  I’m thinking it’s silly to worry about my father.

  First she hugs my father, then she hugs me. She even gives Little Master a couple of strokes on his fuzzy red hair (it’s just baby fuzz and much redder than hers). I know for sure she didn’t want Little Master around us all the time up there, except she did get used to him, but she’s sort of like Sunrise, she doesn’t care what you are. I guess that goes along with her liking my beat-up old father. She doesn’t care what he looks like and even that he can hardly talk. Then she asks if we’re hungry, and all of a sudden we’re not scared to move around anymore. Something about Jane makes everything all right. Little Master dismounts, and we both lean over the edge of the pond and drink. When we lean back up, Jane is spreading out food, even greens for Little Master. She says she picked them on the way down and boiled some for her breakfast.

  She asks us, did we see the flowers?

  Little Master’s ears look giggly again. “I sang them!” He shouts it. “I sang them all!”

  “Bright Spot,” my father says and grabs Jane’s hand and makes her sit beside him. He only calls her that for special. He says, “Sorry.” I don’t know what for, and then, “Did you use your . . . smell kit?

  She says, “It’s all right.” And, “I wasn’t worried.” (They always have these conversations that I don’t know what they’re talking about, but I’ll bet it has something to do with Jane ending up with all the bundles.) She leans her head against his shoulder. I’m thinking: But what about Merry Mary? I squat down and unroll Merry Mary’s picture and spread it in front of them. They both look at her really hard. I say, “My mother,” just in case my father forgot what she looked like.

  Jane says, “Beautiful!” as she should, seeing as how Jane is just a skinny freckled. I feel a little bit sorry for her, but I’m glad my mom is so beautiful. To my father I say, “You promised you would find her.”

  But he doesn’t answer. He turns to Jane and pulls her face around so she’s looking at him. He says, “Beautiful,” right to her, and then he takes her hand and kisses it, hard, like he wants her to know he really means it, and, still staring at her, says, “Beautiful,” twice again.

  Well, that’s nice of him, but everybody can see she isn’t.

  Then he turns to me. “They have. . . . The people . . . gone. . . .” Then he coughs out a big “Kh! . . . Cliffs!”

  I know he means the people will be up there in the secret place, and no guards could follow except one-by-one. Then he says, “Merry Mary . . . yes . . . but first. . . .”

  Then all of sudden he can talk, almost like the rest of us.

  “I can’t leave poor mounts. Like that. Like those. Not leave like that. I can’t. I won’t.”

  There . . . that’s the first time I’ve ever seen him not calm. And he says it as if there’s no doubt in his mind that he can save them, that it’s all up to him and nobody else. I guess maybe it is, but I do doubt. I counted them. It’ll be him . . . just one Wild Sam against twenty . . . twenty-one, it was . . . and all just about as big as he is, and all those Hoots had poles.

  Then he looks at us in an odd way. Thinking hard. “Ch . . . Charley. . . . I’ll need you. You’ll have to let Little Master ride Jane for a while.”

  He shouldn’t have said that. Little Master, squatting beside me, gets a Hoot hold on my elbow and my wrist.

  My father takes the knife that’s buckled to his belt. (That belt is really, more or less, a surcingle, but he wouldn’t want to hear it called that.) For a minute I’m worried about Little Master, but my father takes everything, belt and all, and buckles it around my waist. First, though, he has to use the knife to make another couple of holes so it’ll fit me.

  While he’s still got the knife, he says (and back to sputtering), “Do you know . . . what this is . . . for?” Now he holds it low and upside-down like that runner did when he almost cut me.

  I shake my head no.

  My father makes a motion, his right arm across his chest—up and back, fast and sure. The Hoots have their heads either resting on top of our heads or on our left, cheek to cheek. (The left is the proper side for everything they do.) If he’d had a Hoot on his shoulders, cheek to cheek like that, for sure it would be dead.

  I can feel Little Master loosen his hold as though he’s getting ready to jump away from me.

  I’m thinking how I’ll never, never do that, but, right after, I’m also thinking about the leap-and-choke and how he sometimes holds me by my throat; this knife will be a good thing to have—for lots of reasons.

  My father buckles it on me so that when I grab it, it’ll be upside-down the way he had it.

  “What will you do without it?”

  He picks up his pole—I hadn’t noticed it there, by the wall of the pond. “Fine,” he says.

  “But if. . . . Those guards?”

  “Fine!”

  He never talks much, but when he does it thumps down and lies there by itself. No wonder there was always silence when we ate with the others up at the village.

  I see Jane has a pole, too, one of those small ones sticking out of her pack.

  After we eat—and for once there’s enough, dried meat and parched corn and everything (I didn’t ask what kind of meat it was. I didn’t want to know.)—they gather everything up (my father takes most of the bundles this time). They smear us with a smelly goo and say we’ll get used to it in a couple of minutes, and we head towards the mountains but not following the road. We just go straight out. You can see by the squashed flowers that somebody . . . somebody with big feet—my father, probably—walked this way before, just skuffed along and wasn’t even a little bit careful of them.

  That smell bothers Little Master a lot more than it does me. I’m wondering if he’ll ever get used to it. He keeps leaning back and away, trying to get a breath of fresh air, but then, as we go through the flowers, he starts to kick his feet and sing again. “I’m singing about you, too,” he says. Then he starts to bounce, as if I didn’t have a nice smooth trot. I hope my father and Jane don’t notice and think it’s me bouncing. But I feel good, too, anyway. It’s still morning and there’s all this red—off on each side of us as far as you can see—and I had a good meal and almost got full for a cha
nge.

  We go straight—practically right straight through the forest. We climb everything that’s in the way. We push through brush. We hardly even go around anything, and when we come to the cliffs, where you usually go a mile or two farther down where it’s not so steep, my father goes straight up the cliff face. If we weren’t with him, he’d be going up just as fast as he walks, I’ll bet. He hangs on by the tippy, tippy tips of his fingers and toes. You’d think such a big man wouldn’t be able to do that. We can’t, and we’re not even big. Well, Little Master could, but he won’t let go of me. My father helps us, sometimes with a long stick for us to grab on to.

  Little Master isn’t scared. Hoots are good climbers, and they feel safe when they’re on top of something. (Not counting when they feel safe all closed-in underground.) I’m mostly not scared either, but Jane is. Rocks are one thing, but we cross a landslide area. You can hear gravel trickling down even when we aren’t crossing. That scares all of us . . . except I guess not my father. Or, anyway, he doesn’t show it—when does he ever show anything? Jane is shaking. He helps her cross first. He says for her to keep looking at him. (You can see she’s all stiff as she hangs on to my father.) Then he comes back for me. He uses the stick stuck in the landslide above us as if to hold back the river of gravel. We get across, but we end up a couple of yards farther down and have to climb up all over again. We had to cross the slide area because the cliff got so it slanted out above us, and my father thought we’d not be able to climb that.

  We rest on the far side to get over being scared. We sit and listen to the trickling down, which is even more than before. Jane cries a little bit. I know she’s so relieved we didn’t fall, and maybe so tired. I feel the same way. She tries to hide it. She turns away from us and wipes her chin with just one finger when the tears get down that far, but my father sees and goes to her and calls her Bright Spot again a couple of times and holds on to her. Little Master says he was scared, too, but I don’t think he was. I think he’s just being nice to Jane, which is not like a Hoot at all. Well, I’m changing, too. Jane is such a nice person, she’s even beginning to look pretty good.

  After that crossing, I start getting worried about this whole thing, like what will happen to us when we meet the guards? Maybe I’ll get to be a guards’ mount without even wanting to anymore. I find a little stick and put it across my mouth to see what a bit might feel like. Little Master says, “Don’t do that.” Then my father notices and gives me such a wide-eyed look. . . . He opens his mouth to speak, to shout, more likely, but nothing comes out at all, except some choking breaths. He looks as if he’s going to have an attack of some sort.

  There’s something he needs from me—or for me. This is part of what my rescue is all about. I’m supposed to be a certain way. I’m supposed to have a kind of life that has nothing to do with anything he went through. I can’t even try to find out what his life felt like. I could drive him crazy. I could not spit the stick out.

  My father comes at me, but Jane grabs him. She says “Heron!” but in a whisper, so, so softly. They hang on to each other as if each one is the cliff we’re climbing and they’d fall to their deaths in the next minute if they didn’t have the other one to hold.

  I spit out the stick and look away. I never do like to see them hugging like that right in front of people, though now it’s just us.

  Even struggling along like this, we’re saving a lot of time. We’ll get to the top of the first pass before the guards do. And all of us smelling like . . . maybe like dogs. Well, there are so few dogs now, they’ll think: Coyotes, or wolves. I hope we smell scary. I wonder if they can tell there’s only three of us and one Hoot? They’ll be thinking Little Master is in charge. I would. He’s getting bigger, too. Last couple of months we both are. Sunrise measured. (She even measured Little Master.) I wonder if I’m twelve yet. It was in my folder, but I forget. Maybe Sunrise can tell.

  Those guards will have to spend the night below us. Or maybe they’ll go on all night. We can’t see in the dark, but Hoots can. They wouldn’t go as fast, and the mounts would need plenty of leg cues from the Hoots, but they could go, go, go. All us Sams and Sues are good at sensing the slightest movements from our riders. We can even tell where they’re looking by their seat on our shoulders. That’s what our trainer was always yelling at Little Master: “Look where you’re going so your mount will know, too!”

  My father stops now and then to let us rest and drink. He’s not breathing hard, though he’s carrying most of the stuff and all the water. One time when we rest, I say, “The Hoots know there are hardly any dogs left, will they think we’re wolves?”

  “The smell . . . it’s . . . grizzly.”

  “Bear! Oh, great!”

  Then Jane talks for him like she does sometimes, “Mountain lion would scare them more, but bear smell is stronger and easier to get.” She’s leaning way over against my father, as usual. You’d think he’d be too lumpy for comfort.

  “Will they know we’re only just us two Sams and one Sue and one Hoot?”

  “No.”

  Little Master doesn’t talk much in front of my father, but he says, “They’ll know.”

  We get up to the saddle of the mountain. It’s still not late, though the sun is about to set behind one of the far peaks. We’re well beyond the halfway hut. It’s a mile below us, back towards town.

  I flop down—we all do—and look at the sky—which is nothing, not a single cloud. It seems as if none of us has the energy to look anywhere but straight up. After a while, Little Master moves his legs from my shoulders (he’s still half on me, and I’m lying against a stone) and finds a softer spot to curl up in. Pretty soon I have the energy to turn and look at all of us, sprawled out there. We’re a mess. It’s a good thing we all have short hair and don’t have to do it up every morning like I used to have to. My hands . . . all our hands are scratched and dirty, front and back. We’re dirty all over, with bloody scraped places. Even places you’d never think could get scraped. Our clothes are torn. Even Little Master is dirty and torn. We look completely uncivilized. This is exactly what I never wanted to be or be around. I suppose I’ll have to call myself a Wild Sam.

  When we finally have the energy, we chew on our chewy things. I don’t care what anything tastes like. We don’t even notice if it has a taste at all. This is not only exactly what I never wanted to eat, but exactly how I never wanted to eat it. I may be changing—I do feel friendly lying here with them after a scary climb—but I haven’t changed how I’d like my life to be. There’s something about all this my father does like: Homemade and hardships. After our all-day hike up to the secret town and back, he told me he loved to be all worn out from hiking. “It’s a good kind of tired.” And I thought, well, I like that, too, but only after a nice race with a Hoot on my back, or a nice hard circling on the go-round so I know I’m getting to be a better mount.

  Pretty soon we feel rested enough to start to wonder things again, like (again) will the guards stay in the halfway hut and the mounts have to stay outside? Or will they go on all through the night? The three of us wonder. Not my father, he sits, listening, alert. He doesn’t have to be so alert with Little Master here. There’s no way he can notice anything before a Hoot would. Even if Little Master wasn’t paying attention, he would hear things way before my father could.

  Then my father gets up and leaves. He just gets up, without a single word, and walks away. Down. Towards the trail and the halfway hut, where the guards will be, or be on their way to. Jane and I look at each other. Then she says, “That’s how he is. Always is. We’ll wait a bit and then we’ll follow.” Then she calls, “Be careful,” but my father’s gone. There’s nobody but us to hear.

  That’s what we meant to do, follow in a few minutes, but we’re so worn out we doze off. All of us. When we wake up, it’s pitch dark. We’re up too high for trees, so it must be cloudy because we can’t see a single star. It’s Little Master tells us my father’s still gone. He can see he’s
not here—and even though we have that bear smell smeared on us, he can smell he’s not, too.

  Jane says, “Why didn’t Heron take Little Master so he could see?” Then she asks Little Master, would he have done it—gone with him and led him through the dark? Little Master says he would for me, and after a minute he says he might do it for her, too, but not for my father. “He’s too big, and too untamed, and he would take his knife if he had me on him.”

  “Help us free those Sams,” she says. “We can’t see anything without you.”

  “Those Sams are worthless. That’s why they’re guards’ mounts.”

  She says, “If they’re worthless, then we’re all worthless.”

  “I’m About-To-Be-The-Ruler-Of-Us-All. You’re just primates. You couldn’t hear those things they sang to teach me things even if you listened. They sang me how those mounts were ruined way before they even got to be guards’ mounts.”

  “Heron was one of them, for heaven’s sake!”

  I can’t see anything, but I can hear her swishing about beside me. Even just hearing her move, I can tell she’s angry.

  “Hoots!” she says.

  And then I hear Little Master say, “Kindness is the best policy.” And then, “Except when it comes to guards’ mounts. They’re bad.”

  We leave our stuff there except for Jane’s pole and my knife. I don’t want to leave my mother’s picture (for a minute I get really scared because I can’t find it in the dark, but Little Master sees it and gives it to me). Little Master doesn’t want to leave his doll, but Jane says it’ll be safer if we don’t carry it with us. Little Master finds us a good place under an overhanging rock. I say, “What about rattlesnakes?” but Jane says, “They’ll be too cold. Besides, I think we’re up too high.” We put everything under that rock, the food packs and water, and cover them with stones. Jane smears a little bear cream around them.