I don’t look up into Pmola’s dark eyes. That might be seen as a challenge. Instead I look down at the earth, bow my head to show my respect, and speak.
“Anhaldam mawi kassipalilawalan.” Forgive me for any wrong I may have done to you.
I can hear the even rhythm of Pmola’s breath from at least five feet over my head. Then a sound I didn’t expect.
“Hmmph!”
Is there approval in that sound? I risk looking up and see that Pmola is holding out its long arm and pointing with one razor-clawed finger toward a trail that leads down the mountain.
“Go,” Pmola says in a voice that reverberates through me like the clang of a huge bell.
I hesitate, though. I wasn’t just asking for understanding and forgiveness for myself, but also for Grampa Peter. I don’t know where he is or what’s happened to him. I can’t leave the mountain without him. But how can I tell that to a creature that could take off my head with one swipe of its claw?
“Piel!” a voice calls to me from down the trail that Pmola just pointed to. It’s Grampa Peter. Even in the moonlight I recognize his familiar shape. He’s gesturing to me with an open hand.
I take one step backward and then another. The huge, black-winged being stands there as still as a statue, although it does seem as if the expression on its long-muzzled face has changed just the slightest bit. I might be wrong, but it almost looks amused. Then I turn and walk forward to take my grandfather’s outstretched hand. We go down the mountain together. We don’t say anything and we don’t look back.
At first we pass through a thick curtain of mist. Then the way ahead of us begins to clear. We stay silent and walk on as minutes and then hours pass.
There is more light around us even though the moon is gone. It’s the first light that comes before dawn. I’m concentrating on the trail because it is starting to look familiar. There’s a pond, as green as emerald at the foot of a cascade. Gem Pond. I know where we are. Less than half a mile later we cross a brook. We’re on the Ammonoosuc Ravine Trail that leads to the parking lot on the Base Road.
Birds are singing to greet the new day, and I hear the sound of human voices as well. Around the bend, climbing up toward us is a party of five or six hikers getting an early start.
As we pass, they hardly give us a second glance. Hands raised, they greet us as if we are nothing out of the ordinary, even though neither of us has a pack and my torn clothes and the bloodstains on my coat must make me look as if I’ve been wrestling with a bear. They’re totally focused on the climb ahead of them.
“Hi!”
“Great day for a hike.”
“Yo.”
I smile and say hi to each of them in turn.
When they are all past, I look at Grampa Peter. He nods at me. We’re back in our own time again.
It is midmorning when we reach the parking lot. I suddenly feel as if I’m about to collapse. My legs are shaking.
“Here,” Grampa Peter says. He helps me sit down. Then he walks over to a Land Rover with out-of-state plates. Its middle-aged owners look friendly and also unlikely to do anything more than turn around and drive back down the road after having come this far.
“My grandson had a bad fall,” he says. “Lost his pack. Could you give us a ride down the mountain?”
It’s one of the longest speeches I have ever heard him make, and it works. Fred and Irma Peck turn out to be two of the kindest folks you could ever want to meet, visiting New Hampshire from Indiana to see the Presidentials. They’ve got a thermos full of something they call sweet tea and they insist that I drink some of it and eat one of the energy bars they’ve got in their glove box.
“We’re taking you two right to your door,” Irma says as she hands me a second energy bar. “It’s only a little out of our way.”
“Not every day we get a chance to be Good Samaritans,” Fred adds with a big grin.
“Thank you both so much,” I keep saying in between sips of tea and mouthfuls of carob-covered caramel and nuts.
“Why, son,” Irma says, “it’s nothing more than anyone would do if they had a chance.”
Ironically, she says that just as we go past the place where Darby Field turned off the road. Was that only a day and a half ago? I look over at Grampa Peter, who I’m sure is thinking just what I am.
No, there are some people in the world who would not do what the good-hearted Pecks are doing. Far from it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Surviving the Hardships
Two months have passed since Grampa Peter and I came down from Agiocochook. I start school tomorrow and I am sort of looking forward to it. After years of saying no to coaches, I’ve finally decided to try out for the basketball team. It turns out I can shoot the ball better than I thought.
One morning, after the wound in my shoulder healed up, Grampa Peter pulled up with a backboard and a hoop in the back of his truck.
“Exercise therapy,” he said. Then he tossed me a new red-and-black basketball, and the two of us set up a half-court on the paved drive in front of the trailer.
My first left-handed shot swished through the net without touching the rim. I just about couldn’t miss when I shot from that side, whether it was a fall-away or an actual dunk.
Maybe it’s that the rest of my body has finally caught up with all the height I put on over the last two years. I’ve been filling out more, too, adding muscle. I’m twenty pounds heavier than at the start of the summer, and none of it is fat.
Or maybe there’s another reason why I healed up so fast. Why I’ve been getting stronger. Why I have such accuracy when I shoot a basketball. Why I have so much more self-confidence. Maybe when Pmola touched me with its talon, it wasn’t trying to hurt me. Maybe it was actually giving me a gift, like it gave that hunter in Dad’s story.
There are times when I wake up in the morning and wonder if what happened to us was just a dream. But I know it wasn’t. It’s just like when I wake up thinking that Mom and Dad are in the next room and not off in Iraq. Some things that you wish were just unpleasant dreams are real. Life is hard a lot of the time. The trick, as Mom said to me once, is not to expect things to get easier. Just get better at surviving the hardships.
I open my email. Nothing new today from Mom or Dad yet, but I have to remember that time in the Middle East is different. When it’s day here, it’s night there. In more ways than one. But I hear from them regularly. They’re both doing okay. They’ve sent me loads of photos. My favorite, which I printed out and stuck to the wall above my bed, shows them with their faces so close together that they are cheek to cheek, smiling so wide that it looks like one big grin between the two of them.
They’re going to be all right. I know that in my heart. And when I said that to Grampa Peter, that my parents were going to come home safe and sound, he looked at me like he was looking into me. Then he nodded in a way that told me a lot of things.
Grampa Peter and I have exchanged knowing looks a few times over the last week when we’ve tuned in to cable’s The Search for Darby Field: Mystery Man’s Mysterious Disappearance. Apparently no one noticed that his group was missing until weeks after Grampa Peter and I last saw them. It seems that Field always kept a cloak of secrecy over his movements. Even his producer had no idea where exactly Field had been heading when he left Boston. All he knew was that it was somewhere in New England. Grampa Peter and I are the only ones who know where they really were when the past, literally, caught up with them.
A week into the search a local news anchor and cameraman tried to interview Grampa Peter, seeing as how he was the Native American elder who knew the most about these mountains, which might have been Field’s destination.
Although news shows these days like short sound bites, Grampa’s usual “yups” and “nopes” were a little too short for that news anchor. She gave up on the interview after ten minutes.
Did the four of them survive? Are Field and his crew alive and caught in the past? I have to admit, I’m
not worried about them. All I know is that wherever they are, it’s better than having them here among us.
I lean back in my chair and close my eyes. I see a tourist who has parked his car on Base Road to take a picture. It’s ten, maybe twenty years from now. He notices an old trail that was concealed by the slope of the road, climbs down to follow it—ten yards, twenty, a hundred—as it turns and twists away from the road. He sees a glint of rusting metal, pushes aside a branch, and sees a van deep in the evergreen thicket. He reads the fading words on the van’s side. Then he sees that a trail begins just past that spruce thicket and thinks of taking it.
But just as he has that thought, he realizes the day is fading, the sun slipping behind the western slopes. He hears a sound from overhead, something like the beating of wide wings. He looks up, but doesn’t see anything. Still, by the time he reaches the familiar safety of the highway above him, clawing his way up the slope in panic, he’s deeply relieved to see that nothing has followed him. He stands there, breathing hard. His heart is pounding.
Why was that van with its strange name hidden down there? What happened to those who left it?
That hiker will never be able to imagine just how strange the answers to those questions really are.
About the Author
JOSEPH BRUCHAC is the author of SKELETON MAN, THE RETURN OF SKELETON MAN, BEARWALKER, THE DARK POND, and WHISPER IN THE DARK, as well as numerous other critically acclaimed novels, poems, and stories, many drawing on his Abenaki heritage. Mr. Bruchac and his wife, Carol, live in upstate New York, in the same house where he was raised by his grandparents. You can visit him online at www.josephbruchac.com.
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Also by JOSEPH BRUCHAC
Skeleton Man
The Return of Skeleton Man
Whisper in the Dark
The Dark Pond
Bearwalker
Credits
Jacket art © 2009 by Sally Wern Comport
Jacket design by Ray Shappell
Copyright
NIGHT WINGS. Text copyright © 2009 by Joseph Bruchac. Illustrations copyright © 2009 by Sally Wern Comport. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Adobe Digital Edition May 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-191950-3
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Contents
Prologue
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About the Author
Other Books by Joseph Bruchac
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Night Wings Page 11