Maybe – despite the mood in the town right now – this place might begin to feel properly like home to me?
“…WHAT shall we do with the DRUNKEN sailor!”
The loudly sung words break the spell, and the hind – this wonder of nature more miraculous than some poor creature on show in Barnum’s American Museum – is gone in a near-silent bound.
And behind where she stood, I see now something glittering, shining through the bars of great, gnarled tree trunks.
“Look!” says Easter, spotting it too.
A few root-tripping steps further and we come to an open space, the length and breadth of it made up of a pond, frozen hard and marled white.
The three girls on the ice – Henni, Matilde and Morwen – cannot hear us above the glory of their shouted song, a cheeky sea shanty learned from the Irish lads.
“…WHAT shall we do with the DRUNKEN sailor!” Easter joins in, running on to the ice and sliding into a spin on her smooth-soled black boots.
As the girls squeal in surprise and delight, Easter’s arms windmill around her, her ragged shawl spiralling out behind like a solitary woollen wing as she skates. I am about to applaud her when – with a sudden wobble and clatter – Easter’s boots go quick-quick from under her and she is sprawled flat out, laughter crippling her so much she cannot raise herself up.
I take hurried but small tip-tapping steps across the ice to help, but Henni and the other girls are already getting Easter to her feet. At that moment I remember our purpose.
“What are you doing here?” I ask the girls, wiping back my hair now that it has wriggled its way free from its pins and tumbles to my waist. “The ice might not be safe, there could be wild animals, or you might step in a trap!”
“It’s all right – we’re not alone,” says Morwen. “The others are here somewhere. We could call for help.”
It’s a poor excuse for sense. Speaking of that, where is my brother?
“Did Lachlan come up to the woods?” I ask, guessing that he would find it hard to resist any fun to be had if everyone else was joining in.
“Yes, the rest of them went exploring that way,” says Matilde, pointing towards a high-ridged bank on the far side of the pond.
I listen for the sound of capering and I hear nothing – but I see something. That bank… In it is a large dip with scrubby low bushes in its lap. Above it, a thick crust of snow – naabidin – pushes over the edge of the ridge.
It is the strangest thing; I have never been to this place before and yet the shape of what I see before me is somehow very familiar.
“What’s wrong?” asks Easter, noticing that my attention has been stolen away.
“I think… I think I know what this place is!” I tell her, my heart beating a rhythm of excitement as I walk towards the bank.
The others follow, wondering what I find so fascinating.
“Look,” I say, drawing a shape with my finger. “Does it not mimic the entrance to the mine head back in the settlement?”
“What do you mean?” says Easter, her tone uncertain as she stares at the dipped wall of earth under the awning of the ridge.
“Jean told me there was copper aplenty in the mountains if you knew where to look,” I say, staring at the possible shape of an original opening. “The Chippewa have legends of long-lost mines worked by ancient peoples.”
“Ooh, look! So pretty!” coos Henni, pointing down at the pond’s edge.
We all bend and peer, spotting tiny glinting red-gold pebbles caught in the ice.
“Copper?” suggests Easter, turning to look at me questioningly.
“I think so…”
“You know what this means?” says Easter.
“That we might have found a mine?” I laugh.
“More than that! You might have saved the town,” Easter replies, her pretty eyes wide.
“Oh, does this mean we can stay and not have to move somewhere else again?” asks Matilde as Morwen jumps up and down, clapping her mittened hands and squealing.
“Maybe this will cheer my papa!” Henni suggests. “He is in such a dark temper all the time, especially with my brother.”
I look at the desperately hopeful faces of the younger girls and wonder if this truly is something that will lift the black mood that has hung over Hawk’s Point like a stubborn sea mist these last weeks.
But wait…
“Why is your father angry with Oskar?” I ask Henni, thinking that sympathy for the poor lad is more in order after the injury he sustained in the explosion.
“He is angry because my brother plays cards for money all the time. Father disapproves of—”
BANG!
We all halt as a sharp, too-close-for-comfort blast of gunshot rings out.
“Hunters?” says Easter, clutching the three smaller girls about her, feeling like myself, all of a sudden so very far from safety.
Dread crushes my chest and my legs threaten to crumple beneath me as I think of the beautiful hind…
Then a terrible yowling commences, followed by desperate shouts. A hunter would not call out like that, I am certain. I am also certain that no hunter would sound so young.
“No, no, NO!” the voice yelps.
My brother’s voice.
“Lachlan! LACHLAN!” I shout back, cupping my hands to my mouth so that my voice might reach him wherever he may be in this puzzle of endless trees.
But then there is a sudden crashing sound above us and our eyes are momentarily filled with falling snow from the ridge’s edge. A shadow hurtles overhead, and a terrible whack, crack and whimper resounds from the hard surface of the pond behind us.
Easter, the three girls and I, we turn as one, shaking ourselves clear of our icy blinkers.
“Help! Help!” Charlie Nathaniel calls out, clutching a strangely twisted ankle with one hand, while a rifle – the one I saw him point at Easter and myself in his father’s store on the day of the mining disaster – goes spinning and spiralling off across the ice.
But it is not the ankle Charlie has probably broken from his foolish and frankly dangerous leap that concerns me – it is the continuing snapping of the ice, water already rushing to the surface around him.
And it is as if that icy water suddenly flows in my veins. Easter and I are both quite small and thin, but if we two run together to Charlie’s rescue, we will surely all be tipping into the breath-crushingly cold depths. But whatever has happened, however much I cannot bring myself to like the boy, I can hardly stand by and watch as the ice slowly gives way and he drowns, can I?
“Get away!” I order the now-sobbing younger girls, pointing to the safety of solid ground beyond the pond.
“Here!” Easter calls out and I see that she has run to a spindly, leafless tree that grows close to the frozen water’s edge. I go to help her, and together we yank and tear off a branch in seconds.
“If I lie flat to spread my weight, I can reach him…” she says.
“I’m littler than you, and lighter,” I remind Easter, as Charlie snivels and begs from the crackling, sinking middle of the ice. “I’ll do it. Hold on to my skirts.”
And so I flatten myself and crawl out as far as I dare, trying not to see the whirling waters that are seeping through the growing crevices.
“Grab it!” I order Charlie, as I throw the branch to him.
He feebly lunges, wild-eyed and sobbing, but manages at last to catch hold of it. I try to wriggle myself backwards on the ice, helped by a crouching Easter who tugs hard at my ankles and skirts. But I have miscalculated; yes, I might well be smaller than Easter, but she has two strong hands while I have only one that can truly grip hard and fast.
“Use your feet, Charlie! Push yourself towards me!” I shout again, feeling a panic set in as an ever-growing spiders’ web of cracks spread from under Charlie’s body.
He seems to try while I wriggle frantically backwards, Easter grunting and panting as she struggles to pull the combined weight of us. But truth be told, I do n
ot know if this will work. I can hear and feel the cloth of my woollen skirt tearing where Easter pulls desperately at it, and I do not know that we can pull Charlie free in time, before both he and I join the rifle I have just seen tilt, slip and disappear beneath the surface with a death-like gurgle.
I only just hear Easter’s sudden cry of surprise before I feel two large hands encircle my waist, crushing the air from my body but yanking myself – and in turn the branch and the snivelling boy – backwards to the safety of the pond’s edge in one, two, three hard pulls.
“Jean!” I croak breathlessly, swivelling around to see my Anishinaabe friend get a hold of Charlie’s coat and pull the injured boy clear, before roughly letting go of him and watching him flop to the slushy ground.
Jean says nothing but stands panting and wild-eyed himself.
And then I hear sobbing coming – peculiarly – from somewhere else entirely, from somewhere on high.
Blinking as fast and hard as my heart races, I glance upwards. On top of the ridge above us stands my brother, unsteady on his feet as he holds the heavy, flopping weight of Odayan in his arms. Great drops of red stain what remains of the snow crust. The dog’s head lolls lifelessly, its grey eyes staring down, blind to the scene in front of it.
The hope, the joy I felt only minutes ago melts faster than snowflakes on a burning hot griddle…
I cannot think what we must look like, this raggle-taggle band of children I lead out of the woods.
“Ach du meine Güte!” one of the German women calls out in alarm, dropping her gathered armfuls of kindling in the road at the sight of us.
The woman’s panic pricks through my haze of sadness. For what must she think, seeing me come walking into town, all muddied and soaked, my shirt and skirt torn, propping up my brother who appears half murdered, his clothes and whole self so soaked in blood. Alongside us, Easter looks after the desperately sobbing Henni, Matilde and Morwen, while more of the boys and girls who’d happily scampered up into the woods now forlornly follow us out, after they heard the shot and yells and came scurrying to see what terrible thing had occurred.
As for Charlie, two of the Irish boys have an arm each and are – roughly, I think – helping him limp away from the terrible trouble he caused.
“Bridie! BRIDIE!” I hear Father call out as he runs from the school building he is near completing. “What has happened! Lachlan … where are you injured?”
Lachlan can barely breathe from the crying, never mind answer Father’s question.
“He is not injured,” I quickly assure Father, as he holds my brother by the shoulders and looks him up and down. “Charlie stole a rifle from the general store. He killed Odayan.”
“I thought it was a wolf!” Charlie protests somewhere behind me.
But I am done with that boy. I don’t care for his excuses. All I know is that I will never forget the look on Jean’s face as he walked back up the bank after saving Charlie, and wordlessly took the weight of his dead dog’s body from my staggering brother.
“Go!” he’d roared, walking away from us. “Go – all of you! NOW!”
In that moment I knew Jean would leave Hawk’s Point for certain and we’d never see him again.
“So none of you are hurt?” Father checks, casting his eyes over everyone while more folk appear, wondering what the commotion is about.
“Only Charlie – he’s broke his ankle, I think,” says Easter.
“You should go fetch Dr Spicer then, my dear,” Father suggests to her, and I watch as my friend gently lets go of the younger girls, leaving them in the care of the womenfolk, before hurrying away towards the mine manager’s house.
A surge of people now run and circle us, jabbering questions at us all.
“There’s something else – Bridie found something!” I hear Henni pipe up as she finds herself being wrapped in the thick comfort of a woman’s shawl.
But no one pays her any attention beyond making her cosy, or understands her meaning in the muddle of the moment.
“Bridie found something important!” she tries again, sounding frustrated, wrestling herself out of her knitted cocoon. “She found copper!”
The babble of voices eases.
And then begins again as everyone turns to me…
Several hours later, my ears are still ringing, from the loudness of the shot, from the awful cracking of the ice, from the incessant questioning, from the cries of excitement that reverberated up and down the settlement all day.
“So it looks like there really might be some copper to be found there?” asks Dr Spicer, holding Father’s hands over the table in the parlour so she can inspect his grazed knuckles.
The team of men who went up to inspect the site at the pond this afternoon had worked hard, clattering their pickaxes into bone-hard ground, digging with their shovels, sometimes clearing a few feet of earth with bare hands in their excitement.
“Aye, it seems promising,” says Father, wincing a little as Dr Spicer dabs his raw skin with some potion of hers. “Where’s Lachlan?”
“He’s in the back bedroom,” I reply.
After we got him home and cleaned him up, Lachlan took to his bed and lay silent and shivering, and would not be consoled. Eventually he cried himself to sleep – I laid another thick blanket over him when I went to check him a little while ago, before Father returned. He does not yet know that Father went to Jean’s cabin this afternoon and found it empty and shut up, Jean long gone.
Myself, I’ve not been able to settle to anything. I washed and scrubbed our bloodied and dirtied clothes and hung them to freeze-dry on the rope at the back of the building. I made a stew for Father when he returned. I went back and forth to see to Lachlan. And all that done, I am not sure what to do with my restlessness.
“How was your patient today?” I hear Father ask, and realise I had forgotten about Dr Spicer meeting with the mine manager’s young wife this afternoon.
“She is very low in spirits,” the doctor replies. “And being isolated for so many months, she is bothered with her nerves when it comes to meeting new people. It will take a long time to gain her trust, I think, but she has agreed for me to visit her weekly. And she did listen when I told her how dangerous it is to take the sleeping tincture as much as she does, and has promised to use less of it and give it up eventually.”
“Poor lass,” says Father.
“Most of all, it is my opinion that she mustn’t stay shut up in that house. I have looked out a pamphlet for her about the benefits of fresh air and exercise, even though the muscles in her legs will be weak from lack of use at the moment,” says Dr Spicer, nodding at a folded sheet of paper on the table. “I’ll give it to Easter in school tomorrow.”
“Or I can deliver it now?” I suggest, seeing a way to walk off my fidgeting.
“Well, I suppose it is not too late,” says Father, looking at the clock on the shelf, where the hour reads near seven.
“I won’t disturb Mrs Eriksson,” I assure the doctor, already reaching for my heavy jacket. “I’ll just tap at the kitchen door for Easter.”
With the pamphlet in my hand, I let myself out. Though the sky is dark, the Snow Crust Moon is full, and with its company of stars it will not be hard to find my way along the road. And another glow lights up the start of my short journey; Nat’s Store is bright with lamplight and candles, loud with the voices of men inside, full of hope and ale.
I stop for a moment and watch the silhouetted heads at the windows, thinking of the miners smacking their tankards together in celebration, perhaps toasting me when they should be toasting Jean. For if he had not told me what to look for, I would never have spotted the old mine entrance. But no one wanted to hear that earlier, and I don’t suppose they’ll want to hear it now, or later either…
“Well, you certainly got them out of a fix, didn’t you, Bridie?”
I halt at the sound of the voice, and at the sight of a hunched figure sitting in the shadows of the stoop.
�
�Seamus?” I say, recognising the lilt in the words spoken, though they might as well have been said in Hebrew for all the understanding I have of them.
Mr Nathaniel’s lodger shuffles forward so that I might see him a little better in the pool of light from the nearest window. He clutches a sloshing tankard in his hand and seems unsteady. I swear Seamus has aged in the last few weeks; I’m not sure if it is due to dread of going down the mine each day after the accident, or the sheer amount of alcohol he has been drinking lately.
“See, the pair of them weren’t sure they’d get away with it. But what you found today, it’s got them out of trouble. And they don’t deserve that…”
I can think of no answer for Seamus because I can’t think what he means.
“You know, I said no to ’em, Bridie. Turned ’em down flat.”
“Listen, I think I had better go,” I mumble, pointing away along the road. But Seamus doesn’t appear to hear me, so lost is he in his conversation with himself.
“That poor young boy. Didn’t deserve to get hurt so bad…”
Wait – now he talks of Charlie? I cannot keep up. Luckily I am saved by Mr Nathaniel of all people.
“Ah, there you are, Seamus!” says the storekeeper, barging out of the door and giving me just the most cursory of glances. “Shall we get you in out of the cold? Maybe get you a shot of rum to warm you up, eh?”
Seeing my chance to leave, I slip away along the road, hurrying now that the evening temperature dips ever lower and the cold truly bites. More lights glow from small, square windows as I reach the miners’ cabins, where I hear the clatter of domestic life inside the little houses: a lullaby sung here, a baby’s cry there.
A minute more and I find myself at the winding path through the trees that leads to the mine manager’s house. It’s here that a little of my confidence begins to ebb, for the leafy canopy above shuts out the moon and starlight, pitching the path into darkness. Taking a deep breath, I push ahead, keeping my eyes on the faint glimmer of a gas lamp from the parlour.
“What’s to fear?” I whisper to myself. “The worst things I have seen have come in the daylight. What terrors can the night hold?”
Little Bird Lands Page 9