“Hmph,” said U’ku’let with a shrug.
And so they all consented to the silence and the warmth. When it became clear that the little man was no threat to them, U’ku’let and S’tka surrendered to their exhaustion.
S’tka dreamed of warmth and shelter, of shadows ducking and dodging on the walls of a cave, of security, and the luxury of laughter, only to awaken by a dying fire in the blistering cold.
The ugly little stranger was gone without a trace.
“Let’s go,” said U’ku’let gruffly.
And soon they were up and trudging east toward the mountains, the pressure between S’tka’s legs unbearable.
By midday, they had reached the low hills, and slowly they trudged up and over them. In two hours’ time they reached the patchy forests and stony outcroppings that they never should have left in the first place.
Shortly before the sun dipped out of sight behind the hills, they found pitiful shelter in a burrow at the base of a rockslide. The space was so cramped that S’tka was forced to crawl in on her hands and knees, a task rendered nearly impossible with her fit-to-burst belly.
U’ku’let gathered sticks for a fire at the mouth of their shallow warren, where he finally roosted sullenly, just as the snow began to fall. S’tka, sprawled beneath her shelter of stone and earth, without so much as an extra hide to comfort her from the frozen rock, gasped for breath as she was wracked with her first contraction.
Let it come stillborn, she prayed. Spare us another life to sustain in this frozen wilderness. But such was the agony of childbirth that even prayer was beyond her reach. It seemed that all she could access through the pain was bitterness and contempt.
Bah, the Great Provider! What do you provide us but cold and misery? Why must we forever scrape, and wrestle, and beg you to spare us? Why saddle us with the capacity to care? Why not let us die off mercifully, freeze in our slumber, rather than face your unending burdens? What is the reward, this? To cleave a woman in half, to rip her apart for the unwanted opportunity to perpetuate the misery in the form of a helpless lump, to pass along the agony and struggle through the generations? Oh, Great Provider, it’s hard not to wonder at your wisdom.
The torturous spasms were getting closer together. S’tka’s pelvis raged, her heart galloped, her breathing came in shallow fits. Though she yearned for a hand to clench, a concerned face to gaze up at, she knew better than to call for U’ku’let for support. She couldn’t help but wonder why he ever chose to defend her in the first place? Was he really so naive as to believe that he alone might have planted the seed that caused this? Why did he wait to claim her until it would cost him the only life he’d ever known? Oh, Great Provider, you are a fickle master.
Once the contractions were so close that they came one after the other, S’tka’s thoughts glazed over and hardened like a sheet of ice. The thing told her to push, so she pushed with every bit of strength she could muster.
Outside the rocky hollow, the snow gathered round U’ku’let as he stared into the fire, cursing his fate.
After hours of struggle, an exhausted S’tka finally managed to push the baby free of her, only to gather it up in her arms. A profound relief washed over her at the sound of its pinched and phlegmy cries.
U’ku’let soon ducked his head into the crowded space.
“Has it come? What is it?” he said in the darkness.
“A boy,” she said.
“Ahya! Haha!” he said. “A boy! He will be N’ka.”
And so the boy was to be called N’ka, named for the fearsome wolf of the north. May he grow to be fearsome like his name, S’tka thought, for he would need to be in this cruel, frozen place. N’ka the wily survivor, N’ka the fearless hunter, N’ka whose name struck fear in the hearts of his adversaries.
“N’ka,” U’ku’let said again, and S’tka could actually feel him smiling through the darkness.
And for the first time in so long she couldn’t remember, S’tka felt herself smiling, too.
“N’ka,” she said as much to herself as to her whimpering son, as she stroked his tiny head.
As soon as U’ku’let ducked back out into the night, retreating to the fire, she heard him let loose a hoot into the snowy heavens.
“Ahya! Haha!” he said. “Oya N’ka.”
Oh, Great Provider, I have doubted you.
The strain of S’tka’s effort had chased the chill from the enclosed space around her.
“You are N’ka,” she cooed, as the rooting infant groped to find its mark. With a little coaxing, it arrived there with a snuffle and a sigh.
S’tka nestled N’ka close as he suckled, shielding his little ears from the chill air. Outside the warren, U’ku’let laughed giddily at the falling snow. In an instant, the whole frozen world had changed.
A Sticky Burden
The moths arrived on the bluff like a pestilence. The night air throbbed with them. Ravenous for the pale light of the fire, they flitted desperately about, their thousand wings thrumming and pulsing around the little camp on the plateau. Of all the natural discomforts Dave planned for—the bitter cold, the relentless wet, the mud, the snow, the ice, the chapping and chafing and blistering—moths were nowhere among them.
In recent weeks, Dave had sensed Bella’s optimism waning somewhat. The pitch of her excitement when she talked about the natural world was not what it had been a month ago. A month ago, she hardly ever came in before dark, scurrying and climbing and stalking butterflies until the sun dipped below the hump. But in recent days she’d been spending more time within the stuffy confines of the cave, flipping impassively through books, scratching patterns in the dirt floor, or simply idling. Of late, Bella seemed to have turned inward, and Dave could only wonder if it was because he, too, had retreated further within himself.
Sometimes she seemed to be living somewhere completely outside of herself. Several times Dave caught her staring wall-eyed out over the canyon, or fixedly into the candle flame. While not alarming, the behavior spoke to a developing habit of disassociation that could be problematic if not checked.
“Let’s go to town tomorrow,” he said, as they sat around the fire, long after dinner, the inexorable moths bumping the sides of their faces.
“We’ll leave bright and early,” he said. “You can go see Nana. I can go to the library and get some new books.”
She brightened immediately.
“Can we go to the park?”
“Sure, we can go to the park. Nana can take you.”
“Even if it’s raining?”
“Of course. Nana’s not afraid of a little rain, is she?”
“Can we stay more than one day?”
“We’ll see,” he said, knowing he was lying.
Two nights would feel like a defeat, three would be suffocating. He wouldn’t stay at all if the hours of the day would permit it. But how could he possibly expect Bella to hike eighteen miles in a day?
“Can we have pizza?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“The frozen kind?”
“Sure, baby, we can do that,” he said.
A familiar guilt prodded Dave at the thought of all he had denied Bella, all the things she’d been forced to relinquish through no choice of her own. The least he could do was let her indulge in these estranged comforts now and again when the opportunity presented itself, though he knew it would only make their paths more difficult in the end. In an ideal scenario, they would cut themselves off from the world completely.
In the morning, the weather gods smiled upon the North Cascades. Dawn arrived without a cloud in sight. The purity of chill mountain air exhilarated with its crispness. The jagged spires of the high country seemed so close, stood in such sharp relief against the deep blue sky that it seemed you could reach out and touch them. To the west, beyond the succession of wedge-shaped valleys, still engulfed in shadow, the straits and channels of the Salish Sea shone like hammered steel, clear to the horizon, broken only by the cluster of San Juan islands rearing their h
umped backs, as though to warm themselves in the morning sunlight.
Dave and Bella loaded up on carbs by the fire, oats with walnuts and dried huckleberries.
“We should get moving,” he said, scraping the pan clean.
Upon their departure, Dave kicked out the cooking fire and hoisted the empty external-frame pack on his back.
“Baby, put your coat on,” he said.
“But I’m not cold.”
“Honey, you’ve gotta wear a coat. At least until it warms up.”
She wouldn’t catch a cold on Dave’s clock. In all their time there, neither of them had contracted so much as the sniffles. They ate well, if a little light on protein, supplementing their diets with chewable multi-vitamins. They stayed warm, they got plenty of sleep, they exercised, and they hydrated religiously. Most important of all, they had no contact with anyone. You had to be around other people to get sick.
The trail was mostly dry and clear as they wended their way down the rocky face of the mountain and into the canyon below. It took the usual twenty minutes or so for Dave’s hip to warm up and stop popping. Though the river was still running high, already the alders and maples were beginning to change colors. The air was beginning to thin with the approach of fall. By mid-morning, they’d put two thousand vertical feet behind them, and reached the bottomlands, where the mosquitoes began to swarm them.
“I’m tired,” Bella said, a whine in her voice.
“We’re almost there, baby.”
The promise of frozen pizza and jungle gyms had worn thin by the time they reached the highway, jumped the culvert, and began hiking west toward town. By the time they reached Dave’s mom’s house, Bella was officially cranky. His mom was not at home, and both doors were locked.
“I’m thirsty,” said Bella.
“So am I.”
“And hungry.”
“Me, too,” said Dave. “Be patient, baby.”
Dave considered jimmying a window, but ultimately decided against it. It shamed him that he was annoyed with his mom for not being home, though he’d given her no notice, not so much as a hint that they might appear at her doorstep. But of course there was no way they could. So they sat on the steps, where Bella fell asleep in Dave’s arms, a sticky burden, until his mother returned home an hour later, smelling of flowery perfume and candle wax.
As it turned out, his mom had been at church, where she’d stayed late to fold chairs, sweep up scone crumbs, and throw away coffee cups in the reception hall. She gossiped, a little nervously it seemed, as she readied her patented sandwiches in the kitchen: thawing the sourdough in the microwave, gathering the generic mustard and mayonnaise from the door of the fridge, the bread-and-butter pickles, the wilting iceberg lettuce from the crisper, and the thick sliced turkey she always got from the deli counter at Red Apple that invariably looked dried out, and a little off-color, like dead human flesh. Not that Dave didn’t appreciate his mother’s efforts, not that Bella didn’t think they were the best sandwiches ever.
Watching his mother execute the same sandwich routine he’d watched a thousand times, from his earliest youth to this moment, Dave was itchy to get moving.
“I wish I would have known you were coming,” she said.
“Sorry, Ma, no phone.”
“Among other things,” she observed nonchalantly, plating the sandwiches, which she’d carefully cut into quarters.
When she circled back to the fridge for the orange juice, she whispered in Dave’s ear.
“What on earth did you do to her hair?”
“She wanted it,” he said. “It was getting tangled all to hell. She looked homeless.”
“Well, she is, at least as far as anyone but you is concerned,” she whispered.
“Look, Ma, I don’t need to hear it, okay? I’ve got a lot to do in town. Can you take her to the park?”
“Of course,” she said, averting her eyes.
She didn’t bother to ask him when he’d be back for Bella. Whenever it was, it would be too soon for everybody involved.
Underdogs
Watching Bella dismount the monkey bars with a smile and a wave for her nana, it was hard to see any deficit in the child from where Judy was sitting, beyond that dreadful haircut Davey had given her. To hear Bella’s laughter, to listen to her imaginary play, to behold her politeness, and her curiosity, one would have to conclude that somehow, some way, she was well adjusted despite everything.
“You shouldn’t smoke, Nana!” she called from the jungle gym. “It’s bad for you.”
There was a reason Judy sat upwind from the jungle gym. Though she was down to two cigarettes a day, she’d been dying for this one since midway through Reverend Hardy’s sermon that morning, which wasn’t half as comforting as she might have hoped. Travers would kill her if he knew she was smoking again, but her nerves were shot. What toll was two measly cigarettes a day going to exact compared to the anxiety Davey and Bella caused her on a weekly basis with their absence from her life? She kept telling herself it was temporary, that this crazy notion about living off the grid would run its course, but she was finding it harder each day to persuade herself.
As normal as Bella seemed drinking diet soda and eating frozen pizza in front of the TV, there were moments, like a few minutes prior on the drive to the park, when Judy caught the girl in a thousand mile stare, as though she’d totally checked out of reality, lips silently at work, almost like she was praying, which Judy wished she was.
“Bella? Are you okay, sweetie? Bella, honey?”
“I’m fine, Nana, I was just thinking.”
Judy was glad Travers wasn’t there to see the child lost in her thoughts like that, because Travers and Kris had already determined to take matters into their own hands, and Judy was not so sure that was a good idea, the two of them putting themselves between Bella and her daddy. Judy had prayed about it, but the Lord had been none too forthright in providing any answers. She just wished Davey would come to his senses. She knew the old Davey was in there somewhere, the Davey who used to be a light in the world, who’d had that generosity of spirit you could lean into like a campfire. He could absorb. And he had so much to give. But every time he came back from that business in Iraq there seemed to be less of him: less laughter, less warmth, less patience. Whatever it was that wrung it all out of him, he never talked about it, and everybody, including Judy, was afraid to ask. Seemed to Judy the least the damn Marine Corps could have done was help Davey get his old self back.
“Nana, can you push me?” Bella called from the swings. “Please, please, please?”
Judy stubbed out her cigarette on the bench, setting the half-smoked remainder aside for later as she rose dutifully from her bench seat.
“I used to push your daddy on these exact swings when he was your age,” she told the child.
“Did you give him underdogs?”
“Of course.”
“Will you give me one?”
“Oh, Bella, I’m an old lady. I couldn’t.”
“Please?”
Judy was not even sure she could bend down far enough to get under Bella, let alone duck out of the way in time to avoid getting kicked in the head. Add that to the growing list of things Judy couldn’t do anymore. Like this town, like Davey, like the world at large, Judy was not what she used to be. Why couldn’t they all just turn back the clock and have their old lives back? Back when V-Falls felt like the center of the world, back when Davey was in the newspaper for his athletic exploits, back when Judy could walk around town tingling with a sense of pride and accomplishment, back before everybody was discussing politics at all hours of the day and night, back when differences of opinion were still reconcilable.
Judy gritted her teeth, bent at the waist, and lunged forward, executing an underdog for the first time since 1988, though she pulled something in her back doing it. Still, she’d take any small victory she could get today, knowing that tomorrow morning Davey and Bella would be gone, and outside of her tiny sphe
re of influence once more.
“That wasn’t really an underdog,” said Bella. “You gotta go all the way under, Nana.”
“Oh, Bella, honey, it’s really tough on Nana’s back.”
“Okay,” she said, a little sadly. “I understand.”
Bella’s deference, her willingness to accept disappointments, big and small, her impassive little face reminded Judy of Davey at six years old. Six-year-old Davey had aimed to please. He was polite, even-tempered, played well with others, minded his little brother, and made very few demands on her patience, unlike Travers, who was needy and tempestuous. Davey had very much been a first born: compliant, conscientious, if not a little on the earnest side.
She remembered the year after Wayne left, sitting at the vanity applying her eye shadow, a cigarette smoldering at her elbow, while the boys sat watching from the bed, awaiting the sitter, Travers restless, Dave resigned. Looking back, Judy felt guilty for wanting more. Like those two precious boys should’ve been enough. But they weren’t. How could they have been when she never got a break?
“Who are you going out with?” said Davey.
“Just a friend.”
“Mrs. Vance?”
“A different friend,” she said.
“Mrs. Reese?”
“No, honey.
“The guy from the tow truck place?” said Davey.
“No. Davey, go see if that’s the sitter.”
Despite any confusion it might’ve caused Davey and Travers, Judy didn’t regret trying to find companionship, whether it was Rudy, or Stan, or Walter. The thing she regretted was that she couldn’t provide more for her boys, more security, more happiness, more opportunities. Twenty years ago, she hadn’t had these regrets. Things had been working out reasonably well for Travers, and it looked like Davey was set to make the world his oyster. But he never got that far.
“Nana, you can finish smoking if you want,” said Bella. “I don’t need you to push.”
“I’d hold on, if I were you, young lady,” said Judy. “And keep your feet forward.”
Legends of the North Cascades Page 9