One afternoon, as S’tka was gathering wood at the edge of the basin, she spied beyond the brush a lone stranger trudging tall through the valley, dragging a bloody pelt in his wake.
Crouching for cover among the reeds, S’tka watched his steady march south, at once heartened and distressed by the appearance of this stranger. Her pulse quickened as she watched his purposeful stride. How long since she had spoken to anyone other than her uncomprehending child?
Who was this stranger, and why did he travel alone? What if this person had news of her clan? Was he an outcast like her? Had he a family somewhere for whom he provided? Though S’tka was compelled to call out to him, perhaps even to cast her meager lot and join forces with the stranger, she reasoned that it would be unwise. She knew nothing of his nature, of where he came from, or what his customs may have been. She couldn’t take the risk. God, what she would have given for some adult conversation, another body to occupy the space next to her. Her chest ached for intimacy.
Stealthily she crept closer in the reeds, tracking the loner’s progress through the high grass, which was trampled and besmirched by blood in his wake. Soon, S’tka drew to within a stone’s throw of him, until her shifting weight snapped a twig, drawing the stranger’s attention. He instantly halted his progress and looked around, sniffing the air like a bear, until it seemed he was looking directly at S’tka.
S’tka froze. A frigid hand gripped her heart as she recognized the stranger, the flat nose, the brutish brow, the rotten teeth, the stupid expression. For a long moment it seemed that he held her gaze, that he must have seen her crouched in the reeds. S’tka stopped breathing, closing her eyes as though it might render her invisible, praying that N’ka did not fuss, or budge, or make a peep.
In that terrible moment, as the dead-eyed brute gazed directly into her reedy cover, S’tka summoned the Great Provider for the first time since her husband’s death.
Please, let him go on his way.
And breathless, S’tka awaited her fate.
At last, the stranger stopped sniffing at the air and shrugged before promptly resuming his bloody march south.
But Not for Me
As usual, her dad was right: it didn’t take long for Uncle Travers to track her down. The day after Bella’s arrival, when she and her dad returned to the bluff with a half-dozen Chinook on the line, they were greeted by Uncle Travers, pacing the bluff, clad in sweatpants and hiking boots, and a baseball cap instead of his usual fake cowboy attire.
“That was quite a stunt, Dave,” he said. “The whole goddamn county is looking for her. Least you could’ve done was leave a note like me. Might have saved everybody a lot of heartache and trouble.”
“She came on her own, Trav,” her dad said, like she wasn’t standing right next to him. “It’s not like I kidnapped her.”
“Bella, you had us worried sick,” Uncle Travers said. “Why’d you run off like that? You had us up all night looking for you, the police, everybody. We thought something terrible had happened.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, casting her eyes down.
“Why’d you run away?”
“Because you wouldn’t let me come,” she said. “I kept asking.”
“Well, c’mon,” said Uncle Trav. “It’s time to go back, sweetie.”
“Not so fast,” said her dad.
“Listen, Dave. I’m here to take her back. If you want, I’ll come back up in a couple weeks with all the right papers and the rest of it and we can make it official. But I’m not leaving here without her.”
Bella clutched her dad about the waist.
“She was just starting to sink back into some sort of a normal life, Dave,” said Uncle Trav. “The specialists at school have been working with her. She’s been getting counseling. You can’t set her back, Dave, it’s not right. You’ve got to let the kid grieve properly. Damnit, Dave, you owe her some stability.”
“Stability is one thing I do give her, Travers,” said her dad. “It may not look like much to you—”
“Me or anyone else, Dave.”
“Well, Trav, I can’t account for your lack of imagination. You’re just thinking like everybody else down there, and that’s fine for you. But not for me.”
“And not for Bella, either.”
“It’s not that I don’t like you and Auntie Kris,” Bella said, still clutching her dad. “I just want to be with Daddy. Please, Uncle Trav.”
When Uncle Trav reached out for her, her dad stepped between them and straightened himself up in a threatening way.
Though Uncle Trav was an inch taller, it was hard to look tough in sweatpants and hiking boots.
“What have you got in mind here, Trav?” said her dad. “We always knew I could lick you if it ever came down to it.”
“But you never did, did you, Dave? You did the right thing, because you were a good big brother. And now I’m asking you to do the right thing again and be a good father.”
“Please,” said Bella. “Let us be here, don’t make us go back.”
“He can’t make us do anything, baby.”
“What about winter, Dave? What’s that gonna look like? How are you gonna eat? How are you gonna stay warm up here?”
“If you think I haven’t given full consideration to those things, well, then, little brother, you don’t know me too well. And maybe you put too much faith in modern conveniences. How do you suppose folks got by for the last two hundred thousand years?”
“It’s true,” said Bella. “The ice people did it.”
Uncle Travers looked at them both in turn. When her dad locked eyes with him, Uncle Trav seemed to shrink a little.
“This isn’t over yet, Dave,” he said. “Anybody can see this ain’t right.”
“You get moving, now, little brother. You tell everybody we’re just fine up here.”
“Well, it sure don’t look that way.”
“Well, it is,” said her dad.
“It is, Uncle Trav,” said Bella. “I promise, it is.”
“It ain’t natural, Dave.”
“Or maybe it’s the most natural thing in the world,” said her dad. “Maybe it’s life down there that ain’t natural. Maybe everybody’s so checked out, and distracted, and scared, and disconnected from real life that they’ve lost their way. Of all the trouble in the world, all the suffering, how much of it was caused by folks living the simple lives they were intended to live?”
“Intended by whom, Dave? That’s what I don’t get. By God?”
“Not by God, little brother, by nature,” he said. “By the natural order that governs all living things.”
“No way you’re gonna make living in a cave with a little girl sound natural to me, or anyone else, let alone have us believing it’s a noble thing.”
“Doesn’t matter how it sounds to you,” said her dad. “You can see yourself that Bella’s made up her own mind.”
Uncle Trav looked at her meaningfully, and Bella averted her eyes, clutching her dad’s waist tighter.
“Well, that don’t mean she’s right,” said Uncle Trav. “She’s a kid, Dave. She loves her dad, which is the only natural thing I can see about any of this.”
“I love you, too, Uncle Trav,” she said. “And Bonnie and Auntie Kris. But I don’t want to go back, really I don’t.”
“You’re gonna change your mind this winter, darlin’, believe me.”
“I won’t,” she said.
“Go on, Trav,” said her dad. “You heard her. Get along back to town. You let everybody know we’re just fine up here, and we want to be left alone.”
“Oh, I’ll let them know,” said Uncle Trav.
N’ka
The world was resplendent with light and color; every leaf, every cloud, every shaft of golden sunlight slanting through the trees, every speck of dust swam with life. Only the child’s mobility depended upon his mother’s whim. When she toted him about, his eyes and ears and impressions were free to wander.
Every moment o
f every day, N’ka catalogued a new sensation: the burbling of his own laughter, the trilling of squirrels from high in the canopy of trees, the trickle of water beneath the ice. This world was a feast for the eyes, inviting his touch, begging for his observation; it sung, and whispered, and nudged him; it nourished him with its warmth.
Above all else in this world, above the golden sunlight, and the bottomless blue sky, N’ka prized the shelter and attentiveness of his mother, delighting in her gentle touch, her adoring gaze, and her endless patience. There was no greater music than the sound of her voice.
“You are everything to me,” she told him, as he drew his nourishment.
The child cooed, and smacked his lips, and beamed up at her, his little heart full.
“I live for you,” she said, stroking his head.
N’ka did not know the meaning of her song. He only knew that it would last forever.
The Toll
Bella dreaded Uncle Trav’s inevitable return. If she knew anything at all about her uncle it was that he was a doer, not a talker, just like her dad. Maybe the expectation of his return was taking a toll on her dad, too. There was a nervous energy about him, a new shortness of tone. Bella had begun to feel as though she was in his way much of the time, like he wanted to be alone.
“You don’t want me here,” she said, watching him craft a fishing fly.
“That’s not true, baby,” he said, looking up from his work. “Why would you say that?”
“I can tell,” she said.
“Nonsense,” he said, resuming his task.
“It’s because you’re worried, isn’t it? When you’re worried you don’t talk as much.”
“Mm,” he said.
“See, you are worried.”
He paused to inspect his work.
“Look, I am a little worried, okay?” he said. “It’s part of being an adult, baby.”
“But there’s plenty to eat,” she said. “We have enough wood. We can go back for more supplies whenever we need them.”
“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just . . . sometimes I worry I’m not doing the right thing keeping you up here with nobody your own age. Maybe your uncle is right.”
“No,” she said. “I want to be here, Daddy. I keep telling you that.”
“Okay, baby, I hear you.”
But Bella still didn’t believe him. She could tell he was ambivalent, like he was trying to convince himself something he wasn’t really sure about.
“You want me to go back, I can tell.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You think it.”
He left off tying his fly and looked her in the eye.
“I just wonder if maybe it would be better for you to be with your friends, and your grandma, and your cousin.”
“I don’t want to be anywhere else. I want to be with you,” she said.
Bella remembered being at her dad’s side constantly the days right after her mom died, following him about in a haze, clinging to his side as he tended to his daily business. She sat quietly at his side as he made phone calls, and waited outside the door when he went to the bathroom. She clutched him for dear life when he broke down to grieve. For nearly a month, she couldn’t sleep at night unless she could hear his breathing. She was afraid that the world might take him away, too. And now, all these months later, she was still afraid. But now it seemed a new anxiety muddled her every thought and polluted her every action: the fear that he didn’t want her.
“I don’t know, baby,” he said. “Maybe it’d be better for you in town. You’d have all your old stuff back. You’d have your friends. You could eat pizza any time you wanted.”
“You said yourself you didn’t like it down there,” she said. “You said the world was going to S-H-I-T. So, why would I want to go back there?”
“Aw, baby,” said her dad. “I shouldn’t have said that. I’m sorry. I was just frustrated with my own life.”
“Please don’t make me go back,” she said. “I don’t want to. I want to be with you.”
“Okay, baby, I won’t,” he said.
“Promise me.”
“Baby, I’m not sure I can promise that.”
“Promise, Daddy,” she said, gravely.
He looked up from his work and searched her face long and hard from across the fire, as Bella watched his ambivalence harden into something that looked like resolve.
“I promise,” he said.
S’tka
The new moon had come and gone, and the bulge in S’tka’s abdomen continued to grow. For weeks she moved about her daily tasks in a fog of preoccupation, vacillating between denial and disquiet, until finally she was forced to accept the terrible, unavoidable fact of her condition. For the better part of two days afterward, to N’ka’s frequent and obvious consternation, S’tka hunkered in the depths of the cave, succumbing to grief, sobbing the hours away. It sickened her both physically and mentally to feel her body changing, knowing with chilling certainty, as she’d known from the very moment of conception, that the bulge belonged not to U’ku’let, but to the dead-eyed marauder.
Just when it appeared that the Great Provider had heaped every torment in her arsenal upon poor S’tka, she had bestowed this unthinkable curse upon her. What design was this? Those barbarous acts on the bluff had begotten a cruel arithmetic; that one life was taken senselessly, and another added, was something less than a zero sum.
In the weeks that followed, as the unwanted thing continued to grow inside of her, and the pressure on her abdomen seemed to increase daily, S’tka agonized about her untenable future. What about five and six moons from now, when the ice had returned with its deathly grip on the landscape, and the food was scarce, and her stomach was out in front of her like an obstacle? Somehow, once before, she’d managed to survive under such duress. But recalling those cruel months of servitude on the ice, ravaged by hunger, exhausted beyond her capacities, S’tka knew she could not, and would not, endure such agony again, especially not for the monstrous thing growing inside of her.
Late one afternoon in the meadow, seven days thawed, and blazing purple and yellow with wildflowers, S’tka set aside her bundle of sticks. Unfastening N’ka, she laid him in the high grass, where he immediately began to fuss. Kneeling, S’tka leaned down and put her face near his so he could feel her breath. Within seconds, the boy settled back into sleep, and S’tka began to survey the vicinity for a means to solve her problem.
At the edge of a tiny stream, only recently liberated from the grip of the ice, she found her means in the form a rock, the size of N’ka’s head.
“It has to be done,” she said beneath her breath.
Hefting the stone, S’tka took a deep breath, releasing it quickly, like something unwanted. Gritting her teeth, she held the heavy stone at arm’s length, and proceeded to pummel her abdomen again and again, silencing her agony so she wouldn’t wake the baby. If that didn’t sum up parenthood, what did?
After five or six blows, S’tka doubled over in the grass, and began to retch and cry at the same time.
Why was this happening to her? Was this the price she paid for her disobedience to the clan, for sneaking a leg of meat, the price for wanting to nourish a child she never asked for, for wanting to eke out a meager existence on this forsaken ice, for having to accept a man she never chose, for having to learn to love him, only to watch him humiliated, then die brutally by the hand of savages?
And what of their recompense? What about the men who accounted for all this trouble and strife? How did those brutal savages pay for their inhumanity? And what of the elders before them? Did they suffer for taking liberties with S’tka whenever the mood presented itself, only to turn their backs on her when she was pregnant and starving? What price did the clan pay for depriving her, then casting her out onto the ice? Was it the victim’s legacy to always pay?
When the baby began to stir, S’tka, her stomach still in full rebellion, her breath strangled by the awful cramping,
cleared her watering eyes against her forearm, and resolved herself to continue her life, as little as she was compelled to.
First Offering
It was early afternoon, though you wouldn’t have known it. You wouldn’t have known that it was raining in sheets, either, except for the trickle of ground water leaching in through the volcanic rock. Were it not for the pale blade of light knifing in slantwise from the mouth of the cave, you couldn’t tell night from day. It had been nearly three weeks since Travers’ visit, and by Dave’s count it had rained practically every day since.
He was losing Bella. And though he sensed her unhappiness, though it seemed to hang in the air between them at all times of late, neither one of them spoke of it. Once again, he was failing her as a parent.
Sugarfoot slumbered fitfully in the dirt near the mouth of the cave, his burr-tangled belly rising and falling uneasily with each breath. Sometimes Sugarfoot didn’t come home for days. And when he did, only warily did the white-pawed loner sink into domesticity.
Tito curled in the corner, his orange and white legs scissoring the air as he groomed himself with a sandpaper tongue.
Betty sprawled nearest the fire, green-eyed and black as night; so baggy and deflated after her last litter that she almost looked like a rug.
Jimmy Stewart curled in Dave’s lap, purring like an air compressor, though Dave had done nothing to encourage him.
Bella was sitting stiffly at the foot of the bed, as she had been for an hour, alert but unresponsive.
“What say we bundle up and go outside?” he said.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“C’mon, Bella.”
“Coco,” she said. “My name is Coco.”
“You’re not a damn cat, Bella.”
“You said damn again, Daddy.”
It was true, he ought to watch his mouth, though they had nobody to impress up here. Isolation had whittled his vocabulary down to the coarse and rudimentary. So little remained in his life that required the nuances of language. It was getting to where he hardly recognized his own voice.
Legends of the North Cascades Page 15