Free Tsuga's Children by Thomas Williams Page A

drifting away into the frozen air. If the two of them were to live, they had to have warmth and food. But then she would think of her children, who must have fallen into the chasm of the waterfall and drowned, and she wondered why she cared whether she lived or died.
    She knew that Tim Hemlock needed more nourishing food, so in the morning when she woke cold and stiff in the fireless cabin she dressed and went to the barn. She would take the male goat from the barn and slaughter him. This would take all her strength, but her husband needed the sustenance meat would give him.
    There was silence as she entered the dim light of the barn. Brin breathed long breaths but made no other sound. When her eyes got used to the dim light she saw that the goats stood side by side, the male goat in his pen, the nanny goat in hers, not moving, staring at her through their strange yellow eyes. They didn’t move their heads or stamp their narrow hooves as they usually did, but stared at her as though they knew why she had come. In her hand she held the rope noose. In her pocket, sheathed in its leather scabbard, was the short sharp sticking knife.
    The goats stared at her. The nanny goat moved her jaws once, chewing, then stopped. We know something, the goats seemed to say through their unmoving attention. She could almost hear dry goat voices.
    She turned away, shut the barn door and latched it, and went back to the cabin, where she put the noose and knife on the table and stood, dazed by her inability to do what she had to do. Tim Hemlock slept. She could not wake him. She would lie down next to him on the pallet, cover herself with the bearskin robe and wait for the final sleep. The small wilderness farm would die and be retaken by the forest. She must at least set the animals free, even though they would die too. All of these thoughts passed with unnatural calm through her mind as she stood looking down at her husband. But no, she could not leave him. She would burn the tables, benches, chests and chairs, make food from the seed corn, beans and potatoes as long as anything lasted. Maybe when the last of these were gone she would have the desperation to kill the goats. Even Brin. She knew how to load the flintlock rifle. The thought of entering the animal silence of the barn with that weapon dismayed her. They would know and she would know.
    She poked the fire into life, sat down beside it on the still-warm hearth, reached for her husband’s hand and held it in hers. Though still hard and calloused on palm and fingers, his hand had shrunk toward its bones.
    If it were all going to be over—her life, her family—she could at least remember their times of happiness, and other hardships they had overcome, other bad winters. She and Tim Hemlock had been married when they were very young, back where the people lived. Her mother and father had died when she was a little girl and she had been brought up in the Hemlocks’ house in the settlement. She could barely remember her mother and father. When she was sixteen and Tim Hemlock eighteen they had been married. She knew he would go deeper into the wilderness but she hadn’t cared then. They were both strong and young. He could never explain why he had to live in this far country where there was no other smoke but the lonely smoke from their cabin chimney. It had always seemed to her that he was searching for something, not just wanting to get away from the other people. He was known as a strange, silent one. Like his grandfather, the people said, who had been a dark, quiet man who went his own ways and would disappear for weeks, even months at a time to hunt in the wilderness.
    Many times she had watched her husband’s face as he gazed toward the mountain, often in the early morning just at dawn when the sun shone on its long slopes and granite peak, making each tree and rock so vivid and near, the great mountain seemed closer and higher than it was, like a wall leaning toward them. His face