Free Tsuga's Children by Thomas Williams Page B

would be perplexed, fierce with a kind of baffled curiosity. At night the children would sometimes get him to tell some of the legends of the Old People and their gods, and then he would tell them, smiling at the magic tales, that the ancient stories were just legends, and they shouldn’t take them as the real truth. Yet he had never gone to the mountain.
    He helped her teach the children how to read and count, to learn the things that people must know, but he was best at teaching them the skills of the forest.
    For a moment she felt angry at him because he had brought his family so far away from the other people, who might have helped them now. But then she knew that it was his nature, that she had known it well when she was sixteen. Just for that one moment resentment flickered before it was drowned by care.
    She remembered long evenings by the hearth when the children listened to the old stories, felt their warm bodies again as they hugged her goodnight, remembered how in the night she would know that they were sleeping on the loft, the heat from the hearth rising on winter nights. Now the loft was empty and she, too, was empty, even of tears. Where were her children? Tim Hemlock’s son and daughter were gone away from them forever, taken by a cold world that had no mercy toward the weak, the young, or anyone.
    As if in answer the wind pushed against the cabin and the ice rang like struck iron.
    Jen woke up just at the first silver paling of the sky, the coldest time. Her feet had pushed out from under her parka and were numb with cold, so she pulled her legs up until she was all in a ball, but still she shivered. The cold made her feel more alone in the strange valley. A white-footed mouse sat on the root next to her face and looked at her, then ran away terrified when she blinked her eyes. She heard him scrabbling away across the frost-rimmed spruce needles, so scared he couldn’t remember for a moment where his hole was. She knew what he thought, feeling his terror and confusion at finding this large animal right in the middle of his usual morning path.
    She seemed to remember the small voices or thoughts of other animals who had come across her in the night, their interested or frightened questions before they moved away from her.
    She got up long before the sun came over the mountain rim, then went through the dark spruce toward where she hoped the meadow would be. It was a green darkness beneath the spruce, cool and moist. She walked for a long time, quiet on the hummocks of needles, before the sun rose. She never saw a hoofprint or a track of any kind, and she worried that in going around and ducking through the random tree trunks and dead lower branches she might even be going in circles. She was still cold and shivery from the long night and yearned to come out into an opening where she could feel even the pale rays of the winter sun. There were high boulders and thickets of fallen branches and vines, all dim below the green roof of spruce. When she had to cross a small brook one foot slipped from a mossy boulder into the dark water and cold knives of water went down over the top of her boot. She would have to find the sun in order to dry out her boot and stocking before she spent another night, or her foot might freeze as she slept. She knew how her heat would slip away through dampness.
    She was running out of strength, so hungry she stopped to pry a small sphere of spruce gum from a tree and chew it. It would do little good but it made her feel a little better to chew on its sticky spruce-flavored bitterness, as if it were really food.
    Ahead she thought she saw the broader light of an opening, and went toward it as fast as she could. It turned out to be an alder swamp, where dark stagnant water lay in random ditches between the twisted alders. She would have to go around it, out of her way. Many of the surrounding trees were poplar, yellow birch and ash that beavers had gnawed. Stumps, pointed and etched by