Читать книгу Wilderness of Spring - Edgar Pangborn - Страница 8

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In windless calm under the pines, Reuben's dark-dilated eyes could still find the furrows where sled-runners had passed, and the half-moons of dainty hoof prints. Nothing stirred within the vague archway continually opening before him. Gradually, tree and rock and snow came to possess sharper lines, stronger shadows; somewhere, a birth of new light—"Ben," he said, "it's the moon."

"Where, Ru? I can't find it."

"Somewhere ahead...."

Since they came under the shelter of the trees—and that was a long time ago—Reuben had felt no longer the cold kiss of snowflakes. It had been nothing but a flurry, now ended. At a curve in the road he discovered, through a break in the treetops, a grayness brightening. He halted; Ben blundered into him, arms slipping clumsily around him as if in need of support. Dull rags of cloud dropped away from the naked radiance. "I told you, Ben. There she rides." Ben was smiling. "Ben—all's well?... I did right? We could not have stayed, and thou to be flogged, maybe put in the stocks."

"The stocks, was it?"

"Yes, old Anna was yattering about that too when they came home from the sermon, and Grandmother never said her nay."

"Of course thou'st done right.... They'll search. That snow wasn't enough to hide anything."

"No.... We've walked more than an hour—must have done five miles."

"We can walk another five." Though standing quietly, Ben was breathing too fast, his eyes too steadily fixed on the new light in the sky.

In the woods Ben always had been leader. And there it was Ben's natural way to send his glance flickering everywhere. Reuben recalled the voice of Jesse Plum: "No Inj'an'll ever surprise you, Ben. Swoonds, you could look at a squirrel while the little bugger jumps from one branch to the next, and tell me its age and gender, and if she be female whether she got little 'uns." Jesse had not croaked that in flattery. Wilderness had been near and vital to Jesse; he never made a mock of it, and was capable of scolding either boy for walking noisily in dead leaves.

"Ben, do you feel——"

"All's well. Let's go on."

Reuben walked on ahead, trying to set an easier pace. Surely, surely there was no reason why Ben should fall ill....

In time the forest opened to a park-like region where perhaps in past seasons the Indians had followed their custom of burning over the land, killing new growth and brush, allowing established trees to expand their side branches in isolation. Through more than a mile of this they walked. Ben did not speak.

The sled-tracks passed abruptly over the edge of a slope. Reuben could make out no treetops directly ahead, though a thick cluster of them stood to his left; the part of the slope where the road ran down would be open ground. A ghost of alien sound disturbed him.

He held out his hand, but Ben either failed to see it or was unwilling that his brother should go ahead alone; he still followed closely—more quietly though, more careful of his steps—when Reuben reached the beginning of the slope.

The thing could not be more than thirty feet away, a living blot of long shadow on the trampled white.

The slope ran steeply down. At the bottom, a flat expanse to the right must be the northern end of a pond or lake, frozen, snow-covered. The sled-tracks, plain in moon-shadow, skirted that level surface and disappeared in thicker woods beyond. On Reuben's left, all the way down the slope and connecting with the farther woods, hemlocks loomed densely black, branches bowing to the ground.

The thing gazed up across the wild turkey between its paws, and Reuben understood the sound—crunch of monstrous teeth on frail bone. Ben drew his knife and pushed in front muttering: "He won't attack, Ru. They're timid—Jesse alway said...."

The panther had flattened in alarm and readiness, all motionless but for a quiver at the tip of the tail. Round ears spread back on a skull smooth and cruel as the head of a snake, and moonlight greenly sparked from eyes arrogant with the majesty of loneliness. Once or twice the angry head dipped as if meaning to snatch up the meat and save it from the human threat; the motions were abortive, the beast preferring to freeze, and watch, and wait.

Reuben yielded no time to the weakening pain of anticipation. He scooped a handful of damp snow into a ball, swung on his heel in the fine free motion that Ben himself had taught him, and let fly.

The snowball hit the great face on the nose, spattering wonderfully. Unbelieving, Reuben watched a grayish blur shoot away to the black shelter of the hemlocks, belly to earth.

A violent tremor of reaction took hold of Reuben; he heard Ben gasp. "Ru—Ru—oh, man, how he scooned off!" Ben sat down laughing helplessly in the snow.

"Ay," said Reuben, shaken and panting and full of pride. "I allow, Mr. Cory, he might travel some little time, Mr. Cory." The tremor was overcome by the swift joyous action of running down the slope to bring back the remains of the turkey. "See, Ben—he's left us both legs and some of the back and breast."

"Poor puss! My own little brother, a man who'd steal from a——"

"Snow down your backside!" said Reuben, and jumped for him.

Ben caught him fairly and pulled him off his feet, but in the mimic struggle Ben stiffened suddenly and groaned: "Ru—help me up!" Before Reuben could do so, Ben was on his feet without help, denying his own words: "It's nothing, Ru—I got a little dizzy, nothing more."

"Ben, if you——"

"We can't go back.... Hoy, here's a thought! All that turkey blood on the snow—couldn't we make it seem——"

"Law you!" Reuben yelped and war-danced. Ben could not be ill, he thought, so long as he was able to produce such a dazzling conception. "Ben, a marvelous bloody swindle—why, damme, they'll mumble it in chimney comers till the Devil's blind, and his eyes a'n't sore yet. Think of it!—those poor lost boys!"

"Small red gobbets."

"What?"

"Hast thou forgotten? Thine own tales——"

"Oh, that. Nay then, behold how bravely they did stand before the beast—alas, all for nothing, though Benjamin Cory with his good right arm did—did make varsall sure to pick up the turkey feathers."

Eagerly Ben joined him in that undertaking. Reuben found and scuffed out the line of tracks where the gobbler had walked out from under the trees into calamity. As they viewed the shambles critically in devoted silence, it seemed to Reuben that there ought to be more blood. Beside the patch of snow where the stain was largest, Reuben dropped on his back with outflung arms to leave a tragic imprint. Ben grunted approval, but then spoke with a discouragement that was unlike him: "It'll never deceive a woodsman."

"Oh, Ben, they'll be townfolks that find it. Superstitious too. If our own trail ends here, what can they think? We must go under the trees, where—where he went."

"Oh, him!" Ben recovered, laughing again not quite naturally. "He's na' but a spent fart, Ru. He'll travel as you said, and then I picture him climbing a tree to grieve all day tomorrow about what my little brother did to him. 'Snowballs!' he'll say. 'Me, to be whopped by a snowball—why, bugger me blind, and all the time it was that Reuben Cory no bigger'n a boar's tit!'"

"You're no Goliar neither, in fact I could whup you handy with my arse tied under my chin. Now drag me, Ben, from here to the trees, along that line where he ran. That'll make a fine confusion and wipe out your own tracks. Then we'll follow his marks under the trees and smear our own till they can't tell which from nohow."

"That's the thing. What a catamount was he! Know what he did? Laid us out like a pair of sticks, he did, your ankle crossed on mine, took both feet in his mouth, poor wretch, and for his sins went a-blundering through the woods with a boy dangling on each side."

"I tell you, Ben, the superstitious will believe madder things than that. La, some of the tales Jesse used to tell!"

"Miaaow!" Ben doubled over, laughing far too much. "Why, of course—by the time the tale is carried back to Springfield he won't be a catamount at all. He'll be taller'n a house, the Old Nick himself with a passel of demons. It'll be a—a——" he stopped, watching Reuben blankly, all laughter spent.

Reuben said: "It will be a judgment of the Lord." Ben stared, and nodded, and looked away, searching the northern sky above the hemlocks.

Following his gaze, Reuben lost himself a while in the wonder of open night, seeing Cassiopeia released from a last fringe of departing cloud, and the Great Bear slanting toward the North Star. Reuben darkly felt the absence of some familiar thing, something his own mind ought to supply and would not. The night was serene, without complication beautiful, answering nothing.

Ben Cory followed his brother in slowly deepening weariness. The time must be not far from dawn. The moon rode high and lonely, dimmed by new cloud battalions from the west. Ben groped at the thought of sleep; but Reuben, who was wise about everything tonight, might tell him it was not yet time. Ben suffered a passing resentment, that the boy could walk on ahead so untiringly, so unconcerned.

In this more open part of the woods they were not attempting to disguise their tracks. Reuben said it was no longer worth it, and Reuben knew best. Ben tried to step in his brother's prints, nowhere else. This seemed a clever thing to do—when he could remember to do it, and forget the pain in his knee, and ignore certain soft dark waves that now and then approached him from nowhere and flowed away independently of any shadow on the moon.

Back there under the crowded hemlocks, a very long time ago, it had not appeared necessary after all to search for the panther's prints and follow them. All the way down that slope, and far beyond it where the land rose again and the hemlocks continued, many patches of snowless ground allowed them to progress without leaving marks. For an hour, or two or three hours perhaps, they had worked their way along these areas. Glimpses of the moon held them to a general easterly direction. In several places—Ben recalled this with solemn pride in Reuben's wisdom—Reuben had spread his jacket across a patch of snow too wide to jump, so that they might step on it and leave a vague blur nothing like a footprint, rather like the impress of some animal's body lying down. At the least, their efforts would provide a most confusing trail unless the searchers brought dogs; they reassured each other of this from time to time. Advance by this method had been tormentingly slow, yet after a while Reuben, who knew everything, announced that they must have covered another mile.

The road and the sled-tracks were things forgotten. The eastward direction was still a certainty: the moon had said so, until it climbed too high to be a fair guide. The trees had thinned out, the snow lay continuous on the ground; Reuben who knew everything said they might as well walk naturally again, since there was no help for it anyway, and to blur the tracks here would be a waste of effort. Ben had a confused sense of walking on higher ground where a light wind was blowing.

Once, back in the darker woods, he had heard the wail of a mountain cat, so thin and far away that hills and hollows must have intervened. Their friend, maybe, lamenting at snowballs. Reuben had laughed at it. Later Ben caught another sound, a remote tenor howling, lonely at first but answered by another and another. Reuben who knew everything had not laughed at that. Ben thought or imagined that he heard it still.

No wolves had come.

Or if they have come, he thought, I can't see them. They slip along fogfooted behind the larger trees—that tree or that one—maybe. If they are truly come, my brother Reuben will know and tell me. In time for me to draw my knife. Wolves do understand cold steel, they say....

"Ru——"

The boy turned quickly and came back to him. Ben saw his face fade and brighten; the eyes, improbably large, watched him from a mighty depth. Now that, Ben thought, that is certainly an effect of the new cloud-wrack passing over the moon. How warm it is! he thought—nay, damn the thing, how cold! Nothing's truly warm since Mother died, therefore I was deluded.... "Ru, what's the time?"

"Can't be far from dawn."

"How do you know?"

"I can feel it.... Some kind of shack over there—see it? A hunter's lean-to, that's what it is."

"Looks more like a beast."

"Can't you see the poles? Come on—it's not far."

"Ru, listen!"

"Yes, I hear them. They're a long way off. Come!"

"Wait, Ru!" The waves of darkness, each time they advanced on him, were climbing higher, toward his eyes. "Listen to me, Reuben, and not to the wolves." Perhaps the next one would go over his head, and he could be quiet. "Listen to me—in my father's house are many mansions."

"Ben, save thy breath. Lean on me. It's not far."

Nothing came in search of them that night. For another hour Reuben heard the wolves, unable to guess in what region of the secret night they were crying. The shrill desolation of the noise wavered from every quarter of the dark, ceasing at times; then the mind could propose that it had never sounded, until it started up afresh, as pain will.