Читать книгу Cloven Hooves - Megan Lindholm - Страница 7

Eleven. Betwixt and between. Two pigtails, the color of dirty straw. Fuzzy pigtails, down past my shoulders, the hair pulling free of the braid like strands breaking loose in old hemp rope. They have not been taken down, brushed, and rebraided in days, perhaps weeks. It doesn’t matter; no one scolds. My mother has six children, and her two older daughters are at a much more dangerous age than I am. They are the ones who demand all her watching. What is it to her if my hair has not been brushed and combed, the stubborn snarls jerked from my tender scalp, the long hair rebound so tightly it strains at my temples? It is summer, school is out, and we live in an aggressively rural area. There is no one to see her youngest daughter running wild as a meadow colt.

And I do. Both knees are out of my jeans, and my shirt has belonged to two older siblings before me. Boy’s shirt, girl’s shirt, only the buttons know. It lies flat down the front of my androgynous chest. There are holes in my sneakers, too, and my socks puddle around my ankles. Yes, that is me, eyes the color of copper ore, hard and green, a scatter of freckles across my nose. Unkempt, neglected child? Hardly. Free child, unwatched, unhindered, unaware of being free, as it is the only thing I have ever known. Free child in the deep heat of July, the forest baking around me in the seventy-some degrees of the Fairbanks summer sun.

I am where I should not be, but I do not even know it, nor would I care if I did. I am between the FAA tower on Davis Road and what will eventually be the Fairbanks International Airport. It is supposed to be a restricted area, but no one really cares about that. Not at this moment in time. If I want, I can follow the surveyor cuts through the forest until I’d come out to the small plane tie-downs. A bit farther, and I’d come to wide pavements of the airport, where the airplanes let people down right on the asphalt of the runways. There would be people and noise and traffic. All the things I hate. Where I am is much better. I am sitting on the bank of the slough and thinking it is the most beautiful place in the world.

The slough varies with the seasons, like a snowshoe hare varying its coat, but it is always beautiful to me. During winter it is a wide white expanse of snow, broken only by the protruding heads of the tallest grasses. The snow humps strangely over the mounds and hummocks of coarse grasses. Owls hunt over it, watching for tiny scurrying shrews and mice to break to the surface and brave the flat whiteness. If I walk cautiously, I can move across the frozen crust without breaking it, standing tall above the earth, my feet supported by millions of tiny ice crystals. Treacherous trickling sunlight sometimes softens my floor, and then I break through it and wallow up to my hips in snow that infallibly finds every opening in my clothing. That is the winter.

Then comes spring and breakup, when the slough fills with water that reflects the sky and the tangled branches of the trees on its banks and the tiny leaves budding on them. The white snow sinks down to isolated hummocks cowering in the narrow tree shadows, bleeds to death as seeping water that fills the slough. The slough flows with a perceptible current then, carrying off the melted snow to the Chena River, and birds cry above it, ravens black against the transparent blue sky. The wind of breakup reddens my cheeks, and my old socks wad down inside my battered boots. During the spring thaw, the slough is deep, how deep I do not know, for it is much too cold to think of wading in it. I jump from tuft to hummock to clump of grass to cross it, and at its highest flow I cannot cross it at all. I go home wet, my hands red-cracked claws of hands, my nose dripping, my eyes green with spring.

But that is not now. It is summer now. The early greenness has passed. There are tall yellow grasses, higher than my head, with waving tasseled heads of wild grains. The water has hidden itself beneath the living earth, only appearing in secret pools of shallow water banked with green mosses and ferns and squirming with mosquito larvae. Low-bush cranberries, tender little plants with tiny round leaves, no taller than my hand-span, coat the bank where I sit. Behind me, closer to the edge of the true forest, are twiggy blueberry bushes, bereft now of their tiny bell-like flowers, and not yet heavy with round blue fruit. Today I have seen a red fox with a spruce hen clamped in its jaws, and a litter of tiny rabbits just ventured from their burrow. I have seen the green bones of a winter-kill moose acrawl with beetly things, and pushed the bones aside to see the white grubs squirming beneath them. Myriad small creatures besides myself live and hunt here. The faun is one of them.

He is beside me, likewise lounging on the bank. He is stretched out to the lingering touch of the sun on his belly. He is totally unremarkable and completely marvelous. I love him as I love the sound of wolves at night, and stories of wild horses in thundering herds on the plains. I love him as I love my hands and my hair and my ice-green eyes. He closes the circle of who I am, and makes me complete. In loving him, I love myself. In my mind I call him Pan, but aloud I have never spoken a word to him, nor him to me. We are the closest of friends.

He has a boy’s face and arms, a boy’s curly thatch of hair atop his head, interrupted only by the nubbins of his horns, stubby things shorter than my thumbs, shiny brown like acorns. He has a boy’s chest, tanned and ribby, flat nipples like brown thumbprints. From the hips down he is neatly and unoffensively goat. His hooves are pale and cloven, slightly yellower than my toenails but much thicker. The hair on his legs is like that on any goat, smoothly brown, growing so closely it hides any trace of skin. His penis is gloved as neatly as a dog’s, held close to his lower belly in its coarsely haired sheath. The most I have ever seen of it is the pointed pink tip, moist like a puppy’s. To my eleven-year-old mind it is a superior arrangement, much better than my younger brothers’ dangling, wrinkled genitalia. More private in a way that is not prissy.

He rolls to face me, yawning, and then smiling. His teeth are white as only the teeth of young carnivores are white, and his eyes are a color that has no name. His eyes are the color of sunlight that has sifted through green birch leaves and fallen onto a carpet of last year’s leaves. Earth eyes, not brown nor green nor yellow. The color of a forest when you stand back from it.

He rises and looks at me askance, and I shrug and rise to follow him. My dog falls in at our heels. He pants delicately in the heat of the summer, making hardly a noise at all. Not for him some doggy lolling of a long pink tongue. He is more than half a wolf, my Rinky, with his sleek black coat and his pale cheeks and eyebrows. In the woods with me, he is all a wolf, and I am his cub as surely as Mowgli belonged to Akela. He has taught me everything, this dog, that a young creature must know to stay alive in the forest. From him I have learned to be still and to be silent, and to move with the forest instead of through or against it. I have watched him and seen how well he fills the niche that nature has allotted to him. I, too, will be as he is, perfect in my place.

We follow Pan, Rinky and I, and he leads us down the slough. We walk in the flat troughs that meander between the hummocks of grass. Short weeks ago, water flowed where our feet walk now. We flow as it did, silent and seeking our level. Pan has neither hips nor buttocks, but only the sleek flanks of an animal and the restless tail of the deer kind. His cloven hooves leave more of a mark than Rinky’s wolf feet, and my sneakers leave the least discernible track of all. Insects chirr around us, and the air is heavy with pollen and sleep. I can believe that, save for us, nothing larger than a shrew is stirring in the forest at this hour.

Then the duck explodes in front of me, right before my feet, her brown pinions slashing my face as she rises on her battering wings. Her nerve has been shattered; she withstood the passing of Pan and Rinky so close to her nest, but I, a human, am too totally foreign to her experience. I fall back with an incoherent cry, my hands rising to protect my face, but she is already gone. My eyes tear from the slapping they have taken, but that is the sole extent of their damage. When I lower my hands and blink my eyes clear of tears, they are laughing at me.

Rinky’s pink tongue does loll now, mockingly, dangling over his picket fence of white teeth and his smooth black doggy lips. Pan is worse. He clutches his belly, bends over it, brown curls falling into his eyes as he shakes with silent hilarity. His teeth are very white, his mouth is wide with mirth. Miffed, I ignore both of them, and crouch to examine the nest.

The nest is a late one, probably the duck’s second effort this year. To the casual eye, it is empty. But with thumb and forefinger I lift the soft blanket of down that covers the fourteen pale turquoise eggs. The eggs are not much larger than grade-AA chicken eggs from the store, but they are much more real. Eggs from the store are cold and bony white, their surfaces dry and chalky, trapped in cardboardy trays. These eggs are warm, and smooth, almost waxy to the touch. I take two and Pan takes one, and we carry them off with us, leaving the duck free to return to her brooding.

We go back to the sunny bank of the dried-up slough and sit on the moss and eat our eggs. Pan and I bite the ends off ours and spit the crumpled bits of shell aside before we suck out the warm white and the sudden glop of the yolk. Rinky puts his between his front paws and delicately breaks it with his teeth so that he can lap up the egg and eat the shell that held it.

And that is all that there is to this day, but it needs nothing more. It is complete, like the scene trapped inside a glass paperweight, a whole sufficient to itself. I am eleven and lying there between a dog and a faun. We three make a circle, from human to beast and back again. I love them as I love my hands or my hair, unthinking, totally accepting. They are the two most important creatures in my life and always will be. When we grow up, I will be Pan’s mate and we will live and hunt in these woods and Rinky will always run beside us. I know these things as well as I know that the summer sky is blue and permafrost is cold.