The Mockingbird Legends

A Postmodern Gothic Tale. Coming of Age Rural in a Dissolute Time.

Thirty-seven

The morning was very warm yet with a freshness born of brief, heavy rains that had barely wet the surface. Her face had grown lean with an attenuated relief that he found hauntingly beautiful. There were dark crescents beneath her violetblue eyes. She wore a long-sleeved western pearlclasped shirt in a fine paisley print tailored slim beneath her breasts with the sleeves buttoned down and not tucked in at the waist of loose-fitting jeans. Her locket hung at her throat. She had not been in evidence when he had arrived at the landing below the asylum but she had soon come from the direction of the building. G’day stranger, as she approached. Surpressing an urge to hug her. She held her hand out to him and they shook. Visiting Missus Ambrose? he said.

-Dropped Lili off a bit ago, bin hangin’ out on the steps.

-She’s in there?

-She’s workin’ the morning shift here now, they were short-staffed. She watched him looking askance in the direction of the edifice. Let’s get a move on anyways, she said, starting off towards the trailhead.

Lachlan doing a jogstep to catch up.

-What about the farm?

-The farm?

-Isn’t Lili working on the farm anymore?

-She’s still working fer Milo, she just wanted some space. They were moving up the trail to the upper tract now, the mockingbird audible from the direction of the asylum. They strode up the trail in silence.

-What do you wanna learn today? he said, nearing the benchlands.

-I wanna learn how to track, she said.

They topped out in the soft cleansed heat with the ground steaming now ever so slightly in the fashion typical of a morning after a rain with the heat coming on. He pointed out the red-tailed hawk gliding at treetop level over the far portion of the peafield. The peas were shorter now for having been cutover once, but were coming back fast and in bloom again already, and there was a whitetail doe out in it with twin fawns. They stopped and watched the impossibly graceful beasts retreating in leisurely bounds with their bright white tailflags waving like semaphores. They went on down the trail and Lachlan bent to point out some great hemispheric divots and Willa said heavy horse and Lachlan smiled, surprised. We cut the crop with a team and an old sickle mower, he said.

-Who’s we?

-Caleb cut it. I helped with the team.

-You know how to do that?

-Learning.

They walked on a ways and Lachlan stopped again and stooped to point at two fine sets of prints sketched like runes into the surface pellicle of siltmuck at the edge of a shallow drying rainwater puddle from which the sketchartists had drunk. This is a chipmunk track and this is a weasel track, Lachlan said. Willa stooped down beside him.

-They look similar to me.

-Yeah. Families of animals have tracks that run to patterns. The sizes of the tracks within the family will differ along with some fine details, but in general they tend to be larger or smaller versions of the same print within families. Look at this chipmunk track, which is the squirrel family and the same as other squirrels. The overall effect of the track is jagged and edgy. Two larger prints in front and two smaller ones behind here where it was bounding in approach is the pattern of squirrels and other rodents, too. A mouse track will look like this pattern but smaller. Now look at where the weasel bounded up in approach. There is a pattern of only two tracks side-by-side. All the weasel family leaves this two-track pattern when bounding, from the tiniest weasel to the wolverine. Now look at the details. The hind foot of the chipmunk is the larger foot out in front and it’s in front because the animal lands with its front feet and anchors with them while the haunches swing forward straddling them on either side and ending up to the front where they push-off. The hind foot registers five toes whereas the front foot registers only four. Offset chevron-shaped pad mark here, which is the ball of the foot. The weasel on the other hand when he bounds places the hind feet right in the front tracks before it pushes off. If you could see all four feet you would see that it’s the front feet of the weasel that are larger, but anyways. The weasel family registers five toes back and front feet, here. And you can see that the track is less jagged, more rounded than in the squirrels. The ball imprint is chevron-shaped. Here is the heel print, this little circle to the rear of the track. The weasel family is plantigrade, they walk on their whole foot like us and like bears do. All these details are important to keep in mind as compared to canine and feline tracks that are digitigrade, walking on their toes and leaving no heel track, have more triangular ball-of-foot marks, and register only four toes.

-Whey, that’s a lot to know.

-I know. Better if I don’t blather other than tell you what they are. Relax and pay attention to the patterns. Your subconscious is already working on the rest of it, like it musta worked out for the horse prints. So, two prints side by side for the bounding weasel family, four with two large front and two small back for squirrel family as well as mice. She stood and stared at the tracks a while and then she said okay as though having reached some conclusion or come to some verdict.

They went on up the trail a ways and Lachlan pointed out the tracks of crow and jay at the remnants of another rainwater puddle and indicated how these two birds from the same family also left the same track, smaller and larger versions. Further on and approaching where the trail passed through the extension of the woods, Lachlan stooped again and pointed to a set of tracks paralleling the sassafras line in the sandy loam at the side of the trail. Coyote, he said.

-It looks like a dog track.

-That’s right. But look how the pad and the four toes are more compact and symmetrical than most dog tracks. Notice also the claw imprints in front which are one of the details that sets dog track apart from cat tracks, which are superficially similar with four toe imprints but lack the claw register.

-Are we likely t’see cat tracks?

Lachlan hesitated a moment. No, he said. Maybe housecat. Which again are a smaller version of the print that is typical for the whole family.

-I’ve seen housecat tracks, she said. They are very small.

-Yeah, about an inch across on average. A bobcat track is the same only two inches across. A painter track almost the same only the toes are just a little offset and from three to four inches across.

-Painter?

-Panther, cougar. Puma. The same.

-There’s none of those here are there?

-Bobcats, yes, occasionally. Painters… no.

They went on and now they entered the stretch of woods that the trail cut straight through to the upper meadow. In the middle of the trail part way through was extended a tiny snake with limbate blotches deep red and edged in black, superimposed on a pearl-grey to almost white background. Milksnake, Lachlan said. Willa crouched down immediately and picked-up the little serpent. What if it was poisonous, he said.

-It ain’t poisonous, she said. I know a housesnake. Er, milksnake as you call ’em. Had ‘em in The Valley. She held it up and they admired it twining about her extended fingers.

-Just hatched, Lachlan said.

They admired the snake in silence as the young woman turned it slowly to catch the light.

-My father is an atheist, Lachlan said. If you believe there is such a thing. It’s hard for me to look at the beauty of almost any of the creatures you will see out here and think that it is an accident. I mean, why are they all so beautiful? They could be equally effective I imagine being ugly and blend in as they must do. Lookin’ like muck. And yet look at them. Even ourselves. How could it just have been happenstance?

-Amen to that. She put the little snake down and it poured off the trail like a rill of quicksilver and vanished beneath the laminate of the past autumn’s leaves. She wondered what else might be hiding there. Hiding anywhere. How much was there around her all the time that went unnoticed and unknown and even unknowable. She began walking and Lachlan hung back just a moment to slake his sight on her lissome form moving in no less wondrous a fashion than anything else to be witnessed in nature. He caught up and continued on into the upper meadow with her. He glanced in the direction of the pond and then made a point of not looking that way again. This he said, squatting and pointing to another track in the path. Any thoughts?

-Not a test already.

-No pressure.

She squatted down beside him and looked at the mark and said nothing for a piece of time that felt as something other-than-time. It looks like the chipmunk track, only bigger.

-Very good, he said. It’s a woodchuck, which is a marmot. Basically a huge fat squirrel.

Willa smiled her first smile of the outing. I like this, she said. They walked on. Do you think there’s anythin’ t’ancestral memory? Hank is always going on about it.

-Caleb certainly thinks there is something to it.

-Another unknown, I suppose. But maybe helps make trackin’ easier when you start to piece things together?

-That’s a thing about tracking. Opens a window into what’s otherwise unknown.

-Speakin’a windows and unknown things goin’ on, you heard what happened up at Bulldyke’s bushparty the other night, dincha?

-I heard some talk.

-Yeah, well. Anyways, we were up there in two separate kers sharin’ a jer to the side of the road and we went on and she stayed back awhile and someone set off a whole fireworks display around the vehicle she was in.

-Amazing.

-Dunno if it was in combination with the effect of that splo but it really freaked ’er out.

- How would someone pull that off?

-Not that it’s any’a yer concern anymore.

-It’s still my concern.

-Aw, blather. You never called ‘er until now, and she’s movin’ on.

-She didn’t say no. She said she’d think about it.

-I think you should give it up.

Lachlan stopped and she stopped and he stared at her a moment. I don’t give up so easy he said. He turned and they went on a ways in silence almost to the upper end of the meadow where it entered the woods of the ridge.

-How ‘bout we head back Lachlan said.

-There’s still plenny’a the day.

-Let’s head back. That’s enough for one session. He began walking back the way they came.

-Look I’m sorry. It’s just how I seen it.

-Well I see it different.

-Okay.

They walked on in silence down the curving trail through the upper meadow with its rich cloak of wildflowers, grasses, and holding its secrets. They re-entered the corridor through the woods and Willa wished for another snake or another interesting track but there was nothing more observable or at least that Lachlan was willing to halt for. She grabbed him by the sleeve and stopped and he stopped and looked at her.

-Yer not gonna quit on me, air you? she said.

-No, he hesitated. I’m not going to quit on you.

-Promise?

-Sure.

-Isn’t there anything else you can show me this morning?

He looked around them. There was everything to show. What would he show was the question. I could show you the squirrel woods. Where I hunt my lunch.

-You mean you eat something other than possum?

-I like a little variety.

-Isn’t all the woods squirrel woods?

-Yeah, but not all squirrel woods are created equal. Cummon, we’ll cut through here.

He left the trail and lead her on a tangent to the west beneath the canopy of maples and ash and hickory with an understory of ironwood and blue beech where through intimacy he saw much of what was hidden without having to see it anymore, in the present and in the past like a reel of vignettes playing in his mind although he tried not to see what was hidden in the future for the provisional feelings it raised in him. They passed west beneath a ceiling fronded elliptical and pinnate and dappled multiverdant and shot at intervals with comets of tanager-red. Lachlan pointed to the bones of a whitetail laid in her own hide and surrounded by breastworks of the duff that had been used to cover it pulled-away for a final meal and whispered coyote feeling fraudulent for knowing this was the work of no such animal.

Willa looked all around to see if anything watched them, and although she felt her view of their immediate surroundings combined with her knowledge of what they had passed beyond was adequate she could only see so much of what lay ahead and knew not to make predictions based on what had already been negotiated. She was nonetheless surprised when they came to the edge of the ravine where the floor of the forest rolled gracefully over and downward, creased by gullies and sidewashes where woodchucks and foxes made their dens under the latticed hands of undercut root masses. Lachlan motioned a halt and their eyes swept the aboriginal scene below them. Scan from near-to-far, this is the order of importance. He pointed out a horned-owl slumbering on a low hemlock bough and a woodchuck motionless outside the black O of its burrowmouth just as the animal merged with the earth like fluid into lofted wool. At middle ground they caught the movements of chipmunks on the level floor and nothing towards the far bank. There came from some conifers a loud rattling call. Willa asked if it was a kingfisher, and Lachlan whispered it was a boomer, a red-squirrel. Rare here. In comparison to the tastier greys.

-Every year I take a woodchuck here, he went on. One woodchuck that I freeze then cube into baits for trapping.

-Do you think it is alright to come out here from your cozy house and do that?

-I think it is what I do.

He took her north along the contour of the ravine with the peafield on their right and great black oaks now arced over them. It reminded her of being in a cathedral only with less felt barrier between herself and God.

-This oak ridge, he said, motioning. A squirrel factory. There are some beeches too, see? There and there. Acorns and mast. This is a very rich stretch of woods. If there were hogs here, this is where they would come and I would hunt them, too.

-Would you hunt everythin’?

-I would not hunt what I had no reason to hunt based on basic survival.

-Y’don’t need to hunt. There’s the IGA

-I need to hunt. I am a hunter.

-You could decide not to be.

-It is not something you decide. It is decided before you are born, I think.

-But y’don’t need it fer basic survival.

-There is more to survival than survival of the flesh. Here, let’s sit a moment on this log and watch. We’re making too much noise for the bush.

They sat and soon the canopy and the grey limbs of the oaks stirred again with the activity of squirrels. Watching them in their vitality she thought they must be difficult to shoot and she wanted to ask him but she kept quiet. The leaves rustled before their feet and the attenuated head of a tiny shrew appeared a moment and was gone. Jays screamed and the grey treefrogs began their procyonid trilling and a fox shrieked to its mate, causing a second unseen woodchuck to whistle a warning and submerge. They became audile to the point where they could hear the brook below them speaking in its gentle dialect. That brook comes straight from a spring at the base of the ridge, Lachlan whispered. You can drink right from it. He didn’t mention the stone structure two hundred years old that still stood at the edge of the springpool with the remnant coils of copper tubing where the best of local product as familiar to she herself had been made for two centuries from grain that grew where the peafield was now and wild grapes before the first local vineyards and was still being made there up until relatively recently. As much for the sheer audacity of doing it anymore as for the surprising niche market cashflow it generated.

Squirrels were multiplying. Squirrels in the boughs and squirrels in the boles and squirrels chasing briefly over the ground raising whirlwinds of leaves behind them before corkscrewing breakneck up the next broad trunk. He stood, extending his hand to her. She took it and he helped her up although she didn’t need it and she stood before him and retained his hand a moment and they looked at each other as though witnessing something eternal, and then Lachlan said I almost forgot about something and he took his hand away and reached into his back pocket and produced a small square of fabric with the number 16 embossed in stitching on it. He handed it to her. She took it and turned it over and looked down at it utterly still for some time as though decommissioned and then she looked up at him. Where did you get this?

-Caleb had it, told me to pass it on to you. Told me to tell you never to worry.

-What else did he say about it?

-That’s all he said.

-And you’ve had it how long?

-A while. I reckoned sooner or later I’d see you.

-A while. Like a month, a year?

-A week maybe. There was a long silence as she stood as though she’d gone petrified, staring at the object in her hand, doing the math.

-Well damn and blast you both, she said, turning abruptly and stalking off across the peafield scribing a clean diagonal part to the scalp of the land there, her motion tight and stilted and when he made to follow her she said don’t. He watched her recede awhile as though watching someone else’s horse run away through the window of his truck. What’s going on, he called to her. Arsehulls she called back. Consarn you both. He stood at the edge of the woods and watched her go. Arsehulls, he heard again, barely.

***

He sat back down and studied the woods. The squirrels had vanished with the approach of midday and the soughing of a rising wind. He sat some more and midday came with its circadian languor and the cicadas sounding and he got up and tilted back his head and cupped his hand to his mouth and let out a long howl that reverberated as though heralding the return of a deceased world order. He stood awaiting a response. Long enough for all temporal context to fall away. He thought he heard a muted answer from away off at the rim of the hollow but was not sure. He cleared with his boot down to the soil at his feet a circular space through the leaves and through the duff and through the humus and then he stripped off his shirt and tied the sleeves about his waist and went about gleaner-lean amongst the boles collecting downed branches. He propped the driest sections of the hardest wood against the log and broke them with his booted foot and then he took his knife from its beltsheath and shaved a small ball of excelsior from a dry stick and placed the ball in the middle of the cleared spot and made a rough teepee of the wood overtop that graduated from thin to thick and soon he had a hot and smokeless fire going. He sat staring long and long and when it had burned down he arose and went in a semi fugue-state to the rill in the cloughbottom and lay in a pushup position, putting his face to the water.

He looked for himself there in the pool but the light was at too high an angle and the pool scarcely deep enough to drown a babe and what he saw he could not recognize. He sucked deep of the fossil draught and it ran from the lengthened whiskers fringing his chin back into the pool creating ephemeral annuli that expanded, weakened and expired having failed any shore. Slaked, he went back upslope seeking a certain black oak that had known his ancestors three hundred years before. He ascended the great grey trunk and sprawled supine twenty feet off the forest-floor with his upper back rested against the torso of the tree. The rest of him melded into the shallow curve of a horizontal bough almost the diameter of himself. One leg dangling leopardlike. In this fashion he slept until the sun came high enough to bear down into the canopy with enough tumescent heat to awaken him. He arced his pelvis reaching for a packet of venison jerky in a front jeanspocket but froze mid-reach. There came the sound of something approaching over the sound of the wind and over the litter from behind and to the left, footfall-and-drag, footfall-and-drag. Something wounded or something crippled. Lowering back against the trunk incrementally, he tracked the creature by the sounds of its progress. It circled directly behind his tree from the northwest and came on approaching unhesitant. It passed well beneath his dangling right leg and did not look up, a scrawny and bedraggled old wraith in flimsy white bedclothes dragging the toe of the right foot in an arc as it went. He watched as the figure was consumed by the understory and he arced and reached once more for the jerky and once more froze. Something else coming, now. Something from the southwest stalking the crone. Producing sounds more felt than heard.

The painter passed beneath him like a coil of tawny smoke, belly appearing alternately from his vantage to either side of topline as it moved, heavy with recent meat. It stopped in midstride beneath him and looked straight up into his eyes. There was a moment of something passing between them, something for which no word existed, some pact perhaps, before she turned back to that which she was trailing and disappeared from sight and sound. The young man’s generous mouth split his face in an even double curve of teeth. He produced the jerky and chewed a strip contemplative, shaking his head gently. The wind was like surf in the canopy now, ebbing and surging and thrashing the treetops. This uppermost sound and fury subdued in its downward transmission through the superstructure to a gentle rocking at the level of his perch. He turned his shining bonestrong face to take the sun and with this anodyne gesture he closed his eyes and dozed.

He jolted awake to the tongue of hounds.