Nightwoods - Charles Frazier [94]
Later, they stop and get off and stand bleary and disoriented in a bald place at the top of a mountain. All around, ghostly frosted clump grass.
Sally collapses her knees and then her hind end, an awkward fore-and-aft jerk, to lie down. She blows three deep breaths and falls asleep. Dolores and Frank use her side as a backrest and lie canted toward the sky, eating raisins and watching the stars fade out toward dawn.
They sleep a brief while and wake high above the world to silver bands of light illuminating valley fog so deep and broad that only the tallest peaks rise dark and solid from it, like islands in a pale sea. As if the island they occupy is theirs alone, a place where they hold the only power to be reckoned with.
But as the sun climbs above the east ridges, the sea draws into the ground until only a distant small shape of elongated fog remains between ridges, underneath which lies the lake. The landscape reconnects all its parts, and the children on their pinnacle are not any kind of power anywhere.
Below them, a hawk floats on a cushion of air, and the children look down on it, studying the novelty of sunlight glinting off the tops of its spread wings, the brown feathers like bronze. With two strokes, it rises and sweeps over them, close enough that they hear the sound of its wings cutting the air, a faint rattle of feathers.
Sally stands and walks stiff-legged a few yards across the bald and begins cropping long grass, dead brown and lapped over by frost in smooth striated waveforms. The children each take fists of grain from the bag. Much tingling and laughter at the velvet sensation as she lips it out of their palms.
Neither reasoning nor planning for the day ahead, and hardly consulting each other except, perhaps, by glances and gestures and thought waves said to be shared exclusively by twins, one thing becomes clear. No going back. Ahead, mountains and woods and creeks, endless by the look of them. Follow old wagon roads, cart tracks, footpaths, animal trails. Go the way the sun goes, as far away as you can. Don’t worry about what happens next until it happens.
CHAPTER 2
BUD’S LIFE HAS BEEN such that he hasn’t witnessed the beauty of dawn in some time. And yet, now, peering out at it from the hole in the mummy bag, how disappointing. Everything grainy and unformed. A new damp chill in the air, and the low sky the color of cold bacon grease.
A fat granddaddy bear, not yet settled into his winter den, waddles from the trees and begins rooting around in the knapsack. He’s scarred around the head from various fights in the past and sort of dusty-looking under the long glossy black hairs of his outer coat. Very casual. A pro. A few motions of the wide forepaws, with their long curved claws, and the knapsack and tent become ribbons and Bud’s stuff is scattered all over the ground.
The bear is first drawn to the wieners, which scent the air for hundreds of yards into the woods. In three bites, he eats a full loaf of bread, including the cellophane wrapper. The bear sits up on his round ass and sucks down all Bud’s uncanned food like a cartoon glutton. Then he gets interested in anything else falling even vaguely into the category of edible. Such as Bud’s suede gloves with the sheepskin linings.
Bud, with just his face from eyebrow to lower lip out the hole of his bag, watches and figures maybe he’s next. He tries to sit up and find the zipper at the same time, but his fingers jitter. The inside pull eludes him, and he can’t squeeze his hand out the face hole to get to it from the other side. He jerks himself vertical and tries to hop away from the bear, but he falls onto his side. Breath won’t draw right, and his diaphragm burns. The bear walks near, sniffs and blinks tiny brown eyes, huffs from deep in his chest, the breath steaming in the cold air. He shies away and disappears into a laurel thicket.
After a while of calming himself and fiddling with the zipper, Bud squirms out of the bag like an extrusion, then eats some of the canned stuff leftover from the