Pax, Journey Home: Chapters 21–32

She had wanted to walk herself, but whenever she tried, she soon fell over on her side, looking bewildered.

She struggled whenever Pax tried to pick her up, but even when she finally relented and allowed him to carry her, she whimpered if he ran or even trotted, so they had to travel slowly.

Now, he let her down gently onto a welter of smooth roots beside the riverbank.

While he had stopped here, his boy had eaten beside a wood fire—Pax could smell traces of meat and of marshmallows. He tracked down three stripped branches bearing remnants of the sticky prize on their tips, covered with ants.

Samuel had drawn the short straw and had trudged off through the underbrush to find the feeder springs.

“It’s always moving. Never lets anything stop it up. As if it knows blocked water goes stagnant.”

Peter located the bird, at least a dozen feet up, studying them intently.

“Communion. With a bird. Can you believe how lucky we are?”

Maybe it was the chickadee, maybe it was the river murmuring sleepily—something lulled Peter into letting down his guard.

He set a tin of beans on the fire and pretended to be engrossed in stirring them.

She lapped at it tentatively, and then gulped it.

Pax assessed the muddy riverbank and then the higher dry ground.

The storm had hit with a sudden volley of hail, hard as gunshot, then settled into a gusty downpour. Peter had shown Jade and Samuel how to make a lean-to of thick cedar boughs, and they’d crouched under it most of the day, sodden but grateful they weren’t out in the open getting lashed.

“That’s quite a knife. And you’re really good with it.”
“No, it’s all the knife,” Peter demurred.

“The mill operation is pushed off a week at least, maybe two. The storm surge compromised a dam upriver and our platoon is being diverted there."

In the silence, Peter could hear the dull thunder of the rapids, far off but ominous.

Peter slid a thumbnail under the bark of the log and pried off a strip, considering.

Pax taught his daughter to wear the storm on her fur and flare her nostrils into its vigor.

Determined to keep up with her father, she needed less rest, as if she were recovering from whatever illness had befallen her at the still pond.

They gorged themselves from plentiful spring nests—more snapping turtle, also bufflehead and wood duck and goose. Seeing her eat eased Pax’s worries.

Gasping, Pax let the current carry him to the edge. And there, just for an instant, he saw: on either side the land fell away and fell away in great ripped chasms, the river raged and thundered downward.

Down he went, into the churning water, until he slammed hard against a ledge.

He scrabbled for purchase, found it, lost it, got his legs on another outcropping and held on, claws to rock.

For another moment, she hung as empty and lifeless as a pelt.

He nestled her on a hummock of grass and curled himself around her, reassuring her she was safe.

But the path home to Bristle was fraught with dangers, and even if none were encountered, the walking alone was too arduous for a kit as battered and exhausted as his.

But the path home to Bristle was fraught with dangers, and even if none were encountered, the walking alone was too arduous for a kit as battered and exhausted as his.

An ancient hemlock whose boughs swept the ground, making a piney grotto underneath, where Pax had once sheltered with the old fox, Gray. Dark but airy, cushioned with many seasons of soft pine duff, whose scent would mask their own from predators.

Here, in the backyard, he could set the blaze. Make a base of kindling—dead branches from winter storms all around, pile it with hay, load all his stuff, then...

And he almost patted his pockets for an apple, passing the split-rail fence where the dapple gray pony used to wait.

Where had all the other moments gone? And where were those boys now, dispersed by the war and the bad water? Would any come back to their empty town?

Its surface was glassy flat this morning, except for a rolling furrow of current that flowed down the center.

Peter knew those pools from the bottom up, had seen sky through them. A view that as a boy he always found disorienting but peaceful at the same time, as though time had relaxed.

All the way up, the meadow seemed almost defiantly alive. Blossoms shot out of tall, bright grasses and even burst from the outcroppings of ledge.

Clear as anything, he could still see his father’s face: military-short hair, shaving cut on his cheek, beseeching eyes that filled with relief at those words.