Echo Mountain: Chapters 25–40

She and Esther were standing in the yard much as I’d left them, except now they looked grim and panicky.

“I’ve been hiding here forever, and I fell asleep and got a crick in my neck, and I’m hungry, and Mother means to give your pup away. But I’m not crying,” he said fiercely.

The concoction inside smelled sweet and musky.

I’d forgotten all about it. Which astonished me, since every other carving had led me into endless curiosity and speculation and happiness...and made me grateful for the gift.

Then I laid the torch on the path where it would slowly give up its flame and pulled the pack over my head, tucking the edges of it into my collar and buttoning my jacket up tight to hold the makeshift hood in place.

One of them stung my wrist where there was a sliver of skin between glove and cuff.

And I felt besieged, suddenly, by the bees, by the need to steal from them, by the way I’d been banished from my own home, by the blame I carried with me like a harness, like a thorn in my hoof, like a puppy taken from his mother, from Maisie, from me.

And, in that moment, my own loneliness doubled...and then receded down to less than what it had been.

In my mind, I flew up like a turkey buzzard to circle above the hills and valleys, looking at them with a new eye.

I was really asking Larkin, though I looked at Cate, who said, “Would you want to traipse down a slope you used to know, tree by tree, brook by brook, that’s someone else’s now?”

“I’m not sure find is the right word. More like, did I manage to collect it even though I got stung and some bees died and the rest of them will probably starve to death now.”
She seemed to like that. “Spunk,” she said, nodding.

If he’d had a hat, he might have doffed it.

“...'wounds sometimes received by butchers, cooks and fish-dealers, who handle—’” He paused. I looked over his shoulder.
“Putrefying,” I said.
“...'putrefying animal matter,’” he continued.

“‘Such wounds are particularly—’” He paused again.
“Virulent,” I said.

“‘A wound of this...character should be thoroughly washed,’” he read, “‘opened and swabbed with pure carbolic acid, then washed with’”—he skipped a word or two—“‘mercury solution, and wet antiseptic dressing. Bites by animals should be so treated, the human bite being one of the worst.’”

Maisie was already awake, and the puppies, too, staggering around their nest like sweet dopes.

He was so sleep- tousled that he looked like he’d been caught in a storm.

The cows were eager to be milked, so I obliged them, soothed by the music we made in the process—the rhythm of the milk hitting the metal pail and then the wet hush, hush of its froth building.

Skunk stink, which would surely tell him that something was amiss.

I slipped aside so Esther could cling to his arm, smiling and crying, and Samuel could climb onto the bed and bounce into the happy fray like a puppy.

She beckoned for us to follow her from the room.

She turned to look at me, the knife poised in her hand.

By now the snake in his picture had acquired a set of enormous fangs.

Then I took the jacket with the apron to wash under the well pump. Wrung them out. And put the jacket back on, wet as it was.

When I reached my hand out, palm up, Captan rested his soft jowl in it for just a moment and then turned to lead the way to Cate’s cabin.

His left eye was swollen shut, the skin around it a mottled black and blue.

“And I was angry, too. And I split a log so hard that a piece of wood kicked back. Caught me in the eye.” He smiled ruefully. “I won’t do that again.”

The edges of it stuck to his skin, holding it in place.
“Like this?” I said.
“Just like that. Now press gently to mold the poultice to the eye.”

I helped steady her, and then we two hobbled out into the clearing.

I looked from Larkin to Cate and back again. And suddenly I saw what should have been obvious. In the way Larkin was lanky and lean. In the shape of his mouth. His hands.