Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,11

knew. Some of what I did not.

And here, on this mountainside, among the families, in broad daylight, with two of us together—Samuel making enough noise for ten boys—there was little chance of a bear or coyote meddling with us.

But we’d be carrying a sack of fresh meat, which would be like hoisting a big come-and-get-it sign in the language of carnivores.

So, “Straight back,” I said, looking her in the eye, nothing soft about either of us.

I was the first to look away. I knew I was right about those lullabies. But that didn’t make her wrong.

I picked up a tangle of wet laundry and shook it out: my father’s bed shirt. It was marbled with brown from where his sores had bled.

I pinned it on the line.

“What?” Samuel called as he came out of the trees into the yard, faceless in the shadow of his hat but all Samuel, still, in the set of his shoulders, the way he pumped his arms as he climbed the tilted yard. He was, in many ways, my father, cast small.

“We’re going to the Petersons’ now,” I called.

“Says you,” Samuel muttered, but we heard him.

“Says me,” my mother said, swinging her head around to look at him.

“Well,” Samuel said, “I’m going up first.” And he charged past us, past the cabin, toward the path to the Petersons’.

He did that a lot. Charged through life without paying much attention to where he was going.

“Like a little bull.” My mother shook her head.

Finally, she’d said something beyond the barest of bones.

And I wanted to do the same. To tell her about the treasures I was hiding on the shelf in the woodshed. How lonely I was. What had really happened on the day my father got hurt.

Instead, I nodded. “Like a bull. Or a puppy.” Which led to “When can I hold Quiet again?”

She shrugged, Samuel’s long johns like a headless puppet in her hands. “As soon as Maisie says so.”

Which meant I would visit the litter again after I’d brought the venison home.

Perhaps if I smelled enough like both a harmless deer and a juicy dinner, Maisie would let me hold my pup.

“Tell the Petersons I’ll bring up a peck of potatoes later on,” she said. “You take the pail of milk I left by the well.”

That was another way we paid our way on Echo Mountain.

Our two milk cows, Venus and Jupiter, had a little fenced-in yard of their own below the cabin, but we loved those big, mooey girls too much to keep them locked in a world of mud and flies. So my father had threaded barbed wire through the trees in a big hoop around their pen, and every morning we let them out to roam in the woods, feasting on wild grass and moss, scratching their shoulders on the trees, napping in the shade. At dusk, we herded them into their tiny stable, just big enough for the two of them, a net of hay, a trough of water, and nothing else.

One time, a mountain cat had climbed onto the roof and screeched at them through the tin and wood, and they had lowed and hollered in fear until my father had come out, a torch in his hand, to scare the cat away.

I would remind my father of that. How the cows needed him, too.

I thought about such things as I lugged their milk up the trail to the Petersons’ that morning, Samuel far ahead of me.

The trail was steep, the milk heavy, and I knew what would happen if I tripped on a root and spilled it, so I kept my eyes on the ground until I reached that tree, there—that big old balsam fir that curtsied a little in the wind as if it had been waiting for me.

I set the pail carefully aside and, taking my knife and a scrap of leather from my pocket, ducked under the tree’s prickly skirts and ran my hands along the rough bark until I felt the blister where I’d recently cut a branch to chip into tea for my mother.

The tree hadn’t seemed to mind sharing what it had to share.

The blister was the size of my thumb, its skin tough, a hard bubble. When I pierced it with the tip of my knife, the sap inside oozed out onto the blade, and I wiped it onto the scrap of leather over and over until I had a sticky dollop that I folded up carefully and slid into my