Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,16

look she gave me.

“What dog?”

“That’s what I want to know. It was a big one, brindled, with ears that stood up. And it didn’t seem quite tame.”

My mother added a stick to the fire. “You sure it wasn’t a coyote?”

“Dog,” I said. “Come down the trail from above.”

“Maybe someone on the hill has a new one.”

I shook my head. “There wasn’t anything new about this dog. And Mr. Peterson didn’t know him.”

“I wonder if that could be the hag’s mutt. Except it’s never come down from her camp before.”

The hag. I hadn’t heard that name for a long time.

Not since a foggy morning long before, when I had been tempted by how the mountaintop disappeared into the mist, ignored my father’s warnings, and climbed beyond the last of the five families, where there were no trails except what the deer and moose made . . . and smelled a fire up above. I had run back down to warn my father. Wildfire, I had thought. And I hadn’t been entirely mistaken.

When I found him splitting wood and told him there was a fire above, he set his ax aside and said, “It’s all right, Ellie.” He wiped the sweat off his face with his hands. “That’s just the hag up there.”

“‘Just the hag’?” The only hags I knew were in storybooks. Gnarled old creatures who cast spells and ate children for supper. “What hag?”

“The only hag I know of. And I met her only once myself, when we first came here. Didn’t know she was up there when I went looking for the mountaintop. She was in her little yard, skinning a deer, and I tell you, Ellie, I had a hard time standing still when I saw her. She was that odd. And she had a dog with her. A big one. With a dark eye.”

“What, you mean one eye black and one eye not?”

“No.” He laughed. “A dark stare. No welcome in it. Not in hers either.”

I pictured that. “Did she say anything?”

He nodded. “She said, ‘You need a leech on that ear. Then honey if it’s hot.’”

I remember him smiling at the look on my face. “I had a hurt ear. From a fall. It was swollen. She told me I should go down to the marsh and get a leech or two to drain the blood off or I’d have a ruined ear.”

“And did you?”

He shook his head. “I had your mother lance it instead. It bled so bad I thought we’d made a mistake doing that, but the pus came with it. And then I recall we did put some honey on the open cut, and it healed right and quickly. So.”

I remember how he picked up his ax again. Went on with his work. But I stopped him with a fresh question. “And what about the hag? Did you go back up after that?”

At which my father shook his head.

“You don’t ever even talk about her,” I said. “Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about her?”

My father set a fresh log on the stump and hefted his ax. “Nothing to say. And no sense pointing you children toward something better left alone. Which is what you’ll do, Ellie. Leave her alone.” And there was something so hard in his voice that I’d obeyed him.

* * *

—

Now, much later, as I stood with my mother by the fire and stirred the tallow, I wondered if the hag might have carved the little lamb and the dog and all the other small gifts I’d been given.

“How old is the hag?” I asked my mother, remembering the face I’d seen in the woods, which had seemed too young for someone called a hag.

“I have no idea,” she said. “But from what your father said, I’d imagine ‘old’ would do.”

So: not the wood-carver. But perhaps something better.

“Did you ever ask her to come see Daddy?” I asked. “After he got hurt?”

My mother looked at me like I had two heads. “The hag? When the doctor said there was nothing to be done? Don’t be foolish.” She fed another stick to the flames. “I don’t know if that dog was hers or a stray, but if you see it again, you keep away and let me know.” She kicked an ember back into the fire. “Tame or wild, a hungry dog will eat. And your brother’s still little enough to be dragged away.”

I imagined Samuel in a set of jaws, and my shoulders went up around my ears.

For a tiny