Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,28

of them faded and worn.

I looked again at the carvings on the windowsill, and for just a moment I thought this woman might have made such things for me, left them for me to find. But she was far too old to have the face I’d seen peering at me from the woods.

One of her hands, lying on the blanket, reminded me of the day I’d found a dead bird in the yard, its claws limp but curled up, like a baby’s hands will curl when he’s sleeping. Except there was nothing about babies here in this room. Nothing at all. Despite the books, despite the flowers overhead, despite the small wooden creatures and the handsome tools, everything here felt old and beaten and sad.

The air buzzed with flies.

The dog sat by the bed, waiting.

I put down my pack and walked slowly closer.

The woman who lay there was still, her eyes closed, but I could see that she was breathing.

A dead rabbit lay next to her head, flies drinking from its eyes.

I swallowed. Made myself breathe.

“That’s the rabbit I saw in your mouth, down-mountain, isn’t it?” I whispered to the dog. “You were trying to feed her, weren’t you, boy?”

He watched me without blinking.

The woman looked clean but gray. Whole but broken.

“Ma’am,” I said softly, and then again more loudly.

She didn’t respond.

I touched her hand. I had expected cold. I got hot instead. Too hot. And I was suddenly filled with a terrible sadness and such longing that I felt empty and stricken and poor.

I touched her old-apple face. Even hotter. Even more like the end of a sad tale.

Something was very wrong with her.

There was a small cloth doll tucked up in the crook of her neck. It was made out of rags. The kind my father used to polish things.

I spent a moment looking at that, thinking about that, and then I pulled the blanket slowly down, past the hem of her nightdress, and saw that one of her thighs was swollen and purple but also oddly white and . . . almost moving, though her leg was still.

I leaned closer in the dim light and realized that I was looking at a clot of maggots feasting on her leg.

I dropped the blanket and stepped back, gasping.

Ran out into the yard.

Bent over, my hands on my knees, and swallowed hard, again and again, but I couldn’t shake off the sight of that leg. The smell of it. The idea of her lying alone in that bed while her leg softened with rot and those hungry worms.

When I could, I stood up straight and wiped my face with my hands. Pushed my hair back and away. And went into the cabin again.

Into the terrible, raspy fizz of the flies.

I stood staring at the old woman. At the rabbit on her pillow.

What was I going to do?

I wanted her to wake up, but to what? The sight of her own leg rotting?

The dog lay down next to the bed and put his head on his forepaws, his eyes on me, his brows twitching.

“What am I supposed to do now?” I said to him.

But he didn’t answer.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Fire, I thought. I would make a fire.

There was plenty of dried grass and moss and leaf litter near the cabin, all of which I gathered for tinder, carrying it inside to pile near the cold hearth. I made a nest of the best bits, tucked it between some cooking bricks, and went to work with my knife and flint until the sparks caught.

I had fire in moments.

Carefully, I blew on the small flame until it consumed the nest and easily lit the thin twigs I fed it, then the larger twigs, then a stick and another and another and then a small log until I had a strong fire burning.

I was as aware of the woman in the bed as I was of the mountain itself.

The dog watched me steadily.

The smoke from the fire fought off the smell of that leg, but I knew I would have to face it again soon.

I had once watched my father use a hot knife to seal a wound in the palm of his hand. It wasn’t a very big cut, but it had begun to fester. “Best to kill a germ before it spreads,” he had said, heating the blade of the knife on the kitchen stove and then taking it outside before pressing the tip of it hard against the wound.

He had bellowed like a