Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,32
need. I’ve eaten nothing. And that’s the first I’ve had to drink since yesterday.”
“You have fever.”
“I know. My bones hurt with it. But it’s no mistake and does more good than harm. Until it’s high enough to kill me.”
“Then I’ll go get you the honey. And I’ll come back as quick as I can.” I looked at the rabbit alongside her head. “I can cook that up for you before I go.”
She nodded. “For me and him both.”
The dog smiled for the first time.
“And I brought you a fish,” I said, remembering the trout.
She made a face. “Why would you come up the mountain with a fish for someone you’d never met before? And how did you even know I was up here?”
“My father told me about you. You saw him once, with a bad ear.”
She squinted thoughtfully. “I remember him.”
“And your dog. I thought he might be trying to tell me something.”
“Good.” She nodded briskly. “A girl who can understand dogs.”
“Any girl can understand dogs.”
This time, she shook her head. Closed her eyes.
For a moment, I thought she had more to say about that. But then she opened her eyes again and said, in a harder voice, “That rabbit’s not going to cook itself, you know.”
So I picked it up by its hind legs and carried the poor thing into the clearing, the trout along with it.
* * *
—
I’d butchered a rabbit before. My father had taught me how. And how to scrape the skin and stretch it in the sun to cure.
This one was no different, except I was alone. And the rising wind on the mountaintop spoke a different tongue than the wind down below. And that woman, Cate, was in terrible trouble.
I wanted to heal my father, and I would.
But I was suddenly the only one standing between that old woman and real danger. Maybe even the end of her.
At least she would not punish me for my troubles.
I could not say the same for my very own kin.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I expected to be punished as soon as I got home. But Samuel was still missing—and had been for two long hours—so finding him came first.
“No sign of him,” my mother said, and I could tell that she was scared. “We hoped he was with you.”
She and Esther were standing in the yard much as I’d left them, except now they looked grim and panicky.
“I said I’d send him home if I saw him.” I could feel them blaming me again for something I hadn’t done. It felt like horsehair inside my clothes.
But then I realized that this was about more than one kind of blame.
Esther looked like she wanted to claw me. “Why did you do that?” she hissed. “Why did you put a snake in with Father?”
I stood up as tall as I could. “I knew it would make you scream.”
“Mercy,” my mother said. “You really have lost your mind.”
“Why would you want me to scream?” Esther said.
I couldn’t remember the last time she had smiled at me, but I was sure that she smiled at our father every night before she went to bed, though he couldn’t see her. “You think Daddy wouldn’t do everything he could to help you if he heard that?”
I had decided I wouldn’t cry, no matter what sort of punishment waited for me, but this kind of talk made me so sad that I struggled to keep my voice from shaking. “If anything is going to wake him up, don’t you think his Esther, screaming, might?”
My mother and sister both stared at me with less fury than before, but not much more of anything good or kind.
“I’ll deal with you later,” my mother said. “Go find Samuel now, and be quick about it.”
But as I turned away, she stopped me again. “Where are the eggs? You were gone long enough to lay some yourself.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Then where’s the fish?” Esther said. “And where were you, if you weren’t at the Andersons’ for eggs?”
“I was . . . looking for Samuel, up-mountain. And a dog ate the fish,” I said, which was the truth. Or part of it.
My mother frowned at me. “That mutt?”
“What mutt?” Esther asked.
“I saw a mutt on the path,” I said.
“And he took the fish?”
From my hand, yes. He had eaten eagerly, the fish steaming in the cool air. And I might have said something like that. I might have said, Yes, he took it from me, and told half the truth that way. But