Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,68

wrong between you two?” she said. “You used to be like peas in a pod.”

I thought about everything I might say, then chose the simplest. “We’re different.”

Cate scoffed at that. “So are ink and paper, but they get along very well indeed.”

“She’s mad at me,” I said.

“Not mad,” Esther said.

“She thinks I’m the reason our daddy got hurt.”

Cate scoffed again. “You’re a girl. You’re not a tree.”

“She was in the way,” Esther said.

Cate shook her head. “Blame comes from the Greek for ‘curse.’ That’s the root of it. A curse. Against the sacred. Which is what sisters are. Or should be. To each other.” She glared at us both. “Sacred.”

I looked at Esther. She looked at me.

“It’s all right that you were in the way,” Esther said. “You’re just a kid.”

Which made me mad, but I held my tongue.

I found Cate watching me carefully. “Captan fetched the right person,” she said.

And, just like that, I wasn’t mad anymore.

“In the morning,” she said, “look for Larkin down the path alongside the spring, down over the rocks and around and down until you reach the cabin.”

“I will.” To Esther, I said, “Wait until those bandages are bone-dry, cooked clean, and then wrap her leg up again. Clean as you can. And light that lantern there before I go,” I said, since I would need my own for the hike back down to home.

And, along with it, a good bit of courage, besides.

Chapter Fifty-One

My lantern ran out of oil before I ran out of path.

I stopped then and there, the woods dark and windy, and wanted badly to go back the way I’d come. But I’d heard my father say many times that wild animals were more afraid of people than people were of wild animals, so I wasn’t much more than nervous as I continued on in darkness.

The bear I saw as I rounded a bend in the path was several shades blacker than the night.

When I saw him, I froze.

He did, too, when he saw me.

And for a long moment, we stared at each other in the darkness, and I was glad that he was not a big, burly summer bear.

Not a wounded bear, since I knew that a bear hurt was a bear mean.

Not a mother bear, her cubs bleating with fear at a girl in the woods.

Just a thin spring bear who was surely as scared of me as I was of him. My father had said so, and I had believed him.

But then I made the mistake of reading, in his eyes, a wildness I admired. Of feeling, in him, a love of things I loved: like lying in a meadow with the grass rising high all around, hiding me from everything but the sky and the bee-heavy blossoms nodding down toward me, springing up again as the bees flew. Or a pink end-of-day sky. Or the clear whistle-ring of a wood thrush.

And I leaned—just a little—toward the bear as he stood there, stiff-legged, his head up, his eyes on me . . .

. . . and he decided to prove my father wrong.

When he started toward me, growling, I dropped the dead lantern and ran.

I knew better.

I knew that a bear would chase someone who ran.

I knew that he could run faster than me.

I knew that he could manage the trail far better with his night-eyes than I could with my day-eyes.

I knew that I would be smarter to play dead.

But I ran anyway.

And he would have been on me in no time if I hadn’t fallen and suddenly found the good sense to tuck my hands up under my chin and lie still.

I had already done a few hard things in my life, but one of the hardest, then or since, was lying with my face in the dirt, without moving at all, not at all, while the bear snuffed me and kicked my legs, still angry but puzzled and winded from the uphill run, more interested, it seemed, in new grass and grubs than in girl.

But when he plucked the cap off my head, I learned a new kind of fear.

And when he finally turned and left me, I said a new kind of thanks.

For my life.

For my unscarred skin.

And especially for the fact that Esther had stayed with Cate.

I tried to imagine her meeting up with the bear. Then I tried not to imagine that.

I lay there, unmoving, for some time.

And then I got up slowly, in chapters, and quietly brushed myself off,