Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,88

he understood in return.

Later, I would do that. Find him.

After I’d helped Cate. After I’d helped my father. After all that. If he hadn’t come to find me first.

“What’s that?” my mother said, nodding at the deer hide that hung from my arm.

“Deer hide,” I said.

“What for?” she said as I gathered up my pack.

“You’ll see. It’s hard to explain.”

She followed me to the cabin door and stood watching as I laid the deer hide on the ground and scraped the hair away with my knife until nothing but leather remained.

But she went back to her work when I knelt to build a fire where we had made soap. Before the fire got too big, I laid stones in a small circle around its edge so the pot would sit above the ground and the flames would stay where I wanted them.

While the fire was growing, I cut the leather into strips and tucked them all into the old pot, added a little water from the well, and set the pot on the fire.

“What are you doing?” Samuel said as he crept out of nowhere and my shadow merged with his.

“Playing the piano,” I said.

He made a sound that was mostly snort. “You are not, Ellie. You’re cooking something.”

“Then why did you ask?”

He peered into the pot. “But what is it? Is it something to eat?”

“Maybe if you’re a wolf,” I said. “A very hungry wolf.”

“Well, I’m not a wolf,” he said, though he sounded a little doubtful, as if he reserved the right to eat what I was cooking, should it prove to be something sweet.

“I’m making glue,” I said, stirring the strips of hide with a bare stick as the water began to simmer.

“What did you break?” he said happily. For once, he was not the one who had done the breaking.

“Nothing,” I said. “But I’m going to fix it anyway.”

Samuel poked at the fire with a stick of his own. “How do you know how to make glue? Did Daddy teach you that, too?”

I shook my head. “I taught me how. I just hope I taught me well.”

He made a face at that. “You’re silly.” He poked at the fire some more. “Do you need help?”

“Always,” I said, though it wasn’t true. Though it was.

Chapter Sixty-Six

Samuel and I spent the next hour tending the fire and the pot as the deer hide slowly melted down toward glue and the day trod on toward evening.

“I think it’s done,” I finally said, letting some drizzle from the end of the stir-stick.

“That’s a lot of glue.” He looked around the yard. “What’s so big and broken that you need all that glue to fix it?”

“Cate,” I said, using a rag to move the pot off the fire. I set it aside to cool.

“You mean the hag?” he said, astonished.

I nodded. “I do.” But I knew he was astonished by the idea that I could glue her back together, not that it was a hag I meant to heal.

* * *

—

“What are you brewing out there?” my mother asked when we came into the cabin to check on Cate.

I liked that we were brewing something. I liked that word.

“Glue,” Samuel said.

I could see that my mother wanted to ask more, but she didn’t. She simply turned back to her work, which was a supper of corn bread and beans and one of the trout . . . and a pie. Something as uncommon as hen’s teeth these days.

“Is that a pie?” Samuel said, his eyes amazed.

“Of a sort,” my mother said with a sigh. “Dried blueberries and apples with walnuts and a little maple syrup. Which is hardly what I’d choose to bake. But bake it I will.”

“For Miss Cate?” I said.

She nodded. “How often do we have a guest in this house?”

I wouldn’t have called Cate a guest, but I was glad that my mother saw her that way.

At the bedroom door, we found both Cate and my father sleeping, though differently. I could see that just by looking at them. Even asleep, Cate looked as if she were . . . aware.

Esther was there, too, sitting alongside the bed in the rocking chair, reading aloud to both of them—and to Captan, too—as they slept. A very good book about a bear named Winnie and a pig named Piglet and a host of others that I had loved and still loved and would always love.

I was jealous at the thought that Cate might be meeting Pooh and Piglet for the