Blue Mountain Read online

  “A dry creek bed?”

  “You could climb to the clearing at the top of the mountain by this creek bed,” the marmot said. “But you must go quickly. The snow is beginning to melt, and when it does, the creek fills with rushing meltwater.”

  “Will you show us?” Tuk asked.

  The marmot chewed on the grass thoughtfully, then nodded his head and disappeared into a fold in the underbrush. Dall ducked low and followed and Tuk and Rim came right behind.

  In a moment the green gloom opened to reveal a rocky avenue that climbed up the mountain, wide enough for a grown bighorn. The trees made a canopy overhead, but as high as Tuk could see, the riverbed climbed.

  It went against Tuk’s every instinct to be in the wood, without long sight lines to allow him to run from predators. “Can we do it?” he asked.

  “I can do it,” Dall said. “Can you?”

  “I’ll show you,” Tuk said.

  “I’ll show you, too,” Rim said.

  “You both will,” Dall answered.

  They emerged from the forest into the open and told their bandmates about the creek bed. The main herd, bunched together a little way off, murmured.

  “It is time to go,” Dall said.

  “Yes,” said Mouf. “Someday. When I am ready.”

  “Now,” Dall said softly.

  “Now,” Mouf said. “Now is when I will be ready.”

  Tuk turned to the herd. “I will come back for you,” he said. “When we have found blue mountain, I will come back and show you the way.”

  Sham stepped out of the herd. “May I come with you?” she asked.

  Sham was mild-spoken and always stayed in the middle of the herd, so everyone was surprised.

  “But you have a lamb in you,” Kenir said.

  “That is why I must,” Sham said.

  “Aren’t you afraid of places without trails?”

  “Yes,” Sham said. “But I love Wen more than being afraid.”

  “Wen?”

  Sham lowered her eyes to hide her pride. “Wen will be the name of my lamb. He has opinions.”

  The herd considered her in silence. They couldn’t argue with an unborn lamb who had opinions.

  “You are welcome to join us,” Dall said. “You and Wen.”

  “Wen is the most important one now,” Mouf said. “Even more important than me.”

  When no one disagreed with her, she sighed.

  Kenir turned to Dall. “Wherever you are going, you must be there in time for Wen. You must be there, wherever it is.” To Tuk she said, “Trust the mountain.”

  WOLVERINE

  One by one they entered the forest of treed mountain and found the creek bed.

  “Tuk is saving us now, right, Tuk?” Mouf said. “Have you started?”

  “He has started,” Dall said, and she began to climb.

  After a whole winter in the flat valley, it felt good to be climbing again. But soon the bighorn began to lose their nerve, enclosed in the wood without good sight lines, and in territory without the slightest scent of bighorn. They talked together to help them forget the listening, watching silence. As time went on, they slowed down and their talk quieted.

  Except for Mouf.

  “What is blue mountain like, again?” she asked.

  “The stories say man is not there,” Tuk answered.

  “Is anything there?”

  “Of course, Mouf. A mountain, and grassy meadows and rocks and cliffs.”

  “Story grass? Story rocks?”

  “Real rocks. Rocky rocks.”

  “But if it is just a story, will we have a happy ending?”

  “I hope these questions will have a happy ending,” Tuk said.

  Dall, just ahead of him in the lead, looked back briefly. He could see the weariness in her face. Climbing through the forest was taxing her. It was taxing them all, of course, but going first was the hardest. At least he and the others had the comfort of following, of being in the slipstream of a familiar scent. Still Dall climbed steadily, her head and shoulders bent to the task.

  Tuk had lots of time to think about the night wolves, and how the herd had escaped harm because of the trick of climbing on the machines. Speed, agility, and trickery: the law of the peaceable had served him that far. But if not for the gun, he would be bones in the valley.

  His horns had begun to grow at a great rate, but not, he thought, fast enough.

  A little after midday, long after even Mouf’s chatter had ended, the trees stepped back from the banks of the dry creek bed and revealed a small dell. The band stopped, shaking with fatigue, to look for forage, but it was meager and the snow was wet and heavy.

  “Are we there already?” Mouf said.

  “We are not there, Mouf,” Nai said. “We have just begun.”

  She hung her head. “I shall die of being tired if we have to keep going.”

  Sham had already made a bed and lay down.

  “We have to keep going,” Dall said. “But not today. We may not find another clearing before dark. We’ll rest and make the top tomorrow, and you are not allowed to die yet, Mouf.”

  “Tell me when,” Mouf said.

  * * *

  Tuk did not sleep well that night. He woke to every sound and wished they had kept going. Early the next morning, though, he could see how the rest and grazing had heartened Sham and Mouf.

  Again they climbed. The creek bed became steeper and choked by old growth. Hair lichen hung in pale dry wisps from the trunks of limber pine that crowded with their sharp, naked branches. Dall slowed down. Her footing was hesitant when the creek bed was especially narrow and the trees closed in.

  Tuk could hear Rim at the back, encouraging Mouf and Sham, and sometimes nudging them along. He pressed forward, every so often saying to Dall that surely soon the wood would open up again.

  Toward afternoon, when Tuk was more weary than he had ever been, the trees gathered suffocatingly close, and the rocky creek bed cut deep into the mountain.

  Mouf stopped suddenly. Ovis and Rim were unable to get around her for the dense underbrush on either side of the trail. “I have to stop,” she said.

  “Here?” Ovis said.

  “Yes,” said Mouf.

  “Yes, you must stop,” said a voice out of the wood.

  Tuk looked to his left to see a wolverine in the bracken beside them. Kenir had taught Tuk that wolverines were proud, unwilling to live close even to their own kind, and could be vicious predators.

  “What are bighorn doing here on treed mountain?” the wolverine asked.

  “We are going to blue mountain,” Mouf said.

  “Blue mountain?” the wolverine said with a growl. “But this is my mountain, and if you tread my mountain, you pay a price. So which of you will be my dinner?” The wolverine crept closer. “I promise you my kill methods are most refined, second to none, the result of good breeding and aristocratic stock. You are weary and half-starved and trapped with no place to run, and now the little one may lie down and not be able to rise. Perhaps the rest of you can go on, and she can be my dinner. Surely she cannot survive this journey anyway.”

  “She declines to be your dinner,” Tuk said to the wolverine. “In fact, we are not tired at all.”

  “I am,” said Mouf.

  “Mouf,” Dall said, “the wolverine will only attack if we are weak or wounded, and you are as strong a young ewe as ever I saw.”

  “Oh. Good,” Mouf said, glancing at the wolverine.

  One by one they passed by the wolverine and continued their climb. The wolverine followed in the brush to the left of the creek bed, staying parallel to Mouf.

  “Never mind,” said the wolverine. “Soon enough you will stumble, little one, and hurt your foot, or fall asleep and wake up only long enough to scream a little before you die. But don’t worry. I have manners, and I kill quickly, before I even open you up. I am quite skilled.”

  “That is a relief,” Mouf said.

  “Of course, I have made th
e occasional error in judgment,” the wolverine said.

  “No one is perfect,” Mouf said.

  “Don’t talk to him anymore,” Ovis said.

  But the wolverine continued to keep pace with the herd.

  “You won’t make it,” he said. “No, you won’t. But go ahead and make me wait for my dinner. Be inconsiderate, if you must. It is the way of your lowly kind. No sympathy at all for the fact that I, the finer breed, haven’t eaten anything but mice for days…”

  “We must stay strong and alert until we get to the top,” Dall said. “Tuk will tell you a story, Mouf, one to keep you awake. But he will only tell it if you walk.”

  “I will tell you the story of the wolverine who troubled Lord Denu,” Tuk said as he climbed.

  “I love a good story,” said the wolverine, following alongside.

  In the days when Lord Denu wandered the mountains, a wolverine plagued the first herd. He felled and ate two lambs. The matriarch sent a strong yearling to find Denu and ask him to return from his wanderings to help the herd. Denu came, and by then the wolverine had felled a third lamb.

  The wolverine was pleased that the king had returned just to deal with him. It made him feel powerful and important, and he strutted before Denu.

  “The mountain gave me tooth and claw and an appetite for flesh. I am the proud wolverine, and I am entitled to eat the lowly sheep.”

  “You are a proud creature,” said Denu. “Who are your relations, wolverine?”

  “Why, you can tell by my name that I am related to the wolves,” said the wolverine, drawing his head up tall.

  Denu said, “Ah—no wonder you attack our kind, seeing as you are from wolf stock. But are you sure? I met with a wolf not long ago who denied you were any relation at all.”

  “What?” cried the wolverine. “I shall bring a wolf to you today who will tell you that I am related, probably a close cousin.”

  Immediately the wolverine ran away, and for days in his absence the herd lived in peace and the lambs grew stronger and faster.

  Finally one day he returned looking thin and bedraggled and with a nose that had a wolf’s bite in it.

  “I see no wolf cousin with you,” Denu said to him.

  “Wherever I went the wolves said I was not related to them at all,” the wolverine said. “I cannot understand it.”

  “Well,” said Denu, “you will have to go then, for I cannot allow just anyone to cull the herd.”

  The wolverine’s stomach growled. “I have been told I look bearish. Perhaps I am related to the bear!”

  “Ah—an impressive creature indeed,” Denu said. “If you can bring a bear to testify to this, then of course I will understand why you must cull the herd.”

  Immediately wolverine ran off, and again the herd was left in peace for many days. All this time the lambs were growing bigger and stronger and quicker.

  When wolverine returned he was a starved-looking creature. The wolf bite was badly healed, and across his side were four great claw marks—the slash of a grizzly.

  “I cannot understand it at all,” said wolverine to Denu. “The bears say I am no relation of theirs, no relation at all.”

  “That is too bad,” said Denu. “But I have done some searching of my own while you were away, and I have found your true relation, your very cousin. Would you care to meet him?”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said wolverine, who was now feeling quite alone in the world.

  Denu called, and the wolverine waited.

  “Here he comes,” Denu said.

  “Where? I see no one.”

  Just then a small, slithering creature ran up to Lord Denu and gazed at wolverine.

  “What is this weasel doing here?” said wolverine. “I cannot abide a weasel—sneakish things.”

  “This,” said Denu, “is your cousin.”

  “Cousin? No, it can’t be!”

  “I am sorry to say,” Lord Denu said, “that it can be, and it is. I am afraid that weasels and their families are not permitted to hunt the noble bighorn. You must go, and if you do not, I shall have to tell all the creatures about your relations.”

  At that, wolverine tripped and tumbled down the mountain in shame, and was never seen among the herd again.

  “What a cruel and distasteful story,” the wolverine said to Tuk.

  “Related to the weasel,” Mouf said with a sad shake of her head.

  The creek bed had become broader and less steep as Tuk told the story. He felt a breath of open air.

  “A few more steps, and we’ll be above the tree line,” Dall said.

  The wolverine crashed through the trees, keeping up with them. “You must go down the mountain, too,” he said. “And I will follow.”

  Finally, as the sun disappeared, they came out into the open, a small rocky clearing on the eastern crown of treed mountain. The sun had been warm on the shadeless clearing and the snow was melting away in spots. They grazed hungrily.

  Soon they were more tired than hungry, and they began to paw out their beds. They could hear the wolverine in the bracken just below. As the band fell asleep one by one, Tuk saw that Rim and Ovis were awake.

  “We will take turns watching,” Tuk said. “I’ll go first.”

  In the quiet of the night, Tuk marveled that they had made it to the top of treed mountain. He had not truly believed they would make it even that far.

  FOG

  Just before dawn Tuk woke and jumped to his feet. A Chinook had blown in during the night, warming the air and melting much of the snow, but now the air was still, and that stillness had woken him. Fog swirled around his feet and slipped like spirit wolves between the trees that ringed the small clearing. He could hear water dripping in the creek bed and the wolverine snuffling in the trees.

  Dall was awake also, gazing intently into the woods.

  “The wolverine is still out there,” Tuk said to Dall quietly.

  She nodded. “Out of sight but within smell.” The fog muffled all sound and flitted in the bare branches like ghostly birds. “But feel it, Tuk. Spring is at the top of treed mountain! It is as if spring has always been here, waiting for us.”

  Sweet coltsfoot had sprung up overnight, the warm stems dimpling the snow. Tuk’s band feasted on them in the still-dark morning, and on the tender blades of new spring grasses. Tuk ate as much as he could, and gradually, though the fog still pooled on the ground, the skies cleared.

  Dall came to his side. “Come look, Tuk,” she said.

  She led him to the west side of the clearing and they jumped onto a great boulder muscling out of the earth.

  To the west, Tuk could see another mountain, not as thickly treed, but higher, and spotty with meadows among the forests.

  “Another mountain,” Dall said, shaking her head. “With forests.”

  “But some meadows,” Tuk said. Below them, between treed mountain upon which they stood and meadow mountain in the distance, a valley cupped the fog like a great white lake. The fog shifted and stirred but gave no clues as to what was beneath. At the north end was a break in the fog, and there they could see a river pouring into the valley, split into two shallow arms. At the south end they could see the river flow into a corridor between low mountains.

  “Look, Dall, beyond meadow mountain.” The peak of blue mountain had just appeared above a bank of cloud, like an island in water. “Do you see it?”

  Dall looked and her mouth opened. “Yes, I see it! But—it floats. How can we live on a mountain that floats?”

  Tuk and Dall searched out another creek bed going down the west side of treed mountain. When they found it, it was slick with water, but passable for steady bighorn feet.

  When they returned to the band, Mouf said, her mouth full of grass, “I smell that wolverine. It makes my food taste funny.”

  Tuk thought he could smell wolf, too, but perhaps it was only a memory stuck in his nose.

  Down they walked, down and down treed mountain, and behind them the wolverine follo
wed, plodding and relentless.

  After a long day of miserable trekking, finding little more to eat, they finally came to a grassy area more than halfway to the bottom. They could smell water and something rank coming up from the valley, but the trees blocked their view.

  “We’ll stay here tonight,” Dall said.

  “In the trees again?” Mouf asked.

  “Mouf,” Nai said irritably, “be still. You’re making me jumpy, startling at every little thing.”

  “We are all a bit jumpy,” Dall said. She and Sham scraped out their beds beside Mouf. Tuk and Rim and Ovis again took turns to watch. Though they could smell the wolverine skulking nearby, he did not close the gap he had maintained all day.

  BEAR

  When the sun rose the next day, the band finished the short trek to the flats and emerged from the trees. The wolverine followed, keeping the same measured distance he had kept the day before. Tuk, last in line, felt his haunches quivering, imagining the wolverine’s claws in his back.

  In the near distance was a fast river. A pair of white owls floated silently on the air to the north as the band approached the banks. Snow melted and fell into the water chunk by chunk. Shining fish darted just above the ice-scrubbed stones of the bottom.

  “We will have to cross it,” Dall said. “It’s shallow enough here, I think.”

  “Yes, when I am ready,” Mouf said.

  Dall shook her head. “We must cross it today for the sake of Wen. We must be at the lambing cliffs of blue mountain in time for Sham to have her lamb.”

  “Wen is the important one,” Mouf said. She sniffed. “Something smells bad. Worse than wolverine.”

  Dall stepped into the water and then stopped, stiff-legged, as a great rise of earth suddenly came to life. It had not been earth at all, but an enormous old bear. He stood on hind legs and looked at them from the opposite bank of the river. His head was boulder-sized and his paws had claws like tree branches.

  The bear licked his lips as Dall stepped back out of the water. The band lined up along the bank.