Sister Wolf (20 page)

An old wood does not reach its full size by welcoming man and his devices, his axes, sugar taps, and specimen bags. Marit could feel the trees close ranks, like a nation-state preparing for invasion. There are huge stones in England, in Cornwall, like the megaliths at Stonehenge; and there are tales about those stones, that men have gone too near them at certain phases of the moon and been found dead near their base with their bones broken, as if the stones had embraced and crushed the life from them. These trees were younger than the Cornish stones, and might not have attained the strength to kill, but Marit knew, with every hair and every pore, that they were merging forces to expel her and whatever living being lay whining near enough to hear but out of eyeshot.

She had no choice if she was going to help the creature but to move toward it and flush it out of hiding. She walked cautiously, trying not to graze the tree trunks, but her footsteps thrashed through the crumbled leaves, the louder for the mist which broadcast sound. There was a thrashing, in answer to her progress, ten yards away, at the edge of a little clearing. The animal that started up from cover, forced by panic into the open, cowering in the open in the hunched position in which it had been hiding, had two legs, like Marit, and the marks of the female sex.

Marit dropped down on all fours, as if she were the one in danger, not the rescuer, and her safety depended on keeping out of sight. There was no danger to Marit from the figure in the clearing. The figure could not see her. She could not see the moon overhead or the plumes of mist or the rutted tree trunks. She did not seem able to talk, in any normal human language. Her mouth opened and closed, murmuring confused syllables, repeating a pattern of high-pitched sounds that had no meaning, like a penitent saying the rosary.

What kind of penance would Gabriel set himself when he found out that he had let his protégée lose her way? A good teacher does not make cripples of his students, so he had pushed her off to walk the ground unaided. He would make himself pay for his miscalculation. He would redouble his guard, valuing the lost lamb more than all his self-reliant charges, who could dress and feed themselves, tell north from south, saddle horses, and beat him at chess. This was a shorn lamb huddled in the clearing, shuffling in slow circles, fleeced of her wiles and assets, her breasts drooping and her fine legs tracked with scratches.

On all fours, in the hunting posture common to beasts, Marit started forward, poised and eager, like a ferret out for rabbits. She felt herself grow hunched and prognathous, dim and feral as the ape-man. Her hands seemed immense and hamlike. Her fingers brushed the ground as she moved. Blood pounded in her temples and facial arteries. Her eyes were slits.

A ferret glides; a cobra slithers. Larger hunters make clumsy errors in their footwork, tipping the odds in favor of their prey. Marit’s knee pressed down on a branch half-covered by leaves. The branch cracked and broke. The blind girl started to run. A thud and a moan. She had run into a tree. She was down and scrambling back onto her feet, and felled again as she lurched into a second trunk. This time she stayed down and crawled, dragging herself forward on her arm, keeping the other raised to fend off nearing trees. When one arm tired, she lifted the other, sweeping it back and forth in front of her, striking the back of her hand, more painful than the palm, against a tree trunk, flailing the bruised hand, her body sagging lower and lower, expended, until finally she was moving on her elbows.

Marit was erect now, hunting on two feet as humans, do, working her prey by deliberate moves. They had come to a darker region of the forest, where the denser growth of trees blocked out the light. Marit felt her smooth-skinned quarry more than saw her, guided as surely in her direction as a water witch is led by the forked branch slanting downward. Her hearing had grown sharp and stoatlike; she could see with the backs of her arms and the soles of her feet, even through her shoes. Her feet picked out soft patches, lichens and woodruff, to damp her tread when she wanted to give the girl a rest. When she wanted to scare her onward, she found loose stones to roll, puffballs to burst, dry twigs to snap. There was no hurry. She had the blind girl on a long leash. She could let her run or jerk her back or stop her short. She could take the whole night to enjoy the pleasures of the chase, the excitement of stealth, her own fleet, buoyant body that did not yield to hunger, cold, or nerves. After such a night the girl would be well broken. She would live within the rules and by the timetable, speak softly, and never play with older boys.

For some time Marit had felt her pace grow faster. She smiled in the dark to think that revenge had put wings on her heels. Now the darkness began to lift, troubling her vision for a moment, but not her footing. The trees had thinned out, admitting some rays from the moon. In the paler light, she could see that the woods ran downhill. Gravity, not revenge, had quickened her motion.

The girl up ahead had risen to her feet. She was leaning backward, her chin tucked into her chest, one arm in front of her face to protect her eyes. On such steep terrain she could not control her balance. She stumbled headlong, breaking her fall against one tree, losing her grip and pitching forward against another. She was on a runaway course, unreined, flung from trunk to trunk, playing blindman’s buff with giants in a waking nightmare.

The girl was hurtling downward. She was losing her. Marit was running with extra care, to save her neck. The downgrade grew sharper, inclining to perpendicular. Marit lengthened her stride; she was still several trees behind her. The girl’s head bobbled as if it were working loose. From her mouth came a high trilling scream, a sound heard sometimes in extremes of pleasure. Her head jiggled and turned, making almost a full rotation. Marit saw her face. It was wizened with fear, old and doomed, screaming words or parts of words, louder and louder on the final plunge, five zigzag falls before Marit could hear that she had cried for help.

The woods cleared, giving way to a narrow bank. There were no trees here to curb Aimée’s last fall—into Yoke Pond, fed by springs and deep as a mine. Openmouthed and unwarned, she swallowed two lungsful of water. She sank as if she were weighted down with stones.

Marit heard the splash as she fell. The unexpected sound, as sharp as gunfire, made her remember the rock-bound pool beyond the trees, a pond that she had only seen from the other side, the side that lay within the boundaries of her land. As she moved down toward the bank, she hesitated, waiting to hear more splashing in the water, or coughing, or another cry for help, the sounds of the blind girl flailing on the surface. It was such a little pond, seven strokes at most to swim its entire length, surrounded by rocks that offered a ready handhold.

At the edge of the clearing she slid on matted leaves, and braced herself against a leaning birch. She saw the water churning into ripples. Wavelets beat against the rocks and drenched the bank. There seemed to be no cause for the disturbance, no shape upon the surface or below. She had lost sight of the girl for no more than ninety seconds. Drowning takes longer, even in deep water. The girl had escaped and climbed out on dry land. She had groped her way up the bank and found her footing. She would blunder into the open where Marit could spot her. Marit would lift her up and take her by the hand, and guide her through the forest back to Meyerling. When they had reached the lawn, she would point her toward the mansion, waiting to see that she did not stray again.

It was taking the girl too long to show herself. Marit leaned on the birch to brace her trembling limbs. The pond was ebbing into glassy calm. If the girl was safe, she must be very near, near enough to hear Marit’s faulty, ragged breathing, near enough to have sighted Marit’s own position, with the extra senses given to the blind. She was hiding from Marit, or waiting to make a move. Her feelings for her pursuer would not be friendly. She would take her revenge in kind, close in on Marit by inches, and hunt her down.

All at once the night was filled with warning sounds, a chittering on her right, a thud, like an object falling, from behind. A swish, repeated twice, the sound of a branch or stick swung through the air. She heard a clatter and a hollow plop. A stone rolled over rock into the pond. There was movement at the far side of the water, two young trees swaying when there was no wind.

Marit felt her scalp rise and her chest grow cold. A dark shape filled the breach between the saplings, looming as she watched, then shrinking out of sight. On feet that felt as soft as dampened putty, she edged away, still clinging to the birch.

A cloud passed over, blocking out the moon, plunging the forest into sudden darkness. Another light went off, in Marit’s mind. A grouse whirred out of hiding, just uphill. She heard the drumming louder than a siren. She screamed and ran, like running through a quagmire, where every footstep seemed to pull her down.

When the sun came up in the morning, the surface of the water reflected the first red rays. The pond was empty, except for dragonflies fishing. The grass on the bank had sprung back tall and wavy, erasing the human footprints that had crushed it flat.

D
URING THE SUMMER CAMP
season, all of Meyerling rises, or is wrenched from sleep, at 6:30 a.m., to the sound of Daisy Fellowes singing “Good Morning, Mr. Yellowbird,” piped at top volume over speakers that were set on every floor and hall. Miss Fellowes had been singing reveille for so many years that it had become a camp tradition, and had given rise to another accepted practice, sabotaging the loudspeakers.

This Tuesday morning, August 12th, black-haired Miss Muskie climbed on a chair to untie the down parka that she had wrapped around the speaker on the older girls’ hall the night before. One parka had failed; but three would not have done the job. The boys’ wing was still asleep. Conrad, the new swimming instructor, had disconnected the lead wires; he had been told that it would be unsporting if he cut them. Other methods had been tried, under the mistaken notion that plugging up the cloth face of the speakers would lower the volume of Daisy Fellowes’ gravelly voice. Earlier in the season, John had stood on Wyeth’s shoulders, chewing a mouthful of bubble gum, and popped large pink bubbles against the nylon mesh. The episodes of the rubber cement and the Spackle, three years before, had resulted in the firing of a woodworking counselor who was barely older than the boys on his floor. No one knew when Dufton and Fellowes might crack down on the speaker pranks; they seemed to play it entirely by whim.

Out of forty campers at Meyerling, ten boys were missing at breakfast, not to mention Conrad. Such a striking number of truants concealed the absence of a lone girl camper, a girl who had been late in the mornings in any case, and who complained that at home she always had breakfast in bed. Boys began straggling downstairs, singly or in twos, tripping on their shoelaces, shirttails slopping over their belts in back, looking hangdog and pleased with themselves. Each time a new group arrived, Miss Fellowes walked around all four tables, slapping the tops of heads and counting out loud. After seven headcounts she called the roll. Then she ordered Gabriel to take attendance again to verify her tally.

Aimée Dupuis was not accounted for. Fellowes ordered Muskie to get her up. Looking as remorseful as if he had been one of the latecomers himself, Henry Dufton announced that the whole camp would be benched for the day and confined to their rooms. The children began growling and buzzing. Mr. Dufton relented, as he always did at the first sign of protest. Miss Fellowes intervened and restated the punishment. Twenty cords of wood had been cut for the winter and lay stacked at the bottom of the meadow near the tennis courts. The campers would take the logs, as much as frail or husky arms could carry at one time, the quarter of a mile from the meadow to the woodshed, until every log was neatly piled inside: “Like busy ants, children, working for the good of the colony!”

Miss Fellowes was explaining how the pyramids had been built, evoking long files of black Egyptians hauling stones; Wyeth was squashing pieces of bread and stuffing them in his ears; and Nannie was sinking slowly beneath the mahogany horizon of the table when Miss Muskie came back, flapping like a hen, too distressed to take Miss Fellowes aside, and blurted out for all the children to hear that Aimée was missing. Her bed was made up and her toothbrush was dry. Her clothes were in the closet and the drawers. The maids and the cook had not seen her; neither had the groom nor the handyman. The gardener had found a wadded handkerchief near the rhododendrons with the initial “A” worked on one corner. Miss Muskie stretched the handkerchief out in front of her, the way bridal sheets are displayed after a peasant wedding.

“She was waylaid.” Miss Muskie broke down. “Waylaid and raped!”

The dining room broke into an uproar, composed of one part shock and two parts glee. Those children who did not know what “rape” meant were clued in by those who did. Preston was wrestling Nannie to the floor. She had eclipsed herself under the table and pinched the first flesh she made contact with, Preston’s calf. Several chairs toppled backward. One of them hit Preston, who collapsed over Nannie, pinning her down with his full weight. This looked remarkably like the fate of poor lost Aimée. Miss Muskie began to scream. Mr. Dufton was tapping his water glass with a knife blade. Gabriel cocked his head at Conrad in the direction of the terrace doors. They converged on Miss Muskie from opposite sides of the room. Too late. She had had her say: she had seen a hatted man in the lemon garden, and a bearded youth on one of the floors, who claimed to be a glazier. She had reported both men, but no one had paid attention.

The cook entered the fray. She would like to know who had stolen her boning knife; moreover, what were those muddy streaks on her clean kitchen floor? And with the price of Scottish oatmeal, she would not take the blame if most of it went to waste.

John took this as a signal to flip blobs of cereal, stone cold in his bowl, off the end of his spoon. Some fell on the floor; some landed in the hair of his tablemates, who were forced to fight back with milk, eggshells, toast rinds, saltcellars, tea bags, and jam. Six boarding counselors, one of whom was beside herself, were not enough to quell thirty-nine storming children. There would have been seven counselors on hand, but Miss Fellowes had left the scene, pressing her palms to her temples, a flighty gesture that was most unlike her.