The Endless Forest
Page 58

One day he came upon a doe and without giving it much thought he threw and killed her with one clean blow to the neck. He had to hold the doe’s head down with one boot to wrench the blade from the spine where it had lodged.
Once he had mastered the tomahawk Daniel began working with smaller blades. Now he had a half dozen different weapons of all sizes and types, some of them of his own design, forged in the smithy. He carried five or six blades with him at all times, as he would have carried his rifle.
Daniel was proud of the fact that he hunted for his own table, cleaned and cooked what he brought down. Rabbit and squirrel, grouse and turkey, ducks, and once a wild swine. He left the larger game for the most part, because he couldn’t get it home on his own and disliked the waste of field dressing. The skins he brought to Annie for curing, and paid her for her help.
Now a knife came as easily to hand as a fork or spoon. Daniel tested the weight of the heavier hatchet before he let it go. It made the whoop-whoop-whoop sound of an eagle flying overhead, and then it severed a witch hazel branch as thick as his good wrist.
He was sweat-soaked but not so weary that he didn’t hear the sound of his mother coming through the woods, a full five minutes before she stepped into the clearing.
The sight of Ma out here in the open always surprised him, though he knew it should not. Thirty years ago she had gone into the bush a new bride and come out again changed. Able to care for herself in the endless forests, if need be. The wife of a backwoodsman.
“You could cut a few more branches,” she said to him. “And put them in your classroom. They smell so sweet.”
Daniel had to laugh at this suggestion. All her years in Paradise among trappers, and she had never resigned herself to the stink of sour clothes stiff with grime. She never gave up on trying to improve what she called the miasma of the classroom, and retiring from teaching hadn’t dampened her ongoing dedication to a problem that Daniel could live with.
He said, “Ma, I’ll cut some for you if you like. To put by your window for when you’re working.”
“That would be lovely.”
A woodpecker rattled overhead. Daniel went about caring for his weapons; his mother would raise whatever topic sent her looking for him soon enough. But she surprised him, reaching out to take his grandfather’s tomahawk from him to run her fingers over the carving.
“Hawkeye told so many stories,” she said. “And most of them had to do with war. This is the hatchet that saved your grandmother Cora’s life on more than one occasion. But that was three wars ago.”
She seemed to be talking more to herself than to him as she traced the carving.
“You are very pensive today,” he said. In his mother’s company his vocabulary began to stretch and grow and words he never used anytime else—except in spelling lessons—would come out of hiding.
“Am I?”
“You’ve got all of us together in one place; what is there to worry about now?”
“Lily. Lily worries me. Her health and her state of mind both.”
Daniel wished now he could take back the question. His mother did enough worrying without his encouragement.
“Ma,” he said. “Did you come to talk about Lily?”
She cast a frowning glance and then turned away to look into the trees, her arms folded over the ends of her shawl and her head canted forward, her gaze focused on the ground beneath her feet. She was patient, and demanded the same of her children. The words would come when they presented themselves in the proper order, and not before.
“There is a letter,” she said. “It came with the post yesterday, for Hannah. She asked me to talk to you about it.”
Elizabeth was braced for what must come next, and so she watched the animation leave his face and his jaw settle hard. Inscrutable. The very image of his father when he sensed a battle ahead.
He said the one word.
“No.”
“Daniel,” Elizabeth said quietly. “I want you to listen until I’m finished, without interrupting me. Will you please do that for me?”
Oh, how he wanted to deny her. She could see it in the way his gaze jerked away into the woods. But he was a good man and he had been trained well by his father. It took a concentrated effort but he calmed himself.
“Go on.”
She sat down on a fallen log and took the letter out of her bodice. Fine paper, closely written. Not a watermark or crease beyond the folds. It had come in a chest with medical supplies and books, and a manuscript written in the same clean, tight hand.
“Do you remember Hakim Ibrahim?”
“Only from stories,” Daniel said. He would not volunteer anything, and in some ways that made her task easier.
“Hakim Ibrahim and Hannah have been corresponding for many years, before she went west with Strikes-the-Sky, and again since she came back from New Orleans after the war.”
Hannah corresponded with so many doctors and healers of every stripe. Sometimes she recited bits of their letters when they had a meal together, but for the most part the tone and subject were of interest to Birdie and Curiosity and no one else.
“Apparently she asked his advice about your nerve damage,” she went on. “Some years ago.”
The muscles in Daniel’s jaw jumped, but he stood his ground.
“Hakim Ibrahim is recently returned to his home in India after five years in China.”
She paused then, searching for the right words, and with that he let out a sigh.
“What is it? Another herb? Another tea? I’ve had enough, Ma. A few green things steeped in water can’t fix what’s wrong with me. I’ll never have the full use of the arm again. If I can live with that, why can’t you?”