The Early Years

Careful of the big gold-toned hoops that pierced my earlobes, I strapped on my helmet and straddled the beat-up Yamaha. It wasn’t my dream bike, but it would do until I could afford the one I really wanted. I glanced back to make sure my saddlebags were latched. The teal compartments were secure, held in place with leather straps tightened by Bobby, who now stood to the side, his face long and his eyes downcast. Everything was in place and ready. A thrill of excitement raced along my skin, prickling like fur. Despite the heat, I pulled on my leather riding jacket and tucked my hip-length braid inside it, out of the way. I touched the gold necklace that I still wore like a talisman and reached for the key to start the engine.

“You don’t have to go,” Bobby blurted.

I looked up at him: his red hair catching the afternoon sun, his freckles a spatter of cinnamon. He was standing with his arms crossed, his hands tight under his armpits, eyes staring at the asphalt. Afraid. He had always been afraid. Prey, the insistent, soft voice whispered in my mind. With long practice, I shoved the presence down deep, ignoring it. It hacked with amusement but subsided, watching. Waiting.

“Yes, I do,” I repeated for the thousandth time, trying to keep the impatience out of my tone. “I can’t stay. They won’t let us stay after we turn eighteen. The funding runs out today. And I have to leave.” That wasn’t strictly true. The children’s home did have a program for their graduates, as they called us, but I didn’t fit into it at all. And though they would have found a place for me for a while, I had seen the looks on their faces. They were ready for me to go.

“I’m not going to college or tech school, so there’s no money for my housing till fall. The only security firm that wanted a trainee is in Asheville. I have to go.” That much was true.

“But it won’t be the same, Jane.”

I knew what he really meant. Like me, Bobby was different, not like the other kids at Bethel Nondenominational Christian Children’s Home. While I was just . . . different, he was a little slower than most, both physically and mentally. Bobby was seventeen going on ten. And he was lonely, just as I had been. Like me, he’d been picked on mercilessly by the other kids. Not when a group home parent was nearby, of course, or when a counselor was watching. Never then. Only when no one was looking. His life had been hell until I’d taken him under my wing in the middle of December more than two years ago.

I already had a rep as a fighter at the school, and had spent more time in detention than any other girl had in the history of Bethel. A record I was happy to leave behind me. But despite how tough I was, from the first day he came to Bethel, something about Bobby had called to me. He was like a day-old kitten, mewling in fear. I had fought for Bobby. Protected him. Made sure the other kids left him alone. With me gone, Bobby would have to fend for himself.

I had done what I could to see him safe, mainly by threatening the ringleaders of cliques that bullied the most. I’d come back to visit. And they didn’t want me unhappy when I did.

I wasn’t that tough—not really—though the years in the dojo learning street fighting proved I could kick butt when I needed to. While the other girls in the group home were taking ballet, piano, and French, I was getting tossed around by a sensei with black belts in three different martial art forms. I was pretty sure the general manager of the school, the dude who had approved the cost of the lessons, had expected the rigorous training program to knock some sense into me and teach me self-restraint. He had probably also figured Sensei would send me back with my antagonistic tail between my legs. Things had worked out a bit differently.

In the dojo, I had finally found a place where I belonged, where I fit in, with Sensei and the kids he groomed as fighters. I never stood for belt testing, but I stuck out the training program, living with the bruises, sprains, and occasional broken rib. I was good. But mostly, as far as the school counselors and their opposite number, the bully masters, were concerned, I was just really good at looking dangerous.

I also worked after school at the dojo, my first real job, cleaning floors and the workout mats, washing windows, general handyman stuff. Sensei taught me how to do the books, pay the taxes, order supplies. He was my first real friend. Even if he did knock me silly when we sparred.

I took Bobby’s hand, his flesh soft and moist, and held it, drawing his unwilling eyes to mine. “As soon as I get the trainee position and get started, I’ll schedule a few days off and come back. I promise.”

Tears filled his eyes. “Okay,” he whispered. “I’m not going anywhere.”

And he wasn’t. Bobby’s parents had been killed in an automobile accident with a drunk driver. Though his grandmother had taken in his three brothers and sisters, she had decided she didn’t have the strength to raise a kid with a seventy-four IQ. So she dumped him here, which I understood on one level, but it still made my brain boil. Bobby went home to Gramma’s to visit on Christmas, on Easter, and for a week in the summer. That was it. That was as much as his grandmother could take of her less-than-normal grandkid.

Of course, I never went anywhere, but I was used to it. I had always been alone.

Weak. Prey, my inner voice whispered. My own personal demon, never acknowledged aloud, never alluded to, never hinted at. The counselors would have thought me insane or possessed, depending on their religious beliefs. Either way, I’d have been medicated and sent to more counseling sessions. And been subjected to more torment by my housemates. Again, I shoved it deep and silent.

“I’ll be bringing you a present,” I said. “Something from the mountains.”

Bobby’s eyes lit up. “From your spirit quest?”

I dropped his hand and chucked him on the chin. “Right. See you soon.” Before he could delay me more, I turned the key and gave the Yamaha a bit of gas. It spat for a sec and then shot me forward. Into the future. I wove through the grounds of the children’s home one last time. I would come back. But Bobby was right. This would never be my home again, and it would always-ever-after be different.

Bethel Nondenominational Christian Children’s Home was located near the Sumter National Forest in South Carolina, within spitting distance of Georgia and North Carolina, in a locale with more rednecks than all other ethnic groups put together, and ten times more livestock than people. Maybe a hundred times. Maybe a thousand. The place I was going was a lot less populated and a lot more remote.

I dropped down my face shield, cutting the hot wind but making a steam bath inside with my own breath. Speeding, I passed the main offices and lifted a thumb to the one person standing outside to see me go—Belinda Smith, one of my former houseparents. She smiled and waved, and I knew that of all the people at Bethel—besides Bobby—she really was sad to see me leave. She had liked my essays.

I glanced in the rearview to see her place a hand over her mouth, and I could have sworn that she was crying. Not possible. No way.

I looked back at the street and the road before me. Gunned the motor again. The outer gates neared, passed, and fell behind. The bike tore out of the grounds of Bethel, along the main road, and out of the city.

Soon I was gunning it up the mountains.

The quality of the air changed around every bend, freshening each time the elevation rose. The world changed as I two-wheeled into my future and—I hoped—my past.

I didn’t have a history. I had wandered out of the Sumter National Forest when I was somewhere near twelve years of age, traumatized, weak, skinny as a rail, totally unsocialized, and with complete amnesia. The newspaper that captured the story and sent it out on the newswires suggested that I was raised by wolves, an accusation that contributed more than almost anything else to the drubbings I took until I could hold my own. Well, except for the fact that I couldn’t speak a word of English. That had brought on a lot of pain and suffering too. I couldn’t even remember my own name.

All I had muttered was a Cherokee word that one of the park rangers who found me was able to interpret. Yellow Rock. So I became Jane Yellowrock Doe. Eventually they dropped the Doe and I acquired a birth certificate as Jane Yellowrock, birthday August 15, the day of the month when I had been found, and a presumed birth year that made me twelve. No records of me had ever been located, and no one had ever come forward to claim me.

The only memory I had was of a granite mountain cliff, a sunrise, and a white quartz boulder. It was as if I had been born with the vision of the mountain’s rock face as seen from above, standing on the crest and looking down on it, and also from far below it, looking up. The horseshoe-shaped granite had been pitted with perfectly round holes, some large enough to act as a cup holder, some sized as if for candles, all in long strands of eroded or carved holes, like tears across the stone of the mountain face, a confusing gray pattern in the rising sun.

On the Internet, it hadn’t been that hard to find a mountain fitting the horseshoe description. Horseshoe Rock was in Jackson County, North Carolina, in the Nantahala National Forest. Not all that far from where I had been found. If the pictures were right, there was a gigantic curving rock face on the eastern front of Wolf Mountain. And if that was really true, then so were my dreams, my possible past, and any hope of a family I might ever have.

The memory of the white quartz boulder was more shadowed, hidden. No mention of the boulder was anywhere on the Internet, which had totally sucked. But at least I had a starting point. A place in my broken and lost memory that matched with reality.

Once I discovered that Horseshoe Rock really existed, I had spent hours in the school library researching the history of the mountain, trying to see why I was drawn there. For whatever reason, I had dreamed of the rock face of the mountain my whole life, though as far as I recalled, I had never seen it in person.

In my visions, the image of the white quartz boulder threaded through with gold had been within sight of the mountain. I touched the gold nugget I wore beneath my clothes. Part of my past. The only thing I had from the “Before Times.”

But maybe I had family where I was headed. Who knows. Or maybe I had just been born with the pictures of it all imprinted on my mind. Whatever. But I was drawn there like a pile of metal filings to a magnet. I had harbored the need to go there forever, and now, the day I turned eighteen—according to my fictional birth certificate—I was finally on my way.

I had done my homework on MapQuest and TerraServer. I knew where I was going and how to get there. In the latched saddlebag compartments I had annotated Internet maps, a sleeping bag, enough food—mostly beef jerky—to last a few days, water, a rain-resistant backpack and slicker, and well-worn hiking boots. I was headed to my past.

I reached the Nantahala National Forest before dark and took State Road 281 through the hills, the coiling blacktop like the ridges of a dragon’s back, the bike roaring up and down and around, my excitement growing with each turn. The cooler air dried my sweat-soaked skin. Shadows lengthened and the air darkened. On a hairpin turn, I spotted a sign that read WOLF MOUNTAIN ROAD. It was a narrow, blacktopped side road that curled up and out of sight around a fold of the mountain. Satisfied, I headed back into more commercial areas and a cheap hotel that catered to motorcyclists.

Bedding down, I lay staring at the ceiling. The sheets were older than I was. The room probably hadn’t been painted in decades. But the place was surface clean, and for what I wanted to pay, that was probably okay. Still, the carpet smelled of mold, stronger than the reek of the fresheners the housekeeping crew used, and I couldn’t turn off my nose or my reflexes. When I finally slept, it was only poorly. I was hyperalert on some deep level, a sensation that seemed to prowl around inside me like a nervous, edgy cat, feeling the excitement still gathering, pulsing through me.

I was up at five, pretty much the only person awake except a waitress/cook at a Huddle House knockoff joint. I was so excited I could hardly think, and the breakfast of eggs and bacon I scarfed stuck about midway down and stayed there.

By dawn, the August heat was already in the high eighties, and I was tooling up 281. The sun, hidden by low clouds, threw diffuse shadows across the blacktop. Morning-cool air raced beneath my riding leathers as I turned onto Wolf Mountain Road, a winding asphalt tertiary street that morphed quickly into an unmarked narrow paved strip, and then to a two-rutted trail. The track was ground down and sloppy with mud from the last rains, scored with tire tracks from four-wheelers and off-road motorbikes. It wasn’t something my street bike was built for, but the Yamaha was in a good mood, agreeable to my spirit quest, as Bobby had called it, and I made okay time.

Wolf Mountain’s highest peak was more than four thousand feet above sea level, and the trail wound up and down at sharp inclines. I skidded and threw dirt and stone as I alternately gunned and braked my bike, balancing with my feet on my climb to the crest. I passed no one, saw no one. I was alone on the mountain. Totally alone. Climbing hard. Following my nose and some instinct I couldn’t name.

Once, when I took a break, I touched the necklace, the gold nugget that was the only thing I still had from the forgotten life before I was twelve. Holding the gold, its rounded shape a perfect match for my palm, I opened my mouth and sucked in the morning air, heavy with promised rain, pulling the scents in over the roof of my mouth, tasting, smelling, feeling in the way that worked so well for me. It was a method that had resulted in the other kids laughing at me until I learned to sniff with my nose only, like they did.

Taking off again, I breathed deeply as I roared along the track, through a low-lying cloud heavy with rain. Mist draped the landscape, hiding and revealing boulders, ferns, green-laden trees. The place smelled familiar. Felt familiar. My excitement grew. In the back of my mind a strange thought whispered, The world of the white man falls away.

I reached the crest of the mountain after lunch, sweating in the August heat and humidity even at such a high elevation, with the misty clouds burned away. I keyed off the bike and sat, listening to the hot metal pinging, my booted feet on the stony earth, breathing in the mist, letting it fill my lungs, my heart fluttering like a bird caught in a too-tight fist. Letting memory and reality merge.

The air was noticeably thinner, and the smells of hemlock, pine, fir, maple, and oak were stronger than the lingering smell of bike exhaust. Clouds were thickening in the east, and I knew there would be rain soon.

I stepped off the bike, locked it to a tree with a length of chain, hid my helmet in a pile of bracken, and grabbed up my supplies, sliding them into the backpack. And I walked off the two-track trail to the top of Horseshoe Rock. Standing in the lowering clouds, their mist snaking over the ridge and down into the valley below, I looked out over the world.

Horseshoe Rock was bigger than I had expected. Too big to see its scale in photographs. Bigger than the grandstand in a coliseum. Bigger than Horseshoe Falls in Canada. Bigger than anything I could ever remember seeing. Yet it was familiar. I had been here before. Several . . . no. Many times.

The sensation of a pelt rubbing against my flesh and bones grew.

Rippling, uncomfortable. My breath sped, my heart tripping.

I walked the rock, sure-footed, as a thin rain began to fall. Thunder rumbled overhead. The misty drizzle damped my clothes, sticking them to me. Wet seeped into my braid and trickled along my scalp, adding weight to the long plait. I raised my face to the rain. Unlike the other girls in the group home, I had never cared whether I got rain-wet, because I didn’t wear much makeup and my hair had never been styled. It was black and straight, hanging way past my hips, worn most often in a single braid; rainwater didn’t cause me the problems it did the more socially upscale, high-maintenance girls.

Now, wet and uncaring, I walked all along the upper ridge of the rock, seeing the surface shapes that had caused such arguments among archeologists.

The cliff was marked with ridges of hard rock, veins of whiter marble, harder than the surrounding gray granite, standing up just a bit higher, running across the curvature like multiple spines ridging the stone. And it was pitted. . . . The pits were all uniform in direction, falling from the top of the stone across the almost-flat side, perpendicular to the marble spines, and down, down, around the curve of the mountain, like tears of rain and pain. Every single pit was flat-bottomed, level, and nearly perfectly circular, though the sizes of each pit trail were different. Some tracks were small, starting the size of a Coke bottle bottom and falling away to holes no bigger than a quarter. Some began the size of a large can of . . . of ravioli, descending to the size of a can of cola. Always larger at the top and growing smaller as they trailed across and down the stone to disappear under the curve of the rock.

Moss grew so thickly in the shaded areas that it was like piled carpets in overlapping shades of green from nearly black to nearly white. A flash of lightning forked across the sky. I looked up, into the face of the brewing storm, violence all around me. Drops of rain pelted my face, cold, washing away my sweat. I shivered.

With a sudden roar, the drizzle increased to a true rain, beating the trees and leaves with a hollow patter, slamming against the bare stone, kicking up into the air again, and cascading back into rivulets, rushing down the bowed rock face, through the pathways of pitted depressions, across the ridged spines, down the mountain, splashing and gurgling, as if the earth drank down the rain.

I followed the downward movement with my eyes and then with my feet, to the far right, where scrub grew, dropping fast from Horseshoe Rock, away from the stable flatter stone to the deep earth and down, sliding and slipping below the curve of the broad cliff face into a narrow gorge. Loping with a gait that felt odd in the hiking boots, I splashed through runnels and rills and slipped through muddy depressions. Leaves tossed pooled rain at me; branches whipped me.

I opened my mouth, scenting, pulling in the world with a harsh sucking sound. My breath came fast, almost painfully, in gasps that resounded off the trees and filled my head with partial memories. I have been here. I have been here. Home . . .

The elevation fell away, quickly and furiously, trees and leaves and ferns flashing past as I followed the water down. A deer froze off to the side, and I slowed. Crouched. Stopped. Fixed her with a steady stare. Her scent flooded my mouth and body, and I started to salivate, staring at her. I panted, studying the doe. I don’t know what she saw in my gaze, but she whirled and bounded over a fallen tree, moving fast, uphill. My muscles tensed, bunching tight, as if to follow. I held myself still, hands gripping the boles of saplings to either side.

Meat! the voice said.

“No,” I whispered.

The presence within me, the voice that spoke to me, the . . . the weirdness that set me so much apart from the other girls, hissed, frustrated. And growled, stirring as if alive. With long practice, I shoved the voice down and moved on, away from the fresh meat. Deeper into the trees, the light dimming into colorless false dusk. Holding on to trees to keep my balance, catching myself when gravity took over and the earth fell away.

Artificial evening took over from the afternoon as the sides of a tight crevice closed in, and the rain became drenching, wetting through to my skin, down into my waterproof boots and the collar of my denim jacket. Shadows dappled and moved as if alive. Rain coursed down the mountain.

Nothing looked the same. Everything looked the same. I have been here. I have been here. Home . . .

•   •   •

The trees, which had once been huge and old—older than the ravens and the owls, old as the sky and the earth itself—had been raped by the white man, cut and butchered and carted away on trains, leaving bare earth and eroded soil. Now they had been replaced by saplings. I remembered both—the old, massive trees and the barren earth. I remembered the time of hunger. I remembered young trees, when the world tried to regrow . . . the world before and the world after. And a world of fire, when flames consumed everything and the few remaining animals raced in panic. For a moment I saw fire, red and scorching, the mountainside black with suffocating smoke. And the flood that followed, wiping out what little was left.

I had studied the history of the place. I was remembering the early nineteen hundreds, when white men stripped the entire Appalachian Mountains bare of trees. Matching my memories, there had been a fire . . . here. A time long before I was born. Surely it had been long before I was born. Yet I remembered.

I leaped over a rill of water and vaulted over a fallen tree, my palm abrading on the wet, rough bark. Now the trees were somewhere in between in size, no longer saplings but not yet old, not yet wise. Less than a hundred years in age. So much smaller than my earliest memories. And still I plunged down, into the ravine with the water and the rain. Searching.

Something white caught my eye. I stopped. Frozen. Still. Where had I seen it? What?

Rain rolled down my face to hang on my nose and jaws, to drip from the end of my braid. I was at the bottom. Too far right. I moved left, slightly uphill, my feet squishing with the wet that rolled down my ankles into my boots.

I saw the glimmer of white quartz beneath a matting of soil and decades of leaves. I raced to it, knelt, and brushed away the detritus that hid it. And saw the faint line of gold trailing through the quartz. I touched my necklace. The same gold. The same exact gold: from this place, from this rock.

I sobbed hard, a concussive explosion of trapped agony. It was real. All this time. The memories, the dreams. All real.

Unbalanced, I slid downhill, my feet unsteady on the steeply pitched hillside. Caught myself on trailing branches and an oak trunk. Trying to think. How had white man not seen dalonige’i? The yellow rock. The gold he lusted after. How had it remained hidden?

Slightly above me, the ground around the boulder gave way, carrying with it pebbles and dirt and a few fist-sized rocks. Erosion had hidden the boulder. Floods had uncovered it, hidden it, and uncovered it again. And though the trees had been raped from the earth by the white man, though they had trampled all over the chasm, they had missed it. The boulder was still here.

My feet, precariously perched in the mud, slid out from me, and I sat down hard, landing with a splat in a runnel of water. A roar of white water sounded nearby, running off Horseshoe Rock above, the runoff grown to a river in the rain. Leaves bowed down, and droplets still drummed, and creeks appeared that had been empty only moments ago. Long minutes passed. I leaned a shoulder against the white quartz stone. Lifted a hand to rest against it, my fingers splayed on the cool stone. It’s real. . . .

Rain raced over me, dribbled through my fingers onto the quartz. I’d found it. I had found the place of my dream. The only thing I had of my past. The one thing that the voice that possessed me and I agreed upon. This rock.

What had happened here? How long ago?

A shiver caught me up. I was so cold. My fingers were blue gray against the white quartz. I stood and moved uphill to a slightly more level place and stripped, tossing my wet clothes across a branch, careless even with the jacket and boots. I opened my knapsack and pulled out my sleeping bag, glad that the pierced and tattooed greenie who sold it to me had insisted that I buy the best rainproof brand. I dried off as well as I was able and climbed inside the bag, zipped it closed, and tied off the hood that protected my face. A mini-tent.

Encased, I curled into the fetal position and stared at the rock, unable to take my eyes off of it. My shivering eventually eased. The day died. As long as there was light, I stared at the white quartz boulder. With the thin vein of gold running up its side.

Dreams began the moment darkness fell, the night wet and chilly and utterly black. I was so deep in the chasm that there was no sky, no moon, no stars, not even clouds to spit out the rain. Yet rain still fell. My body vibrated, shuddering with tremors that I felt in every muscle, every nerve fiber, every cell. My flesh sparked and tingled, itching and painful, like a bad sunburn.

In my dream I untied the sleeping bag and looked down inside. At my body. If clouds were made of light instead of water vapor, they would look like this, like me, all sparkly silver, thrust through with motes of blackness that danced and whirled. The vaguely human-shaped mist coalesced, thickened, and eddied around me. Was me.

In my dream I stared as night rain beat down on the sleeping bag. I saw the snake in my body, deep in my cells, thousands of snakes, millions, each a double helix of snakes, twisted and writhing. And I saw the other snake, in my memory. The snake of the voice. The snake of the presence.

And I . . . shifted. Changed.

The grayness enveloped me. My body bent and flowed like water—or like hot wax, a viscous, glutinous liquid, full of gray light and gray shadows and black motes of power. The bones beneath my flesh popped and cracked. Pain arced through me like lightning. I heard my grunting scream, muted for lack of breath. The agony was a blade, slicing me bone from bone, nerve from nerve, fiber from fiber. Agony that went on and on. Whirling like a tornado of torture.

My breathing changed.

The light that was my body grew brighter, the dark motes within me darker.

Both began to dissipate. I slept.

Day came slowly, rain dropping with sharp splats onto the wet ground. Night bird sounds gave way to morning birds.

Hard to catch. Not enough to eat. My stomach rumbled, low growl of the hunter.

I crawled from bag, leaving behind earrings and gold necklace on wet cloth. I stepped from the sleeping bag, unsteady on four feet. Paws. With claws. I flexed my claws out, happy to see them clean and bright, slightly yellow in pale dawn. It had been long. Many years. Many moons. She was in control too long this time.

I—Beast—stepped down the slope to water, to a pool gathered in a shallow basin below the white boulder. The rock that tied us together as one. She did not remember why. But I—Beast—did. I am good hunter. I forget nothing.

I lapped at pool and then, hungry, snatched at human bag of human food. Bloodless, dead meat. But here. With strong claws, tore into bag and into other bags, scattering smoked meat across ground. Wolfed it down. Salty. Cold. Satisfied for now. Sat, grooming, above the water pool. In its reflection saw a mountain lion sitting, eyes golden, with human-shaped pupils. Puma concolor. Mountain lion. Big-cat.

Heard scurrying in leaves. I froze. Slow steps sounded from downhill. Dainty. From upwind. Four legs. Tiny hooves. Smelled deer.

Leisurely sniff. Hunger rumbled. Prey. Slow hunch. I curved into earth. Wary, cautious placement of paw, paw, paw, silent into lee of white rock. Deer came down for water. Paused, head up, eyes going wide. Tensed.

I launched. Up. Claws out. Lips pulled back. Killing fangs exposed.

Deer leaped.

In midair, I twisted, a sinuous move, claws out. Sinking deep. Blood flooding like life. Struggle of prey, legs flailing. With a single wrench, snapped neck. Doe quivered. Dying. Flesh in jaws was strong with muscle, wet with blood. Taste flooded my mouth.

I held. Unmoving. Feeling, hearing, tasting, smelling. Long moments later, her heart stopped, I dropped her, licking mouth and bloody paws and claws. Looking around for any who would steal.

Theft happened here once. Theft of prey and theft of life. Now this was a good place. Alone. With blood food. I screamed. Claiming this place. My territory. Mine! Satisfied, I settled to the throat of the deer and ripped into warm meat.