CHAPTER FOURTEEN CHAPTER FOURTEENIt was still dark when the alarm clock shook Joey awake, and the room was very cold; he got shivering into his clothes with the help of his flashlight, went into the kitchen and lit the lamp, and ate a few slices of bread and butter. There was a basket of persimmons on the table, and he ate several of them. They had found the basket at the back door when they got back to the house the previous evening; all of the persimmons had been carefully selected and were perfect, and the basket was a homemade one beautifully plaited out of twigs. It had apparently been left by Sharbee, as an acknowledgment of his Christmas present.
After a moment of indecision Joey decided to take the shotgun and went out the back door. It was still dark, and there had been a light dusting of snow during the night. It would help him, for if it hadn’t fallen the only procedure open to him would have been to sit somewhere along the shore in the hope that the otter would eventually pass by. Now he could make a circuit of the Pond to see whether he could find its tracks, which might give him an idea of its movements and the places that it liked to land. If it had been moving about after the snow fell he might find something. He went down the hill and started at the dock.
The evening before, after dinner he had talked with Mr. Ben about the habits of otters, and he knew now that his chances of even seeing it again were very remote. Mr. Ben had told him that it probably had a den somewhere along the shore or on the edge of the swamp with an underwater entrance, that it probably didn’t stay around the Pond all the time but periodically made a circle of possibly twenty miles around the little ponds and streams in the vicinity, and that he wasn’t at all sure that it ever came ashore twice at the same place. If it caught a fish, the old man had said, it would come ashore to eat it, and there might be a few bones or some dung with fish scales or crawfish shells and claws in it, but who knew whether it would visit that spot again? When he set traps for an otter he set them in these places, but he only caught an otter about once in five years or so. It was easier to find a small needle in a large haystack, said Mr. Ben, than such an animal.
On top of this, Joey had no assurance whatever that his enemy was still about; it might have started on its swing around the country right after the fight, in which case it wouldn’t be back until after he had gone home. If the weather grew a little colder and the Pond froze, it would also go away to work the streams that stayed open. Thus briefed, Joey was well aware of what he was up against, but he was not discouraged. Just as he was convinced of the rightness of his crusade, he was convinced that it would be successful. He moved along the shoreline slowly and carefully, foot by foot, often pausing for long periods to sit quietly and watch. It was nearly noon by the time he reached the head of the Pond and the beginning of the swamp, and the overcast that had covered the sky looked as though it might break up and let the sun through to melt the snow. If this happened it would leave him with over half the shoreline unsurveyed for tracks, and he realized he had better put off his still-hunting pauses until some other day.
He picked up his pace and started on his circuit around the borders of the swamp, and here his difficulties began to multiply. Many small streams ran out of the swamp and meandered all about and he thought he should follow most of them for a way; trees were insecurely rooted in the wet ground and every storm had uprooted some of them. The area was a tangled nightmare of windfall timber; he had to crawl through or over it or make wide detours, and the swamp covered a much greater area than he had expected. He found tracks of foxes and minks, possums, squirrels, rabbits, and raccoons, but nothing that looked like the otter’s. The short winter day began to draw toward an end, earlier than usual because the overcast still covered the sky, and he had to turn back with most of the swamp’s edge unexplored.
It was dark when he got back to the house, and he was tired to his bones. There was a stew keeping warm on the stove, and as he came into the kitchen Mr. Ben was just coming from the living room pulling on his coat.
“I was just going out to see where you were,” he said. “It’s pretty cold to sleep in the woods without any supper. You’d better let me know about where you’re going to be after this.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said. He pulled a chair close to the stove and sat down wearily to take off his hunting shoes. After he got them off he sat for a moment wiggling his toes and soaking up the stove’s warmth; the smell of the stew made him realize how hungry he was. “Yes, sir.”
The old man stood looking at him for a moment with his forehead creased, lantern-jawed, stooped a little, with the lamplight laying a silvery sheen over his one day’s growth of gray stubble. “You didn’t have any lunch either, and I doubt much breakfast. You’re going out again tomorrow?”
“Yes, sir, I reckon I will.”
Mr. Ben took his coat off, hung it over the other chair, and began to dish up the stew. “No more of that,” he said, coming closer to an order than he ever had before. “If you’re going on with this caper you’ll take time to boil a couple of eggs for breakfast, and we’ll pack a couple of sandwiches before we go to bed. Let’s eat, now.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said. He got up stiffly and followed Mr. Ben into the living room. The first mouthful of stew was the best thing he had ever tasted in his life, and as he sat there chewing it he looked at Mr. Ben and realized that the old man had been worried about him. It brought him back momentarily from the concentration that had been enclosing him; he was rather abashed that he had not given a thought to the old man, who had always been thoughtful of him. “I’m sorry, Mr. Ben,” he said. “I’ll write down where I’m going and leave it on the table every day.”
“A lot of things can happen to anybody alone in the woods,” Mr. Ben said. “What would your father and mother think of me if you were to get into trouble out there and I didn’t know where you were?” Joey didn’t say anything; he wasn’t at all sure that his father—and certainly not his mother—would let him do what he was doing. “A lot of people would think I ought to be locked up for letting you do this at all,” Mr. Ben went on, echoing Joey’s own thought, “but people and even boys have to settle things for themselves, and you’ve had one experience with the fool-killer. You’d best think of it once in a while. And if you get into trouble shoot three times. I’ll listen particularly just as it’s getting dark.”
“Yes, sir,” Joey said humbly. “I will.” He smiled at the old man and began to eat again. He finished his stew, and as he sat there, with the good warm food inside him and the grateful heat of the stove on his back, he began to nod. Fragmentary recollections of the woods powdered with snow, the windfalls he had crawled through, and the sustaining excitement of expecting to see the otter at any moment drifted through his mind as he fell asleep. Mr. Ben got him to his feet, steered him into the bedroom, covered him up, and wound the clock without waking him.
The overcast had held through the night and the temperature hadn’t changed; the snow was still there the next morning, and Joey went up the other side of the Pond. The usual tracks were about, a delicate and fascinating record of the comings and goings of many creatures, but the otter’s wasn’t among them. As Joey rounded the last point before the cut-over section, however, he saw well ahead of him, near the water, a dark shape against the snow. It was too far away to identify and the morning was too gray to give it color, but it seemed to be crouched and eating something; being so close to the water Joey thought that it must be eating a fish. Excitement took hold of him and he wondered how he could get near it. His best chance seemed to be to angle back into the cut-over and stalk it, so he took that course after picking out a high tree on the other side of the Pond to give himself a mark of location.
He moved as fast as he could with quietness, but the cut-over was a tangle of blackberry vines and brush and old tree-tops that were dry and crackly. He was afraid that the animal would finish its meal and vanish before he got in sight of it; the stalk seemed to last forever and he hurried it, and either his impatience or the light breeze (which he had forgotten in his preoccupation) betrayed him. When he came over the last little rise and could see the place, the object of his stalk was gone. He was bitterly disappointed, and when he reached the spot he found the rather doglike but narrower tracks of a fox leading away from it. The creature had been a fox after all, but it had been eating the remains of a fish; there were a few bones and a tail still there. Fox tracks were all about and practically covered the area, but when he got down on one knee and searched about among them he found one different pawmark; five-toed, almost round, and a little over three inches across. It could have been made by nothing but the otter.
The otter had been there, then; it had brought the fish ashore, left some of it, and the fox had found it. That Joey hadn’t frightened off the otter itself lessened his disappointment, and the fact that it was still there and hadn’t left the Pond as yet was most encouraging to him. He continued to search about among the tracks and finally found, sandwiched between two of the fox’s, another that looked like the otter’s but was smaller. This was a puzzling thing, but finally the answer came to him; there must be a young otter there too.
“Great day!” he said to himself. “A little one!”
This would make it better, he thought; it would be easier to find two than one. The little one wouldn’t be as wary, and if he could only get it … A number of wild schemes began to run through his mind, most of them too impractical to be considered for very long, but one remained. If he could only get the little one and hang it up near the water somewhere, it would attract the other, and he could watch the place until the other came.
This plan was the measure of his delusion; that it was ruthless and cruel didn’t occur to him. He stood up, feeling now that he had a more potent weapon, and continued on his way. He found no more otter tracks along the shore, and came to the swamp again. This side of it was like the other, full of blow-downs and detours, and buoyed up by the new plan he grew careless; he hurried too much and finally, in climbing over one very bad tangle of fallen trees, slipped on a snowy branch and fell through the confusion of trunks and branches. It was a bad fall and half stunned him. When his ringing head began to clear he tried to stand up; hot pain shot through his left ankle and he found that it wouldn’t support him.
He lay still for a time while the pain diminished, and fear built up in him. There was a flutter of wings over his head, and he looked up to see a big red-tailed hawk on a branch above him. The snow it had disturbed in landing drifted down around him; it gripped the branch with sharp talons, and its cold, impersonal eyes assayed him as possible prey. At his movement it jumped from the branch and flapped off, but for a little time its hungry eyes still seemed to be boring into him. He shivered. If he had broken his ankle and couldn’t walk he was in a bad situation; although he had left a note for Mr. Ben, it merely said that he was going up the south side of the Pond and around the swamp, and that was pretty indefinite. There was a great deal of country they would have to look for him in, and it was difficult country. Mr. Ben would have to get other people, and that would take time; he wouldn’t start to do anything until dark or later, and he, Joey, would be alone and cold and uncertain.
He was afraid, but as he thought of these things his first blind fear began to diminish. He wasn’t in unoccupied country and out of reach; sooner or later they’d find him. His tracks were in the snow, if it held; he could crawl; he could shoot his gun to help them locate him; he would be making a great nuisance of himself. These things were bad, but if he had to give up the search it would be worse. Tears of frustration and anger at his own carelessness came into his eyes, and, grasping two of the branches above his head, he pulled himself up. The ankle hurt, but not as badly, and after putting weight on it gradually and moving it a few times he found that it would work. It wasn’t broken after all, and after he crawled out of the blow-down and hobbled carefully about for a time it stopped troubling him.
His relief was great and he went with more care; he realized that a much worse thing could have happened to him. Late in the afternoon he came to a large creek flowing into the swamp, and judged that it was the main one. When the otters left the Pond for their periodic swing around the country, he thought, this would probably be the creek they would use; if he hid somewhere along it, if he could stay there long enough, he would probably see them sooner or later. He wanted to explore it further, but although the overcast was breaking up and daylight would last longer than it had yesterday, the afternoon was waning and there wouldn’t be time. He estimated that he was more than halfway around the swamp so he continued on to be sure that there wasn’t a larger creek between this one and the place where he had turned back yesterday, and so went on to the house down the northern shore.
It was after dark again when he got back. Mr. Ben had left the kitchen door open despite the chill to be more sure that he would hear the gun if Joey had to shoot it. He closed it when Joey came in, put more wood on the fire, and got his back to it. “Any luck?” he asked.
“No, sir,” Joey said wearily. “Not yet.” He went on to his bedroom to change his boots and leave his gunning coat. As he sat pulling his boots off he thought of telling Mr. Ben about his plan for the little otter and his plan about the creek, and decided not to. At any other time he would have done it, but this time he would not. He had grown closed away and secretive, and proud of his plans—which, indeed, were very logical and mature for his age, and not like him. Nothing that he was doing now was like him.
The next morning he left early and went up the southern shore to see if the otters had landed again at the place where he had found the fish. They hadn’t, and he went on to explore the creek. It had cleared in the night and warmed up enough to take most of the snow away, and after the sun got up it melted what was left. The snow had lasted long enough to show him that the otters were still about, or had been two days ago; it had fallen at a propitious time for him, and seemed to indicate that luck was with him. Buoyed up by this, he went at his exploration of the creek with enthusiasm and finally came to a place where there was a waterfall. It was only four feet high, for there was little surface rock in that country, but it was high and vertical enough to cause the otters to come ashore to get around it; one bank was precipitous, too steep for them to climb, and the other was gently sloping. This was where they would come out when they passed, and he decided that this was the place to wait and waylay them.
There was a pine thicket to hide in within gunshot, and he set about clearing a field of fire in front of it and making himself a comfortable place to sit; when all this was done he sat down and composed himself to wait.
He got up even earlier the next morning to be at the place at first light, and stayed there until the edge of darkness. No otter came past that day, or the next, or the day after. He began to wonder whether he had been wrong in his plan, but he stayed; he had an odd conviction that sooner or later he would see them. As the days followed one another, as he sat immobile in his hiding place or moved from the house to the place and back to the house again in the half-light when most of the wild creatures were returning to their dens or emerging from them, he saw more of their lives than he would have seen in a year of hunting. They weren’t game in his mind now; he didn’t think of shooting at them for fear of frightening or alerting the otters, and began to see them differently. Before, they had been targets, somewhat like animated but wary mechanical figures clothed in fur or feathers, to be outwitted, knocked over, and put into his game pocket; now they slowly turned into personalities with mannerisms and idiosyncrasies all their own.
He first noticed this in a solitary old raccoon which lived in a hollow in a big beech not far from his hiding place. It was a very large raccoon, and the first time he saw it it came ambling up the creek from its nocturnal wanderings early in the morning, pausing occasionally to turn over a stone in the creek bed. When it did this its paws, so much like little hands, seemed to have a life of their own; they felt all about while the old raccoon sat hunched, apparently not interested in them, and looked all about. As it came nearer it climbed out of the creek bed, walked a few steps, and turned back to the creek bed again. There was a light-colored stone near the falls; it went straight to that, felt all about beneath it, and left the creek bed again. When it came opposite Joey it stopped, turned its black highwayman’s mask toward him, and froze. Although Joey hadn’t moved and there was no wind, something told the old raccoon that an alien presence was there. It sat for a time, apparently weighing the mysterious intuition; several times it tensed as though to dash off, and relaxed again; finally it turned without haste, moved to the beech, climbed it, and disappeared into the hollow. Thereafter, when Joey was there, it paid little attention to the pine thicket. Oddly enough, it never investigated the thicket further but always avoided it; but no matter how it approached the beech it always made a detour to feel under the light-colored stone. During the day it occasionally came out of its hollow and sprawled over a limb to take a sunbath; it was company for a few of the long hours and fun to watch.
Several other raccoons wandered through the territory, but they all went through an elaborate series of maneuvers to investigate him; several deer passed, delicately moving and pretty, but only one of them was aware of him. That one startled him half out of his skin by approaching unheard and snorting loudly when it finally identified him. None of these animals stampeded off in fright after they had placed him but quietly withdrew; in some unfathomable way they seemed to know that he wasn’t dangerous.
Others never knew he was there: a mink, dark and quick and lethal-looking as it worked the creek; two flying squirrels living near him that he often watched in the gloaming swooping down swift and shadowy between the darkening trees; a terrified rabbit and the bounding, sinuous weasel that pursued it; several hunting owls that went over him like ghosts in the dusk. A possum almost walked across his legs one day and rolled over, grinning, to play dead when he moved. After a while it cautiously came back to life and died again when it saw he was still there; it went through this amusing performance several more times before it decided that he was harmless and went off, looking distrustfully back over its shoulder.
There were long periods when the woods were silent and empty. Between these empty and silent hours, however, he saw more than most people because he had more patience and more time, and in these hours he thought about the livelier ones.
The play of life about him, the clean and simple reasons for the actions of the creatures that he watched, their acuity and their moments of stress or calm or playfulness, brought him closer to them as time went on. He wondered about the enigmatic sixth sense that seemed to make them less assiduous in avoiding him than they had been before and made a start toward understanding it; unconsciously he was moving into a sympathy and concord with the animals around him, but he had a way to go yet. His feeling about the otters disturbed it, and if this feeling began to soften, he would remember the fight or Mr. Ben would mention that Charley had come looking for him and he would hate them again.
He sat on, through several storms, through sunny days and cold, gray ones; more than half of his long Christmas vacation went by. Mr. Ben worried but didn’t interfere; perhaps the old man saw something waiting to emerge but not very apparent yet from a few things that Joey said about the animals that he watched. It was a strange time, detached and set aside from the usual tenor of his life, and sometimes he realized this himself and in a remote way wondered about it. Sometimes it was like being in a dream, like someone else watching a boy named Joey who was doing a queer thing; sometimes he felt that something more substantially based than himself was watching and waiting for the time when it could approach and free him from the dream.
He sat on, half hypnotized in the silent and brooding woods, having rationalized his affair to himself as older and supposedly wiser heads before him had rationalized their pogroms, wars, and Inquisitions.
There came a morning when he awoke a little before the clock, with a feeling different from other mornings, a premonition that this would be the day. When he switched on the flashlight he could see his breath and shivered as he dressed, but the shivering was physical and not from anticipation; inwardly he was quite calm. He went into the kitchen, and when he lit the lamp everything looked cold and flat and otherworldly despite the shadows and the soft light; the kitchen looked different too, and somehow increased the surety that was in him. It was as though some apperception, coming from the restlessness within the dark den under a bank, coming across the leaden water, had reached him and told him that the otters would move out. He had to hurry, for he had a long way to go; he left without eating breakfast or taking the sandwiches that had been made the night before and put in a bag on the table.
When he reached the head of the Pond there were streaks of dusty crimson in the sky, glowing and diffuse; the woods were emerging from the night. They had brightened when he came to the boundary of the pine thicket, and then he heard the first spitting snarl. It dropped to the long, menacing moan with which fighting cats had awakened him in the night at home, and suddenly rose to a screech that made his hair stand up. The sounds came from near the waterfall; he half raised his gun and began to run through the pines. The thick carpet of fallen pine needles deadened his footsteps, and through an interlaced screen of branches he saw a shape bound forward and back again; the snarling went on.
He stopped at the thicket’s edge and had the otters before him, the big one and the pup half grown, and the long-legged snarling bobcat. The pup was confused and frightened; it made several false starts and retreated, and the big one, whose back was claw-raked and bleeding, leaped to head it off and drive it around the waterfall and into the water and then turned back to the bobcat again. The bobcat moved with extraordinary quickness and seemed to be everywhere at once; its paw strokes were so fast they blurred on the eye, but the big otter, despite the disadvantage that its short legs imposed, always seemed to be between the pup and the cat that wanted it. The old otter caught the cat at the end of a bound, took the punishment, and dealt his own; the cat didn’t like it, broke away, and stood several yards off with its face contorted with fury.
The violent action had held Joey spellbound; the sudden quiet freed him. He had always hated cats, those eldritch disturbers of the night, and to see the otter drive it off suddenly filled him with such admiration that he almost shouted encouragement. The otter stood for a moment, black and bloody; then, obviously ready to carry on the fight, it took several steps forward. The bobcat moved back two steps, snarling. Joey didn’t think; he swung the shotgun up and fired at the cat.
The cat fell over backwards; the otter turned its broad whiskered muzzle toward Joey, looked at him without fear, and then turned again and drove the pup before it around the fall and into the creek.
Joey stared for a moment at the place where they had been, and then at the dead bobcat lying a few yards away. He took a deep breath and expelled it in a sigh, like someone waking from a long and troubling dream. He lowered the gun and looked around, and it was only then that he saw Sharbee standing near him. Sharbee had come through the pine thicket too, and one sweeping branch half concealed him; he stood with his old gun under one arm, his pale amber eyes fixed broodingly upon Joey, and suddenly he smiled.
“I was powerful afraid you was about to kill him,” he said, “and the little one, too. After all that long time waitin’.”
“I reckon I almost did,” Joey said. His mind ran back, over the fight and the search in the snow, the hours he had waited in the thicket; all of it seemed very long ago and almost as though it had happened to someone else. “I reckon I almost did,” he said again, and suddenly felt light and free. Then he remembered the feeling that had come upon him sometimes, that someone was watching him. “Did you know?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” Sharbee said in his soft voice. “I watched you, like I did before. I had to be sure,” he said and nodded.
“It was the fight,” Joey said, feeling that he had to explain himself, “when he tried to kill Charley.”
“Yes, sir,” Sharbee said. “It the little one. He have to watch out for that. One time they go away, and when they come back the she one gone. I reckon somebody catch she.” His voice changed a little. “They is the best. They happy and pretty; they right peaceable does everything leave them be.” He smiled again, more to himself than for Joey, and the boy could see that he knew their lives and loved them.
“I reckon I made you worry,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Sharbee.”
“It all worked out,” Sharbee said, “like you was meant to help them. I thank you, again, and for the Chris’mas gif. You a real good boy, Mr. Joey. Come spring I get a little coon. You come see me in June. I have him then.” He smiled again, raised his free hand, and stepped back; Joey could see him moving through the shadows of the pine thicket, and then he was gone.
Joey walked over, picked up the bobcat by its hind feet, slung it over his shoulder, and started for the house.
Charley was lying in the yard, looking rather forlorn. When he saw Joey he stood up and trotted to meet him, wagging his tail in welcome. He thrust his nose into Joey’s hand and then he smelled the cat; his hackles rose, and he circled the boy to investigate, saw that the cat was dead, and then trotted along beside Joey looking as pleased as though he had killed the beast himself. Mr. Ben came out the back door carrying a basin of water to throw out. When he saw Joey he put the basin down.
“Hi, Mr. Ben,” Joey said, and moved his arm to get the cat off his shoulder and hold it up. “Look.”
He walked to the steps, dropped the cat to the ground, and sat down. Mr. Ben came down the steps and sat down beside him, looking at the cat. They both stared at it for a moment, then Joey turned toward Mr. Ben.
“There was a little one,” he said, “and the bobcat tried to get it, and the big one fought it. He was wonderful. You should have seen him, Mr. Ben.”
“And you shot the bobcat.”
“Yes, sir. Somebody had caught the mother and the big one, the father, he’s raising the little one. He sure is a fighter, Mr. Ben. I reckon Charley tried to get the little one too, but I didn’t know that then.”
Mr. Ben didn’t ask him how he knew all this. “You’ve got it settled, then,” he said.
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” Mr. Ben said, and a smile began on his face. “I’m glad that’s over. It’s been lonely without you.”
“I reckon it has. I felt sort of funny too, but I just had to do it. I’m glad I did, Mr. Ben.”
“So am I,” the old man said. “I wondered sometimes, but I thought you’d better do it your own way. I’ll skin that cat and you can have a rug made out of it.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ben. I reckon I better feed Charley now.”
“I fed him,” the old man said. “I doubt if he can hold any more.”
They smiled at each other and sat staring in companionable silence at the bobcat; soon Joey’s head began to nod. He was suddenly so sleepy that he couldn’t hold his eyes open; an overwhelming desire to sleep, to forget the emotions that had caught and driven him, the long, long hours and the catharsis at the end, washed over him like a strong and rising tide. He staggered up and began to climb the steps; halfway up he paused. “Charley,” he mumbled. “Charley.” The dog heard him; it got up and came after him and followed him into the house. It hadn’t been in a house for a very long time and was wary, but it stayed beside him, and when he dropped into the bed, already asleep, it lay down beside the bed with a sigh.