Night Wings (2 page)

A
s soon as we get back, Grampa Peter and I shut the windows of the trailer, latch the door of the shed, cover up the young tomato plants, make sure the plastic over the woodpile is secure, and retie the tarps over our four-wheelers. It’s a good thing we’re moving fast. The wind hits the trailer just as I shut the last window.

Whap.
It’s as if a giant has swatted an immense hand against us. The thirty-foot trailer shudders like a nervous horse. Then the rain and hail hit hard against the aluminum roof and walls, creating a deafening roar.

I always like storms like this, but I like them even more when I’m outside. I’ve been coming to Grampa’s trailer in New Hampshire for
years and I’ve gotten to know all the best sheltering places on Mount Washington and Mount Jefferson, the mountains that rise above it. It’s really amazing to be under a rock ledge or in the mouth of a cave in the heart of a storm.

Of course not everyone feels that way. To some it is just plain terrifying. Mount Washington, the tallest peak in the Northeast, is one of the most dangerous mountains in the world. Wind lives up there. That wind was once clocked at 233 miles per hour, the highest surface wind ever recorded. And Mount Washington is also often the coldest place in the lower forty-eight states. At its worst, figuring in wind chill, it can be just as cold on the summit as the deadliest winters in Antarctica. Every season hikers get lost up there; some die. Even the eight-mile-long road that winds 6,288 feet up the east side to the summit can be deadly. Cars get blown off of it in late summer, and it is closed to tourists in the winter.

You have to respect the mountain. It’s not just a pile of rocks. It’s alive, and there are times when it can really hurt you. The name Mount Washington makes it seem friendly, as familiar as the first president of the United States. People think of the mountain as being tamed. After all,
there’s an observatory on the top, ski runs on its slopes, and an old cog railway running along one side. There even used to be a hotel up there.

But my family remembers what our old people called it: Agiocochook. Some have translated that as “Home of the Great Spirit,” and others have said it means the place where the storm wind blows. But neither is exactly right. The true meaning, “Where the Wind Spirit Is Alive,” is far more ominous.

No one knows more about this part of our land than Grampa Peter. Sure, a geologist can speak about the formation of these mountains and valleys, a meteorologist can explain why the climate at the summit is so forbidding, and perhaps a historian could do a more scholarly job of talking about the European history of this place they now call New Hampshire that is still part of Ndakinna—Our Land—to us. But they don’t know it from the heart and spirit the way he does.

What my Grampa knows is both as old as the wind and as present as the breath in our lungs. He knows how to talk to the mountains and has not forgotten how to listen to them. One big reason that he was such a popular wilderness guide before he retired was that no one
ever got lost or hurt when he took them into the peaks. Hiking, rock climbing, cross-country skiing, canoeing. He did it all. He worked with scout groups and grown-ups and, believe it or not, he was a great storyteller.

“Scouts wear you out,” he said once. Then he chuckled because he knew that I knew he was just joking. He really liked those kids, and they worshipped him. They thought he knew everything about the mountains. They weren’t wrong.

I turn now to look out the window and I can no longer see anything other than a solid wash of water streaming down the glass. Behind me, Grampa Peter is getting the casserole ready to put into the oven. He’s a good cook—as long as a meal involves bacon and anything that comes in a can. Baked beans are his specialty.

Good thing I like beans. I’ll be eating them a lot until I learn to cook some of the recipes that Mom has left with me, all printed out neatly in green ink on color-coded five-by-seven-inch cards. Red cards are main dishes, yellow cards are sides, and white cards are desserts. Mom is nothing if not organized.

I pull out a white card at random. Tapioca. I open the left-hand cupboard, which has the foods arranged alphabetically starting with the
bottles of applesauce way up top, and pull out a tapioca box from the lowest shelf.

I look at the picture on the box of the dessert, a yellowish-white mound, almost like the snow-covered peak of Agiocochook. A shiver runs down my spine. I close my eyes, and it’s there. The dream I had last night is still with me.

I put down the dessert box and walk over to open the door. The storm has blown through as fast as it came, and a single hailstone, as big as the end of my thumb, is caught in the recessed aluminum strip across the outside screen door. I reach my hand around and grab it, holding it up to my forehead and then putting it into my mouth, letting it melt on my tongue.

It makes me feel calmer, this icy gift from the highest clouds where the Thunder Beings walk. It cools my insides. But my dream from last night haunts me. I am still running, still trying to hide from something I cannot see. I know that it sees me with eyes that can pierce the darkness. I know that it hungers to take my life.

I
slump down in the old recliner in the living room of the trailer, remembering something my father once told me: “If a dream is troubling you, find a quiet place to sit down, close your eyes, and run through it in your mind.”

Sometimes it doesn’t work, but when I close my eyes now, it’s as if I am right back in the dream. I can’t see the monster, but I can sense it. It’s above me, swooping down on wide, leathery wings, its arms spread out to grab me with talons glistening in the light from the full moon.

I open my eyes and it’s gone. I take a deep breath.

In my family, we believe that dreams can be more than just your subconscious acting out its
insecurities. Sometimes they are warnings. And when it is something as clear as the winged creature in my dream, it’s a warning you need to take seriously.

I stand up and go to the window. I can see the peak of Mount Washington in the distance. Few of our people ever climbed it before the Europeans came here to our land. The first white man to make his way to the top did so more than 350 years ago, in 1642. He was a Puritan named Darby Field. One story is that he thought he would find riches up there. But all he found was a bare, rocky peak, and he came down in disappointment. Our old people said he was lucky to come down at all.

Some people wonder why Field thought there was something precious hidden on top of the mountain. I don’t. Because even though all that greedy man found was the wind and the stones, our old stories tell of something more that remains up there to this day.

Pmola.

And Pmola’s treasure.

My mom first told me about Pmola’s treasure when I was in fourth grade. The teacher had sent each of us home with an assignment to collect a story from someone in our family.

Mom and Dad had looked at each other, one of those looks that told me they were both thinking the exact same thing. Then Mom had nodded her head. “Tell Paul the story about Pmola’s ring,” she said to Dad. “It belongs to you Fortunes.”

So Dad did.

Long ago, an Abenaki hunter was following the trail of a wounded deer high up the slopes of Wanbi Wadzoak, the big white mountains. When he looked back across the valley, he saw that a storm was blowing in and he quickly crawled into a narrow cave in the mountainside. The storm lasted a long time, and the hunter fell asleep. Night had fallen by the time he woke up. When he looked outside, the moon’s reflection was glistening on the face of a pond known as Small Lake of the Clouds.

The hunter had gone past Small Lake of the Clouds when he took shelter. Now, after having slept, he felt thirsty and thought of going out to drink from that pond. But an uneasy feeling held him back. He realized that when he had passed the water on his way to seek shelter, he had not seen the dark boulder that was now by the edge of the pond. The hunter froze then, for it seemed as if that dark boulder was moving. As he watched, dark
wings unfolded from it and the crouched figure stood up.

The hunter held his breath. He recognized the winged being as Pmola, the powerful creature that was said to have its lair atop the high peak. Almost no one ventured up there, and if they were foolish or brave enough to try, they never returned alive.

Pmola turned and looked in the hunter’s direction. The hunter closed his eyes. When he opened them again, he saw that Pmola was no longer looking his way, but bending to turn over a big stone. As the hunter watched in fascination, Pmola placed something glittering under that stone before rolling it back in place. Then the wide wings spread, flapped once, and Pmola lifted up into the air and disappeared into the night.

The hunter waited, uncertain of what to do. He shuddered at the thought of what might happen if he came out too soon and Pmola saw him. But then an idea came to him. It was said that every powerful creature had a source of strength that it kept hidden. If anyone found that source, the creature would be at their mercy, too weak to harm them. Perhaps, the hunter thought, that glittering object held
Pmola’s strength. If he could gain control of it, it might protect him from the monster.

The hunter looked up to the sky, where the Night Traveler, the grandmother moon, was showing half of her face. “Grandmother,” the hunter whispered, “protect me.” Then he slipped out of the cave and made his way down to the Small Lake of the Clouds and the stone by which Pmola had crouched. His hands found something hard and smooth. He pulled it out and held it up, watching it glisten silver in the moonlight. Then, the hair on the back of his neck stood up. The hunter turned to see Pmola looming over him, clawed hands reaching out.

Still clutching the glittering thing he had pulled from its hiding place under the stone, the frightened man took a step backward and then another as Pmola slowly came toward him. Soon the hunter found himself at the edge of a cliff with a long drop to the rocks below. There was nowhere further to retreat. Pmola spread its leathery wings wide and opened its mouth, showing teeth sharper and longer than those of any wolf.

Then Pmola screamed.

T
hat was where Dad ended that story the first time he told it. Talk about a cliff-hanger! And that’s where I’ll end it right now because I can hear someone knocking on the door of our trailer. I am sure that Grampa Peter also hears it, even though he’s out back by the woodpile. Old as he is, his ears are better than anyone else’s I’ve ever known—which is saying something since everyone in our family has really good hearing. We joke that our hearing is so good that when we go fishing, we can hear the fish dappling the surface on the other side of the lake. But Grampa Peter’s hearing is so good that he can hear the fish swimming underwater!

Ever since I was a tiny kid, he’s used little sound signals to send me messages. There’s this certain call he uses, a little like a chickadee’s but longer, to let me know when he’s around before I’ve seen him. If he thumps the ground twice with his foot, like a rabbit does to warn its little ones, I know that danger is near and I should stay still and not move. And a long whistle, like that of a red-tailed hawk, means to come quickly because he needs help.

Now, though, he’s not making any sounds aside from the noise of one piece of wood being placed on top of another as he rearranges the pile—which seemed perfectly fine before he started working on it.

I guess this means that he wants whoever is knocking to go away. Or maybe he wants me to be the one to open the door? Probably choice numero uno. But curiosity has always gotten the better of me—or the worse in some cases—so I go to the door, open it, and look down to see who is standing on our steps.

Then I look up. The guy who was doing the knocking is actually almost even with me, despite my height and the fact that the trailer door is two feet above the bottom step, where he’s standing.

But while he’s tall enough to be a center in the NBA, his face isn’t like that of a basketball player. It sort of resembles one of the bad guys in those
Pirates of the Caribbean
films or maybe the cartoon Captain Hook. He has dark eyebrows, a pointy, oiled mustache, long black hair that falls to his shoulders, and a grin on his face that looks more painted-on than friendly. But what makes him even stranger is what he’s wearing. Not a buccaneer getup like his appearance from the neck up might lead you to expect. Instead, he’s got on a three-piece suit that probably cost as much as our trailer—when it was new. The trailer, I mean, not the suit. And by the way I’m talking now you can tell how confused I’m feeling.

But I don’t let it show. I keep my face expressionless—unlike those eyes of his, which glitter with some kind of recognition as he studies my face. Like I am the answer to some problem that’s been bothering him. Or maybe, on second thought, like a hungry man looking at a Big Mac.

“Ah,” he says, in a voice peculiarly high for someone so big, “you must be the grandson.”

I don’t say anything. How do you respond to something like that?

His smile broadens. This time it’s a look straight out of that same Peter Pan cartoon. Not from Captain Hook, though. The crocodile.

“Not so?” he asks. He’s got a strong English accent. I still don’t answer him. “It must be that you are his relative,” he continues. “A grandson, no? You are most assuredly as taciturn as the old man. So where is he?”

The answer to that is right behind him, where Grampa Peter has come up so quietly and suddenly that even I didn’t see his approach.

“Here,” Grampa Peter says in a voice that is both quiet and strong.

Captain Hook spins halfway around and almost trips over his own feet. He doesn’t fall, but he’s unhappy about being taken by surprise and the phony smile is momentarily wiped off his face, replaced by a look that combines impatience, displeasure…and menace. If I felt leery about this guy before, I for sure don’t like or trust him now.

He recovers himself quickly, though. The expression of insincere friendliness pops back onto his face as quick as a rattlesnake striking.

“Mr. Fortune,” Captain Hook pipes, “so nice to see you again.” He holds out a hand toward Grampa Peter—who does something
I have never seen him do before. Instead of taking the man’s hand in that ancient gesture of truce between enemies or trust between friends, Grampa Peter folds his arms and raises one eyebrow.

“Nope,” he says, keeping his gaze on the ground.

Wow! This guy really is bad news!

Captain Hook turns to me. “Talk some sense into your grandfather,” he hisses. “We’ll make it worth his while if he assists us.”

He turns back toward the extended-cab Chevy that is parked at the end of our walkway with the passenger door left open. There’s a woman behind the wheel wearing big hoop earrings. I can’t make out her features because she has on a Yankees cap that shades her face, but I can see that her brown hair, woven into a braid that falls over her shoulder, is even longer than Captain Hook’s.

As he reaches the truck, Captain Hook, who I now realize is wearing built-up boots with heels that have increased his height by at least five inches, turns back to glare at us both.

“And if you foolishly choose not to help us,” he snarls, “you shall indeed regret it.”

He throws himself into the cab and slams the
door. The truck peels out, throwing an arc of gravel from its fishtailing rear wheels.

Grampa Peter can tell how confused I am by the look on my face. He gestures for me to go inside and sit down on our mini couch, which I do, knees up around my ears as usual. He follows me and starts sorting through the remotes to find the ones that control, respectively, the high-def flat-screen TV and one of his Sony DVD players.

Grampa Peter may be an old guy in his sixties who knows more about the traditional ways than almost anyone I know, but he loves modern gadgets. The whole western wall of the trailer is taken up by an assemblage of turntables, stereos, tape players, TVs of various shapes and sizes, computer monitors, Super 8s, VCRs, DVD units, even a Blu-ray player that showed up three days ago. Everything works, too. Plus the shelves under the equipment are chock-f of records and tapes, discs and DVDs, all arranged according to a system I don’t understand, but one that makes it possible for Grampa Peter to put his hands on anything he wants in a matter of seconds. It might be an old episode of
Raw-hide
(Grampa Peter loves Clint Eastwood) or a documentary on the Yanomami people of
the Amazon. Or maybe something about his two favorite people from the twentieth century—Harry Houdini, the escape artist, and a comedian named Lenny Bruce, both of whom he says could have been Indians.

An unmarked DVD seems to fall of its own accord off the top of a pile right into his left hand. He slips it into the Sony, slides in next to me on the couch, and presses a few buttons. A convoluted eight-armed figure that looks vaguely Tibetan fills the twenty-four-inch flat screen.
FORBIDDEN MYSTERIES
read the words in red twisty letters at the bottom.

Grampa Peter turns up the volume as a face fills the screen. A high, insistent voice with an English accent rises in midsentence.

“…truth of the Mothman Prophecy will be revealed. Such beings as these that have haunted our dreams, do they truly exist? And are they here among us now? What secrets or treasures do they guard? Come with me, your intrepid host, Darby Field the fourth, as we seek the truth of another Forbidden Mystery!”

I feel a chill go down my back. What was that name he called himself? Did I hear it right?

The figure is replaced by a rough drawing of a birdlike creature with no head and two
red eyes staring out of its chest. It morphs into another image. This one is not a drawing, but a photograph of what archaeologists call an “artifact” and my people call a sacred object. A second chill goes down my back.

I’ve seen it before. It was on display in the Fruitlands Museum in Harvard, Massachusetts. It was made of sheet copper, probably fashioned from a kettle obtained through trade with white people back in the seventeenth century, and stood about ten inches tall. Its body shape was sort of like that of the figure in the drawing and there were two holes in the chest area about where the eyes were here. The label on the case said that it had been “recovered” from Amoskeag Falls in Manchester, New Hampshire. Not that far from here.

The museum people described it as a “thunderbird.” I didn’t try to correct anyone about what it really was or tell them they really ought to return it to the place it came from. I also didn’t tell them who it really depicted. Pmola. I just whispered to the sacred object in Abenaki and let it know I sympathized with it having to be locked in a case and that I hoped it wouldn’t feel so bad that it would bring harm to anyone.

Grampa Peter pushes the pause button on the remote and turns to me. He knows I’ve seen enough.

“Hmm?” he says.

My heart is beating like I’ve just run a hundred-yard dash.

“Did I hear that guy’s name right?” I ask.

“Uh-huh.” Grampa Peter nods.

I take a deep breath to calm myself. I’d recognized the voice and face of Darby Field IV, the host of
Forbidden Mysteries
. How could I not, with that superior, sneering tone, those leering eyes, that black mustache, long hair, and toothy grin? Captain Hook.