Before I stepped onto the trail, I had another thought:
If this is the bears’ favorite path, I don’t dare use it.
What if I bumped into them coming back home for the night? What if the baby bear was ahead and I cut him off from his mother? Then there’d be nowhere for me to run.
So instead, I kept edging around the meadow, hoping to find some other way across. It seemed like miles and miles and miles to go, but I knew I’d taken the safer way.
Safe was good.
As things got darker, I could no longer tell which way east lay. I turned around and around, trying to figure it out. In the end, trying to be foxy, I’d outfoxed myself. I was more lost now than I’d been before.
I didn’t dare wait until the next morning. By then anyone trailing me might find me. My only hope was to go forward, quickly.
So I faded back into the forest but near enough to the meadow that I would still have a bit of moonlight as a guide.
And that’s when I saw the eerie glow coming from an old tree stump as if magic had set the woods aglow. The kind of magic a witch might do. At first I was startled, then frightened. If Stepmama had found me, all was truly lost.
But soon enough sense returned and I knew what I was seeing. Not magic at all.
Fox fire!
I stepped closer and there was a cluster of orange mushrooms, their undersides glowing a soft green. Oh, I knew these weren’t for eating. Jack-o’-lantern mushrooms could make a person sick for days with stomach cramps and the runs. But I
could
follow them in the dark, going from cluster to cluster. My own private path.
“Thank you,” I whispered, unclear this time who I was thanking.
So, all alone in the dark woods I followed the jack-o’-lanterns’ glow till I was simply too tired to go any farther. Luckily, I found a hollow in a tree, too narrow for a bear but just right for me. It was warmer there than up on a tree limb. The breezes couldn’t reach me and the heat I made just by breathing seemed to envelop me. I settled myself down for a nap that turned into a long, deep, healing sleep.
When morning came with a chorus of birdsong, I was ready to go on. After chowing down on half of the leftover ramp bulbs and rinsing my mouth with some water from a stream, I raced around the meadow and found myself on the eastern downslope of the mountain.
Am I safe
? So far that day I’d heard no hounds, no bears, no cars or trucks, no gunshots. No crackle of footsteps on leaves or fallen branches behind me or ahead of me. So, safe enough.
I was almost giddy with relief.
Avoiding the patches of loose rocks as much for safety as for the noise, I stayed within the embrace of the trees on the way down. I passed by a cave like a yawning mouth and found myself suddenly on a well-worn path.
I wondered if I should avoid it, for fear of meeting someone. About to step off the path and plunge back into the undergrowth, I suddenly heard a growl behind me. A full-throated, angry growl. Looking over my shoulder, I saw a huge black bear standing up on its hind legs in front of the cave. It was staring down at me, jaws open and white drool forming in the corners of its mouth.
I don’t think I screamed, but I must have because someone did. I started to run, knowing it was a stupid thing to do. But my mind couldn’t control my legs. I raced down the path heedless of anything but the beast at my back. And it
was
at my back. I could hear its heavy breathing behind me.
Did I turn and look? Of course not. I was only intent on escape. And when, rounding a corner, I saw a strange little house at the edge of the next turning, standing like a triangle under a stand of pine trees, I cried aloud, sure I was saved.
A hot breath at my neck sighed with me. A bear sigh. I threw the stick I’d been holding over my shoulder and heard a satisfying
thunk
as it struck home. All I could hope for was that it would distract the bear for a second or two.
The hot breath on my neck disappeared.
I thought I’d outrun the bear.
I hadn’t.
I thought the bear had let me go.
It hadn’t.
In fact, the bear was shepherding me toward the house and I didn’t know that’s what it was doing until long after.
•24•
SEVEN BEDS
I
reached the house. The doorknob turned. I flung the door open and slammed it closed behind me. I could feel the heavy thud as the bear hit the door a moment after.
I My heart was chugging painfully in my chest at the close call. Frantically, I glanced around for something to prop up under the doorknob, something strong enough to keep the front door closed against the weight of that enormous fierce beast.
To my right stood a chair, high-backed and sturdy-looking, with a needlework seat. Afraid to move from the door, I managed to angle my foot around one of the chair’s rungs and slide it over with my foot. Then I turned and quickly jammed it under the knob. It seemed to hold. But just in case, I looked about for a back door, somewhere I could use to escape if the bear broke in.
Across the crowded room, stuffed with sofas and chairs and a large table piled high with papers, I could see several doors. I chanced racing across.
One door led to a tidy kitchen, another to an inside privy. A third opened inward to a bedroom cluttered with seven beds. Six were on the small side, hardly larger than a child’s bed. The seventh was regular-sized. If there was a mother or father here all alone with six small children, surely I could be of some help.
The six small beds were each neatly made up, with sheets, a pillow in a pillowcase, and a hand-pieced quilt. The largest bed had no bedding on it at all, only a handsome wedding-ring quilt folded at the bed foot. Everything was too neat for it to be a father and children. It had to be a mother. When they got home, I’d explain everything to them.
But what if they came home to a house where a fierce bear lay in wait? Had I led them, poor mites, into a trap?
There were four windows against the far wall. I could use one of those for escape should I need to get out to warn the family.
Closing the bedroom door quietly behind me with a soft click so as not to alert the bear, I turned and put my ear to the door. I listened hard for any houghing or growling or heavy steps, anything to indicate the bear had gotten in.
The house was surprisingly quiet.
Too quiet.
I thought again about the mother and her children. What could I do? What should I do?
I pushed the big bed against the door to hold it shut before I felt in the slightest bit safe.
Then, curled up on the bed, I listened for about a half hour longer, straining to hear anything that could mean the bear had gotten in through the front door or the mother and children had returned home. After a time, I let my fear go and my exhaustion creep in. With the quilt held tight around me with my left hand, the caul bag even more tightly in my right, I closed my eyes. Before I knew it, I’d fallen asleep.
When at last I awoke, it must have been hours later, for what I could see of sky through the window was late afternoon. There was a sound like someone at the front door, pushing it open: the chair falling on the floor and many great shouts.
Not a bear, then,
I thought sleepily, but got no further with that thought, because suddenly the door to the bedroom starting moving inward, which meant the bed I was on was moving, too.
I heard men’s voices, angry voices—three, four, five of them. They were cursing in some foreign tongue. Not children at all.
Had I fallen into a robber’s den? Ali Baba and the thieves? A murderer’s home like Bluebeard’s castle? Had I escaped from one sure death into the path of another?
Frying pan into the fire,
Cousin Nancy would have said. I could all but feel the flames.
Throwing the quilt to one side and leaping off the bed, I raced to the bank of windows, now my only means of escape. I stood on the bed closest to the wall and pushed open a window. Clambering onto the sill, I stuck my feet out, readying myself to leap. I’d take my chances outside rather than be found here sleeping, like Goldilocks in the Three Bears’ house.
The very thought of
three
bears made me shiver anew. One had been bad enough.
As I glanced over my shoulder, the door opened a crack and then was shoved wide, the bed squealing in protest as it slid along the floor. To my amazement, three rather small, wiry men stumbled in.
“Hold!” one of them called to me as I gathered myself to jump from the window ledge. He had, I noticed almost calmly, a long graying beard.
“Don’t jump!” the second shouted.
“Cliff’s edge!” That was the third little man.
Only then did I turn and look down. Just as the third had warned, a huge chasm yawned beneath my feet. From where I sat, I couldn’t see the bottom of it. There was only about a foot between where I’d planned to jump down and the edge. If I’d leapt without knowing, I’d most probably have tumbled in and been dead from the fall.
But if I stayed . . .
I looked back at the men who’d called out the danger. Who no doubt had chased off the bear. Then I turned again and looked at the gulf below my feet. Clutching the caul bag, I measured one danger against another—an unknown frying pan against certain fire.
I stayed.
“Giff me your hand,” said the man with the gray beard, coming closer.
“No one shall harm you,” said the second. He was almost completely bald, his head shining like Mama’s white teapot.
“Gott im Himmel,”
said the third, “it’s a girl.” He had reddish hair and flyaway eyebrows.
I looked at the three of them. For all that they differed in coloring, there was a sameness about them: same height, same broad shoulders, same sky blue eyes. Their voices didn’t have the twang of a Webster County man’s, and some of their words were strange, but they were comforting all the same.
I let myself fall back onto the bed, sat up, stood. But I gave no one my hand, all the while thinking about that strange phrase:
Gott im Himmel.
It sounded like no words I knew.
“Are you aliens?” I asked at last, thinking about the pictures of the odd creatures from outer space on the covers of Papa’s paperback books.
“Aliens?
Ja.
Ve are miners from Hessen,” said the graybeard.
All right,
I thought,
I can deal with aliens.
After all, I’d already endured two years of a witch stepmother, encountered a snake-handling preacher, run from a knife-wielding hunter, and just now eluded a charging bear. How could I be afraid of these small creatures?
I held out my hand. “My name is Snow-in-Summer Morton,” I said. “Welcome to West Virginia.”
Unaccountably, the three of them began to laugh.
I folded up the wedding-ring quilt carefully and set it at the foot of the bed, while the little creatures nodded in an approving way. Baldy and Gott im Himmel moved the bed back to its rightful place. And Graybeard closed the window. Only then did they escort me into the living room, where three others were waiting, as small and as broad-shouldered and as blue-eyed as they. Graybeard showed me to a chair and then they all made a loose circle around me.
I suppose I should have been afraid, but they weren’t scary at all. Even when they began questioning me, I felt instantly that they did it because they wanted to help.
“Vy are you here?” Graybeard asked.
“And look at you, poor child,” added Baldy, “you’re filthy. Vat a terrible time you must have had.”
Their sweet concern broke down the wall around me and tears began to fill my eyes. I scrubbed at them with one fist, which only made things fuzzy.
Gott im Himmel offered me a large white handkerchief, rather the worse for wear. It had dark smudges on both sides, but then—I supposed—so did I. I took the handkerchief and dabbed at my eyes.
“Start from the start,” Graybeard said softly.
“There’s . . . there’s an awful lot to tell.” My voice was suddenly quite shaky. “And a lot of it is awful.”
They laughed again.
“Ve haff quit vork for the day,” Baldy said, “so ve haff much time for tales.”
Gott im Himmel added, “And ve
luff
a good story.”
“There’s little good about it,” I said.
Graybeard held a finger up. “Let us be the judge of that, child.”
Nods ran all around the circle.
Then Graybeard introduced them all to me. He was Jakob, Baldy was Karl, Gott im Himmel was really Philip. Redbeard was Friedrich, called Freddy. The short one was Klaus. And the dark-bearded one was George. Hardly the kind of alien names in Papa’s books. Which had too few consonants and a lot of apostrophes.
“Und how long since you’ve last eaten?” asked George.
I thought a minute. “Since yesterday morning? A bit of lamb’s-quarters and a handful of ramps.” I pulled the last couple of ramp bulbs out of my pocket. The leaves were broken and wilted, the bulbs crushed. A pungent garlic smell filled the air.
“Get the child some tea,” Jakob ordered, and Klaus wandered off at once, I guessed going into the kitchen.
“Und some sausage and
küchen,
” Freddy called after him.
“Thank you,” I said, not knowing what
küchen
was but hoping it tasted good, though at that moment
anything
would have tasted good. Even more ramps.
The küchen turned out to be a little apple cake, very moist and sweet. And along with it came bread and butter, sausage, and mashed potatoes. A feast.
“Ve have only tea or beer or vater to drink,” Jakob said.
“Ve’re not used to being visited by little girls.”
“Little girls on the run,” added Freddy with a shrewd guess.
“I’m not
so
little,” I explained. Then, not wanting to be impolite, for I was taller than the six of them, I added quickly, “After all, I’m nearly thirteen. And I can shift for myself.”