Peter Dickinson - The Ropemaker

They took the track beside the upper meadow and crossed the spare ground. When they reached the trees Tilja looked back and found that she could no longer see the farm. The wind whined and whistled among the bare branches, and swirled flurries of snow to and fro at ground level, sweeping whole patches bare and gathering the whiteness into sudden drifts. There was no track, but little undergrowth either, and mostly the trees had grown close together and been forced upward toward the light, so that the lower trunks were branchless. Tilja had only once been deep into the forest, on that strange visit to the lake with Ma, last summer. Otherwise they had stayed near the edge, looking for firewood and fungi and setting traps for small game. Though when she and Meena had entered the wood she had had a good idea where the lake lay, now she realized how easily she could have gone astray. Apart from the occasional great cedar towering above the rest, the forest seemed endlessly the same, just pillared trees and gently undulating ground beneath. There was no sun to steer by, and the unsteady wind, buffeting around every which way, was no use either.

Once they were well in among the trees Tilja loosed the leading rein so that Meena could pick her own path. Calico was certainly not going to let herself be separated from Dusty, out here in the forest, but to keep up with Dusty’s enormous stride she had to move at an awkward pace, walking for a bit and falling behind and trotting to catch up.

She did so now, and drew almost level. Tilja heard Meena hiss with pain. She reined Dusty back.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“I’ve been better. Left a bit now.”

“Couldn’t you just tell me the way? Then you could go back.”

“You can’t feel it then? Where the lake is?”

“No.”

Meena had been gazing up at her with her usual fierce stare, but now she grunted, looked away, paused for a moment and shook the reins.

“Let’s get along, then,” she snapped. “No point hanging around, chattering.”

They rode on, but there had been something in that pause that reminded Tilja of the time she had stood beneath the sweeping branches of an enormous cedar and gazed out over the glistening stillness of the lake.

“Can you hear anything, darling?” Ma had said, with an odd note in her voice, both eager and anxious.

So Tilja had stood and strained for some unexpected sound, but had heard only the whisper of a light breeze through the cedar branches and the steady calling of two doves.

“Nothing special,” she’d said. “What sort of anything?”

Ma had looked away. Then there had been just such a pause before she’d said “Never mind,” and smiled at Tilja with a sort of pity.

Time passed, both too slow and too fast. It seemed endless, but always Tilja was conscious of the precious minutes dribbling away and nothing else changing, always the same wood, the same wind slapping loose snow and dead leaves hither and thither between the gray tree trunks, and the same certainty in her mind that they were already too late. Then abruptly, the nature of the forest changed. The bare trees gave way to a belt of cedars, whose lower branches swept to the ground and interlaced with their neighbors’, leaving no clear way through into the blackness beneath.

“There’s a path,” said Meena. “A bit to the right, it’ll be.”

So they followed the line of cedars for a while, and came to a narrow, winding slot in the green thicket. Tilja headed Dusty into it. He didn’t care for the look of it and for the first time jibbed, but obediently plodded on as soon as she flicked the reins. Almost at once, though, as they rounded a bend, the traces of the sled tangled into a pine branch and she had to scramble down and clear them. The path was barely wide enough to let the sled through and it was bound to catch again, so she knelt at the front of it and clucked to Dusty to carry on, as Da did when plowing. He heaved forward, and she positioned herself ready to keep the traces clear at the next corner. Despite her efforts, they stuck several times more before she saw open sky ahead of them and caught a glimpse of steely gray water ahead.

Just before they were clear the sled jarred against a hidden stump and she had to back Dusty up to heave it free. She was standing, dizzy and gasping with the effort, when she heard Meena cry out behind her, “Look! Oh, look! There they go!”

Tilja moved to see beyond Dusty’s huge haunches but tripped over the runner of the sled and fell. By the time she picked herself up, whatever Meena had seen was gone. Meena herself was sitting bolt up in the saddle, gazing ahead, her lined old face shining with excitement.

“Who’d’ve thought it?” she said in a dazed voice. “Forty years I came to sing to the cedars, snowfall after snowfall, and never a glimpse, and now I’ve seen three of ’em. Little wretches.”

Astonished out of her worry and exhaustion, Tilja stood and stared at her until Meena shook herself.

“Well, don’t stand gawping there, girl,” she snapped. “Get that brute moving, and we’ll go and look for your mother.”

Tilja clicked, Dusty plodded ahead as unconcerned as if he were harrowing the bottom acres, and out they came into a wide space ringed with cedars and almost filled by a long, narrow lake. Most of the way round, the trees grew right down to the shoreline, with their branches reaching out over the water, but to the left of the path a strip of grass the width of a broad lane ran up between them and the lake to a small meadow at the top. Here enough snow had settled to cover the area. Lying in the middle of it was a darker shape.

Tilja dropped Dusty’s reins and ran.

The shape was Ma. Her heavy cloak covered most of her body.

Tilja knelt beside her, gasping for breath, and shook her by the shoulder.

“Ma! Ma! Wake up!” she croaked. “Oh, please wake up!”

Nothing.

Her eyes were closed, her face very pale, apart from a single dark mark like an angry bruise in the center of her forehead. Hands and cheek were cold, but not icy. Tilja bent to listen for her breath but the roar of the wind through the cedars drowned all fainter sounds. She couldn’t find her pulse.

Desperately she called again, “Ma! Ma!”

Did the pale lips move in answer? For a moment she thought so, then she wasn’t sure.

She looked round and saw that Meena had somehow caught hold of Dusty’s reins and ordered him forward, and that Calico had then decided to trail along beside them. Tilja rose and ran back.

“I think she’s alive,” she gasped. “I think I saw her lips move.”

“Miracle if she is, this weather,” said Meena, as though talking about a frost at apple-blossom time. “Give us a hand down, then, and let’s take a look.”

Once on the ground she stood with her eyes closed and her face as gray as porridge, then shook her head, let out a long breath, and with Tilja taking as much of her weight as she could, knelt beside her daughter’s body. She drew off her glove and with gnarled and twisted fingers felt at the limp wrist.

“Well, maybe there’s a bit of a pulse there and maybe there isn’t,” she said. “She’s warmer than she might be, though. Well, we’ll be taking her home, dead or alive, so you may as well get started on that. You’ll need to make room for the two of us, mind. There’s no way I’m getting back on that walking taterriddle, supposing I could.”

So Tilja led Dusty on and turned him to bring the sled close beside the body, but before she reached it Meena called out to her to stop.

“Come here, girl, and look at this a moment. We’ve messed it up this side, but there—what d’you make of that?”

She pointed. Tilja looked and saw that though there were patches and streaks of snow on the body itself, and a good covering caught in the grass around, all along Ma’s further side and the fold of cloak beyond there was only the finest dusting of snow, that might have fallen in the last few minutes. And now that she knew what to look for she could see that it had been the same where she and Meena had knelt.