Blood in Her Veins (Nineteen Stories From the World of Jane Yellowrock)(6)

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.