True Places by Sonja Yoerg
“It is not down in any map; true places never are.”
—Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
CHAPTER 1
The girl knew before she opened her eyes that Mama was gone. She always knew. The air inside the cabin cradled a hollow space, a missing shadow of warmth, an exhaled hum, the absent heartbeat. Early mornings were best for hunting, she accepted that, but loneliness was a heavy cloud to wake up in all the same.
She turned onto her back and listened to a squirrel hightail it across the roof. One beat of quiet; it had leaped. Her own limbs sensed the animal’s limbs extending, forepaws reaching defiantly, no hint of hesitation, tail along for the ride. Gravity was a prop, a toy. Leaves rustled as the squirrel landed. The girl clenched her teeth, pulled in one side of her mouth, and sucked hard, letting loose a chatter. The squirrel answered.
The girl swung her feet to the floor, keeping the blanket around her shoulders. Pale, streaky sunlight filtered through chinks in the log walls. She tested the air with a breath. Not that cold. April was here, but winter crouched nearby, haunches twitching, ready to dump more snow, make sure they got down to the last of the deer jerky. Maybe they’d get lucky and outrun winter this time. Maybe today Mama would get a turkey.
She threw off the blanket, pulled on pants, and tucked in the shirt that fell to midthigh. Her father’s leather belt was so long that after she cinched it she slid the dangling end nearly all the way around again. She crammed her feet into rubber boots, pushing her toes against the rags she’d stuffed into the ends to make them fit, and slipped her knife through a belt loop at her hip.
“Come on, Ash.” She beckoned impatiently to the empty room, unlatched the door, and stepped outside onto the narrow porch.
Fog hung in the trees, a hush of silvery damp, but the girl could tell the sun would burn through before long and dry the grasses hunched under the weight of dew. The cabin stood in a small clearing, and the trees surrounding it had strained toward the heavens for a long time, long enough for the trunks to have become too thick for the girl to enclose them in the circle of her arms, long enough for anyone with decency to fall silent in reverence. The clearing was so circumscribed that if a bordering tree fell—and this she had imagined several times—the ones opposite would catch it in outstretched limbs before it crashed onto the cabin roof. Indeed, she had wished for this, to have a massive trunk leaning over them like the shaft of a giant arrow driven into the ground from above. It was unlikely. For all their mutability, trees stayed pretty much where they were.
A dove mourned from a stand of hickory to the east, and the rounded mauve notes soaked into her, mixing with the sleepiness hanging inside her like hundreds of cobwebs. She yawned and felt her stomach churn. She had to fight the urge to go inside and grab a piece of jerky. The longer she waited to eat, the less she needed. Besides, there might be a rabbit. Mama didn’t mind if she cooked a rabbit for herself as long as she kept the fire small and well tended. And the girl always saved a piece to share later.
The clearing and the cabin it held were wedged in a crease between two steep ridges, hidden from sun, wind, eyes. She set off on a narrow track parallel to the east ridge and crossed the creek in two giant steps. The water music trailed after her as she wound south, stepping among knee-high arcs of Solomon’s seal cast in uncertain light from the canopy above, sparse with new leaf and clouded in mist. As she walked, the slopes peeled away from each other, and soon the trees thinned. Umbrellas of mayapples clustered at the bases of the trunks, tip to tip, then ceded to red trillium and foamflower, whose sprays of tiny blossoms reminded her not of foam but of stars.
Using a large black oak as a landmark, the girl found the first runway into the underbrush and checked the snare, adjusting the dangling wire loop. She inspected the other five she had set nearby, all empty. Tomorrow, maybe. Her stomach growled.
She continued through the woods, casting her eyes across the forest floor. Spotting a patch of wood sorrel, she plucked the stems near the ground and chewed the tender, sour leaves as she went. A group of tall, two-tiered plants caught her eye. Indian cucumber. She dug into the dirt at the base of a narrow stem and extracted a rhizome the shape and length of her finger. She wiped it on her shirt and ate it, relishing the crisp, cool taste.
A rifle shot rang out.
The girl paused, then smiled. Mama didn’t waste bullets, as there were none to waste. Tonight they would have fresh meat. She knew she should wish for a deer, for its size.
“Let’s hope it was a turkey, Ash. Turkey’s our favorite.”
The girl waited by the stream Mama would cross on her way home. Idle and hungry, she ate all the watercress she’d collected to have with the turkey; all that remained were a few ramps. Ash told her the story about the time he climbed a tree and came nose to nose with a porcupine. When he finished, she was restless. She drank from the stream and headed for the ridge in the direction of the rifle shot.
The fog had disappeared as surreptitiously as it had come. The sun was high and all the green in the world was rising toward it. She listened as she climbed, her skin and each of her senses bound together into solid awareness. Everything surrounding her, impinging on her, she felt and knew.
She did not call out. Mama was here in these woods, and the girl would find her, or Mama would find the girl, by and by.
Sunlight sliced through at an angle now, drawing a sharp breeze from below. The girl returned to the stream and to the cabin, but Mama was not there. She climbed the ridge again by a different route, always a different route so as not to leave a trail, and called out this time, her voice too high and bright. Worry tunneled like a mole through her belly.