The Stolen Child(66)

behind the dashboard. From the edge of the forest, Luchóg could not resist any longer and struck a

match in the lin-gering darkness. After the very first drag, he had to duck when birdshot pep-pered the

air above his head. The man fired the shotgun again, long after my friend had disappeared, laughing and

coughing, into the heart of the forest.

After these incidents, Béka clamped down on our freedoms. We were not allowed to travel alone,

nor could we be on any road during the daylight. He restricted any forays into town for supplies out of

fear of detection. By day, the hum of engines, the staccato of hammers echoing from our old home to

wherever we had camped. By night, a haunting stillness invaded. I longed to run away with Speck to the

library and its comforting privacy. I missed my books and papers, and my materials were few: McInnes's

fading composition book, a drawing of the woman in the red coat, a handful of letters. Numbed, I was

not writing, either, and time passed unrecorded. In a way, it did not ex-ist at all.

To gather food, Ragno, Zanzara, and I sewed together a crude net, and after much trial and error,

we managed to capture a brace of grouse, which we then killed and took home for dinner. The tribe

made a ceremony of pluck-ing feathers, tying them in bundles, and wearing them in our hair like the

Huron. We dressed the birds and risked our first large fire of the season, allow-ing us to roast our meal

and providing comfort on a cool night. Assembled in a small circle, our faces glowed in the flickering

light, signs of anxious weari-ness in our tired eyes, but the meal would prove revitalizing. As the fire burnt

down and our bellies filled, a calm complacency settled upon us, like a blanket drawn around our

shoulders by absent mothers.

Wiping his greasy mouth on his sleeve, Béka cleared his throat to summon our attention. The

chitchat and marrow sucking stopped at once. "We have angered the people, and there will be no rest

for a long, long time. It was wrong to lose that boy, but worse still was bringing him to camp in the first

place." We had heard this speech many times before, but Onions, his favorite, played the Fool to his

Lear.

"But they have Igel. Why are they so mad?" she asked.

"She's right. They have Igel. He's their Oscar," Kivi said, joining the chorus. "But we don't have

ours. Why should they be mad? We are the ones who have lost."

"This is not about the boy. They found us, found our home, and now bury it under asphalt. They

know we are here. They won't stop looking for us until they find us and drive us from these woods. A

hundred years ago, there were coyotes, wolves, lions in these hills. The sky blackened with flocks of

passenger pigeons every spring. Bluebirds lived among us, and the creeks and rivers were fat with fishes

and toads and terrapins. Once it was not un-usual to see a man with one hundred wolf pelts drying by his

barn. Look around you. They come in, hunt and chop, and take it all away. Igel was right: Things will

never be the same, and we are next."

Those who had finished their meals threw the bones in the fire, which sputtered and crackled with

the new fat. We were bored by doom and gloom. While I listened to our new leader and his message, I

noticed some of us did not accept his sermon. Whispers and murmurs ran along the circle. At the far end

of the fire, Smaolach was not paying attention, but drawing in the dirt with a stick.

"You think you know better than me?" Béka yelled down to him. "You know what to do, and how

to keep us alive?"

Smaolach kept his eyes down, pushed the point into the earth.

"I am the eldest," Béka continued. "By rights, I am the new leader, and I will not accept anyone

challenging my authority."

Speck raised her voice in defense. "Nobody questions the rules... or your leadership."

Continuing to make his map, Smaolach spoke so softly as to almost not be heard at all. "I am

merely showing my friends here our new position, as I estimate it from the time traveled and by

calculating the stars in the sky. You have earned the right to be our leader, and to tell us where to go."

With a grunt, Béka took Onions by the hand and disappeared into the brush. Smaolach, Luchóg,

Speck, Chavisory, and I huddled around the map as the others dispersed. I do not remember ever

seeing a map before. Curious as to how it worked and what all of the symbols represented, I leaned

forward and examined the drawing, deducing at once that the wavy lines stood for waterways—the river

and the creek—but what to make of the perfectly straight line that crossed the river, the bunches of

boxes arranged in a grid, and the jagged edge between one large oval and an X in the sand?