Tsuga's Children by Thomas Williams Read Free Book Online

starving, Oka was lost. She had to go on even if the whole world had changed to evil and would kill her. “I’ll go on anyway,” she said, not hearing her own voice over the deep roar of the water. She could feel her small voice but not hear it. “I’ll go on anyway. ”
    Maybe Oka was now a battered wet cow-corpse tumbling over rocks in the rapids below. In places the ledge was only a foot or so wide, sheer rock above, sheer cliff below. Yet here and there she could find the broad print of a hoof. “I’ll go on anyway, ” she said again, the small silent voice all she could set against her fear.
    Jen crept along the narrow rock shelf, the falling water booming louder as she approached the falls, the bulk of the water so great that for one awful moment it was more substantial than the rest of the world; while the water seemed to stop falling, she and the cliff hurtled skyward. She grasped the mossy rock with both hands and shut her eyes tightly, waiting and hoping for that terrible motion to stop. When, after a while, she thought that the cliff had grown steady, she opened her eyes and once again it was the gray-green water that fell. And right in front of her, in the moss, was the large print of one of Oka’s hooves. Oka had passed this way, yet the shelf of rock here was so narrow, Jen couldn’t see how Oka could have kept her balance. Her wide cow sides must have had to scrape against the cliff.
    She shivered with cold and fear. Though it was warmer here than back in the frozen forest, the dampness of the mist came through her clothes. Oka’s rope bridle, heavy with the wet mist, pulled down on her shoulder.
    The falls were green in their depths, heavy as falling glass, but she kept on until the shelf of rock led behind the long columns hissing on their way to the roar below, and came to a narrow black hole in the wet rock directly behind the falls. Ahead of her, mist churned across the dark opening. She hesitated, trying to overcome her fear. There was no other way Oka could have gone but into that hole, unless she had fallen to the rocks and water below.
    That blackness in there was almost too much; to go into a hole, a cave of blackness, was against everything she had ever been taught. But now she examined that fear, as if she were Jen who was seven and also another Jen, older perhaps, who knew or had long theories about the animals and their voices, a Jen who had looked into the old lady’s eye and seen this very place before and was too deep for the simple fears of childhood. No, she was not too deep for those fears; maybe they were the deepest of all—but something pulled her toward this opening into the unknown. She unstrapped her crampons, tied them to Oka’s bridle, and began to feel her way in. The floor of the passageway was smooth, as if it had been polished by water or feet, and led slightly downward. She felt with her hand along the smooth wet side, her other hand feeling the damp air in front of her. As she felt her way along, the roar of the falls lessened, the retreating boom and roar sounding again like a long moan, now at her back and growing sad and low.
    “Oka?” she called, but her voice came back to her strange, constricted by the rock into a high, piping noise that sounded as if it hadn’t gone anywhere.
    So she didn’t call again, but saved her strength, feeling her way along. The passage turned sometimes, sometimes climbed and then descended. Her open, staring eyes ached to see any kind of light, as if her sight tried to breathe through them and they were being suffocated by the blackness. It seemed she had gone miles and miles in that blackness darker than night, darker than any void she had ever stared into before in her life.
    She felt her way forward for so long a time, she began to believe that she would never get out of the black tunnel, that it would never end but just go on, deeper and darker with the dank cave smell into the under-parts of the mountain. But then, little