Tsuga's Children by Thomas Williams Read Free Book Online Page B

myriad vibration in the center of her head. The specks were clearer now. Leathery wings beating, and black bodies; she was in a bat cave, but there was the way out, and she was getting closer.
    As she began to be able to see the rocks around her she climbed faster toward the light. The bats still flowed all around her, none touching her with anything but the wind from its wings. The light grew and at first hurt her eyes. She saw blue sky and the tops of green trees, and she was stumbling, crying with relief to see daylight. Finally she got through the entranceway and ran to the side of the cloud of streaming bats. She was in a new warmth full of autumn smells, looking down across a mountain valley to a blue, island-studded lake, tall trees, a mountain meadow, all surrounded by mountain walls reaching up into glinting white.
    The bat cloud rose above the cave entrance, swirling into a confused whirlwind in the brightness. Above the dark cloud and beside it, two great hawks turned and then fell into the cloud, which received them and let them plummet straight on through, each of the thousands in the hawks’ way swerving aside from the arched talons at the last moment. But then there was a bump in the air. She could almost feel it. In all that flowing and falling there was ajar, a stoppage somewhere up in the swirling cloud, then another and another, before the two hawks broke out below the cloud to brake with their broad wings and cupped fan-shaped tails. Each had a broken bat in its grasp.
    Another bat fluttered down and landed near her feet, one of its soft wings splayed out, blood on the dark furry body. It tried to fly, but one wing was broken, the fragile wrist of the bat’s wing. She felt sorry for it, and bent down so she could see its clattering little fangs, and its nose, which was bare and pink and flat as a pig’s snout. Large pointed ears stood out from its head, full of little white hairs. It was ugly, but she knew it was ugly only to her and not to itself. She wanted to help it. The bats in the cave were like a nightmare to her, and had frightened her badly, but really she had frightened them and caused them to fly out into the daylight where the birds of prey had an advantage they wouldn’t have had at twilight or at dawn. In a way, she had caused this little animal to be hurt. But when she bent nearer to him he felt her presence, or saw from his pinhead eyes, or heard her in the echoes of his squeaking, and opened his mouth, coughing with hatred and fear, to display his white fangs. He couldn’t fly any more and was doomed to die, but he didn’t yet know it. Jen knew it, and knew that she couldn’t help.
    The bat cloud turned once more above the cave and then, as if sucked like smoke into a flue, came down toward the cave entrance. She scrambled away and hid in some ground juniper as the cave received its thousands and thousands again into safe darkness. The air was clear, warm in the low sun that was about to go behind the white rim of the mountains. The hawks were little specks now as they climbed toward the cliff’s behind her. The wounded bat was gone. No, there he was beside a stone, not moving now, lying there in that extra kind of silence that meant he had suffered other wounds, and he was dead.
    As the sun went down behind the distant rim, the air turned colder and the light turned around, growing golden as it was reflected from the snow fields high above her on what must be the eastern rim of the valley. But it was not winter down here. The sweet juniper smell mixed with all the live odors of fall. If Oka had come this far she might still be alive, maybe in that green meadow below, beyond the dark forest. With the thought that Oka might be near, she felt for a moment some of Oka’s calm warmth, but then it all changed and seemed so impossible and strange that her fright and loneliness grew worse. She didn’t know if her weakness came from fear or from hunger. Between her and her home was the