Ian had recovered his self-possession in the concentration of navigating the rough ground. He paused now and then, reaching back to help her down a particularly tricky fall of rock, or over a tree uprooted in some recent flood—but he didn’t meet her eyes, and the shuttered planes of his face gave nothing away.
Her curiosity had reached fever pitch, but clearly he had done speaking for the moment. It was just past midday, but the light under the birches was a shadowed gold that made everything seem somehow hushed, almost enchanted. She could make no sensible guess as to the purpose of this expedition, in light of what Ian had told her—but the place was one where almost anything seemed possible.
She thought suddenly of her first father—of Frank Randall—and felt a small, remembered warmth at the thought. She would like so much to show him this place.
They had taken holidays often in the Adirondacks; different mountains, different trees—but something of the same hush and mystery in the shadowed glades and rushing water. Her mother had come sometimes, but more often it was just the two of them, hiking far up into the trees, not talking much, but sharing a deep content in the company of the sky.
Suddenly, the sound of the water rose again; there was another fall nearby.
“Just here, coz,” Ian said softly, and beckoned her to follow with a turn of the head.
They stepped out from under the trees and she saw that the gorge dropped suddenly away, the water falling twenty feet or more into a pool below. Ian led her past the head of the falls; she could hear the water rushing past below, but the top of the bank was thick with sedges, and they had to push their way through, tramping down the yellowing stems of goldenrod and dodging the panicked whir of grasshoppers rocketing up underfoot.
“Look,” Ian said, glancing back, and reached to part the screen of laurel in front of her.
“Wow!”
She recognized it immediately. There was no mistaking it, in spite of the fact that much of it was invisible, still buried in the crumbling bank on the far side of the gorge. Some recent flood had raised the level of the creek, undercutting the bank so that a huge block of stone and dirt had fallen away, revealing its buried mystery.
The raked arches of ribs rose huge from the dirt, and she had the impression of a scatter of things half-buried in the rubble at the foot of the bank: enormous things, knobbed and twisted. They might be bones or simply boulders—but it was the tusk that caught her eye, jutting from the bank in a massive curve, intensely familiar, and the more startling for its very familiarity.
“Ye ken it?” Ian asked eagerly, watching her face. “Ye’ve seen something like it?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, and though the sun was warm on her back, she shivered, gooseflesh pebbling her forearms. Not from fear, but sheer awe at sight of it, and a kind of incredulous joy. “Oh, yes. I have.”
“What?” Ian’s voice was still pitched low, as though the creature might hear them. “What is it?”
“A mammoth,” she said, and found that she was whispering, too. The sun had passed its zenith; already the bottom of the creekbed lay in shadow. Light struck the stained curve of ancient ivory, and threw the vault of the high-crowned skull that held it into sharp relief. The skull was fixed in the soil at a slight angle, the single visible tusk rising high, the eye socket black as mystery.
The shiver came again, and she hunched her shoulders. Easy to feel that it might at any moment wrench itself free of the clay and turn that massive head toward them, empty-eyed, clods of dirt raining from tusks and bony shoulders as it shook itself and began to walk, the ground vibrating as long toes struck and sank in the muddy soil.
“That’s what it’s called—mammoth? Aye, well . . . it is verra big.” Ian’s voice dispelled the illusion of incipient movement, and she was able finally to take her eyes off it—though she felt she must glance back, every second or so, to be sure it was still there.
“The Latin name is Mammuthus,” she said, clearing her throat. “There’s a complete skeleton in a museum in New York. I’ve seen it often. And I’ve seen pictures of them in books.” She glanced back at the creature in the bank.
“A museum? So it’s not a thing ye’ve got where—when”—he stumbled a bit—“where ye come from? Not alive then, I mean?” He seemed rather disappointed.
She wanted to laugh at the picture of mammoths roaming Boston Common, or wallowing on the bank of the Cambridge River. In fact, she had a moment’s pang of disappointment that they hadn’t been there; it would have been so wonderful to see them.
“No,” she said regretfully. “They all died thousands and thousands of years ago. When the ice came.”
“Ice?” Ian was glancing back and forth between her and the mammoth, as though afraid one or the other might do something untoward.
“The Ice Age. The world got colder, and sheets of ice spread down from the north. A lot of animals went extinct—I mean, they couldn’t find food, and all died.”
Ian was pale with excitement.
“Aye. Aye, I’ve heard such stories.”
“You have?” She was surprised at that.
“Aye. But ye say it’s real.” He swung his head to look at the mammoth’s bones once more. “An animal, aye, like a bear or a possum?”
“Yes,” she said, puzzled by his attitude, which seemed to alternate between eagerness and dismay. “Bigger, but yes. What else would it be?”
“Ah,” he said, and took a deep breath. “Well, d’ye see, that’s what I needed ye to tell me, coz. See, the Kahnyen’kehaka—they have stories of . . . things. Animals that are really spirits. And if ever I saw a thing that might be a spirit—” He was still looking at the skeleton, as though it might walk out of the earth, and she saw a slight shiver pass through him.
She couldn’t prevent a similar shiver, looking at the massive creature. It towered above them, grim and awful, and only her knowledge of what it was kept her from wanting to cower and run.
“It’s real,” she repeated, as much to reassure herself as him. “And it’s dead. Really dead.”
“How d’ye know these things?” he asked, intently curious. “It’s auld, ye say. You’d be much further away from—that”—he jerked his chin at the giant skeleton—“in your own time than we are now. How can ye ken more about it than folk do now?”
She shook her head, smiling a little, and helpless to explain.
“When did you find this, Ian?”
“Last month. I came up the gorge”—he gestured with his chin—“and there it was. I near beshit myself.”
“I can imagine,” she said, stifling an urge to laugh.
“Aye,” he said, not noticing her amusement in his desire to explain. “I should have been sure that it was Rawenniyo—a spirit, a god—save for the dog.”
Rollo had climbed out of the stream, and having shaken the water from his fur, was squirming on his back in a patch of crushed turtlehead, tail wagging in pleasure, and clearly oblivious to the silent giant in the cliff above.
“What do you mean? That Rollo wasn’t afraid of it?”
Ian nodded.
“Aye. He didna behave as though there were anything there at all. And yet . . .” He hesitated, darting a glance at her. “Sometimes, in the wood. He—he sees things. Things I canna see. Ken?”
“I ken,” she said, a ripple of unease returning. “Dogs do see . . . things.” She remembered her own dogs; in particular, Smoky, the big Newfoundland, who would sometimes in the evening suddenly raise his head, listening, hackles rising as his eyes followed . . . something . . . that passed through the room and disappeared.
He nodded, relieved that she knew what he was talking about.
“They do. I ran, when I saw that”—he nodded at the cliff—“and ducked behind a tree. But the dog went on about his business, paying it no mind. And so I thought, well, just maybe it’s no what I think, after all.”
“And what did you think?” she asked. “A Rawenniyo, you said?” As the excitement of seeing the mammoth began to recede, she remembered what they were theoretically doing here. “Ian—you said what you wanted to show me had to do with your wife. Is this—” She gestured toward the cliff, brows raised.
He didn’t answer directly, but tilted his head back, studying the jut of the giant tusks.
“I heard stories, now and then. Among the Mohawk, I mean. They’d speak of strange things that someone found, hunting. Spirits trapped in the rock, and how they came to be there. Evil things, for the most part. And I thought to myself, if that should be what this is . . .”
He broke off and turned to her, serious and intent.
“I needed ye to tell me, aye? Whether that’s what it is or no. Because if it was, then perhaps what I’ve been thinking is wrong.”
“It’s not,” she assured him. “But what on earth have you been thinking?”
“About God,” he said, surprising her again. He licked his lips, unsure how to go on.
“Yeksa’a—the child. I didna have her christened,” he said. “I couldna. Or perhaps I could—ye can do it yourself, ken, if there’s no priest. But I hadna the courage to try. I—never saw her. They’d wrapped her already. . . . They wouldna have liked it, if I’d tried to . . .” His voice died away.
“Yeksa’a,” she said softly. “Was that your—your daughter’s name?”
He shook his head, his mouth twisting wryly.
“It only means ‘wee girl.’ The Kahnyen’kehaka dinna give a name to a child when it’s born. Not until later. If . . .” His voice trailed off, and he cleared his throat. “If it lives. They wouldna think of naming a child unborn.”
“But you did?” she asked gently.
He raised his head and took a breath that had a damp sound to it, like wet bandages pulled from a fresh wound.
“Iseabaìl,” he said, and she knew it was the first—perhaps would be the only—time he’d spoken it aloud. “Had it been a son, I would ha’ called him Jamie.” He glanced at her, with the shadow of a smile. “Only in my head, ken.”
He let out all his breath then with a sigh and put his face down upon his knees, back hunched.
“What I am thinking,” he said after a moment, his voice much too controlled, “is this. Was it me?”
“Ian! You mean your fault that the baby died? How could it be?”
“I left,” he said simply, straightening up. “Turned away. Stopped being a Christian, being Scots. They took me to the stream, scrubbed me wi’ sand to take away the white blood. They gave me my name—Okwaho’kenha—and said I was Mohawk. But I wasna, not really.”
He sighed deeply again, and she put a hand on his back, feeling the bumps of his backbone press through the leather of his shirt. He didn’t eat nearly enough, she thought.
“But I wasna what I had been, either,” he went on, sounding almost matter-of-fact. “I tried to be what they wanted, ken? So I left off praying to God or the Virgin Mother, or Saint Bride. I listened to what Emily said, when she’d tell me about her gods, the spirits that dwell in the trees and all. And when I went to the sweat lodge wi’ the men, or sat by the hearth and heard the stories . . . they seemed as real to me as Christ and His saints ever had.”