The Trees Read Free

there.”
    “You mought git wild bulls in the open prairies,” she told him.
    But Worth didn’t hold much to that. How could he swap talk with any of the foreign Indians upthere? Now Delaware was second nature to him for wasn’t he part Delaware himself? And Shawanee he could get along with.
    In the end they took the lefthand fork, and the light faded from Jary’s face. All that day and the next the forest continued to thicken. None but Worth had ever laid eyes on such trees. A black walnut stood along the trace and three of them couldn’t reach around it. No, they had to get a fourth to span it. Still bigger buttonwoods stood rooted on a creek’s bank. Worth reckoned the heaviest close to fifteen feet through. He bragged he could drive two yoke of oxen past each other and never get off that stump.
    Jary’s face had gone cruelly bleak at the talk of oxen in this wild place. She peered dully at the nameless stream. The giant trees reached over and covered it from either side. Even in the middle the water looked dark as old Virginia tobacco.
    “Ain’t it got sun in these woods, Worth?” she complained, her eyes hard on him like her enemy. And when he had shed his pack and gone nosing downstream with his gun and Sarge, “If anything happens me, Saird, don’t let him always have his way. You’ll never git the chance to see Pennsylvany again.”
    “I mought never want to go back,” Sayward encouraged her.
    “Don’t talk about the old state thataway.” Jarysat the log, her face slanted down, her head giving at every beat of the blood in her gaunt neck. “I knowed it that day on the ferry I made all your beds wrong for you. Now you’ll have to sleep in ’em as best you kin.”
    A long time afterward they heard Worth faintly hallooing down the stream.
    “What kin he see in here?” Jary muttered.
    “He mought have found some riffles we kin cross without gittin’ wet to our middles,” Sayward said. Together she and Achsa managed their father’s heavy pack between them. When they reached him, far off the trace, the stream was still deep and slow with flecks of brown foam.
    “Hain’t you got eyes in your heads?” Worth put at them, puffing on his clay, his own eyes sharp and knowing in his beard.
    Sayward expected at first the black soil where he stood was scattered with small gray stone. Then she saw they were the shed horns of deer. Most of them were broken up. Porcupines, squirrels and other woods creatures had eaten them through. And yet so many pieces lay around that at one place they made a thin drift like the gray leavings of last year’s snow. It was plain even to little Sulie’s wide eyes that herds of deer had been coming here for many winters to shed. Most every tree you looked at was rubbed smooth in places as their old axe handle.
    Worth said little but the smoke came fast fromhis bearded lips. He showed them what he called a shovel horn and a blue horn and one on which he counted thirteen points. In the crotch of a tree where some Indian must have hung them he fetched out two unbroken gray moose horns. When he set them on the ground and put their tips together, all the young ones save Sayward could walk under.
    “By the tarnal!” he kept saying.
    He took them where the dark stream emptied in a log-choked river. Down the river path he fetched them to a small run and up that run to a strong spring cradled in the knees of an old beech. The ground hereabouts was black as charcoal and the timber the densest stand Sayward had yet seen. God Almighty, she expected, would have to take an axe here if He wanted to look up and see the firmament He made. The big butts stood shoulder to shoulder, and something came in Jary’s sunken eyes as if she had found herself in a herd of those great foreign elephant beasts she had told her young ones a hundred times she had once seen splashing through the mud of a Lancaster street fair.
    She looked around her in a sort of terror.
    “You don’t aim to stay here,