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EXCERPT TOWARDS HOME
Squelching along back of the woodshed, she headed off towards the woods, keeping the snake fence on her left. Land. Could it be that all of this was hers? The bobolinks lilting past her, the lichened stone piles, the pasture rose canes springing up here, every little crooked hill and valley on which she rested her eyes? Now she was flapping her arms in the gangling sleeves of the tattered raincoat and holding them up to the wind like wings. All this is mine? In joyous disbelief, she swished through last year's beaten-down field grasses.
The rain stopped for the time being, and a dim sun shone through the veil of mist that was creeping in over the tops of the elms. Back in Amherst the snow had been gone for several weeks, but here in the north country there still were little patches of snow in shaded hollows.
"The north country” she was in love with the very sound of it.
Before long, she reached the edge of dark forest, a forest very different from the more southerly woods where she had grown up. There were spruce spires, setting off the starkness of the white birches, but there were also clouds of vivid green which must be aspens leafing out. Spring might be later here, but it was spring, all the same. For a moment she stood, watching a flicker, who was clinging to a half-dead spruce, propped on his tail, cocking his head to listen to the distant knocking of a woodpecker.
* * *
Actually, there was drumming everywhere in the woods, drumming like strange utterances, in the unearthly, misty light. Although many of the taller trees appeared to be old or even dead, on entering the forest, Anna felt she had slipped into a realm of greenness made quick. Deep moss glowed with a greenish light. She was surrounded by the presence of life beginning. Fragrance overwhelmed her. It was in the pungency of the glistening balsams. But it was also in the life-giving ripeness of wood which was decaying into soil--soil which was host to the bristling baby trees struggling up everywhere.
Droplets of rain quivered at the end of branches. Now it was raining once again and little spatters were bursting through the dense canopy, bringing maple flowers showering down. Her dark raincoat was stippled with scarlet. Simply for the joy of leaping, Anna bounded deliberately wide over a rain-swollen brook which had gouged out a rocky path across the trail. Clinging to the hummocks beside the trail were a queer assortment of small, unfamiliar plants. Sometimes, sheer granite outcroppings veered up, grim amidst so much life, and yet, even from the clefts of these, cedars were sprouting. Along the rutted trail, spidery dead branches, tufted with strange nests of wispy lichens, stretched out to her.
"Anna," an inward voice plucked at her, "don’t you think it is foolish to be out walking like this? Nobody would know where you are. The track seems clear enough, but are you really sure you will be able to find your way back safely?"
It didn’t matter. Tingling with happiness, like a fairy tale princess drawn by an invisible thread, Anna had to go on. On, just around the next curve, just to see what came next, on, up the next rise to that cluster of shadowy grey-white birches. Then merrily, almost running, her feet were taking her pelting down the next, steeper hill, splattering on the soggy leaves. I know this place. Although I have never been this far north, I know it as I would know a beloved.
Ahead of her, over the top of the hill, for as far as she could see, stretched a vast, grey marsh, a strange, rustling place, where the shallow water was teeming with small fish, frogs and even a snake. You must be crazy, her inner voice rebuked her. But, closing her ears to caution, she picked her way out into the middle of the waterland, while the shrilling of frogs vibrated giddily around her. When she finally let herself look back, she was in a dizzying sea of cattails and alders and sound. But still something made her press on. She was only too aware of the ooze that was welling up in places, and the actual caved-in holes in others. All the same, even where the trail was under water, she found she could jump from hummock to hummock, brushing past the swelling alder catkins that danced around her."Oka-lee," cried a redwing who was perched on a ratty tuft of cattail. It was as if her feet were teaching her the new steps she needed.
Wasn't that a burst of lighter grey up ahead? Now a narrow trail, hollowed by the wanderings of generations of cattle, led her to an entirely different view. To the south of her spread sloping fields enclosed by trees. Here the fields were cared for, cleared and neatly fenced. Anna followed the old cattle path around the curve of a hill and halted. After the deep woods and the swamp, she had come to a view that stretched all the way across a valley--to the next concession, apparently, for in the distance she could faintly see an assortment of rusted barn roofs snuggled in a grove of spruce trees.
It was then that her glance was arrested. Rising in the midst of the field were a series of low cairns. In the now driving rain, the rock piles loomed like figures. Stifling alarm, she retreated to the lee side of an immense white pine and looked out again through the wavering curtains of rain. Who? Away back here, where she had thought she was so far from anyone?
Startled, she was turning to go home when, on the far side of the valley she noticed the jagged red bricks of a solitary chimney, remnants of a settler's house, most likely. Beside it crouched a figure, his long hair and ragged beard blowing in the wind, rocking back and forth on his knees, head bowing to the earth, swaying back, arching his back, hands upright to the pelting rain.
