Chapter Twenty-Eight

COLD BISCUITS • WINTER STORES • PIRATES AND THE EXPLORERS OF AFRICA • AN AGREEMENT

FOR THE NEXT half hour, Beatrice pulled fish with greater frequency. Lionel stood observing from the shore while Mr. Hawkins went back up to the lodge to get the cook fire going. Lionel watched the growing number of fish as they lay packed in moss, gasping for their final breath. He had enjoyed the fish the night before and knew that he would eat them again for breakfast, but now, after seeing the starfish, he did so with an awareness that wasn’t present until this morning.

Lionel thought about his grandfather and wondered when he would return. He wondered what his grandfather would think of the starfish and these new thoughts that now raced through his head. Lionel decided that he would say a prayer thanking the fish for their lives. He sat down on the bank with one hand on the bear claws around his neck and sang a low song.

Beatrice caught another fish, threw it up on the bank, and then crossed the pool to join Lionel. He thought about stopping the song and telling Beatrice about the starfish, but instead he kept singing, and they were soon joined by Junebug and Corn Poe, who appeared on the opposite bank looking disheveled and wiping the night from their eyes. Lionel grew quiet.

“I’m thinkin’ that a swim is the only thing that’s gonna get me goin’ after a sleep like that,” Corn Poe announced, stripping off his clothes.

Beatrice gathered the fish, smiled at Lionel, and disappeared in the direction of the lodge.

“I suppose that’s right, leave the bathing hour to the menfolk. It’s only proper,” Corn Poe continued, slipping into the icy pool. Junebug followed, then Lionel; and soon the three of them were swimming where their breakfast had just been caught.

They ate the fish with cold biscuits and spent the rest of the day looking over and repairing the Hawkinses’ gear. Mr. Hawkins showed them their traps and the pelts and skins they had gathered over the course of the long winter. Lionel and Beatrice told Mr. Hawkins what their grandfather had taught them, and he soon put them to work in the smokehouse curing the meat and tanning the hides that lay in bundles, bent and tied in stiff squares.

This continued for the rest of August, with the five of them falling into a pleasant routine that felt the most settled since Beatrice and Lionel had fled the school. They spent the days preparing the lodge for winter, tanning the hides, smoking meat, and preserving the vegetables from their overflowing garden and the abundant huckleberries, blackberries, blueberries, and raspberries that began to cover the hills.

They saw the grizzly bear with greater frequency as he also chose to spend his late-summer afternoons in the berry patches eating his fill for the long winter that lay ahead. They also took walks in the Great wood, sometimes to hunt, but mainly just to take in, as Mr. Hawkins put it, “its magnificence.”

This strange consortium sat around the fire at night always in the open air, and Mr. Hawkins told them stories from the war, the Carolinas, and the few tales of piracy and the high seas that he still remembered from his mother’s island.

Lionel loved these times and grew closer and closer to Corn Poe and the mute boy, Junebug. They often stole away in the afternoons after their chores were done to act out Mr. Hawkins’s tales of piracy or to fish and swim in the stream.

They found a sprawling section of fallen trees in the Great wood that became one of their favorite spots. There, they would engage the pillaging pirates or the gruff sea captains that hunted them down, depending on what Hawkins’s tales and that day’s imagination dictated. A clearing opened onto a broken jumble of giant tumbled trees now lying dead and dying in star-shaped patterns stretching as far as their eyes could see. Lionel loved to run along their immense trunks and climb through their extensive branches, which, while still perpendicular to their base, reached up as opposed to out, their tips in some cases as high as the standing trees that still surrounded them. The fallen trees’ exposed roots were now the bows of great ships, the extending branches their masts and rigging. Corn Poe thought that they could walk the trunks all the way to Canada and never have to touch the ground.

When they weren’t engaged in piracy on the high seas of the Great wood, they wandered the rocky crags that surrounded the small lodge in the meadow, pretending to be lost somewhere in the ancient wilds of Africa—not recognizing themselves for the pioneers and explorers that they really were.

As the nights became colder Mr. Hawkins suggested that they sleep indoors around the crumbled fireplace, although he continued to sleep out of doors, the pistol and rifle always at his side.

Beatrice seemed happy, but also became more withdrawn. She slept inside with them, but as the cool weather approached, her coughing returned; and many nights Lionel would wake to find her sitting upright and staring into the fire, trying to catch her breath, or standing at the lodge’s thick-glassed windows, looking out into the night sky.

One morning they woke to find Mr. Hawkins and his bedroll covered in a light powder of snow, but the snow had all but melted by mid-morning, and the day turned out no different from the rest of these last days of summer. Beatrice agreed with Mr. Hawkins that they could all stay in the little meadow as long as they worked together and didn’t ask each other too many questions about why they each needed to stay there instead of moving to a more suitable climate.

On the morning of the second snow, they awoke to find Mr. Hawkins covered in another light dusting. He was sitting by the open-air fire, talking to their grandfather.