“I want you back before it gets dark.” His fingers pinched me and I pulled away, but he didn’t let go. “Punzel?” He said my name low, with an unspoken threat.
“OK!” I yanked my arm from him and walked off toward the forest. When I reached the trees, I glanced behind me. My father was still there, leaning in the doorway, watching.
I went straight to the gill and stared down into the runnel where we had sat the day before. The tree trunk still lay wedged from bank to bank, but all the forest litter which had been crammed behind it had been washed away as though it had never been there at all. The stone Reuben had lifted to reach the water to clean my face had even been put back—everything looked the same, and yet everything was different. I sat on the bank, patting my hair to check the braids were still in place. I tried out different positions and expressions: elbows on knees, looking moody; sitting up with the camel dress arranged in a circle around me; lying back in the afternoon sunshine with my eyes closed, humming. He didn’t come. Our scrap of land carried on moving while I waited, rotating away from the sun until I was sitting in the shade. And I suddenly thought Reuben wouldn’t be expecting to meet me here, by the gill; he would be watching the fawn again. I raced downhill, retracing our steps from the day before, slowing to a nonchalant walk when I got near to where I had first seen him. He wasn’t there either. I crept forward and parted the grass as Reuben had done. The fawn and its mother had gone. The only evidence that the birth had even happened was a few flattened ferns.
I did my rounds, plodding from one trap to the next. Two rabbits and a squirrel went into the rucksack slung over my shoulder. Perhaps Reuben crossed the river in the mornings; maybe he had meant to collect me from die Hütte, shake my father’s hand, and ask if he could walk out with me. He could be there now, or maybe he was ill, dying, washed away by the river. I was a few yards from the gribble when I remembered that we had talked about its sour apples the day before; then I was upon it, and Reuben was sitting under the tree, in a patch of sunshine, his back against the trunk, writing in a book. He squinted up at me.
“Glad to see you’ve got both shoes on today,” he said, and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. He smiled back, and those little pouches appeared above his hairy cheeks, and I wondered how old he was and where he had been born and who his mother had been.
“What are you writing?” I could see the slope of blue words across the page, but couldn’t make out what they said. I wanted to read them and take the pen from his hand and write; to remember the feeling of letters and words appearing from the ends of my fingers. He snapped the book shut.
“Oh, nothing. Just some thoughts, ideas.” He stood up and tucked the book and the pen inside a satchel he wore slung across his chest. “Come on,” he said, then grabbed my hand and pulled me. “There’s something I want you to see. We might already be too late.”
As I allowed him to tug me along a track toward the gill and away from the gribble, I remembered Phyllis’s grave and her head buried in the earth. When I looked behind me, over my shoulder, I saw that the twig marker was no longer lying flat on the ground but had been bound with string into a cross, which now stood upright in the soil.
“Wait!” I cried out, but laughed too while he dragged me behind him. “Where are we going? Why are we running?”
“Come on,” he urged. “I promise you it’ll be worth it.”
At the gill, I took a couple of steps down the steep bank.
“I’ve got a better idea,” he said. He still had hold of my hand, and with it he pulled me back up. “Let’s cross on the tree trunk.” It remained jammed into the bank on either side, but most of its bark had been stripped away, revealing the smooth and pale sapwood underneath. “Hold your arms out and don’t look down,” he said, stepping onto the trunk. He walked confidently along it; one, two, three long strides and he was across.
Reuben faced me. “Easy,” he said.
I lingered on the bank, my fingertips sweating and my mouth dry. I looked up at him and down at the trunk. I stepped forward—it was barely wider than my feet. I took another step, and my centre of gravity shifted out over the gill; I compensated, moving in the opposite direction, too far. I tried another step, too fast. Reuben was bending toward me, his arms outstretched, but there was no grip on the slick surface of the trunk. And I fell. I heard myself cry out, and there was a smack of pain as my hip and chest hit the rocks a few feet below.
“Punzel!” he shouted; then he was sliding down the side of the gill and helping me to my feet. “Christ, have you broken anything?”
My hip burned and the hand which had been under me felt crushed, but I said, “No, no, I’m fine. Really, I’m OK.”
He held my hands in his and looked me up and down. “Your dress is ripped,” he said. There was a tear through the beige fabric.
“It’s just an old thing. It doesn’t matter.”
We were balancing on the damp boulders in the bottom of the gill. I pulled my hands away from his to brush the mud and bits of moss from my dress and so I could look down while I worked hard at not crying. I couldn’t cope with being the centre of his attention.
“What was it you wanted to show me?” I said.
“Are you sure you’d still like to go? We could see it another day.”
“Which way?” I said, starting off up the bank, trying not to limp or wince. At the top, I went left, weaving through the bushes toward the mountain, aware of Reuben following.
“Across the scree,” he said, overtaking me. “This was why you needed your shoes.”
Behind him, I lifted up my dress to examine my hip—the skin was ragged, the area over my hip bone already reddening.
The ground underfoot shifted and moved, sliding us backward even as we climbed. Every year, winter frosts chipped away at the side of the mountain and the loose fragments of rock crept downhill like a grey lava flow. We scrambled up the slope for five or ten minutes until right against the escarpment the angle of the land flattened off, and we stopped to catch our breath and look back. The view carried us out over the frilly tops of the wintereyes and down to the spiked firs in the valley bottom. There was a flash of the silver river, and a green hillside rising up from the water, and, finally, the naked line of rock at the edge of the world.
“That’s where you live, isn’t it?”
“Come on, the sun’s moving,” Reuben said, and led the way along the side of the mountain, loose stones spinning out from under our feet and clattering off the mountainside. We came to an expanse of heather covered in a drift of purple flowers, similar to those I had found the grubs in many winters ago. In the shade of the mountain, Reuben crouched and pulled me down beside him. “Now we have to wait.” And he sat staring straight ahead at the bushes. I thought it was a joke, but he didn’t move; he didn’t look at me or say anything else. So I crouched there too, until the sun crossed our backs onto the heather, which trembled in the light, lifting its flowers toward the sunshine. As we watched, the heather flexed its petals, purple and pink with black-eyed spots. Like a ripple on a still pond, the flowers fluttered in the sun’s warmth and, in a chain reaction, they lifted, a flock rising and fluttering in the air around us.