Page 58 of The Forest of Lost Souls

“She hosed it off outside, moved it in here, and it dripped a few hours.”

“You’re a regular detective.”

Having no ear for sarcasm, Trott nods in self-satisfied agreement. “Well, I got experience with machines.”

“She recently did some serious digging,” Vector says. “We need to have a look around, see what project she undertook.”

47

A NIGHT WATCH OF WOLVES

At all times, the forest is simultaneously dreamlike and real. In daylight, it is a wondrous exhibition of green architecture, as pleasing as anything in a sleeper’s best illusions. At night, Vida has often thought of it as a shadowy stage where moonlight pools like mist in places and starlight drips and magical beings—sprites, fairies, elves—seem to hide everywhere behind masks of leaves and cone-laden boughs, waiting to step forward and perform in an amusing midsummer night’s dream. Now, however, this realm has no qualities fit for a tale by a master of light fantasy, but is instead eerie, alien, as if another universe wheeled through Vida’s, the particles of one seething through the empty spaces between the particles of the other, with no catastrophic collision, but leaving behind strange matter and unknowable presences.

The eeriness arises from her awareness of the kind of men with whom she’ll have to contend in this vastness, her beloved wildwood having become a battleground, changed as she had never imagined that it could be.

Without either urgency or tedium, one hour folds into another. Now guided by a Tac Light when needed, she ascends at a measured pace through timeless woods and arrives at a crest beyond which a shelf of flat, open ground reveals shallow beds of bunchberry.

Already at an elevation so cool that snakes are unlikely to be on the move, she unstraps her backpack to use it as a pillow. She lies down in the whorls of green leaves and tiny white flowers for what bedding the bunchberry might provide.

Vida intends to get two hours of rest and be awakened when the first light breaks over her. Her sense is that, with morning, she won’t just be fleeing from her enemies. She will also be advancing toward revelations that will elevate José’s death from accident to murder and martyrdom in the eyes of those who thus far remain blind to that truth.

Her dreamless sleep is like a tide on which she floats, gently rising and falling between the world and the world not. Sometimes, as the tide lifts her toward the world, perhaps she hears sighs and soft panting, seems to feel other sleepers shifting around her as they react to their dreams. Her eyelids are so heavy they cannot be raised. She chooses to believe that Lupo and the pack have bedded in the bunchberry to look after her as she lies helpless, a pleasant conviction as the tide carries her down into a swale of deeper sleep.

48

ETERNAL FAWN

The evening before Ogden dies peacefully in his bed, when Vida is eighteen and he is eighty-five, they linger over dinner while her uncle fascinates her with stories of the nomadic peoples that once traveled the plains and mountains of this state, hunting buffalo and exploring—Ute, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Apache, and Shoshone. He has much knowledge of them and admiration for them. They were as deceitful and violent as human beings are in all times and places, but they were also as courageous and noble and wise in numbers alike to those of other cultures, with rich traditions and codes by which they ordered their societies. He is sentimental, but his sentiment ranges from sweet nostalgia to melancholy. “They fade away,” he says. “So do we. This country isn’t what it was when I was a boy.”

Growing up, Ogden knew many people of the Cheyenne, Apache, and Shoshone nations who still kept proper faith with their history and ancestors. Three-quarters of a century later, few know the truth of the past in all its cabled fibers—or care to know it. Some operate casinos and are as slick as the Vegas sharpies who partner with them. Others boil their culture into a syrupy reduction of color and noise and dance, robbing it of its complex meaning while purifying it for the pleasure of audiences. With every generation, the young define themselves less by thehistory out of which they were born, and pour themselves into the one mold that globalism demands. This is also true of recent generations of other cultures, of all races and ethnic groups. The ruling elite loudly champion diversity but use the powerful tools of technology to shape everyone into like-minded worker bees and mindless consumers, into an obedient oneness. Her uncle has lived long enough to see this, weary of it, and mourn.

Toward the end of the evening, on a lighter note, he recounts vivid, charming stories about a Cheyenne maiden named Eternal Fawn. In his opinion, the other name imposed on her by the bureaucratic state isn’t worth speaking. In 1953, Eternal Fawn was a medicine woman dedicated to preserving the knowledge of ancient therapies, but also an artist of great promise, working in pencil and in oils to produce portraits, often of the living elders of her nation, each rendered in exquisite detail, with great care and respect.

“The portrait of you in the library,” Vida says.

“Yes. A gift from her.”

Only now, after raising Vida for more than thirteen years, he reveals it was Eternal Fawn who divined the existence of the placer mine and led him to it, who taught him, among so many other things, which mushrooms are edible and which poisonous, who saved him from despair when he came home from a war fought against a merciless and depraved enemy.

After they clear away the dinner plates and pour fresh glasses of wine, he tells her more about the artist. Too subtle to be felt, a draft floats golden waves of candlelight over her uncle’s face, a lavage that appears to wash away effects of his well-lived years. Or perhaps it is his memories of Eternal Fawn that, for this interlude, restore to him an appearance of youth.

Vida is enchanted by her uncle’s revelations. “You loved her.”

“The more amazing thing is that she loved me, too. I’ve thought about that for more than sixty years, and I still don’t know why she did or how she could.”

“Now, Uncle, no one could be easier to love.”

“That’s sweet of you to say, but you didn’t know me back in the day. When I came home from the war, most of the light had gone out of me. I was a house of empty rooms—and over two years, she furnished them.”

With her uncle’s first mention of Eternal Fawn, a mystery has been born and grows deeper with each memory he shares. Now Vida asks that it be solved. “Yet you never married. Why not?”

Spectral light sheets against the windows, followed by the first thunderclap, which begins as a hard crash and fades into a scrooping sound, as if the gates of Heaven are opening against the resistance of rust.

“Her family was proud of their heritage and deeply committed to Cheyenne ways, she no less than her parents and two brothers.”

“No intermarriage?”

“Not to anyone with skin like mine. They called me awasicus, which is a Lakota word some other indigenous people adopted.”

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