Page 101 of Dark Tides
“The river’s full of ice,” Ned protested.
“I know, I’m taking you to a lake. Have you ever been ice fishing?”
“No,” Ned said with no eagerness. “Never.”
Wussausmon hesitated. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Ned lied, putting on his big coat and tying his oiled cape on top.
“No—tell me?”
“No, no.” Ned hid his embarrassment in irritation. “Nothing. Nothing, I tell you.”
Wussausmon laughed at Ned’s bad temper. “Ah,Nippe Sannup!” he said, putting his arm around Ned’s shoulders. “Tell me what is the matter, for I can see you don’t want to come fishing with me, though I thought it would be a great treat for you. And you could take a fish to your woman: Mrs. Rose.”
“Don’t speak of her like that,” Ned warned him.
“Not a word! Not a word!” his irrepressible friend promised him. “But what is wrong,Nippe Sannup? Waterman?Netop? Friend?”
Ned sat to tie his moccasin boots, bending over them to hide his shame. “I’m not one of the People,” he confessed. “I’m not one of you. I’m not used to such hard winters that the ice freezes so you can walk on it, dig a hole in it.” His voice dropped lower. “It frightens me,” he confessed. “We have frost fairs in London some winters, but you can see that it’s frozen hard, and there are dozens of other people walking around. I can’t stomach the thought of stepping on a deep lake all on my own, and hearing it crack below me. I can’t bear to be all alone on the ice.”
There was a silence and he glanced up, expecting more laughter, but Wussausmon’s lively face was compassionate. “Of course,” he said. “Why did you not tell me at once?”
Ned shrugged. “It’s not the part of a man to be afraid,” he said.
“Oh it is,” Wussausmon assured him. “We teach our boys and girls to know their fear and step towards it as their friend. To use it as a warning. Far braver to face it than go away. Was that not the path of the Lord? In the wilderness? Facing His fear?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “That’s for Mr. Russell. I don’t know.”
“Don’t choose to be stupid,” Wussausmon begged him. “Whatelse do you fear here, in this land which is not yours and is so strange to you?”
“The forest… the winter,” Ned admitted. “God help me, I don’t want to be a coward; but I keep thinking: what if I fell? Or a branch of a tree came down and pinned me down, or even something as little as I set my foot down wrong and turned my leg and couldn’t get home? It could be the smallest of things and in this weather I would die before anyone knew I was missing.” He took a breath. “They wouldn’t find me till spring,” he said. “They wouldn’t even know I was out there.”
Wussausmon put a gentle hand on Ned’s shoulder. “Waterman, this is not cowardice, these are real fears of things that might really happen. It is true for me too: when I am sent all round the country on strange paths. Like you, I think: What if I were to make a mistake here and wander into country that I don’t know? What if my enemies are waiting for me? What if someone somewhere has lost patience with a man who lives in two worlds but belongs to neither?”
“What d’you do?”
The man grasped Ned’s hand and hauled him over the threshold and up the big bank of snow, helped him balance to put on his snowshoes. “Look around,” he said. “That’s what I do. I look around and I think all the time about what I am doing, not what I will do later or tomorrow, or any dream of tonight. I am here like a bird circling in the sky and always looking down, as the wolf going quietly through the woods, ears up, hackles up, scenting the wind, like the woods themselves always knowing. So I don’t misstep or let a branch fall on me because I am watching all the time where I step, what the wind is doing in the trees, what is around me, every moment of the time.”
“You watch for accidents as if they were enemies?” Ned asked.
“As if they were companions. They come with me everywhere I go, everything can always go wrong. I walk in a world where I am safe at this moment but who knows what happens next? I watch to see that accidents don’t surprise me—but I know they are always there. I make sure they do not creep up on me while I am dreaming of something else.” He looked into Ned’s face. “You be the same. Don’t be in a hurry, like Coatmen always are. Pause, watch, listen, smell, taste, hear, and use that other sense, wolf sense that tells you that somethingstrange is happening even hundreds of miles away, bird sense that guides hundreds of them to move as one, turning at an invisible moment. You have to be dead to your wandering thoughts, never thinking of what has gone or what is coming next year, you have to forget the last step or the next, you have to be locked into here, now.”
Ned thought. “Now? The wind now and the trees now?”
“Now, and now, and the next now after that. Where your feet are, and the snow under them, what is above your head and is anyone behind you?”
Ned nodded, thinking of awareness of the world around him, suddenly vivid and bright.
Wussausmon took his arm and looked into his face. “Now, can I teach you to fish?”
Ned grinned. “Yes, you can. And teach me how to watch all the time, as you do.”
“You can try,” the man promised. “But you are a people whose mind never stays on one thing at a time. Unless it is money.”
“I will try,” Ned promised.
“Follow me then,” Wussausmon ordered. “And follow in my tracks, don’t wander like a child.”
