The Skeleton Tree Read online

  That was Frank’s way of saying that he had given up on building a fire. He had tried it and failed, and would never try again. But the strange thing was that he actually believed himself. In his mind, he could still build a fire if he really wanted to. It just wasn’t worth the trouble.

  I couldn’t imagine that the salmon would dry like candy, and by the end of that day they were starting to smell. But I didn’t complain, and I didn’t argue. I was afraid that if I made Frank angry he would leave, that I would wake in the morning and find the cabin empty.

  I slept under the table that night, as far as I could get from the door and the window. It was another restless night spent waiting for morning, with the wild singing of wolves in the distance. To see dawn come gleaming through the little cracks made me frightened instead of happy.

  But the thing did not come to tap at the window again. Night after night, as I added marks to the wall, it was the thought of that thing that kept me awake. Waiting for it to come scratching around the cabin was nearly as bad as hearing its voice.

  I kept myself busy, and I made myself useful so that Frank would stay around. I collected bottles and filled them with water at the stream. I scraped out a pit to be a bathroom, then made a toilet by bashing a hole in the seat of a plastic chair I had dragged from the beach. I even found a little box to hold our roll of toilet paper. I gathered buckets of berries: the sour salal and the hard little huckleberries.

  Frank didn’t thank me. He just dragged me into his schemes, his big plans that never worked out.

  “We’ll make an X in the clearing,” he said on our third morning. “We’ll make it so big they can see it from the space station.”

  We trudged up and down from the beach, dragging long chains of junk like old Jacob Marley’s ghost. We collected everything that was red, and we laid it out in the clearing. Frank stooped down and sighted along a stick to make sure our lines were straight. But on the first windy night, our X became a scattered sprawl of plastic bits. In a little fit, Frank kicked half the stuff back into the sea, and we never rebuilt the X.

  “We’ll build a raft and sail away.” That was his second plan, on the seventh day. He dreamed it up as the sun went down, and spent the whole night planning a great raft forty feet long. In the morning he sent me off to gather fishing floats, barrels and buckets. He took the knife and started slashing at the tangled ropes and fishing nets.

  For a while, I thought it might work. We had a small forest of logs, and more rope than we needed, and no end of things that floated. But every night the tide reached higher up the beach and stole our floats. Or the waves bashed our bundles into pieces. When Frank saw a smashed barrel tumbling in the morning surf, he looked frightened. I was sure he was somehow reliving our landing in Uncle Jack’s red boat. I actually saw him tremble before he noticed me watching. “What are you looking at, moron?” he said. That same day, he stopped work on the raft, and never started again.

  My notches on the wall spread toward the corner. Each marked another day of fishing at the pool, of hanging salmon up to dry, of arguing with Frank. Not one day was really happy, and one of the worst of all came on the morning when I went behind the bush we called our bathroom and discovered that Frank had used the last piece of toilet paper. Not even the cardboard tube was left. Not even the plastic bag. I had to squat with a fistful of leaves, and I felt like an animal.

  How we hated each other! I couldn’t stand Frank’s hair flicking, his pouting, his little laugh that made me feel so small. He tried to make me angry, refusing to talk about his life in the city or my uncle Jack. I sometimes thought he argued just to pass the time. He got mad when I made mistakes, when I put something down in the wrong place, when I didn’t answer fast enough. Sometimes he called me such awful names that I felt like crying.

  Frank still had the bed and the foam pad. It was the worst bed I’d ever seen, but I could hardly stand the thought that I had to sleep beside it, on the floor. I had to look up at him, while he looked down at me, and as long as he owned the bed he was in charge. If I wanted things to change, I would have to fight him for it, and I doubted I would win. He was too big and strong.

  On my half of the cabin I got the rickety table. On my half I got the fish. Another six or seven every day, they hung mostly on my side. I had to duck and weave to get around them.

  The only thing we shared was the flies. They filled the cabin as thick as raindrops, from tiny whining things to giant deerflies that could take a chunk out of a person’s flesh. They buzzed at my arms, at my neck and hair. I decided that flies were the most horrible things in Alaska, not counting Frank.

  On our thirteenth day in the cabin, the raven came back. I was sitting at sunset on the rocky point, hoping for a ship to come along, when I heard the peculiar whistle of his wings. I turned around to see him settling at the top of the skeleton tree, above the smallest coffin. He folded his wings and made a little croaking sound that I imagined was a raven’s way of saying hello.

  Hunched as he was, he looked sad and lonesome, and I wondered if he had come to visit the body of his dead friend. I remembered wandering through the cemetery after my father died, thinking that I was going to visit him there. I hoped the raven remembered his friend soaring through the sky, not hanging from a doorway wrapped in red wire.

  From the top of the tree he called again, his voice now a musical note like the sound of a wooden xylophone. Of all the sounds he made, it was the most beautiful.

  I wondered if he had always perched in that same tree at the setting of the sun to sing that little song. Maybe he liked to keep company with the skeletons, or to watch over the bones. But what if he came on stormy nights, when the moon shone through ragged clouds, and he roused the skeletons from their coffins? What if he assembled their bones with his black beak and drove them down from the tree to run through the forest? It was such a gruesome picture that it made me shiver, and then laugh at my own imagination. But as I looked at the raven perched above the silvery coffins, a strange little phrase popped into my head:

  The black fruit of the skeleton tree.

  Oh, I miss my raven. I would love to see him now, but there are only hours to go until we’re rescued. I know why he has gone, but not where.

  I’ll have to leave without him; there’s no choice. And one day he will come back to the cabin and find nobody here. What will he wonder? What will he do?

  I don’t think he will stay long in the cabin without me. He’ll hunch at the top of the skeleton tree, where he can watch for people coming. Then everything will have gone full circle, and it will be as though Frank and I had never found the place. The bones will rest in their coffins, and the raven will keep his lonely lookout.

  I wonder, that day, was he watching for someone when I found him at the top of the tree, with Frank sitting alone on the shore? Maybe he was waiting for the man who’d built the cabin. He might have been waiting for years.

  Or maybe even then he was plotting against Frank. Maybe everything that happened was carefully planned by the raven.

  •••

  As soon as Frank came out of the forest the raven stopped his musical gurgling. He flapped his wings and rose from the tree, flying off across the forest.

  Frank walked straight toward me with his hands in his pockets. His boots shuffled through the yellow grass. Then he stopped and turned, and we both stared at the mountain—at our mountain—with its craggy peak gleaming in the sunset. Streaks of snow were red as blood.

  To me it was a beautiful sight. But Frank was thinking only of practical things. “We’ve got to climb that mountain,” he said.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “It would take forever.”

  “One day up, one day down,” he said. “We’d have to spend the night on the summit.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if there are lights, moron.” Frank shook his head at my stupidity. “We could see everything from there. We’d know if there were people around. We’d know if this is an island or
not.”

  I shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course Frank would want to be the king of his world, to stand at its very top, for a little while the highest thing in existence. But I couldn’t imagine crawling up the rocks and over the snow. I could never sleep up there.

  “Have you ever climbed mountains?” I asked.

  “Sure,” he said. “Me and my dad climbed lots of them.”

  Again I felt a little pang of jealousy. My dad had been different. “I tried it once,” I said. “My dad and Uncle Jack took a bunch of Boy Scouts—”

  “You were a Boy Scout?” said Frank.

  “Just Cubs,” I told him.

  It hadn’t lasted very long. Uncle Jack signed me up when I was nine years old, thinking I needed friends and adventure. He liked the lady that the boys called Jacala, and volunteered to lead the troop of Cubs and Scouts into the mountains past Whistler. He made it sound like such a big adventure that even my dad came along.

  We trekked up beyond the tree line, to a bare slope of flat stones that slithered under our feet.

  “Don’t lean into the mountain,” Uncle Jack told us. “Stand up straight. Keep your feet apart.” Then he set off in the lead, with Jacala beside him in her little red shorts, and my father close behind, followed by the other leaders, who were followed by the Scouts, who were followed by the Cubs. And last of all, were me and Alan.

  Nobody liked Alan. He was fat and clumsy, the only kid who had never earned a badge. But he was my best friend in school, and I couldn’t just leave him behind on the mountain. He was afraid of heights, afraid of falling, afraid of snakes and bears and mountain lions. We had barely stepped out onto the shale before he was crying like a baby.

  “I can’t do this, Chris,” he said. “I’m scared.”

  I shouted for Uncle Jack, but he didn’t answer. I shouted for my dad and heard my voice echoing through the valley. It sounded high and shrill.

  They just kept going. My uncle, my father and everyone else. Alan and I hadn’t gone a hundred yards, and they were already just specks on that gray mountain.

  Alan trembled. He leaned forward and his feet slid out from under him. He sprawled across the stones with his arms spread out, clattering down the slope in a cloud of dust. “I can’t do it,” he said again.

  I yelled as loudly as I could—“Dad! Uncle Jack!”—and my echo yelled it over and over. But those distant figures kept moving, and soon they vanished around the corner of the mountain.

  Alan was too busy crying to call for help. He could hardly move. Angry and frustrated, I screamed for my father. But no one came back to help me.

  Step by step, I led Alan along. “Stand up straight,” I told him a hundred times. “Don’t lean into the mountain.” I carried his little canvas pack. I carried the stupid hatchet that he would not leave behind. He shuffled like a person on an icy street, and when we rounded the shoulder of the mountain, everyone else was rounding the next one.

  We didn’t catch up until they reached the end of the shale and stopped to eat lunch on jagged rocks. Cheered by the sight, Alan barged ahead, leaving me struggling along with his hatchet and pack. So I arrived last. Everyone else fell very quiet as I came up. Uncle Jack turned around to talk to Jacala as though he hadn’t seen me. My father was sitting on a stone, eating his sandwich, and he didn’t even lift his head.

  I wanted him to say that I had done a good deed by helping Alan, that he was proud of me for being the only one who had stayed behind. But he didn’t understand. He thought I was the one who needed Alan’s help. He was so ashamed of his crybaby son that he lost his appetite. He stuffed his half-finished sandwich into the paper bag. “Let’s get going, Jack,” he said.

  They never knew I had helped Alan. I didn’t tell them then because Uncle Jack hated boasters. And I didn’t tell them later because I didn’t think they’d believe me. But I promised myself that would I never cry for help again, and that I would never go back to the mountains.

  A part of me wanted to tell that story to Frank. But I was afraid he would laugh, or tease me forever. So I said I had tried climbing mountains, and I didn’t like it. But he wasn’t satisfied.

  “You scared?” he asked.

  “No,” I said, though that wasn’t really true.

  “Then why? Huh? Why?”

  He would have kept asking all night. I said, “Because it doesn’t matter, that’s why. If it’s an island, what’s the diff? We just have to wait for someone to find us.”

  “What if they don’t?” asked Frank.

  That was impossible. “They found the cabin guy, didn’t they?” I said.

  “Did they?”

  It was so frustrating sometimes, to talk to Frank. “Is he here?” I asked.

  “Is he gone?”

  That seemed like such a stupid question that I didn’t know what to say. I watched the last bit of sunlight vanish from the very top of the mountain, and the blackness of the world made me see that Frank had a point. I didn’t know that the cabin guy had been rescued. He could be wandering lost in the bush, or hiding behind a tree to watch us.

  Frank stretched and groaned. “Only one of us has to climb the mountain,” he said. “The other should stay here and keep fishing.”

  I didn’t like those choices. Climb a mountain by myself and spend a night on the summit? Or stay alone in the cabin with the skeletons out there? I dreaded them both.

  “Maybe we’ll draw straws,” said Frank.

  I thought he meant to do it right then. He walked away, as though to collect sticks in the forest. But like all his plans, he left this one unfinished. I fell asleep worrying about it, and I woke worrying about it again in the middle of the night. At dawn I was still trying to figure out what to do when I heard a little scratch at the window, and that awful voice came through the walls.

  Lousy birds.

  This time Frank heard it too. I didn’t know he’d been lying awake. But the bed groaned as he sat up. “What the heck’s out there?” he said.

  Seeing that Frank was frightened made me even more afraid. I crawled farther from the wall, until I knocked against the table and it rattled in the dark. The scratching at the window stopped. But the voice spoke again.

  I hate you.

  “It’s the cabin guy,” said Frank. “It has to be. He’s a lunatic.”

  But no man would have spoken like that. The words were hisses and croaks, sounds made without lips, without a tongue or teeth.

  Frank got up.

  “Don’t go out there,” I said.

  But he wouldn’t listen to me. He took the gaff and went to the door. He paused for only a moment, then pushed it open and went outside. I couldn’t lie alone in the cabin waiting for something to happen. I went after him, into the gray light of the forest.

  Frank was standing at the window, facing the trees. The shadows of the forest seemed deep and mysterious. Anything could be hiding there.

  “This is what happens,” said Frank. “People go crazy if they’re alone too long.” He slapped the gaff into his palm and suddenly shouted, “Come on! Where are you?”

  There was just a tiny sound, a tick and scratch. Not sure where it came from, we stared all around.

  No one’s coming.

  Frank bashed at the salal bushes. I whirled around, then stumbled back, and I looked up to see the raven standing on the cabin roof. He thrust out his head and opened his beak. That croaking voice came straight from his throat. I hate you.

  He seemed to cough the words from deep inside him, to barf them from his gaping beak. They sounded wicked and ominous.

  “He can talk,” said Frank.

  “I think he’s just making sounds,” I said. “I don’t think he understands the words.”

  Frank stared at me. “Gee, thanks, Mr. Science.” Then he rolled his eyes and flicked his hair. “You see? That thing’s a pest.”

  The raven was peering down at us, his head turned crazily sideways. It made me laugh. “You want a treat?” I asked. “Just a minute
.”

  I went inside to get a piece of fish. Frank came in right after me. “Don’t feed that thing,” he said.

  “Just a little bit.”

  “No!” he shouted. “I didn’t carry those fish all the way here so you could feed them to a bird.”

  “Then I’ll give him one of the ones that I carried,” I said.

  It was ridiculous. I couldn’t tell one salmon from the other, and Frank knew it. But he didn’t stop me as I tore a piece from the tail of a fish and went back out. I broke the flesh into pieces, which I tossed to the raven. He caught them easily in his beak and gobbled them down.

  “Frank, come and look,” I said. “He’s done this before.”

  Inside, Frank peered up through the window, looking just like the bird peering down. It made me laugh again.

  The raven wiped his beak on the roof, rasping it back and forth. He ruffled the feathers on his folded wings and cried out to me.

  “You want more, you’ll have to come down and get it,” I said.

  I moved a few yards from the cabin, into the ghostly edges of the morning. I knelt there and held out the fish.

  It was comical how the raven fretted. He paced at the edge of the roof, then dropped to the ground and turned in little circles. He hopped toward me; he hopped away. But very slowly, an inch or two at a time, he came nearer.

  It was a long time before he stood close enough that I could feed him. I held out my hand with a piece of fish in my fingers, and he leaned forward as far as he could. He leaned so far that he lost his balance and had to catch himself with frantic flaps of his wings. He was a little clown who made me laugh out loud.

  He tipped his head and stared at me with one black eye as round and bright as a little marble. You took it, he whispered. Then he came the rest of the way in one hop and plucked the fish from my fingers. He ate it right there, watching me as he gobbled it down. I fed him another piece before I tried to touch him. He watched my hand move slowly nearer, then closed his eyes and trembled all over. But he didn’t move away. With just the tips of my fingers I brushed the feathers on his wings. They were surprisingly cold and coarse. I touched his back, his shoulder, moving my fingers slowly toward the little feathers that made overlapping rows around his neck. But he’d had enough. With a cry, he opened his huge wings and flew up into the trees.