“Tell me what you look for,” Barry said after a moment. “Show me a sign of their passage there.”
Mark looked surprised at the demand. “Everything shows they came this way,” he said. He pointed to the tree that supported Barry’s back. “That’s a bitternut hickory tree — see, nuts.” He brushed the dirt aside and uncovered several nuts. They were half rotted. “The boys found some and threw them. And there,” he said, pointing, “see that sprout. Someone bent it to the ground, it still isn’t straight again. And the marks of their feet, scuffing the dirt and leaves on the forest floor. It’s like a sign saying, this way, this way.”
Barry could see the difference when Mark showed him, but when he looked in another direction, he thought he could see scuff marks there also.
“Water,” Mark said. “That’s a runoff trail from melting snow. It’s different.”
“How did you learn about the woods? Molly?”
Mark nodded. “She couldn’t get lost ever. She couldn’t forget how things looked, and if she saw them again, she knew. She taught me. Or else I was born with it, and she showed me how to use it. I can’t get lost either.”
“Can you teach others?”
“I guess so. Now that I showed you, you could lead, couldn’t you?” He had turned his back, scanning the woods, and now faced Barry again. “You know which way to start, don’t you?”
Barry looked carefully about them. The scuff marks were on the path they had just made, where Mark had pointed them out. He saw the water trail, and looked harder for the trail they should follow. There was nothing. He looked again at Mark, who was grinning. “No,” he said. “I don’t know which way to go now.”
Mark laughed. “Because it’s rocky,” he said. “Come on.” He started again, this time keeping to the edge of a rocky trail.
“How did you know?” Barry asked. “There’s no sign of them among the rocks.”
“Because there was no sign anywhere else. It was all that was left. There!” He pointed, and there was another bent tree, this one stronger, older, more firmly rooted. “Someone pulled that spruce down and let it spring back up. Probably more than one did, because it’s still not quite straight, and you can see now that the rocks have been kicked around.”
The rocky trail deepened and became a creek bed. Mark watched the edges carefully and soon turned again, pointing to scuff marks as he went. The woods were deeper, the gloom more intense here. Thick evergreen trees covered the slope they began to descend, and sometimes they had to wind their way among the branches that touched one another in the spruce forest. The floor was brown, springy with generations of needles.
Barry found himself holding his breath in order not to disturb the silence of the great forest, and he understood why the others talked of a presence, something that watched as they moved among the trees. The silence was so intense, it was like a dream world where mouths open and close and no noise is heard, where musicians’ instruments are strangely muted, where one screams and screams silently. Behind him he could sense the trees moving in closer, closer.
Then, suddenly, as if it had been growing a long time and he only now had become aware of it, he found that he was listening to something over and beyond the silence, something that was like a voice, or voices mingling in whispers too distant to make out the words. Like Molly, he thought, and a shiver of fear raced through him. The voices faded. Mark had stopped and was looking about again.
“They doubled back here,” he said. “They must have had lunch up there and started back, but here they lost their way. See, they went over too far, and kept going farther and farther from the way they had come.”
Barry could see nothing to indicate they had done that, but he knew he was helpless in that dark forest and he could only follow the boy wherever he led.
They climbed again and the spruces thinned out and now there were aspens and cottonwoods bordering a stream.
“You’d think they’d know they hadn’t seen this before,” Mark said with disgust. He was moving faster now. He stopped again and a grin came and went, leaving him looking worried. “Some of them began to run here,” he said. “Wait. I’ll see if they regrouped ahead, or if we have to find any of them.” He vanished before he finished speaking, and Barry sank to the ground to wait for him. The voices came back almost instantly. He looked at the trees that seemed unmoving, and knew that the branches high above were stirring in the wind, that they made the voicelike whispering, but still he strained to hear the words over and over. He put his head down on his knees and tried to will the voices into silence.
His legs were throbbing, and he was very hot. He could feel trickles of sweat running down his back, and he hunched over more so his shirt was snug across his shoulders, absorbing the sweat. They couldn’t send their people out to live in the forests, he knew. This was a hostile environment, with a spirit of malevolency that would stifle them, craze them, kill them. He could feel the presence now, pressing in on him, drawing closer, feeling him . . . Abruptly he stood up and started to follow Mark.
Chapter 22
Barry heard voices again, this time real voices, childish voices, and he waited.
“Bob, are you all right?” he called when his brother came into view. Bob looked bedraggled and there was dirt on his face; he nodded and waved, breathing heavily.
“They were climbing toward the knob,” Mark said, suddenly at Barry’s side. He had come upon him from a different direction, invisible until he spoke.
Now the boys were straggling into the same area, and they looked worse than Bob. Some of them had been crying. Just as Mark had predicted, Barry thought.
“We thought we might be able to see where we were if we climbed higher,” Bob said, glancing at Mark, as if for approval.
Mark shook his head. “Always go down, follow a stream, if you don’t know where you are,” he said. “It’ll go to a bigger stream, then finally to the river, and you can follow it back to where you have to go.”
The boys were watching Mark with open admiration. “Do you know the way down?” one of them asked.
Mark nodded.
“Rest a few minutes first,” Barry said. The voices were gone now, the woods merely dark woods, uninhabited by anything at all.
Mark led them down quickly, not the way they had gone up, not the way he had followed them, but in a more direct line that had them looking over the valley within half an hour.
“It was a mistake to risk them like that!” Lawrence said angrily. It was the first council meeting since the adventure in the forest.
“It’s necessary to teach them to live in the woods,” Barry said.
“They won’t have to live out there. The best thing we can do with the woods is clear them as quickly as possible. We’ll have a shelter for them down below the falls where they’ll live, just as they live here, in a clearing.”
“As soon as you’re away from this clearing, the woods make themselves felt,” Barry said. “Everyone has reported the same terror, the feeling of being closed in by the trees, of being threatened by them. They have to learn how to live with that.”
“They’ll never live in the woods,” Lawrence said with finality. “They’ll live in a dormitory building on the bank of the river, and when they travel, they’ll go by boat, and when they stop, they’ll stop in another clearing where there is decent shelter, where the woods have been beaten back and will be kept back.” He emphasized his words by hitting his fist on the tabletop as he spoke.
Barry regarded Lawrence bitterly. “We can run the laboratories five more years, Lawrence! Five years! We have almost nine hundred people in this valley right now. Most of them are children, being trained to forage for us, to find those things we need to survive. And they won’t find them on the banks of your tamed rivers! They’re going to have to make expeditions to New York, to Philadelphia, to New Jersey. And who’s going to go before them and clear back the woods for them? We train those children now to cope with the woods, or we’ll die, all of us!”