Bandit had a question: “Do you intend that we should discover our future dens now, for habitation later?”
“That’s what Custom dictates.”
“I don’t see how our dispersal according to Custom solves the issue of Dad hogging the River to himself.” That was Touchwit.
“It might. Then, it might not.”
“I don’t see how it might,” Clutch said.
“You can’t find out what’s inside a container unless you pop the lid.”
“Mom, stop being ineffable.”
“Que será, será!”
“How does Custom dictate that we should go about seeking our futures?” Bandit asked.
“Isn’t the future something that is not yet accustomed?” Touchwit asked.
“What have cubs done in years past?” Clutch asked.
“Go far, and farther than far. Each of you go in your own direction and at your own fair speed.”
Clutch caught the spirit of adventure in the lyrical High Words spoken by his mother. “I shall discover where Dawn rises from her bed to paint the clouds each morning,” he said.
“And I – I shall go to the back of the North Wind,” Bandit said.
“And you, Touchwit?”
“I shall find out where the Sun goes when you can’t see it anymore,” the daughter said. “What about you, Mom? What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. Maybe redecorate the chimney. Start a school for lost cubs. Learn how to create Makings. I’ll be here when you return with your stories. A can of tuna with a pop-off lid to the one who brings back the best tale.”
From this I learned that it wouldn’t be until the late summer that I’d hear their stories – if all the cubs returned from their quests.
11
Night after night I waited for a conversation to begin. I fondled the stethoscope draped over the arm of my study chair, listening for the rough, affectionate chittering which had become so familiar. But there was only a hollow silence. I felt like a parent whose kids had gone away to college. If at least the mother had stayed, I could have shared my sympathy with her through the wall. But Slypaws went too. With her children out in the world, there was no need to inhabit the chimney.
There’s a tree beside my house that I haven’t told you about. I never mentioned it because it didn’t figure in Slypaws’s lesson on gender. The tree will be gone soon – it is quite dead and would have been cut down two years ago except that the City Parks department appreciates how a tree that is dead can enjoy a second life as an ecosystem, and besides this tree remains beautiful in death.
She is a Catalpa tree, so stooped and withered in her old age that her lower branches touch the ground. Even in her prime, she seemed unable to revive with the Spring and her branches were still dormant in early June, well after the surrounding trees were in leaf. Inspecting her brittle branches, neighbours walking by my house would pronounce her dead in a voice loud enough for me to hear. Then she’d proudly put out her leaves and blossoms – immense, heart-shaped leaves and huge white wedding bells with a violet and gold interior that smelled pungent and covered the street like snow when they fell. The Catalpa was remembering the season of a distant climate in which her kind flourished, even though she has shaded an intersection here since the days of horses and carriages. She died from having lived.
Now her body is the hub of a community, a tenement for nesting birds and squirrels, and a cafeteria for woodpeckers. A chipmunk has dug a burrow between her roots.
It was 4 in the morning. Robins were singing all across the city like the rollicking lilt of church bells. First I checked the state of the river under a half moon, then looked out a second-floor window at the intersection. The Catalpa was backlit by the glare of an L.E.D. streetlight, making the spectral tree seem like an old photographic negative, its limbs outlined by a silver glow from the moisture left by the last rain. She had become a spirit tree.
Then a darkened shape moved on one of her branches.
It was the mother raccoon etched in cold starlight that radiated from her fur and danced around her ears. She stood up on the limb where she’d been lying, arched her back, and leaned forward into a satisfying stretch. Then she sat on the branch and licked her paws. She washed one paw, toe by toe, then the other paw, toe by toe. After, she began to work on her tail. I watched her at ease and caring for herself after a winter of motherwork.
She must have sensed me, because she stopped washing and looked straight at my window. My face must have looked ghostly in the streetlight. She casually took me in as a familiar feature of her environment. It was good to think that she was done with the chimney. That she no longer needed a secret shelter for her family. She could live outdoors, waiting for the first of her cubs to return with a story.
12
Voices behind my wall. In daylight. But they seem faraway. Where is the stethoscope? I can’t find the stethoscope! Then it occurs to me that the voices sound faraway because they are echoing down the chimney from the chimney top. Of course, it is a warm spring day, and Slypaws has woken up and decided to bask in the sunlight. But who is she talking with? Has one of her cubs returned home prematurely, broken and defeated?
I tiptoe out to the second-floor balcony. The voices are clear and elegant.
“Oh, but this is a most commodious burrow! However did you find it?”
“You are kind to say so. But no – it is not at all roomy and it is open to the sky. In addition to the wet weather, one has to endure a rain of twigs and straw deposited by earnest birds who fancy the concavity to be the foundation for a nest. Yet this hole suits the uses of privacy.”
“I smell cubs. Three small ones. Congratulations. May one ask where they are?”
“They’re out making their first solos.”
“And you are not worried about them? In these tense times, my body thought it prudent to produce only two children. But they are brave cubs. They are so brave they left home and never came back.”
This remark was followed by laughter. I heard Slypaws chuckling too. It must be a pleasure for her to participate in polite discourse again, after listening to months of bratspeak. The visitor seemed free-spirited and prone to irreverent mirth. Two mothers on holiday.
“You are a fellow Clanswoman from Creek Town, if I’m not mistaken. What brings you upriver?”
“Yes, you are right. I am of the Creek Town community. But, alas, that is no more. We are scattered to the four winds on account of the impulses of the Overlord. Do you know whom I speak of?”
“Up this way, he is called Meatbreath.”
Giggling.
