The Underneath by Appelt Kathi

Author:Appelt, Kathi [Appelt, Kathi]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Publisher: Atheneum Books for Young Readers
Published: 2012-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

68

PUCK WASN’T THE first one the trees tried to warn. There have been others. A thousand years ago, they tried to warn Hawk Man. They tried.

As soon as Night Song stepped into the creek, Hawk Man awoke. He sat up and rubbed his eyes. How long had he been sleeping? He shook his head, groggy. In the nighttime’s dark, he waited for his eyes to adjust. He stretched his arms and yawned. Across from him, his daughter slept, the jar his wife had made beside her. He smiled.

Then he noticed the unused mat beside him where Night Song normally slept. The emptiness was enormous.

He looked at the quiet mat, cold and undisturbed. A stab of panic, like a knife to the ribs, pierced his chest, sharp and quick. Night Song. Where was she? He felt a cry well up in his throat, but he stuffed it back, afraid he might alarm his sleeping daughter.

Quickly he left the hut and ran to the edge of the creek. He walked first upstream, to the bend. There, the weeping willow dipped its fingers into the cool water. He knew that his wife often came here at night to wash her hair. But now, as the salty water tumbled by, there was no sign of her.

All at once, he heard a whirring in the air and looked up. Birds. Birds everywhere, lifting into the dark sky, thousands of them. He listened for a message, but their voices were silent, only the thrumming beat of their wings against the breeze. They filled the dark air, shadows against the sky. Hawk Man’s heart raced. This couldn’t be good.

He retraced his steps and walked downstream, past the village. He splashed into the creek and stood in the shallow water of the edge. He looked at the opposite bank, toward the thickest part of the woods, thick with brambles and vines and the poisonous ivy that curled around the trunks of the towering pines. His heart pounded. Surely she did not wander into the dark side of the forest, not there. Its large pits of quicksand could swallow up an unsuspecting creature—a deer, or a black bear. Once he and the whole village had witnessed a bison, up to its belly in the sucking mud, struggle for more than a day to escape. Its thick cries had been terrible and deafening. Finally the sand won and pulled the beast under.

Bereft at the disappearance of so much food, Hawk Man had cried for the loss, but to get near the beast would have meant certain death for anyone who tried. They would have gone under too, pulled by the struggling animal and the sucking mud. Helpless, he had stood and watched the great creature disappear.

The memory of the bison set Hawk Man to shaking. He had to sit down. Where was his beloved wife?

• • •

He didn’t know that there, in the realm of the Bayou Tartine with its little bayou sister, someone else was crying. Night Song. She

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