Stone Junction

As he worked his way carefully downslope toward camp the next morning, Daniel felt simultaneously serene and raw.

Wild Bill was cooking pancakes when Daniel walked into camp.

‘Those smell wonderful,’ Daniel greeted him. ‘If there’s extra batter, drop one on for me. I’ve been fasting for almost a week.’

‘Yeah?’ Wild Bill tried to flip the pancake on the griddle, then had to pause and unfold it with the spatula. ‘What were you fasting for?’

‘Dreams and visions, as instructed.’

‘I don’t remember any instructions about fasting. Fasting is tricky. It can put an odd twist on things.’

‘It worked. I had visions.’

‘Just a second.’ Wild Bill slid the creased pancake onto a tin plate and handed it to Daniel. ‘So. What’d you see.’

‘I saw …’ Daniel started, then hesitated. ‘Well, actually I didn’t see anything.’

Wild Bill grunted. ‘Good start.’

Daniel couldn’t tell if the grunt was playful or cutting or both. He could feel the warmth of the pancake through the tin plate against his palm. ‘Do you want to listen or not?’

Wild Bill looked up. ‘Is it important to you?’

‘I cried,’ Daniel said, feeling like he was going to again.

Wild Bill said softly, ‘Then I’d be honored.’ He gave the pancake batter a quick stir and poured it sizzling onto the griddle.

‘It was something I heard,’ Daniel explained. ‘I heard my mother calling ‘Alie-alie-outs-in-free.’ That’s what you yell at the end of Hide-and-Seek when you give up the search. That’s how the other players know––’

‘I’ve played the game. When did you hear her?’

‘Last night.’

Wild Bill watched the bubbles burst thickly on the pancake’s surface, then slipped the spatula under the crusted bottom, hefted it a moment, flipped. The pancake turned over two-and-a-half times, splatting down perfectly. But Wild Bill looked glum. ‘Goddamn, Daniel, I don’t want to crap on your parade, but you deserve the truth. That wasn’t your mom you heard last night. It was me. Yodeling.’

Daniel stopped his pancake halfway to his mouth. ‘Yodeling?’

‘Yodeling,’ Wild Bill affirmed. He lifted the pancake and slipped it on Daniel’s plate. ‘Eat. You’re delirious with hunger.’

‘You weren’t yodeling,’ Daniel said.

Wild Bill turned solemnly and faced the lake. He tilted his head back, exhaled slowly, took a slow deep breath, then another, and then astonished Daniel. With a power and bell-note clarity completely unlike his habitual grunts and mumbles, Wild Bill blended and blurred long open vowels and gliding consonants into an undulant song that shifted between rejoicing and keening, delight and lament. Daniel heard it clearly toward the end: ‘Allleee-allleee-ah-sen-freeee.’ Wild Bill repeated the phrase, then whirled it through itself in tight variations, winding it inward, suddenly leaping an octave, then slowly letting it slide into the last haunting note.

Wild Bill stood listening to his voice echo across the basin until it was absorbed into the air. He turned to Daniel. ‘Yodeling. I learned it from Lao Ling Chi, my teacher when I was doing work on breath and breathing.’

Daniel said, ‘That was lovely, it was close, but it wasn’t your voice I heard – it was my mother’s.’

‘Whatever,’ Wild Bill shrugged. ‘You heard it, so it’s yours to understand. Me, I’m going to go look for mushrooms for tonight’s rabbit stew. If you feel ambitious, I got a stack of fir saplings I thinned that need to be trimmed up and hauled back to camp. They’re piled at the base of that big maple on the west side. Take the hand- ax.’

‘Fine,’ Daniel nodded, wolfing down a pancake. ‘See you.’ He wondered what Wild Bill wanted with the fir poles but refused to give him the satisfaction of asking.

Swinging the horribly lopsided basket he’d woven from split reeds and grasses, Wild Bill made his way around the lake and then up the south slope to the rim. As he went over the crest, he stopped and gave a short yodel: ‘Oodell-a-eee-ooooo.’ It resounded in the basin.

‘Jerk,’ Daniel muttered. Wild Bill – always watching for mistakes, and taking a malicious glee in pointing them out. What kind of teacher was that? Daniel was beginning to suspect Wild Bill’s eccentricities were merely a screen for incompetence, and with a mean satisfaction he realized how much he’d enjoyed the seventeen days by himself – no scrutiny, no picking and prodding and little put-downs.

Daniel did the dishes, then took the hand-ax and headed around the lake. The saplings were stacked on a small bench about a hundred yards upslope from the lake’s edge. As Daniel hauled the first one off the pile he caught a flicker of color in the corner of his eye, thin bright red, thinking snake at first flash, then, with a bolt of terror, realized it was a wire.

A voice screamed from the sky. ‘Daniel! Run!’

He swung the ax at the wire but he was a moment too late. The explosion rocked him and he staggered backward, hands covering his temples, staring blankly as the blast-showered confetti of soggy leaves settled around him. He looked at his hands: no blood. He picked up the ax and spun around. When he saw a wisp of smoke from the small crater fifty yards uphill, he let the ax drop to his side and started looking for the wire.

With the piercing cry of an osprey, Wild Bill dropped on him from the overhanging limb of an ancient fir, driving