In The Forest Of Harm by Sallie Bissell Page B

shoulder.
    â€œMaybe we’ll have us a party when we get to Simpson’s Bald,” he wheezed like a splayed-out accordion. “Or maybe we’ll just sit down and try to recover from the getting there.”
    He pushed his way through a stand of goldenseal that cluttered the trail. It was odd to see a flatland weed growing up so high, but these mountains always did do strange things. Birds that belonged in Maine roosted in Tennessee; trees that covered the cliffs of Nova Scotia sprouted up in Georgia. His immediate destination, Simpson’s Bald, was strangest of all—the bare top of a mountain that reputedly got its name from a Union spy who’d been hanged from the lone oak tree that grew there. The soil was a sick shade of gray beneath the limb-span of that old tree, and the mountain people teased their children with tales of witches and boogeymen who held horrific ceremonies in the wide circle of blighted earth.
    Brank, however, found Simpson’s Bald restful. He was accustomed to the single, ineffectual ghost that haunted the place, and no one else ever bothered him there. The mountaintop afforded a 360-degree view of the surrounding terrain, and the huge roots of the old hanging tree coiled so thick and deep that a man could lie down between them and wait out a blizzard without getting wet. It was solitary, it was safe, and it was also the one place he knew he could get a clear shot at his sister.
    â€œScheisse!”
he cursed as he stubbed his toe on a rock hidden in the goldenseal. Lately he’d found himself cursing in German, the language of his childhood. Though he had not heard a word of it in thirty years, for the past several weeks it had floated on the top of his consciousness like a bobber on a fishing line.
    â€œ
Scheisse
meant shit,” he explained to Buster as he recovered his footing. “
Esel
meant stupid.
Wiesel
meant me.”
    He trudged higher. The goldenseal gave way to a scraggly stand of white pines, which shrank into an even thinner scrub of rhododendrons. He decided that green things must run out of juice this high: all the effort devoted to growth at lower elevations up here went to pure survival. He scrambled over a final patch of lichen-covered rock, then he was there.
    In the dying daylight the mountaintop glowed a pale green. The single oak tree thrust up from the earth like a bone-yellow hand begging something from heaven. Brank guessed most people would find this tree unsettling, but he admired its stubborn defiance, and the odd, hardscrabble shelter it offered.
    â€œFate Lyons would have hooted at all these silly hillbillies, Buster,” he chuckled to the snake. “This old bald’s just a place where witches land their brooms.”
    He walked across the mountaintop and threw his sack down beneath the gnarled tree. His shoulders and legs burned from the final mile of the trail, and the cold wind that whipped around the mountain made his eyelids feel like sandpaper. With spare, practiced motions he quickly unfolded his blanket and laid it in a deep trench between two of the thickest roots. Punching his near-empty sack up like a pillow, he nestled down inside the trench. The hard earth felt good against his back, and for a while he just lay there, relishing the sensation of not moving. He would build a fire, but later. Right now he just wanted to be still.
    When the almost-full moon rose he got to his feet and snapped off some of the lower limbs of the tree. Dead to the point of being powder, they broke off with a groan rather than a crack, and a few minutes later they lay in a pile, orange flames licking their undersides. Brank huddled close to the small aura of light and warmth the old branches produced and stared into the fire. Though he’d missed his best shot at Trudy, the day hadn’t been a total loss. He’d mailed his pelts off and had some fun stealing that Cherokee’s photograph. He patted the pocket of his shirt