He Walked Into The Mountains

 

            One night, early in the fall of that year, the first snow came while everyone slept. Like dusty dreams, light and powdery, it sifted down to reach ground level. There wasn’t much, not in the Home Clearing, just a light frosting. Elegant. Restrained. Glamorous.
            The wind must have been sleeping somewhere too. The air was as still as air may ever be. Through this scene a single snowy owl drifted, silently, and passed on, finding no prey there.
            As morning neared, the wind woke and shooed the snow clouds away.
            A fiercely blue sky peeked down through the canopy.
 
            Inside, as the family slept, the wind spoke to Twigg as in a dream. “Come out,” it said. “It’s time. Come out now!”
            Twigg woke with a gasp. He found himself at home in the cave, in his bed, wrapped in the Gifting Day quilt. He pushed the dear old quilt tenderly aside. He sat up, putting his feet on the stone floor, steadying his mind, considering the message.
            Cherry woke suddenly. “Why are you sitting up,” she said to her brother.
            “I’ve heard a call. It’s time to go out now. Cherry, tell them that, and that I will return if I can,” said Twigg.
            “I will,” said Cherry.
            “Don’t be afraid,” he said, to comfort her.
            “I won’t,” she said.
            It was strange that Ramona didn’t wake. Normally, if her children were up talking before dawn she would have noticed, but she didn’t. Neither did Blue, nor the Puma Bros, nor Ralph himself.
            Taking nothing with him, Twigg got out of bed, walked past his parents, opened the clever green door, stepped out into the morning, and closed the door carefully behind himself.
            The first snow, if it appears suddenly overnight, is always a surprise. To Twigg the beauty of the moment seemed like a precious gift. He was also amused to see his breath appear like smoke in the air. This snow would stick around; it was below freezing in the Great Forest.
            “Walk this way,” the wind told his heart. It blew toward the high peaks. “Let’s go up higher!” it called. It blew some snow so light that it was hardly affected by gravity down on Twigg’s head to get him moving.
            So, Twigg walked. He left his home behind, and all of his life there. He walked a path that was seldom taken. It was long and rather hard and rocky going up that steep incline. He’d never been there before, but he kept going up higher, as bidden.
            The underbrush thinned and vanished. Only a few firs dotted this mountain slope. There was more snow on this path, but not enough to keep him from walking. He walked higher and higher, until he was far above the tree line. There were only the granite slabs and peaks and the sky.
            He stopped and looked around himself. All he could see were mountain tops and the sun in the empty blue sky. It was very cold up here, near the sky.
            The sun dazzled his eyes. He wasn’t seeing much but light, and the air was so thin that he was getting dizzy. His head was pounding, and he was hungry by now. If someone had been timing Twigg, they would have said that he had been walking for about four hours.
            He sat down right where he was and closed his eyes against the brilliant glare of the sun.
            “Why am I here?”  he asked. He wept a little, for he was young after all.
 
            There was thunder in the distance, and he could see a line of clouds building on the horizon, though the sun shone on as brilliantly as before.
            The wind came back, pulling the thunderstorm along behind itself. As Twigg looked at the line of storm clouds a darkness separated itself from the cloud bank It was the Changeling.
            She was dark, impossibly huge, but flying in the light. She hovered there before him with  the sun glancing off of all her blackness. Her piercing eyes searched his face with longing.
            “Please help me again, Twigg,. Free me from this darkness!” the Changeling said to him, in a way that only they two could hear.
            “I release thee,” Twigg said in the deepest, most formal words of the Old Language.
            Rose, the Changeling, entered the light before his eyes. All of her darkness was as if it had never been. When asked, in later days, he never could adequately describe this change.
            “Come with me?” she called to his heart.
            “Not yet,” Twigg whispered after her. Again, he wept.
 
            He felt like it was time to go home then, so he headed back down into the forest. The wind was at his back, so it was faster going home than it had been going up into the mountains. On the way down, Twigg nibbled a few shoots and buds, which he found near his path. He scooped and ate a few mouthfuls of snow, for he was very thirsty and tired.
 
            Ramona saw him coming from a long way off, and when he was in her presence she held him in her arms and didn’t ask any foolish questions. She rejoiced that her son had returned, and she saw that he was changed.

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