Grandfather's Journey
by S. Evans

We gathered things for Grandfather's Journey while he dozed: warm clothes, food, candles, a basket of names.

One of my aunts packed the travel roll, working from a list Mother had written. Mother lined us up from oldest to youngest, in front of the basket. She'd thought of everything, organized everything. That was her job; as Secret Keeper, she remembered things for the knot.

I held my tail low and whispered my name into the basket. My whiskers brushed against its handle. My cheeks tingled. I shook my head until my ears slapped against the sides of my face, and then backed away to let the last of the juveniles take her turn.

I wasn't quick enough to suit her. She flattened her ears at me and hissed her annoyance. I would have hissed back, but Grandfather chose that moment to utter a barking cough. The other juvenile backed away, turning toward the basket and cutting in front of a litter of babies so young that they hadn't lost their spots.

Grandfather showed me his teeth. His lips parted, cheeks bulging: amusement.

The Old Ones didn't emote properly; they couldn't. Their whiskers fell out as they aged, and their ears shrank, rounding and settling close against the sides of their heads.

I padded forward and grinned at Grandfather, confident that he wasn't going to chastise me. I was his favorite, and the whole knot knew it. Despite Mother's protests, he'd saved me from the usual fate of a runt too weak to nurse.

Grandfather had bullied Mother into letting him try to save me. He pitted his standing within the knot against hers. He won without having to fight; that was the winter before he'd stepped down as Secret Keeper. He kept me alive, letting me lick grain-mash from his paws until I was strong enough to compete with my litter-mates.

Mother had never forgiven him.

Leaning back against the sun-warmed boulder, Grandfather smoothed a forepaw down my spine. I shivered at the blunt feel of his clawless toe-pads, elongated and naked with age. He was so old that no one could remember when fur had covered his body.

He said something, voice slurred and overloud. I wrinkled my upper lip at him, and he repeated it more slowly. "Hello, kitling. What are they doing?"

I sat down, warming my toes with my tail. The Old Ones had trouble hearing. Some of them had trouble understanding. Grandfather didn't seem to have lost his wits, just his hearing. So I shouted. "Mother made you a basket to hold our names in."

"Eh?" At first I thought he didn't understand. Then he slumped over until his face was close to mine. I tried not to sneeze at the vegetable-smell of his breath. "Why?"

The juveniles were long gone; summer-season had started. Passing up the opportunity to hunt meant sleeping with an empty stomach-- not like winter, when the adults would dig up caches of dried meat to feed us. "To take with you on your Journey."

He nodded once, twice, unsurprised. "That sounds right."

I twisted around to groom a spot at the base of my tail, hiding my expression as best I could. When I regained my composure, I looked around.

We were alone; the adults had taken the babies back to the caves. "I was hoping you could tell me. Where do you go? What do you do when you get there?"

Before he could answer me, I added, "I worry about what's going to happen to you."

Mother had cuffed me for asking, last winter. She still had claws enough to make the blow sting, even through fur.

That was not for me to know, she'd told me. The end of the Journey is their secret to keep, not mine to share. For emphasis, she'd pulled one of my whiskers out with a deft tweak of her forepaw. I rubbed a paw over the spot on my cheek, remembering.

Grandfather showed me his teeth again, pulling his head down into his shoulders. If he'd had a tail, he would have lashed it. Instead, he waved a forepaw at the basket. "Well. I'm pretty sure you know more than you think you do. Do I take that with me?"

I thought of all the hours that Mother had spent twisting rivergrass together to make it. That much, I was sure of. I sat up straighter, kneading the earth with my claws. "Yes."

"And where is it I go?"

I dragged a forepaw through the grass. I knew the answer to that question, too-- sort of. "Away?"

"You see? You do know something." Grandfather was so amused that his words slushed together. "Do I have to go alone?"

I rolled over and stared up at the sky. Last year's leaves stuck to my belly. The smell of moist earth rose up around me; the touch of it soothed the itching on my back. "No?" I inhaled, tasting his scent on the wind. "Yes. Why, though? Is it dangerous?"

"What do you think?"

"Yes," I said confidently. No Old One had ever returned from a Journey. Their names were added to the Basket of the Dead once they'd left. I kept staring at the sky; my paws itched to chase the clouds that frisked across my field of vision.

Grandfather leaned forward. "Here's the real question, kitling. Is it deadly?"

Unfair, to ask a question that split scent from prey. I flattened my ears at Grandfather, but he didn't retract the question. "No," I snapped, lying to him. "No, no, it's not."

Grandfather stared at me; the ground began to press painfully against my back and I flipped over again. My tail twitched back and forth; I was sure he was going to chase me away.

Instead, he nodded and stood upright, balancing on hind legs grown long and hairless. He scooped the basket and travel roll up with his forepaws. "Well, then. I'd best be off."

He walked to the river-bank, and then started heading upstream. I hurried after him, picking my way across moss-covered stones and trying not to get my feet wet. "Grandfather, wait! Why are you going upstream?"

Grandfather paused, staring down at me, green eyes sharp as ever. "Up the mountain is the place where the river is born."

"The best hunting is downstream," I grumbled, licking at a sodden hindpaw. "And the Ghost Gliders nest upstream. No one Journeys in that direction."

Not that anyone had seen a Glider in a paw full of winters or more; they were rare. More than that, they were dangerous. They feasted on our dead-although they weren't picky about whether or not their meals were still moving. That made them proscribed meat; to eat them was to eat our own kind.

"No one must be my name, then." Grandfather glared at me. "My father Journeyed up that way. My mother, too. They must have been 'no one' also, hnh?" Normally loud, his voice echoed, shaking the rhododendron leaves and bouncing off the slate snags that rose out of the water.

I rubbed my head against his waist, twining around his stick-thin body and showing him my throat. "I'm sorry, Grandfather."

"You're not supposed to be traveling with me anyway," he grumbled. "Go home."

He slapped my flank. I slunk off into the bushes. But once he started walking again, I followed after him. He didn't turn around, didn't act like he'd noticed. But he reached into his travel pack and tossed a dried dove behind him when my stomach growled too loudly.

By the time the sun was mid-sky, my stomach was growling again and the snack Grandfather had left for me was long gone. One last splinter of bone was caught between my back teeth. I stopped to push it loose with a hindpaw.

I had to run to catch up with Grandfather. Rather than slowing down as the hillside sloped more steeply, he increased his pace to a ground-eating lope that I was hard-pressed to keep up with.

I tripped over his travel roll, tumbling tail over ears. He'd dropped it streamside, among the dull brown rocks. My paws tangled up; my head collided with a boulder.

Grandfather stopped at my wail, turning back. He'd started to limp. "Kitling, what happened?"

I untangled myself, staggering to all fours and holding my tail low to the ground. "Your roll, Grandfather. You dropped it." My ears were still ringing.

I picked the roll up with difficulty; the grapevine that Mother had wound around the bundle cut into my gums as I offered it to him. The smell of the food inside made me drool.

"I don't need it any more." Grandfather squinted into the sun, forepaws pinewood-pale against the handle of the basket he carried.

I shuddered, pelt prickling, and tried to offer him the roll again. But he was already moving. I caught the scent of blood-- his blood-- as he began to jog again.

The sun had only moved half a tail-length by the time I decided to abandon the travel roll, too. I left it half-buried, covered with a drift of oak leaves after devouring the rest of the food.

Grandfather had stopped as well, examining his paw-pads with some surprise. He picked at a hind-paw with elongated fore-toes. His motions seemed more absent habit than deliberate grooming; he stared upstream as he freed shredded bits of skin from behind his hind-toes, gaze distant.

I'd seen that look before, in the eyes of the other Old Ones who had Journeyed away and never come back. It made the fur along my spine bristle. I unsheathed my claws, taking reassurance from the feel of them sinking into the earth.

Mother raised us to be hunters, to face our fears. Sheathing my claws, I sauntered forward and leaned my head against the bare skin of his flank. When he looked down, I yawned so widely that he could see all my teeth.

Grandfather stiffened with amusement. But instead of knocking me over and mock-fighting with me, he looked away. "You should go home now, kitling."

I flattened my ears against my skull, confused. "But--"

Grandfather coughed. Instead of drooling politely, he tossed the mouthful of spit to the ground like it was a hairball. "Go." His tone brooked no argument.

I only had to turn my head to grip one of his hind legs in my jaws. I narrowed my eyes at him; his skin dimpled under my teeth.

Grandfather snarled at me, abandoning voice-talk. Despite his difficulty emoting, he could still swear clearly.

This time, though, I didn't show him my throat. I bit down harder, until my mouth was filled with the rock-and-bark taste of old age. I didn't quite draw blood.

He looked upward. I growled, lashing my tail before I realized that he was showing me his throat. "Do what you want, then. Just remember, I told you. You should go home."

When I opened my mouth, Grandfather stood up and limped upstream, muttering to himself. He didn't speak to me as I slunk along behind him. And no matter how much river water I drank, it didn't wash away the taste on my tongue, or the ache in my throat.

I thought he would stop once the sun began to set. I could see the obstacles along the riverbank: roots and stones, rivulets and tree trunks. He couldn't, night-blind with age as he was. But he stumbled onward anyway. I crept closer, but he didn't say anything to me.

The third time he fell into the water, I could hear his teeth click together. He didn't get up.

I leapt forward, nosing at him until he slung a stick-thin foreleg over my back. For the first time in my life, I wished I was older. If I had been a little older, I could have grasped him with my forepaws and hauled him out of the water-- but my toe-pads were still stubby, still useless.

Lacking any other way to pull Grandfather out of the river, I wrapped my jaws around his other foreleg and pulled, backing slowly up the riverbank as I hauled.

This time, I tasted blood, sharp-salt and coating my tongue. Grandfather's breathing was harsh in my ears, louder than the murmur of the river. He didn't yelp, didn't even twitch when I sung my teeth into his foreleg. Somehow, that made it worse.

Once back into the shelter of the rhododendrons, I collapsed on top of him. He was shaking; I realized I was wet. I rolled off of him and bit a leaf from the nearest branch. The taste was foul, but it cleared my head and washed the coating of blood from my tongue.

"Grandfather! Are you all right?" I nosed at him; his skin was clammy and he was trembling. Then he started moaning.

"…so cold. Tired. Need to rest, kitling. Not safe here…"

I backed out of the trees, shaking myself off. My fur stuck out in a dozen different directions. I didn't see anything. Grandfather had dropped into a deep sleep when I returned to his side; I could not wake him up by whining or by licking his face. I would not draw his blood again.

Had he been anyone else, I would have run all night to reach the home caves and Mother. But Grandfather was Journeying; his name had been added to the Basket of the Dead.

The most I could do was stay by his side, cleaning the tooth marks I had left as self-inflicted penance and curling up around his body to offer him what warmth I could.

I must have fallen asleep sometime after dawn, for I woke up thrashing. I stopped when I realized that what I was hearing was the rattling sound of Grandfather breathing.

He seemed thinner. Lighter. Paler, too; perhaps it was just my imagination, but I thought his scent had changed. The wound in his foreleg had stopped oozing, but it was still puffy and red. I licked at the tooth marks guiltily, and then decided to clean off his face.

It wasn't until I'd cleaned out his ears and his left nostril that Grandfather woke up. "Kitling--" He pushed me away, with a shudder. "My basket?"

"You dropped it." A flicker of motion distracted me. I lunged, and then spoke through a mouthful of mole. "Last night."

Grandfather grunted, pushing himself up on his hindlegs. I heard his joints creak; he was scooping up water in his good forepaw and dribbling it into his mouth. When he spoke, he sounded relieved. "Without the basket, I won't…"

I didn't wait for him to finish. I hated the way he looked, hunched over. "You will. You will!"

Grandfather glanced sidelong at me, and then sat down on a nearby rock, sprawling out. "Hope and hairballs, kitling. Neither gets you where you need to be."

He closed his eyes. "Go home. Leave me to the Gliders. Remember me to your children, when you have them."

I stood over him and snarled. "I'm not going home. I'm not going anywhere except with you. And you're going to keep going."

For the second time in two days, we stared at each other. And for the second time in two days, he looked away first, showing me his throat. He made a raspy sound that wasn't amusement; his eyes leaked clear fluid.

Some times, it was easy to understand him. I brushed the top of his head with my whiskers. "So. We follow the river to the top of the mountain today."

To my surprise, he shook his head. "No. I won't make it to the place where the river begins."

I waited; he didn't look defeated any more. Just thoughtful.

He sat up on his haunches, teetering a little. "I need a cave. A small one."

I bounded up the trail a few body-lengths, tossing up great clods of dirt with my hindpaws and sending pebbles scattering down the riverbank. "Well, then. Let's find one."

It wasn't quite that easy. The first one was too large, the second too small-- and so on and so forth. By the time we found the fifth, Grandfather was sweating and shaking. Red streaks were crawling up his swollen foreleg; when I apologized, he cut me short.

He looked like he was collapsing in on himself: his back was bent, and he staggered on his hind legs, doubled over with his forepaws tight to his stomach.

"This will have to do." He crawled into the crevice in the rocks. One of his hindlegs stuck out. "There's no mud."

I flattened my ears against my skull and looked for something small and fuzzy to crunch. "Mud for what?"

"For walling myself in." Grandfather's face reappeared as he turned around in the cave. "Get me some mud. And some leaves if you can find them, kitling."

For the first time in over a day, Grandfather sounded like himself. I let my jaw drop, and my whiskers prick forward. And then I went to get some leaves and mud.

Not too far upstream, I found a bank of rich soil, sliding into the river. I'd stopped on the way to snack. My stomach was tolerably full of trout, and all was right with the world.

By the time the sun began to set, though, I was lightheaded. My feet were sore from constant travel over riverbank and root. Mud was stuck to the roof of my mouth; it caked my fur and rubbed between my toepads.

And Grandfather had stopped talking.

There was a muzzle-sized chink in the mud-and-leaf wattle he'd made with his clever toe-pads. He'd used the mud from my last trip to finish covering the mouth of the cave.

I could hear him breathing, inside. I spat out one last mouthful of clay. "Grandfather?"

No answer.

"Grandfather?"

He snarled, from within the walled-off cave. "Go. Away."

Worried, I almost tried to smash the barrier down. And then I remembered: the basket of names. Without it, how was he supposed to remember me? All he could see was darkness. All he could smell was mud.

I looked about, frantic. No basket. Nothing I could use for a basket. No rocks, no hollowed out pieces of driftwood. And inside the cave, Grandfather's snarling was getting louder. The wattle shook, flexing as he pushed against it.

I closed my eyes and stuck my muzzle into the hole. Something struck me across the nose, stinging. I tried not to howl.

Instead, I yelled all the names I could think of: Mother, Father, my littermates and aunts and uncles. Every juvenile in the hunting knot, every adult and Old One. And when I couldn't remember any more names, I said my own, over and over, until I had only a whisper left for a voice.

When I finally stopped, Grandfather was silent. The wattle had stopped shaking. I backed away, lying down and putting both forepaws over my poor abused nose. I felt it carefully; it was intact, if sorely bruised.

The sun had set while I named names. Getting up, I climbed up the hill, backtracking until I could lie down on the slate overhang above Grandfather's cave. I was asleep before my whiskers touched my forelegs.

I waited at the mouth of the cave for two days, until the lack of food drove me back to the home-shelters, toe-pads bleeding and claws worn to stubs.

I had been gone on longer hunts, and less successful ones; Mother cuffed me for not coming back sooner and then made my littermates share their kills with me until my paws healed.

It would have been all right if I had kept my mouth shut. But no one mentioned Grandfather at all, except in the past tense. And when I objected, Mother held me down while Father bit a chunk out of me… both as punishment for following Grandfather and as a reminder.

"He's not with us anymore," Mother told me, after putting a poultice on my still-bleeding ear.

The poultice stung. I bit savagely at a stick, spitting bits of bark everywhere. "He is. I can show you…"

She knocked me over, with a snarl. "Stop. I don't want to know. He's gone."

"I know right where he--" This time, Mother clamped her teeth around my throat to stop the tide of words. When she finally let go, I was gasping for breath.

"No. What you did was wrong. Stop, now, before you make it worse."

The summer days shortened while I sulked. My ear healed. Mother stopped glaring at me, and eventually let me go back to hunting on my own. But I didn't go back to Grandfather's cave. I told myself that I didn't want to know, that it wasn't my secret to keep.

It wasn't until frost covered the ground that I followed the river upward, toward the top of the mountain. The trees were changing colors, and the river-moss was brown around the edges.

The cave was empty; the wattle had crumbled, falling away. I couldn't tell if it had been pushed open from the inside, or broken open from the outside.

I pushed my way in, but frost and river water had scoured away any hint of Grandfather's scent. The cave smelled like a cave, all damp stone and sand.

Something dark lay in the back corner of the cave. I took the two steps to the back and stared: it was only a bit of driftwood. I had been expecting bones.

Claws scrabbled against rock, outside. I turned around, staring out of the cave, past the crumbling wattle walls.

A Ghost Glider had landed a bodylength away, on the bank of the river. It was pale and tail-less, nearly hairless. It blinked its huge red eyes, looking in my direction, and then it shrieked, sails billowing around it.

Maybe it hadn't seen me. I tried not to flinch. I tried not to look; crossing gazes with a Glider meant certain death.

It shrieked again, the sound dying down to a series of clicks as it bobbed its head back and forth, hunting my scent. As it did so, I saw the marks on its forearm. Tooth marks. Healed wounds.

Marks that I had made.

"Grandfather?" The question slipped out, and the Glider whirled, locking gazes with me.

I cowered, terrified… but the Glider clicked again, looking away. It-- he-- examined his own foreleg, and then looked at me. And then he turned to go, moving weasel-fast up the bank and leaping forward.

I saw his shadow on the water as he soared overhead, crossing the river. And it wasn't until he was gone that I cried. My Grandfather was gone-- and worse, he remembered.

That night I sang the death-song to Grandfather's empty cave, and in the morning I left that place behind.

When I returned home late that morning, Mother sat next to me, dragging her scraper and hide frame to the sunny spot where I brooded.

"When I am an Old One and you are an adult," she said, "I don't want you to craft me a basket of names."

I turned to stare at her. She stared back at me; finally, I nodded. For a few moments, the only sound was the scrape of stone on hide. And then she spoke again. "You'll take my place as Secret Keeper, when the time comes."

I hadn't looked away. Neither had she. When I recovered from the surprise, I asked, "Why?"

Mother looked up, into the sky. "Because someone has to know. And because..." She hesitated.

I looked up, too, and wondered for the first time what it felt like, to have the air bear you up.

"...because it's beautiful to watch them soar."

The End

Story copyright S. Evans, published by the Fortean Bureau
http://www.forteanbureau.com