19 The Beginning of My Story’s End

More About The Spring in the Winter and the Beginning of My Story's End The owl had broken the spell of winter, From that time on, things began to happen that you'd have to see to believe. Insects appeared while the snow was on the ground. Birds built nests, raccoons mated, foxes called to each other, seeking again their life-long mates. At the end of February, the sap began to run in the maple trees. I tapped some trees and boiled the sap to syrup. It takes an awful lot of sap to make one cup of syrup, I discovered– thirty-two cups, to be exact. All this and I was still in my winter fur-lined underwear. One or two birds returned, the ferns by the protected spring unrolled– very slowly, but they did. Then the activity

gathered momentum, and before I was aware of the change, there were the skunk cabbages poking their funny blooms above the snow in the marsh. I picked some and cooked them, but they aren't any good. A skunk cabbage is a skunk cabbage. From my meadow I could see the valleys turning green. My mountain was still snowcapped, so I walked into the valleys almost every day to scout them for edible plants. Frightful rode down with me on my shoulder. She knew even better than I that the season had changed, and she watched the sky like radar. No life travelled that sky world unnoticed by Frightful. I thought she wanted to be free and seek a mate, but I could not let her. I still depended upon her talents and company. Furthermore, she was different, and if I did let her go. she probably would have been killed by another female, for Frightful had no territory other than the hemlock patch. and her hunting instincts had been trained for man. She was a captive, not

a wild bird, and that is almost another kind of bird. One day I was in the valley digging tubers and collecting the tiny new dandelion shoots when Frightful saw another duck hawk and flew from my shoulder like a bolt, pulling the leash from my hand as she went. "Frightful!" I called. "You can't leave me now!" I whistled, held out a piece of meat, and hoped she would not get her leash caught in a treetop. She hovered above my head, looked at the hawk and then at my hand, folded her wings, and dropped to my fist. "I saw that!" a voice said. I spun around to see a young man about my own age, shivering at the edge of the woods. "You're the wild boy, aren't you?"

I was so astonished to see a human being in all this cold thawing silence that I just stood and looked at him. When I gathered my wits I replied, "No, I'm just a citizen." "Aw, gee," he said with disappointment. Then he gave in to the cold and shivered until the twigs around him rattled. He stepped forward. "Well, anyway, I'm Matt Spell. I work after school on the Poughkeepsie New Yorker, a newspaper. I read all the stories about the wild boy who lives in the Catskills, and I thought that if I found him and got a good story, I might get to be a reporter. Have you ever run across him? Is there such a boy?"

"Aw, it's all nonsense," I said as I gathered some dry wood and piled it near the edge of the woods. I lit it swiftly, hoping he would not notice the flint and steel. He was so cold and so glad to see the flames that he said nothing. I rolled a log up to the fire for him and shoved it against a tree that was blocked from the raw biting wind by a stand of hawthorns. He crouched over the flames for a long time, then practically burnt the soles off his shoes warming his feet. He was that miserable. "Why didn't you dress warmer for this kind of a trip?" I asked. "You'll die up here in this damp cold." "I think I am dying," he said sitting so close to the fire, he almost smothered it. He was nice-looking, about thirteen or fourteen, I would have said. He had a good bold face, blue eyes, hair about the colour of my stream

in the thaw. Although he was big, he looked like the kind of fellow who didn't know his own strength. I liked Matt. "I've still got a sandwich," he said. "Want half?" "No thanks," I said. "I brought my lunch." Frightful had been sitting on my shoulder through all this, but now the smoke was bothering her and she hopped to a higher perch. I still had her on the leash. "There was a bird on your shoulder," Matt said. "He had nice eyes. Do you know him?" "I'm sort of an amateur falconer," I replied. "I come up here to train my bird. It's a she –Frightful is her name." "Does she catch anything?" "Now and then. How hungry are you?" I asked as his second bite finished the sandwich.