"The Mountain"

The hippo did not look at her the way a something looks at another something.

She watched it from the roots the same way it watched her. The same way a soldier looked at you. The same way a crocodile looked at you---she had seen a crocodile look at the ferryman once, the whole long body of it gone still and aimed. The hippo did not aim. The small eyes set high in the great wet head moved over the bank and over the water and over her and did not stop, did not catch, the way your eye goes over a stone in a wall and counts it as wall. She was wall to it. She was a something on the edge of its water. It was not coming for her because she was worth the coming. It was only coming, the way the water came, the way the dark came, because the bank was where it was going and she happened to be on the bank.

That was worse.

She knew enough to know it was worse.

A something that wants to kill you, you are worth something to. A something this size that does not even want to will do it the way you step on something in the dark, and never know your foot has come down.

She counted its breaths. She could not help it; her hands kept the count for her, the small counting that was always running somewhere under everything, and now it ran on the long wet pulls of air going in and out of the grey mountain of it. A four-count in. A slow six out. She held the numbers. The numbers did not do anything. She held them anyway.

She named it Grandfather.

Because it was old---the hide grey and split and gone pale in long scars where other grey mountains had fought it across the years, and it moved the way old men moved, slow, certain, owed. And because you name a thing so it cannot be taken from you without your knowing; her mother had taught her that, or she had taught herself, and she did not want this one going out of her sight.

She wanted it named and counted and exactly where she could see it.

Grandfather. Hello.

She did not say it out loud. She knew it could not be talked to. She was a river child and she had never once in her life made the mistake of thinking the river, or the things that lived in it, would stop for words.

The stone was in her hand. The flat one. The brother's kind.

She was not going to fight it. She knew that the way she knew the hide was too thick and her arm too small and the whole idea a small child's idea. There was nothing in her that was going to beat the grey mountain. She held the stone because her hand wanted to hold a thing, and she watched Grandfather come, four-count in, six-count out, and she did not know what she was going to do.

⁂

Grandfather came.

There was no warning in it. No gathering, no lowering of the head the way a goat drops its head before it comes---the grey mountain simply stopped being still and was fast, all at once, the whole mass of it coming up off the shallows with the mud flying and the water sheeting off its back, and there was nothing in her that decided anything. Her body went off the bank sideways the way it had gone off the cliff, not choosing the water, only choosing not to be where the mountain was, and the mouth came down on the roots where she had been and the roots went to splinters with a sound like the whole tree breaking its own bones. And then she was in the river.

The cold took her, and the current took her, and she went under into the brown and came up once and got a breath that was half water and went under again, and the mountain came in after her. In the water it was not slow and it was not old. It was the fastest thing in the world. It went through the river the way she could not, the way nothing she had ever seen could, and there was no swimming from it with one arm that worked and one that hung and a leg that dragged behind her like an anchor. There was no away. The river ran where it ran, and the mountain was in it, and the bank was behind the mountain now, and she could not get to the bank.

She found the tree with her good hand. A drowned something, its branches wedged down in the dark against the bottom, and she got her fingers into it and held, and hung there under the surface in the brown with her chest already burning, and above her the great shadow turned, and turned, looking.

And here was the thing she had to do, and it was the hardest something she had ever done in her life.

She had to stop.

Everything in her had always been moving. The talking, that ran out ahead of the silence so the silence could never catch her. The naming, that caught things before they could be lost. The counting, that went under all of it. And the running---she had run since she was small, she had run from every room that ever tried to close on her; her whole self was a thing that moved so that the thing behind it could not. And the mountain above her saw moving. That was all it saw. It did not see her; it saw the thrash, the kick, the small frightened motion of a thing in its water, and as long as she moved she was a thing it could find.

So she stopped.

She made herself stop.

She made the kicking leg go quiet, and the good arm go quiet on the branch, and the breath she did not have go quiet in her, and she hung in the brown and did not move, and it was worse than the rock had been, worse than the cliff, because the rock and the cliff were somethings you did, and this was a thing you did not do. This was lying still while the biggest death she had ever seen turned in the water an arm's length over her head, and every part of her that had kept her alive for eleven years was screaming move, move, move.

She did not move. She counted.

That was the only thing she let herself do, because the counting did not show---the counting was inside---and it was the only thing keeping her from coming apart and kicking for the air her body was begging for. She counted the turns of the shadow. One. She counted the long seconds. She counted the wet pulls of Grandfather's breath coming down muffled through the water, four in, six out, and they were her brother's numbers, the numbers from the gold afternoon, the count he had put into her without either of them knowing it was a thing she would one day hold on to at the bottom of a river to keep from dying. She counted, and she stayed still, and she let the count be the only part of her that moved.

The shadow turned. It passed over her. It came back. It hung there, the small high eyes going over the brown water, over the drowned tree, over the still small something in the branches that was not moving, that was wall, that was a stone in the wall of the river---and it did not catch on her. It went over her and did not catch.

It lost her.

She felt it lose her the way you feel a hand let go in the dark. The great head swung off, away, the certainty going out of the turn, and Grandfather hung in the river no longer knowing where the small moving thing had gone, because there was no small moving thing now. There was only the river and the dead tree and the cold.

And then, from upstream, far off, there came a sound.

It came down through the water before it came through the air---a deep thing, a bellow, low and huge, another grey mountain somewhere up the river saying something in the language the mountains spoke. Grandfather lifted its head out of the water toward it. It made the sound back, and the whole river shook with it. And then it turned, the great body coming round in the current, and it went---heaving up out of the deep into the shallows and up the bank and away upstream toward the other voice, toward whatever the sound meant, toward a thing that had nothing to do with her at all.

She did not know why it left. She would never know why it left. The river had turned the mountain away from her and toward something else, for reasons that were the river's and not hers, the way the river did everything---deciding, and not telling---and she hung in the water and watched the grey back go and did not understand any part of why she was still alive.

⁂

She got to the bank a long time later, or a short time. She had lost the holding of time somewhere in the water; the count had gone out of her once the staying-still was done with.

She came out the way the river left her, on her front in the shallows, and she pulled herself up onto the mud with the one arm. The other one she could not feel anymore. The cold of the river had gone all the way into it, and the shoulder where the bullet had gone in was a far-off thing now, a cold weight hung off her that did not belong to her and did not hurt---which she knew was not a good sign and could do nothing about. The leg dragged. She did not look at the leg. She got herself up the mud and into the black under the leaning tree, where the roots made a kind of room, and she pulled the dragging leg in after her, and she stopped.

She still had the stone. It was shut so hard in her hand that the fingers had gone stiff around it and she had to think to open them.

Her hand went to her pocket.

It went on its own, the way it had on the first bank, before she told it to---down her wet side and in, past the cold cloth---and the shell was there. The cowrie. Cool and round and ridged under her stiff fingers, the one Márànata had sent ahead of her over the water, before she had a face to go with it, the one that knew her name. The river had taken the morning and the cliff and the second bank, and it had put the grey mountain in her path and turned it away again, and in all of that it had not got the shell.

It was still hers.

The lake still knew her name.

She closed her fingers on it in the dark of the pocket, and on the spoon beside it, and that was how she knew the rest of her had come up out of the river too---the part that was not arm and was not leg. There were things in the pocket, and a hand that had to be sure of them.

The sky over the river had gone from grey to a deep bruised purple, and the first stars were out in it, small and cold and very far.

"Best one on the river," she said. To Shèyí. To the stone. To the dark coming down.

Her voice was almost nothing. It did not matter. There was no one to hear it, and she had not said it to be heard; she said it because it was true and because it was his and because saying it was the last small thing she had left that was hers to do. So she did it, and the river ran, and the stars came out, one and then another, over the water.

Then she heard it.

Up on the cliff, where she had gone over---a sound. Small at first. A shift of stone. A slide of earth. The particular sound a thing makes coming down a steep place: a weight, finding its holds, coming down slow. Coming down toward the water. Toward her.

Her body knew it before she did. The good hand came up off the mud and crossed her chest to her shoulder, to the place the strap went, the strap that was not there and had not been there for a long time, the hand closing on her own thin bones and the cold wet cloth and nothing, the way it always closed on nothing.

She did not hide. She was past hiding. There was nowhere left in her to hide from one more thing coming down out of the dark, and her body had gone as still as the water had taught it to go---still in a new way now, a used-up way---and she lay in the root-dark with the stone in her hand and the sound coming down the cliff a stone's slide at a time, and she did not run, and she did not call out, and she did not name it.

She held the stone, and she waited to see what the dark was bringing her.