"The Raft and the Waterfall."

The Raft and the Waterfall.

Mark Patton.

It was our third night camping out, and there must have been two dozen of us girls gathered around the fire. The youngest were around eight or nine, and the oldest thirteen or fourteen. We had eaten the sausages that we had cooked in the embers around the edge, and the dough that we had wrapped around sticks and toasted in the flames. We were drinking elderflower cordial and waiting for someone to start up a song when, out of the darkness, a woman stepped into our circle and sat down with us beside the fire.

A hush fell over us like a blanket as the glow from the fire lit up her face, and we realised who it was. We had all seen her from a distance, admired her poise, her clothes, her jewellery, but I’d never spoken to her, and I was pretty sure that none of the others had, either, so it came as a double surprise when she started by asking a question.“Have any of you ever been bored?”We sat, for a moment, in silence. What sort of question was that?I looked up.

The grand old lady was gazing directly at me, her eyebrows raised. Her face was weathered, etched with deep creases like the bark of an ancient oak tree. Her long white hair hung down around her shoulders, and the clasps that she wore in it shimmered in the firelight. She smiled when she caught my eye. Then she nodded, making a little beckoning gesture towards me with her hand.

“I’ve been bored,” I said eventually. “My father took me fishing, and we sat in silence all day. He caught nothing.”The girls around the campfire laughed.

“And what did you do with your boredom?” the old lady asked, making the beckoning gesture towards me again.I didn’t know how to answer that one. Surely the point about boredom, I thought, was that there was nothing you could do about it. I was bored because there had been nothing to do.

“You were by the river,” she said, looking into my eyes, “so there must have been trees or reeds, and there must have been birds and dragonflies and beetles. Was there nothing that you could learn from them?”I shook my head.“Well, I know I still have plenty to learn from them,” she said, “and I must be, ooh, five or six times your age. But let me tell you about a time when I was bored.”

“I was ten years old,” said the old lady, beginning her story, “and I had gone with my father to a place faraway. We had gone there to visit my uncle and aunt, soon after my mother died. We had left my baby brother behind to be looked after by another woman, who had lost her own baby. I could have stayed with them if I had wanted, but I thought that travelling with my father would be an adventure. On this particular day, my father and uncle had taken me on a long walk, starting out early in the morning, just as the wrens and the thrushes were beginning to sing. We climbed a high hill, and my uncle had promised me that, from the summit, he would show me another land, far across the sea. He had been to this land, he said, and he would tell me stories of it in the evening. But when we reached the top of the hill, the backs of my legs aching, we could see nothing but clouds.

My father told me to sit there, and to keep watching, that eventually the sun would burn the clouds away and I would see the most amazing view that I had ever seen. Then he and my uncle went off to look at the rocks. They were away for a long time, but they didn’t go far. My father had a voice that carried, and I could hear him below me, talking to my uncle. I could peer over the edge of the cliff, balancing myself against a rock that seemed to hang in the air, and I could see them, feeling the stones with their hands, my father pointing first to one rock, and then to another. I even saw my father licking the stone, as if he could taste something special in it.

But the clouds didn’t clear. They only got thicker, so dense that they set me shivering and made my hair wet. I never did see the view that my uncle had told me about, or the land across the sea, or even the sea itself, though I fancied I could smell it in the moistness of the clouds.

‘Come!’ said my father, springing up between the rocks as swift and sure-footed as a goat, ‘let’s go.’ We walked downhill, following a fast-flowing stream into the woods. The trees on either side of us were in flower, little white feathery tufts. It was a type of tree we don’t see around here, ‘wiggen trees,’ my uncle called them. ‘There will be orange berries in the autumn,’ he told me, ‘that’s what your aunt uses to flavour the sausages that you love.’

It was the wrong thing to say, of course. My aunt’s sausages were delicious, but we hadn’t brought any with us, and now I could think of nothing else.‘When can we have something to eat?’ I asked my father.He stopped in his tracks and stood, his hand covering his mouth and beard, as though it was something that he hadn’t given a moment’s thought to. Then he jerked his head back.‘Your cousin has gone fishing,’ he said, putting a finger in the air, ‘he’ll bring some up to us if he catches anything.’

‘If he catches anything,’ I thought. My cousin was easily distracted and, if he did catch something, he was just as likely to make a fire where he was and find a pretty girl to share it with. There were plenty of those in the village where my uncle and aunt lived, and they all had eyes for my cousin.Deep in the woods above the village, we came to a spot where the clear water of the widening stream plunged over a sheer rocky edge. Below the waterfall was a patch of grass where the sun shone, and there my father and my uncle sat down.

My father had on his serious face, his forehead creased and his head supported by his hand. He wore this look like a mask, and I knew better than to disturb him when he had it on. He and my uncle spoke with a passion that I hadn’t seen before, and didn’t understand. One moment my uncle had his fingers over his mouth, the next he was gesticulating wildly in the air, but all the time speaking so quietly that I couldn’t hear what they were saying.Whatever it was, it was mens’ talk.

I clambered up the path beside the waterfall and sat down beside the deep pool above it. There, at least, I found friends of sorts. A little way back from the waterfall, a tree had fallen in to the stream, partially blocking it. A pile of twigs and sticks had accumulated behind it, and a family of mallards had made their nest on this floating platform, a green-headed drake, his brown-feathered wife and seven fluffy brown and yellow ducklings. I sat for some time watching their comings and goings, marvelling at the way that the adults guided their young, nudging them with their rounded beaks, always keeping them well away from the edge of the waterfall. It distracted me from the hunger that tore at the pit of my stomach. All the time I was expecting my father to come bounding up the path, as he had on the top of the hill, but I waited and waited, and still he didn’t come.

I walked to the edge of the waterfall and looked over. My father and my uncle had hardly moved. They were still talking, still gesticulating. My father had picked up some small stones and was planting them in the mud of the riverbank, pointing to them, my uncle leaning across to look. I went back to where the ducks were, dandling my feet in the water. The mother duck guided the ducklings back up onto the nest. The drake swam across and sat in the water in front of me. His orange feet were paddling beneath him to keep him still in the fast-moving stream, and he opened his bright yellow beak as if to speak to me.

‘What shall I do, Uncle Drake?’ I asked him, ‘my father is not like you. I think he has forgotten that he has a daughter!’He turned and swam back to his nest, jumping up beside his wife.

I took off my shoes and jumped onto the fallen tree-trunk, edging my way along it, curling my toes to get a grip on the rough bark. When I was almost level with the nest, I looked closely at it. The large sticks and twigs at its base lay higgledy-piggledy, as they had been washed by the stream, their entanglement with each other holding the nest fast against the fallen tree-trunk, but those on top had been carefully laid by Uncle Drake and his wife, some lying in one direction and some in the other. It gave me an idea. If something as flimsy as a pile of sticks and twigs could support a whole family, floating in the water, I could use something like it to send my father a gift that would grab his attention, distract him from whatever it was that he was discussing with my uncle.

‘Thank you, Uncle Drake!’ I said, skipping back along the tree-trunk and jumping up onto the riverbank. I knew, of course, what it was that I would send down to my father. He had spoken of nothing except rocks and stones since we had arrived at my uncle’s village. I walked up the stream a little way until I found what I was looking for. Peering down into the clear brown water, an eel was fanning the stream with its tail. Beside it, lying on the stream-bed, was a rough, grey stone, a little larger than my hand. I hitched up my dress around my waist and waded into the cold water, bending down to grasp it. It was the same type of stone that my father had been looking at earlier in the day. I dried it on the hem of my dress and licked it, hoping to taste whatever it was my father had tasted. It tasted only of the muddy stream-bed.

I had a small bag with me, and in it a little knife, and a ball of string that my aunt had given me to tie the bundles of herbs that I had been collecting for her the previous day.I set about cutting twigs from the wiggen trees, selecting the straightest and trying to keep them to an even length. Sitting down again on the bank, I took four of them and tied them together at the corners to make a square. Then I laid the other twigs across the framework to make a raft, tying it around with string to make it secure. Finally, I tied on the stone, binding it tightly. Then I waded into the water and laid my raft on the surface. It edged forward with the current, but then it slowed and wavered, as if the stone was getting heavier.

The front of the raft dipped lower in the water, until it tipped and sank. I reached down and grabbed it, and was about to vent my frustration by hurling it at a tree, when I heard Uncle Drake calling to me. He was standing on his nest, waggling his tail. I looked again at the nest. It had seemed small when I had first looked at it, but it was at least four or five times bigger than he was. Then I looked again at the raft in my hand. That was the problem, I realised. The raft was too small to support the weight of the stone. Rather than pull the raft apart and start again, I choose four much longer sticks and tied them together to make a frame, then laid more twigs across it, finally placing my original raft in the middle and binding it all together.This time, when I placed it on the water, it floated as proudly as a swan.

I pushed the raft out into the stream and it floated towards the precipice, gathering speed as it moved forward. The water surged towards the edge and the raft disappeared.‘Aiyee-ah!’ I heard, then a great splash, far too big a splash to have been caused by the stone reaching the bottom of the waterfall.

I ran to the edge of the waterfall and looked down. My father had pulled off his clothes and was standing waist-deep in the stream beneath the waterfall. He grabbed the raft and held it up to show my uncle.‘Can you believe this?’ he asked, handing it to him.I ran down the slope to join them.‘I always told you that she understands more than she lets on!’ said my uncle, unaware that I was about to appear from behind a rock.‘Yes, yes, yes,’ said my father, ‘but this is something else again!’

I ran to him and he lifted me as he climbed out of the stream, kissing me on the forehead and placing me back on the riverbank.‘Do you think it would work?’ he asked, turning to my uncle, a hand resting on my head, ruffling my hair.‘It did work!’ I said, tugging his elbow, ‘you saw it! I made it work! Now can we have something to eat?’‘No, no,’ he said, batting the air with the back of his hand, ‘I mean for real, would it work?’ ‘It is for real,’ I said, ‘how can you say it’s not real?’

He gestured to me to sit down with them. He was wearing his serious face once again.He took the raft back from his brother.‘The thing is this,’ my father said, looking directly at me, ‘this idea would work if there were a river leading all the way from here to the place we need to take the stones. That would work perfectly. The trouble is that this stream leads into a river that flows to the sea. The Elawar is a totally different river, many miles away...’‘Perhaps we could take one of these on the sea,’ said my uncle, interrupting, ‘if it were calm enough.’‘Yes,’ said my father, ‘but how would we steer it? How would we keep it off the rocks? It’s one thing to manage a raft on the river, steering with a pole, but the sea is too deep for that, I think.’‘Ah,’ said my uncle, patting me on the head, ‘perhaps it wouldn’t work. It was a clever idea, though.’

My father put the raft down in the grass, and he and my uncle went back to the conversation they had been having before I sent the raft over the waterfall. I sat with them for a while, watching them as one might watch two robins competing over a piece of ground, my glance shifting from one to the other. I hoped that one of them might turn to me again, but neither of them did.

Snatching the raft, I scrambled back up the path and sat down opposite the ducks.‘They don’t like our idea, Uncle Drake,’ I said, sobbing, ‘it’s not enough to float a stone over a waterfall. They want to float big stones on the sea, and they don’t know how we would steer the raft. How should we know? I’m just a girl and you’re just a duck!’

‘But ducks know all there is to know about floating!’I turned around, startled. My cousin must have crept towards me as if he were stalking a deer.It was not difficult to see why Engus turned the heads of all the girls who saw him. If I had been a few years older I would have fancied him myself, even though he was my cousin. Tall, green-eyed, with locks of fair hair falling around his shoulders, he had the stubbly beginnings of a beard. He wore calf-skin breeches and a jacket with a painted design, red and yellow bands in-filled with triangles. On his belt he wore a copper knife with a wooden handle decorated with a band of shimmering gold.

‘What’s up?’ he asked, sitting down beside me.

‘I’m bored and I’m hungry,’ I said, ‘and your father and my father have spent all day ignoring me.’

‘Why am I not surprised?’ he said, chuckling, ‘it really might be better to keep those two apart. Put them together and they could ignore the entire world. Your mother understood that, if nobody else did. But you won’t be hungry for much longer, that I can promise you. I caught four big juicy trout. I’ve left them down there with our fathers. But what’s this?’He picked up the raft, examining it, his smile broadening.

‘May I?’ he asked, rolling up his trouser legs.I nodded. He waded in and placed it on the water, watching as it floated.‘Impressive!’ he said, grinning at me, ‘so what’s the problem?’I explained to him the conversation I had had with my father and my uncle.Engus lifted the raft out of the water. Sitting down again beside me, he rested his chin in his hand the way my father always did, looking down at the raft.‘Just suppose,’ he said, glancing up at me, ‘we were to lash a boat on either side of the raft. Just a normal boat, the sort the people round here use for fishing on the sea. The men on the one side would paddle to the left, and on the other side to the right, and we’d have a steering oar on each boat. Wouldn’t that solve the problem?’

‘Do you think it would work?’ I asked.Engus shrugged his shoulders.‘You never know until you try,’ he said, ‘but I don’t see any reason why not.’He stood up, picking up the raft.‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get a fire started. You’re not the only one that’s hungry.’

I waved to Uncle Drake as we walked away, climbing back down the path beside the waterfall. I gathered the wood and built the fire whilst Engus explained the idea of the boats to my father and my uncle.‘I’m convinced that Nanti’s idea would work if we did it like this,’ I heard him say, as I carried over a pile of brushwood. I watched as he placed the raft down on the mud of the riverbank, took his knife from its leather sheath and scratched the outlines of two boats in the mud, one on either side of the raft. Later, as I gutted the trout by the riverside, and wrapped them in dock leaves to cook, I heard my uncle saying that ‘the weight of the stone must be taken by the raft and the water, not by the boats.’ He took his own knife and sketched seven boats in the mud, towing the raft from the front and both sides, ‘like a skein of geese,’ he said.

But by that stage I didn’t much care. As I enjoyed the delicious, rich tang of the trout, I knew that the stones would float, and the stones did float, and that’s how they came to be here.”

The girls around the campfire applauded as Nantosuelta, the Lady of Elawar, ended her tale. There would be no sleep that night, I realised. From where we sat, we could now see the stones of the shrine silhouetted against the gradually lightening sky in the east. Behind the stones, people were gathering for the ceremony. The drum-beat had started.

Soon the rising sun would appear behind the entrance stone, and with it the Lord of Elawar, Nantosuelta’s nephew and his wife, wearing the great masks of the god and goddess.“I don’t understand,” said one of the girls, “my father helped to bring the stones here, but they didn’t use rafts, they hauled them over-land.”

The old lady pointed to one of the largest of the stones, a beautifully dressed block that soared skyward, waiting for its companion-stone to be set in place the following year.“Your father helped my nephew to bring those stones,” she said, “the ones that he is still bringing. The stones my father brought here are different, smaller, but more precious, since they come from so far away. Your father wasn’t even born when we brought those stones here.”

“Everyone talks about the shrine your father built,” said another girl, “or the shrine your nephew is building. Nobody ever talks about part of it being your idea. Are you saying that it’s fine for women, or even little girls, to have great ideas, but that their fathers and brothers and cousins will always get the praise?”

“I’m not saying anything except what happened,” said the old lady, “my own memories of being there, and how I felt at the time. But if you expect the world always to be fair, you will live a life of disappointment. That much I have learned in my seventy years. Don’t forget that it is a fine thing for men to father children, but it is always women who must carry them, and suffer the pain. That’s just the way things are. Everyone knows my nephew as ‘Demacal, the son of Gwalchmai, the son of Arthmael.’ How often do they mention my mother, who died giving birth to his father? But don’t forget about Uncle Drake, either! Nobody ever mentions him when they talk about the shrine, but I know that he was there with me that afternoon above the waterfall, and that, without him, there would have been no raft. For as long as I live, he will be part of the story that I tell about the shrine. Now that you have heard my story, it is up to you how much of it you chose to pass on to your children, and your grandchildren, after I have gone.”

I had never spoken to her before that day, and I never spoke to her again. Later that year, as the first snows were falling and a great flock of redwings descended to take refuge in the fields above our village, the Lady of Elawar died.

My father had been out hunting a few days earlier, and had come back with several mallard. I plucked them, carefully keeping to one side the small green feathers from the heads of the drakes. Years before, when I was a baby, Nantosuelta had given my mother a deer-hide pouch, containing herbs. I had been desperately ill, and my mother was convinced that it had been the herbs that had saved my life. She still had the pouch on which, fading, but beautifully painted, was an image of the trefoil leaves of wood sorrel.

I sewed the green feathers in a double rosette around the painted image and, on the day of her funeral, I placed the pouch in her grave, overlooking the stones of the shrine.I took one last look at her face which, in death, looked like a carving in wood, and promised her that, if I ever had children, I would tell them the story of the raft and the waterfall, exactly as she had told it to me.