“But you don’t leave footprints if you don’t want to, and you never break branches unless you want to,” said Rigg.
“Ah,” said Father. “You’re more observant than I thought. But since I told you to find me after the traps are set, doesn’t it stand to reason that I will make it possible for you to do it, by leaving footprints and breaking branches?”
“Make sure you fart frequently, too,” Rigg suggested. “Then I can track you with my nose.”
“Bring me a nice switch to beat you with when you come,” said Father. “Now go and do your work before the day gets too warm.”
“What will you be doing?”
“The thing that I need to do,” said Father. “When you need to know what that is, I’ll tell you.”
And they parted.
Rigg set the traps carefully, because he knew this was a test. Everything was a test. Or a lesson. Or a punishment from which he was supposed to learn a lesson, on which he would be tested later, and punished if he hadn’t learned it.
I wish I could have a day, just a single day, without tests or lessons or punishments. A day to be myself, instead of being Father’s project to make me into a great man. I don’t want to be great. I just want to be Rigg.
Even taking great care with the traps, leaving them in each beast’s most common path, it didn’t take that long to set them all. Rigg stopped to drink, and then to empty his bladder and bowel and wipe his butt with leaves—another reason to be grateful for the autumn. Then Rigg backtracked his own trail to the place where he and Father parted.
There wasn’t a sign of where Father went. Rigg knew his starting direction because he had seen him go. But when he walked that way, Father had left no broken branches, no footprints, nothing to mark his passing.
Of course, thought Rigg. This is a test.
So he stood there and thought. Father might mean me to continue in the direction I saw him go when we parted, and only after a long ti
me will he leave a mark. That would be a lesson in patience and trust.
Or Father might have doubled back as soon as I was out of sight, and left in another direction entirely, blazing a trail for my eyes to see, but only after I had walked blindly for a while in each random direction.
Rigg spent an hour doubling back again and again, so he could search for Father’s signs of passing in every direction. No luck, of course. That would have been far too easy a challenge.
Again he stood and thought. Father listed the signs he could leave; therefore he isn’t going to leave any of those signs. He’ll leave different signs and my job is to be creative and think of what they might be.
Rigg remembered his own snotty remark about farts and sniffed the air, but he had only the ordinary human sense of smell and he couldn’t detect a thing that way, so that couldn’t be Father’s game.
Sight and smell haven’t worked. Taste seemed ludicrous. Could Father leave a clue using sound?
Rigg gave it a try. He stood in absolute stillness so that he could truly hear the sounds of the forest. It was more than holding his body still. He had to calm himself and concentrate, so that he could separate sounds in his mind. His own breathing—he had to be aware of it, then move past it so he could hear the other sounds around him. Then the near sounds—a scurry of a mouse, the scamper of a squirrel, the jarring notes of a bird’s song, the burrowing of a mole.
And then he heard it. Very distant. A voice. A human voice. Impossible to know what words it was saying, if any; impossible to know if it was Father. But he could tell what general direction it was coming from, and so he moved that way, trotting along a path used by many deer so he could make good time. There was a low rise on the left that might block sound—he wanted to get past that; he knew there was a stream to the right, and if he got too close to that the babble of the water might drown out the voice.
Then he stopped and went into stillness again. This time he was reasonably sure the voice was Father’s. And he was more certain of the direction.
It took two more stops before he could hear the voice clearly enough to run continuously till he reached Father. He was saving up some choice criticisms of this tracking method when he finally reached the spot where the voice was coming from, a clearing where a large tree had recently fallen. In fact, the path of the falling tree was still sparkling blue. There was little occasion to follow plants, since they moved so little, except a bit of waving and bending in the breeze, but this tree must have fallen only a few hours ago, and the movement of its fall had marked a bright path through the air.
Rigg couldn’t see Father at all.
‘“Where are you?” he asked.
He expected some remark with a barbed lesson in it, but instead Father said, “You’ve come far enough, Rigg. You’ve found me.”
“No, I haven’t, Father.”
“You’ve come as close as I want you to. Listen carefully. Do not come any closer to me.”
“Since I don’t know where you are—”
“Shut up,” said Father.