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Blue Mountain

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

TUK

Tuk was born in the snow and wind of early spring. He was the biggest lamb born on the lambing cliffs that season, and for seasons out of memory. Gradually, over the generations, bighorns had been getting smaller, but Tuk was a reminder of the herd's former days of greatness.

Soon after his birth Tuk stood on shaky legs. Before the day was out he could run and leap small leaps and keep up with his mother, Pamir, as she grazed on the sparse grasses of the rocky heights.

"Who are we?" he asked Pamir.

"We are the bighorn," she replied. "We live on the mountain's high places, above where most animals can live, above even where the trees can grow."

"Bighorn?" Tuk said. "But your horns are small."

"That is because I am a female," said Pamir. "But you are a male, and when you are grown, a ram, you will have big horns. You will use them only in sport, to prove you are strong enough to father the lambs."

Two other males, Ovis and Rim, were also born on the lambing cliffs that spring, as well as four females: Nai, Mouf, Sto, and Dall.

The nursery band ran and jumped and butted one another playfully. They ran faster each day, zig, zag, darting through the legs of their mothers, and from one end of the meadow to the other. Though Ovis was a good climber, Tuk was at least as good and sometimes could go even higher. They ran races, and though Rim often won, Tuk was almost as fast, and sometimes faster. Nai was graceful and could jump far, but Tuk could jump, too, and sometimes farther. Mouf asked many questions, and Tuk was the one who searched out the answers. Sto was quiet and timid and did not like to venture far from her mother, but sometimes Tuk could persuade her to play.

Dall was calm and steady. She was the one who decided they had explored a patch of grass enough, and when she sought out a new patch, they all followed. She would only wait for one, and that was Tuk.

After a few days, Pamir said to Tuk, "Tomorrow we return to the main herd. Before we go, I must teach you the most important thing about the bighorn. Listen, and I will tell you an old story."

When the mountain first created the deer, she said, "Consider my austere beauty. You may have it for your own." The deer said, "The mountain is too rocky and forbidding. We would rather have the lowlands and the brooks, and the woods to hide in, and antlers with which to fight our enemies." And so the mountain gave them their desire.

Then the mountain created the elk and said, "Ponder well my severe beauty. You may have it for your own." The elk said, "We do not want the mountain. It is too steep and cold and craggy. Give us the hills and the valleys and the rushing creeks, and give us bigger antlers even than the deer with which to fight our enemies." And so the mountain gave them their desire.

When the mountain made Lord Denu, the first of the bighorn, she said to him, "I am rocky and forbidding. I am steep and cold and craggy, but do I not have my own beauty? Will you be the one to have it?"

"Yes," Denu said, "we will, because from the top we can see the lowlands and the brooks and the woods. We can see the hills and the valleys and the rushing creeks. We can see the world."

The mountain was so pleased with Denu's answer that she gave him tricky feet so he could scale the steep places nimbly. She gave him strong jaws and bowels so he could eat the forage that grew out of the mountain. She gave him horns that were thicker and stronger and more powerful than the antlers of the deer and the elk together, but she called Denu the peaceable one.

"Peaceable?" Tuk asked.

"It meant we would survive because of our speed and agility on the heights, where predators cannot follow," Pamir explained. "We would thrive as a herd at peace with one another, and the bear and the puma and the wolf would see our great numbers and stay away. The mountain cannot be beautiful without us."

SUMMER MEADOW

The next day the nursery band and their mothers left the lambing cliffs to join the main herd at the summer range.

"Now that you are quick and the wind is warm, we go to the sweet grass farther down the mountain," Pamir said to Tuk. "You will meet the yearlings and the barren ewes."

"What are yearlings?" Tuk asked.

"They are the lambs that were born last year."

The lambs and their mothers started down the mountain, past elk-kill meadow and avalanche slope and the lodgepole forest. They passed black stumps in the bracken where the forest had burned long ago, and crossed quick, shallow rivers. The ewes taught their lambs the traditional paths that had been used by the bighorn for countless generations. Tuk, and Rim with him, wanted to explore, but their mothers would not allow it.

"Rams may roam and wander, but ewes and lambs who are wise stay to the ancient trails," Pamir said.

The lambs seemed to have always known the scent of bear scat, and the track of the puma and the call of the wolf. They learned where mineral licks might be found and where the sweetest grasses grew at the edge of the late-melting snow. That evening they bedded down in fleabane and yarrow beside loon lake, and from there Tuk had an unobstructed view of the sky.

Abruptly, the low evening sun broke apart the clouds and he thought he saw the far sky take the shape of a great high mountain, blue and unsolid. Tuk had thought he could see the whole world from the lambing cliffs, but now he saw that the world went on forever.

"Dall, look!" he said, but in the next moment the clouds covered the sun again, and the blue mountain vanished.

"What is it?" Dall asked.

"I thought I saw—" But he had no words to describe a mountain that floated one moment and was gone the next.

The loon called, and Tuk wondered if his life was not only one thing, and not only his. He thought he understood what his mother meant when she taught him that his kind had been always, and he was part of the always.

* * *

The next day they walked again, down and down. The rooty trail led them to new delights—beds of gentian and nodding onion, and stretches of soft grass between the stones.

Just before evening a comforting scent came to Tuk—a musky scent like his mother's. Tuk and his nursery band came to a long ridge that overhung a sloping meadow rimmed on the north and south by rock and cliff and pine. The meadow stretched downward in folds and dips and rises, spotted by cloud shadow.

Beyond the meadow the mountain continued westward to drop down in natural terraces of field and forest, finally bottoming out in the hazy distance into a vast valley. Across the valley rose a mountain covered thickly in trees, and beyond that another hazy green mountain, only a little higher than treed mountain. After that was the endless sky.

* * *

The mothers led them down from the ridge into the sloping meadow, and as they came the barren ewes and yearlings of the main herd gathered around. There were about twenty of them, and they nosed and nudged the lambs as gently as if they were their own. "Welcome, welcome," they said, "we have been waiting."

After a time everyone fell silent, and the herd parted for an old ewe—old, but not weak or ill. She walked among them as if she had known them since they were lambs, for indeed she had. She was Kenir, the matriarch and leader of the herd.

"Let Kenir see the lambs," some in the herd said.

The mother ewes drew their lambs to their sides and lowered their eyes so none would see their pride.

"Stand tall, Tuk," Pamir said.

Kenir looked solemnly over the new crop of lambs. She sniffed Ovis and Rim and the female lambs and nodded solemnly before Dall.

"This one will be a matriarch someday," she said of Dall.

She looked last at Tuk. Pamir dipped her head to Kenir.

"What is his name?" Kenir asked.

"His name is Tuk."

Kenir looked Tuk over, up and down and around.

"Before man hunted with guns and took our territory, the biggest rams fathered lambs like this one."

The herd murmured. Just at that moment the clouds to the west opened and again Tuk saw the blue mountain.

"What do you see, Tuk?" Kenir asked.

"I thought I saw a mountain made of the sky," he said. "But it is gone now."

"A mountain made of sky?"

"Yes," Tuk said. "It was blue like the sky, and white as a cloud at the top, but it was flat as a dry leaf against the horizon."

The herd made another murmuring sound.

"Have you seen it, then, Tuk?" Kenir said, wondering. "You call it blue mountain, but others have called it story mountain because so few see it, and fewer still believe it is real. The stories say that there the meadows are knee-deep in grass, the streams are never dry, even in summer, and that man never goes there."

"He says he sees story mountain," one ewe whispered to another.

"He calls it blue mountain," said another.

"He is only a lamb."

"But he is a big one," Rim said, defending his friend, "as the lambs were long ago."

Kenir raised her head and gazed over the herd until they were silent. "This Tuk the mountain has given us to keep the herd from dying out," she said. "To him I will tell all my stories."

The herd began to press him. Pamir grunted a warning.

A yearling named Balus said, "How can a lamb, even a big one, keep the herd from dying out? Can he stop man from destroying the winter grazing grounds? Can he stop man and wolf and puma from hunting us?"

Tuk waited for someone to answer, but no one did.

"When I am grown and I have horns, I will fight winter and wolves and man," Tuk said.

The herd laughed. "Perhaps your mother has not taught you that the bighorn are peaceable," an elder ewe said.

"Maybe he is not a bighorn," Balus said. "Maybe he is some other creature."

The yearlings laughed and wandered away to graze, but Tuk's nursery band stayed with him.

"You are too young to save us just yet, Tuk," Pamir said gently. "Go play, all of you."

Kenir and Pamir spoke quietly together, and Tuk bounded away to play with his bandmates. He bolted to the end of the summer meadow, and, reaching its piney borders, he leaped and turned in the air and ran in the other direction. He climbed every protruding rock, and tumbled and chased and played until his sides heaved. Sometimes, Tuk was sure, he could hear the mountain laugh.

EAGLE

One day was like another for Tuk—the warm summer air, an abundance of food, the closeness and comfort of his fellows. At times Tuk would see blue mountain beyond the shadowy green mountains, climbing into the clouds, blue at its roots but white at its peak. Sometimes he would turn away from blue mountain to see Kenir gazing at him, as if disappointed that he was still a lamb, that he was not yet big enough to save them. Then she would call him to her and tell him the stories of their kind.

But Tuk and his mates grew quick and fearless under the watch of the herd. They feasted on every grass, learning the taste of fescue and foxtail, buttercup and betony, twinflower and groundsel. At the height of summer the sun burned the blue out of the sky, the berries weighed down their branches in the heat, the grasses baked, and the warblers slept in the shade.

Eventually the lambs were too big to nurse anymore. "Now you must get all of your strength from the food the mountain grows," Pamir said to Tuk, pushing him away. No longer would she be his mother. Kenir and the other barren ewes would watch over the lambs now.

Sto was grazing unhappily a distance from her mother when Balus saw her and said, teasing, "Sto, I see you are scared to be so far from your mother. You had better run back."

Tuk put himself between her and Balus. "Don't be afraid, Sto," Tuk said. "We are the bighorn, the lords of the mountain. Watch!" He lowered his head and said to the grass, "Feed me!" He plucked a mouthful of grass sweetly with his teeth. Rim laughed.

"Lords of the mountain?" Balus said to his mates standing nearby. "If we are lords of the mountain, why does man hunt us at his will? Why does the herd shrink year by year until it offers no safety?"

Tuk put his nose to the golden cinquefoil that quivered in the breeze at his feet. "I command you to shine," he said to the flower, and so it did, like a tiny yellow sun in the grass.

All Tuk's bandmates laughed, but Balus scowled.

"Spin!" said Tuk to a spider that spun its web in a bush.

"You must do as he says," said Dall, and they both looked on proudly as the spider continued to spin.

"Lie still," Rim said to a rock.

"Sing," said Ovis to the nuthatch in the tree.

"Blow," said Dall to the wind.

"You see, Sto?" Tuk said. "All is as we would wish it to be."

Sto looked up. "Fly!" she called in her timid voice. The others looked and saw a golden eagle hovering on the hard sky with wings like pine boughs. "Fly and dive!"

As if it had heard, the eagle banked and dipped and down, down it swooped.

"Run!" Tuk cried.

The lambs scattered, all but Sto, who gazed up, enthralled. Tuk ran back toward her. "Sto! Come!"

The eagle fell from the sky, but Sto did not move. Tuk saw the eagle's sharp wings and its blade of a beak and saw it pounce into the meadow and rise again with a lamb in its talons.

Tuk saw that it was Sto.

She was lifted up and up and her white coat got smaller until she was a star in the day sky, until the eagle, flying toward blue mountain, vanished.

Tuk heard no sound. Sto did not bleat, the eagle did not cry. It might not have been, except that Sto was gone from the herd. The meadow was quiet. Tuk was surprised most of all by the silence inside him.

He felt as if the meadow had shifted under his feet. His bandmates gathered together closely, but Tuk stood apart, staring in the direction the eagle had flown, in the direction of blue mountain that might only be a story.

"Lord of the mountain, how will you save the herd?" Balus said close behind Tuk. "You couldn't even save a lamb from a bird."

He went away, but his words rattled in Tuk's head.

Kenir approached the nursery band. Tuk still gazed in the direction the eagle had flown. When Kenir came close, he said, "The eagle took Sto because I did not fight him."

"No," Kenir said. "Because our numbers have dwindled, we have little protection from predators who would stay away if we were a large, healthy herd."

"Why? Why have our numbers dwindled?"

"Winter," she said.

"I am not afraid of winter."

"Are you not?" Kenir said. "In winter, snow covers the mountain, the ground, the grass. Squirrels sleep in holes in the trees, marmots keep warm underground, the puma has her cave, and wolves their lairs. But the bighorn has nothing but the mountain. The bighorn does not sleep through the winter like the bear. In winter we are hungry."

Tuk did not know hunger, and anyway he could not think what it had to do with eagles and Sto and sorrow like a thistle in his throat.

"In winter," Kenir continued, "we leave the summer meadow and go down out of the mountain to the winter valley where the snow is not so deep. And what do you think we find there, Tuk?"

"Grass," said Tuk.

"Yes. We should find grass under the snow, waiting for us—grass that has grown all summer long undisturbed. But men come with their tame sheep and graze the grass to stubble, and we catch their diseases against which we have no resistance. Now man has built a wide trail between the mountain and our winter feeding grounds, and on it many of our number are killed by man's machines. Last year, they began to build dwellings in the valley, filled with the light of the sun even at night. We come back to the mountain fewer than we left, and as our numbers lessen, our predators grow fatter—the puma, the wolf, the eagle."

She waited a time for him to speak, and when he did not, she turned away, saying, "Today, Tuk, you are older. Do not blame yourself."

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Excerpted from Blue Mountain by Martine Leavitt. Copyright © 2014 Martine Leavitt. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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