A Child's First Book of Tunnels

Paul was in a blackish mood as he dodged the big Sikorsky’s shadow around a small herd of caribou.

He watched impatiently as the Savage River Valley unfurled below. It seemed the Morons of Earth had convened their little lodge early this season.

Paul Andrus had been a ranger at Denali Park for nearly seventeen years and every season it seemed to get worse. Lately, rescues seemed to involve a lot more body bags.

The Valley is a place well named. It is amazingly beautiful, but entirely unforgiving of stupidity. He was hoping this call would turn out to be just one more chubby tourist stuck on a rock.

He dropped the chopper down just below the cliff-heights, to circle a rock spire. Just below, a group of hikers frantically waved hands and jackets trying to attract his attention.

They had placed their extra clothing out on the ground to form a marker––a factor which somewhat altered Paul’s appraisal of their position in the food chain.

He pulled in as close as he could without blowing them off the trail with his prop wash.

The rescue team leader in the cargo bay scanned the little group with her binoculars. "Day hikers...all look fine," she said over the comm line, "Family, maybe...sort of all look alike."

The hikers waved frantically, pointing towards something on the other side of the narrow valley.

"They’re all wired up about something," she said. "Paul, can you see what they’re pointing at?"

"No. Can’t see a thing from down here. I’m gonna take us up the west wall a bit...and see," he said. "Something’s sure got’em in a twist."

Paul carefully lifted the machine up the valley wall. "Oh, my God," he said quietly into the intercom. "Himiko, are you getting this?"

"Yeah, got it. Yeah, it’s a little kid up there!" the squad leader said as she linked her harness to the winch line.

"Hell if it is. That’s a baby!"

The toddler was trying to stand up among the boulders, gazing curiously at the noisy machine. Paul guessed it was a little girl––he shared custody of a couple just like her with both of his ex-wives. The kid wobbled around the shelf. She was surrounded by a bunch of whitish boulders––the only things blocking her from the drop-off. She wasn’t crying; didn’t seem worried at all. Actually, she seemed to be right at home.

"If that kid gets over those rocks, she’s gonna be paste," Himiko said. "I’m going out now!"

The cable whined in protest as it caught her weight. She could feel it hum in the wind all the way through her harness. The air currents threatened to bash her brains against the cliff wall as the winch dropped her downward to the narrow rock shelf. She kicked away, and almost too far. She crashed down hard against one of the boulders.

There was a long pause on the comm. "Oh shit, shit, shit...!"

Himiko was a pillar of the Missouri Synod Lutherans. No one on the team had ever heard her so much as say an, "oh golly, gosh darn," before today.

But Himiko had good cause for her concern. Their little rescue victim was, very much, not alone.

___________________________________

Jennie glanced up from her crayons, and looked out the bedroom window as a bald eagle chuckled contentedly, settling its bulk into the snow sodden tree across the road. From her perch by the window, she could just see the big plastic thermometer on the porch.

Winters in Alaska come down hard sometimes and this was February. The big red arrow sat firmly on the number sixty––on the minus side.

She had always been something of a loner. It might not have been her first choice, but other children thought she was weird and the adults in her life found her "strong-willed," and disobedient. She had been left pretty much to her own devices early on when they discovered her spirit was not something they could break.

She was not an especially attractive child by most standards. Her features were a little sharp and strange looking. The doctors said she seemed to have some exotic congenital defect, which left her skin, tinted just a little bit greenish. You wouldn’t mistake her for a plant, but only because she moved too fast.

It had been particularly evident under the fluorescents of the clinic where they did her first physical. That had not been a fun day for Jennie. Oh, everybody tried to be very nice, but the West Indian doctor at the health service clinic down in Anchorage had been very upset with the Yupik lab technician. It had something to do with her blood. Evidently, there was something wrong with it––something about blood groups.

At any rate, the doctor was convinced the lab had made a mistake. From the way that he kept slipping back into his native Konkani, it must have been a pretty big one.

But they had stuck her one time too many, and on the next assault, she bit the offending technician––really hard. He was more surprised than mad, but she drew blood and he was mad. She was madder and glared back up at him like a treed lynx, watching for her next opening.

"You let me alone," she told him.

She had not made a sound with her voice, but the man winced, blinking hard as though he had just been stuck with a hot ice pick someplace very soft.

He smiled at her then and nodded. He couldn’t talk to Jennie. She hadn’t met any people here who could, but sometimes she could make them hear just a little.

The tech left her and there followed another even more explosive discussion with the doctor off in a side room. It wasn’t quite like she had a new friend or anything, but, for that day, at least, there were no more needles.

She watched the pale reflection floating by the eagle’s tree––her only companion some days. She wasn’t quite avocado, but it was pretty distinctive particularly framed, as it was, by the deep light-eating black of her hair. Those tightly spun spirals completely refused taming by any brush. They hung in coils to her shoulders, and rustled like baleen when she moved her head.

Jennie wasn’t her real name. No one knew what that was. "Jennie" had been given to her by her original social worker, a slim little Inupiat woman with a very big smile. She had been, "Baby Girl" for a long time. During her second year in State’s Custody the judge finally signed the permanent order, allowing her to choose a legal name.

Jennie came to court that day. Judge Cecilia Kitka felt that names were important, and that a child should have some say in such life decisions.

Jennie liked the judge. She was a single young Haida mother and her own little girl had come down with a bad earache during the night. The judge was trying to be wise and fair with everyone but she felt like a "bad mother" for not being with her own child

Judge Cecilia would have been absolutely appalled to know that she was saying all these things in the presence of a child, but Jennie heard them all––quite plainly.

There had been several other social workers since that day. She liked the one she had now, but his mind was always in turmoil and she never had his full attention. He was constantly worrying about his next court date and late reports, and he was always tired. There were sometimes as many as eighty children on his caseload.

Their faces kept him company each night.

Jennie was an orphan––a foundling actually. She had been spotted stuck up on a rock ledge by some hikers over by Mount Denali. They hadn’t been able to reach her by themselves, but one of them had been carrying a satellite phone, and called the ranger station. Within the hour a helicopter was rappelling a mountain rescue team down to pick her up.

There was a cute little story that a herd of Dahl sheep had been huddled around, keeping her warm. One of the rescue team members told a reporter later on that several of the animals stayed close by the little girl right up to the moment the team dropped down to the ledge. Even the noise of the rotors couldn’t drive them off.

Anyway, that was how the news services got it, and it made good copy. The public loved it and the little fable gave Baby Girl Jennie her last name––Dahl, after the sheep that had supposedly watched over her.

No parents or relatives ever came forward to claim Jennie, and no children of her age turned up missing anywhere around the region. Inquiries were even sent to the Lower Forty-Eight and Western Canada. No one seemed to know anything about her or how she happened to get up on the ledge.

Even the clothes she had been wearing offered no clues. Parts of it appeared to be smoke stained, but none of the pieces had a store label. They were hard to focus on for very long and everything seemed to be made out of some papery foam––butter soft but tough as moose hide.

For all practical purposes, little Jennie Dahl had just dropped out of the sky.

She was known for her obstinance and a tendency to get even when she felt she was being wronged. Her language development was way behind, though she possessed an uncanny ability to make herself understood. Her total English vocabulary amounted to about a dozen words, which she would use if she were in a good mood. She made other sounds, which one linguist who recorded them, thought might indicate the previous imprinting of her crib language.

Native Elders came to see her, trying out all of the twenty-one or so Native languages still spoken around the state of Alaska. When that didn’t work the University tried a dozen or so other Asian and European languages. They even found a Rom speaker on the long shot that she might come from Gypsy stock. But, Jennie wasn’t from the Romany folk, and none of the other languages they tried worked for her either.

In her second year of custody, the Court declared her "Free for Adoption." However, Jennie, herself, was not considered a particularly likable child and there were very few serious inquiries from the adoption exchanges where she was listed.

She was on her third set of foster parents, and from what the doctors said, she was now between five and six years old. It was beginning to look like Jennie might end up in permanent state foster care.

So, it wasn’t such an unusual thing for Jennie to be sitting alone in her room with a box of crayons drawing pictures of things which she had no names for.

The crayons were a new acquisition. Her present foster-father had picked them up at a restaurant one day—the kind of place where the servers come over and draw their names on the paper table covering. He had brought the crayons home to Jennie.

Rummaging around in some cabinets together, they found a forgotten box of computer paper for an old tractor printer that had died years before. Then he showed her how she could draw pictures with the crayons.

She caught on to the concept right away, and that had been a major turning point. She quickly filled the sheets with the things she saw in her mind––big shining shapes floating in blackness. She pretty much wore the black "nero" crayon down to nothing. There was no doubt in her mind, though. That particular crayon was important. Those houses were surrounded in blackness.

And those shapes were houses. She knew that they were and that they were filled with people. They weren’t the kind of houses where she lived now, and she didn’t know how to describe what the difference was. But they were. She knew they were.

Sometimes she would try to draw one of the people in at a window. She got to use all of her crayons for them. That was another thing she knew - - that the people were all kinds of colors - - black, pinkish, blue, and some were as green as she was. There were two people she tried especially hard to draw. She couldn’t quite remember their faces, but she knew their voices.

There were lights everywhere in the houses, and around them––like they were having a big party.

Some time ago Jennie had found the art of drawing holes. It had been kind of fun at first, to make a circle on her paper and then watch it sort of sink down through the desk.

The first time it happened she wanted to see where the hole went. She picked up the paper to look closer and found that there was no hole in her desktop. She turned the paper over, but there was no hole on the other side either. She tried putting one of her crayons inside the hole and it went down inside, but then her fingers slipped and it fell all the way through. She turned the paper upside down but the crayon wouldn’t come back out.

A couple of days later she found the crayon out in the garage––not the one attached to the house. It was in the garage across town where her foster-father worked. He was a diesel mechanic and worked on the big school buses that pulled up in front of the house every morning.

The garage trip had been a kind of reward for something or other that had probably been important at the time. Anyway, it was something she had been looking forward to for days.

The main bus barn was filled with grease, dirt, and a new kind of life she had not met with before. Her foster-father walked her through the shop area and introduced her to his "yellow dogs" as though they were all old friends. Each of the old school buses bore a name he had hand lettered on its side.

Listening closely, she found that he was right. They each did have a name––just not the one he thought. The "dogs" were really very fond of her foster-father.

She was sitting up on a stack of clean towels on his workbench when she saw the crayon. He had put her up there so she could watch as he tightened up the bolts on an alternator. It was lying on top of some reddish-orange colored shop rags, now flavored with diesel fuel. It was the same crayon. There was no doubt about that––a darkish red, with the name "rosso violetto" on the side. That was why no one had seen it against the rags. It had a tear along the paper wrapper that she had made with her teeth. The teeth marks were still there. It was her crayon, and she discreetly slid it into her pocket.

That all seemed just so very interesting. In the next few days, she discussed the matter at some length with Mmrrrar, her constant companion, and sage advisor.

Mmrrrar was the big gray-green stripy alley cat she had adopted from Animal Control.

"Adopted" didn’t really cover the situation from either Jennie’s perspective or his. Mmrrrar had been elected to be her Companion by all of the other animals in residence there.

The humans of this world had all lost the faculty of Companionship thousands of years ago, according to Mmrrrar, and Jennie was a welcomed surprise. It had been a very important decision for them all, and even those who went to their deaths that day voted on the matter.

Mmrrrar talked in pictures, the way she did. He was very good with relationships and his arrival commenced a bewildering, but most welcome, age of peace and tranquility for the household.

And then one afternoon Jennie came across a book in the public library that changed everything. She found it in the kids’ section stuck in with the fluffy bunny stuff where she usually didn’t go––she just wasn’t the fluffy bunny type. It was a child’s book about making holes in things––holes that went to other places.