The Silver Doe by Audrey Parker (historical books to read txt) 📕

1,

The doe was old. She must once has been a dappled white and brown fawn, but she was presently draping silver. The snowy pelt cascaded down the legs and cheeks and chin, clumping in those subtle spots. The hoofs disappeared and then reappeared every time the doe took a step. And those steps seemed to take forever and pained the doe to the extent of violent torment and misery. To the outside observer, the hoof prints made slowly in the grass by the doe resembled a newborn sea turtle taking those first experimental belly slides across the sand and into the glassy water. Or a sailor wobbling around before he receives his land legs after a few years out at sea.
With the hoary down and feeble steps, there was single thing the continued to be lively in the doe the many years she had lived through, while her body gradually became disabled. They were rimmed with creases and tear residue, but the sparkling baby-breath eyes never failed to enchant. They were the color of blindness, as many old deer eyes tent to become after years of service; however, the silver doe’s were not cloudy, but held a charm in them. The allure goes concealed to the inattentive, but piercing to the vigilant watcher.
An old wise tale speaks of the eyes acting as entryways to the soul. On humans, it’s almost always true. They betray their owners continually. But deer eyes mostly display terror when any moving thing other than the wind sights them. When they are unaccompanied, they are restful and at peace, selecting the correct vegetation to east and to line their nest for the juveniles. The doe never felt anxiety or foreboding at company. Her eyes remained brilliant at all times, and that set the doe apart from her relations. They began to feel alarmed around her, and then even at the passing thought of her.
When the doe was adult-like and tanned in the correct spots, her valued mother drifted away from her. It was many years until the notion of abandonment crossed her thoughts, and when it did, it did not trouble her, for the doe was long over her upbringing. She had scrambled around wildly for food, and only after long hardship did she form a small nest and a store for herself, in order to survive the harsh frost and snow.
No buck dared approach her. For each sensed something different, strange in the Silver Doe’s eyes. And in the way of her structure: how she held and carried herself. There was no contact, needless to say, and the silver doe spent her life alone, spouseless, childless, friendless, for years on end.


2,

Clara Mill had run away.
She was far, far away where her journey started in her hometown of Maple Springs. Her parents would be undoubtedly frantic with worry. But Clara would not think of her parents. As an only child, she knew her disappearance would break their hearts more than if she had a brother, or sister.
Clara also knew she would turn around and travel back to Maple Springs if she did not keep her mind focused on her very important goal.


3,

Saris swung her brother’s sharp axe down, hard, and ruptured the oak log on the chopping block. She had no protection for her hands and only a faded flannel shirt layering her forearms. The toothpick-like wood bit hard into her skin, but she continued at her tough work, for she understood she could not take a break. Sari’s older brother would be coming home much too soon for her liking. He’d be expecting a burning fire in the hearth and a roasting dinner on his table so he could stop in and eat, then depart again.
With her lungs gasping for air, and her fallow muscles straining against her, Sari finished splitting the logs and laid the axe aside, resting it in the packed dirt at her feet.
She prided herself in accomplishing this sore task, and took a few sparse moments to seize her breath, but knew she could not relax as long as she wished to. Sari gathered up the splints of wood that could fit in her arms and vanished around to the entryway to the to the small farmhouse where she only had just begun to call home. She copied her previous motion with the remains of the firewood until all of it was piled into the wood box.
When Sari had built a crooked teepee in the fireplace with a number of her logs and warped sticks from outside, she set about lighting it. She scuffled around in the few cabinets and drawers positioned in the small kitchen counters, finding a small matchbox only half teeming and a colony of thin and scrawny mice. They all darted way into their wall hoes when Sari had brandished at them.
Although Sari had been puttering around the small farmyard for a few weeks now, striking a match was still beyond her. But though her Papa had constantly taken charge of the fire, Sari had often observed him while he was juggling the tiny matches in his practiced hands. It had appeared to be straightforward, at the time. But as she ruined a few on her first attempts, she realized shat years of practice her Papa had kept veiled.
Several struggles later and Sari had made a small flicker on the matchstick, and then a flame. It grew and spread and consumed the brittle wood quickly. She dropped the match down into the teepee, where, miraculously, it grounded on some kindling and blossomed into a blaze.
Sari started constructing a stew of her own creation and set it on to poach when she had became aware of the flames she had created in her moment of clumsiness.
Sari sat down in one of the scarred wooden chairs with her only book, A Little Princess. She enjoyed reading more than everything else in the world, and once it had been her most celebrated pastime, but now it was merely a distraction from her grueling work when she could squeeze it into her busy schedule, but only just. The setting was too unfamiliar to her for her to read without fretting about all her other chores she had to maintain to keep her brother’s feeble farmhouse underway.
When Sari understood that the scenery inside the house was too confined for her and her Sara Crew, she stimulated outside to carry on with her comprehension. That didn’t work well either.
The only time in the day that Sari gets an opportunity to read her book is when her stew is brewing. When she exits the plants and wildlife around her and steps into her imaginary world, she disregards everything around her and concentrates wholly on the words on the page.
Her nightly stew had been boiling, as always, but Sari paid it no interest - she had vanished unreachably into her book again. She was assembled in a bed of dried pine needles and comes, reading, when her vision became clouded by visible smoke. Her nose overflowed with that dreaded smell and that was enough to awaken her from her reading stupor.
Astoundingly, only the stew was enormously heated, and appeared thicker than average. Sari saved it by adding more water to it, and her brother noticed.
“What new did you do to this stew? It tastes different,” he asked that night, licking his lips, openly considering if it was any good.
“I added some new spices, Kaz. Do you like it?” Sari kept her worry of what her brother would say tightly locked up and off her face.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “Make it the same way tomorrow night.”
But at the next dinner and the many following, the stew was nothing exceptional.


4,

Clara Mill had run away.
It had been two days since the night of the letter, the letter she received that made her expedition decided. She carried it around in her back pocket, and she could feet it burning a hole in her dirty and worn blue jeans.


C-
I would not attempt to contact you if the situation were not desperate. I feel it is too risky for you, but I cannot help myself in asking; I am at my brother’s farmhouse on Williams Road. My brother’s name is Kaz. He is never around, and I am in dire use of company. Please come, but beware; the roads can be hazardous at more times than at night.

Love, S
P.S. Your departure must remain a secret.


5,

Uncle Joel was horizontal on his floor mattress in his shabby apartment, opening and shutting his eyelids repetitively and promptly. His beloved dog, Axle, lay obediently on his feet, gazing unblinkingly up at her master. His balding head and strangled graybeard splayed wildly across his flat pillow, and wriggled into the creases when he crooked his head.
A short and smart rapping on the door, so silent it was almost inaudible, attained his shell-like ears. Uncle Joel was irritated at the sound that was disturbing his almost-sleep and did not take kindly to it. He rolled over until his fishhook nose was pressed up against the cracked plaster that made up his walls.
“Uncle . . . Uncle Joel?”
He had been expecting a voice, but his apartment hadn’t heard the voice, but his apartment hadn’t heard the young man who had spoken for countless years. He turned his neck only just enough to confirm his accusations; it was his nephew, Kaz Ausen.
“Uncle Joel, are you awake?”
The Uncle’s nephew was upon him now and Uncle Joel could sense Kaz’s morning breath warm on his neck. The old dog finally lifted his head in notice of the man, but seemed to have memorized his scent years ago. Axle went back to resting, as he saw no threat, but Uncle Joel knew better. What Axle didn’t know was the emotional feelings tied to his nephew. He didn’t like to dwell on the past.
“Yes, I’m up,” Uncle Joel said crossly because of the fact that he remembered Kaz’s persistence, and that he would not leave him alone without informing him of troublesome events and asking him for advice. “What a wonder this is,” thought Uncle Joel. “I didn’t believe I could remember much of anything these days, especially of my sister’s family.”


6,

Clara Mill had run away.
The hole the letter burned in her back pocket was large, and so was her abounding book-bag, though the weight of it had nothing on the former. She could see where William’s Road began, and it made her body excited and restless to get there. It was agonizingly close. Clara was anxious to see Sari, to hear her voice for the first time in little over three weeks, to hear her speak of her adventures.
Clara was very close to quenching all her anxiety. But although she was almost there, it was almost dark. And she knew Williams Road was lengthy and it would take a long while of searching houses before she found where to find her friend.


7,

The creek bed was a good place for forgetting.
The water rippled silently, as if in sorrowful mourning, and the willow boughs wept overhead, and Kaz was feeling the enchantment this spot had held for him since his early childhood.
He chafed his eyes with his hands to try to flee the weariness that followed him like a shadow these days. Ever since his sister had come to live with him, Kaz has been