Echo Mountain

Ellie is sent to look for Samuel and starts to make her way up the mountain. She has a strange feeling and decides to go up the brambled path toward where the old hag lives. On her way, she sees the wild dog, who slowly and cautiously leads her back to the hag’s encampment. Ellie finds a clearing, a fire pit, and an old shawl on a tree. She then spots the hag’s small cabin “tucked against the topmost ledges of the mountain” (95). The dog leads her toward its door, which is open. Ellie notices there is no smoke in the chimney and “no sign of life” (95). She follows the dog into the cabin, her curiosity once again leading her somewhere new.

Ellie walks cautiously into the cabin. She sees the usual fittings but also shelves full of books, flowers hanging from the ceiling, and a workbench surrounded by tools that her “father would have cried to see” (97). She soon notices that there is someone in the bed in the corner, and she approaches to find the hag lying there. The woman is alive and breathing but is burning with fever and surrounded by flies and a dead rabbit that the dog brought for her. Worse still, Ellie notices that one of the hag’s legs is purple and being eaten alive by maggots. She runs outside and vomits, braces herself, and then goes back in. The dog stares at her as she asks it, “What am I supposed to do now?” (99).

Ellie decides that first she will make a fire to heat the room. She gathers some leaves and sticks and creates a fire from the flint in her bag. Next, she thinks about the wound and how she will deal with it. She recalls a memory of her father sealing an infected cut on his hand with a searing hot blade and has the idea to do something similar. She finds a chisel among the woman’s work tools and heats it on the fire. As she approaches the woman’s wound with it, the hag awakens.

The hag’s blue eyes startle Ellie as she says in a “dead-tree dry” voice, “You didn’t knock” (103). Ellie explains that the dog let her in. The hag rips a tick off the dog’s face and asks Ellie to grab a jar for her to put it in, in case she needs it later. Ellie realizes that perhaps “she’s not a hag. She’s a witch” (104), and the woman calls Ellie a ninny, as if she heard what Ellie was thinking. The woman reveals that her name is Cate, short for Cathrine (with no “e”), and Ellie reveals that her full name is Leigh. The dog’s name is Captan (with no “i”). Cate ensures that the spelling of these names is clear, as if she intentionally chose to make them different from the norm. When Ellie asks about the wound on Cate’s leg, Cate explains that a “fisher cat” (or fisher, an animal in the weasel family) was trying to attack her dog; she got between them, and it attacked her instead. Its infected mouth infected her leg, and she is using the maggots to eat the infection away. Cate explains that she needs honey for the wound, and Ellie regrets having left the comb in the hive.

Cate panics when she finds out Ellie is heating the chisel, begging her to take it out of the fire. Ellie apologizes profusely as the woman explains that the tools are not hers. She asks for some water from a nearby spring, and Ellie leaves the cabin to fetch it, feeling “a little dizzy and unreal” after so many strange events (109-110). Ellie finds the spring, which is mostly moss with some water underneath it. She pushes the jar into the moss as water creeps out, and she samples it to find it “like poured winter. Fresh. Perfect” (110). Ellie goes back to the cabin and gives the woman the water, asking her about the carvings. The woman answers that “he may come this way in time for you to see for yourself […] From somewhere else” (110-111) but will say nothing more about it. Ellie offers to cook the rabbit for Cate and Captan before she leaves for the honey. She realizes that she now has two people to heal.

Ellie returns home and finds her mother and Esther frantic, still not having found Samuel. Ellie tells a half-truth and says she was up the mountain looking for him but mentions nothing of Cate. She explains why she threw the snake into their father’s bedroom. Her mother worries she is becoming wild, and Ellie feels as if she is “not a good town girl, trying hard to tame the mountain like [her mother] was” (116). Ellie searches everywhere and finally finds Samuel huddled in the cowshed with Quiet in his arms. He is trying to save Quiet from being taken to the Andersons, and Ellie deeply admires his courage and compassion. Ellie takes Quiet back to Maisie, worried how Maisie will react when she is parted from her puppies in a few weeks.

Ellie thinks about all the people who need her desperately: her brother, her father, Cate. At lunch, Ellie finds that her sister and mother are still punishing her. She is told she will have no lunch or dinner, just an apple and a biscuit, despite having fetched the venison, searched for Samuel, and climbed the mountain. Ellie also notices her mother looking at her with “the same thing [she] saw on her face when any wild thing came too close to the cabin” (120). She feels increasingly isolated from her mother and sister.

Ellie decides to spend the afternoon gathering honey and seeking ways to heal her father. She thinks back on the snake and the water she used to try to wake him, both of which she stumbled upon by chance. These attempts were different from her current brew, made intentionally and with purpose, and by her own hand. Ellie takes her concoction into her father’s room and feeds it to him by hand. She sees his eyes roll a couple of times, and when she lifts his eyelid, she sees “bright points in the darkness. But no sun rising. No waking yet” (123).

Ellie goes back to the oak tree to collect the honeycomb. She prepares herself much the same way, except this time, she tucks herself into her jacket so her head is fully covered. Ellie smokes out the hive and feels for the comb, which is “like a soft, vibrating brick” (127). Several bees begin to sting her as she grabs a chunk of the comb and shoves it in a jar along with the bees still attached to it. Ellie stumbles back, feeling overcome by the bees, by the treatment she is suffering from her family because they blame her for the accident, and by all the responsibilities she must undertake. When she has pulled out the bee stings, Ellie heads up the mountain toward Cate.

When Ellie arrives at Cate’s cabin, a boy is there. His name is Larkin, and he is tall with black hair and pale skin. Cate explains that Larkin lives on the other side of the mountain, and that his people have done so long before Ellie’s family arrived. Ellie recognizes Larkin as the boy who has been leaving her the carvings. Larkin is polite, asks many questions, and seems eager to help Cate. When he is instructed to help Ellie apply the honey to Cate’s wound, he groans at the sight of her leg.

Ellie thinks back on her day and its extraordinary events, such as meeting Cate and Larkin, collecting the honey, and trying twice to wake her father. Together, Larkin and Ellie scoop the maggots out of Cate’s leg as she groans and writhes. When they are finished, Ellie heats a knife and Larkin uses it to re-open the wound. Ellie squeezes the honeycomb over the wound “like a wax sponge” (136), and then she and Larkin push it shut. The honey manages to glue the wound, and Ellie cuts her precious shirt that her father made to tie bandages around it. When the process is complete, Cate faints, and Ellie and Larkin sit down to rest.

Ellie and Larkin decide to consult one of Cate’s books to find out about healing the wound. They discover that witch hazel would be useful in keeping it clean. Larkin reveals that he can read an average amount because Cate is teaching him; Ellie confesses she went to school in the town before moving to the mountain and still learns from her mother. As a result, she can read quite well. When Ellie leaves to find witch hazel, she reflects on another wound that she needs to heal: the one tearing apart her family. She knows that she is different from her mother and sister, and that they need to come together again somehow. Ellie decides she will find a way to make that happen. She looks up at the stars above the mountain peak and decides to name the mountain Star Peak; she hopes to find a way to help her mother and sister feel as much at home there as she does.

Ellie gets ready to head home, and Cate tells her that she will not be needed at the cabin with Larkin there. Ellie is saddened at the thought of not getting to know either of them better, and when she reveals that her father is in a coma, Cate invites her to come back and ask for help. Ellie feels like crying, and she stares at the two of them for a moment before leaving. When she gets outside, she stops in the clearing to look at the stars and sees a woman standing at the other side of the clearing. She cannot see her clearly but gets the feeling that the woman is “bitter. Like something scorched” (144). She runs back into Cate’s cabin, and Larkin tells Ellie to go home, stating that it is only his mother she saw.

Ellie walks carefully down the mountainside in the darkness. She hears Larkin’s mother yelling at him from above, telling him to come home, and Larkin yelling back. Ellie hopes very much that she will see Larkin again soon, and that they will get to know each other. Ellie makes her way home and goes to sleep in the shed with Maisie, her final punishment for the day. When she awakes the next morning, her mother is standing at the door of the shed, offering breakfast: eggs, venison, and a biscuit. Ellie looks at her mother in confusion, wondering why she is getting such a good breakfast after being punished, but gets little answer. Ellie’s mother instead directs the conversation to Ellie’s father and asks Ellie to stop interfering. She suggests that he may wake up still unwell, and Ellie realizes she has something entirely new to fear. When she blurts out that he rolled his eyes yesterday, she realizes she has trapped herself into explaining the brew.

Ellie tells her mother another half-truth, saying she made a broth “from river water and balsam” (151). Her mother is angry and insists that Ellie stop trying to help her father. She does not want him to die due to some mistake, and she clearly does not trust her daughter. When Ellie mentions Cate, her mother replies that Ellie will not be allowed to see the hag ever again. Esther believes that Cate is a witch, although Ellie insists that she is a good person who simply wants to help. After Ellie explains how she and Larkin helped Cate with her wound, her mother threatens to lock her in the woodshed if she ever sees Cate again. Ellie rebels, believing she is right, and tells her mother she will continue trying to help her father and will bring Cate to see him. Ellie tells her mother that her father “has to get well […] Or you won’t either” (154).