Chapter Six
Mountains usually don’t get worried, but after the new people were around a few years, things really did change. The men built funny roads from pieces of trees connected with shiny rails. Then huge contraptions called “trains” brought more and more folks. Women and children started appearing, and the men built wooden buildings where everyone spent their time.
Not only did the trains bring people, they brought all kinds of supplies. The men digging into the mountain’s sides brought out more and more of its innards, and they crushed it in frighteningly loud machines. The men took some of the material away on the trains, but most they just dumped below the mine (as the men called the openings into the mountain’s side), forming piles which slid downhill.
The people were very busy with their digging and building, but mountain was confused. They did not seem happier or more content than the people who had lived there before! Speaking of whom, the mountain thought, where did the earlier people go? The mountain did not know. All it could see was the new people working and then running around with each other in and out of the buildings they made.
When people died, as some did in the mines or in the buildings, the others would bury them in the mountain. The mountain did not remember the earlier people doing so, and it paid attention whenever this happened. A small girl was buried one day in a meadow near beaver ponds. Men had built places to live next to the ponds, and in summer people would catch fish as children ran and played.
The child’s parents put a small wooden board where the girl was laid, and years later the mountain saw the parents, now older, return and mark the spot with a pretty white granite stone. Long after men had stopped digging into the mountain, people would read the marker the parents left behind. And the mountain felt happy-if mountains can really be happy-whenever people did so.