Follow the River (34 page)

“It’s putrid,” she said.

“Yah.”

“Hope it don’t sicken us.”

“Just cut. Hurry!”

The skin slid off the slimy meat easily. There was flesh on the jaw muscles. It was pasty white, a little blue, even, and they almost gagged as they chewed it.

There wasn’t much else but the tongue. Mary got it loose and threw away the rest of the head so she wouldn’t have to see the eyes. She split the stinking tongue lengthwise and gave half of it to Ghetel. They sat down on opposite sides of the log to eat, as neither could stand to watch the other eating offal.

The stench of the rotten head was still in their nostrils and hands and clothing that afternoon when they passed opposite the mouth of another large river that flowed into the New from the east. It looked familiar, though Mary was beginning to suspect that winter had changed the aspect of everything so completely that she might never recognize another landmark against the ones she had engraved in her memory.

And if so, she thought, then we sh’ll just have to travel largely on faith alone.

Ghetel coughed loudly several times behind her, and Mary felt a rush of sympathy for her.

On faith alone, she thought. That’s all poor Ghetel’s been a-travelin’ on this whole way.

“Dem deers,” Ghetel said at twilight as they were inching their way over rain-slick rock slabs at the river’s edge. “Oh, all dem deers! I want ’em!”

“Eh?” Mary stopped and looked back. Ghetel was pointing toward the opposite shore. There at the river’s edge a quarter of a mile away there were three white-tail bucks and two does, their heads down as if grazing. Mary felt her hand tighten instinctively on the shaft of her spear-stick and
wished she could be on that side of the river. I’d get one, she thought. I swear I’d get one and we’d make a fire an’ roast it so nice …

And then she noticed something.

The deer were all licking at the beach. And the beach was pale, a strip of gray-white, as if snow had fallen there.

“Ghetel!” she whispered intensely. “It’s th’ salt lick!” Her heart frolicked inside her ribs.

“Vat’s?”

“The salt lick! Ghetel! I know just where we be!”

“I t’ought you alvays know dat.”

“Aye, but …”

Two of the bucks had raised their heads and were looking across the river. They had heard the voices. They were alert, beautiful, tiny at this distance, the enormous dark mountainside rising a thousand feet into the clouds behind them.

Ghetel raised her spear over her head and shouted:

“You! I could eat you raw!”

“You raw! You raw!”
the mountainside echoed.

They found shelter under a shelf of rock stratum twenty feet above the river that night. It was not quite a cave; it was perhaps three feet from floor to ceiling at its entrance and six feet deep into the cliff. The dry floor was littered with sticks and leaves, and animal and bird droppings, and there was a fragment of a clay pot near the back. A charred flat stone on the floor and soot on the ceiling showed that somebody, however long ago, had enjoyed a fire. At one end, Mary found a scattering of cracked turkey or duck bones and some flakes of flint, including two sharp but broken arrowheads. Dast we try a fire? Oh, she thought, how I should love t’ look in a fire after all this lonesome cold an’ gray!

She shaved a fistful of tinder from a stick with the edge of the tomahawk, stacked twigs near at hand, and knelt, shivering, over it with the tomahawk in her left hand and a piece of flint in her right. She struck several sharp, glancing blows against the steel with the flint. But the flint was so small and light that she could produce only a spark or two. She exchanged it for another scrap of flint but it was even smaller.
The sparks flew like little stars in the darkening cave, but were too feeble to ignite the tinger. After a while, breathing hard, cursing, knuckle and thumb smarting and bleeding, she gave up and sat back on her haunches, all but crying with frustration. “Well, I reckon we’re just not meant …”

“Hssssst!” Ghetel was peering out into the twilight, listening.

And then Mary heard it: a syllable in human voice from across the river through the hush of rain, and shortly after, another and another, and the clatter of hooves. Words were indistinguishable, but the inflections of the voices left no doubt that Indians were passing on the opposite shore. Maybe her imagination was tricking her, but in the murky gloom over there she thought she saw figures moving downstream among the tree trunks. After a while the sounds were swallowed up by the rain and the river but the two women huddled motionless for some time longer.

And when they rolled into their blankets, she gave a prayer of thanks to the same Providence she had been cursing a moment before for the same reason: her failure to ignite a fire.

They left the cave early the next morning, too cold and hungry to sleep past dawn. They went flinching along the stony river bank for five minutes, their aching-cold feet punished unbearably by each step, their stiff toes seeming to stub on every rock. Finally Ghetel stopped and sat on a log, saying, “No, no, no. Gif me de ax.” Mary hesitated. “Come, come. Gif,” Ghetel insisted, putting her palm up and waggling her fingers for it.

She took it and bent down to a leatherwood shrub and deftly scored a branch and stripped off several strands of bark.

Then she tore four large rectangles of cloth from the remains of her skirt. Mary sat and looked on, curious. The old woman worked, talking to herself, her breath condensing in the bitter air. Every few minutes she had to stop and put her stiffened fingers between her thighs to warm them. Mary sat with her hands between her own legs. With the constant hunger, her blood seemed more and more sluggish, her heartbeats
more feeble and uneven, and her extremities seemed to be getting no blood at all to warm them. It was, she thought, as if her heart were trying to pump cold sorghum instead of blood.

Ghetel raked a pile of dry leaves onto each of the pieces of cloth. Then she placed her right foot on one of the piles, drew the edges of the cloth up around her ankle, and tied a strip of bark around the ankle. She did the same then with the other foot, so that she now had, in effect, a bag of leaves bound around each foot. “Now you,” she said.

Mary was touched; her eyes brimmed as she watched the miserable old creature kneel at her feet and struggle with her gnarled and benumbed fingers to knot the stubborn bark. She helped her rise, and smiled at her. The old woman grinned broadly, quite pleased with herself. And they set off again up the river bank. They had to walk carefully to keep from snagging or loosening the makeshift shoes, and had to stoop and retie them often, and replace the crushed leaves, but the warmth and cushioning were luxurious, and Mary turned often to Ghetel with smiles and sighs and happy headshakes to express how much she appreciated them. This in turn kept the old woman much more genial than she might have been otherwise.

Mary saw the flames first. For a moment she was baffled by the sight of yellow-orange fire billowing out of the riverbed a mile ahead. Then she remembered. She stopped and pointed at it. Ghetel looked up from her careful negotiation of the rocky shore and her eyes bugged. Delight and then fear passed rapidly over her features, then she hung onto Mary’s arm and looked to her for explanation. Mary told her about the odorous air that bubbled from the mud, and how the Indians had ignited it. “Must be them Indians we heard last night thrown a brand into it,” she speculated. “What sport, eh?”

They found a rock ledge directly across the river from the burning spring, and brushed up a thick pile of leaves under it. Then they foraged up and down a nearby ravine for two hours. They were uncommonly lucky, and brought in half a
pound of acorns, eight walnuts and a handful of wildflower bulbs that looked something like wild onion. Almost gleeful, they huddled in their blankets against the biting cold, gazed across the broad river at the cavorting pillar of flame and its reflection on the water and ate their variety of victuals as a purple dusk gathered. “Odd. We wanted a fire so last night. Now here we jus’ wait a day an’, I be blessed, we got one. Hum?”

It was too far away for them to feel any of its heat, of course. But as the nourishment of their repast stole out into their limbs and owls hooted and wolves wailed among the mountains, they gazed at the flames long into the night and thought of their respective hearths, and their souls at least were warmed by the sight of the distant fire.

Sometime in the long, cold hours after midnight, the wind strengthened and backed into the northwest. It began moaning up the valley, rattling the millions of bare branches. Then it gusted suddenly to a gale strength, shrieking along the steep mountainsides, sweeping leaves off the ground, flinging a hail of broken twigs through the forest and blowing down shallow-rooted trees. Mary and Ghetel were jolted awake by the ripping and snapping and thudding of great limbs and tree trunks, and in terror clutched at their blankets, which the icy wind threatened to tear from their bodies as it scoured all the leaves of their bedding out of their alcove and pelted them with flying debris. They huddled together, squinting. Across the river, their friendly pillar of flame from the burning spring leaped and ducked and fluttered horizontally over the
water before the force of the wind, then with a
pouf
was blown out.

They sat clinging to each other in the howling darkness the rest of the night, their backs to the rock, trying to keep their blankets tight around their shoulders and anchored under their feet. There was no such thing as sleep now, just shivering and waiting, clutching each other when some huge splintering, slamming weight would thump to earth above or below them. The wind sang through a range of demon voices, now harsh as a wildcat’s yowl, now lowing, now shrill as a man whistling through his teeth, sometimes all those at once. Toward dawn a fierce hissing joined in and the women lowered their faces to their knees to protect them from the needle-stings of sleet.

It was maddening. It seemed to Mary that this pitiless cold lashing had gone on for a year. She clenched her jaws to keep from screaming because to scream would be to become a part of the wild-devil’s soul of the storm itself and she knew there would be no coming back from that. Mary had some confidence that she could anchor her own soul against the storm until daybreak, but she feared for Ghetel’s soul, which, since that morning she had tried to go back for the horse, Mary had suspected was unstable and at times on the very brink.

A woman in her state c’d easy go stark mad this night, Mary thought.

And so from time to time she would reach over and find Ghetel’s hand and squeeze it reassuringly, hoping to keep her in touch with her reason.

They crawled from cold water into colder air, out of still another creek. They lodged themselves in a crevice between two boulders, to keep themselves from slipping back into the cold swift water if they should faint. They were shuddering and gasping, unable to stand up without support. It was the second creek they had waded this day. It had been breast-deep. The first one had only come to their hips.

They stayed there pressed between the boulders and tried to recover their breath, but after five minutes, Mary felt she would die of chill or shake her brittle-cold body to pieces with
shivering if she did not start moving. “Come,” she muttered through chattering teeth. “Must get along.”

“No. No farder.”

“Come now.”

The old woman glowered and shook her head, her slack lower lip wobbling to and fro as she did. It was chapped and split and bleeding. In these last two days, Mary had seen Ghetel eat the flaking skin off her lips and chew it as if it were food. They had not found anything truly edible since they had left the place of the burning spring. They had been chewing buds and slippery elm bark and the hairy, hard, sour berry clusters they had found on a small stand of red sumac. None of this seemed to be giving them any strength that they could feel. It filled and stretched their shrunken stomachs, but the exhausted fibers of their flesh still clamored for nutrients with a hunger of their own.

Ghetel embraced the cold boulder and put the side of her face against it and closed her eyes.

“Y’ must come, Ghetel.” A powerful spasm of shivering broke Mary’s voice as she said it.

“No. I do not have to do vat you say.”

“Oh, but y’ do.”

“No. I die from doink vat you say.”

“You’ll die
here
.”

“Because I listent to you!”

“Come.” She stretched out a gray, cold hand and grasped Ghetel’s wrist. The old woman jerked free and struck at the hand. Feeble though the blow was, it hurt Mary’s bones.

“No!”

“Ghetel …”

“No! Damn, damn! Don’t touch again or I kill you!”

“Ghetel!” Mary was stunned. She reached to her face to pull back a rope of wet hair that hung over her eye, as if to see this rebellious outburst better.

“I kill you,” Ghetel muttered. This new thought seemed to have fixed itself in her desperate brain. “Kill you.”

Mary tried to smile, feeling that the old wretch was merely venting her misery with a meaningless, pitiful outburt. But her smile crumbled when she saw Ghetel cast a sidelong
glance at the tomahawk, which still hung in a loop of Mary’s belt. She remembered suddenly the premonition she had had days ago about giving Ghetel the tomahawk to crack hickory nuts. She inched back, bracing herself against the boulder, to get out of Ghetel’s reach. She lowered the point of her hickory spear between them defensively. Ghetel turned painfully and leaned now with her right shoulder against the rock, and in turn held her spear-point directed at Mary.

They stood like this for minutes. Mary’s heartbeat was skipping and fluttering. The old woman’s eyes were terrible, watering with the cold but burning with naked hate. Her filthy white hair, matted and snarled with leaf crumbs and moss and pieces of scab, was plastered wetly against the right side of her face.

Mary began shaking her head in disbelief and backing around the rock to get out of this creek gorge, to get away from that treacherous stare.