Vanishing Act (26 page)

27

Jane had paddled across Charley Pond and Lake Lila by five in the morning, and she was still paddling. Her clothes had dried and the old feeling of competence had returned. She began to look for a place to head in as soon as she entered Lake Nehasane. It was still dark, the lake overshadowed by thick forests that ran up a mountainside to the east, and the sky clouded over.

She began to search in earnest after a couple of hundred feet. While she looked for shelter, she didn’t stop watching for the enemy. The rain had been hard enough to wash away any marks he had made in the woods, but it had also been hard enough to make him take some measures that he wouldn’t have taken in clear weather. He might hang clothes or a bedroll out to dry, and it was cold enough now to make anyone want to build a fire.

She kept her rifle propped on the seat beside her, muzzle upward. The big hunting knife with the hollow handle was in her belt. Before long, she saw the place to pull the canoe out of the water. It was a low bank with big rocks on both sides. She was almost certain that Lake Nehasane was where he would be. It was a big oval with lots of depths and a complicated shoreline, and it was fed on the upper end by the outlet of Lake Lila and emptied on the other into the Stillwater Reservoir. It was big enough to have plenty of fish. The lures he had bought were for lake fishing—flatfish and poppers for bass and northern pike and sinkers for bait-casting in deep water.

She would go ashore and hide her gear in thick cover and wait. Sooner or later he would be visible somewhere along the shore or on the lake. After a few more minutes, she realized that she had misjudged the time a little. She could see that dawn was coming, so she paddled harder. She took a shortcut across open water and began to paddle with determination. As she reached and held her top speed, the silence exploded in her ears. The bullet hit the canoe with such velocity that she felt it swat the craft a few degrees to the side.

Jane ducked low, and the next shot gave a whip-crack sound before she heard the deep, echoing report of the rifle. As she reached out with her paddle to pull the canoe along, she looked down and saw the entry and exit holes of the first bullet, just below the waterline. The canoe was filling up,

The next shot shattered the left strut beside her leg. The canoe seemed to buckle and founder, and then she was sideways and going down. The canoe just listed to the side and scooped itself under. In an instant she was in water so cold it seemed to clap the breath out of her lungs. She gasped, and her legs kicked in a reflex to try to lift her body out of the water. The fourth shot hit ahead of her, smacked into the water and threw up a splash so close she could feel droplets on her face.

She ducked again, putting her head under, and saw the canoe sinking far down below, looking yellowish, then green, then brown as it slowly drifted into black depths. She held her breath and swam under the surface, her hands scooping the water and her legs pulling her wet boots in a clumsy frog kick.

She saw the next bullet from under the water. It shattered the mirror surface ahead of her, not there at all one second, and then a bright silver streak made of bubbles and speed, and then lost. She came up and broke into a freestyle, swimming as hard as she could, and then her hand hit rock. She hoisted herself out, and when her feet touched, she was running. The trees started six feet back from the rocks, and then she was among them, sprinting into the woods.

She ran hard, through brambles and thickets and across glades blanketed with ankle-high plants that could have been poison sumac or ivy, scrambling higher up the side of the hill. After a time she found herself far above the lake. She lay face-down on a big rock and looked back down the way she had come, but she could see no movement in the forest below her. Then she saw the canoe.

He must have been shooting from across the lake. He had gotten into his canoe and paddled to the place where she had run into the woods. He was drifting offshore, scanning the woods and hills. Then she heard his voice. It made something in her reverberate. It was the voice she had listened to at Grand River and tried to make herself remember afterward, but now the familiarity of it made her feel sick.

"Jane!" he called. "It’s me!"

She pressed her face against the rock, trying to disappear into it.

"I found your pack in the water. I didn’t know it was you. Don’t be afraid!"

She pushed herself backward on her belly and down behind some stunted pine trees, then looked down cautiously. His head was turned up toward the woods around the lake, looking for movement or color. She couldn’t see her pack in his canoe, and she couldn’t imagine how it could have floated back up, but she did see the binoculars. He lifted them off the floor of the canoe and began to search the hillside. She dropped to her belly again and slithered away from the rocks into the trees.

In a moment he would land and come for her on foot. She stood and ran again. The ground was slippery from the rain and every step was uphill. There was no doubt that he would follow, and she knew she was leaving tracks. She had to go for distance now, just paces that she could put between them. The trees and brush seemed to grab at her and hold her back, and at every clear space she could almost feel the crosshairs settling between her shoulder blades.

It must have been an hour later when she stopped to catch her breath. She lay down with a stitch in her side and limbs that felt like stone. She was too tired to think, but she listened and stared into the woods she had come from, trying to gasp for air without making noise.

Then the voice reached out to her again. "Jane!" he called. "You’re making a mistake!"

She held her breath and then realized that she had to go on, and she needed to keep breathing hard to do it. Hiding would just give him time to catch her. "You’re alone, with no food or water!"

She sprang to her feet and ran on, higher into the woods. At noon she was at the peak of the mountain. It was bare rock, nearly at the tree line, with only scraggly pines to hide her. She moved along the ridge, trying to see him coming. If only she could find a hiding place, a cave or something. But there was nothing up here that would hide a rabbit. She started down the far slope, then rested again when she reached the heavy growth of leafy trees below.

Then she saw him. He was up on the summit exactly where she had stood, and he was combing the valley below with the binoculars. Above his shoulder she could see the barrel of the rifle and the sling across his chest.

She moved down lower on the mountainside. For once, he wasn’t lying. She had already pushed herself to exhaustion, and she hadn’t eaten or had water since midnight. In about four or five hours the mountain air would turn cold, and she was dressed in wet clothes. Even if he didn’t find her, she was going to be in trouble.

But he was carrying a pack and rifle and ammo and binoculars. All she had left to weigh her down was the knife in her belt. She could take advantage of her loss and try to outrun him. They had both been moving fast through the woods for hours now, up a fair-size mountain. If she was this tired, he must at least be feeling the strain.

Jane slipped deeper down into the forest, controlling her breathing now, stretching her legs, and shaking her arms to loosen the tightness in her back and chest as she broke into a trot. The going was easier now, all downhill, so she ran harder, trying to keep her momentum from building out of control and making her turn an ankle. She took no care to hide or stay quiet, only to build up her speed. She ran for fifteen minutes and then came to a rocky, clear streambed. She could tell it had filled up in the rain the night before because the banks were muddy, but now it was shallow again. She sloshed into it, and then realized it could help her. She rushed upstream thirty feet and took a dive up the bank to the right, a belly flop into the mud. Then she pulled her knees in and got to her feet and walked down backward into the streambed.

She looked at her work. It wasn’t bad. It looked as though she had gone up the bank, slipped, and gone on to the east. She cupped her hands and drank deeply from the stream, then hurried on downstream a hundred feet before she found a place where there were three stones she could use as steps, back up into the woods to the west.

She concentrated on picking up the pace again, her eyes always searching the forest ahead for the next twenty yards that would afford a foothold and her legs lengthening her strides to take them as quickly as possible.

She ran on for two hours before she found a rocky outcropping, like a shelf near the top of the next mountain. She gained it, chose north, and picked up her speed again. This was the place to lose him, while darkness was coming and there was nothing to retain her tracks. After half a mile, the rock and the sunlight both ran out. She kept going into the dusk until she found a huge thicket of thorny bushes in a hollow.

As night fell, she went down on her belly and crawled into the thicket below the level of the thorns and foliage. When she was fifteen feet into the middle of it, the bushes were taller and older, the spaces between them wider, and she could make better progress. She crawled another thirty feet before she found a patch of weeds. She rolled over and over on them until they were flat, then curled up, consciously relaxed each aching, strained muscle, and lay there for a moment with her eyes open. It made her feel dizzy and light to lie there staring into the darkness, as though she were floating.

The dream started as soon as she closed her eyes. She still couldn’t see anything, but she could feel that she was being held. She was in her mother’s lap, lying against her breast, her face on the soft silk, where she could smell the perfume. She could feel the smooth, strong hands gently stroking her back. "Mama?" she said.

"Shush," came the whisper. "Go to sleep, Janie. You need your rest." Her mother’s voice began to hum to her softly, tunelessly.

Jane whispered, "How did you come?"

"I’m not out there anymore, Jane. I’m inside you now, and my mother is inside me, and her mother is inside her, all the way back. We’re all here, just like those Russian dolls, one inside the other."

"What am I going to do, Mama?" Jane could hear her own voice, and it was the voice of a child.

Her mother treated it like the question of a child. She held her, rocked her, and said distantly, "Whatever you can, dear." Then the voice came from farther away, as though her mother were holding her out to look at her. "Are you hungry?"

"Yes," said Jane.

"You should eat," said her mother. "In the morning. But now you need to sleep."

"He’s coming for me."

"Yes, he is," her mother said. "That’s why you have to lie still now."

Her mother’s arms held her and rocked her back and forth, back and forth. "You’ll always be my baby girl." She began to hum again, the low, breathy sound that had always put Jane to sleep.

28

It was after midnight when she heard him on the rock shelf above her. He walked without trying to muffle his footsteps, and then he stopped and shouted, "Jane! I know you can hear me!"

She sat up, her heart pounding. She had forgotten where she was and a thorn jabbed into her back. She winced and slowly bent down again. She could feel the thorn slipping out, and then her shirt was wet in the back.

"Jane!" he called from up the mountainside. "You’re not going to lose me. I was born up here. I can track you longer than you can run." He waited, probably listening to hear her breaking from a hiding place and running, then called, "I don’t want to hurt you." There was another pause, and now he said, "You’ve got to understand. I can’t let somebody who hates me run around loose in the woods where I can’t see her." She could hear him walking along the ledge now. Whether he was just shouting into the woods and was trying to send his voice in every direction or had seen her and was trying to get a better angle for a shot, she had no way to tell. "All you have to do is come in, and you can have food, water, everything. I’ll only tie your hands when I’m asleep."

Jane felt the heat well up from her belly and move up her spine to her throat. She wanted to scream out at him, but that was what he wanted, too. She clenched her teeth and stayed still. It was like a hot iron pressed against her skin. She had taken him into hiding out of pity. He had used her, and done so with a cold, efficient detachment because he could—because she had let him. Now he didn’t even have to make up a nice lie anymore.

She was cold, wet, dirty, and hungry in a place where those conditions weren’t just discomforts but could kill her. He offered what?—to make her his slave in exchange for scraps of food and a chance to lie by the fire? It occurred to her he might not even be lying. It might appeal to him to keep her alive for a time, maybe for the whole summer, while he waited.

Then, some evening in September the sky would turn iron-gray and there would be frost on the ground in the morning. It might be a quick bullet in the head while she was still sleeping—tied up to sleep, he had said. More likely it would be a knife across her throat, the way he had done Harry. Winter would be coming and he would have to leave the mountains. Maybe he would explain it to her first: You have to understand. I don’t want to do this, but I can’t set a woman who hates me loose in the world.

Then she saw the beam of his flashlight stab into the darkness. It was incredibly bright, racing quickly across the expanse of forest. Wherever it passed, the trees lit up and threw huge shadows behind them that moved. She ducked down again and pressed her face into the dirt.

In a moment the beam passed and went out. She kept down, not daring to move. After a long time she heard his voice again, this time from farther away along the rock shelf. "Jane! I know you can hear me! I don’t want to hurt you ..."

Slowly, she crawled to the edge of the thicket, slithered out on her belly, and rose to a crouch. There was no way she could run through these woods in the darkness, so she began to walk. She had lost her compass, but now and then she could see the sky through the trees, and at some point the clouds would clear and she would be able to find the north star. She walked through the woods, not sure of the direction she had been going, not planning now, just covering ground. She knew that he would not give up. He had no reason to stop looking until he found her body. He could keep tracking her for weeks. She could be dead in two or three days.

The clouds didn’t clear. Instead, the cold wind penetrated her light shirt, bringing with it big icy drops that slapped the leaves and exploded into mist. After that, the body of the storm arrived overhead. The rain came down in an avalanche of water, plastering her wet clothes to her skin and making the trail muddy and the stones slippery.

She walked into the wind because it usually came from the west or the northwest, and because she knew that this was one thing that would be as hard for him as it was for her. She went on for hours. She was shivering, and her hands began to feel numb. At last, when she climbed onto a flat place in the middle of a grove of tall, thick trees, her foot slipped out from under her and she fell.

The ground was wet and spongy, but it didn’t feel cold anymore. She rolled over onto her back and lay there. It felt good. She hadn’t known how good it was going to feel. She knew she was going to have to get up, but not now.

This time when she dreamed, she felt her mother’s lap again. She wanted to stay there on the soft, smooth fabric, feeling the hands petting her to sleep. But then she heard something. It was a voice, harsh and hoarse. She looked up and saw, far above her in the sky, the tiny shape of a man falling. He was hundreds of feet above her, turning over and over as he fell, and he was screaming. She said, "No. No, not this." She closed her eyes tightly, but it didn’t make any difference. Her eyelids were clear.

Her father was plummeting downward at incredible speed, but the distance was so great that he just kept falling, minute after minute. She watched him, trying to will him to stop, to make the air under him thicken and hold him, but it didn’t work. It never worked. She was as terrified as he was, looking down at the ground and feeling his sensation of falling. She held her breath as he came faster and faster.

Now she could see him clearly. He was the way he always had been, dressed in a soft, worn red cotton shirt and a pair of washed-out blue jeans. He was coming head-first, his arms outstretched and his mouth wide open. He seemed to be looking into her eyes as he fell. Jane went rigid, pressed her fingers over her eyes, and braced herself for the impact.

She could hear the wind now, hissing past him and making his clothes flutter and flap. Something strong forced her hands apart as it always did, to make her see him die. Just as he was about to knife into the weedy plateau where she lay, the sound of fluttering seemed to increase, and he swung upward again, so close to her that she could feel the wind in her face.

He soared up into the sky, and she could see that he was changing. His arms were outward from his shoulders, and they were black and had long feathers. He flapped them, and it made the same wind sound, and he shot upward as quickly as he had fallen. He rose higher and higher until she couldn’t see the red shirt and the jeans anymore. He was just a black shape against the bright sky. He gave a loud cry, not a word but a shout, as though he were calling to her.

She heard another voice answer him. It was harsh and hoarse like his, and it seemed to be coming from overhead. She opened her eyes, and it was daytime, and her father was gone. She looked up at the crow. He was big, perched on a limb near the top of the tree maybe sixty feet above her head, riding on the leafy end of a branch as it bobbed up and down in the morning sunlight. He called, "Gaw," and another crow flew in, his wingspan at least two and a half feet. The sun shone on their feathers so they looked as though they had been combed with a viscous oil that put blue-purple-yellow highlights over the coal-black. She must have heard them in her sleep and invented a dream to incorporate the noise.

The crows looked friendly to her, benign. She watched them without moving until she could tell them apart. She sat up slowly and glanced around her at the other trees, and saw more crows above and streaks of white crow shit on some of the tree trunks. There were bits of wet, downy feather here and there in the weeds. She had managed to stumble into the middle of a rookery in the night. They had found her there and decided she was not a threat.

Crows posted sentries higher up than she could climb, with eyes so sharp they could see a leaf move from a thousand yards off. That was what her two friends were doing up there. If the killer came anywhere nearer than that, the cry would go up. She stood up slowly and quietly, so the sentries would not be alarmed by the prone figure popping up.

She said quietly, "Thanks, Daddy," to the crows, not because they would magically know what she meant, but because it would help them get used to the fact that she would be making sounds and moving around.

Jane now saw things with a mad clarity. So much came into her mind that she could only acknowledge that it was there, and not go over it step by step. She had been trying to fight against the enemy and the woods at the same time. She had accepted his terms of battle: that they would go deep into the wilderness and bring with them the equipment of civilization—guns, tents, boats, and compasses. Whoever brought the most and the best had the advantage. He was bigger, stronger, faster. He had all the food and the warm clothes. He had let the journey use up everything she could carry, and let the chase wear her down to nothing.

The crows had reminded her. She didn’t have to think like a frightened, half-starved white girl lost in the woods. She didn’t have to invent a way to escape, or invent anything at all.

She spent a few minutes under the tall trees collecting a handful of coal-black wing feathers, ten inches long, that had fallen to the ground from the limbs above. Then she went for a walk, looking around her for the right kind of tree. She found one at the edge of the next clearing. It had that special smooth, grayish bark that had always reminded her of an elephant’s legs. When she touched the trunk it was hard and cold like granite. It was definitely genus Carpinus: ironwood. She stepped back and stared up at the limbs. She found the right one in a few minutes. It was ten or twelve feet up, and the wind had broken it off at the joint and the knot had come with it. The limb was at least four inches thick and fifteen feet long. She looked around for a way up, but there was none.

Jane remembered a night in Los Angeles years ago. She had been driving along a freeway at two o’clock in the morning, and she had seen a boy climbing up a metal signpost beside the pavement so he could spray graffiti on the exit sign. He had put his belt around the pole, held both ends in his hands, and walked up. Jane took off her belt, slung it around the smooth trunk, and tried it. She was up in a few seconds, touching the limb. She got her hands around it and walked herself along it, hand over hand, until she had bent it to the ground. Then she patiently pushed and pulled and walked with it until it tore off and fell at her feet.

It took her half an hour just to carve through the limb with her knife. The wood was incredibly heavy, close-grained and hard. But as she worked she got better at it, and learned to split off long strips at a time from the handle of her ga-je-wa. The knot at the end she carved into a lump about four inches in diameter, and she had curved the handle in toward it a little, tapering the handle slightly and flattening it like a blade.

After two hours of carving, it was a little over two feet long and looked like a slightly cruder version of a war club she had seen in the New York State Museum in Albany. She tested it by thumping the ground a few times, then practiced swinging it. The shape gave it a kind of hammer force, and it was rock-hard and heavy. She stuck it in the back of her belt as the Nundawa warriors used to carry theirs. The ga-je-wa would not make her Martin’s equal, but it would make close combat a different kind of experience for him.

She resumed her walk, listening to the birds for the right kind of call. The one she needed was different from the deep-woods birds’. Those all made some metallic, low-register thunk or vit or whit. She walked and listened for a warble. When she heard it she walked toward it, and came out into a mountain meadow. The thrushes, birds like the robins at home, might eat a lot of things, but right now they would be looking for the first berries. She walked the margin of the meadow until she found them. There were wild strawberry plants growing in a patch on the east side of the meadow, where the sun was the strongest. It took her some time to find enough that had turned red, but she ate the green ones too. They were hard and tart, but they wouldn’t kill her. She found rain water collected in some of the lower parts of the meadow and drank from the puddles.

As she crossed the meadow to look at some bushes that might be blackberry plants, she almost stepped on the antler in the weeds. It was big—what hunters called an eight-point rack—but this was only half of it. When she picked it up, she could imagine the scene. The snow was probably still on the ground when mating season started. Two bucks had fought here until one of them had broken this antler. The other had gotten the does, and this one had gone off to sulk and grow a new one. She stuck it into her belt with the war club.

The blackberry bushes were something else she couldn’t identify, and whatever they were, they didn’t have berries, but beyond them she found the stand of hickory and maple trees. She took a great deal of care looking for saplings of the right size. She needed ones that had grown straight because they were out in the sun and not stunted or interfered with by their overarching parents.

When she found some, she took out her knife and began to cut, strip, and shape them into ga-no. They needed to be three feet long and so perfectly round and straight that she could roll them between the palms of her hands without detecting a shimmy in the tip. When she had prepared fifteen of them, she set them aside and went to work on the wa-a-no. It was a hickory sapling an inch and a half thick, with a slight natural bend. She made it four feet long and carved bits of it off until she could just bend it with all of her weight. Then she started to work on the bowstring.

Inside the handle of the survival knife were some fishhooks and two hundred feet of monofilament line. She cut three lengths of the fine, transparent fishing line, tied them to a standing sapling, and braided them the way she braided her hair, because it was the only way she knew. When she had braided three strands of three, she braided those three braids, ending up with a nine-threaded string that had a little thickness and body. It took all of her strength to string her bow.

She stopped to listen to the crows in the rookery, and after a time she was satisfied that Martin was not close enough to hear her work on the antler. She found two heavy rocks and used one as a hammer and the other as an anvil to break it. Then she found that by using the knife as a chisel and the war club as a hammer, she could chip pieces from the base that were sharp and roughly triangular, then carve an indentation on each edge. If she split the tips of the arrows a little, she could slide the arrowheads in and tie them in place with the fishing line.