Follow the River (32 page)

“Aye, dear,” she said, forcing a benign smile. “Y’ve listened to me, an’ we’ve come more’n three hundred miles with no hurt t’ speak of, eh?”

“
I
hurt.”

“Eh, well. I feel same as you, not m’ very best ever. But I’m whole, an’ y’re the same. An’ damn’ee, we’re no squaws. Keep in mind, Ghetel m’ darlin’, we’re free as birds!”

Ghetel looked incredulous at this cheery lecture. Finally she said, indignantly:

“Free as
birds
? Eheh! You know how free is a bird? Alvays a bird goes here for a seed, and he goes dere for a gnat. And
dat’s
all
he does in his whole day! And he nefer yet gets enough. So dere for your freedom of a bird! Hah!”

Mary was delighted by this outburst. So the old woman’s brain was still alive after all! She grinned into Ghetel’s wrinkled scowl. “Well, y’see then! We really
are
as free as birds, then, ain’t we?”

And Ghetel, after scowling for a moment, actually laughed. It
was
a little miracle.

They had come to recognize hickory, walnut and oak trees from a distance, and would go to them if they were accessible. The season for berries and wild grapes was past, but there were still nuts to be found—sometimes.

Now they were toiling up a steep, rock-studded slope toward a pair of likely looking hickories, a few yards above the river, whose shaggy bark made them conspicuous. Mary had given Ghetel her pointed lance to use as a walking-staff, as the old woman seemed to need its support more than she did. As they climbed, their breath was shallow and harsh and their feet dragged through the rustling leaves on the slope. It was a dry morning, without wind for a change, and except for the sounds of their progress and the wet murmur of the river below, a vast silence filled the valley. The winter-stripped trees were stark, and without foliage to screen it, the hard angularity of the terrain was forbidding: mountainsides tilting skyward, V-shaped ravines full of mossy boulders and detritus, huge fallen tree trunks strewn like jackstraws on the slopes and in the gullies or sometimes leaning half-fallen, hung in the branches of other trees. Some of the mountain ridges ended abruptly in sheer gray rock cliffs facing over the river. From some of these rock faces, water seeped and dribbled and darkened the rock, and in places, mountain springs and freshets would simply spew over the ramparts of such cliffs into space, disintegrating to mist before reaching the valley floor.

When Mary and Ghetel reached the hickories they found that squirrels had been working there before them. The ground below the trees was covered with husk-quarters and a
few broken, yellow-brown nutshells, but most of the nuts were gone and the few that remained were marked by the dark little pinholes that meant worms had already invaded the nutmeats. The two women scratched over the leafy slope for fifteen minutes for a yield of a dozen good nuts. Like most of their recent disappointments, this gave Ghetel an excuse to glower in silent accusation at Mary.

They sighed and sat down on a lichen-mottled slab of limestone, to break the nutshells and get to the tiny breakfast within. Mary pulled the tomahawk from her belt and, before she could crack the first nut, Ghetel said:

“Gif me the ax.”

“Mmm? Well, wait, I will …”

“Now. Me first.”

Mary shrugged, and started to hand it to her, to humor her as she had done so often recently, when a sudden caution turned in the back of her mind. Ghetel already had the hickory spear, and if Mary gave her the tomahawk too, the unhappy old woman would be in possession of both their weapons.

Mary hesitated. She was surprised by the thought, by what seemed an unwarranted suspicion. Surely Ghetel would not hurt her. And yet she could not shake off that strange whisper of dread.

“Gif me,” Ghetel said.

“Ahm, would y’give me the spear there first?” Mary asked, as nonchalantly as she could.

“W’y vant dat?”

“Because I, uhm, I want t’ poke about in the leaves and see if I can find a few more nuts. This is scarce enough t’ keep a bird alive.” She offered the little bird joke to try to gauge Ghetel’s frame of mind. But the old woman’s eyes only narrowed and she held out her hand for the tomahawk. Mary held out her hand for the spear, and for a moment they sat there like that, the tentative uneasiness hanging between them, until Mary began to fancy that, even if this dread were only a product of her imagination, Ghetel could surely read it and
get
the idea of having both weapons, even if she had not been thinking of it before.

“Give me the stick, please,” Mary said through such a tight throat it almost came out a whisper. She chose to call it the stick, not the spear, lest she betray her fears.

“Ach! Like a child!” Ghetel sighed, and picked up the stick and extended it to Mary. Point first, Mary noticed. And when she closed her hand around the stick, Ghetel closed her hand around the tomahawk handle. They exchanged them simultaneously.

Am I imagining all this? Mary wondered. If so, then indeed I must seem childish to ’er.

And as Ghetel bent over her hickory nuts with the tomahawk, Mary, with the familiar spear shaft in her hand, remembered the strange ghastly feeling she had had watching Ghetel tear off the little arms of the frog.

I’m a-gettin’ too spooky, she thought. I’m a-gettin’ feelings I needn’t.

All the same, she resolved as she scratched among the leaves with the stick, looking for more nuts while keeping Ghetel in the corner of her eye, when she gives me back that tommyhock, I’m a-gonna cut me one o’ these hickory saplin’s hereabout an’ make another spear.

The overcast sky that afternoon was swept a shimmering blue by a northerly breeze. The last rags of the sun-washed clouds disappeared up the valley, and the towering landscape, ridge after ridge, brightened from the colors of lead and pig-iron to silver and brass. The leafless trees were engraved in clarity: white and tan limbs, blue-black shadows. Cliff faces a mile away showed their flinty details as if they were close enough to touch.

The women were picking their way over the shingle at a river bend, gingerly placing each step of their bleeding feet among the rocks, when they heard a small clatter off to their left toward the river’s edge and looked up and saw the fawn.

He was a little white-tail, a few months old, no bigger than a large dog but walking high on his stilt legs away from them, looking back over his shoulder at them, as much in curiosity as fear. He was out on the end of the shingle, almost at the water’s edge. Both women at once seemed to realize that they
had him cornered on the point, being between him and the woods; they heard each other gasp and whisper and each saw the other turn the point of her spear toward him. Mary could actually feel her little reserves of strength rushing to readiness in her breast and arms. Her hurting feet were nothing now as she turned toward the creature, staring unblinking at him.

This was their greatest stroke of fortune yet. A hundred times more wonderful than a cold catfish lying on a creekbed. This creature could feed them red meat for a week or more. His hide could make moccasins. In her mind Mary was already building a fire, risk or no risk, to cook their first meal, to cure the rest of the flesh for food to eat along the way. She held the spear-pole with both hands, angling it forward from her right hip. Instinctively, she and Ghetel were moving in concert, slowly closing the space between themselves and the animal, leaving no space for it to flee between them or around them.

The fawn stopped at the water’s edge now, and turned its left flank to them, its face toward them as if it were watching one of them with each limpid brown eye. Its glistening black nose trembled as it tried to identify them by scent. Doubtless they were the first human beings it had ever seen. It still did not seem to have become afraid; it stretched its neck toward Ghetel, who was now ten feet from it. Mary was closing in on its flank. Another yard, she thought, and I can strike. Her hands were shaking and she was almost nauseated by her desire to feel the lance plunge into that soft hide of brown and black.

She heard a clatter of rock behind her, and at the same instant the fawn looked in that direction, seemed to comprehend its danger. It contracted an inch suddenly as its legs tensed for flight.

Mary lunged desperately at the fawn with her spear, falling forward, aware as she fell forward that something big and alive was running past her toward the fawn. Pain slammed through her knees and hip and arms as she fell on the rocky shingle. Hooves were clicking in the stones a few feet away and Ghetel was roaring something, and then the hooves rattled
up the shore and away and something hard skittered along the rocks in that direction. Mary opened her eyes and looked back over her shoulder to see the fawn and a doe, its mother, springing like jackrabbits down the shore and then out of sight up a wooded slope. Ghetel’s thrown spear slid to a stop among the rocks behind them.

Mary put her face against the pebbles and winced and sobbed and waited for the physical pain to go away.

She knew from her cold and empty feeling and from Ghetel’s abandoned howls of frustration that the pain of their failure would be with them much longer than this of the stone bruises.

“Ah, Ghetel, this looks t’be a lovely, fat an’ juicy ’un!”

“Eh, May-ry! And here! This one makes a feast for a kink!”

Mary was holding up a brown stalk she had pulled from the mud at the water’s edge. Mud-clots and water dribbled from the gray root. Ghetel had just torn some nameless scrub-plant from between two rocks and was brushing dirt off its reddish-brown taproot.

They had been acting this way, desperately silly, since their failure to kill the fawn. For a few hours after its escape they had wailed and prayed and fallen into silent rages of frustration. Then, as if freed from any more hope of getting meat to eat, they had been swept with a wave of giddy cheerfulness—even Ghetel—and had returned to foraging for anything that grew within reach, whether they knew it was edible or not.

They had stopped at every bush that had large winter buds, and had picked off handfuls of the buds and eaten them like nuts as they stumbled along. It was like eating wood, though often more bitter. Some of the buds were too hard and fibrous to chew with their loosening teeth, so they would soften a mouthful of them in their saliva until they could chew them apart and swallow them. And they would pretend to each other this way that they were indescribably succulent and delicious. It was a dismal joke, but it was a joke and they would repeat it and repeat it and break out in high, wild laughter, the steep mountainsides echoing the laughter.

Then there had come a time when they could not bear to
chew another dry, tough bud, and they had remembered arrowleaf tubers. They could not find any arrowleaf stalks along these swift waters, but they began to see every sedge and cattail as a banner signaling the location of some succulent root or tuber below. They began pulling up whatever the ground would let loose of, and chopping out stubborn roots with the tomahawk. Then they would wash the dirt off the roots and rhizomes they had gathered, and continue upstream, mincing on their bruised and lacerated feet, making desperately high-spirited remarks about the delicacy of what they were eating.

Some of the roots really were not too bad. Some were crisp and could be snapped between the fingers like turnip flesh, and easily chewed, tasteless or bitter or spicy in flavor. Others, no matter how promising their shape or color, were nothing but wood. Some of these woody ones, however, had soft and palatable bark that could be gnawed off before the root was thrown away.

And others, they found, had tough and stringy bark that was bitter and inedible, but inside the bark there would be a whitish or yellowish core with the consistency of a potato or onion. The tomahawk was indispensable to the task of digging these and getting to the flesh of them. The women were spending perhaps two hours of every day on their hands and knees, going nowhere, digging and chopping and peeling roots and snapping off buds. The tomahawk blade grew nicked and blunt and less useful. Mary experimented with different kinds of stone and finally learned to identify the kinds that would whet steel. And so she was able to keep an edge on the weapon—nay, she thought, it’s no more a weapon, it’s a tool—despite its rough usage.

Every time she would pull up a new root or pull down a withered berry and start to put it in her mouth, she would think fleetingly: pray this’n’s not poisonous. She had heard the menfolk talk about poisonous plants and berries and leaves, and she herself knew precious little about them. She would simply look at one a moment, and if she got no forebodings, she would try to eat it. She had learned to trust her forebodings.

And anyhow, she would think, the big poison of all is to have nothin’, nothin’, nothin’ whatsoever in th’ belly.

Poison or no, this diet included many things not intended for human innards, and the women were afflicted by a succession of fluxes and blockages, nauseas and intoxications they had never experienced before. One day both of them began vomiting helplessly, spewing up green fluid and undigested plant fiber, until they were empty, then continued to heave up nothing until they were too weak to get to their feet. They hardly slept at all that night, a night of cold moon and shimmering frost on the ground, owl-hoots fluting among the mountaintops, disturbed every few minutes by the sudden explosive spasms of their own retchings. By the next morning they were feverish and yellow-faced and covered with cold sweat, but the spasms had moved deeper, now clutching at their bowels until they would double over in agony and pray to die. By that afternoon they were stopping every few yards to excrete scalding gray waters. Then even that went dry while the need continued. Mary would stop, not hearing Ghetel’s footsteps behind her, and would look back to see the old woman squatting on the trail redfaced, groaning as if in childbirth, trying to pass something that would not move. Then it would be Mary’s turn to squat and strain without success.

And then there came the trouble with seeing. The river would suddenly turn black; cliffs would turn yellow. Mary would see two Ghetels, Ghetel two Marys. Once a huge blob of darkness with blazing white edges ballooned out of the ground in front of Mary and swallowed her with a rush of noise—hissing and voices—and then left her standing, weaving, in a landscape piercing white and shadowless as if illuminated by lightning.