Follow the River (38 page)

“Yah, a promise.”

“I mean your true word, God as your witness.”

“Yah. Gott I swear.”

“So be it. Now come.”

They reached the mouth of the roaring creek and turned southeastward late in the morning. The descent had taken them hours because they had had to cross two great, precarious rockslides where any misstep sent stones and boulders tilting out from under their feet and rattling and crashing down into the creek. They had also been slowed by Ghetel’s new taste for bugs. She had picked up a sharp-edged piece of flat rock, and at virtually every downed tree she had lagged behind to hew rotten bark away with the stone and look for such beetles as she had enjoyed for breakfast. Mary grew impatient, and was constantly coaxing her on. But in a way it was better; as long as Ghetel had hopes of finding food and was preoccupied with it, she seemed less desperate, less sullen toward Mary, less dangerous. Ghetel had found no more bugs despite all her stalling and hacking, but she seemed certain that she would, and was comparatively happy.

Crossing the rockslides had done awful damage to their feet. The skin was off most of their toes and ankles and they left little red smudges of blood wherever they stepped. Mary had a deep gash in the arch of her right foot and a puncture in
the sole of her left where a locust-thorn had gone in at least an inch. She had pulled it out but a part of the point had broken off and was deep in the flesh. Ghetel had caught her left foot between two jagged rocks, and in trying to lift one off had badly ground up the flesh of her little toe. But, as the white bone was visible, they had been able to inspect it and see that the toe was not broken. Every part of their feet had been stubbed and jammed and scraped countless times, so often that each time it happened it was a surprise that the new pain could be felt through the old pain. And so when they reached the narrow strip of bottomland in the New River gorge, they sat down on a drift log in the weak November sunlight and, despite the chill of it, made plasters of the icy mud and caked each other’s feet in them. They spent an hour there, sitting side by side on the log, the blanket across both their backs, facing the sun, all the weight off their feet, letting the mud dry and pull the sharp pains out of their feet. “Notice?” Mary said. “Y’can count your heartbeat by th’ throbbin’s in your feet.” They did that for a while as the sun shone on their faces and closed eyelids. Ghetel jerked awake suddenly, saving herself from falling backward off the log.

They sat in the hush of the river valley and waited for the courage to put their weight back on their feet and go. A flash of intense scarlet shot through their vision and stopped on a bush ten feet away: a cardinal. He sat on a swaying twig looking about with abrupt little turns of his crested head, his bead-black eyes almost invisible in the band of black around the base of his beak. Mary was seeing him with an intense clarity of vision brought on by her utter emptiness, a kind of seeing in which he was not just a bright red bird in a wintry landscape of browns and grays and dying greens, but was a flying vehicle designed to carry the vibrancy of its life from place to barren place and thus to keep all places from being without the beauty of life. Mary had never had such a thought before, and she was staring at the bird the way she had stared at the burning spring several nights before, warming her soul at it, when Ghetel moved abruptly beside her and flung the rock she had been carrying. The toss was feeble and inaccurate; the rock struck low in the bush, shaking it, and the
cardinal fluttered away untouched. Mary turned and looked at her, incredulous. “Why?” she demanded.

Ghetel’s eyes were blazing, happily. “I just t’ink: There are alvays birds, here, dere … and a bird is not much to eat, but it is more den a
bug!
We carry rocks, eh? And one time now and den, ven ve trow ve don’ miss, eh? And ve vill eat a bird dat day, eh?”

Mary shook her head. Ghetel and her gut.

But when they put their weight on their feet, groaning with the returning pain and then getting used to it, and started to move on, Mary stooped alongside Ghetel and gathered rocks of good throwing size, enough of them to carry at the ready in one hand. It was true, there were always many birds darting about, even in this stark season, and one bird, one cardinal or mockingbird, even one small oriole or robin or a tiny sparrow, would be more nourishment than they had taken in the last week.

Maybe, Mary thought, still working things out in the lightheadedness of hunger, maybe that is what the redbird was telling us, all bright red and full of life like that.

Early in the afternoon they reached the creek of the painted trees. By that time they had gathered and thrown several handfuls of stones, but had come nowhere near bringing down a bird, and Mary was beginning to understand that if they ever did hit one of the swift little creatures with their feebly-thrown missiles, it would be more by chance than by aim. She had resigned herself to that. Still, there was a chance, and so they carried rocks and they stalked birds and threw at them as they went along.

But somehow as they progressed they saw fewer birds, and Mary sensed that somehow the birds were warning each other.

The river and the paint-tree creek both were higher and faster than they had been in July. They could not wade across the New River at the shoal; it would have been too high and fast now even if they had been on horseback. And it appeared that they would have to do still another walk-around to get
across the paint-tree creek. So they turned up through the brushy, narrow canyon.

The narrow bottomland where they had camped on the way down was under water now, just saplings and bushes sticking up out of the water, and where the sides of the gorge were too steep to walk on the two women waded in the cold water up to their knees and held to a bush, a tree, a root, a vine. They were extremely weak now and did not trust their benumbed legs to support them even in this shallow water, so they would not let go of one handhold until they had a new one. This creek twisted like a snake around the base of steep mountains whose sides seemed to mount to the very center of the sky, and the sun was down from sight early in the afternoon so there was not even that faint warmth to bless their skin. The ravine was so narrow that Mary sometimes had to hang onto a tree and look up and around to assure herself that the mountainsides were not moving together to crush her.

They went about five miles up the west side of this creek before they found a place of riffles and decided they could cross there. Mary decided. The old woman was simply following along now, moaning with hunger or pain or both, stopping now and then to heave a rock weakly at some bird. They waded across the creek easily, simply clenching their teeth and letting the egg- and fist-sized pebbles of the bottom torture their feet as they would; that did not matter any more; they just had to get across this creek and back down to the river before dark.

Mary had assumed a similar attitude about her stomach. It was simply going to gnaw and hurt and give her that awful, weakening hollowness, and that was the way it was. She did not try to find just any old thing to put into it anymore; she simply was not as desperate as Ghetel to have something in it for the sake of having something in it. She thought it probably was better to have nothing in it at all than to have it half full of such trash as Ghetel was continually picking up and gnawing and swallowing: bark and seed pods and husks, fungus off the dead trees, dead moss full of dirt, and now, even beetles and grubworms.

But as dusk came down and they returned to the valley of
the river, Mary’s hunger made her so faint that the world around her began humming and swooping, and she realized that even though she could stand the misery of starving, her body would not keep going much longer on nothingness. It really had exhausted all the residue of roots and sumac berries and slippery-elm bark she had eaten days before and was now consuming itself, and will or no, or Will or no, her body would simply stop here. The truth was that she could not ignore her hunger any longer; she could not just rise above it.

And so in the last light of this day she hunted food alongside Ghetel with an equal urgency. They pulled up and gnawed roots. They ate buds. They found a few acorns, cracked them with rocks and ate the dried-up, leathery, bitter meats. They threw rocks in vain at a few sparrows. They threw the spear at a raccoon and missed. And when Ghetel at last barked an old log that yielded a few squirming grubs, Mary did take a few in her palm and, trying to think of faraway things, threw them into her mouth and swallowed them, unable to bear the thought of chewing them. When they were down she gave a great shudder. And she had a grim thought then that made her smile:

If you don’ eat worms, they’ll be eatin’ you
.

She felt a little stronger in the morning. Clouds had come up from the southwest, again dulling the colors of the valley but warming the air a bit. There was no frost this morning and the ground was soft and moist, squishy with cold damp. Ghetel was reasonably cheerful, being warmer and not quite so famished as she had been on previous days, and even gave Mary a grand, spontaneous hug.

We’ll do all right mostly, Mary thought. But when times are at their worst, I must watch ’er.

To keep Ghetel complacent, Mary decided to devote a while to feeding before they started up the gorge this morning.

They found a quantity of the sour, fuzzy sumac berries in an old burnt-over draw, but could eat only a handful as they were brown and dusty dry and disintegrating. They flaked old shelf funguses off dead trees, gray, leathery and foul-tasting,
but filling, and pulled a few water’s-edge stalks and ate their bitter bulbs. Still queasy about the eating of worms, though now resigned to it, Mary helped Ghetel hunt for grubs. They found none. But Mary remembered how Henry Lenard had used to turn up rocks to find earthworms for fishbait. And somehow the thought of healthy pink earthworms this morning seemed less revolting than that of the white grubs, which reminded her too strongly of maggots. So, in the humus-rich, leaf-covered soil at the base of the mountainside, Mary began turning rocks over, and in fifteen minutes had a palm full of glistening, reddish-pink crawlers. Ghetel, delighted, fell to the same work and soon had a good handful.

All right now, Mary told herself, don’t think, just do it. Just like a bird. She shut her eyes and put three or four in her mouth and chewed them quickly and swallowed them. They were tough and slimy and cold and strangely sourish, and left her teeth gritty. But there was no doubt: it was meat. It would strengthen her fibers and enrich her blood. She ate the rest, and, under the influence of those thoughts, they tasted more palatable each mouthful. “Eh well, dear,” she said to Ghetel, who was beaming now, “truly that was the best breakfast we’ve had in an age, say what? Y’ ready to walk now? Here, you wear the blanket a while first.” Ghetel nodded and flung it over her shoulders. Mary had noticed that Ghetel talked little to her now; since their fight, she had hardly said a dozen sentences, but would often discourse with herself in Dutch as they struggled along.

Within a few hours of walking, Mary began to notice a change in the aspect of the valley above the painted-tree creek. The mountainsides were steeper and more forbidding, and were footed right on the river’s edge. There was no level bottomland to walk on. The river tumbled furiously, glassy green and white, among boulders as big as houses, which lay at the bases of the cliffs from which they had fallen. The mountainsides soared steeply a thousand feet or more up from the roaring riverbed, darkly forested all the way from the water’s edge to their crests. Huge, water-weathered gray trees, undermined by the river’s force, lay jammed among the boulders, their gnarled roots upended, their branches in the
tugging river, sometimes entangling great masses of dead bushes and reeds that had been swept into their clutches by old floods.

There were places where whole mountainsides seemed to have sloughed off and fallen into the river, leaving stark blue-gray cliff faces as precipitous as walls, hundreds of feet high, topped with full-size forest trees which, from this distance, looked tiny as blades of grass.

Ahead stood a mountainside whose entire slope from the crest to the base was covered by the scar and scree of an avalanche: an enormous slide of boulders and dirt leaning a third of the way up the mountainside, full of splintered trees and jutting root-boles, massive ash and walnut trees bent double or twisted open like segments of frayed rope by the weight and force of the rockfall; above was the bald face of new rock from which it all had come, slanting a thousand feet into the sky.

We’ll have to cross all that rubble, Mary thought. Pray it’s done all the fallin’ it’s going to do.

Inured though they were by now to the power and indifference of the wilderness, the two women felt the grim force of this gorge pressing on their senses and squeezing their hearts. To be enclosed by the walls of this gloomy, craggy, roaring canyon was like being on the floor of the den of a giant, who might step on them at any moment without noticing or caring. Mary felt as tiny as any one of the lice now making their way through the folds of her own flesh. It’s no wonder the Indians take the ridge road around it, she thought. For a moment she considered turning back to the paint-tree creek and going that way.

Nay, she thought. I’d get us lost in the mountains for sure. At least I know this awful gorge leads to home.

There was nothing so simple as walking now; it was now mostly a business of climbing, scooting, crawling and sliding over and around the gigantic rubble of the riverbed. To skirt a square-cornered rock chunk the size of a barn they would have to climb over two or three as large as cabins. Often they would find their way barred by a huge snarl of fallen trees or drifted brush, and would snake through or under these, scraping
their skin, spraining joints, taking thorns and splinters, snagging and losing still more of their skimpy rags, forever afraid that their efforts would dislodge some key log and cause the whole jam to rend itself apart and crush them or drop them into the torrent below.