Follow the River (40 page)

One of these two forks, she thought, is the New River. But which one?

There were no landmarks in her memory to answer that question, because she had never been through this place before.

Ghetel was hovering at her shoulder, waiting, as ever, for her to lead on. Mary knew she must choose one fork or the other immediately, because if the old woman sensed that she was uncertain of the way, she might well grow rebellious again.

Mary chose the fork leading right, toward the south, for two reasons. First, it looked to be just a little wider and thus probably was the main rivercourse. Second, because there was no way to get to that other river without crossing this one.

And so she led Ghetel down the slope closer to the river bank. She proceeded as if she were absolutely certain they were on the New River. But she knew there would always be a doubt in her mind as to whether that other stream had been the New River, her highway to home.

And if I ever find out it was, she thought, it’ll be too late by then.

That doubt became a burden, as heavy as if she were carrying another person on her shoulders. In a way, she was: that other person she was carrying was the Mary Ingles who believed that the stream not taken was the right stream.

Her footsteps, heavy and painful enough already, were dragged down with reluctance.

And the gorge up which they were moving now was even more gigantic and ominous. Now every ridge they could see came directly to the river’s edge and ended in a sheer cliff dropping fifty to a hundred feet to the river, where the current
over the centuries had cut under the mountainsides. Ten feet offshore from where Mary and Ghetel now slid and crawled, there were three or four rock chunks in the river, big as ships, with trees growing on top of them. The women were passing under a steep gray cliff now, a hundred feet high, from which those huge monoliths evidently had fallen into the river. Across the river in a shadowy, narrow ravine, a creek poured over a stone ledge and cascaded in twenty-foot leaps down the picturesque, narrow notch it had carved for itself. It was the kind of place Mary would have lingered hours to gaze at under any other circumstances. Now, in her frightened and doubtful state of mind, things of great beauty saddened her.

Ghetel was coming along automatically now, stumbling a few yards, sitting down to rest and rub her feet, talking to herself. She had not said a word about the pounding Mary had given her with the stick at the falls. She seemed to be retreating into herself, drawing a cloak of resistance around herself to shut out the miserable realities of their plight.

I could do that too, Mary thought, if I had but to follow; if I needn’t think.

That other river back there, she thought. Oh, that haunts me!

In the three days since they had passed the falls, they had found nothing to eat.

They had seen hickory trees and walnut trees and oaks high on the slopes above, but invariably, on climbing to them, they found nothing but a few broken shells. Squirrels and other animals had harvested everything.

There were no swamp plants with succulent roots up here in this stony gorge because there was no still water anywhere. All the rain that fell and all the sleet that melted poured down steep rivulets into creeks, raced over shallow brown rock-and-pebble streambeds and plunged over ledges into this river, which hurried recklessly down its zigzag course as if desperate to get out of these high Alleghenies and down into the stately O-y-o, now more than a hundred miles behind.

There were not even any worms now. There was no soil at the river’s edge, only rock. And up the slopes; the ground had hardened with cold; if there were earthworms in it, they had burrowed deep.

There were fish in the river and the creeks: big, swift, beautiful fast-water fish, but they were not like a catfish, to lie lazily on a shallow bottom inviting a spear; they were darters, seen in a flash and gone deep; and Mary had nothing with which to make a serviceable fishhook. Even if she had had a fishhook, there would have been nothing for bait. And even if she had had a fishhook and bait, she probably would have had no patience to sit and fish. She was driven and tormented by her uncertainty about this river. She could not rest in this thundering gorge, not knowing whether it was the New River or not. She had decided to give herself six days to turn up a landmark, any landmark she would remember having seen before the Indians had set off overland. If she did not see anything she recognized by then, she would contrive some means to get across this river—floating on a log or something, whatever the risk—and would go back down to that river that had led up to the east and follow
it
until she recognized something. She had grown that desperate. She was sure they had walked six hundred miles or more since they had fled from the Indians. To have come six hundred miles through a hostile wilderness and suffered such hardships, all in vain, would prove a God too mocking and cruel to abide. As it was now, she would scowl at the wintry sky several times a day and demand to know why a decent woman like herself had been thrown into this dank and thundering hell-pit.

There were not even birds in this gorge, it seemed. She
could remember seeing no small woodland birds since passing the falls; this was a craggy land fit only for hawks and eagles and vultures, all of which she had seen diving from cliff-tops or wheeling over the gorge. You could not throw a rock up there and knock one down to eat. Likely you could not even bring one down with a rifle. She had seen wild turkeys at a distance, but they were nervous and impossible to approach.

And the forest animals were simply too wary and agile to kill for food without a gun. In these three days above the falls they had glimpsed a fox, three wolves, or one wolf three times, a blazing-eyed lynx crouched on a bluff looking down at them from twenty feet above, an elk on the far shore. And in one startling instant just after dawn, they had glimpsed the face of some cat-creature, as big as the face of a man, in a clump of bushes five feet ahead of them, before it disappeared with a swish and a rustle. They had not seen any bears for weeks, which was all right with her. The cold weather had also retired the snakes.

That’s just as well for the snakes, Mary thought, as I’d stone one and eat ’im now if I could find one.

Ghetel had groaned all night; neither of them had slept. The night had seemed a year long. Mary, herself eaten up inside with cramps and gnawings, had fallen into spells from time to time, in which she would be looking at the cold stars glittering above the cliff-tops, then would be awakened, by a shudder or a fibrillation of her heart, to the realization that she was still looking at the cold stars but that she had not been seeing them for a while. And Ghetel would still be groaning. Sometimes the old woman would twitch violently, or would suddenly jerk her knees up and curl herself into a ball, hugging herself, her bony knees slamming into Mary’s side. And then the blanket, which had been arranged so carefully over them to keep all their limbs covered, would be pulled askew and Mary would have to sit up, shivering, to rearrange it and tuck in its edges. During those hours, she would think of virtually nothing but the tragic loss of Ghetel’s blanket. In those early morning hours with the frost seeming to fall on them directly from the bitter blue-white stars, the loss of that blanket would
grow in her mind to be the greatest of their misfortunes, greater than the loss of the tomahawk, greater than their want of food, greater than their need of shoes. In the daytime her great preoccupation would be that awful growing certainty that they were on the wrong river, and that they would perish before having a chance to verify and correct their mistake.

It must be a simple matter to be Ghetel, she thought. To her, our greatest misfortune is always the same: that we’re starved nigh to death.

Mary felt, as she had been feeling all night, the pebbles of the narrow beach grinding against her fleshless bones, even through the crushed bed of moss and drift leaves they had laid down, and she thought:

William might well not even know me if he saw me now. Surely I scarce weigh six stone anymore.

Her stomach gripped. She drew her legs up and squinted against the pain and drew cold air through her clenched teeth, and the cold air on her teeth sent needles of pain through her face, into her eyeballs. Her gums were rotting and her teeth were loose and sensitive to cold, even to biting. It was an agony to drink water, and chew a root.

And another strange thing had happened to her, something she had realized one long, sleepless, thoughtful night somewhere along the way, one night when she had been going one by one over the effects of the ordeal: by her count of the days on the knotted belt, she ought to have had her monthlies by now. She had gone through them once since the baby’s birth, while she was still in captivity, but she should have had them once again, just a few days ago. It was good not to have the bother of them, of course, but still they were something her body always had done when it was supposed to, and now it was, she suspected, a sign, along with the loose teeth and the swollen joints and the constant coldness and the periods of distorted vision and unclear thinking, a sign that she was truly starving—not just desperately hungry, but starving.

She thought about these things and waited for the daylight, though she now felt such an overwhelming lassitude that she didn’t know whether she could even get to her feet, come morning—or why she should.

It was doubly hard to think about getting up and moving now that she suspected she was following the wrong river—and perhaps going farther from home.

The stars had faded out and the sky had turned peach-colored above the walls of the chasm. Now Mary could see the rivercourse again, could see the boulders and shrubs gradually set themselves out from the massive silhouettes of the cliffs, and the hopelessness of the night receded into the back of her mind again as it did every morning when she could look up the river and see their way.

It took her five minutes to stand up. First she would sit up with a groan. Then she would fold a leg a little at a time, wincing, then the other leg, until both feet were flat on the ground. Then she would push her weight forward or pull on a limb until her weight was on her feet. Then she would squat there a while, resting, moaning at the stabs of pain in her knees and feet and hips, until she was ready to haul herself to a standing position.

Some mornings, if there was nothing to hold onto and lift herself, she would turn over onto her stomach and get onto all fours and then stand up.

It was as if her leg and ankle and hip joints froze in the night. It was like breaking them loose every morning. Then after she had helped Ghetel get up, and had walked gasping a few hundred feet, the joints would stop grinding and shooting their pains through her, and she would be ready for another day’s going.

The desultory clunking of Ghetel’s bell bothered Mary now. Now that her head was in a fuddle over this dubious maze of rivers, the bell seemed a silly thing, a stupid indulgence.

But she ought to wear a bell, Mary joked grimly to herself sometimes; she is, after all, such a mule.

This morning they came to a place where the river curved away to their left. Along the outside of its curve, where they were now limping along, the river had carved its way into the base of a high cliff. There was a stretch of several hundred feet ahead of them where the water swirled along right at the
base of the clff. There was no place between the roiling water and the stone wall to walk.

Mary stopped and studied it. They had come to such places every day since the falls. There were only two ways, sometimes only one, to get past these places. Either was horrible in its particular way.

She tried the direct way first. Steeling herself against the cold and clutching at handholds in the sheer stone, she probed the water with the hickory pole in her left hand. She felt a rock bottom. It was shallow enough here for a first step. She stepped down into the water; she felt the shock of it shoot up into her chest and make her heart skip. Then she probed ahead with the pole again and found another solid place. She put her left foot on it and then brought her right foot over. The icy water was swirling around her hips now, and she moved her right hand from one crevice to another, then reached out again with the pole.

It found no bottom this time. She pushed it further down into the water. Nothing. She shifted her grip to the upper end of the pole and shoved it farther down until her hand was in the river. The whole length of the pole was underwater and was touching nothing. That meant it was over her head and they could not wade along the base of the cliff and would therefore have to do it the other way. The cold water was seizing up her joints again. She turned her face back along the cliff and started inching her way back across the distance she had come. Ghetel was sitting there in the blanket, as if in a stupor, just waiting to be told what to do. Mary climbed back onto the bank, shaking violently. She had to struggle briefly with Ghetel to get the blanket, and wrapped herself in it. “Let’s go back a ways,” she said. “We’ve got to climb this’n, I’m afraid.”

Ghetel got up and followed without question, her bell clunking dismally; she did not really seem to know anymore whether they were going one way or the other.

They went back beyond the place where they had slept. Every step back was twice as hard as any step in the right direction, and Mary would almost despair whenever she
had to expend her waning strength backtracking from a dead end.

Mary found a place at last where they could start up the slope, a place where there were roots and rocks to haul themselves up by, to climb the mountain and pass over above the cliff.

They spent the rest of the morning on this passage. They could go only a few feet before stopping to slump against a tree trunk or to lie face down against the slope hanging by roots to get their breath while their legs twitched and trembled from the strain. They would stop when the dizziness came, when the huge rampart they were ascending would seem to waver and tilt and threatened to dump them off into the dark river below.