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, mincin
g 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.
And then these things, or some of these things, would cure themselves, and the women would be lucid and even-tempered again for a while, and would try to determine which of the roots or berries or buds had poisoned them, so that they could avoid them next time. But of course they had no way of knowing, as they had tried anything they could chew and swallow, so they were doomed to be overcome every few days by the same afflictions.
Despite all these miseries, Ghetel seemed to be having a resurgence of that brave good humor that had first incited Mary’s admiration on the day of the running of the gauntlet.
Mary studied her from time to time and marveled. It’s almost more than I can bear at my age, she thought. And she’s two times my years at least.
Once the old woman must have been quite fat. Mary had noticed, when first seeing her at the Shawnee town, that her frame was massive and her flesh was loose as if she had lost perhaps thirty or forty pounds of fat between the time of her capture and the time of her arrival at the Indian village. Now there was nothing massive about her any more. She was burning her flesh up from inside. She was a framework of heavy bones draped with a hide that once had been full and now was empty. Wrinkled folds of flesh hung from her arms like thrums on the sleeve of a hunting coat. Her breasts drooped like empty wallets and the skin of her legs bagged and wrinkled at the knees and ankles like hose ten sizes too big. Her shanks were covered with running sores. Her nails were split and broken and caked with black dirt. Her unruly white hair was matted with twigs and leaves and filth, and much of it was coming out. There were sores around her ears and scalp where she had scratched constantly at lice, and from the end of her nose there perpetually hung a string of snot. Her eyes were sunk in wrinkled red pouches and her face was cadaverous. Somewhere once quite long ago, Mary had seen a face that looked like this, and she had been trying to remember where, and now suddenly with an awful jolt she remembered: In Philadelphia when she was a little girl, in the cellar of a house nearby, neighbors had discovered the body of a derelict woman who had crawled in there and died as much as a month before. Mary, with other children of the neighborhood, had had a horrified glimpse of the corpse as it was brought out to the dead wagon. It could have passed for Ghetel’s twin.
Yet here was this wretch, looking fully like a cadaver that would not lie down; here in this roaring huge wilderness, in this valley where surely no white human had ever been before, except Mary and her fellow captives last summer, here was Ghetel, refusing to die yet, sitting here at this moment on a boulder tearing strips of cloth from the rags of her dress to wrap around her feet, still trying to take care of herself. The old muffled horse-bell still hung useless from her neck like a pendant.
“Ah,” the old woman said, looking at her new footgear and then turning to smile at Mary. “Now I make a pair for you, eh?”
Mary choked back a sudden swollen ache in her throat, and the old hag-face shimmered beyond a film of tears. “Thankee, yes, Ghetel. Yes, God lov’ee!”
Mary stopped, aghast. She stood there leaning on her spear, an awful panic of confusion building up in her.
In their way lay a river mouth. It came out from between two mountains swift and deep, and swirled into the river they had been following. It was not just another river course to be detoured; worse, it was a river that did not exist among the succession of landmarks in her memory.
For days she had been watching the opposite bank for that whitish beach that would be the salt lick where she and Bettie and Henry had camped and worked on the way down. That salt lick was supposed to be her next landmark. She had not noted a river here.
“Vat?” asked Ghetel, who had stopped beside her.
I can’t tell ’er. I mustn’t tell ’er I think I’ve got us lost. She’d kill me sure.
“Vat?” Ghetel repeated.
“Oh, m’dear. Just another tiresome walk-around, is all.” She forced herself to smile. “But we sh’ll make quick work of it, shan’t we? Shan’t we, old friend? By now we sure know what t’ do aboot rivers in our way, don’t we?”
And so they turned south and west, though the compass in her head said south and east. And as they climbed over cold mossy boulders and snarls of driftwood, she ransacked her memory; she tried to remember where they might have taken a wrong turn; she tried to keep from lying down and giving up.
The dark swift water rushed by, almost beneath their feet. Mary looked down into it with a dreadful longing.
She was thinking how simple and quiet it would be, how easy it would be to terminate this infinity of miseries, to find eternal rest from this struggle, to take one step sideways off this rock, into this nameless river.
CHAPTER
18
As if reflecting her somber doubt, this canyon blackened as they climbed, crawled and hobbled up its twis
ting course among the mountains. Much of the rock debris underfood was black, and there were wide strata of gleaming black rock along the cliff faces. A heavy overcast had ended the spell of bright cold weather, deepening the gloom of the valley, dulling the details of the forests. The water looked like ink. Ghetel’s brief period of good humor seemed to be guttering out like a candle under the influence of this hellish gorge and Mary’s own dark preoccupation. They went along in grim, laborious silence, hearing only their rasping breath, the sliding and grinding of shale and rock underfoot, the ominous, hollow rushing of the dark river and the moan of the wind in the trees high on the hillsides. The leaves had fallen out of Ghetel’s beloved bell, and now it clunked dismally as they struggled along.
I just don’t remember this black valley, Mary told herself time after time. If I’d come by it once I’d not have forgot it. I remember a valley farther up where the stone was blue. But I don’t remember this black valley. I’m sure I’ve never been by this black valley!
She kept watching the opposite shore for sight of the salt spring.
Surely we’d ha’ come to th’ salt spring by now. Surely. If’n we were on the proper river.
Once her heart leaped when she saw a line of white at the shoreline in a riverbend ahead. There, she thought, wanting to shout it, there’s the salt spring!
But when they drew abreast of it, she saw that it was not a white beach, but the swift white water of a riffle. The shores were relentless black and gray. She sank to the ground and retied on her feet the strips of cloth, which had grown pitch black. “What a bleedin’ dirty place,” she muttered, looking up at the crumbling black cliff at their backs. “Have y’ ever seen th’ like?”
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