Follow the River

by JAMES ALEXANDER Thom

  Aye, here I could cross, she thought. Come daylight. Must find a place to lie down and wait out the night, sleep if I can. It’ll take strength I don’t have left now to cross here.

  Something moved in the corner of her eye, something on the shore a little way upstream, on her side of the stream. She tried to look directly at it, but saw nothing at first in the half-light. She turned back to the stream, then detected movement again. This time she saw it.

  A wolf was standing among the boulders looking at her, perhaps forty feet away. Then she detected another blur of motion coming down to the river’s edge. They stood together for a moment, then began slinking cautiously toward where she stood. They moved with an eerie silence, or seemed to, as nothing could be heard over the burbling and shushing of the stream. Sometimes they would stop and then she would lose sight of them. Their dull markings blended them into the leafless undergrowth and leaves and rockfall of the mountainside and they were invisible now, except when they moved. A few feet at a time, they were approaching her, coming close down along the water’s edge, weaving among the rocks, close enough to be visible now against the darker wet mass of rock, now stopping to sniff the air, raising and lowering their heads to peer at her, in much the same manner as shortsighted old men will squint and move their heads to make out someone who has entered their room.

  Mary held her lances pointed toward the wolves. Her heart was whamming but seemed to be pumping ice-cold blood. She sidled away from the wolves, closer to the water’s edge, feeling the cold, wet, sharp-edged rock with her bare feet.

  What do wolves do? she thought. She had heard them howl many nights among the mountains, but far away; none, as far as she knew, had come this close. Unless maybe when we were sleeping, she thought. What do they do? Jump on you? Or do they wait till you lie down? Likely they have their ways o’ knowin’ whether you’re weak, she thought. Once she had heard Henry Lenard tell Will that a wolf can sense dying. They’re not too cowardly to attack, he had said, but they’re smart enough not to risk throwing themselves at something that might be stronger than themselves. Like Indians, Will had observed. Aye, Henry had nodded, like Indians. Mary remembered this old conversation, and she made a decision then that she would have to cross the rapids now, as she dared not lie down on this side of the river in the darkness. Under the roar of the water she thought she still heard the keening of that voice but now she suspected that what she had been hearing, or imagining she had heard, were the warnings of her own fears.

  Her blanket was reasonably dry and she wanted to keep it that way so she could get warm when she reached the other side of the stream. She laid the spears down within reach, pointed toward the wolves and, keeping an eye on them, began fumbling with numb fingers to untie the knots with which she had fashioned her blanket-dress. She took off the blanket and rolled it into a bundle and tied the bundle with the rope of yarn. All that remained of her dress was a few rags of cloth hanging from her shoulders. The dank cold searched over all her body, and she shuddered, knowing that the swift water would be even colder.

  The wolves, though she had not really seen them moving, were a mere ten or twelve feet away, still watching her. One opened its mouth and she saw the curved line of its white teeth. Then it licked its muzzle and peered at her.

  Mary put the blanket bundle on her shoulder and slipped the yarn-rope over her head so she could carry the bundle high on her shoulder while keeping both hands free. She gave the wolves one last long look, then with a sudden sense of exhilaration, told them, “Bye now, lads, I got t’ be a-leavin’.” At the sound of her voice, one cocked its head quizzically and the other side-stepped a few feet in retreat. Then Mary picked up her hickory sticks and turned her back on the wolves and put one leg down into the strong and icy current. The shock of the cold went up her leg, making her hip-joint ache and sending a cascade of shudders from her scalp down to her knees. She lowered her other foot into the water and leaned against the current. She felt ahead for footing with her toes and thus went out an inch at a time into the roaring water. Again she thought she heard a voice, and then a moment later she was sure she heard a voice. She was concentrating with all her attention on footing and balance, staring down into the blackness of the stream as if she could penetrate it and see where footholds and dropoffs were, and afraid to look up from this concentration, but now she could hear a voice and it was calling her name. She braced the lances against the bottom and leaned on them and slowly turned her head to look around for the source of the sound.

  Ten yards downstream there was Ghetel, creeping along the bank, banging onto rocks with one hand. Her drained face and white hair were like a faint, pale lantern against the deep twilight grays of the gorge. Here she came now, that stubborn, cranky, half-mad, hostile old crone who had complicated the flight, and Mary had never in her life been so glad to see anyone.

  “Here!” she hallowed back.

  And then she remembered the wolves.

  They had seen and heard the old woman’s approach and Mary saw them retreating slowly up the slope, looking over their backs at her. They were not scared, and were not going to run away, but were backing off to appraise this newly arrived creature, perhaps to determine whether she had death on her.

  And as Ghetel saw Mary, and began moving more purposefully toward her, crying something incomprehensible over the noise of the rapids, the wolves stopped and turned and began moving toward her, somehow emboldened.

  “Ghetel! Look ’ee up!” Mary raised one of the sticks and pointed it toward the predators. “Wolves!”

  The old woman paid no attention. She was busy crying her greetings or pleadings or apologies or whatever they were, and climbing over and tottering around the boulder heaps and slabs of rock toward the fording place.

  “Wolves!” Mary cried again. The old woman was almost opposite Mary now, still jabbering her words, her bell just audible, and the shadowy wolves had come down within ten feet of her, their gray legs tensed and bent as if coiled to spring at or away from her. The roar of the river was a maddening barrier of sound, baffling their efforts to make their urgent words understood. Mary pointed repeatedly and violently toward the stalking beasts, but Ghetel, perhaps thinking she was shaking the stick threateningly at her, kept coming toward Mary, talking, and then in a moment she was at the water’s edge, pleading and gesturing, a mere arm’s length from the larger of the two wolves, which crouched on a rock ledge at the level of Ghetel’s shoulders and seemed to be aiming his muzzle directly at her throat.

  “Ghetel!” Mary screamed hoarsely, and then in desperation, forgetting how precarious was her balance in the current, she shifted her grip on the spear in her right hand, cocked it over her shoulder and threw it at the wolf.

  The moment exploded into confusion and movement. Mary lost her balance and fell forward into the fast water. The wolf, struck in the shoulder by the pointed stick, gave a fierce, snarling yap of pain right at Ghetel’s ear and sprang almost straight up; and Ghetel, startled by the explosion of savage sound and motion, lunged forward off the bank and plunged into the icy water.

  The wolves scrambled and bounded away in the rocks, yelping with fright and rage. Mary and Ghetel were on hands and knees in the swift, shallow water now, trying to get handholds and kneeholds on the rocks of the bottom and keep their faces above water. The current tugged at Mary’s blanket bundle, pulling the strap of yarn tightly across her throat. The icy water swirled and pressed around them, threatening to lift and carry the women away into the deep pool below the ford. Ghetel, now totally occupied with hanging on for her life, had released her hold on her blanket, and the water carried it off of her and away.

  Mary at last got a foot under herself and teetered to a standing position. She shouted Ghetel’s name and extended to her one end of the lance she still held in her left hand. The old woman felt it touching her shoulder and had just enough presence of mind to grab for it. With the last of her waning strength, hardly able to draw breath because of the stunning co
ldness of the water, Mary pulled on the staff until Ghetel could get her feet under her. And now, all but naked, gasping, quaking and moaning, the two women stumbled and floundered in near-darkness through the roaring rapids, each holding one end of the hickory spear, one or the other usually falling and trying to rise, until Mary’s outstretched right hand encountered something solid and rough above the waterline in front of her: a root.

  She clung to it, crying, “Ghetel, we’re over! Hold tight!” She pulled herself toward the bank with the dwindling strength of her right arm and with the other pulled on the staff to drag Ghetel the last few feet.

  The root was part of the exposed, gnarled root of a big sycamore that had been almost undermined by the flow of the stream. It provided a profusion of handholds as well as stepping places for their benumbed and bruised feet, but they were so spent and stiff with cold that their climb out of the creek occupied some five minutes, during which they were in danger of falling back in. It was almost totally dark now. Mary staggered onto the steep bank, trying to support herself with the staff, but fell among stones and driftwood debris, and lay there sucking for breath and enduring waves of shuddering that swept from one end of her aching frame to the other. Ghetel was somewhere nearby in the deep dusk, gasping and voicing long, pitiful, quavering moans.

  Mary felt that the cold had gone into the marrow of her bones and through her innards, and that the remaining warmth of her heart itself was about to wink out like a candle.

  To bend a finger hurt, and so it took her a long time to remove the blanket bundle that was slung around her neck and untie the knots that had held it together. As she worked on it, teeth chattering, nose running, fingers stiff and clumsy and powerless as twigs, she remembered Ghetel’s blanket sliding away into the stream. What an incalculable loss that seemed now. Two women, one blanket. Surely it could be the difference between surviving or not surviving.

  And something else had been lost this awful day, she seemed to remember; yes: as if it had happened twenty years ago and just now returned as a memory from childhood, she saw the tomahawk skittering down the slope and disappearing into the river …

  Ye God but this day has cost us dear, she thought.

  And there had been still something else. Her mind was almost too numb to remember, but then she did recollect: the spear she had thrown at the wolves. Aye! That was gone too! In the benumbing traversal of the stream even the frightful encounter with the wolves had slipped out of her mind.

  There. A knot loosened and she drew the end out and groped for the other knot.

  A tomahawk and a spear and a blanket, she thought. Almost everything of the little we had to keep us alive is gone. We could make another spear, she thought. Oh, no, we can’t! Without the tomahawk we can make nothing. God help us.

  And we’d ha’ lost none of it but for the folly o’ that great antic bitch of a Dutchwife lyin’ over there …

  The indignation made her heart glow a bit stronger. She thought, defiance flaming up in her breast and warming her blood: Well, by heaven, old Ghetel, we shall see just how long I’ll put up with a troublesome piece o’ baggage th’ like of you …

  But then she remembered the unbearable aching emptiness, the loneliness, when Ghetel had been out of sight behind her.

  “Come, dear,” she said, rising with agony to her feet and letting the partially wet blanket fall open and advancing toward the sounds of Ghetel’s misery, “let’s us bundle now in this blessed blanket, or … or we’re goners for certain …”

  Sleep was impossible, of course. They had blundered weakly about in the darkness, every stinging cold raindrop and every touch of their sodden rags provoking a bone-rattling shudder, seeking some overhang or hollow log under which to roll up, finally getting under a huge log that had fallen across a fissured outcropping; they had raked enough fallen leaves into the fissure to insulate their cocoon against the clammy earth under them and the dank air above, and had burrowed into the leaf pile and pulled the blanket around themselves and lain skin on skin in an embrace, waiting for their bodies to produce some faint warmth for each other. But each found the other cold as death; Mary remembered her father ice-fishing once, and two fish lying in a snowbank; their contact now was like that. Their heartbeats were weak flutters and skips. Each felt the other’s tremors as well as her own. They lay breast to breast and belly to belly, each one’s arms full of the other’s bones. No warmth came, for a black, hissing eternity; instead, just a gradual numbing of the senses and a dulling of minds, a slowing and thickening of dreams, as if thought itself were congealing; and Mary’s last nameable thought was that this nothingness was the relief of death. She waited and listened inside her head for familiar voices and watched behind her eyes for light or familiar faces or other hints of heaven.

  The rain stopped. For a while water drops dribbled and pattered off the twigs to the leaves of the forest floor and the clouds above the trees dissolved to let starlight through, and after a while there was a sliver of a moon over the mountain, and after it had ridden for two hours into the sky above the gorge, all the leaves on the ground looked like silver flakes in their sheen of moonlit new frost. Across the river, from high on a ridge, spun the eerie tremolo of a wolf’s howl. Moonlight flickered like cold flame on the fast black water. In the blanket covered with leaves under a slanting tree trunk, nothing moved. The women’s wretched shivering and shifting had fallen still.

  Mary lay in total darkness remembering dying; before the blankness had come she had been thinking that that was the experience of dying, but now she knew that she had not died, but had only gone unconscious, because now she was alive, had just now been awakened by a dream of wolves and could hear them now outside, far away, howling in the cold. And in a way she was disappointed that she had not died, because death had seemed like a rather fair place after all, certainly better than what she had been enduring for the last four or five weeks and had yet to endure for another week or two.

  But no, she thought now, I don’t really want to die so far away from Will, I don’t want to die without Will knowing whether I’m alive or not or where I am. I don’t really want to die at all while Will’s still alive because I’m his wife and he counts on me. Nay, she thought with a long sigh, I don’t really want to die at all because I’m young and Will’s young and we have to beget us another family to go on in place of our three tads them bloody savages has cost us; Will wouldn’t be happy atall if they was no Ingles children t’ reap what he’s sown.

  He might find another wife if I was to perish here, she thought. Now I don’t like the thought o’ that hardly atall, so let’s just not have any more thoughts of this dyin’ business …

  Mary’s breathing was slow and steady now and her heartbeat was thumping along steadily, not fluttering like a candle in a draft as it had been, and she could hear that Ghetel’s breathing was all right too.

  Oh, Dear God, but we come near enough t’ have a peek at you this night, I swear we did. Ghetel and me both.

  She remembered that after the crossing of the cold fast stream they had been too chilled and exhausted, desperately hurting all over, to say anything to each other. Ghetel had simply followed her and they had hollowed out and padded up this crevice they were in, and Ghetel had crawled in beside her, and maybe Ghetel had thought she was dead, too.

  Old Ghetel got sane again after that crossing, Mary thought. Guess she was just too miserable t’ think any more about killin’ me. An’ now here we are sleepin’ close as a man and wife do. After her takin’ after me with th’ tomahawk and me thrashin’ her with that hickory pole. Oh, God, don’t it beat all!

  Somehow during the night, after they had gone unconscious, instead of their hearts stopping, instead of the cold creeping the rest of the way in and snuffing out their hearts, their hearts had driven the cold back, driven it back out of their torsos and their limbs and finally even out of their feet, and the warmth of their blood had eventually reached to their skin; then the warmth of Mary’s skin had r
eached the warmth of Ghetel’s and Ghetel’s had reached Mary’s and they had been heating each other the way a hot stone warms your feet when you step off the cold floor and slip into bed. They had warmed each other so well that even the damp blanket felt dry now. The utter numbness had gone out of Mary’s feet and they ached in a dull way now, even, from time to time, felt as if they were being struck with thousands of little needles, which would make her legs twitch, and she was glad she could feel them. It was not truly what one could call warm here in this blanket, but it was not terribly cold, and where the two women’s bare skin touched, there actually was warmth.

  It’s a miracle what’s happened while we slept, Mary thought. Thank ’ee, O Lord in Heaven, for another little miracle. I reckon I’ve thought some unworthy thoughts your way from time to time since last July; still don’t quite know why y’ve done me th’ way you have, but y’ do seem to come around an’ look after us now and then after your fashion, so I must guess you haven’t forgot us altogether.

  Now I admit Will and me often forgot our prayers, sometimes for days at a time, as they’s so much t’ do when you live out here this side o’ th’ mountains and have to make and do everything, just everything, for yourself, so we often forgot, it’s true, and maybe that’s why’ y’ brung th’ Shawnee savages down on us. As that horseback preacher said last spring, might be y’re a jealous an’ wrathful God, and need reg’lar devotions from us thy mortal children—like Will hisself needed it a lot from Tommy an’ Georgie—but Lord, Lord it don’t seem fair what y’ve done to us.

  Or maybe all this misery is just random, she thought then, and God has nothin’ t’ do with it. It seemed for a moment a more charitable way to consider God, but soon she was ashamed of herself for having thought that anything could happen without God’s intervention.