Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

  “That sounds perfectly reasonable to me,” she said, and then yelped again. “And what is a skelf, if I might ask?”

  Nathaniel held up a small shred of wood impaled on his needle. “That’s a skelf. What do you call it?”

  “Misery.” Elizabeth grimaced. “Otherwise I suppose I’d call it a sliver. Skelf must be Scots.”

  “Hmmm,” Nathaniel agreed absently. He had a set to his jaw she didn’t like, and so she looked away.

  There was an eagle circling over the tops of the pine trees, raw, gliding power. She could hear the way its wings cut the air. Or she could, she was sure, if she just concentrated hard enough. Vaguely she was aware of the sound of running water from the stream just behind them, and the way her own sweat ran down her face into her eyes and stung, stung, stung. She rocked her head back and bit her lip.

  “Would you relax, Boots?”

  “As soon as you get the last of it out of my foot, yes, why then I will be happy to relax,” she shot at him. He was frowning, one corner of his mouth turned down in concentration, and her tone seemed not to unsettle him in the least.

  They were in a secluded glen between a mountain and an incredible fortress of boulders which seemed to have tumbled down directly from the heavens. Many of them were taller than Nathaniel, most of them were slick with moisture and a deep green moss. They had been crossing the rockfall when Elizabeth had misstepped and landed with all her weight on a nest of deadwood.

  Moccasins had their limitations, oh, yes. Any of her boots, which had been such an extravagance and had earned her her nickname—those silly, vain, immoderate, oh so lovely boots with their leather soles—would have kept her feet protected. The muscles rolled and cramped in her lower leg.

  “When my hair got plucked I got water in my eyes, often as not,” Nathaniel said in a conversational tone.

  Unexpectedly intrigued, Elizabeth came up on her elbows. “Your hair plucked? Your scalp, for battle?”

  “Aye, and the rest of it.” He grinned without looking at her. “It’s not attractive to the Kahnyen’kehàka, in case you didn’t know. Chest hair and the like.”

  “But you …” She paused, looking at him hard. He had shaved this morning, as he did every morning, with a straight-edged razor. More than once she had wondered why he bothered, but she liked him clean shaven, the line of his jaw and the angle of his chin, and so she had not said anything at all. Every evening, in spite of his careful attentions, his cheeks were rough with new growth, something she had learned to anticipate and also to appreciate. She looked at him now, the deep, thick growth of the hair on his head and the way it hung in waves over his shoulders. It struck her that there was little hair on him otherwise, and that this might be unusual.

  “If you pull it out by the roots and you keep doing it long enough, it gives up eventually,” he explained.

  Elizabeth twitched as another splinter was pulled from her foot.

  “You mean to say that you plucked the hair from your chest? Every day?”

  “Not me,” said Nathaniel. “There was an old woman in the Turtle longhouse, she did the tattooing and the hair pulling, mostly. Said I had a good face and that it would be worth the trouble to get rid of the hair, so I could find a wife. Took me on as a project. Every morning and every evening she’d just about sit down on top of me to keep me still and she’d go to work on me with her shells.”

  “You’re making this up,” Elizabeth said.

  “I ain’t,” Nathaniel said, distracted momentarily from his story while he concentrated on her foot. Then he pulled another sliver. “She had shells tied together with a piece of rawhide, notched on two edges so she could grab with them. Or she used her fingers, for the scalp.”

  “I’m glad to see she didn’t mind those growing back,” Elizabeth said dryly. “So how long did it take?”

  He shrugged. “I guess maybe three years, at least until my chest was clean enough to suit her.”

  “Well, I would hope that was enough,” Elizabeth said. “What else could she have had in mind? Not your legs …” Her voice trailed away.

  Nathaniel said, “She was trying to do me a service, but I drew the line below my belly. Thought any girl who couldn’t see past the hair on my”—he raised an eyebrow at her—“legs wasn’t worth worrying over.”

  “The question is why you put up with it at all,” Elizabeth said, flustered.

  “Maybe I was just vain, did you think of that? And besides, Ya-wa-o-da-qua told stories while she worked.” He was squeezing the tender flesh of the ball of her foot between two fingers, and then he plucked suddenly and made a satisfied sound. “Not much more to go,” he said. “But there’s one pretty deep, so you hold tight now, Boots.”

  Elizabeth had been propping herself up on her elbows, but she lay back down and put an arm across her eyes. “What does her name mean?”

  “Ya-wa-o-da-qua? Pincushion. Don’t laugh, it’s true. Hold still, Boots.” There was a sharp jab of the needle; she thought she was prepared for it, but she reared up anyway, and there was Nathaniel, grinning. There was a swipe of her blood on his cheek, and a wickedly long and bloody sliver on the end of the needle. “I think that’s the last of it. You did good.”

  “I sniveled,” she corrected him, out of sorts. There was blood running down her foot; it was a most disquieting sensation.

  “But nicely,” he allowed. He helped her up and then to the stream, where he saw her settled on a boulder with the injured foot in the water. This stream came off the mountain and it was ice-cold even this far into the spring, but it numbed the ache in her foot and she swished it back and forth, not unhappily. Nathaniel was rummaging in the packs, his back to her.

  “We’ll make camp here and get you poulticed. There’s a storm coming on anyway.”

  “So say the blackfly,” Elizabeth agreed, rubbing her neck. The exposed skin from collar to her hairline was raised to washerboard consistency by a hundred tiny welts. After a few days of dampness, the blackfly moved in armies of thousands and millions, and today there had been a particularly difficult confrontation with them. Her skin felt warm to the touch and she was almost light-headed with it, but she knew that in the morning it would be gone. Until the next encounter with the little beasties. She cast an irritated look at Nathaniel; he was scratching, too, but less. He had coated his face and hands with ointment, and it had kept him relatively protected.

  Elizabeth struggled hard not to let her irritation get the upper hand. There was a point, she concluded, at which the only possible tool was numbness; she could not manufacture an artificial cheerfulness when she itched and hurt and smelled. But Nathaniel didn’t seem to mind her mood; in fact, the more taciturn she became, the more his own dry humor rose to the surface. It was something she hadn’t anticipated, and she liked him for it tremendously. It almost made up for the infernal blackfly.

  Nathaniel came up behind her with his hands cupped. Elizabeth tipped her head back to look at him upside down and dissolved in a genuine smile as he smoothed pennyroyal ointment over the mass of tiny welts. Her nose wrinkled at the smell, but the relief was undeniable. She let her head rest against the hard plank of his abdomen, her plait brushing the ground. He looked down at her, all seriousness, while he wiped her face gently with a square of muslin that had once been a part of her second shift.

  “If you coated yourself with this every morning you’d be better off,” he said.

  Elizabeth sighed softly in response. Mrs. Schuyler had given her the concoction of pine tar, castor oil, and pennyroyal before she set off with Bears, vowing that a liberal coating on face, neck, and hands would ward off any biting insect. Thus far, though, Elizabeth had preferred the blackfly to the pungent stink and its deep brown color. But she knew that unless the insects simply disappeared, she would soon have to resort to grease or ointment, or learn to live with ravaged skin. They might spend another two weeks or more living in the bush, and it was time she faced that reality.

  “Do you really know wher
e we are?” she asked, suddenly wondering.

  “I do.”

  “Amazing. Have you never been lost, then?”

  “No, I can’t say that I have. Although I was mighty disoriented once for a few days.”

  Elizabeth laughed out loud, and reached up with both hands to pull his head down to her, where she kissed him and rubbed a tender cheek against his.

  “Don’t get too friendly,” he said. “There’s more yet to come. We got to clean out that wound. A bit of salt would do the job, or some spirits. I’ve got some of Axel’s schnapps along.”

  Elizabeth thought of the jagged hole and blanched. “Is that really necessary?” she asked.

  “Aye,” he said, “we best get it over with. Then we can work on making you feel better.”

  It was a hot, searing kind of pain that spiraled instantaneously into a great burst of color, but it didn’t last long. Elizabeth bit down hard on the urge to scream; if no other lesson had been learned, Nathaniel had made it clear to her how important it was to keep their noise down to a minimum. But tears brimmed in her eyes and the world doubled and tripled. When it cleared, Nathaniel bound her wound with her third-best handkerchief dampened with Axel’s schnapps, and then slipped the delinquent moccasin back on her foot. With a few deft motions he pulled her legging down and laced the moccasin over it. Elizabeth observed while he sewed the tear in the sole with the same needle he had used to fish the splinters out.

  “Very handy of you,” she noted, still out of sorts.

  “You should be able to walk on this tomorrow.”

  “I intend to walk now. Can’t we camp on the shore back there?” Just before her misstep, they had come past a small lake with a good protected place to settle under an outcropping of rock. At that point they had thought to walk for another three hours, but now Elizabeth was glad to have a valid excuse to go back. It had been an unusually pretty place, even for this wilderness. And since she had finally learned the basics of swimming, she took every opportunity to practice.

  Nathaniel took all the packs and let her manage on her own, limping gingerly. She felt slightly silly, and looked around herself as if there might be curious neighbors watching. Instead, she caught a pair of fox cubs at play in the sun before their burrow hole, their red coats gleaming bright. They looked at her without fear, and she looked back.

  Once settled, Nathaniel gathered wood for a fire. The shore was lined with a wide margin of sweet flag, and he pulled up great armfuls of the long green spikelike leaves to lay over the burning wood. The smoke that rose and filled the air would keep flying things away.

  Elizabeth breathed a sigh of contentment, knowing that she should rouse herself to see to the food, but she was feeling strangely indolent. Reclining on the smooth, warm expanse of rock, she enjoyed the feel of the breeze on her inflamed face.

  “I must look a sight,” she said. “And you needn’t bother to contradict me.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, Boots.”

  She snorted, and liking the sound of it, snorted again. “If I had the energy I’d make you pay for that,” she said, and grinned in spite of herself.

  “Now you’re fishing for more than compliments,” he said, eyeing her with one raised brow while he shredded a long stalk of grass and tossed bits into the fire, absentmindedly.

  She looked out over the lake, thought about swimming, and then lay back down lazily.

  “And if I were? Isn’t that my right?”

  He came to sit beside her. “Aye, that it is. So what is it you want?”

  She managed to look him in the eye. “A day abed with you without the need to get up and go.”

  Nathaniel leaned over her. “I please you, then, do I?” He wasn’t smiling anymore, but there was a contented look about him.

  She pushed at him a little. “You know that you do.”

  “Well, then, Boots, I’m glad to hear it. Because you please me mightily, too.”

  “I don’t recall using the word mightily,” Elizabeth said primly, and she yelped as he grabbed her, pulling her up against him to pinch her bottom.

  “Mightily! Ow! Mightily!” she conceded, laughing and trying to squirm away from him.

  He settled down with her half-pulled across his chest.

  “Can we do that, tomorrow?” she asked. “Stay abed?” She knew the answer before he shook his head, but it was a disappointment anyway.

  “Wouldn’t be wise. We’ll have our days abed, if you haven’t got tired of the business by then.”

  “Oh, now who’s fishing for compliments?” she asked. She sat up to look around herself. There was a small island in the middle of the lake, populated by beech trees and crowned with a few tall pine trees that reflected unevenly in the water.

  “Shall we swim out there?” she asked lazily, lying down again.

  “Not with your foot the way it is,” he said. Instead of rising, Nathaniel stretched out and pulled her head to a more comfortable spot on his shoulder. This pleased her, but it was hard to ignore the rumbling in her stomach.

  “There’s trout enough for the taking,” she suggested.

  But Nathaniel was pointing into the sky, and she followed the line of his arm and drew in a sharp breath.

  Above them the eagle still circled, but she wasn’t alone.

  Against the gathering clouds, the pair dodged around each other and then seemed to purposely collide in midair. With locked talons they plummeted downward in a free-fall interrupted by a series of complex somersaults. Suddenly they tore free of one another.

  “They mate for life, but they go through this every season anyway,” Nathaniel said. The pair was rising again, the sound of their wings clearly discernible. Talons struck and the birds fell in a swoop that ended in a long roll. Once more the performance was repeated, and this time the male covered his mate in mid-fall with a great scream of triumph, a sound almost human.

  “Not exactly lovely Venus consorting with Mars,” said Nathaniel. “But you might call it sporting.”

  Elizabeth stifled her laughter against his chest. “Very unseemly, this conversation.”

  “But you like it anyway.”

  “I like it precisely for that reason,” she said, suddenly thoughtful. “It is a great luxury, the freedom to speak what is on my mind. What other person in the world—male or female—could I ask about these things?”

  “Don’t go imagining I’ll always have an answer,” Nathaniel said.

  “It isn’t an answer I want—”

  “Aye,” Nathaniel interrupted her, squeezing her hand. “It’s the freedom to talk. I know, I know. So you’re in the mood for talk just now?”

  Elizabeth didn’t answer. She looked into the shadows of the forest, wondering about the eagles. “She didn’t seem to enjoy it very much, did she? Nor did he, for that matter.”

  “They don’t take joy in mowin’, not the way folks do.” He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. “It’s a good sign, anyway,” he said. He had a thoughtful look about him.

  She still found it strange sometimes to hear that Nathaniel took such things seriously, signs he read from the animals and the stars and his own dreams, in which he sometimes flew over the world. Her first and strongest impulse was to reject it all as wishful thinking, but slowly she was beginning to wonder not so much about the truth value of Nathaniel’s beliefs, but at his powers of observation.

  “Do you think we’ll be like that, always struggling and then coming back together?” she asked.

  He rubbed a hand across her back. “I expect we’ll tussle,” he said. His rubbing became slower and more purposeful, and she shifted a little and murmured against his chest.

  “You’re tired,” he said. “And you hurt, I guess.”

  “It’s not so bad,” Elizabeth admitted. She was tired, that was true; she thought she might never move another muscle. But if she gave Nathaniel any encouragement at all, they would forget about swimming and food altogether for a while. It would take her mind off her foot; he co
uld make her forget anything and everything when he came to her.

  “Come, then,” he said into her hair, tugging on the clasp to release it. “Come consort with me, darlin’. If you’ve the mind for a little venery, that is.”

  She could feel him smile, but she didn’t rise to his teasing. Instead Elizabeth ran her hands over his chest, breathed in his smells. She could get dizzy sometimes, this close to him. With one finger she traced the line of his jaw, and thought about kissing him. She intended to kiss him, and very soon, but for the moment she was content with thinking about it.

  “Boots, tell me, tell me what you want,” he said against her ear.

  She squirmed a bit and buried her face in the curve of his neck, gasped as she felt him cup her hips and pull her up against him. She slid a hand down his belly.

  But Nathaniel caught her hand and held it away from him, his head tilted hard to one side and his expression suddenly preoccupied and distant. Elizabeth froze, seeing his concentration directed outward, to the forest. He heard something. She softened her own breathing, closing her eyes to screen out distractions in an attempt to hear what he did. There was something, just above the sounds of the lake. It might have been the wind on the cliff face, but the treetops stood unruffled against the sky. It came and went and then came again. Singing. Very faint, but clearly singing.

  Nathaniel was on his feet, reaching for his gun. “Stay here,” he said softly.

  “No.” She stood up, too, and then staggered.

  He pushed her back down, gently. “Scoot all the way under there, and keep yourself small. Do you have the musket? Good. I’m just going to have a look.”

  After a moment she did as he had directed, sitting with her knees under her chin and the musket in the valley of her lap. She watched him skirting the lake. He stopped to listen and then walked on again, disappearing into the bush with a brief look back toward her. Elizabeth stood up then, unable to stay still. Listening with all her power of concentration, she could hear nothing at all except the sounds of the lake, and the birds. The singing—if it had been singing—had stopped.