Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

They weren’t often apart in the last days, and when they were, it was a strange thing. It was true that she was more and more at ease in the forests, but Elizabeth knew that she was still very vulnerable. While Nathaniel hunted she saw after her clothes, or his, or cooking, any task to take her mind off what frightened her most: what would happen if he didn’t come back. It wasn’t so much being lost that worried her, although that was a real danger, one too vivid to be contemplated for long. But what worried her more was coming back to Paradise without Nathaniel. Facing Hannah, and Hawkeye. And her own life, without him. The longer he was gone, the more detailed her anxieties became.

  There was a shrill whistle; she turned to see Nathaniel emerge from the forest farther up the shoreline. He came toward her at a trot. His preoccupation was still there, but some of the tension was gone.

  “Man hurt,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “Don’t know him. He’s got shelter up there, but he’s in bad shape.” Nathaniel began to gather up their things.

  “Very bad?” she asked, reaching for her pack.

  “Aye,” said Nathaniel. “He’s dying.”

  XXXIII

  Nathaniel set her to hauling water. In spite of her foot, and the fact that the stream was a good distance, and the awkward makeshift rawhide bucket, and the great deal of water they would need; in spite of all that, he set her to the task, and waited until she had started off for the first time before he went into the shelter. The fact was, he didn’t know whether or not the man was dangerous, and he just didn’t care for the idea of Elizabeth nearby. Not yet.

  The singing had faded away just before he came upon the camp, where he had found the stranger in an uneasy and fevered sleep. Looking at him, it hadn’t taken much for Nathaniel to figure out that he was on the run: his skin was the deep color of wild plums in August, his hair and beard like mottled fleece, his hands great overused tools. On his heavily muscled upper chest there was a brand that Nathaniel could just see through the opening in the homespun shirt. A runaway slave, of a good age, but strong. And he was dying. The deeply sunken eyes gave it away. That, and his left arm: below the shoulder it had swollen to twice its normal size, straining the hunting shirt he wore to bursting. The stink of putrefaction hung about him like a burial blanket.

  Before he fetched Elizabeth, Nathaniel had spent some time looking around. Things were out of kilter here, and it worried him. A lean-to carefully built out of the materials at hand by a man who knew his work, who had more intelligence and imagination than tools. Inside the shelter there was a makeshift cot and a flattish boulder that served as a table. On an old blanket spread out neatly Nathaniel saw an ancient musket, but no evidence of shot or powder, some snares, a single beaver trap, and the remains of a meal of rabbit and fiddlehead ferns on a mat of woven reeds. In a rough carved bowl covered by a flat rock there was some dried meat and peas, but otherwise no provisions. Outside there was a hatchet, a short shovel, a hammer, a knife, a whetstone, a single cook pot, all scattered to the elements and already showing the first faint glimmer of rust. This had been the first sign that something was very wrong; Nathaniel knew instinctively that a man who could plan and build this camp would never have treated his tools in such a way; they stood between him and extinction.

  Nathaniel reached up and poked a hole in the roof, and then he started a small fire below it, burning the filthy grass bedding and then the roofing material itself—bark shingles mostly, lashed together with cord braided of roots—to drive the stench away. Even while he worked, the man didn’t wake, and Nathaniel wondered whether he would at all, or if he would slip away without even telling them his name.

  When Elizabeth returned for the third time with the filled bucket, he sent her back down to the lake to bring him as much sweet flag as she could carry. She went without a complaint, trying to hide her limp.

  Through all this the man slept, twitching and starting. He cried out in pain and then mumbled, slipping back down into a deeper sleep. In his dreams he was fighting a battle other than the one that would kill him. Nathaniel couldn’t make sense of his fears, of the things he had done to protect himself. There were piles of rocks, fist-sized and right for throwing; dried grasses twisted into torches, maybe thirty of them that Nathaniel could see just inside the shelter. A pike constructed of three long branches bound together with a sharpened stone at one end, as if to fight something he had no wish to be near. And then there were the pits.

  They were the first thing he had pointed out to Elizabeth when he brought her up here, one by one. Each had been covered by bark mats, and Nathaniel had only narrowly missed a fall before he saw them, spaced irregularly around the camp. He had searched them out, yanking the covers off and throwing them onto the cold cook pit. They were all of the same good depth, but not so deep that you couldn’t climb out—except a man who fell in wouldn’t be in any shape for climbing: each one was studded with slender branches sharpened to a lethal point.

  When the sweet flag was burning inside the shelter, Nathaniel asked Elizabeth to start the cooking fire and see to the food. It was twilight, and they were both hungry. She did as he asked, but he could see by the set of her jaw that she had gone long enough without information. He joined her at the cooking pit, hunkering down beside her while she worked. And he told her what he knew about what was to come.

  “A doctor?” Elizabeth asked feebly, when he had finished.

  “It’s too late to take the arm off. Even if there was time to go fetch somebody.”

  “I see.” She was cutting meat into chunks and tossing it into the pot. There was a settled quality to her face when she worked through a problem. Nathaniel watched her thinking, almost seeing the darting of the ideas behind her eyes. Looks-Hard was Runs-from-Bears’ name for her, but it was a good one.

  “He could take some broth, couldn’t he?” she asked quietly.

  “I expect he could,” Nathaniel said. “He probably ain’t had anything for more than a day.”

  “How long do you think it will be?”

  He shrugged. “Hard to say. He’s strong, and he’s fighting. But he’s been lying there for a while, and fever takes a lot out of a man. I expect he’s about burned out now, so maybe a day.”

  She caught his eye; he knew she was thinking about Todd. It worried him, too, but they couldn’t leave the man to die alone.

  “How close behind us do you think Richard is?”

  “Don’t know, really.” He cleared his throat, and then tried again. “We have done some backtracking, but he knows his way around and we leave a good trail. Two days, I’d guess, if we set still. Maybe less.”

  She digested this in silence, her hands moving automatically about the task in front of her.

  “I don’t want anyone killed,” she said. “If it comes to that, then I think we should go back with him.”

  Nathaniel watched her work, but his real attention was turned to the forests around them. He knew what she wanted; he didn’t know if he could give it to her, and so he promised her nothing at all.

  Behind them, there was a shifting and a groan from the shelter. They waited, tense, and then stood when the singing started. The voice shaky at first, and then settling a little into a fine tenor.

  “Why, that’s Latin,” said Elizabeth.

  “Aye,” said Nathaniel. “The Agnus Dei.” And to her quizzical expression, he finished: “From the mass.”

  “How is it that you recognize the Catholic mass?” she asked, her brow creased in confusion.

  “Lots of the Kahnyen’kehàka are Catholic,” Nathaniel said. “Not to mention the Scots.”

  “But not you,” Elizabeth said. It was a tone he had never had from her: wary, and put off.

  “Oh, aye, once I was,” he said softly. “A long time ago.”

  There was no time to explain any more, because the singing in the shelter had suddenly stopped.

  “We had best introduce ourselves,” Nathaniel said, brushing off his leggings. “It’s the polite thi
ng to do.”

  Elizabeth had expected the man to be frightened, and uncommunicative. Nathaniel had told her that he was an escaped slave, and she anticipated that such a person would be wary of strangers. Instead, he had a slow smile and he was willing to talk, even eager. His language was accented in a way which reminded her very strongly of Axel, which surprised her again. But she resisted the urge to ask him questions.

  The first thing he did, after drinking two bowls of water and introducing himself as Joe, was to apologize that he had no chair to offer her.

  “Been meaning to rig something,” he explained. “But this sore arm of mine has been keeping me from my work.”

  Elizabeth glanced uneasily at Nathaniel, but he seemed to take this tremendous understatement in stride. She herself could not bear to look at the arm for long. It lay there tight and so swollen in its wrappings that she thought she could almost see it pulse.

  “What happened?” Nathaniel asked. “Get your hand caught in a trap?”

  He nodded. “A few days back. But I expect I’ll be up and about tomorrow.” His eyes turned to Elizabeth, their whites murky gray.

  She tried for what she hoped was an encouraging smile. “I’ve got some broth cooking,” she said. “You must be hungry. I hope you don’t mind, we added your dried meat to ours.”

  “Beholden to you.” There was something gracious about him that contrasted with the nervous plucking of his fingers at the blanket. “But it’s near dark,” he pointed out. “And you should both be inside before.”

  “Before what?” Nathaniel asked.

  Joe’s head swung toward him in surprise. “Before the Windigo come.”

  “Windigo?” echoed Elizabeth, turning to Nathaniel.

  “The stone men,” said Nathaniel softly. There was a new expression in his eyes that Elizabeth did not like at all.

  Nathaniel paced up and down while she scooped the thin stew into a bowl.

  “He seems so reasonable,” she said in a low voice. “Does he really not know he is dying?”

  Nathaniel ran a hand through his hair. “Hard to say.”

  Joe was singing again, his voice hoarser now.

  “Does his mind wander from the fever?” she asked. “Is that why he fears—what did he call them?”

  “The Windigo. No, that’s not the fever. He was afeared of them before he got hurt—it took a long time for him to do all this, these pits.”

  A thought occurred to Elizabeth and she wiped a stray hair from her cheek as she observed Nathaniel.

  “You believe him.”

  Nathaniel’s irritation was easily read from the way the muscles in one cheek jumped. “I’ve never seen a Windigo,” he said. “But yes, I believe him.”

  “Well, he is being pursued,” she said. “Given what should happen if he were caught, I suppose it is not surprising that his fears have grown out of proportion.” She held out a bowl to Nathaniel.

  He took it slowly. “Not all things lend themselves to rational explanation,” he recited. “Do you remember saying that to me?”

  She blushed. “I do. But that was about something else, something I had myself experienced. And he’s—his mind is wandering, from the poison in his blood. How am I to credit the idea of giants covered with hair set on human flesh?” She glanced toward the shelter.

  “The Hode’noshaunee and the others to the east, my grandfather’s people, all of them know of the Windigo who live in the bush.”

  “Has your father ever seen one, or your grandfather?” Elizabeth asked, and then looked away, embarrassed. Nathaniel was disappointed in her, and it made her unhappy to see that on his face. “It does not signify,” she said. “He believes, and he is frightened. Perhaps we can put his mind to rest for the little time he has left. I will try to remain open-minded,” she offered. “Although I will admit to you that it is hard, Nathaniel.”

  “Aye, well,” he grunted, tipping up the bowl and swallowing. “Let’s hope the evidence you’d need to convince you don’t decide to come up and shake your hand.”

  “I was born on a farm on the Mohawk,” Joe told her later, when he had taken as much of the broth as he could hold, and in response to her gentle questions. “German Flats, maybe you been down that way. Never learned no English till old Sir Johnson bought me to work his mill, when I was maybe twenty. That was more than forty year ago, but the Dutch ain’t washed out of my mouth yet.”

  “Did you stay with Johnson long?” Nathaniel asked.

  Joe squinted in Nathaniel’s direction. “Thirty years, near to. When he died, Molly sold me to a widow woman in Pumpkin Hollow.” He had been talking easily, looking back and forth between Elizabeth and Nathaniel, but suddenly he looked away from both of them, out into the open. “Could I have more water?” he asked.

  There was some vague memory stirring in Elizabeth, but she couldn’t quite bring it forth. She held the bowl of water for Joe as he lifted his head.

  “It’s sweet, the water up here,” he said when he had finished drinking. “Land of plenty,” he added. His lips were cracked and discolored with fever, but he smiled weakly anyway.

  “There’s a pretty sunset,” Elizabeth said. She could see it above the trees, all cinnamons and crimsons. The storm had sputtered and then blown away. Tomorrow would be fine and clear. She thought of telling him so, and then hesitated, thinking of what the day would bring.

  When she looked down at Joe, his head had dropped back on the cot. “Night comin’ on,” he whispered. “Time to be indoors. They come in the dark.”

  She waited, and he took this as encouragement, turning his head toward her.

  “Saw the first one over by that big pine, when I settled in here some weeks ago. If there was still snow on the ground you could see his tracks. Scared him off with a torch, that time.” He worked the fabric of the blanket between his fingers. “Eyes red as raspberries.”

  “What do you suppose he wanted?” Elizabeth asked. She was very aware of Nathaniel just behind her as he fed the small fire.

  Joe had begun to blink drowsily. “You think I’m a crazy old man.”

  “No,” Elizabeth protested feebly.

  He laughed softly. “Well, I’m old enough. But I saw what I saw.”

  Nathaniel had brought in a small sawed-off log from Joe’s woodpile and upended it, and it served as a sort of stool at the head of the cot. Elizabeth sat there now, and leaned toward Joe. “Tell me, if you like. I’m truly interested.”

  “Are you? You got that look about you like that young Father Mansard, wondering what trouble I got up to. And looking forward to my confession, see how to set me straight with the Lord.”

  She had to laugh. “I’ve never been compared to a priest before,” she said. “But I assure you that my interest is real.”

  “You should be interested,” Joe said in a tone that was almost fatherly. It made Elizabeth suddenly wonder about his family, if he had had one he left behind, and what worries they had for him. But his gaze turned toward the deepening dark of the sky in the doorway, and it was troubled.

  “They play games with you,” he said softly. “Like to scare people. Come close and throw things, run away. Like children set on mischief, throwing rotten apples at a man sweating in the field ’Cause they know he cain’t run after ’em.” He paused, his thoughts very far away. The silence went on until she wondered if he was falling asleep. When he spoke, Elizabeth started at the new strength in his voice.

  “In the night sometimes, I hear them moving around. But they don’t like fire.”

  “How could any people survive winter in the bush without fire?” Elizabeth asked.

  In the growing dark she could still clearly see the surprise on his face. “The bear do,” he said. “The bobcat and the rest, anything with enough of a fur coat.”

  “So this creature is not a man?”

  There was a faint smile on his face. “I see you, Miz Elizabeth. You more and more like that Father Mansard, that Jesuit. You want to talk logic, and I’m talkin
g Windigo. My skin ain’t the same color as yours, and you see that, and you believe it. But if I tell you there’s another kind of man, with enough of a pelt to live in this bush in the winter, then you sit back and get a frown line.”

  “You think they sleep through the winter?” Nathaniel asked from behind Elizabeth.

  “Never said that. Don’t know. All I can say is that in the night I seen them here, usually a big male, but once there was two of them. Chunking things at me, and howling. And I drove them off with fire.”

  “Perhaps they meant you no harm,” Elizabeth said.

  Joe’s face contorted. “I wonder if that very same idea is going through the rabbit’s head when the shadow of the owl falls over it.” Another wave of deep sleepiness moved on his face, but he kept her gaze firmly in his own. “They like to play with folk, scare ’em. But don’t be fooled, these ain’t no fairy folk. Will you keep that in mind?”

  Elizabeth wanted to assure him that she would indeed, but he had slipped away suddenly into sleep. When Nathaniel spoke behind her, she jumped.

  “I’ll set up in here.”

  She didn’t protest.

  By the light of the fire they dozed, and woke and then dozed again. Joe talked in his sleep, mutterings that couldn’t be followed. Once Elizabeth rose to go out of the shelter and relieve herself, and when she came back, Nathaniel was sitting up with his arms slung around his knees, staring into the low flames. She stood looking at him for a moment, the strong profile lit by the fire, his eyes hooded with worry. There was grass caught in his hair, and she went to him and took it out.

  He caught her wrist and pulled her down next to him.

  “When she was a girl,” said Elizabeth, “My cousin Amanda would come into my bed at night because she feared the Green Man. Did your mother ever tell you of him?”

  When Nathaniel shook his head, she sighed. “I think that for many years I have put the story out of my head quite willfully.”

  “Tell me.”

  Elizabeth took a minute to gather her thoughts.