Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

  It had been a long, warm day but the water was still quite cold. Standing in the lake to her knees, she undid her silver hair clasp, noting that it was already quite tarnished and needed a good polishing; another task that would have to wait until they could return home to Paradise, along with other chores such as mending her shift and trimming her hair. Carefully, she wrapped the silver clasp in her handkerchief, and tucked it under a rock on the bank.

  Elizabeth ran her fingers through her plait, hastily combing it until her hair snapped and crackled around her all the way to her hips, and then she inhaled and submerged herself. She pushed herself in mercilessly, feeling the gooseflesh rise bump by bump. Under the water she opened her eyes, and came almost face to face with a turtle, which started away with a whoosh. In a mood suddenly euphoric and restored, she broke the surface of the water and began to swim slowly toward the small island in the middle of the lake.

  She was tired by the time she reached it, and dragged herself up on the bank with arms slightly trembling. There was a patch of sunlight and a small grove of paper birches, slender as young girls, whispering among themselves in the breeze. Elizabeth used one of them to sit against, drawing up her knees under her chin and lifting her face to the sunlight. Her hair hung veillike around her, the shorter strands around her face already lifting and drying in the breeze, curling and twisting lazily. Between her breasts Joe’s disk and Nathaniel’s pearl cluster felt slightly cold against her wet skin.

  On the lake there was little sign of wildlife, with the exception of the usual birds fishing. Elizabeth had noted that there were no beaver, and she wondered why that was. On most lakes this size they had seen evidence of them, but there were none here at all. It occurred to her that Joe had probably chosen this lake for that reason, as it would be of less interest to the trappers. The thought of Joe made her think in turn of Nathaniel, and she glanced into the forest where she knew he would appear, but saw no sign of him.

  Directly across from her was the projection of flat rock where they had been lying when they had first heard Joe singing, and Elizabeth noted how it looked like a stage from where she sat. It was just as this thought crossed her mind that the dog came out of the shadows and into the sunlight.

  He was very large, even larger than she had thought him this morning. He stood in the light, his rough coat shining deep red, his tongue lolling, and looked toward her. He was not all that far away; she could see the rim of red in each of his eyes, and the glint of his teeth. Elizabeth sat very still, wondering what he would do if she should swim over to him and try to coax him back to the clearing to prove to Nathaniel that she had not imagined him. So concentrated was she on the animal that she didn’t notice Nathaniel until he had already stripped and entered the water.

  She stood up then, waving her arms above her head in an attempt to direct his attention to the dog.

  He felt the cold of the water in his gut, but the sight of Elizabeth brought his blood up warm. She stood on the bank waving at him with her arms pulled over her head. She couldn’t have any idea how she looked, how that gesture made the wet shift strain against her. Her skin, impossibly pale, and the dark circles of her nipples, and the darker triangle between her thighs, all this was brought into relief as she stood there waving at him with no hint of the turmoil she was causing. The wet fabric clung to her breasts, perfectly round. Nathaniel concentrated on moving himself through the water because the sight of her was too much to bear.

  He came to his feet and walked onto the bank knowing that his arousal was plain to her; his breechclout revealed rather than hid it. He saw this in her dazed look, her eyes half closed in anticipation already, before he ever touched her. He heard her draw in breath, but then she looked away behind him to the far shore, distracted. He frowned, and pulled her to him without discussion. Her mouth was warm and she came to him willingly, pressing up against him in spite of the cold lake water that ran off him to soak her again.

  “The red dog,” she mumbled when he came up for air.

  He would have laughed, if there hadn’t been the fire in him, the need to have her now, and without delay. “Forget the godforsaken dog,” he said, lowering his head to hers again, and then lowering her to the bank.

  Before he got her shift off her he had broken two ties, but she didn’t complain; instead she reached for the thong on his hip. But there was no time for that. He pushed her hand away, and his breechclout with it.

  “Come, come to me,” he whispered to her, pulling her underneath him.

  Elizabeth looked up into Nathaniel’s face, felt his breath on her skin. There was something of pain in his expression, in the deep lines etched on his forehead. He was frantic with it, with the need; she had never seen him like this before, and it excited her deeply. She cried out then, at the strength and persistence of him, at his urgency. There was a sudden sharp pain in her lower belly; she tensed, but it was gone before she could even gasp. But Nathaniel wasn’t. Nathaniel was still with her, murmuring to her, sweet words at her ear, the flat of his tongue on her neck, holding himself over her with one arm, the other hand beneath her, pulling her up to him again and again, harder and then harder still. When she began to shudder he raised his head and watched her, a look of fierce satisfaction on his face.

  “Have mercy,” she gasped.

  He shook his head, spattering her with lake water and sweat. “I’m nowhere near finished with you yet.”

  Nathaniel knew he was pushing her, maybe too hard. He moved in her without any concern for her comfort, focused only on the gathering tension that boiled up from the center of him in response to her heat.

  She pulled his face to hers and kissed him, then, and he felt the first trickling break in the dam inside her. He thrust himself deeper into her, met her tongue with his own, and then it happened; she let go, every muscle in her first relaxing and then flexing around him. It was the kiss, the depth and intensity of it, that sent her over the edge. He wondered if she heard, from a place deep inside herself, the sounds of her own surrender, but he couldn’t stop to ask her, or even to comfort her.

  Nathaniel found himself up on his knees, holding her tightly in his arms, her legs wrapped around his waist. He had no memory of lifting her, or how they came to this position, but her bottom was cushioned against his tensed thighs and her arms were wound around his neck. He pulled her waist in with one arm and thrust one last time, searching with his mouth for her ear in the wild confusion of her hair.

  “Open to me,” he whispered. “Open to me now.” His release came then with hers. It left him in long, slow ribbons, spooling endlessly into her. She reared back with her head to look into his eyes, and he saw it there, her awareness of each pulsing, and the power of her response.

  · · ·

  She was near sleep almost as soon as he lowered her to the bank, a stunned look on her face and the deep flush that ran from her breasts to her hairline already beginning to mottle.

  Nathaniel curled himself against her on one side, brushed her hair away from her face.

  “Did I hurt you?”

  She shook her head, and then with a visible effort, turned on her side to fit herself to him. “Never,” she said. And then, sleepily: “What got into you?”

  Nathaniel said, “Joe died, just before I came down. In his sleep.”

  She tensed for a moment. He expected tears, but she simply put her face against his and trembled a little.

  “That blessing of Robbie’s,” she said. “What was there in it about healing?”

  “ ‘To you the sheltering spirit of healing,’ ” he recited.

  Elizabeth turned her face up to the sky.

  “Amen,” she said. “Godspeed.”

  XXXV

  The morning was wet and cold and inhospitable, but there was no time to waste. Nathaniel dug the grave, the shovel rasping hard in the unwilling earth while Elizabeth packed their gear, tucking the newly dried and bundled meat in every available space. She worked in the wet because it did not see
m right to be in the shelter where Joe lay, where they had sat with him through the night, sleeping fitfully.

  She paused to warm her damp hands over the sputtering fire. Nathaniel was working hard, and she watched him for a moment, secretly. It seemed inappropriate, somehow, the joy she took in the sight of him—given the task at hand. But it was difficult to look away. There was such concentration in him, such focus. He would do what must be done and do it simply and well. It made her own dread and unease seem immature and silly; but still, it was almost inconceivable, the idea that they would lay Joe to rest in that simple hole with nothing to shelter him but the earth itself. There was no time to make him a box to lie in, even if there had been the tools to make such a thing as a coffin.

  Nathaniel paused to wipe the misting rain from his face with the sleeve of his shirt. He smiled at her, a grim smile but an encouraging one.

  “I’ve got everything ready,” she said. “Shall I—” She looked over her shoulder toward the shelter, and paused.

  “I ain’t quite that far yet,” Nathaniel said. “If you feel like washing go on down to the lake, we can take care of him when you get back.”

  She nodded, unable to talk.

  He hefted the shovel again. “Take your time,” he said. “There’s the pits to finish.”

  They were both anxious to be gone, but she couldn’t help him with much of what he needed to do first. And so she left him there, nervously, but glad to be away from the clearing.

  The forest sagged with the rain, each leaf dripping, rivulets running into streams, streams running down to the lake. She followed them, and was surprised to find, when she came out from under the canopy of trees, that the rain had stopped. Later in the day the sun might manage to burn off the haze, but right now Elizabeth stood on the lakefront and felt as if she had stumbled on some fairyland: mists floated over the surface of the water so that the island disappeared and reappeared, in what seemed to be an almost willful manner. The sounds of the forest and the birds echoed and swelled and faded only to come again, and Elizabeth was reminded of early mornings at home in her girlhood bed, when she rose and fell on the tide of sleep, content to coast between the muted colors and sounds of her dreams and the day that coaxed her awake.

  Cupping her face to her hands, she drank and then sat, strangely without energy. She thought of stripping down to wash. It seemed a foolhardy thing to do; she could not imagine simply walking into the lake and swimming, blinded in the mists with no sense of direction. But she was sticky with perspiration and meat drippings and she knew that they would be moving fast for two or perhaps three days, stopping only when it was no longer light, with little hope of time or opportunity to bathe. And so she settled down on the bank and washed herself systematically and as well as she could without stripping down. The sleeves and neckline of her shirt would dry soon enough.

  As she watched, the mist cleared suddenly, revealing the curved end of the lake and the table of rock with its overhang. For the first time since the previous afternoon, Elizabeth thought of the red dog. It had been sitting just there, not twenty feet away from her, and it had remained there while Nathaniel swam toward her, walking off into the bush while they had been occupied with each other. On a sudden whim she wiped her wet hands on her leggings and stood, tossing her plait over her shoulder.

  Elizabeth scrambled over the boulders, bumping her knee as she climbed onto the platform of rock. Then she stood, looking down at the smooth gray slab. There was evidence of their short stay in the ashes of their fire and a scattering of sweet flag, but nothing else that she could discern. Still, Elizabeth persisted, walking slowly with her gaze turned downward. If the dog would not show himself, a single print would be enough to point out to Nathaniel. She did not take the time to ask herself why it was so important to prove to him what she knew to be true.

  The sheltered rock face was dry and clean, but at its edge where it turned downward and disappeared into the dirt, rain dripped from the overhang and pooled. There the earth had turned to an expanse of mud, crisscrossed with the delicate prints of small birds. She jumped off the slab and felt the claylike mud give slightly under her weight. It felt tacky underfoot, and she looked behind herselfand saw her own prints, already filling with water at the outer edges of the heel. Intent now, she walked a little farther.

  At first she didn’t really believe what she saw. She had wanted this, yes, but it was hard to credit anyway: not one paw print, but a whole line headed into the underbrush. Not a cougar, or a deer or any of the others that Nathaniel had taught her to recognize, but a dog, and a large one. For a minute she stood staring into the shadows under the overhang, thinking about going back. Nathaniel would need help with Joe.

  Later, she could not even say why she had gone on, what had been in her mind except the vague feeling that she had missed something important. Something that Nathaniel would not have missed.

  There were puddles of water, here and there, among the dog’s prints. Strangely shaped. Four of them, at an even interval. Elizabeth looked at them, and felt her pulse double even as her thoughts slowed down to a preternatural slowness; then she recognized them for what they were. Footprints. Human footprints.

  They were much bigger and deeper than the dog’s prints; perhaps that was why she hadn’t seen them immediately. Elizabeth crouched down and she stared, harder than she had ever stared at anything in her life. And two thoughts came to her: they were fresh; and they could not be Nathaniel’s. He had not come down to the lake since the rain began.

  There was a tightness in her throat which exploded in a rush of blood and snapping nerves. In an instant she was running, her thoughts flashing as quickly as her feet as they flew over the rock face.

  She knew that Richard must be ahead of her. He would want to deal with Nathaniel first if he intended to take her back to Paradise against her will. Elizabeth caught a painful breath, half sob, half curse, and launched herself into the bush, catching her foot on a root and falling hard, pulling herself up with a wrench to move on. She felt like a lumbering cow without speed or grace, stumbling once and then again, scrambling ineffectively in wet leaves, pulling herself forward, soaked already to the skin with the dripping of the trees. With the sound of her own breathing blocking out all else, she made a halfhearted attempt to turn her toes inward and run on a narrow track as Nathaniel had taught her to do.

  It could not have taken more than two minutes for her to reach the clearing, but she got there winded and unable to do anything else but clutch her arms to her heaving ribs and struggle for breath. Elizabeth paused in the damp shadows of a stand of white pine and tried to hear past the pounding of her heart in her ears. It began to rain again, in earnest now.

  Something was different, but it took a few seconds for her to realize what it was: the empty grave had been filled in a high arc of fresh earth. Nathaniel had buried Joe without her.

  She wiped the rain from her face and tried to gather her thoughts. From where she stood, there was no immediate sign of him. To walk into the clearing went against everything he had taught her, but he could be lying there out of sight, his head laid open to the rain, while Richard stood over him and waited for her to stumble in.

  At that moment Nathaniel appeared in the doorway empty-handed—she had time to wonder where his rifle was—and Richard came out of the bush at the far edge of the clearing with his own gun to his shoulder and his sights on her husband.

  Nathaniel was turned in her direction and saw her first. Surprise and sudden awareness flashed across his face; he tensed and disappeared back into the shadows as Richard called out.

  “Bonner!” he bellowed. “Show yourself!”

  “Richard Todd,” Nathaniel called back in an easy tone. “Still showing up where you’re not wanted, I see.” Elizabeth could make out Nathaniel quite easily. He was gesturing with his chin in a hard motion for her to move away into the bush.

  “I’ll have to tie you up,” Richard said. “Or shoot you. Take your choice. Either
way you’re going back to Paradise.”

  Nathaniel was gesturing to her more forcefully, but Elizabeth only clasped her arms closer around herself and shook her head.

  “That’s a fancy trick you got in mind,” Nathaniel called back, frowning at Elizabeth.

  “I guess they’ll hang you for killing her,” Richard called. “I won’t mind watching.”

  For a moment Nathaniel’s face froze and then something like real amusement passed over it. He laughed out loud, but Elizabeth was overcome with indignation.

  “Cain’t say that I’m sorry to disappoint,” Nathaniel said. “She’s alive as you and me.”

  “That grave says different,” Richard called.

  It was then that Elizabeth saw the rifle leaning up under the lip of the roof, on the corner farthest from Richard and out of his line of vision. Nathaniel needed his rifle now; that thought went through her head very clearly, and without taking the time to think any further, Elizabeth lowered her head, and ran.

  She dodged the pit between herself and the shelter, not hearing, not daring to listen to the voice raised in surprise behind her. With one hand she grabbed the rifle and then dove, headfirst, into the open doorway, casting the gun away from her as she did, hoping that it wasn’t primed. She was vaguely aware of Nathaniel catching it as she hit the ground with her shoulder.

  There was a scream from outside the shelter followed by a muffled gunshot. Elizabeth rolled and was up on her feet instantaneously, looking around herself for Nathaniel, but finding instead only the empty room and the stripped cot.

  The second scream was louder, and drew her out of the shelter with a jerk. Elizabeth stood just beyond the open doorway, looking into a scene that made no sense.

  Nathaniel stood with his rifle sights trained downward. His hair hung in wet ropes down his back, and rain poured over his face, but his concentration was complete. With a terrible rush of awareness Elizabeth realized why he was aiming into the ground.