by Sara Donati
Otter watched her eat. She saw his eyes moving over her face tentatively, as if he could not quite believe what he saw.
“Is it so very bad?” she asked finally, between mouthfuls.
He blinked in affirmation.
Suddenly exhausted again, Elizabeth slumped. She looked at the sky and was surprised to see that it was still very early, long before noon. She could not have been sleeping for more than an hour.
“Nathaniel?” Otter asked, warily.
“He’s alive,” she said. She did not often weep; she had always prided herself on that, the ability to control excesses of pain or anxiety until they could be digested in private. But now, even as she found the necessary words and told the story in a fairly calm and quite comprehensible way, tears ran down her face and drenched the remains of her shirt. She finished as quickly as she could, leaving out only what she could not bear to relate: how Nathaniel had received his wound, and what had delayed her. Otter was young, but there was a reserve about him that reminded her of Bears. She was infinitely grateful not to be asked to explain her battered face.
“We have to go after Nathaniel, and Todd.” His eyes flashed at this last name, and Elizabeth remembered that there was unsettled business between Richard and Otter. She tried to remember what Nathaniel had told her of the march to Canajoharie, but her head was muddled, and the world seemed bent on a lopsided spin.
“But Robbie,” Elizabeth repeated, thinking of his strength and his experience and his love of Nathaniel. If anyone could save them from disaster, it must be Robbie. “Do you know where Robbie’s gone?”
“There’s no time to waste, waiting for him,” Otter pointed out.
Elizabeth could not hide her disappointment, although she had no wish to insult Otter. But he was looking at her, for the moment, with a narrowed gaze and for the first time Elizabeth saw Falling-Day in him, her quiet determination.
“We got to get you cleaned up before we set out,” said Otter, and he disappeared in the direction of the caves.
Questions were running together in her head, all of which she wanted immediate answers for. What Otter was doing here in the bush on his own, whether Hannah and Hawkeye and the others were whole and safe, how soon they could leave, how long it would take. If he believed Nathaniel could still be alive. She dared not let herself think about it, about the time lost, about what she had left behind under the wild cherry tree, about Nathaniel. She had not yet given up on him, and she would not, until she had seen him laid in the ground or had gone to her own grave.
Otter came back at a trot, his hands full of what he needed to tend her wounds.
Elizabeth got to her feet, and he helped her.
Back on the trail with her wounds cleaned and bound, and Otter’s solid back always in sight, Elizabeth felt herself floating. She knew that she was near to collapsing, and that she must soon ask him to make camp. But they had only been under way for an hour, and she felt the press of time as surely as she felt the throbbing of the bruises that ranged up and down her ribs.
And also, there was the matter of the cherry tree. In less than an hour’s walk they would come upon it, and there would be no choice but to explain. Elizabeth wanted that behind her, and so she took a mouthful of nocake to chew slowly, and she focused her energies on putting one foot in front of the other.
She had been worried about Otter’s youth, about his impulsive behavior: walking behind him, she thought at great length about the gunshot which had bolted the sleigh team, and what might have come of that. But he had been trained by men she trusted and loved, and he walked with their gait and posture and keen, sweeping gaze, his rifle forward and primed. For the moment she was content to follow him. This passivity would not last as long as her collection of bruises; this well she knew herself. But for the moment, she was thankful for Otter, who set a good pace and didn’t coddle her.
Elizabeth convinced herself that she was capable of walking past that spot under the cherry tree. She had nothing to hide; could hide nothing, in fact. She would not let Jack Lingo reach out from the grave to make one last attempt to keep her from Nathaniel. Not that he had a grave, or ever would.
In the end when she recognized the turn of the trail, she could not go on. Otter went those few steps without noticing that she hung back, and she heard a soft exclamation. A long silence followed.
There was a dead oak which had fallen into a small pond. She had not noticed it on first passing. Out of the thick layer of pungent green scum that blanketed the water, a rack of branches bleached the color and glossiness of old bone pointed at the sky. On each sat a single grackle, dark feathers iridescent in the late sunlight. Elizabeth counted fourteen of them, motionless, their eyes turned to her. She could not remember ever seeing grackles in these forests before. Blinking hard, she wondered if she were imagining them, or if perhaps they were part of that other forest which seemed to always be there, right below the surface: the forest of red dogs and stone men, birds shimmering in rainbows and lovers who wandered the swamp murmuring their vows in Latin. Her ability to reason these things away had been worn thin, as thin as the wooden disk that lay still between her breasts. She touched a finger to Joe’s bijou and watched as the birds flew away, one by one.
She started to find Otter standing in front of her. Elizabeth lifted her chin and met his gaze. His eyes were so dark, but they were like her own in at least one way: in them she could read what he was feeling. And what she saw she could not at first credit.
“Awiyo, aktsi’a,” he said hoarsely. Well done, my sister.
Otter opened his palms. On the left, a large gold coin shimmered against the deep bronze of his skin; His Royal Highness King George II seemed to be winking at her, as if he approved of this change in his circumstances. In the other palm—Elizabeth blanched to see it—there was a tooth. Long and yellow and wickedly curved. It was still bloody.
Otter steadied her, his fingers and the coin pressing into her shoulder.
“The panther,” he said softly. Then he held up the tooth to his own necklace of teeth and claws, as if to demonstrate.
“Yes, please, you have it.” Elizabeth felt nauseated and suddenly a little dizzy.
“No,” said Otter forcefully. “You must wear it, it is your right.” He touched his own necklace, and then hers: the bijou and the silver flower that had belonged to Nathaniel’s mother.
She said: “I didn’t kill the panther.” Her voice had gone suddenly hoarse, and she began to shake.
“But he did, and you killed him.” He paused. “It’s Lingo, ain’t it? I’ve heard tell, but I never saw the man before.”
Otter was more than ten years her junior, but Elizabeth felt like a child under his gaze: vulnerable and uncertain and very afraid. It seemed that everything came back very simply to this truth, which could not be avoided. The evidence was around this turn in the path. She had killed a man. And why? Otter had not asked, but he was watching her patiently, and waiting.
For Nathaniel’s sake. Jack Lingo had kept her from her errand, and by that act he may have caused Nathaniel’s death. But she knew in her heart that this was not the truth. Perhaps not even a part of the truth.
Lingo had put his hands on her, and it was that, that sin which had fueled her journey, instantaneous, from the woman she had been to the woman she was now. She had raised the rifle and swung it for herself alone, for Nathaniel had not existed at all: in that instant she had been alone in the world with Jack Lingo.
She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “It is—it was, Jack Lingo.” She sought Otter’s gaze. Those final words would not come, and so she let them float between them.
Something flickered in Otter’s eyes; he was looking at her, looking hard. Seeing the cuts and the bruises on all of her exposed skin, even to the backs of her hands in a spread of color from yellow-green to indigo. “Tkayeri,” he said softly. It is proper so.
Elizabeth took the coin and the panther’s tooth from him, held them together in one hand. The tooth was
very sharp, and mottled with dried blood. “I should wear these?”
“Why not? It is your right,” Otter repeated.
“Why not,” Elizabeth echoed. “Yes, why not.”
They camped on the crest of the hill. Otter built a quick lean-to of balsam branches, beginning with a sapling which he rough-stripped and propped against the trunk of an older tree. Elizabeth ate while he worked, forcing herself to swallow corn bread spread liberally with bear fat. It was slick and the taste was overpowering, but with each mouthful she felt her body stir and waken, as if she were a growing thing supplied with water after a long drought.
She felt suddenly very anxious, and wondered if they should have continued walking. When she asked Otter about this, he shrugged diplomatically. Elizabeth sighed and sought a more comfortable position against the beech. There was a bird calling, a plaintive three-note song, and Otter singing softly under his breath while he worked.
Elizabeth fell asleep with the Tory Gold resting between her breasts, warmed by her skin.
They walked hard the next day. Elizabeth scanned the swamp halfheartedly for Treenie, but saw no trace of her. The swamp itself no longer frightened her; she saw it only as another obstacle between herself and Nathaniel. When they stopped to rest and eat, she could barely sit still, and found herself being addressed like a wayward child by Otter. She snapped at him, and he blinked his disapproval. A trick he had learned from Nathaniel. She sat, finally, and ate.
“If we push hard we could be there just after sunset,” she proposed. Knowing even as she said this that she was incapable of such a thing. Walking as hard as she was able, without injuries, she had needed a full day for the stretch before them, and it was midday now. Elizabeth took another mouthful of dried beef, as salty as tears.
Otter did her the courtesy of not replying.
“You will make a good husband someday,” she observed grudgingly.
“My mother does not think so.” He grinned.
They made camp late, past dark and only three good hours from Nathaniel. Elizabeth could not sleep at first, as tired as she was. Every muscle trembled, and the tips of her fingers were numb. She lay with her leggings rolled to a pillow underneath her head and stared at the sky, the great sweep of stars too bright to ignore.
“You haven’t asked about Hannah,” Otter pointed out to her, and just that suddenly all of Elizabeth’s tension collapsed in on itself There were other people who missed Nathaniel and worried for him; one of them was his daughter. Her daughter.
“She sent along a message for you. Said, tell her I been keeping the new schoolhouse in order, swept up and dusted.”
Her throat suddenly swollen with tears, Elizabeth tried to find Otter’s face in the dark. “Tell me about home,” she said.
In the morning Otter had to wake her, her sleep was so deep and absolute. She sat up, disoriented, and accepted the water skin from him. They ate and drank in near darkness. Elizabeth could hardly strap on her pack, her hands shook so.
Otter was as silent and preoccupied as she was. Yesterday he had talked easily and at length about any number of topics that came to him, but now as the sun rose on a day that promised to be hot and clear, his look was dark and uninviting. He insisted on taking the time to clean his gun again, boiling water in a tin cup to purge the barrel, measuring powder carefully, and loading it with what seemed to Elizabeth enough lead to bring down a bear.
It wasn’t until they were under way that she was able to breathe again. Her mind kept composing pictures for her: Nathaniel weak but clear-eyed, Nathaniel consumed in fever, Nathaniel lost to her, too deep inside himself to hear her calling. When she thought of Richard, it was reluctantly, unwilling to expend any of her goodwill on him at all. Perhaps he is dead, she thought with no regret, and then colored with shame and defiance, simultaneously. It would be easier, and to deny that would be the worst kind of hypocrisy.
Her thoughts went back to Nathaniel, what he would need. Food, and water, and his wounds tended. He would still be coughing, but hopefully not bleeding anymore. Perhaps Otter would know more about herbs than she did, what she should look for, what teas might help. He could hunt and provide for them, and she would look after Nathaniel, until he was well enough to walk.
He would be sleeping when they came in; she imagined this. His face thin with pain and disguised by many days’ growth of beard, but when she woke him he would grin at her, and call her Boots, and hold out his hands. She hesitated to think how he might react to her bruises, but she was determined to tell him nothing of Jack Lingo, not at first. Not until necessary. A bad fall would have given her the same injuries, and he had seen her fall before. She thought that this was a reasonable story, and one she would be able to make him believe. If only Otter would cooperate. If only she could keep her voice from giving her away.
When he was fed and his wounds tended to, then he would sleep. And she would sleep beside him, and he would heal. Then they would go home to Paradise and start their life.
The unnamed lake with the island at its center where they had last been together was suddenly there before them, and the platform of rock, where they had watched the eagles mate. Elizabeth broke into a run, with Otter right behind her. It was only two minutes, but how could that be? It must be ten times that, or more. Otter was talking to her, but she could make no sense of what he was saying; could not even tell if it was English or Mohawk.
At the edge of the clearing she pulled up, hard, and saw the smoke curling at a cook fire. One of them was well enough to get outside to tend it. A great rush of hope burst through her, and she knew how afraid she had been. She paused to catch her breath, and in that moment what she had taken as a great pile of red pelts on Joe’s grave rolled suddenly to one side and gave a low woof. Elizabeth watched in disbelief as Treenie came loping toward her, grinning idiotically, her whole body moving with the rhythm of her tail. There was a wound on her back, crusted with blood. Elizabeth steadied herself by threading her fingers into the dog’s coat, speaking softly to her. Then she cleared her throat and started forward, calling out.
Robbie MacLachlan’s familiar form materialized in the doorframe. Elizabeth’s voice died in her throat, and then she increased her pace, running the last few paces into Robbie’s comforting embrace.
“Weel, then, lassie,” he said while he patted at her back. “It’s nae sae bad, nae sae bad a’all. Dinna greet so, ye’ll break ma heart.”
His great bulk blocked out the rest of the world. Wiping her face with her hands, Elizabeth looked up into his eyes, and saw no end to her troubles.
“Is he alive?” she asked hoarsely. “Tell me he’s alive, Robbie, please.”
“Who, then? Joe? Do ye ken Joe? If it’s him ye mean, I canna hold oot much hope, for there’s a new grave—”
Elizabeth pulled away from him, shook her head. “That is Joe’s grave. He died five days ago.” Without waiting for Robbie’s reaction, she walked stiffly past him and into the shelter. On either side of the cold fire there was nothing but a scattering of straw on the earth floor. The food, the weapons, and the tools; everything was gone. She heard herself moan, pressed the back of her hand to her mouth until her lip, barely healed, began to bleed again.
“I dinna understand,” Robbie was saying behind her. “Where’s Nathaniel, lass? And how come ye here lookin’ sae blue an’ battered?”
“He was here,” she said numbly. “I left him here, to fetch you. They were both injured, and couldn’t walk.”
“Baith injured? Who baith?” The frustration in Robbie’s voice was making it break and crackle. “I dinna understand.”
“Cat-Eater,” said Otter.
There was a soft woosh of surprise from Robbie, and then he came forward to take her by the arm. “I came this way this morning tae look in on Joe, for he was a friend o’ mine. Now ye tell me that Joe is dead, and Nathaniel and Todd were here? They fought?”
She nodded, hesitating only slightly.
“Someone came,” she sai
d, more to herself than Robbie. “Someone came and took them away.”
Robbie’s hand moved to Elizabeth’s shoulder, and it gripped her firmly. “I’ve been in this part o’ the bush for a guid week, lass, and there’s ample sign o’ Indian aboot. No’ three days syne I came across an abandoned camp. They were headed this way.”
Elizabeth looked up at Robbie, saw the hope in his face and felt the stirrings of it in her own heart. “Do you think they were Kahnyen’kehàka?”
“Aye, fra’ the sign I wad say they were. And they are in the habit o’ passin’ through this way.” He cast a glance at Otter which Elizabeth could not quite interpret, but the younger man had a question which was more relevant.
“How many were they?” he asked.
“At least a dozen. Enough tae get both men oot, if need be. And they’ll have had canoes, forbye.”
“But where?” she whispered, and then turning to Otter, she raised her voice. “Where is he?”
Otter’s eyes had been scanning the shelter while she spoke to Robbie, and now he went down on one knee there where Nathaniel had been propped when she last saw him. A knife had been used to scrape the bark away, leaving a small patch of white raw wood. There a single word had been written in ash by a fingertip. It was smeared now and barely legible. On her knees next to Otter, Elizabeth read it aloud.
“Kahen’ tiyo.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered.
Robbie translated: “Good Pasture.”
“Where my mother’s people live,” supplied Otter, and there was some excitement there, some satisfaction in his voice. She turned back to Robbie, and spread out one hand, palm up.
Robbie glanced at Otter, and then he cleared his throat. “Canada,” he said. “Aboot four days’ hard walk fra here.”
Elizabeth had felt completely drained just five minutes ago, but a new flush of energy flowed through her. “Let’s go, then,” she said, standing up and dusting her hands on her leggings. “It’s a good day to walk.” And then she stilled, seeing their faces.