Into the Wilderness

by Sara Donati

  Nathaniel and Runs-from-Bears were just crossing into the forest when Elizabeth called out behind them. She was running, her shawl flapping in the wind. Nathaniel caught her up and smoothed the loose curls from around her face while she fought for her voice.

  “Nathaniel,” she gasped. “It’s Sunday. I just realized. You were supposed to leave for Albany this morning.”

  He had been fixed on the idea of Billy, all his energy and anger of the past day pushing him forward, and he could not make sense of what she was trying to tell him. Nathaniel saw Elizabeth’s frustration, and he forced himself to breathe in and out, and think it through.

  It hit him, then. “God Almighty. The court date.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

  They stared at each other for a moment.

  Bears said: “Maybe nobody needs to go. If Richard don’t show up, his suit against you gets dropped. That’s what van der Poole said, wasn’t it?”

  “But what if Richard is there?” Elizabeth said. “He could be.”

  “Then I’ll have to go,” Nathaniel said. “If I leave now and ride hard I can be there in time.”

  “You cannot go,” Elizabeth cried. “The men here will take justice into their own hands if you are not there to stop them.”

  There was a small silence, and she pulled herself up and looked him hard in the eye. “I promised Liam.”

  “Does it matter if Billy Kirby dies tonight or next week in Albany? Is it worth losing the mountain over?” Nathaniel shot back, exasperated.

  “Bears can go and explain. If Richard is there, perhaps the judge will postpone again when he hears what has happened.”

  “They wouldn’t let me in the courthouse,” Bears said, presenting a simple fact.

  Elizabeth threw up her hands and her voice came hoarse, with effort or suppressed tears or anger, Nathaniel could not tell. “Then I will go.”

  “No,” Nathaniel said flatly. “You will not.”

  “Wait,” said Bears, turning to Elizabeth. “You write a letter for the judge, I’ll take it to Schuyler, and he can go in your place.”

  Nathaniel’s stomach gave a lurch, a knot of anxiety unraveling. Elizabeth was lifting her skirts and turning toward the cabin already. “I’ll write as quickly as I can,” she said, and she was off, disappearing quickly in the darkness. Nathaniel watched her go, and then he turned to Bears.

  “It may be a hard ride for no reason,” he said. “I doubt Richard is anywhere near Albany.”

  Runs-from-Bears shrugged. His expression was blank, but his tone was hard-edged. “You watch out for that treasury agent,” he said. “He’s too curious about the north face.”

  Nathaniel nodded, his thoughts moving away already and up the mountain. He grasped Bears by the lower arm and then took off into the forest.

  He knew the mountain as well as he knew the cabin in which he had been born and raised, as well as he knew the textures and planes of his daughter’s face. It was Hannah’s face Nathaniel carried with him through the dark, the look in her eyes when he pulled her through the schoolhouse window.

  He had rocked her while she wept and sobbed and coughed, rocked her as he hoped her mother might have rocked her, murmuring to her wordlessly. Unable to console her, Nathaniel had wished for Elizabeth to help him with this, and looked up to see her flying toward them, with Many-Doves and Falling-Day just behind. Just then Julian had come bolting out of the schoolhouse with his hair on fire, to be knocked to the ground by Bears.

  The sight of him had seemed to give Hannah a voice.

  “I tried to get out,” she hiccuped. “The smell of it woke me up, and so I tried. But it was locked. The door was locked.”

  Nathaniel had known real rage only a few times in his life. On the battlefield he had made his acquaintance with the pure, focused fury that lifted a man above fear. It had come to him again, seeing what Lingo had done to Elizabeth and knowing that the man was beyond a reckoning. As he walked toward the Southerns’ cabin with Hannah in his arms, the same kind of jagged, razor-edged rage overcame him. Billy Kirby had set the schoolhouse to burning and locked the door.

  He had to ask. “Did he see you? Hannah, did Billy see you?”

  She trembled against him. “I don’t know,” she mumbled, rubbing her eyes now. She had cried herself dry. He could almost feel the tension in her flowing out and away; she seemed heavier now, looser in his arms. Falling-Day came up and he passed the child over to her, following them into the cabin to have his wounds tended. Thinking not of his own injuries, or the daughter who still needed comforting, or his wife, who went pale and straight-backed to her brother’s deathbed, but of Billy Kirby, and how right it would feel to put a rifle up against the man’s head and pull the trigger.

  Running this mountain in the near total dark was not nearly as hard as it was going to be to keep his promise to Elizabeth.

  Nathaniel pushed hard uphill, pausing only to listen. Twice he heard search parties and saw lanterns, not too far off. He kept his own counsel, not because he didn’t need their help, but because he couldn’t afford their company. Not where he needed to go.

  On the edge of a ravine on a slope so steep that he could stand straight and chew grass if he chose, Nathaniel caught a flash of movement above him. The wolves who made this side of the mountain their own were watching him, eyes reflecting red in the moonlight. It was a good sign.

  He skittered over a shoulder of scree accumulated over many years, feeling it shift beneath him. Paying attention to the mountain now, because the mountain was paying attention to him. The Wolf would toss him into the void like a bucking horse if he let his mind wander. When the moon was lost behind cloud coyer he came to a halt and waited, because he had no choice. An owl called in the darkness and nearby, a nightjar seemed to answer.

  Stopping often to listen, Nathaniel made his way along a narrow cliff and past the silver mine. From what he could see through the tangle of juniper that grew out of the cracks in the rock face, nothing had been disturbed; there were no obvious tracks, although daylight might tell a different story. You could walk past the spot a thousand times and never guess what was there: not just the silver mine, tended so carefully these many years, but the strongbox that Chingachgook had brought out of the bush back in ’57, and the rest of the Tory Gold.

  Nathaniel continued on up through the pines, switching back and forth where the incline was too much for him. There was the deadfall, a hundred years and more of wood downed by storm and wind, as dangerous as any bear trap. The cave was just above him, but before that there was a cliff face he didn’t dare scale in the night. The long way around took him a good hour at a steady climb, until finally he could look down on the cave. Under an outcropping of rock he hunkered down, to wait and to think.

  He had played in the cave as a boy, hid there when he wanted to be on his own. Right now Billy might be looking at the elk and deer he had drawn on the walls with a burnt stick. His father had shown the cave to him when he was ten; he would do the same for Hannah, when she was surefooted enough for the narrow ridge that led to it. If they were still here. If they could still call Hidden Wolf home. It seemed more and more likely to him these days that they might actually lose the mountain, or simply walk away from it. Once he would have sacrificed his own life to secure his daughter’s birthright, but just yesterday he had learned that the cost of staying might be too high.

  In the dark Nathaniel could not see the smoke rising from the mouth of the cave, but he could smell it, along with roasting possum. Kirby was in there; he was keeping himself warm and dry. With his rifle across his knees, primed and ready, Nathaniel waited for Billy to show his face, or for the dawn when he could go in after him. Whichever came first.

  Just before sunrise he made his move. From one side, he tossed in a torch, swung his rifle up and went in with his finger testy on the trigger. It wasn’t any struggle at all: Billy simply got up wearily, dropped his gun, and stood staring at the floor.

  “You r
eady to go?” Nathaniel asked.

  Billy raised his head and Nathaniel saw the ruined mouth and the flash of dark resistance in his eyes. It took nothing more than a tap of the rifle stock on the jaw to stop his lunge and toss him down. He clasped both hands to his face, bent himself into a bow and howled.

  “Shut up,” Nathaniel said. “If you don’t want Axel and the rest of them on your tail.”

  Spit and blood ran down between Billy’s fingers as he peered up at Nathaniel.

  “Call ’em in,” he said hoarsely, his torn mouth working in odd jerks. “Maybe I can strike a deal.”

  And he reached under the blanket that lay in a heap on the dirt floor and came up not with the knife Nathaniel had half expected, but fists full of gold coin.

  “Call ’em in!” Billy shouted. “Where’s that treasury agent? O’Brien!”

  He coughed and laughed, and tossed the coins in the air. They clinked and rolled on the ground; Nathaniel kept his eyes on Billy.

  “The judge will want to see that mine,” Billy said, wiping his chin with the back of a hand. “Nice little piece of work it is, too.”

  “The judge is busy burying his son.”

  For a moment the certainty in Billy’s face wavered, and then it cleared. “You’re lying.”

  Nathaniel shook his head.

  “But not in the fire.” Billy’s voice cracked and wobbled. “That wasn’t the idea at all.”

  “What was the idea?”

  Billy just stared at him.

  “We’ll head down to the village and ask, if you don’t believe me.”

  “You can’t afford to take me down there.”

  “It’s you that stinks of fire and spilled blood,” Nathaniel said. “Get up.”

  Suddenly much paler, Billy said: “You’ll have to hand that gold over to the treasury.”

  “What gold?” Nathaniel said. “By the time they get back up here, there won’t be any gold. They’ll think it’s a story you made up, desperate to save your hide.”

  Billy stood up slowly. “The judge will take the mine away from you.”

  “And if he did,” Nathaniel said, “Elizabeth is his only heir now.” He pushed the idea of Kitty and her newborn son out of his head. “We’d get it back in the end. So let’s you and me go on down there and ask him what sits worse, the loss of a mine he never knew he had, or the loss of his son.”

  “You’re lying!” Billy whispered.

  “Am I? Let’s go find out.”

  He made Billy shake out his boots and strip down to the skin, losing a few gold pieces along the way. Then Nathaniel let him dress again and he prodded him out of the cave at the end of his rifle. His face was as calm and impassive as he knew how to make it, but his mind was racing. There was no one who could come take the gold off the mountain now; Bears was gone to Albany, and none of the women were strong enough to manage the strongbox. He wasn’t even sure he could handle it on his own, half empty as it was.

  On the cliff edge Billy hesitated in the first rays of the rising sun. Squinting, he glanced up at the sky, and then over the gorge below. He scuffed with one toe and a cascade of pebbles disappeared.

  “Gotta piss.”

  Nathaniel waited.

  “Aren’t you going to ask about your brother?”

  Billy’s head jerked around, surprised. “What about him?”

  “You don’t know if he’s alive or dead,” Nathaniel pointed out.

  Billy shrugged, pulling his breeches back into order. “I was beat harder than that once a week when our folks was alive,” he said. “Never killed me. No other way to knock sense into a thick head, Pa always said.” He ran a hand over his jaw and winced. “Anyway, they can only hang me once. That is, if Julian really died in the fire.”

  Nathaniel blinked at him and said nothing, feeling the rage rising in his gorge.

  “Stupid bastard, to go in there,” Billy muttered.

  “Maybe,” said Nathaniel, watching closely. “Maybe there was something worth saving inside.”

  Billy studied his boots.

  Nathaniel’s rifle hummed in his hands, speaking to him. He gripped it hard and focused on what he could see of Billy’s face, bruised and bloody. To the right the sun was rising in colors of fire. Ahead of him was the wilderness. Somewhere out there his father was living rough, because of Billy Kirby. And there was Liam—alone in the world, except for this man. The world narrowed down to this, everything in the balance because of a man like this.

  “Why’d you lock the door?” Nathaniel asked, hearing his own voice low and even and far away.

  The shaggy blond head came up slowly. A struggle on his face, the bruised mouth puckered. The expression of a man weighing bragging rights against the little bit of common sense he called his own.

  “It’s like Pa always said.” Billy cocked his head to look out over the wilderness. “If a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing all the way.”

  “That’s damn good advice,” Nathaniel said, and his rifle stock took Billy in the gut and shoved him backward. There was an explosive grunt of air, Billy’s eyes bulging with the shock of it. Nathaniel watched his arms pinwheel once, twice, and there was a furious scrabble and shuddering of loose rock as his boots skittered over the edge. He flung himself forward to grab at the rifle barrel, Nathaniel’s shirt, his legs, the fringe on his moccasins. Then the cliff edge snapped off in his hands with a crack like bone breaking—like Liam’s bones breaking—and Billy Kirby fell a hundred screaming yards to strike the cliff face headfirst, fell again, silently now, to strike again, careening down the mountainside until he was lost in a vast sea of juniper and hemlock.

  Nathaniel stood for a long time, listening to the winds. He thought of Elizabeth, who trusted him to do what was right. He looked into his own heart and knew he had done just that, and no less. For his family, for himself. When the rush of his blood had calmed enough, he went into the cave and collected the gold coins. Then Nathaniel started down the mountainside to put them back where they belonged, and to collect Billy Kirby’s body.

  LVIII

  In the next few days, Elizabeth found herself unwilling to leave home, even in the face of visits which could hardly be put off Her father was not coping as well as she had hoped; there were Kitty and her new baby to look in on, and her schoolchildren seemed to seek her out at every opportunity as if they could not quite believe that she would still be in evidence if the schoolhouse was not. Determined to spend the day at home in spite of all of that, Elizabeth first took up some mending and spent all her time retrieving her needle, or nursing a stuck finger. Finally she resolved to make a list of those books and supplies which had survived the fire. She assembled paper and quill and ink, and found that even the quill felt awkward in her hand.

  “You’ve been to the window five times in a half hour,” Many-Doves said. She spoke Kahnyen’kehàka in front of Liam, a sign of her distraction and irritability.

  Runs-from-Bears had left for Albany four days ago; Elizabeth could not imagine what was keeping him so long. If Bears did not come back today Nathaniel would go off after him, an idea which did not bear long consideration.

  Elizabeth watched Hannah for a moment. The little girl was coping better than the rest of them were with the aftermath of the fire, perhaps because she had taken on Liam as her personal responsibility. When she was not reading to him, or helping him read, she pressed him into service of all kinds.

  Immobilized by a broken leg, Liam had spent the morning mending a harness for Nathaniel; now he watched closely as Hannah demonstrated how to braid corn for drying. She picked up the sharpened deer antler attached to a rawhide loop that slipped over her middle finger, and slit the husk. Then she removed all but four good strands, which she plaited into the string of cobs which trailed off Liam’s lap. They had already finished two longish braids, which Hannah had hung over the rafters by climbing the ladder Nathaniel had raised in the middle of the room. Liam would have climbed that ladder if she had asked him; Eliza
beth had no doubt that he would climb up on the roof, at Hannah’s request. He would do whatever he had to do to prove his worth to the household, and to earn his place.

  There was a hollowness to the boy’s cheek, and a kind of damp-eyed distraction that Elizabeth understood very well: she too was constantly finding herself caught between sorrow and anger at a brother who was suddenly and absolutely beyond redemption.

  She forced her attention back to her list, a melancholy business. Most of the books she had here were not suitable for the children, and all the other materials, from quills to hornbooks, had been lost. On a fresh sheet of paper she began a letter to Mr. Beekman, the merchant who had been so helpful in Albany. At least there were funds enough to replace what had been lost. When she looked up again it was time to start to cook, and Nathaniel was coming up the porch stair, and not alone.

  Many-Doves let her sewing drop to her lap, her whole body trembling. By the time Runs-from-Bears came through the door, she had already taken it up again and her expression was calm, although her eyes sparked when she looked up to greet him. Elizabeth looked away, not wanting to intrude.

  Nathaniel dropped down on one knee next to her chair, and rubbed his cheek on her shoulder.

  “All’s well.”

  She raised a brow, and he nodded. “No sign of Richard in Albany, and van der Poole was as good as his word. The suit’s been dropped.”

  Carefully, Elizabeth put down her quill, and then she turned to him and placed her hands on his shoulders. “Are you sure?”

  “Bears?” Nathaniel asked, not taking his eyes away from her.

  Runs-from-Bears came across the room, pulling some papers from inside his shirt.

  “The judge sent this along, said you should put it in a safe place. And there’s a letter from Mrs. Schuyler there, too.”

  “It is over, then?” Elizabeth asked, because she could not quite grasp it.

  “Looks that way,” Nathaniel agreed.