He ate another of McCabe’s biscuits and finished off the possum as he watched the village until its lights had one by one gone out, and then he lay down on the soft earth beneath an overcup and gazed awhile at the sky and its vast expanse of starlight. A nearly full moon had begun to rise. The night was warm and clear and entirely silent except for the occasional distant baying of some dog. Nail began to sense for the first time the extent of his freedom: there was that enormous firmament of stars overhead, almost enough light to illuminate this enormous firmament of earth that surrounded him and in which he was free to roam or to lie still, as he chose, and he chose now to lie still. Then he slept.
The next morning, after two more of McCabe’s biscuits for breakfast, he climbed down from the ridge and sought a good place to skirt the village undetected and gain the trail that led to Solgohachia, his next landmark. Of course he did not know the name of Overcup, nor would he come to learn the name of Solgohachia, but those were the two villages I found on topographic survey maps I used to trace his probable route. None of those villages he would skirt or pass through—Round Mountain, Wonderview, Jerusalem, Stumptoe, Lost Corner, Nogo, and Raspberry—would ever become known to him by name, except the last, because he did not encounter anyone after leaving McCabe, and, even if he had, would not have stopped to ask questions.
Solgohachia happened to be the hometown of Sam Bell, who was Nail’s inmate in the death hole, sentenced there for killing four members of his divorced wife’s family (Viridis had called him a psychopath), but Nail would not have known this, for he would not have known it was Solgohachia he was stopping through, nor known the Indian legend surrounding the well where he had paused to draw himself a drink of water: a chief’s daughter had been married to a great warrior at this spot, and according to popular belief anybody who drank from this well would have a long and happy marriage; consequently, thousands of couples had come from miles around to Solgohachia to solemnize their weddings at this very spot, where Nail, unknowing, paused for a drink of water. Coming to and going out of Solgohachia, he found an abundance of usable arrowheads for his future bow and arrow, so he should have known that this had once been an Indian place.
Crossing through a gap of the hills between Solgohachia and Point Remove Creek, he nearly stepped on a large snake, whose checkerboard pattern might have misled a woods novice into thinking it a diamondback or a copperhead, but Nail recognized it for what it was, a nonpoisonous hognose, or spitting adder; and he took some time to observe and study it, hunkering motionless on his heels, so still the snake lost its fear of him. It was the first resumption of his nature study. All those months in the penitentiary, of all the pleasures of freedom he had missed, he had missed most his loving attention to the variety of the natural world. Nail was a naturalist of no small merit, but until now he had been too busy escaping the prison to stop and notice the welcome that nature was giving him on every hand. Almost as if Nature Herself had sensed his return to the watching of Her, She let loose a magnificent falcon, a red-backed male kestrel, what Nail would have called a sparrow hawk if he’d had anyone to call it to, and he dallied on his trek for nearly an hour near the tree in which the kestrel had its nest, watching it, and watching too the eventual appearance of the female.
Not long afterward he began the construction of his bow and his arrows. He fashioned the four-foot bow from a long stave of Osage orange, or bois d’arc (the same words from which “Ozark” derives), and the arrowshafts he made from willow. For three nights, in the lingering light after supper, he slowly trimmed and shaped the bow, careful not to whittle it with his knife but just to scrape it into shape. He had saved all the sinew from each animal he’d eaten, rabbits and squirrels alike, and had carefully dried and twisted it into a long bowstring. Leftover sinew went into wrapping the nock ends of the arrows and into tying the arrowheads to the foreshafts. For fletching, he used the feathers of a wild turkey he had surprised with his digging-stick used as a spear, having given up any attempt to hit a quail or partridge, both abundant but elusive.
When he had finished the construction of his bow and arrow, he spent an entire day practicing with it, slowed down on his hike by the necessity to stop and take aim and experiment with ways of holding his bow and his arrows and crouching in a shooting position.
The number of miles he covered each day diminished as the terrain became rougher and steeper: he had reached the Ozarks, and the uplifts had risen; some folks say everything above the village of Jerusalem is technically in the Ozarks; beyond that point he would certainly encounter no more flat plains. Between practicing with his bow and arrow, actually hunting with it, and struggling with the rugged inclines of Van Buren County, his progress slowed to no more than fifteen miles a day. His shoes had begun to fall apart, and he resewed them with sinew and a needle made from one of the fishhooks straightened; they still gave him blisters.
But with his new weapon he was able to kill anything alive and edible that crossed his path, or whose path he crossed: a raccoon, a pheasant, and even, while fording a stream, a large bass. He did not want for food, and he used the pheasant feathers to fletch more arrows and made himself a cap from the raccoon’s fur: although the heat of summer made a fur cap unnecessary, his still-bare scalp was often chilly, and he feared getting sunstroke while walking in the broiling sunshine at midday without a head-covering. But the pheasant and the coon had been small game; he did not feel that his marksmanship with the bow and arrow were yet sufficient to risk an encounter with a buck deer or a bear. He saw plenty of the tracks of both, and once he even saw a mother bear with her cubs, at some distance, upwind, and avoided them. Crossing over into Pope County from Van Buren County, into the wilderness near New Hope, he encountered an entire family of deer and crept up on them, upwind, and took careful aim at the buck from not more than twenty paces; he missed it with two arrows but hit it with the third, right behind the shoulder, wounding it enough to catch it and finish it off with the hunting-knife. It was a seven-point buck. He butchered it of its haunches and stuffed himself on spit-roasted venison, and then, too full to move for many hours, used the time of digestion to carefully skin the animal and prepare its hide for some future use. He carried the deerskin wrapped around his neck like a big cape thereafter, transferring it to his waist as the heat of each day came on, while he gained the headwaters of Illinois Bayou, a trackless wilderness of forest that left him feeling like a pioneer.
I have not been able to find out how the mountain settlement of Nogo got its name. I’m sure there are legends, or apocryphal attributions to some settler who penetrated as deep into the wilderness as the wilderness would allow, and who gave up in frustration because it was “no go” beyond that point. For Nail, it would become no go as well.
In a wild place called Dave Millsaps Hollow, just to the west of Nogo, Nail was picking blackberries when he discovered that he had some competition for the berry patch: a black bear. Almost simultaneously he and the bear happened to look up from their labor of picking berries and stuffing their mouths and looked directly into each other’s eyes from a distance of not more than thirty paces. Nail’s first instinct was to shift his eyes about quickly to ascertain that there were no cubs around, because a female with cubs would have attacked him instantly. As it was, she…or he…just snorted, as if to challenge Nail’s right to the berry patch. Nail stood his ground. The bear growled and lowered itself from its hind legs to all fours, and from that position commenced swaying to and fro while continuing to growl, its eyes locked upon Nail. He made a sudden shooing gesture with his arms and hollered, “Git!” but the animal did not git. Nail, who had encountered bears in his explorations of the Stay More countryside, guessed that the bear was about two years old and probably male, although he could not understand why the bear was not retreating at the sight of him, unless it was so possessive toward the berry patch that it did not intend to relinquish it. Again by instinct, Nail found himself reaching behind to take his bow and arrows, but even while bringi
ng an arrow up and attaching the bowstring to the arrow’s nock, he attempted once more to frighten the bear. He stomped his feet and yelled, “Git outa huh-yar!” and then lunged toward the bear and waved his arms and his bow and shouted, “Go home!” For one instant the bear turned as if to flee, but then it changed its mind and, growling, charged Nail.
Nail knew that he would not have more than one shot, as he had with the buck, so he aimed carefully for a spot immediately below the bear’s chin, toward his shoulders, toward his heart, and waited the extra fraction of a second for the charging bear to get close enough to feel the full impact of the puncturing arrow. Almost in the same instant as he released the arrow, point-blank, with the bowstring pulled back as far as it would go, Nail fell to one side, lunging really, to dodge the bear’s charge, but he did not escape the bear’s reach. The bear swiped at Nail with claws that would have torn his face away had it not instantly felt the confounding pain of the sharp flint transfixing its vitals, and thus the full force of the bear’s swipe had been arrested. As Nail fell, the bear lunged onward a few steps before crashing to the earth, howling in pain and attempting clumsily to grab with its paws the shaft of the arrow. As the bear completed its death throes, Nail watched for what seemed long minutes, his heartbeat and breathing so rapid that he had not noticed that blood was coursing from his forehead down his cheek. He had not even attended to his own wounds before he assured himself that the bear was, if not entirely dead, immobilized enough to be finished off with the hunting-knife.
But as Nail kicked the bear with his foot and prepared to plunge the knife into it, the bear made one last defense, raking a claw into Nail’s leg.
When the bear had become at last motionless, Nail realized he had blood covering his face and more of it running down his ankle, and he had to stop his own bleeding before he could bleed the bear any further.
Later he dragged the bear’s carcass into the mouth of a cavern, or undercut bluff ledge, in Dave Millsaps Hollow, where he was almost too tired to build a fire and butcher the bear and roast some of its meat. While the bear meat was cooking on a spit over the coals, he settled down to prepare the bear’s hide, although there was so much of it, the thick furry hide, that he couldn’t conceive how he would need it for anything in such hot weather. But the bear’s fur seemed more important to him than the meat; he was not particularly fond of bear meat, and he kept telling himself that he had only shot the bear in self-defense.
But if he wondered what earthly use he might have for a thick bearskin, he would soon discover a desperate need for it: the next morning he awoke before sunrise, feeling severely cold. He jumped up and attempted to warm himself by hopping around and clapping himself, and then built up his fire and held himself close to it, and then added more and more fuel until it was blazing and roaring, and then wrapped the bearskin tight around himself, but still it was awful cold! He could not understand: the sun had risen and the day looked just as bright and hot as any late-June day ought to be, but here he was freezing! There was nothing in the appearance of Nature to indicate that the temperature of the air had actually dropped so drastically. He considered that there might be a cold draft blowing up from some hidden crevice inside the cavern, and he moved out into the sunshine, surrounded by warm air in the morning sun, but still he began to shiver; then, increasingly, to tremble helplessly. He lay down beside his roaring fire wrapped tight in both his deerskin and his bearskin and shook so violently that he felt his chattering teeth would knock themselves out of his mouth, that every bone of his body would splinter.
His terrible chill lasted for almost an hour and then abruptly stopped, and he scarcely had time to catch his breath before he became overheated. He threw off the deerskin and bearskin and crawled away from the blazing fire into the cool recesses of the cavern, but still he felt as if he were burning up. He was tempted to hike down into the holler to search for a stream of cool water to immerse himself in, but he lacked the strength to hike because the awful heat seemed to be afflicting his brain and his energy; he felt of his forehead: it was still caked with blood from the bear’s blow, but the skin was hotter than any fever he had ever had. He considered that possibly he had not cleaned and stanched his wounds well enough to prevent infection, but even the worst infection would not so suddenly give him a high fever. Would it?
His fever continued to immobilize him in agony for several hours, for most of the morning, and then, sometime in the afternoon, he began to drip with sweat. Hot as he had been all morning, he could not understand why he had not sweated during the morning, but it was afternoon before the cooling perspiration began to form in his pores and then gradually to soak him and his clothes. He wondered which of the three conditions was worse: to freeze, to burn, to sog. The same bear fur that had warmed him he now used to blot up some of the flood of lather from his skin until the fur had become as soggy as he was.
Was it beginning to darken so soon? The day was ending, and he had accomplished nothing except the helpless attention to his changes in temperature: first too cold, then too hot, now too wet, but now also too weak to do anything but lie upon the floor of the cave and collect his wits and try to imagine what had happened. This was not, he assured himself, the fever of an infection from the bear’s wounding him. Had he eaten something bad? Had the bear meat contained some poison? Or had he perhaps unknowingly been bitten by a poisonous snake or reptile?
He got himself painfully up from the hard earth to search for his bota, and found it, but the goatskin bottle was empty. Had he drunk it dry during his fever? He stepped outside the cavern to begin a hike in search of water but realized he could not go anywhere; he was not just weak but increasingly dizzy. His head began to spin. Darkness was falling, not just from the setting of the sun but from something inside his head.
He fell to his knees and remained thus for a long time, he did not know how long: too tired to stand but too proud to fall over. His vision clouded. Then he saw the bed. The bed! Right over there in one corner of the cavern. How had he missed it before? Well, it wasn’t any four-poster or even any kind of bedstead as such, but it was a neat stack of quilts and blankets and comforters and pillows, and even had some fresh white sheets on it! Somebody had made a bed inside the cavern. He crawled to it and heaved his body up onto it and felt his body sinking into it, and it was the most comfortable bed he’d ever been in, even if it didn’t have any springs or slats or frame or anything but just this thick pile of stuffings. His hand gripped the white sheet with wonder, and then, gripping it further, he discovered that he was also gripping paper. Not just a white sheet of cloth but a white sheet of paper. He picked it up and had to hold it very close to his eyes to make out that it had letters written on it.
He squinted and managed to make out: Dear you (I cannot write your name for fear somebody else might find this), I have been coming to this cavern every day in hopes of finding you here, and I have prepared this bed for you, bringing each time I came a blanket or two, and these pillows, one for you, one I hope for me, this bed for us, when you come here. You will come here, won’t you? I know you will, it is just a matter of time, but as I write these words two weeks have passed since I came to Stay More and began to wait for you, and you have not come. This is the place that Latha said you would come to. I hope. Please come. If you are reading these words, it means you are here, and it means I will soon be with you. Lie still. Be here. The trees will sing for you until I join you. With all my love, The Lady. And there was a P.S.: Your new harmonica is under this bed.
How could this be? Although Nail had had only the rising and setting sun as his compass, and had known that he was pointed in the right direction, he had a good idea of how far Newton County was from Little Rock, and there was simply no way he could already have reached it; he had to be still somewhere in Pope County, northeastern Pope County by his calculation, with maybe fifty miles, three or four days’ travel, separating him from Stay More.
But now he groped beneath the pile of blankets and q
uilts until his hand touched metal, and he withdrew the harmonica: an M. Hohner Marine Band Tremolo Echo, identical to the one he’d had for years and had destroyed to make a dagger. He raised it to his mouth and kissed it, and then he began to play it, and he played it through the dark hours of the night until the trees, roused from their slumber, joined their voices to his music.
Then was it morning? Or did she appear with a lantern? Or was it neither morning nor lantern but her own light, the light that emanated from her goodness? He opened his eyes, realizing he had not slept but having no idea how long he had lain with his eyes closed: he opened his eyes and there she was, kneeling beside the bed she had made for him. She was smiling but also frowning: she was shocked at his appearance, at the blood on his face from the bear’s clawing him mixed with the red of the berry juice and his two-week growth of beard.
You made it! she said. But are you all right?
“I reckon not,” he said. “I must be real bad sick, ’cause I don’t have the least idee how I managed to git here.”
She felt his brow. You’re real cold, she said. Cold as death.
“Yeah, I’ve been either too cold or too hot or too wet for quite a spell.” These words came out almost like stuttering, because of the chattering of his teeth and the trembling of his body.
Before he could protest that he looked awful and smelled worse, she climbed beneath the covers with him and held him tight and attempted to warm him. The thick quilts and coverlets piled atop them imprisoned her body heat and divided it with him, but that was not enough for both of them: she became cold herself. Together they trembled for a long time until each of them removed or parted enough of their clothing to make contact and penetration possible, and the pleasure of the contact and the penetration was so great as to make them oblivious to any cold or sickness or loneliness, and they continued it even beyond the point where they ceased being too cold and became too hot, beyond that to the point where they were both drenched with sweat, as well as the bed, and still neither of them reached the endpoint of the exertion.
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