Follow the River (29 page)

Steeling themselves against the wet cold and the shouting wind, they walked the rest of the afternoon away, both hanging on to the mare as if they might otherwise be blown aside
into the river. Mary, though she had lived close to the edge of the wilderness most of her adult life, had never felt quite this way: like a weightless little speck of chaff lost in a universe of tumultuous elements, shrieking trees and indifferent mountains.

But finally, about sunset time, when the wet leaves were cold and limp underfoot and the wet tatters of clothing stuck to the pasty gooseflesh of their skin, a dull rose glow began to burnish the bluffs across the seething river. Great horizontal rents opened in the purple clouds above the western horizon and glowed scarlet like bloody wounds. Soon a slice of setting sun looked through these rents and glinted in every droplet on every twig and every blade of grass. And finally the sun’s entire orb was freed from behind its bars of cloud; and the storm receding across the river made a vast, bruise-colored backdrop for a perfect rainbow that seemed to straddle the river. Even through her misery, Mary felt she was seeing the work of a God whom she had not thought much of for many weeks. She and Ghetel rolled up together in a wet cocoon of wool blankets that night, hugging, skin to skin, and shivered until the feeble furnaces of their hearts warmed their blood.

While they slept, bold chipmunks and squirrels crept close and nibbled at the little pile of musty corn they had emptied out of their blankets.

Mary rode first the next morning. Ghetel, walking barefooted on sparkling frost, led the horse. The ground was blanketed with wet leaves of every hue from livid crimson to flame-yellow, all their colors intensified by the wet and frost and wan morning sunlight. Ghetel was singing something to herself in Dutch, just above a whisper, her breath and the mare’s breath condensing. Mary had her blanket over her shoulders, Indian-style; there was little enough corn to tote in one blanket now. They had agreed that the one riding would enjoy the blanket, as the one walking would generate her own heat. But if Ghetel was warm she did not show it. Her skin was raised in bumps like a plucked turkey’s, and every few seconds a great tremor would shake her from one end to the other.

God, but she is a rugged old thing, Mary thought. But I’d best trade places with her and give her the blanket right quick or she’s like t’ come down with a grippe ere this day is out.

She hugged herself inside the blanket.

In just a minute, she thought.

Gusty weather came again the next day. Dark clouds sped over the hilltops trailing veils of rain. The wind was so strong that a cloud would pass from horizon to horizon in a minute’s time. Shrubbery shook and rattled as if being slapped to and fro by an invisible giant hand. The air was always full of flying yellow leaves; what little remained of the foliage clung and clung against the wind but invariably was picked off and swirled away, and the trees were almost bare now, bare and gray and brown, and their stark, desolate nakedness had a chilling effect on the spirit. Mary pondered on this as she walked along. I do believe the sight o’ them autumn leaves, like the colors o’ flame, kept my poor soul warm just like watchin’ a fire will do f’r a body …

And she found herself thinking as she rode, looking down at Ghetel, who was at that moment walking and leading the mare:

If only these blankets was red, a nice hot red instead o’ this cold gray, we’d be a sight warmer …

And then she smiled at her fancy.

Y’re goin’ a bit daft there, girl. Best y’ get down an’ let ol’ Ghetel sit up here a-rockin’ and a-daydreamin’ a spell …

That day they came to another river mouth too wide and deep—and cold—to wade across. Ghetel gazed at the far shore and groaned. These detours seemed to frustrate her even more than they did Mary—perhaps because, unlike Mary, she did not know the lay of the land, and every new stream was just another unexpected obstacle, as if God were spitefully throwing down new rivers in their path every day to make their way longer.

So they turned and started up this latest river.

In skirting a marsh in this river’s valley, they found a stand of browning arrowleaf stalks. They tied the horse nearby and
spent an hour wading in the cold ooze, feeling with their toes for the tubers, stooping to pull them up when they found some. They gathered five or six pounds of them, put them in the bundle with the musty corn and continued upstream.

This river was wide and was running fast with brown water from the recent rains. It appeared they would have a long trek up its banks before finding a place to cross. And all the while they were aware, in the back of their minds, of the O-y-o River, their guide through the wilderness, dropping farther and farther behind them.

They tried to make a meal of the arrowhead tubers that evening, encamped under an overhanging ledge with the flooding river roaring noisily a few feet below. The raw tubers had an awful, woody, bitter taste. “If’n we had a pot t’ bile ’em in,” Mary grimaced, “I swear right now I’d risk buildin’ a fire to do it.”

But they
were
filling.

They had traveled perhaps twenty-five miles up this nameless river, when, the next day, Ghetel pointed down and cried, “Look! a britch!”

At a place where the river thundered down over a kind of rock step, a mass of driftwood had become lodged. It extended all the way across the river, a tangle of bleached logs and limbs and roots, and indeed was like a bridge. The brown water rushed through and under it, but it stayed, a great knot of debris.

“We can cross here, neh?” Ghetel urged with a happy, yellow-toothed grin.

But Mary looked at it dubiously. It seemed fine enough, but …

“Wait now,” she said. “I’m getting a bad feeling about this. It don’t look none too sure t’ me, somehow.”

Ghetel turned a darkening face on her, then pointed upstream. “Eh, how far you vant to go up dis riffer, eh? Look!”

Above the driftwood bridge the river was still deep and swift. They might have to go another twenty-five miles before finding a fording place, maybe farther. And that would mean fifty or more back down the other bank to regain the O-y-o. That was an awful prospect.

And here was this bridge, as if put here by Providence to save them three or four days’ travel.

But the bridge nonetheless gave her a premonition of dread. And she was learning to take her premonitions seriously.

“Vatch me,” Ghetel was saying. She had gone down to the river’s edge. She reached out, grasped a protruding limb for a handhold, put one foot on one of the logs. Then, cautiously, she lifted the other foot off the shore. She stood a moment on the end of the bridge, then began flexing her knees, rocking her weight on the lodgment, testing its solidity. Then she bounced more violently, crying, “Vatch! Vatch! It stays!”

Don’t
, Mary thought. It seemed too reckless a taunting of Fate.

But it held. Ghetel backed onto the shore, grinning. “Easy,” she said. “See?”

“Aye, for us, p’raps. But a horse canno’ walk logs, Ghetel.”

“I t’ink she can do. It is like a britch, May-ry. Like a britch.”

“I have this feeling …”

“Go to the deffil wit’ a feelink!” Ghetel’s face was growing stormy with impatience. “If you don’ come over here, I do it alone! Yah, ve’ll see! Who need you and your feelink!”

“No, Ghetel, please …”

“Yah, by damn! Or I go alone!”

“Then let’s test it all the way across first.”

“Yah! I do.” The old woman, bent upon showing what a lark it would be, swung lightly up onto the driftwood again. She walked the logs lightly, and found a handhold every yard or so. In two minutes she stood on the opposite shore, holding her arms up gaily and grinning. Then she hopped onto the driftwood again and came back. “You see?”

“But the horse …”

“It is like a britch.”

And so Mary gave in. She and Ghetel combined their strength to pull the horse down to the water’s edge. It did not want to go. It dug its hooves in on the bank and refused to step onto the logs. Mary looked into its panicky brown eyes and her heart squeezed.

“Move, beast,” Ghetel panted.

It would not.

“Eh, then, ve shall see,” Ghetel growled. “You pull, May-ry. I put a stick up dis animal’s hinder and she
vill
go, ve see.”

She got one of the hickory lances and went around behind the mare. Gently at first, then harder as the horse continued to balk, she jabbed at its rump with the point. The abject terror and pain in the mare’s eyes made Mary want to cry. But she talked to it and cajoled and encouraged and pulled at the neck-halter with one hand while hanging onto a limb with another. At last the mare yielded and took a step forward.

She got a good footing on the log jam with her forehooves and, finding something under her, resisted a little less. But she was still very skittish. The water roaring underfoot was frightening her and Mary did not blame her.

Ghetel roared a curse or command in Dutch and jabbed the hickory point straight into the animal’s anus. With a terrible whinny, the mare gave up the shore and scrambled so suddenly onto the logjam that she almost knocked Mary off into the river.

Now Mary inched backward along the logs, reaching back for handholds, pulling at the halter, trying to ignore the rush of the water below, the swaying and trembling of the driftwood jam under the horse’s weight.

The animal was surprisingly sure-footed, and was coming along now. Whenever she stopped or threatened to panic, Ghetel would prod her on with the now bloody lance, and she would lunge forward a step. These quick moves were dangerous, but obviously the mare was not going to progress without them.

They were midway across the jam now, with a mere fifteen feet to go.

Suddenly, both the mare’s forefeet broke through the matted driftwood and into the water. She began neighing pitifully and throwing her head about. Her rump was high; her chest rested on the logs. She strained with her rear haunches, trying to lift her forelegs up and out. This futile thrashing lasted only seconds. A hind hoof slipped sideways off a log and poked through the debris, then the other hind leg plunged through on the other side of the log. A broken limb had penetrated her right side just behind the ribs; it was impossible
to tell how far. The mare was screaming, her chest resting on the drift with her legs in the water. The water under the horse was running with red stain.

Mary cried encouragements to her, unconscious commands and entreaties, beginning to sob, hauling upward on the halter as if she could extricate the shrieking mare’s legs by sheer force of lifting. Ghetel stood on the logs behind the horse, her ugly face working with disbelief and anguish. She began shouting in Dutch. She dropped her lance and grabbed the horse’s tail and pulled up on it with all her might.

The log jam trembled with their exertions and the steady pressure of the river’s flow. Limbs and logs shifted and groaned. “It’s going to break!” Mary cried. The horse kept throwing its head about and screaming its piteous scream, and trying with futile spasms of movement to free itself. With each movement the wound in her side was torn wider and deeper.

And now the old woman was climbing past the horse, motioning frantically at Mary as she came toward her. “Get off! Get off!” Mary turned away from the beloved beast and scrambled on all fours to the shore. She stood shaking and crying as Ghetel jumped to the ground beside her. She couldn’t look at the suffering beast now. She clapped her hands over her ears to shut out its pitiful cries. She looked at the ground and cried helplessly at this latest great loss. Ghetel stood making helpless gestures with her hands and looking back and forth between Mary and the horse. Finally she said, “Wait,” and climbed back onto the logjam and crept toward the animal.

The mare suddenly fell still, as if trusting this person to come help her. She kept repeating a low, wet nickering deep in her chest.

Ghetel edged alongside her and lifted the blanket-bundle off the mare’s back. Then she started forward again, pausing beside the horse’s head to untie the halter and bell-rope.

She brought these things, all their belongings, ashore. She closed a big hand firmly over Mary’s upper arm and started to propel her downstream away from the dying animal. Suddenly it began shrieking and tossing its head again.

“Oh, stop it,
stop it!
” Mary sobbed. “I can’t bear it any more!”

They were a hundred yards down the east bank now but the horse’s cries were still audible over the rush of the river. Mary felt as if she would hear them when she was a hundred miles away.

About an hour’s walk downstream they stopped to rest. Mary felt ten times as weak as she had felt before. It was as if they had lost not only the horse’s own strength but also an equal amount of strength the horse had given them just by being.

They sat on a black, rotting log. Mary had stopped crying. She sat with her face in her hand for a while and then turned a cold visage to Ghetel.

“You are a stupid old woman.”

Ghetel winced and glanced down, but then raised her eyes to Mary’s and reached over to pat her on the shoulder, saying:

“Eh, now. No. Ve could not do any help.”

Mary pulled away from the extended hand. After a moment, she said:

“You told me you were going to listen to me when I feel something.”

Ghetel nodded. “Yah.”

“But you wouldn’t listen.”

“Eh, now, May-ry. Forget dis.” Her voice was a little brusque now. She was sorry about the horse and she knew she was responsible and did not care to have the blame for that added to her present miseries.

“You said right after I felt them Indians a-comin’ that you’d listen to me from that time on …”

Ghetel jumped up and stood before Mary with both fists raised over her head. “Eh?” she roared. “Eh, May-ry Inkles? I t’ink I listen to you too much already! If I did not listen to you I vould be in a varm Indian house! With a fire and a full belly!”

“Aye, y’ would be, eh? A belly full o’ squash an’ dog meat, that’s what full of!”

“A belly
full
, anyway! My stomach dun’t care vhether the meat said ‘roff, roff’ or ‘moooo’ when it was alive!”