Follow the River (45 page)

Mary was reaching the limits of her strength now. But she could feel Ghetel weakening too. Mary had the fleeting notion that if she could swallow some of Ghetel’s blood she would gain strength from it. But she could not swallow; she could only bite, her tongue dry, her jaws burning with fatigue.

And then Ghetel, with a desperate howl, pressed her face against the back of Mary’s neck and nuzzled about for a tooth-hold, finally getting a fold of flesh and the rope of shoulder muscle at the base of Mary’s neck and clamping her big horse-teeth on it so hard that Mary saw a sunflash and almost passed out, and released her bite on Ghetel’s wrist.

Ghetel seesawed her jaw, really trying to tear the flesh out. With a desperate lurch, terrified that she would faint from the pain, Mary managed to turn onto her side and roll Ghetel off. She was out from under her weight now but Ghetel was still attached to her shoulder like some great leech and Mary’s heart faltered under the onslaught of that agony. The only sounds were their strenuous breathing, the scrabble of gravel, the metallic grate of the bell, the hush of the river.

Mary reached back around her head with both hands and found Ghetel’s face with her fingers. She got one thumb into the hollow cheek and pressed frantically against the jaw muscle; her other thumb found an eye socket and she began gouging, feeling the eyeball behind the lid sliding like a grape. Three seconds of that and Ghetel loosened her mastiff-bite on Mary’s shoulder, sprawling back and trying to tear Mary’s hands from her face.

Then they were separate from each other. Mary realized
that she no longer had hands on Ghetel and Ghetel no longer had hands on her. Pain was receding; the darkness was full of bright golden sparkles; Ghetel was lying close by on the ground, moaning and gasping, stirring gravel as she moved. Mary at once snaked away over the rocks, downslope toward the water’s edge. After thus crawling for a few feet, she rose into a crouch and, groping with her hands in the darkness for obstacles, she crept upstream. Behind her she heard Ghetel’s groans trail off, and then heard her calling, in a weak, quizzical voice:

“Vhere are you? Ma-ry? Vhere are you?”

Through the ringings and roarings and throbbings in her head, Mary could not tell whether she was moving silently or not. But as Ghetel’s voice grew fainter behind her, she knew she was getting wonderful, safe distance between them. She paused and looked back. All the shadows were almost black now, and she could distinguish only the inky-looking river, off which an early star occasionally glinted.

When she could no longer hear a sound from Ghetel, she slipped under a lip of the river bank, at the very edge of the water, crouched there hanging onto roots, and waited, fighting off a strange precipitous drowsiness which she felt must be the brink of dying.

It was while she crouched here, now stark naked but for her rope of yarn, winter night air numbing her skin, that Mary began to think about the canoe. It was a wildly improbable notion. Surely it would not still be around here. She had been able to find no canoes at any of the other crossing-places along the war road. And she knew nothing about steering a canoe if she did find it; she had never been alone in one. Nor could she expect to continue up the New River in one. The current was too strong and she was too weak.

But now she knew she must have this river between her and Ghetel. With a canoe, maybe she could at least get across the river.

Mary finally knew without a doubt that Ghetel had become an implacable hunter, as single-minded as a panther or a stalking Indian, and that she was Ghetel’s prey. Traveling along the same narrow river bank, they would without a
doubt encounter each other again. And surely one more encounter would be fatal.

To one or the both of us, she thought. Most likely to me.

A faint sound nearby caught her ear and she put everything out of her mind to listen. There was a voice, very faint, then the sound of rock grating on rock, and the clangor of the bronze bell.

She pressed herself further under the narrow overhang and breathed slowly. The noises grew louder.

Ghetel was passing just above her. Mary could hear her footsteps among leaves and rocks now, and the snap of a twig.

Ghetel was muttering softly to herself, and among the unintelligible syllables Mary thought she detected her own name.

Then the mumbling changed slightly and became almost sing-song. There was no tune, but Mary realized, with a squeeze of her heart, that Ghetel was trying to sing:

Ghetel was moving very slowly, and it was some minutes before she had passed and her pitiful noises were absorbed by the wet whispers of the river.

The moon was up over the mountain and shining brightly when Mary came out from her concealment. It was too cold for a naked woman to remain immobile any longer. And now that the valley was flooded with moon-silver, its shadows inked in, she could see to look for the canoe. After a minute’s hesitation, she decided to turn upstream to seek it, although she realized there was a possibility that it might have been hidden in the thicket through which she had been pursued.

I’ll go up just a ways, she thought; then if I don’t find it, I’ll come back down and search the thicket.

Now you know better than that, she told herself. If y’ go upstream y’ll never come back down. Best go back and look in the thicket first.

About a hundred yards back she came to the place where
they had emerged from the thicket and fought. A little beyond that, the thicket grew still closer to the river’s edge, and here seemed to be a logical place for hiding a canoe. The winter scene by moonlight was so much different from the summer scene by sunlight that she could find nothing really familiar.

She searched among the leafless bushes at the water’s edge for perhaps ten minutes, trembling ever more violently with the cold, stopping now and then to listen for Ghetel, who might well return down the bank to look for her.

She saw a long, low silhouette, one end in the water, the other among the bushes. Dear heaven, could it really be? she thought, and hobbled to it.

It was only a log, a water-soaked, frozen driftwood log.

But beyond it was a similar shape. She hauled herself over the log and went there.

O it is!

It was the canoe, half-sunk and blown full of dead leaves. It would take much work even to determine whether it was whole, and to launch it and see if it would float. It might require more strength than she had. But, strengthened by hope, she set to work.

A half hour of scooping and raking emptied it of its cargo of ice and sodden, half-frozen leaves.

Now, she thought: the hard part.

She would have to raise it on its side to spill out the water.

She grasped the gunwale with both hands and lifted. It was fast, frozen to the shore or wedged in the brush. She strained upward until she was faint and gasping for breath. She squatted in the moonlight and hugged her icy skin and rested. Then she went to the stern, bent down, put her shoulder to the rough bark, got a footing on the pebbles and pressed. It remained unmoved until she thought her bones would crack.

She had to rest again. Then she put her shoulder to it once more, strained to the point that a groan burst from her throat—and then it budged with a creak and a grind.

Now she could rock it slightly; the water sloshed and broken ice rattled inside. She rested another five minutes, then again lifted at the gunwale.

It was terribly heavy, but it moved. It tried to settle back;
she panted and lifted. It rose slowly. She had to shift her grip, moving one hand down to the underside, and soon she could hear water spilling over the far gunwale. It grew lighter as the water poured out. Soon she had it all the way up on its edge and the last of the water was out. She was so exhausted she barely kept it from falling back to its upright position.

Another five minutes’ rest and she was ready to launch it. But wait, she thought. Must find the paddle.

There was no paddle. She crawled in the thicket and scrabbled on the beach and under the canoe bottom but found no paddle.

The moon was higher now. She had spent an hour or two getting the canoe ready and now there was nothing with which to steer it.

Almost crying with frustration, she started moving down the beach looking for a pole or anything with which to control the vessel. It would be fatal to shove off into this fast river and be at the mercy of its current. She thought of the countless rapids and falls they had passed.

After almost an hour of wandering, during which she became so confused and lightheaded that she forgot several times what she was searching for, she noticed a length of something lying on the beach, almost white in the moonlight.

A tree lay along the shore, broken, apparently shivered and shattered by lightening or windstorm, and she found an almost-flat slab of the trunk, hanging white, attached by only a few fibers. It was about three feet long and four inches wide. It would serve as a paddle, if she could detach it from the tree. She twisted it around and around, and finally, using the edge of a flat rock, managed to pulverize the fibers until she could yank the slab free.

Now she had a paddle of sorts.

It was almost enough to make her believe in God again.

She had never before been in a boat or canoe by herself. She was thankful for the moonlight.

She shoved the end of the vessel out into the stream, then flung herself over the prow into the canoe before it could float away. Her weight, little as it was, grounded the bow, and
the canoe hung to the shore. By her touch on the bark of the hull and the hickory framework, she cold feel the river moving.

She remembered how the Indians had done it. She held both gunwales and walked along the center toward the stern. As her weight moved to that end, the bow lifted and released the shore, and she was moving. Her heart was beating high. This was a harrowing business for a non-swimmer, especially one all but too weakened to move.

She turned and knelt in the stern. The shore was slipping by, silvery by moonlight. The broken and distorted reflection of the moon swung by as the canoe turned on the current.

She dipped the end of the slab into the water alongside and tried to steer. She managed to make the canoe stop turning, but now it was drifting sideways, even faster. It was not nearing the other shore.

She felt icy water under her knees. It was running in somewhere. The canoe was filling with water.

With her flagging strength, she began stroking the end of the slab in the water. The canoe turned. It was moving toward midstream. She stroked more. Now it was pointing upstream, but being carried backward downstream. This was worse yet. And the water now was perhaps two inches deep in the bottom of the canoe, streaming by her knees, first this way, then that.

She put the wood slab over the other side and stroked, straining, her fingers being torn by the jagged splinters. She strained against the water’s resistance, sucking breaths of cold air that made her teeth stab with pain.

But at last the prow began swinging back toward the far shore.

She understood it now. A stroke on this side, then a stroke on that side, and she could keep the vessel moving aslant downstream, toward the opposite shore. She remembered that somehow the Indians had been able to steer without switching sides. Maybe you can with a paddle, she thought. With this stick, I better just do what I know to work.

Her course was erratic; several times she got sideways in the flow, or found herself racing backward, but now she was near the other shore. The water in the canoe was four inches
deep now and the vessel responded sluggishly. Her arms were burning with exhaustion; her fingers were bloody and full of splinters.

And then she felt the soft
bump bump
as the bottom scraped over rocks. The prow nuzzled against the shore and the stern, with her in it, swung downstream. There was a dull crunch as it hit a rock; the rotten bark yielded and gapped and water came pouring in.

Mary stumbled and crawled toward the prow and threw a leg over. In a moment she was standing knee-deep in the cold river and the canoe was slipping away from shore, half sunk. She watched its curved black lines for a moment as it swerved slowly through the shivering path of moonlight on the water, and then saw it no more.

She dragged herself out of the water, chilled to the bone and scarcely able to stand. But a feeble, sobbing, almost hysterical laughter shook out of her, as she stumbled up the shore, hugging herself in her bony arms, tears running down both sides of her nose: She had made it! She had crossed the river! Ghetel could not get to her now.

There was really a river between them now. They were no longer together, after forty days and nights of the most crucial interdependence. They were separate in the wilderness.

The laughter coagulated into a huge knot in her chest and she was blinded with crying.

It seemed that the moon radiated cold as the sun radiated heat. Now there was no blanket. And there was no Ghetel, no fellow human warmth, to draw close to in the night. Mary felt that nothing could keep her from freezing to death now except to keep moving. But after this calamitous
night of mortal terror and fury, struggle and flight, she had no strength left to keep moving. She kept sinking to the ground with dizziness after every few yards of progress up the left bank of the river.

She was on her hands and knees on frozen mud. Somewhere an owl was repeating its one forlorn syllable. Mary listened to it with a strange, fascinated attention, sensing somehow that it would be the last life-sound she would hear and wondering if there might be some reason why God would give her this as her death song. She thought the word “God,” but it was just a word now, cold and distant as that moon and as meaningless as that owl-hoot, too remote now to stir anything in her heart. To pray now was useless and she did not have the strength of mind even to formulate a prayer. The finding of the canoe and her successful escape across the river had been a miracle, an answer to prayers, and she had no reason to expect any more miracles. She did not want any more such deliverances as this one, which in effect had only placed her where she could die alone instead of with somebody.