Follow the River (48 page)

The guide nodded, looking relieved. They had been out long enough. He would like to sleep behind a stockade for a change, as it had been a long time since he had enjoyed the luxury of sleeping with both eyes shut. It would take them three or four days yet to get to Dunkard’s Bottom. When they
did, he was going to get a jug with some of the money Will and Johnny had paid him, and he was going to drink it and go to sleep in a real bed, with his moccasins off.

This gray and sleety morning the two women reached a place Mary distinctly remembered, where the river narrowed and seemed to have carved its way straight through the solid rock of a high mountain. As they inched around the bases of the cliffs on their respective sides of the river, they glanced across at each other frequently, keeping track of each other’s progress. “You’re a-goin’ just fine,” Mary called across, and above the murmur of the river over the rocks, her voice bounced back and forth between the cliffs as if she had shouted in a big room. Often Mary could hear the faint
dink-dink
of Ghetel’s bell. It was a pretty sound again.

There were stretches along the bases of the cliffs where the fringe of river bank simply ran out, and in these places they would have to wade down into the cold, tugging water and search for underwater passages with cold-benumbed feet, clinging with aching-cold fingers to fissures in the rock for support. Ghetel wailed her dismay constantly while making these passages, but she made them. She would stop at each such obstacle as if afraid to wade in, but then, on seeing Mary moving ahead, she would brave the water. Her one night all alone in the wilderness had convinced her that anything was better than losing Mary.

It seemed to Mary that they now must be in the very backbone of the great mountain range through which they had been laboring for so many weeks. Towering straight above
her, she was certain, were some of the same great peaks she had been able to see, all purple-hazy and majestic, from the high ground at Draper’s Meadows. Doubtless that great smooth-topped mountain six or seven miles ahead, which she could glimpse now and again from turns in the rivercourse, was one of those her mother had pointed at in the distant west when talking to the boys about “ten times ten times ten.”

Her mother. The boys
. They seemed so vague in memory now, like somebody she had known in another lifetime. Before this lifetime. It seemed that she had been born and had spent all this present life ascending this maze of roaring canyons: blue-gray rock jutting into the heavens, green water, howling wind, caves, dead leaves, buzzards and eagles wheeling far overhead, wild animals lurking out of reach, tributaries and avalanches thwarting her progress, and the relentless cold, the merciless grinding and regrinding of the flesh of her feet, the endless wheedling and cajoling and pampering with Ghetel. And
hunger
. It was always there, sometimes clarifying thought, sometimes muddling it down to the simple incoherence of instinct and nightmare. This seemed like a life in which she had never known the warmth or the nurture of a mother’s bosom, but had, rather, been spawned and left like a frog egg in a slough or a turtle egg on a river beach, never to know anything in life but creeping and cold blood.

But vague and distant though most of her memories were, there was one that could still come through: the strong hairy warmth of Will Ingles. It was like a ruddy-gold hearth beckoning at the end of every gray valley; it was like the gleaming reward at the end of purgatory. The bearded face of Saint Peter at the heavenly gate would glow like the bearded face of Will Ingles at the cabin door, she fancied.

And, holding to that warm light, she could drag one bloody, blue foot up over the icy rocks and place it before the other, and do that again, and then do it again.

It was afternoon. She was going northeastward toward that great flat-top mountain. She had passed by a low island in the river, for a while losing sight of Ghetel, who was inching along
the base of a cliff on the opposite shore and was hidden by the leafless brush on the island. Then Ghetel appeared beyond the upper end of the island, stooped so far she appeared almost to be on all fours. But she raised a hand and waved and her horse-bell clinked and they went on.

Now the river bent like a horseshoe to the right, around the base of a smooth curved wall of sheer stone three hundred feet high. As she crept into the curve under this precipice, more and more wall revealed itself to her, and it began to appear that it might sweep around for a mile or more, broken only by steep notches carved back into it by falling brooks. It was the kind of wall she had learned to dread, where there might or might not be ledges to cling to, where there might or might not be a riverbottom shallow enough to wade.

Across the river, on the inside of the curve, the slope was gentler and there was an alluvial beach. Ghetel would have much easier going around this river bend. If I was her, Mary thought, I reckon I might try to go over that hill and shortcut the bend. God, I wish I was over there. I’d do that, I would. “Ghetel!” she called. She raised her hands and cupped them beside her mouth. “GHETEL!” The old woman looked. Mary pointed up a gentle draw that seemed to lead to the hilltop above Ghetel. “Go over!” Mary shouted. “Go up and over!”

The old woman looked up the draw, then back to Mary. Mary pointed to herself and made a sweeping motion to indicate that she would be going around the outside of the bend, then pointed to Ghetel and then up the draw. Ghetel shrugged, nodded, then turned up the draw.

Mary moved on for a few hundred feet. The narrow ledge she had been following dwindled to nothing. Eh well, she thought. It’s into the river again. She waded in, up to her thighs, clutching at irregularities on the cliff-face. The water was really not much colder than the air, but it seemed to wash away what little warmth her skin had generated, and she was shaken through and through by uncontrollable spasms.

Then she went on, over the uneven rock bottom. Sometimes the water was to her knees, sometimes to her ribs. She hugged herself close to the wall from time to time when she
grew faintish. Her vision grew uncertain. She would be looking up at the gray curve of sky above the dark blue curve of stone and would get the sensation that she was floating on her back under a stone bridge. Sometimes the cliff would be like a black curtain; sometimes it would be brilliant with details of texture. Sometimes it would seem an hour had elapsed during the taking of a single step.

At last she came to a resting place, a rocky niche where one of the springs had worn its way back into the stone wall, and she got out of the river there and drew herself into a ball, her skin cold and wet and fish-belly white. But the spray from the falling spring in the winter air was even more chilling than immersion in the river. She hugged herself, trembling violently, squinting, and tried to recover her breath. Every inhalation was a spasm of gasping. Her heart seemed to be not beating now, but quaking.

She heard a voice through the hiss of falling water. She looked around, looked across the river. There near the brow of the hill inside the bend, a quarter of a mile away and two or three hundred feet above the river, Ghetel was waving down at her, a tiny gray speck of a person. It was good to see that she had managed the climb.

Mary could see down the east arm of the bend now. She had perhaps another half-mile to go along the base of the cliff before the slope eased off, and beyond that, the river took a sharp bend to her left. In that bend, the sheer wall of the river was on Ghetel’s side. She’d better stay above it, Mary thought. If she comes down from right there, she’ll have a wall just like this’n ahead of her. She tried to shout that warning to Ghetel. A noise, half-croak, half-squeak, came out of her throat. It hurt her throat and made tears sting her eyes. The days of stark exposure to the elements of late November had taken their toll. Her voice was gone.

With an exhausted wave, she gestured for Ghetel to stay high on the hill. She had no way of knowing whether the old woman understood it or not. Then she uncurled, groped for crevices in the wet rock, and let herself back down into the river at the base of the cliff, and continued upstream.

It was dusk when she felt the slope rising and growing
sandy under her feet, and soon she was on a gentle, brushy beach ranging from fifty to a hundred feet wide and extending down to the next bend of the river. Opposite her now was a sheer, fluted cliff rising five hundred feet out of the river like ribs of rock. Somewhere up there Ghetel should be traversing high along the brink, unless she had been stupid enough to come down to the river. Mary dropped to the ground on her knees and embraced herself, teeth chattering, and searched the enormous craggy wall from end to end and from top to bottom for a sight of that bent old figure.

No. She’s up top somewhere, or she’s fell, or she’s found a place to crawl into. Too dark now.

Got to find a place myself ere I perish.

She crawled toward the base of the hill. A narrow creek came out of a ravine and poured into the river. Turning left up the ravine, she found a depression between a boulder and a log, drifted full of dead leaves, and burrowed deep into them, shivered and gasped voicelessly, feeling the cold creep closer and closer to her erratically skipping heart. She lay there considering, almost indifferently, that the heart itself would likely slow down and congeal with cold and finally stop before she should ever see daylight again.

The sound, long and thin as a hair, came coiling into the gray misery of her stupor. It continued for some time before she paid any attention to it and realized that it was a voice. A long, high, wailing voice, repeating itself from a distance and harmonizing with its own echoes.

Then she also became aware of the liquid syllables of the nearby creek running over its stones down toward the whispering river, and of the stab of cold and the buzz of numbness in her body, and realized that she was somehow still alive, and that the voice was Ghetel’s, coming down the canyon from somewhere, calling for her. She opened her eyes and saw flecks of gray daylight showing through the dead leaves that covered her face.

It was perhaps ten minutes before she could overcome the paralysis of chill enough to move her limbs and raise herself out of the leaves. The river was steaming in the colder air,
faint wisps of mist rising against the dark blue of the cliff on the far side. The clouds were crawling over the mountaintops, dark and ragged and slow, looking pregnant with snow. Mary’s vision was blurred this morning by the swelling and the matter in her eyelids. Ghetel’s voice had faded away and Mary could not hear it now.

There was moss on the boulder. It was winter-dead, turned to a dull greenish-brown. She clawed some off with her broken fingernails into the palm of her hand and ate it. It was half dirt, and gritted between her teeth. But she kept clawing it off and eating it until she had the illusion that there was something nourishing in her belly. The illusion itself gave her some warmth. She could tell that her blood was reaching her limbs now because the numbness was dissolving and impulses of pain were coming from everywhere.

What hurts, she thought, y’ know’s alive.

It was difficult to think, but she put her mind to reckoning. There’s maybe ten miles more o’ this canyon, she thought, before I’ll find that gunpowder spring where we stopped on our first day out. Then I’ll turn east off the river and a day or two’s walk would bring me up Sinking Creek to Draper’s Meadows.

I’m that close! she thought. I can’t be more’n fifteen-twenty miles from home! Oh, Will! Oh, darlin’ Will! Wait, hon! Two days more an’ I’ll be a-warmin’ m’self at your side, y’ great hearth of a man!

She loved that thought. It seemed marvelously tender and funny. She threw her head back, eyes teary, and tried to roar with laughter. But there was no voice, only a wheeze, which quickly caved in and became a debilitating fit of coughing. She hacked up great gobs of brown mucus.

But fifteen miles! I swear I’ve come nigh eight hundred. I c’d go fifteen more on a pair o’ broken legs if I had ’em. Up, now!

A quarter of a mile brought her to the abrupt left turn of the river, and she was no sooner around that bend than her beach ran out and she was again inching along an almost perpendicular cliff, some two or three hundred feet high, going hand over hand, hanging onto roots and cracks and shrubs, a few feet above the river. This cliff seemed to extend a mile eastward
before curving southward under the very shoulder of that great, level-topped mountain she had been seeing in the distance for so long.

Most of the time she heard only the gurgly rasp of her own breathing and the wet murmur of the river below, but sometimes she would sense again that distant howl of a human voice. Most of the time she would see only the next root, the next fingerhold in the vertical rock, but sometimes she would hug the cliff and turn to search the opposite wall of the canyon from end to end and top to bottom for the source of that voice.

I know she’s still alive, Mary thought, but not that I’ll ever see ’er again.

This place is just so big, and we’re so little.

After two hours she had traversed the wall of that cliff and begun working her way southward again. Here the canyon made a long, slight curve and she could see about two miles down to the next eastward bend. There was a narrow lip of shoreline along the base of the cliff most of this distance, so she could progress like a human instead of a spider. With her hands free, she was able to pick up any shred or bit of chewable material to put into her mouth—white filaments of root, bits of inner bark from driftwood, winter buds, the pith of reeds, a stinking, half-frozen fragment of a dead fish left at the water’s edge by some feeding animal, and some little cold, squishy gray globule that could have been anything from a turtle egg to a fish eye, for all she knew or cared—for she would eat anything she could swallow now; she was as desperate in her hunger as Ghetel had been, now that her task was to keep going a mere twelve or fourteen miles. At midmorning she squatted, covered with gooseflesh, and strained to pass a small, hard knot of stool. She turned then to study it, for the possibility that it contained something undigested that might be eaten again.