Into the Wilderness (67 page)

For
all of her life she had been coddled and spoiled, Elizabeth knew; finally, the
time of reckoning was at hand. She drew in a ragged breath, cursed
halfheartedly, and tried in vain not to yelp.

"I'll
stop whining," she muttered out loud. "I will, I will stop being such
a coward."

Nathaniel
was sitting cross—legged with her bare foot balanced on one of his knees. He
paused in his work to look up at her. "There's not a cowardly bone in
you," he said. "And you're doing fine."

Elizabeth
was determined to look only at his face and no lower; certainly she had no
intention of looking at the needle held so purposefully between his long
fingers, but as that was almost impossible she looked away completely.

"Good
thing you brought a sewing kit along," he observed, dropping another shard
of wood onto the small pile beside her.

"A
lady," she said through clenched teeth, "is always prepared for
mishaps."

He
grinned up at her briefly. "Once Bears opened up his palm with knife, he
was that crazy to get a skelf out."

"That
sounds perfectly reasonable to me," she said, and then yelped again.
"And what is a skelf, if I might ask?"

Nathaniel
held up a small shred of wood impaled on his needle. "That's a skelf. What
do you call it?"

"Misery."
Elizabeth grimaced. "Otherwise I suppose I'd call it a sliver.
Skelf
must be Scots."

"Hmmm,"
Nathaniel agreed absently. He had a set to his jaw she didn't like, and so she
looked away.

There
was an eagle circling over the tops of the pine trees, raw, gliding power. She
could hear the way its wings cut the air. Or she could, she was sure, if she
just concentrated hard enough. Vaguely she was aware of the sound of running
water from the stream just behind them, and the way her own sweat ran down her
face into her eyes and stung, stung, stung. She rocked her head back and bit
her lip.

"Would
you relax, Boots?"

"As
soon as you get the last of it out of my foot, yes, why then I will be happy to
relax," she shot at him. He was frowning, one corner of his mouth turned
down in concentration, and her tone seemed not to unsettle him in the least.

They
were in a secluded glen between a mountain and an incredible fortress of
boulders which seemed to have tumbled down directly from the heavens. Many of
them were taller than Nathaniel, most of them were slick with moisture and a deep
green moss. They had been crossing the rockfal when Elizabeth had mis—stepped
and landed with all her weight on a nest of deadwood.

Moccasins
had their limitations, oh, yes. Any of her boots, which had been such an
extravagance and had earned her her nickname—those silly, vain, immoderate, oh
so lovely boots with their leather soles—would have kept her feet protected.
The muscles rolled and cramped in her lower leg.

"When
my hair got plucked I got water in my eyes, often as not," Nathaniel said
in a conversational tone.

Unexpectedly
intrigued, Elizabeth came up on her elbows. "Your hair plucked? Your
scalp, for battle?"

"Aye,
and the rest of it." He grinned without looking at her. "It's not
attractive to the Kahnyen'kehflka, in case you didn't know. Chest hair and the
like."

"But
you—" She paused, looking at him hard. He had shaved this morning, as he
did every morning, with a straight—edged razor. More than once she had wondered
why he bothered, but she liked him clean shaven, the line of his jaw and the
angle of his chin, and so she had not said anything at all. Every evening, in
spite of his careful attentions, his cheeks were rough with new growth,
something she had learned to anticipate and also to appreciate. She looked at
him now, the deep, thick growth of the hair on his head and the way it hung in
waves over his shoulders. It struck her that there was little hair on him
otherwise, and that this might be unusual.

"If
you pull it out by the roots and you keep doing it long enough, it gives up
eventually," he explained.

Elizabeth
twitched as another splinter was pulled from her foot.

"You
mean to say that you plucked the hair from your chest? Every day?"

"Not
me," said Nathaniel. "There was an old woman in the Turtle long house
she did the tattooing and the hair pulling, mostly. Said I had a good face and
that it would be worth the trouble to get rid of the hair, so I could find a
wife. Took me on as a project. Every morning and every evening she'd just about
sit down on top of me to keep me still and she'd go to work on me with her
shells."

"You're
making this up," Elizabeth said.

"I
ain't," Nathaniel said, distracted momentarily from his story while he
concentrated on her foot. Then he pulled another sliver. "She had shells
tied together with a piece of rawhide, notched on two edges so she could grab
with them. Or she used her fingers, for the scalp."

"I'm
glad to see she didn't mind those growing back," Elizabeth said dryly.
"So how long did it take?"

He
shrugged. "I guess maybe three years, at least until my chest was clean
enough to suit her."

"Well,
I would hope that was enough," Elizabeth said. "What else could she
have had in mind? Not your legs—" Her voice trailed away.

Nathaniel
said, "She was trying to do me a service, but I drew the line below my
belly. Thought any girl who couldn't see past the hair on my—" He raised
an eyebrow at her—"legs wasn't worth worrying over."

"The
question is why you put up with it at all," Elizabeth said, flustered.

"Maybe
I was just vain, did you think of that? And besides, Ya—wa—o—da—qua told
stories while she worked." He was squeezing the tender flesh of the ball
of her foot between two fingers, and then he plucked suddenly and made a
satisfied sound. "Not much more to go," he said. "But there's
one pretty deep, so you hold tight now, Boots."

Elizabeth
had been propping herself up on her elbows, but she lay back down and put an
arm across her eyes. "What does her name mean?"

"Ya—wa—o—da—qua?
Pincushion. Don't laugh, it's true. Hold still, Boots." There was a sharp
jab of the needle; she thought she was prepared for it, but she reared up
anyway, and there was Nathaniel, grinning. There was a swipe of her blood on
his cheek, and a wickedly long and bloody sliver on the end of the needle.
"I think that's the last of it. You did good."

"I
sniveled," she corrected him, out of sorts. There was blood running down
her foot; it was a most disquieting sensation.

"But
nicely," he allowed. He helped her up and then to the stream, where he saw
her settled on a boulder with the injured foot in the water. This stream came
off the mountain and it was ice—cold even this far into the spring, but it
numbed the ache in her foot and she swished it back and forth, not unhappily.
Nathaniel was rummaging in the packs, his back to her.

"We'll
make camp here and get you poulticed. There's a storm coming on anyway.

"So
say the black fly Elizabeth agreed, rubbing her neck. The exposed skin from
collar to her hairline was raised to washer board consistency by a hundred tiny
welts. After a few days of dampness, the black fly moved in armies of thousands
and millions, and today there had been a particularly difficult confrontation
with them. Her skin felt warm to the touch and she was almost light—headed with
it, but she knew that in the morning it would be gone. Until the next encounter
with the little beasties. She cast an irritated look at Nathaniel; he was
scratching, too' but less. He had coated his face and hands with ointment, and
it had kept him relatively protected.

Elizabeth
struggled hard not to let her irritation get the upper hand. There was a point,
she concluded, at which the only possible tool was numbness; she could not
manufacture an artificial cheerfulness when she itched and hurt and smelled.
But Nathaniel didn't seem to mind her mood; in fact, the more taciturn she
became, the more his own dry humor rose to the surface. It was something she
hadn't anticipated, and she liked him for it tremendously. It almost made up
for the infernal blacklly.

Nathaniel
came up behind her with his hands cupped. Elizabeth tipped her head back to
look at him upside down and dissolved in a genuine smile as he smoothed
pennyroyal ointment over the mass of tiny welts. Her nose wrinkled at the
smell, but the relief was undeniable. She let her head rest against the hard
plank of his abdomen, her plait brushing the ground. He looked down at her, all
seriousness, while he wiped her face gently with a square of muslin that had
once been a part of her second shift.

"If
you coated yourself with this every morning you'd be better off." he said.

Elizabeth
sighed softly in response. Mrs. Schuyler had given her the concoction of pine
tar, castor oil, and pennyroyal before she set off with Bears, vowing that a
liberal coating on face, neck, and hands would ward off any biting insect. Thus
far, though, Elizabeth had preferred the black fly to the pungent stink and its
deep brown color.
 
But she knew that
unless the insects simply disappeared, she would soon have to resort to grease
or ointment, or learn to live with ravaged skin. They might spend another two
weeks or more living in the bush, and it was time she faced that reality.

"Do
you really know where we are?" she asked, suddenly wondering.

"I
do."

"Amazing.
Have you never been lost, then?"

"No,
I can't say that I have. Although I was mighty disoriented once for a few
days."

Elizabeth
laughed out loud, and reached up with both hands to pull his head down to her,
where she kissed him and rubbed a tender cheek against his.

"Don't
get too friendly," he said. "There's more yet to come. We got to
clean out that wound. A bit of salt would do the job, or some spirits. I've got
some of Axel's schnapps along."

Elizabeth
thought of the jagged hole and blanched.

"Is
that really necessary?" she asked.

"Aye,"
he said, "we best get it over with. Then we can work on making you feel
better."

* * *

It
was a hot, searing kind of pain that spiraled instantaneously into a great
burst of color, but it didn't last long. Elizabeth bit down hard on the urge to
scream; if no other lesson had been learned, Nathaniel had made it clear to her
how important it was to keep their noise down to a minimum. But tears brimmed
in her eyes and the world doubled and tripled. When it cleared, Nathaniel bound
her wound with her third—best handkerchief dampened with Axel's schnapps, and
then slipped the delinquent moccasin back on her foot. With a few deft motions
he pulled her legging down and laced the moccasin over it. Elizabeth observed
while he sewed the tear in the sole with the same needle he had used to fish
the splinters out.

"Very
handy of you," she noted, still out of sorts.

"You
should be able to walk on this tomorrow.

"I
intend to walk now. Can't we camp on the shore back there?" Just before
her misstep, they had come past a small lake with a good protected place to
settle under an outcropping of rock. At that point they had thought to walk for
another three hours, but now Elizabeth was glad to have a valid excuse to go
back. It had been an unusually pretty place, even for this wilderness. And
since she had finally learned the basics of swimming, she took every
opportunity to practice.

Nathaniel
took all the packs and let her manage on her own, limping gingerly. She felt
slightly silly, and looked around herself as if there might be curious
neighbors watching. Instead, she caught a pair of fox cubs at play in the sun
before their burrow hole, their red coats gleaming bright. They looked at her
without fear, and she looked back.

Once
settled, Nathaniel gathered wood for a fire. The shore was lined with a wide
margin of sweet flag, and he pulled up great armfuls of the long green
spikelike leaves to lay over the burning wood. The smoke that rose and filled
the air would keep flying things away.

Elizabeth
breathed a sigh of contentment, knowing that she should rouse herself to see to
the food, but she was feeling strangely indolent. Reclining on the smooth, warm
expanse of rock, she enjoyed the feel of the breeze on her inflamed face.

"I
must look a sight," she said. "And you needn't bother to contradict
me."

"I
wouldn't dream of it, Boots."

She
snorted, and liking the sound of it, snorted again. "If I had the energy
I'd make you pay for that," she said, and grinned in spite of herself”

“Now
you're fishing for more than compliments," he said, eyeing her with one
raised brow while he shredded a long stalk of grass and tossed bits into the
fire, absentmindedly.

She
looked out over the lake, thought about swimming, and then lay back down
lazily.

"And
if I were? Isn't that my right?"