The Outlander, page 11
“Thief!” she squawked. “Come back!”
She was quickly falling behind. “Let go of those reins!” she called out in desperation.
And to her surprise, he did let go of them. But the mare continued following him, nudging the rump of the animal before it, only occasionally looking back, reins dangling, to see the widow far behind, struggling along through waist-high grass.
BY EVENING THE man had started a fire and made himself some coffee and was frying meat in a pan. The widow sat at some remove, glowering, the delicious smell killing her. He did not look at her or speak, but she noticed that no matter where she went around the little camp, he never turned his back to her. She had collected her mare with only a little difficulty. Around its forelegs the man had affixed a hobble. As she approached, the mare kept backing up, moving just out of reach and jerking its head away. But finally it allowed itself to be captured, and she stroked its head and cooed into its face. She curried it with moss and twigs, but the experiment failed; it only made the grey hide streaked and dirty. She looked over at the man’s bay horse. Its coat gleamed. He must have taken the horses to a river and run them through it.
At last light, she found herself inching closer to the fire. He now lay with his head propped on his saddle, fingers laced across his belly. She could see his eyes under the hat. They were watching her now, not as amused as before. Something about her worried him. Had he seen her coughing and spitting? Of course he had. It was likely he’d seen her long before that, standing atop the waterfall. A strange shame filled her and she could not meet his eyes. The idea that she had been wandering like a troll above the waterfall, while someone gazed up at her — it was a horrible thought. She began to retreat into the dark when his voice came to her.
“How’d you get separated from your horse?”
To her astonishment, she understood him. He had no accent she could detect. In fact, his voice was much like her father’s, a nice voice. She didn’t reply at first. She would not tell this stranger that she had lost her mind before she had lost the horse. Finally, she settled on the most transparent answer.
“Wolves,” she said.
He nodded under his hat. “Truth is,” he said, “I don’t know why I was waiting for you to come down out of there. I should have been home days ago. I guess I was curious. And I thought it’d be a man.” The fire hissed and glowed at his feet. The soles of his boots were lit by firelight and she could see the crisp stitching in them. “Did you come from Frank?” he asked.
She stayed silent.
“Sparwood?”
She shook her head.
“All right, then. Where?” He propped himself up on an elbow. Unfortunately, she now had his attention. The widow’s addled mind stuttered away from the truth. Could an Indian get her put in jail? Probably. Would this man want to put her in jail? Impossible to tell. She lied and gave him the name of the next biggest town to hers. Strangely, this seemed to shock him.
“Granum? Are you saying you came through that pass?!” he pointed into the dark trees behind her.
“What pass?” she said.
“Those mountains there. You came right through them?” She nodded.
“Well, that’s something.” His grin was huge. “When I tell my wife that a stupid white girl just wandered through that pass . . .” He chuckled and lay back down again.
She sat cross-legged, elbows on knees, her cheeks burning with fury. He didn’t care one bit about her. She was a funny story he could tell people. He hadn’t offered her any of the fried meat. And she would be damned if she’d ask him for some now. The fire settled suddenly and a corona of infernal fireflies exploded upward. The widow tossed another branch across the glowing mass of it and glowered at the man as the green bark steamed. The warmth was gorgeous, and her withered lungs ached with each breath.
When he spoke again, his voice was already slurred with sleep. “She won’t believe it,” he said.
The wind picked up in the trees above them. The heat from the fire tormented her feet, even through the soggy boots, and so she angled her legs out into the dark. A rank smell came to her on the breeze, and she recognized it as the rabbit meat in her bags. As repulsive as it was, her stomach growled. It was warmer down on this plateau, even among the trees, even as the damp earth soaked into her clothing. Down here it was summer. She felt a pleasant fatigue invade her body as she lay wheezing in the dark.
WHEN THE WIDOW awoke, she found she had rolled in her sleep some distance from the fire, which was now going full strength. A coffee pot sat tilted among the coals at the fire’s edge, and steam issued from the sharp little spout. She was alone in the clearing. She sat looking at the fire for some time before she dug into her saddlebags for the tin cup and poured herself some coffee. She stirred it with a twig and blew on the still boiling liquid until it was drinkable. When he returned, she saw that he had been bathing. His dark hair was twisted into a rope that hung down his back. He wore no shirt, and the water that ran down his back darkened the waistband of his pants. She turned away, for she had always disliked it when men paraded around with their shirts off. Even when her own husband had removed his shirt to cut wood or work on the roof, she’d considered it prideful, vain, a kind of taunt. You can’t do this, woman — but I can. She remembered her father’s amusement when she had abused a hired boy.
“Why don’t you take off your drawers too?” she’d cried. “Why not hop around like a dirty old monkey?” And her father had laughed while the boy flushed with shame.
The widow put her cup on the ground and began to walk away into the trees.
“River’s the other way,” he said, and she amended her direction.
It was a wide, shallow creek of mountain runoff, thick with riverstones, meandering among glacial humps in the ground. Meadow grasses grew right to the edge and tipped over and waved in the current as if drowned. She washed her face and feet. A high white cloud floated thinly over the mountain peaks. Dark pines stood in perfect alignment to the heavens. The widow coughed a deep bubbling cough, then spat. She squatted among tufts of water grass, her feet braced on uneven rock, and she peed. Afterwards, she washed herself, wincing, for it was agonizingly cold. She stood by the swift-moving river and looked out across the meadow to the mountains. William Moreland was up there somewhere, hidden in mist.
She had thought she was alone, but he had come upon her when she slept. How easily he could have tiptoed past, let her lie there sleeping, dying. Instead he had waited. He had admitted to watching her sleeping face all that first night. “You had this little strand of hair in your mouth,” he’d said. A wincing tightness in her heart, just to think of it. Unbearable. She could still smell him, still hear his soft voice in her ear. The tent where they lay entwined together, her mouth against his arm. . . . The widow’s eyes welled with angry tears and she began sobbing. Turn your back, just as he did.
But how to do that? How had he done it?
When she returned, red-eyed, the man was properly dressed and his hair was braided. He gave her some hard little lumps of cooked dough. She bit into one and discovered that, while she had to chew endlessly, it contained dried berries and was delicious.
“May I have some meat . . . please?” she asked. He pointed to a rock on which he had laid out for her a blackened chunk of meat, already marauded by ants. His face said he had put it out some time ago, why hadn’t she noticed it yet? She pounced on it, blew the insects away.
“I’m taking you to Frank,” he said.
“Who?”
“It’s a town. From there you can go back to your home.” He watched her gobble the last of the meat so fast it left her hiccupping. “Or not. It’s your choice.”
They packed up their gear and she hung her saddlebags over the roan’s shoulders. There was no saddle now, nothing to strap the bags to, so she would be forced to hold them in front of her to ensure they didn’t work their way sideways and fall off as she rode. Without the saddle too, she could not mount the horse, no matter how she hopped and struggled. The man watched bleakly for a while, and eventually was obliged to dismount and come over to help her. Once she was up, he stood back and assessed her posture on the horse, but what he saw seemed to worry him. “Is that really your horse?” he asked and put a finger possessively around one of the reins.
“Of course. I told you that.”
“You don’t ride her very well.”
She glared at him and yanked the rein away. This seemed to displease him even more; his face darkened. He snatched at the halter and dragged the roan toward a beech tree that stood alone at the edge of the clearing. “You see that?” he said, pointing to a scratch in its bark. He seemed to be pointing out one of a multitude of scars.
“What?”
“That, you stupid woman. That! ” His finger pecked at the little slice. It might have been made by a knife, she could see that now. A wide Y shape, or maybe a T?
“That is a Peigan sign. And our campfire over there? I made that on top of their old one.”
“And you’re not Peigan, I assume?”
“Lucky for you.”
She understood him, finally. He didn’t trust her, didn’t think she could ride with him out of trouble, he was afraid that she would drag him down and get him killed. As if in answer, he said, “Keep up, or I’ll leave you flat.” Then he turned and mounted his horse and together they rode out into the bright meadow. Saddleless, the roan’s spine ground into the widow’s pelvis in a way she knew would soon become painful. Her belly struggled with the first solid food she’d had in days. And yet she felt well rested. She looked at this Indian’s back, gazed at the rump of his horse with its swinging tail — it had finger-waves in it like a girl’s hair. It occurred to her that this man could have taken her horse, taken all her things, left her in the mountains. But he hadn’t, and that was something. She was clearly a burden to him, and nothing more than curiosity had got him into this. She felt sure she could veer off and go a different direction and he would not try to stop her. The widow wanted to repair things somehow, but didn’t know where to start.
“What’s your name?” she called to him. He was silent. They went up over a hillock, the horses rocking their necks with each step of the incline, and lightly trotted down.
“Do you mind my asking what kind of Indian you are?” The roan strained to tug at grasses as it went and she hauled up on its reins. “You can at least tell me your name, can’t you?”
“What’s yours?” he countered.
“Justine,” she said, choosing the name of a girl she once knew. So, silence on one hand and a lie on the other; he had outdone her again. She ran her fingers through her hair in consternation. They continued along the edge of the creek together. Swallows skimmed over the grass and darted above the surface of the water catching flying bugs, and everywhere was the hum of bees. He relented a little and slowed his horse so that they were only a little off-parallel, but he radiated impatience, as if even walking the horse was something she did poorly.
“You know I’m from Cooperstown,” she said. “You know where I’m from. Why can’t you tell me about yourself?”
“Crow.” He shook his head in its mottled hat. “I’m Crow Indian. We say Absarokeh. My mother was born on the other side of that hill, right there.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but his face remained closed.
“And where were you born?”
“Baltimore,” he said.
And with that he heeled the bay into a trot so he was ahead again. The interview was over.
THE RIDGERUNNER crouched at midday in the lee of a massive cedar and waited and watched with his hunter’s patience as all around him the wind blew. Grasses swam, trees bowed and creaked, and there was a hissing in the canopy above. He was the only still thing on this mountainside.
From his vantage point he could see the clearing, his own former camp, and the cold ring of stones where once there had been a fire. Movement everywhere. It promised a glimpse of human life, maybe even some small thing blowing across the ground, and her chasing after it . . . but no. No scent but cold and pine, no voice. Here he remained, hands squeezing the leather straps of his pack. He was whispering, his lips forming half-words and the shadows of explanations, excuses passing in sequence over his face.
After many minutes, he rose and eased the enormous weight from his shoulders and rested it against the tree. And then, as if heading onstage, his face brightened falsely, and he hiked up his pants and strode into the clearing. William Moreland stood alone, hands dangling at his sides. Of course she was gone, everything was gone, every useful or comfortable thing. He had taken his things, she had taken hers. All that remained was the evidence of a camp.
So very unlike him to leave such a wreckage, for any following ranger to find. He had left too quickly. And there was too much evidence to conceal. The countless footprints, bed of pine needles in the shape of a tent’s floor, a nail hole in a cedar where he had hung his mirror and then later removed the nail and packed it, the rope burns halfway up a trunk from the tent’s guy line, the small puddles of coffee and rain, now frozen . . . and one of her bare feet expressed in mud, perfectly preserved.
He bent over this fossil, the small toes blurred by movement, but the lines of the foot intimately clear and frosted. He knew the weight of that foot in his hand. Faultless and warm. He closed his eyes, fighting an unnameable thing in himself. Then he seized the fire-blackened stones one by one and flung them two-handed into the trees.
He would erase it. All of it.
TEN
THAT AFTERNOON the widow followed her companion through a grove of scraggy, ivy-tented apple trees on an abandoned farm. She looked for buildings but there were none. No house, no barn. No shadow of human presence. Nothing left of the enterprise but this orchard in its decayed, marching lines. The mare tramped along heavily and the widow slumped on its bare back. A perfume in the air, the ground around them poxed with fallen fruit that lay in layers of years, squelching beneath the horses’ hooves. The rotting apples seethed with drunken wasps.
The country passed with a comforting sense of procession now, and the widow was pleased at the way forest and rock-fall and pilings of scree seemed to sweep along majestically, not so wheeling and vertiginous any more. Here she was, wandering behind a man again, his purpose having become hers, just as she had gone with her husband into the wilderness on their rumbling ox cart. She recalled his white shirt sleeves, his clean black suit coat draped over his thighs.
How easily it had happened. Without understanding that she had agreed to anything, she had simply followed John Boulton into a new life. Behind the newlyweds rode several men on horseback and another cart pulled by heavy horses, and the drivers, mounted on crates and bins that rocked wildly with every tilt of the ground, were old and rough. They swore, then apologized to her, swore and apologized. At night they camped, and she would retire alone to their large tent and immediately put out the lantern to preserve oil, then lie in the dark and listen to the men talk. She had to listen to what they actually said to know they were arguing, since no one ever raised his voice. The fiercest accusation she heard was, “There’s been a lot of that going on ’round here,” which had been met with a long, fuming silence. But no one denied it, whatever it was.
Sometimes one or another of them would sing, often without accompaniment. One favourite was a teary song about a child left alone by his wicked parents and finally devoured by wolves, the mawkish chorus of which always provoked laughter. Later, she could hear the men snoring, murmuring in their sleep. When she rose in the morning, the oldest man was already up and had cooked breakfast, and he brought her food and fussed over how much she ate just like she were his own child. Nurture was not in her experience, and she hadn’t known how to answer it, coming as it did from such a weathered old coot.
It was incredible how quickly an entire camp could be packed away onto the cart and strapped to the backs of horses. The oxen stamped as the yokes were put back on. The men whistled. Then they all moved on in a rambling, creaking train. At times the path they followed would spread out and fade, like spilled water, and the wagons would stop, and her husband would drop from his seat while everyone waited and walk ahead to look at things, trying to remember the way back to his property. At those moments, she would gaze in dismay at the trackless territory where they stood, dressed in their travel clothes, wondering what mote of memory or logic drifted there in her husband’s mind, what in the world was telling him the way to go? Where was he taking her, and what did all this emptiness look like to him?
He had promised her a “well-appointed house” with hundreds of acres of land. But when they arrived at the spot, there was no house. All that yet existed was a small square foundation on which more workmen had erected their tent. The newlyweds set up their tent in the trees, and it took two months before they had a roof, or privacy, or anything resembling a bed.
And here she was again. The same solemn procession through wilderness into an unknown future, only now she was widowed, childless, abandoned by her lover, ghostly thin in her clothes and stolen boots, following a stranger. Together, they stepped their mounts over windfallen trees, with the river to their left and far ahead, the balding rock faces cut deep by the river that had forged the pass. Presently she saw signs of human society: they passed trails of desiccated horse turds only a few days old and mined already by burrowing insects. She saw the impressions of shoeless hooves, several trails through the grass where previous riders had gone, and finally the gnawed corpse of a ground squirrel flung in the dirt by some dog and forgotten.
People. The widow pulled the mare up and sat among these signs, worrying.
Then she saw to her right a stand of beech trees, ghostly against the dark alpine forest. And there among the trees, as white as if they were made of bark themselves, a loose congregation of teepees. Muted forms walked in and out of the shade cast by the tents. A pack of dogs milled about, yipping. Wild lines ran through the grass away from the encampment, like spokes from a hub. The widow could discern footpaths and wider trails where carts could be dragged. Most led to the river where it tucked in close before swinging away again toward the mountain valley.
