The Outlander, page 6
All these things fit awkwardly into the mouldering saddlebags, the flaps of which were stiff with age. She tossed the stolen fur coat behind the saddle and hung a beaded silk handbag from her shoulder. She mounted again, hitched up her skirts, and proceeded from the barn, a mad silhouette in the night. From the direction of the house came a dog that barked at her once, short and high, a call of question. She listened to things moving in the dark. The dog came sideways, peering, and it circled in a strafing pattern while the blue roan stood its ground. Eventually, they went on, the dog making small yips. She walked the horse slowly over the gravel drive, holding the saddlebags tight to keep their contents from jingling. No light in the house, candle or gas. Its ivy walls went scrolling by and then were gone. They passed through a small field and came upon two looming trees the widow had seen from her window and thought to be stumpy. Instead they were enormous, with vast canopies. The leaves filtered the moonlight and, as they passed under, woman and horse were streaked, erased, reformed.
Soon, they came upon a fence and stood looking over it into another dark field. The widow circled the roan and took them back a short way, then brutally heeled it forward into a canter, and heeled again before the fence, as the dog ducked and veered. They took the jump, landed awkwardly, and trotted to a stop with goods rattling and the roan shuddering and sidestepping with surprise. The dog simply took off. The widow gripped the reins. Two hearts pounding. So, she remembered how to jump too.
They went on into the dark field and soon were gone from sight, leaving the house where they both had been kept and cared for.
THE OLD WOMAN stood at her doorstep before breakfast, her gnarled little hands wringing together and a look of fury on her face. Zenta and Emily cowered behind her. The three women regarded the red-bearded men who waited on the steps, rifles across their backs like hunters.
“I told you,” she said, attempting a sternness she did not possess, “you have the wrong house.” Under the chill of their flat stare, she slowly withered, the trembling lip now mute.
“You have two choices,” said one man. “You can cooperate, or you can see what happens when you don’t. Now, where is she?” His eye settled on Emily, clearly the weakest of the three.
FIVE
THE WIDOW HAD given up guessing the time at around midnight. The moon came and went, its light erased by scudding cloud. She had cantered the horse when she could, along an open road or a clear path through the fields. Houses stood at a distance, flattened to two dimensions by the moon’s light. Cattle watched and chewed, standing or reclining in pools of their own shadows. At what she judged to be the edge of this little burg, she passed a lonely bull segregated in a pen, who gazed over his fence and watched her go. She craned around to see the massive creature, the heavy head hung low, and the wide back gleaming under the stars.
But now a profound dark had fallen and she walked the mare slowly and stopped often to gauge her direction. Cocks crowed into the pitch black. Beside a fence she dismounted and tied the horse. She gathered her skirts about her hips, squatted, and urinated into the dry grass at her feet. Then she remounted and went on.
Toward dawn the sky cleared, and she realized she was on the foothills of the mountains she had seen three days ago, blue and shrouded, from the old lady’s carriage window. These had been her target since her first sight of them. They stood like a monument in her path, promising freedom and camouflage. Pink suffused the horizon, but the sky directly above was all blue and stars. She heard the crack of a rabbit gun far off, and the mare stopped and listened as the sound ranged about them and the hills muttered back. From the direction of the sound the widow figured she had already begun her climb into the foothills and the town now lay some distance below her. She went on, listening, but there was no more gunfire.
They entered a thick stand of trees and once again were sunk in darkness and nearly blind. The widow dismounted, took the saddlebags down, and sat upon a bed of moss searching for something in the bags. Her hands were her eyes. Next to her the mare cropped grasses and chewed, a hollow and leisured grinding to her right. Soon she found a match and in its flare she glimpsed the forest floor, a strange and wicked-looking topography. She saw her own skirts and the horse gawping over at her, its pupils contracting, before the match stuttered and it was black again. Since her childhood, which had ended not so long ago, she had wondered about the existence of goblins and small, biting sprites. Her father had instilled this silliness in his girl, waking her sometimes when he came home late and drunk. Over the objections of her grandmother, they would go out into the dark garden as the child staggered and half-dreamed, and he would seize her and point, insisting some tiny creature hid there, just out of sight, standing motionless in the foliage. Incredible behaviour for a man of his nature and training, a former Anglican minister, his collar now coiled and tucked away in a sock drawer.
Had the news of her crime reached him yet? She felt a wincing regret, for she knew she could not go home to her father and grandmother, not now. That house was no longer her home, and she would not be safe there. Even if she knew her way, the least public route home, they would never hide or protect her when she arrived.
The widow took up a pipe, which she had packed with tobacco, and drew the embers up and sat back smoking in the gloom. She had taken this pipe from the old man’s shrine; it was an expensive and antique object. The bowl was outsized and ornate, carved into the shape of a stag’s head whose antlers came off in a hinged lid. She drew up a fragrant smoke and sighed it back out.
FOR TWO DAYS, the widow and her mare climbed steaming foothills into mountains whose peaks were seamed with impossible snow. The punishing heat faded and the air became pleasantly warm. In the mornings heavy fog poured upward from the earth and drifted in ghostly forms through the trees. She stared: This one is a shepherd’s pipes, that one a woman’s hand reaching. She watched a gaggle of vaporous forms trouble the surface of a little forest slough, and it gave her a curious image of what her own mind endured. The voices. Furies born and soon dead with a simple breath of sun; but potent while they lasted, and terrible.
At dusk the first day she came upon a lean-to built of rotted timber and set against a mossy rock face. Slung across its open ends was canvas sacking that had been eaten at the bottom by mould. She called out but no answer came, and so she ventured close and threw back a flap to gaze upon decomposing blankets and a ratlike strewing of blackened newspaper. No occupant rose up to greet her, no sign of life anywhere. One folded wadge of newspaper in the corner had been underlined in black and the lines had bled into one another. The widow had not slept in two days, and before that never for more than a few hours. Here was a shelter, at dusk, a human sign among the trees. And yet she backed away from this burrow as if from a compost heap roiling with vermin. She wiped her hands on her own ragged dress. On the ground about the hovel she found more refuse. Spoons, an empty wallet, a glove, more newspaper, half-buried under pine needles and loam and none very far away from their source. Like an archaeologist she unearthed a pitiful human sphere. She deemed it to be male, though anyone following her and gazing at her rest spots might think the same of her. The widow mounted and went on.
She rested that dusk and woke later to find all light erased. The night was so dark she thought something stood between her eyes and the rest of the world. Blindness could not be this complete. Nothing but the sound of wind through trees. Somewhere to her left, the breathing horse. And high above, the slow funhouse creaking of pine branches. A blessing of her young life had been the fact that she remained more afraid of her own mind than of the dark. In fact, she loved the night. Still, here among the trees there was the call of unknown things. Small scrounging sounds to the left . . . or in front? She had taken the saddle off the horse and now she lay with her head on it and listened. The horse puffed. She reasoned that the mare would alert her to news of a predator. She did not know that a horse’s eyesight is far worse than even a man’s. All it has is a sense of smell, and that depends on the wind. Throughout that long night, the widow listened to the movements of the mare, and tried to ignore the question of how she would catch it in the dark if indeed something came through the trees toward them.
Morning came in a fug of humidity, the sun a hot smudge above, the ground steaming. When the widow stood, she discovered her skirts were soaked. She bent and wrung them out, but they stayed damp and heavy, and the cloth lapped coldly at her calves as she mounted the horse and rode. They went on through groves of aspen, and the widow saw the clawmarks of bears on smoky trunks, impossibly high, near her waist as she rode. All about lay the papery shreds of torn bark.
The next morning, the air grew colder. She was climbing the range day by day. She sat in meditation on the saddle’s rhythmic creak, the suck of hooves in the wet leaves. She was obliged to dismount from time to time and draw the mare from an impassible web of hemlock or a corral of dead and fallen pines. She worried she was going in circles or even retracing her steps.
They went on into hollows and draws, then up again, along ridges and across clearings that smelled of mint. The blue roan was fattening, since the widow stopped often to let it feed, and it seemed stronger by the day, stepping across alpine meadows so green and seemingly cultivated they spoke of heaven. White dots of mountain goats moved along vertical bluffs with tiny kids following in awkward dashes over the precipitous terrain. The widow watched their pinpoint hops.
She bathed quickly at the edge of a frigid mountain stream and the water stung and lacerated her nerves. A painful cleansing. Where possible she used her long hair to dry herself, for she dared not use her clothes, and the old lady’s fur coat simply slithered coldly over her skin, absorbing nothing. She paced naked in the sun, teeth clenched, hugging herself, watching the mare as it wandered and grazed. She had forgotten completely about the saddle blanket. Oily and stiff as it was, it might have warmed her. She did not know how to properly hobble a horse, but by now had intuited how to tie the reins to one foreleg so the mare could bend and eat but could not gallop or even trot away from her when she came to collect it. She found stiff dried moss with which she tried in vain to curry the horse’s coat, and she lifted the mare’s hooves and dug pebbles from the frog with the old man’s bayonet. This much she remembered to do.
She ate her mouldy bread and soggy fruit. The bushes were full of berries, but she dared not eat anything unless it was recognizable, and nothing was. She saw rabbits, which now looked like food on legs, but could not devise a way to catch them. She saw an eagle and several fat foxes, and at dusk, grey owls gliding silent on the night air with their enormous wings. She put on the fur coat and discovered just how small the old lady really was. She cut her skirt up the middle, front and back, and, shivering and naked with the needle in her hand, sewed it into wide black pants so that her knees would no longer be exposed as she rode. This was a good solution, except that now she had to remove her clothing entirely when she needed to relieve herself. In the cold night she was obliged to rise from her dozing and walk the mare to keep them both warm, while their common breath followed them in meaningless Braille.
On the fourth day, the mare scented the air wildly and stood electrified at the edge of a steep meadow. At first the widow did not know the object of its terror, and then she did. A massive old grizzly stood just clear of the far trees, but the roan’s poor eyesight had not located it yet. The widow stared in terror at what stood across the meadow, swinging its head from side to side as if in similar disbelief. Light brown and sleek and fat, it was bigger than she had imagined any animal could be. The shadow of an entire cloud passed slowly between herself and the bear. Sun penetrated into the deep grasses and flowering weeds. She clung to her dancing mount as the mare puffed and trembled, unable to find the source of its dread. And then the bear was gone; it simply backed away into the darkness of the trees. The widow amended her trajectory and went on, praying. The Lord roars from Zion. These are the words of the Lord.
TREES, EVERYWHERE. And the sun above. A whispering of wind in the high branches and every pine needle and summer leaf moving. The widow rested atop a boulder in a clearing and removed her boots. The saddle was hung lopsided on a branch. She walked slowly around in the soft mud and rubbed her cheeks with the heels of her hands, clearing her head. All morning she had been assailed by memories, inappropriate, ironic ones. Not the usual phantoms but something else, some catalogue of places and things — and for each she suffered a transient yearning. A familiar street corner, a broken banister railing in her father’s house, a wet newspaper full of potato peels in the kitchen. Unpopulated, these memories, but each one nonetheless saturated with human presence, like an unattended meal still steaming. Something was coming, some message — each memory sculpting its own silhouette. She fought them off, struggling the way a swimmer does who must not rest but does rest, only to return to the surface, sputtering. A gang of drab sparrows played tactical games among the deep indentations her feet had made in the mud. The mare shook itself like a dog, and they all flew away.
She had now spent six days and nights alone in the mountains, and still she didn’t know where she was. Yet she wasn’t frightened, merely attentive. The thing to be feared always came from within: exhaustion, unsound thoughts, ignorance, starvation. As a child she had been dragged away from a panicking horse because she had failed to see that it might injure her, the hired man shaking her by the shoulders, shouting, “Do you want to get me fired?” And yet, she had been nearly demented with terror by a dream in which her hands fell off at the wrists. That summer, her bed had been set outside on the screened veranda where it was cool, and when she had wakened screaming, the caged birds by the door had volleyed about their little wicker palace. The sound of adult feet thumping down the hallway toward her, where she sat rigid and shrill, her arms out before her, staring at her hands, still seeing them gone. All the next day she had nursed a miasmic horror: she was unsound, dissipating, her body unable to hold together. And the blame for it lay in dreams. This was the locus of fear for her, a worm in the heart, where hope rotted in its dark whorls, where unwanted visions leaped out — the darkness of her own mind. And yet here she was alone in the wilderness, strangely content.
It was a bright, soft morning. In the sun, the air was warm enough for bare skin, while under the trees the mare’s breath blew into vapour. An arctic chill crept the boundaries of each shadow and gusted from the deeps of the woods. The widow rested her feet in front of her and stared down at the white and blue toes. The mud soothed the soles of her feet and she shuffled them back and forth and clenched her toes into it. She eyed the sparrows glumly, imagining one cooked upon a fire, a meal no bigger than her thumb, crackling and hissing in its small supply of fat. There seemed to be no berries at this elevation, or if there were, they were wizened, white, and bitter. She had not been able to find a gun or rifle in the old woman’s house. So how to kill a small animal? How to capture a bird? She had stopped the horse at every creek and stream to gaze into the clear water, looking for fish, minnows, anything alive. She saw nothing, ever.
Her will was strong enough, but she lacked the knowledge to help herself. She had been trained for another life, and her mind in its dulled state turned over and over in a mire of useless things: sonatas and études; the art of a good menu; trousseaux; dress improvers or bustles, so outdated now. Bedtime at nine. Toast cooling in its wire stand on the breakfast table. Alabaster skin and parasols. Weeping girls who did not get what they wanted at Christmas. One ate and drank and got fat. One worried about chills. Old women mistrusted the damp summer air. Death did not come this way, lingering in the trees. It came by apoplexy. By cancer. By public hanging. Her uncle, known to everyone as a wrathful man, had fallen to the rug in his drawing room clutching his throat, his death caused by an outrageous grocer’s bill.
By noon she had wiped the mud from her feet and calves and put on her boots again. She went to the mare’s left, stroked the long neck, and mounted. Horse and rider went on slowly. Steam rose from the mare’s rolling shoulders and drifted past the widow’s knees, but the widow shivered even as the puddles below her glared brightly in the sun. All through the trees ran paths made by animals big and small. The smaller the animal, and the more of them, the more deeply rutted the trails. The widow had discovered these natural highways at dusk one night, the patterns highlighted for her by the deepening shadows. The red of the sunset had imparted a hollowness to physical things, the evergreens silvered and flat in their sleekness, and suddenly the tousled grasses revealed these animal paths, itineraries, wandering lines of habit she had not perceived before. Rivulets and whorls where mice scurried round rocks and tree trunks. A squirrel’s stitch of hops between pines and then with a leap, nothing. And wider, subtler erosions, where hooves and bellies had drifted and where soft lips had torn away leaves. In the absence of any human map, and wishing herself away from human danger, the widow turned her horse and followed these ghostly rivers, wandering deeper into a wilderness she knew nothing about.
At dusk the light became as thin and cold as the air. There was no sound, no echo, the mare’s footfalls silent in the deep bed of cedar needles. There were no shadows; everything lay impossibly flat to the eye. World without end. The mare put its hoof on an old rotted log, and a muffled crack came from under seasons of flowing grass and blown leaves. The widow slumped in the saddle. Hunger or fatigue? She could no longer tell them apart. She dismounted, staggered briefly on her numbed feet, and plopped down heavily, cross-legged, still holding the reins. Pine cones. Could she eat pine cones?
