CREWS SAW NOTHING UNTOWARD ALL NIGHT and heard only the noises made by the smaller nocturnal creatures, scurryings, flutterings, the hollow cry of an owl, and once the shriek of something obviously being killed, perhaps by the same bird that had hooted. He shivered in the thin shirt and could not take the warming measures he had used when on his own, so will was applied to that matter as well.
When dawn came, he went to the woman, taking care first to call out, so that she would not be frightened by the disturbance of the bushes.
She was awake. Her eyes were without luster.
“I hope you were able to sleep.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Let’s have a look at the wound.” He was gratified to see that she had not only worn his jacket but had fastened the buttons all the way up.
She returned the garment to him now and pulled up the tails of the remaining clothing. The scab was even uglier. The antiseptic seemed to have fed the infection, but he told himself that it was the usual case with any kind of disorder of body that things got bad only as a means of gathering the requisite force to recapture good health—just as the reverse could be true, as with his mother, for whom each remission served as prelude to a more desperate phase, until he got to the point at which he dreaded hearing bad news that posed as good.
“I’ll get a fire started and heat some water, enough anyway to wash your face with. I know how to make a container of birch bark: you wouldn’t think that could be put over flames, but it can. Water can actually be brought to a boil in it.” He raised his eyebrows. But nothing served to lift her morale.
In fact, his own could have used a boost. He had not slept in twenty-four hours, and during the same period had eaten only the one tiny fish and the remainder of hers, and the larder was empty again. A worse problem was that he had no idea where they were. If they had passed the midpoint of the end of the lake, every step they took would bring them closer to where they had last seen evidence of the enemy’s presence. The woods beyond the clearing, in the direction Crews believed was generally north, looked exceptionally dense. Not only would the going be rough, but straying a few feet per mile off the proper course could result in missing the river altogether.
He went to the lake to clean up a bit, splashing water on his hairy face and scrubbing his teeth with a forefinger. He was trying to work up the courage to look at himself in the mirror, something he had not done in days, when she came out on the grassy point to join him.
“This is it,” she said. “This is where I took the swim. There’s where I left my clothes, right over there.”
“Then your camp must be nearby,” said Crews, standing up. “Just point which way. I’ll go and do what has to be done. You don’t have to come.”
She shook her head violently and set off on a diagonal course through a grove of young trees that within thirty yards opened into a little clearing, half the size of that in which they had spent the night but unlike the latter no dead end: a clearly defined trail led out of it toward the presumed north.
But there was no corpse in view, and in fact no camp, though it was obvious that one was not long gone. He poked a stick into the ashes of a cold campfire. On the earth beyond was a rectangular outline from which the normal top layer of nature’s mulch had been cleaned. At each of the four corners the ground had been pierced for a tent peg; the holes were still neat and sharply cut.
The woman came to confront him, with her noble forehead and eloquent eyes. “We really did camp here, as you can see. But nobody came out of the woods and murdered my husband. I lied about that. I still don’t want to admit it even to myself. He wasn’t killed. It was he who tried to kill me. He’s the one I was running from. He’s got the gun.”
Crews looked away. He had been so glad to see her that he had not questioned her original story, which only now seemed implausible. After his initial surprise, what immediately occurred to him at this moment was that his adversary was not some veteran backwoodsman to whom the lake and its environs were home turf, someone born with a rifle in his hand, but rather a soft, civilized city guy who except for the expensive equipment furnished by a sporting-goods outfitter would be at the mercy of the wilderness—as he himself had been, but he had proved his mettle. He could take this bastard. He longed to meet him.
But what he said to her was, “There’s the trail. I’m assuming it leads to the river. Let’s get going. The sooner we get to this Fort Judson, the sooner you can report him to the authorities.”
But now that she had been able to confess the central truth, she had to say more. “I was ashamed. I still am. He was getting ready to do some target shooting with that pistol of his. He did that every time we made camp, coming down from Judson. He’d blaze away at knotholes in trees or whatever, but his favorite target was something living, a squirrel or even a bird in the air. I hate guns on general principles, but the loud noise is really awful, out here where sounds of that kind would never otherwise be heard, and the possibility that he would wound or kill some creature for no reason at all always infuriated me.” She gasped for air. “I don’t want to be phony about it. I eat meat and wear leather, but I can’t stand the idea of needless destruction of—but here’s what never made any sense to me: he’s the animal lover, even gives money to—oh Christ…” It was as if she were trying to breathe underwater.
“Take your time,” Crews said. “I’m listening. I’m not going anywhere.”
After a moment she shrugged and said, in mirthless irony, “What a time to start an argument: when the other guy has a loaded gun in his hand. Maybe I was being suicidal. It seems so dumb now, but that was then, and he had never been violent with me.” She shook her head with force. “But if I start to think of my mistakes, I have to go back a lot further than that. I shouldn’t have come on the trip—I hate camping and canoeing! But I was trying to be fair. That’s always an error.”
Crews was shocked. “It is?”
“Not being fair,” she said. “But trying to be, which means the effort will be unnatural. I wanted a divorce, you see. His response was to beg me to come on a trip into the unspoiled wilderness, far from the corruptions of civilization, without which we could surely reconcile our differences. Of course, I didn’t believe that would or could or even should happen. So why did I agree? Maybe it was rather to be unfair: to pretend that I might reconsider while having my mind made up.” She gave Crews a vulnerable half-smile. “Nothing like being shot to stimulate self-examination.”
“I’m a veteran of marital strife,” said he. “But gunfire goes beyond my experience. Do you think it was his plan from the first to kill you?”
Her expression grew hard, even hateful. Her answer therefore was a surprise. “No,” she said quickly. “I don’t think that at all. I think the shooting was an impulse. I think the trip was a device to postpone doing anything about the breakup. That’s his style. When things don’t go your way, play for time, delay, postpone. Then regardless of what happens, pretend the delay has settled every question in your favor. My mistake was in making that point to him while he was holding a gun.”
“You were hit by the first shot and then you ran and he fired again and missed? I’m sure I heard two shots.”
“I can’t remember those moments very clearly. I was in the thick woods back there, running as hard as I could. I had no idea of where I was going. I didn’t even know I had been hit until I finally looked back for a second, still running, to see if he was chasing me, and turned and slammed my face against a tree and fell down. Only then did I feel a sort of itch at my side, and I looked and saw my shirt was full of blood. I took it off and cleaned the wound with it and threw it away when I stopped bleeding. My face hurt worse than the wound ever did. I kept going until some time later on I found that cave.”
Now that he had learned more about his adversary, Crews saw no need for undue haste in locating the river. The man was no longer as sinister as he had once seemed. It made sense to stay awhile at this place at which fish could be caught and smoked to take along as rations should food be harder to find where they were going.
“I want to hear whatever you want to tell,” he said. “But, as you will find before long, the problem of food becomes paramount out here, outranking all others: unless you are preoccupied with it, you’ll never get any. And even if you’re obsessed, you usually won’t find enough. So I should go and catch more fish now. If you feel like it, you might look around for some edible form of plant life. It isn’t healthy to only eat fish, but I haven’t done well at finding much else. I haven’t had the nerve to experiment much. Better to be malnourished than poisoned. But maybe you can do better.”
He realized that she might be offended by his displacing matters of great moment with banal practicality, but felt there was quite as good a chance that she might rather be relieved. He was, after all, not a destroyer but rather a preserver. And taking the chance paid off. While he fished in the lake with no success, despite trying a variety of bait and moving from place to place along a hundred yards of shoreline, she returned from the nearby grove with a shirttail full of little dark-green coils.
“I know what those are,” he cried. “Fiddlehead ferns! It never occurred to me to look for them around here.”
He went to cut a piece of birch bark. When he came back he demonstrated his pot-making technique. “It doesn’t look like much, but you wait: it’ll do the job without burning up.” The woman meanwhile had picked up and assembled the firemaking bow and drill.
“Am I doing it right?” she asked, but by the time he had completed the making of the crude bark vessel and filled it with water from the thermos, she had a flame going.
The blanched fiddleheads were delicious, just at the edge of bitterness, more delicate in flavor than spinach, firmer in texture. They blew on the coils but ate them still too warm, handing the knife blade back and forth, sparing their fingers but not their tongues.
One was so hot that Crews spat it into his hand. He excused himself, remembering Ardis. “I had a wife one time who really hated it when I did that. A leopard doesn’t change all its spots, even under these conditions.” They were sitting side by side on a fallen log. Between them was the birch-bark box, from which he had poured the excess water. He ate the coiled frond from his hand and stood up. “Go ahead, finish the rest. I’m going to take a bath in the lake and then we’ll hit the trail. You can heat enough water in the box for at least a little wash. Maybe it’s too soon for full-immersion bathing, what with your wound. Also it’s sure to be ice-cold out there.”
“I’ll collect more fiddleheads to take along,” she said. “Maybe they won’t be easy to find where we’re going.”
“Now you’re talking like a survivor.”
He went to the lake and stripped, but took all his clothes into the water and washed both them and his own face, hair, and hide as well as he could. The water felt gelid until he became habituated to it. When he emerged, he wrung as much water from his clothing as was possible and put it on damp. Scrubbing had not gone far to improve the chinos, which continued to display the many stains they had acquired from fish oils, rabbit blood, wood ashes, and other souvenirs of his experiences. Nor did washing make spotless the seersucker jacket, though it revealed new tears of which he had been ignorant.
He had been quicker with his ablutions than she. Forgetting that she had to wait for the water to heat, he was about to return too soon to the clearing when, en route, he saw, in fragmented form through the trees, the glimmerings of her nude body. He discreetly backpedaled to the beach, where he was chagrined to notice a sizable fish rise to snap at an insect, just offshore of one of the places where he had failed to get a bite an hour earlier. Could they really tell when the food had a hook in it? If that were true, no fish would ever be caught. Maybe like human beings they had their keen days, but no living thing could preserve itself forever.
He did not want to think of the woman’s body, of which he had seen very little in any event. He could hardly remember the feeling of fleshly desire, yet had he become altogether asexual he would not, or anyway not so quickly, have acted to honor her modesty.
When he did at last rejoin her, her face was still wet. It was glisteningly lovely that way, but he expressed his regrets at being unable to provide a towel. Dark patches of damp were visible here and there on her clothing.
“It’s a warm day,” she said, fluffing her hair with her hands. “It feels good to get wet and let everything dry on its own.”
Crews indicated his own still sopping garments. “I washed my extensive wardrobe while I was at it, something I might have done more when I was alone. But maybe cleanliness is mostly social, like conversation. I never talked to myself—I mean aloud, where you have to be fairly formal, don’t you, in sentences or anyway complete phrases. No doubt I made noises, grunts, et cetera. And I once talked or rather chanted nonsense at a bear. He probably didn’t mean me any harm. He left soon enough, but it’s scary to have one come and stare into your face when you’re lying half asleep. But in the end I guess I scared him or maybe just bored him. He hasn’t been seen since.”
He had hoped to amuse her with the reminiscence, but it served rather to evoke a grimmer association of her own. “That was why Michael said a gun might come in handy: there were potentially dangerous creatures in the woods, like bears.” Emotion darkened her face, which except for the bruise had stayed pale from the scrubbing.
He made sure the little store of equipment was stowed away securely at the appropriate places on his person. He had refilled the thermos in the lake. He tried hanging it in a new position on his belt so that it would be less likely to strike him as it swung with his stride.
He turned back to her. For an instant he saw the unsullied face of a young girl, but that was something of an illusion: the bruised area was still visible as if in shadow, though fading, and while not as old as he, she was an adult.
“Fine,” he said. “That should do the trick. Now that we’ve got that trail, we should make better time. How far is it from here to the river?”
“We camped overnight where we left the canoe. We started next morning and got here in late afternoon.” When asked for practical information, she was able to give it without evidence of the feeling it must invoke.
“Same rules apply: if you want to stop for any reason at all, sing out. I can’t keep looking back.”
She smiled. “But you do.”
He was surprised to feel embarrassment. It must be the first such occasion in many years. “That was when I didn’t know if you could make it…. Let me know when it looks to you as if we’re getting near the river, if it seems like I’m unaware.”
“You think he’ll be waiting there?”
“That’s a possibility. It’s also possible that he’s just run away. He’s not a professional killer, is he? He doesn’t have any special reason to think you and I have joined forces, but on the other hand, he knows there’s somebody else in an area that he thought was deserted. Has he got the guts to murder two people? When he did such a bad job at trying to kill you?”
“Obviously, I’m the worst judge of what he’s capable of,” she said. “I hardly ever heard him raise his voice. What I always liked about him was his gentleness. He’s so big, but in four years, until this, I never saw the least hint of brutality in anything he did or even said. He loves animals, for heaven’s sake!”
“Big?” Crews asked. “Tall, heavy?”
“Both, but not fat. He’s a weight-training nut. That’s how he got into the health-club business. That’s where we met, in fact.”
“Let’s go,” Crews said, and started off.
They hiked through a seemingly endless forest of straight, tall, high-foliaged trees so regularly spaced that it was sentimentally inviting to pretend the planting thereof had been by design. The trees were home to a number of squirrels, not only the familiar gray but a smaller red species that Crews was seeing for the first time. Hitting one of either breed with a projectile, spear, arrow, or rock, would be unlikely. All were much quicker than those degenerated by life in city parks, and the red ones would be tiny targets.
As a drunk, Crews had especially despised people who did anything at all to make or keep themselves fit, and almost his favorite opponent for a fight was some big inflated guy who thought bulk and physical strength were determining factors in hand-to-hand. Had this been true, the boxing champions of the world would always be the men who had been the largest contenders. But Crews was not his old imprudent, headlong self: he was lost, emaciated, and tattered, and he was defending a woman to whom he had no claim, one furthermore who had seen nothing wrong with this bastard until he tried to murder her.
The tall trees eventually came to an end and were succeeded by an area of low, brushy growth from which twice within two hundred yards plump white-flecked brown fowl sprang up with commotion and flew frantically away to land somewhere ahead—probably these two were one and the same, and likely it was edible, being grouse or partridge or pheasant, all of which he had eaten in the dressed and cooked form, none of which he probably could have identified in a living bird. He still had no weapon with which to bring down such prey.
Up ahead, the forest began again, now with pines, on rising terrain. He liked to think that on the far side, the downward slope, glimpses could be seen of the river in the valley below, for they had hiked steadily for hours, covering much ground. Even so, it was considerably more probable that his hopes were without foundation. That kind of ambivalence seemed essential to prevailing over the destructive elements of not just the wilderness but of the self as well.
He stayed skeptical even after they had toiled up the ascending ground—more taxing than it looked, continuing for a mile or more—and, going down the more acute slope on the other side, he heard the sound of rushing water.
When they arrived at the bank of the stream he could confirm that however vigorous, a stream was all it could be called.
He asked her, “This doesn’t look like where you left the canoe?”
She shook her head. “That was a real river, not so fast-moving, a lot wider. In fact, it’s the Kinnemac.” She raised her eyebrows as if the name might be familiar to him.
He shrugged. “Don’t ask me…. Did you cross, or pass, a stream that looked like this on your hike to the lake?”
“No. I didn’t see water in any form. And we were on the lookout. We only had canteens.”
The ground at the bank seemed dry. Crews found a patch of grass to sit on, and the woman joined him. He was thirsty for fresh water but, with so much at hand, enjoyed the spartan suspense.
“We’ll make camp here. It’s still early, but that overcast looks like it will stay until the sun goes down, and in fact I have begun to smell rain. But the main thing is that we’re apparently lost again. I remember a couple of places where it might have happened. Somewhere I made a bad decision, took the wrong choice of forks.”
“I certainly didn’t help,” she said. “After all, I was the one who had been along that way before, and yet I couldn’t recognize anything since we left the lake.”
Crews smiled ruefully. “I’ve boasted about how I’ve coped out here, building the lean-to and the raft, and getting food. But I don’t have any sense of direction at all unless the sun stays visible, and even then it’s easy to be misled. The other day I went all around the lake with the idea I was going in a more or less straight line. I thought we were heading north when we started. But the slightest divergence, especially when you’re never sure precisely where you are in the first place, the slightest deviation can grow with each mile.”
“He had a map and a compass,” she said. “You haven’t done badly with no help at all.”
That he was pleased to hear such sentiments did not lessen Crews’s chagrin. He had taken what seemed to be the more obvious alternative when they went from the open field onto the long wooded slope: there was a much fainter trail to the left. But then the error might have come much earlier: back in the tall trees, long before they had emerged to disturb the game bird from its home in the brush, he had noticed, perhaps too idly, the suggestion of another trail leading away to the right. Tomorrow they would have to retrace their route to the nearer of the alternative trails, take it, and if by the end of that day they had no good reason to believe it the correct one, come all the way back and take the other.
He said as much to the woman. “And if neither of them is the right one, then we’ll have to really start all over, go back to your old campsite.” He looked downstream, where the water became shallow, splashing around protruding rocks, a minor rapids. “Meanwhile, this looks like a livable place.” He crawled to the edge of the low bank and filled the thermos cup with water, wetting his hand. “It’s ice-cold.” He gave her the cup and went back to fill the bottle. “Should be trout in here.”
She was standing. “I’d really like to take a whole bath,” she said. “I can put with up the cold water.”
Crews frowned. “I don’t know…”
“I’ll be okay. I really have to begin taking over my own care. Believe me, I need to. It’s no reflection on you.” She smiled. “I’m all right, really. You’ve saved my life.”
“Well…”
“But I have to get hold of it.”
“But let me just see how deep it is,” he said, “and how fast the current is running.” He took off his jacket and dropped it on the bank. He stepped down into knee-deep water, which was so cold as almost to cause his legs to buckle. It came only to his waist in midstream. The current was brisk but not as forceful as it had looked. By the time he had waded back he was over the shock of the initial chill. But as he scrambled out he could say quite truthfully, “It’s even colder than I thought. I wish you’d at least let me make a fire first.” He was so chilled he had to show his teeth. “It’s icy even with your clothes on.” He squeezed as much water from his own as he could while continuing to wear them. “I’ll get going on the fire.”
He went into the nearby trees. It took a while to cut a selection of branches from which to make the little firemaking bow. He had been improvident in abandoning the rig he had used at the lake but had foolishly counted on the sun to be available next time he needed fire, and it was inconvenient to tote anything that could not be contained in his pockets.
When he returned to the streamside, he saw the woman’s dark-green knitted shirt, the one borrowed from him, was darker still because it was soaking wet.
“I see you washed the shirt.”
“Actually I used it for a towel. I hope you don’t mind. I didn’t have anything else.”
Crews knelt to assemble his apparatus. He needed her shoelace again, and this time asked her to take it out, if she would, herself. “You went in without your shirt?”
She gave him the lace, having removed it while balancing nicely on one foot. “I was naked. The freezing water seemed to help the wound, like an astringent, you know.”
He quickly completed the construction of the rig and put the tinder in place around the socket of the drill.
She said, “I’ve got an idea I’d like to try. Could I borrow the tool with the knife blade? I waded down to the rapids before. There are lots of fish that swim through the rocks there. The water’s fairly shallow. It really looks like you could catch them with your bare hands, but I tried and failed. I’m just not deft enough. But what about making a spear? What do you think? Didn’t the Indians fish that way?”
“I tried it early on, in the pond, and got too impatient when it didn’t work. I probably didn’t keep at it long enough. Also I didn’t make a very good spear. But, sure, go ahead.”
“Any suggestions as to the design?”
He deliberated for a moment. “If you could make a barb of some kind, like a fishhook. You’ll need something to keep the fish from slipping off after it’s speared.”
“How about a long stick that has a little cluster of three or more branches at one end, like a hand almost?”
“That’s a great idea,” Crews said.
“It’s not original. I saw it in the movies or television. It was being done on some island, I think, by people in sarongs.”
“Terrific,” Crews said. “Just one minute….” He needed the knife for a couple of small alterations to the end of the drill and the socket in which it would turn, having finished which he presented the tool to her.
He watched her tall, slender figure go into the edge of the woods. Her hair was still loose. He hoped he was right in his assumption that if they had gone astray en route to the river, her husband would not be anywhere nearby. Crews had nothing but contempt for the man, and knew no fear for his own safety, but to shoot her in the back from a place of concealment would not be beyond the capacity of such a coward. Besides, it was a pleasure, really a joy, to see her graceful movements. She went too far in saying he had saved her life, but it was gratifying to know he had served some purpose.
He started sawing away with the bow. The process asked for more than muscle: making fire by this unlikely means required the intense concentration of all faculties.
Before he had succeeded in producing the first wisp of smoke, she was back, carrying a serviceable spear. At one end it had been cut just above the junction of three branches.
“How does this look?”
“That was quick,” he said. “I’ve been getting nowhere.”
“Should I try? And you go spear fishing?”
“The spear was your idea. The fire was mine. We should stick with our specialties.”
With the knife blade she sharpened the three branch ends to points and returned the tool to him. He sawed violently with the bow and drill until sweat from his forehead began to fall on that which he wanted to ignite. Taking a breather, he watched her walk along the bank to where the water rushed through the rocks. Balancing on one foot and then the other, she pulled off her shoes and socks, then bent to roll her jeans to the knee. She stepped into the current, which swirled around her calves. Soon she stabbed violently at something, but the spear came up dripping and empty. She did much the same several more times and then turned to look his way and shrug. He waved.
Like everything else performed with primitive implements, spear fishing was surely much trickier in practice than it seemed in theory. But he probably should have accepted her offer to swap jobs, having by now lost faith in the likelihood that fire could come from his current apparatus. He needed a base plate of drier wood. He looked up to see her raise the spear end triumphantly. A wriggling silvery fish was impaled on its points. She waded near enough to shore to deposit her catch on the nearest land. Crews thought it possible that the fish might writhe to the edge of the bank and fall into the water, but he decided to let her learn by experience.
Meanwhile, inspired by her success, he returned with vigor to his own efforts, to which he applied himself so obsessively that at first he failed to register that the sky was brightening. He dropped the bow and focused the mirror on the tinder. The sun broke through the overcast just long enough to get an ember going. It was like a special favor to him. By the time the cloud cover closed in on its temporary rent, he had made a hot little blaze.
During the same period she had mastered the technique and caught fish after fish. At one point she signaled to him with all the fingers of one hand and then shifted the spear to the other so as to display two fingers more. Apparently she did not know the way to signal numbers greater than five using only one hand, or did only boys do that?
When the fire was in a condition to go unattended for a while, he went along the bank to where her catch lay flopping. Now there were nine, and she caught the tenth as he watched. She waded in to shore and presented it to him on the tines of the spear. He added the fish to the lot on the grassy bank.
He gave her a hand with which to pull herself from the water.
“See what I mean?” he asked. “You’re the fisherman in this—in this partnership.” He had almost said “family.” “I was just lucky the sun came out briefly. And by the way, it was over there. Which would mean that what I thought was north was actually way to the east.”
“But to be really sure about direction, just looking at the sun isn’t enough, is it? You really need an additional point of reference.”
“Good of you to mention that,” he said. “But I still have a lousy sense of direction, the only sense that hasn’t improved since I’ve been out here.”
“Maybe because direction according to the compass is a man-made concept. That is, there really is a magnetic pole and a force we call magnetism that affects metals, but what animals care about is light and heat and water and food. Your directional instincts have been fine about those things, even when the sun went in.”
“Now you’re buttering me up,” he said, “so that I’ll cook your fish on my fire.” He had brought along her shoelace and was about to return it but thought of another use. “Do you mind if I string some of these fish on it, to carry back?”
“Let me. You’ve got enough to do as it is.” She took the lace and began forthrightly to thread it through the gills and out the mouth of a fish that was still feebly twitching. “I can’t decide what’s more humane: letting them suffocate or killing them in some other way.”
Crews had known the same feeling. “I’m a coward about that. I just don’t decide, which means they drown in air…. I see you know how to do that. It took me a while to figure it out.”
She sniffed. “Michael never caught anything. But he talked about stringing up his catch, and I remember a lot of stuff just from listening. Then I’ve cooked whole fish that you buy, and watched the fish-store guy clean them—I think you’re supposed to call him the ‘fishmonger,’ but I’d probably laugh if I did.”
“I’ll bet you’re a lot better cook than I,” Crews said. “I have got into the habit of just boiling or burning the food as fast as I can and gobbling it up.”
By now she had strung half the fish on the shoelace. “I can do one or two simple things, but he was the main cook: that is, when we weren’t eating out, which we did a lot.”
Crews uncoiled some of his fishline. “Here. I’ll take the rest.”
They walked back together, each with a sagging string of fish. He dropped his on the ground nearby and knelt to inspect the fire.
He looked up at her. “I’ve never before had this much food at my disposal. I think I’ll go wild and try a new gastronomic treat. Do you know those Japanese restaurants where they bring a hot rock to the table and cook all sorts of things on it, fish, vegetables, thin slices of steak, and so on? I think I’ll try that. Meanwhile I can put a lot of these fellows on to smoke.”
“Can I get the rocks?” she asked. “Nice big smooth ones?”
Crews missed her terribly even on such a trivial separation, when she was in sight the entire time. He had not realized he was so lonely until his loneliness was relieved. But she did everything so effectively that he welcomed the help. The rocks she brought back were just what he had had in mind. He put them into the hot coals. He constructed a smoking rack above the fire, hung on it a spitful of eviscerated fish, and threw on the green branches she had gathered.
“I’ll let the rocks get good and hot,” he said. “You don’t suppose you could find more fiddleheads?”
“I sure can look.”
While she was gone he filleted the remaining fish. After a time she returned from the woods carrying something in the denim jacket used as a bag. She dumped it on the ground alongside him.
There was a mixture in the outspread jacket, representing everything but fiddlehead ferns: some broad green leaves; some slenderer fronds; some delicate shoots that terminated in little bulbs. But most conspicuous were the pale mushrooms.
“God almighty,” Crews said, with more emotion than he would have expressed had he thought about it. “I’m not going to try those!” He paused. “You do know some are poisonous?”
“We—he had this book about stuff you could find to eat in the wild, I don’t know why, because he didn’t look for anything. We lived on those freeze-dried packets they make for campers. Anyway, these mushrooms look just like the pictures of the edible ones.”
“I’ve always heard there are bad ones that are dead ringers for the good kind, and only experts can tell the difference. We can’t take any chances at all—I mean, apart from those that are forced upon us.”
“All right.”
“I don’t mean to be disagreeable,” he said.
“You’re just making your point.” She said this straightforwardly, squatting there next to her jacketful of vegetables.
He smiled at her. “Do you realize we don’t even know each other’s name?” He put out his hand. “I’m Bob Crews.”
Her handshake was warm, but the rest of her response came from a greater moral distance. “You’re welcome to inspect my driver’s license, there in the pocket.” She nodded at the spread-eagled jacket. “But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not hear my name. He kept yelling it while he was trying to kill me. He made me hate the sound of it, at least for now. So if you don’t mind calling me something else. I don’t care what.”
“Of course,” Crews said sympathetically. He was still concerned that he might have been too harsh with her about the mushrooms, even though he had been quite right. “Let’s see….” He smirked. “I’ve been married so often, all the women’s names I can think of have been used up.”
“How about ‘Friday’?”
“Pardon?”
“As a name,” she said.
“As in ‘Thank God, it’s … ’?” He laughed. “Okay, Friday it is, then. Now, these greens, what do you think, should we cook them or eat them raw?”
“I’ve already tried a little of one of these.” She held up the sheaf of bulbed shoots. “Some kind of wild onion, I believe.”
“I remember those things from when I was a kid. I didn’t think they were supposed to be edible.”
“Maybe these are a different species. They’re not bad.”
“I’ll chop them up and use them as a condiment,” Crews said. He tore a fragment off one of the broad leaves in her collection and chewed it briefly. It had a mild flavor, in the area of romaine, but was fairly tough. “This should be cooked.” After similar tests with the remaining greenery, he decided, “These will make an okay salad. Are they plants you saw in the book?”
“I wish I had read the whole thing. Unfortunately I only looked at the part on mushrooms.”
“I’m sorry about them,” said Crews. “We’ll get back to civilization and find that they not only were edible but of a rare variety highly prized by gourmets, and I will be proved a fool.”
“No, you won’t!”
She said this with so much feeling that Crews hastily assured her he had been kidding. “It wouldn’t be the first time I was wrong about food. You should be warned that among my distinctions is an unerring instinct to pick the worst establishment from a selection: I even managed on occasion to find lousy restaurants in France—which by the way were not tourist places but where French truck drivers ate. You see, my then wife—” But this was not the time for such reminiscences. “The stones should be hot enough by now. The fish will cook fast once they’re started.”
He used a pair of green sticks to probe for the rocks, which were buried just inside one edge of the fire above which the smoking rack was mounted. The embers were so hot that the sticks were immediately dried out and ignited, but, working quickly, he worried the two stones out to free ground. Their appearance had not changed, but he could feel the intense heat as high as his face. They were searing the sparse vegetation beneath them.
The waiting fillets were stacked on a clean rock nearer the woman than he. He tried her name on for size. No doubt it would take a while to sound natural. “Okay, Friday, if you’ll hand me the fish, we’ll have a go at this. Unfortunately, I don’t have any oil or fat. I’m hoping the surface will just be so hot the food will seal up when it hits it.”
She brought him the fillets, and he rapidly dropped three of them onto each stone, skin down, snapping his fingers back before they were singed by the ferocious heat. The fish cooked so vigorously, with loud sizzlings and copious smoke, that no sooner had he deposited the last than he returned to turn the first piece over. He had had the forethought to provide himself with two crude spatulas, lengths of a broad branch, each shaved flat at one end.
The first fillet broke in two on his efforts to lift it, but no further, and it left most of its skin behind to blacken and burn. But perhaps it was the oil from that skin that cured the surface of the stone so that, when turned and charred on the reverse, the fish did not stick.
He grinned at Friday. “It actually works!”
They ate off two clean stones that were flat and broad enough to serve as plates, but Crews found reason to complain of his own lack of foresight.
“It didn’t occur to me that these cold rocks would chill the food so quickly. I should have asked you to cut some bark for plates.” He was gobbling the fish as fast as he could, before it lost all heat, and speaking between bites. “On the other hand, if it was too hot we wouldn’t be able to pick it up. Forks would be nice, too. It shouldn’t be hard to carve something that would do.” This thought had never come to him when he was alone.
“I’ll try,” Friday said, eating much more deliberately, and so gracefully with her long fingers that silverware might have been an encumbrance. “Meanwhile, this is delicious. I wouldn’t even use salt if we had any.”
“I wonder if there’s something in the stones, some minerals maybe, that give the salty effect, because it’s there, or anyway the illusion thereof.” He was eating the middle fillet from the stack of three: it was still warm. “This is as close to stark reality as I’ve ever come, and still I wonder what’s real and what isn’t. And the only way I’ve learned to do anything is by trial and error. You waste a lot of time and effort like that, but when you’ve got nobody around to teach you anything … Until now I haven’t even had anyone with whom to compare notes.”
The clear stream flowed vigorously just beyond them. It was sufficiently fast-moving to provide what were probably trout, yet shallow enough to wade across should the need or wish come to visit the forest on the far side. It was full of food, and its water was cold and sweet. Likely it flowed toward the same lake the shore of which they had left that morning. If they had not yet found the river, at least they were not really lost within their piece of wilderness. The route from the lake could always be retraced, and they could start over. Meanwhile dinner was very good, and he could see just the spot to construct a lean-to, for which the adjacent woods would provide excellent materials.
“If it’s okay with you, we’ll stay here for the night. There’ll be enough time, for a change, to make a decent camp.” He was even enthusiastic. “I’ve learned a few tricks on how to make things somewhat comfortable.” He squinted at the sky. “The weather looks good, but I have a feeling rain’s going to come along later on, and a good tight roof might be in order…. I’m about ready for salad.”
He had not gotten around to boiling the big leaves, which Friday had pushed aside, along with the mushrooms. She had torn the rest of the greenery into pieces, sliced the wild onions over them, and tossed the mixture in her jacket.
“Not bad,” Crews said, masticating. “It would only be ruined by oil and vinegar.” The onion got stronger in the aftertaste, or perhaps it was just that his palate was no longer inured to strong flavors.
Friday ate every shred of her portion, then went to the bank of the stream, leaned down, and rinsed her hands. She crawled back on her knees, a movement he found endearing, something she might have done at a picnic.
But she did not return his smile. She stared across at the dark woods on the other side of the water. “Whenever I let myself think about it—which is just about every time I get close to accepting that it happened—I begin to worry about where he might be.”
“I haven’t forgotten him,” Crews said hastily, though in fact he had been trying to do so. “But if he was where we saw that smoke yesterday—and we’ve spent the time since in veering away from due north—then we’re farther from him than ever. On his side of the lake, there isn’t any high ground for miles. We made that little fire last evening, but he wouldn’t have been able to see our smoke from wherever he was in the woods. He’d have had to come out to the shore to get the right perspective. He’s unlikely to have followed us all day to here. If he’s got a compass and map, he knows how to get back to the canoe. I believe that’s where he’ll head. I keep saying ‘we,’ though it’s possible he doesn’t know you’ve joined forces with me. Do you think he might just take the canoe and leave?”
“I would no longer be surprised by anything he did,” Friday said bleakly. “Unless it succeeded.”
Crews took a chance and asked, “Is that more or less what you were telling him when he took a shot at you?”
She stared sharply at him for a moment, but then softened and said, “More or less. I was wrong—and I don’t mean just because of what subsequently happened. I said cruel things to him sometimes, but you have no idea of how hard it is to live with someone for whom you’ve lost all respect.”
Crews sighed inwardly: he had certainly heard enough on that subject at second hand, but he was not violent with the women who told it to him. He got physical only with men, and then invariably with those capable of damaging him. At least he was not nearly so dishonorable as he could have been.
“After a while,” Friday said, “the person you despise most is yourself. You shouldn’t let it go that far.”
Crews was uncomfortable. He could only mutter lamely, “Well…”
“We’d get to a campsite, and I’d gather firewood and fetch water, and he’d shoot his gun at things,” Friday said. “That infuriated me more than his women ever did, because at least they paid for their fees. He owned a health club until, of course, it went under, taking most of my savings with it. The bank wouldn’t lend him a cent. His typical response as business got worse was to expand, open another branch.”
“I’ll bet you have your own profession,” Crews said.
“I’m with a brokerage, in sector analysis.”
“And whatever that is, I’m sure you do well at it.”
She modestly lowered her eyes. “Okay.”
“No,” he said, “better than okay.”
“I’m a vice-president, but only one of several. Let’s say I earn a living.”
Crews picked up her denim jacket, which had served as tablecloth, and shook it out. He returned it to her. “Let me get this over with: I don’t know anything much about any kind of work. A person like you will probably find it difficult to understand that somebody like me exists. About all I can say for myself is that I’ve never really lived off a woman—if that’s any kind of criterion for anything. But I did live off my father until I was way beyond childhood, and in fact long after he died, so I can’t call myself a model of independence.” He was suddenly aware that he had always responded favorably to women who had made a go at a profession, while he resented successful men.
Friday stood up and put on her jacket. “I’m wasting good weather on my whining,” she said, staring into the sky. “I think you’re right about the coming rain.”
“Can you smell it too?”
She smiled intimately at him. “I think so because you do, and you’re usually right.”
Crews realized that he should simply accept the commendation, but the experience was as yet too rare to accommodate readily. So he had to say, “Except when I’m wrong.” But that sounded like a rebuke, so he quickly explained about using one’s nose in the wilderness. “I think maybe smell has a lot to do when you think it’s rather some sixth sense. I’ve learned to breathe harder, by which I mean both deeper and faster, but mostly it has to do with, as it were, listening to what the nose tells you. I’ve tried to take my cue from the animals. Did you notice that deer? For a split second before he took off, his nostrils quivered. He was trying to smell us, even though he could see us well enough, but we were downwind.”
“You saw that? He was just a blur to me.”
“Because you weren’t prepared for it,” Crews said. “When you’re out here for a while on your own, you develop the state of mind animals have: you expect to be surprised at any moment. You go about your business, but you’re always on guard. Being alert is a thing of the nervous system. It doesn’t affect you physically until the moment for action comes.” He laughed. “I’d be amazed if you found any meaning at all in those remarks.”
“I think I do know what you mean,” she said. “It’s like karate. Until you actually make a move, your mind and body are supposed to be in a state of utter relaxation. Then, even while a punch is in the process of traveling toward its target, during that millisecond the fist is resting serenely, only to become like steel at the instant of impact. I hadn’t realized that technique has some basis in natural principles. So much of it seems artificial, the ritual and all.”
“You do karate?”
“My purse was snatched. I resisted and got my wrist broken for my trouble. I was sure I could have fought him off if I had known how: he was not that big. So I took karate lessons when my arm was okay….” She was looking at the fish smoking on the rack above the fire. “I wonder if the smoke wouldn’t be more concentrated if a little enclosure was put around it? Maybe a little lean-to, closed in at the ends. Want me to collect the materials?”
On all previous occasions Crews had used an unenclosed fire, which meant that the fish had to be positioned so that the prevailing breeze blew the smoke their way. It was not that he had failed to think of erecting a wind barrier; it was rather that he had not taken the trouble, what with all else that always needed to be done. But he had a partner now.
In no time at all, Friday had surrounded and roofed the fire in green foliage, through the multifold interstices of which rose the fragrant smoke from the moist wood atop the hot coals, having first bathed the fish on the spit.
Crews meanwhile began to build the structure that would shelter them overnight, the grandest one yet, almost seven feet long, more than four feet high at the ridgepole, and at least five feet wide.
Friday pitched in when her own project was completed. She invariably volunteered for any job he would have, working alone, postponed as long as possible, such as sinking the uprights into the earth, which required dogged excavation with an improvised and inefficient trowel of wood, through roots and rocks, and then leveling them by eye, a miscalculation in which, however minor at the outset, would be magnified as the structure rose with each joint untrue. But she was also more patient than he in the interweaving, the rudimentary thatching, of the freshly cut pine boughs that would, not by luck but with care, make the roof-walls shed rain.
By twilight they had built a shelter sturdy enough to continue standing when Crews pushed firmly against its uprights. It was positively spacious inside, a good two and a half feet for each, with at least a symbolic barrier between them, suggested by the two additional uprights mounted along the center line to help hold the long ridgepole stretching from front to back posts. Outside, because the structure was erected on level ground, they ringed it with a shallow drainage ditch.
“We’ll know how sound the roof is only when it starts to rain.”
“You were right not to make it wider, because that would have flattened the pitch and exposed it more to the rain.”
“That didn’t occur to me,” he confessed. “I was just concerned with how long such slender poles could be without bending under the weight of the boughs they supported. There’s so damn many things to keep in mind.” He heard a pattering above them and for a moment believed birds were hopping there, then identified the sound as rain. “There it is already. I was right about its coming but didn’t know how soon. We finished just in time.”
“The fish!” Friday cried, and before scrambling out, said, “Stay here. I’ll get them.”
She meant those from the smokehouse. Crews had declared them done some time earlier and doused the coals.
She returned promptly, bringing the spitted fish and the strong scent of the fire. He caught the end of the heavily loaded spit as, crawling in, she tried to extend it with one hand. He hooked its ends into the structure above them.
“I hope that’ll hold. As long as it does, we’ve got a convenient larder. You get hungry, just reach up. Of course, the whole thing might come down on top of us. Or the bear might show up. But I’m counting on the weather to keep him in his own home.”
She writhed a little. “With just the right position, this mattress isn’t bad. You gave me the equivalent of a ten-inch innerspring.”
“And still it won’t be enough,” Crews said. “It’ll be completely flat by morning. I’ve done that night after night for myself, and never yet have piled them high enough. What I miss most is not roast beef or ice cream or even salt: it’s a real bed with a real mattress and sheets and blankets.” The fish, with their smoky fragrance, were tantalizing. He finally reached up and pulled one from the spit. “I’m hungry again, after all that work. Help yourself.”
“No, thanks. If it keeps raining, we might need them.”
He had already eaten half the fish. “You’re right. I shouldn’t—”
“No,” she said hastily. “I didn’t mean that. I meant that I’m just not that hungry yet, so I can wait.”
He swallowed the remainder of his snack and licked his fingers. “If you do have any criticism of me at any time, don’t worry about offending me. Just sound off. Out here a mistake could be deadly. I’m lucky I survived those I made when alone. It was especially tough in the early days. Looking back, I think I was half out of my mind. I would just curl up in a hole somewhere. I couldn’t even find the wreck of the plane after a while.”
The light was poor inside the shelter. Her face was in shadow. “I’ve been obsessed with my own troubles ever since we met,” she said. “I’m sorry to say I just vaguely remember your mentioning the crash, I think back at the cave.”
He related the essentials. “In the first few days a couple of search planes flew over, but I couldn’t attract their attention by spelling out messages on the beach. I think one did come after I could make fire, but I didn’t have a fire going at that moment and couldn’t make one because everything was wet. There haven’t been any airplanes since. The only explanation I can think of is that Dick was way off course for some reason. Maybe his instruments failed. I think that can happen by hundreds of miles, eventually. By now I can speak with considerable experience about being lost on land. It must be even easier to do that in the air, especially if there’s trouble with the radio. I remember he was yelling into the mike.”
“Did you say that was a week or so ago?”
“More like a few weeks,” Crews said. “I guess I should have kept a calendar, but I never started one early enough and by now I’ve really lost track. It was late in May, anyhow.”
“May? It’s almost August now. That’s two months.”
“God almighty, can that be? Then I’m even more lost than I thought, in more ways than one. I don’t have any idea where the time could have gone. Building the raft obviously took longer than I was aware, and then I had the eternal job of finding food. I tried making sandals and some other stuff, bow and arrow, et cetera. Maybe I was on the beach, out of it, longer than it seemed. God, two months.”
“Wait a minute,” she said. “I was back in town then. There was a plane crash in the news, I think. But there were more than two passengers, as I remember.”
“How about four? Did I forget? Dick brought along a couple of other passengers, business associates.”
“Four. That’s possible. A prominent businessman, and his party … that’s right. But that was over the ocean, or anyway that’s my memory of where they were searching for them, along the coast. That’s why I didn’t make the connection at first. Could that have been your plane?”
The rain had slackened off a bit. The roof thus far had not been penetrated, a fact in which Crews, disturbed by learning of the derangement in a basic sense he had never doubted, that was concerned with the duration of time, tried to take comfort. “Could have been,” he answered. “Probably was, if what you say is true. I didn’t know we were supposed to be anywhere near the coast, either by design or accident. But then I didn’t know anything at all. I was drunk. In fact, I had been more or less consistently drunk for years.” No doubt that accounted for his disorientation after the crash: added to everything else, the shock and all, were the effects of the cold-turkey withdrawal from alcohol. “What you say would explain why there hasn’t been much of a search around here. We’re nowhere near the sea, are we? Do you know?”
“I think it’s more than a hundred miles from Fort Judson.”
The rain had stopped pattering above them. Looking out the end of the shelter beyond his feet, he could still see as far as the bank of the stream, but the light had begun to fail. That it was so dark inside was due to the dense weave of the roof, which had been mainly Friday’s deft work. They were, of course, vulnerable to any enemy, supine, and blind to any approach not from the brook or from that portion of the woods he could see by rolling on his stomach and looking out the end behind his head, which in fact he had not yet done.
“It’s really hit me hard, that I lost all track of time.”
“But isn’t it true of animals that they lack a sense of duration? If you’ve ever had a dog, you know he hates to be alone as much for five minutes as for all day, and will give you as wild a welcome if you just come back from mailing a letter at the corner as if you returned from a month in Europe. You were just telling me what you’ve learned from animals. Maybe you acquired their approach to time as well.”
“It’s something to tell myself, anyhow,” said Crews. “Thanks. I used to have a great dog when I was a kid, by the way. A golden retriever named Walt. Thanks too for reminding me. I’m going to get another when I get back. I haven’t owned a dog in years. Do you have one?”
“Not since I’ve lived in a city apartment. But sure, all the way through school, my brother and sisters and I had dogs. Sometimes they were supposed to belong to us all in common, sometimes to individuals, depending on how well we were getting along. We fought a lot, and when we’d be mad at somebody, we were officially mad at their dog too, but in fact never were. We’d actually spoil the other guy’s dog to lure its affection away. This never worked. Dogs never turn against any members of the family to which they belong—at least they don’t if every member spoils them.”
The rain returned with a sudden rush. Crews put his fingertips to the boughs above him. He could not really believe that the roof would continue to shed water under this downpour. “I think I developed a block against thinking of the past, though I did it for a while until it just seemed to be weakening me.”
“I was just making talk,” Friday said.
“God, I welcome it! There was a time when I thought I might never hear another voice. I got used to talking to myself internally, without the responsibility of forming words, let alone connected thoughts. But then my conversation with myself tends to get enmired in one subject alone: my failures. My marriages, my father. I had to read in the paper that he put a gun into his mouth and pulled the trigger. We didn’t get along, but that was my doing, not his. There was a lot of other stuff I didn’t know, either, until he was dead. Some of it was good. He was a trial lawyer. His best-known clients were mobsters, but he did a whole lot of pro bono work too, for otherwise defenseless people, for no fee whatever, many of whom, unlike me, went to his funeral in tribute, I read, including the poor guy who served nine years in prison for a crime he did not commit, losing his business, home, and wife. My father got him out and sued the state and never took a cent of the big settlement. I never knew at the end my father had cancer of the throat and couldn’t talk, and he had had this deep, rich baritone that no jury—and few women—could resist….”
A drop of water struck his head from behind. He rolled over on his belly and looked out the near end of the shelter. A little pool had formed in a slight depression in the earth between the shelter and the encircling drainage trench, and the rain was splashing in it. He was struck on the forehead and in the eye as he watched. But he was relieved to see the pool had not yet extended as far as Friday’s side.
“That’s what happens when I take my mind off the here and now,” he said. “It’s coming in over here. I should have made end panels.”
He crawled out of the shelter, backward, at just the moment the heavens lost all restraint and poured water down in great shimmering sheets, one of which immediately drenched him. Before he reached the line of woods he was struck twice again. He was searching his soaked pockets when, out of another swirl of wind and rain, Friday appeared.
Her hair was a tight-fitting, sodden cap. She handed him the multipurpose tool, which he had forgotten she had used last.
“You shouldn’t have!” he shouted. “Now get back.”
“Why? I couldn’t get any wetter.” She was smiling, water coursing down her face and into her mouth. “You cut. I’ll carry.”
He worked as fast as he could, though as she had pointed out, there was no need for haste. They were both drenched to the bone, with no means of drying out till the sun returned. He would not even be able to find dry materials from which to make fire by bow and drill. Even if their roof held tight against the cloudburst, they would soak the interior merely by reentering. But it was better to work than to lie passively in wet misery. He cut enough pine boughs to give each an armload.
They piled a supply at the head end of the shelter, then entered, inserting themselves backward, in the prone position, at the foot—which thereby became, and stayed, the head, for they had to close that entrance too against the rain, and to do so otherwise would have required their reversing themselves once inside, so as to reach out and pull up the pine boughs. It was Friday who had the foresight to design this maneuver.
The interior was darker than before, and by now the roof had in fact finally leaked, though not badly, considering the force of the rain. And at least the makeshift mattress, though wet, kept them off the ground. They had both now rolled to the supine.
“I don’t see how any roof we could make would hold up perfectly against these conditions,” Crews said. “This one’s doing a better job than could have been expected.” From time to time a drop fell on his face, and if he felt for the spot of penetration and poked around, rearranging the branches so that it was plugged, one or more leaks were thereby created in the area adjoining.
“One more layer,” Friday said, “and it would be watertight. I know that now.”
“Maybe a steeper pitch,” said Crews. “But a certain amount of width would have to be sacrificed, the higher the ridgepole.”
“How about making it longer, to compensate, with compartments end to end, railroad-style.”
“It wouldn’t be as companionable, though.”
“That’s true.”
He stayed silent for a moment and had nothing to hear but the falling water. “Where’s it leaking on your side?”
“Here and there. I’m twisted, to avoid what I can.”
Crews sat up. “Switch with me. This side’s better. There’s only a little coming in down by my feet.”
“No, thanks,” she said. “Certainly not. We’re in this together.”
“You’ve still got that wound, haven’t you?” He had asked about it when they were building the shelter and had given her the antiseptic can to keep.
“I told you it’s coming along fine. Really. It doesn’t hurt any more when I move, only if I touch it.”
“We’re stuck here until the rain stops. I never have figured out quite how to handle the problem of bad weather—except in the case of that cave. You know, I went in there to get out of the rain. I never asked you, did you hear me come in in the dark?”
“Of course. For a little while I thought it was him. But then, after the noises stopped, I believed it was some animal, some big animal by the sound of it. I didn’t sleep all night. I was terrified. And then when morning came outside, and a little light penetrated, there near the entrance where you were, and I saw you, and I saw that knife near your hand, I got the idea, the crazy idea, he had sent you to kill me. I had a box of matches in my pocket. I had just made a campfire and was going to cook lunch when he began his target practice the day he shot me. I had found a piece of dead wood that I thought I might use to defend myself, and brought it along to the cave. When I first made out your form, I almost panicked and considered beating out your brains before you woke up. Fortunately, I decided I ought to see you better before doing that, and I used up all my matches getting that stick ignited.”
The rain ceased to come in gusts and settled down to a steady fall of medium force, but that was worse for the roof, which at least on his side leaked more. He did not mention this or ask about hers, because there could be no help for it.
“Don’t forget the fish,” he said. “They must be all wet by now. We’ll have to dry them out when we can. Otherwise they won’t keep long. Of course, we could eat them all.”
“I’ll have one now,” Friday said. It had grown darker outside, which meant he could hardly see her, a foot away. “Here’s yours.”
He accepted the fish, which had been wetted on but stayed crisp of skin. “I’m still so hungry I find this delicious. But we might think about varying our diet. We could use more bulk, and something starchy if that’s possible. Too much protein isn’t good for the system. For that matter, some fat would be in order.”
She was still eating the same fish. She made more of her food than he did. Thus far he had continued the same gulping that had been his way when alone.
“I’ll get on that in the morning,” she said.
He bent his neck at another angle, to avoid the water drops that were falling on his forehead. “I think I now have an idea where we got off the right trail. To find it again, we shouldn’t have to backtrack too far.” New drips had found him, and he moved his head again, this time nearer the center line.
“Why don’t we sleep on it?” she said, very near where his face was now, startling him.
He pulled away a little. “Look, I don’t want to bring up unhappy memories, but something’s been bothering me. Before I heard those gunshots, I found a footprint on the side of a cliff. It couldn’t have been yours, either one of you. Of course, I don’t know how long it had been there.”
He waited for her reply, but none came. He felt better for having brought up the question, even if there might never be an answer. He was pleased that she could fall asleep under these conditions. The rain had not stopped but was no longer falling so loudly he could not hear the regular sound of Friday’s breathing. He had not slept with a woman in ages. He had not slept at all since the night before last, in the cave. He was soaked to the skin, in a universe of dampness, lying on wet boughs above mud, water falling in his face. But he was not alone.