BY MORNING, the widow sat upright among fallen branches, the forest now motionless above her. She was some distance from the saddle and saddlebags. The mare was not in sight. She ventured outward in short spokes from her bed, but it was obvious to her that the mare was indeed gone. Had there been wolves? She had dreamed of running wolves. But she had also dreamed of her grandmother dragging her by the ankle across a lawn. She stood wherever light came through the trees in pools and shafts, and its warmth was pure pleasure. She rubbed her numb arms and face. No sound anywhere. Strange that her heart still beat and her breath came unbidden. She hung the saddle on a branch to dry, though there was no point — she would not use it again. The spattered grey hide and dark ears, shoulders rolling between her knees. Even the widow’s unmoored mind could grasp the meaning of it. Without the horse, her meandering would be slower and she would lack even an animal’s attention to progress. Survival was unlikely. She set the saddle up as a shrine, not to the lost animal, but to herself, to the fact that she had existed.
She left her belongings and wandered aimlessly. Spider webs brushed her face and she did not wipe them away but let spiders cling to her and ride a while and drop away. The sun came down in beams and shafts, and once, when she looked up, she saw the moon hung high and pale in the blue morning. Tricky thing, pretending to be gone when it wasn’t. She was reduced to an idiot child lost in the woods. It was with an idiot’s glee, then, that she came across the tracks of her horse, and bent to see the deep, scored prints where the animal had run and dodged and dodged again. Other horses had run with it and diverged through the trees, hounded by dogs. Not dogs, she reminded herself. Many wolves, harrying the horses.
The widow followed the tracks and came across a carcass. It was a big mule deer. The body lay with its hooves toward her. From ten yards away she could see blood pooling in paw prints in the mud, the throat and belly torn away, intestines dragged over the ground. One leg askew.
She turned immediately and fled, staggering, with a directional acumen that might have surprised her if she had still been capable of surprise. Dodging through the forest with her dark pants flapping, catching trees and clawing a path round them, slapping branches away, and falling finally upon her meagre belongings, snatching the bayonet from its sheath, turning, and stumbling back again.
A lone wolf awaited her when she returned to the carcass, this gasping human, gaunt latecomer to the feast, weapon in hand. She spoke to the wolf in affectionate tones, but her stance and the hollow glitter of her eyes told the animal otherwise. Dun fur rose up on its shoulder as the horror of her scent reached it. The widow was a monster of nature, out of place, pale and stinking of humankind. The wolf fell back a few paces for comfort, then lifted its snout and scented again the wretched thing before it. The widow approached the carcass, every fibre in her body aligned by need. The wolf did not wait to see her cut into the deer’s haunch but turned and loped away.
SPARROWS FLITTERED RIGHT through bushes like immaterial sprites and shrilled to one another. The widow closed her eyes. Before her stood the little fire she had built and maintained for hours. With food in her belly, she drew again on her pipe and puffed a fragrant white smoke, raising a signal into the air that wandered among the hackled pines. The fire was her only concern. That, and going in search of dry wood and leaves, stoking the fire when it lagged, squatting like a golem by its warm perimeter and meditating on the flames. Fat hissed uncut from the deer meat and dropped onto the coals in pops of flame. When the wind changed, the widow would shift the spindly tent of green branches she had fashioned to support the meat. A greasy smoke billowed over her and she was all but lost in the clouds of it.
She had eaten some of the dark, purplish flesh raw, about a golf ball’s worth. It was pliant and dense and rich, and it smelled vulgar. After the inevitable vomiting, she had turned immediately back to eating. She felt as if she were working against a death that was mere hours away. All morning, her affronted belly seethed. She had expected this. But more strangely, transient pains came and went in her limbs, an oppressive ache bore down through her left shoulder as if some vulture stood there, grinding. The tendons of her jaw tautened, and pain spread out and upward across her skull before it subsided. Each distress came and passed, and none lasted more than a few minutes. The body fortifying itself, surveying the empty territories. The widow just sat and endured these events, gaunt and clinging to her pipe, with her knees up around her chin.
This, she thought ruefully, this is the bride, the mother in her apron, or sitting upright at the dinner table, full of bright conversation. These hands had held a hoe that worked a hobby garden, held a rifle and appalled her husband with her aim; these hands had held the bodies of pheasants up so she could look closely at them, their heads dangling like pendants, their wrinkled eyes half-closed. She shifted on her haunches and covered her grimy face. Go away, go away. Remembrance: a fly that won’t leave but bites and bites in the same spot. She poked around in her saddlebags for the matches and busied herself with lighting another ration of tobacco.
She attempted to recline with her feet out before her, as she had done only days ago in a green and fairyish wood. At that time, her horse had been near her in the dark and there was no other threat than self-told ghost stories. But now her belly was so shrunken and taut she could not comfortably recline, and so she was obliged to squat again.
Later, she rose feebly and went hunting firewood. There, among a clutch of lush underbrush, grew something she suddenly and with joy recognized as edible. Fiddleheads. Little curled greens that hid among the parent ferns and that, she knew, tasted buttery when charred along their frilly edges. The widow bent, trembling among the low vegetation, and picked every one she could see, clutching them to her like jewels and snatching back the dropped ones — until she straightened and looked about her at the endless sea of them. Why had she not noticed them before? Was it that good luck tends to bring more of itself, or had she finally found the energy to seek her own survival? The vast shadow of some bird floated by overhead, but when she looked for it, she saw only a ragged seam in the evergreens and, beyond that, a flat whiteness. The widow stood gazing upward, the pipe stem clenched between her molars.
Her father had smoked a tiny ebony pipe when she was a child. Black and polished and prone to extinguishing because of its narrowness. It was, she felt now, a slightly pretentious object. But he had had many affectations, her father. He would let her pack the bowl for him, using the wide end of a golf tee to tamp down the wadge of tobacco, and using its sharp point to dig out the resin and ash. He would glance about to see whether any women were likely to see him and then put his feet up on the antique fire screen, cross his legs at the ankles, and put on a pensive face.
He would explain to his daughter the properties of fire, the vile, vindictive nature of lightning, and the new theories of controlled electrical current.
“There is an exhibition in London,” he had once told her, “where a thousand glass bulbs are illuminated together and the nighttime becomes as bright as day.” People thought of electricity as a liquid, like water, he’d said. It might be prone to leaking. Women’s hair would crackle with the excess discharge of energy, and horses could not be compelled to stand waiting on lighted avenues but ran away still harnessed to their empty carriages, eyes rolling with fear.
“Still,” he had said, “when bustles replaced hoops, they claimed that this panicked horses too. Traffic accidents are an impediment to commerce, so will ladies please dress conventionally?”
Idiocy amused her father, and he saw idiocy everywhere. He was a man who affected an interest in science, and perhaps it was of some importance to him, but his gabbing was mainly intended to annoy the softheads around him, whom he considered to be besotted by religion. Because he was a former Anglican minister, his grasp of scripture far exceeded that of anyone who might want to take him on, even her churchy grandmother, who retired each night to read a page or two of the Bible before sleep — the gospels as soporific; Job’s endless trials a stiff sleeping draught, his story left unresolved. Her father, on the other hand, would tap his own standard Bible where it still sat by his bed, never dusty but never moving its position on the table, and say, “Now, that’s a grand tale.” He would not follow his brothers or mother to church. He had never visited his wife’s grave in the churchyard, as the rest of the family did once a month, to gaze down on the rose marble tablet. She remembered her grandmother bending to flick debris from its face. A small photograph had been embedded there at great cost, framed in tin. It was now completely faded away. This was the comedy of it. Mother, wife, daughter-in-law — now a signified blank.
She would stand at her mother’s grave with the other grim-faced attendants, trying to blot out the memory of her father, who, in the drunken month after the funeral, one night summed up in frigid detail the most likely condition of his late wife’s beautiful body. Not resting on the bosom of Christ. Oh, no. Not sleeping. But this other horrible process. One’s passage through life, he’d said, was as involuntary as peristalsis, and life itself enacted a frightful digestion. For her father, the problem lay in life’s enclosure; once started, it must stop. And no comfort at either end. No heaven, no saviour. Just cessation and decay.
“Why do you pretend there is more?” he’d asked his mother. She shook her head and announced that she pitied her own son, for pain was making him morbid.
“Oh, I see,” he said, “we mustn’t be morbid about death? How comforting it must be to have a bedtime story to tell yourself, Mother, how consoling to stand like idiots around a stone.”
His faith, when it flew, had left nothing in its place, no opposite protesting view, no view at all.
Her grandmother whispered to her at bedtime, “Despair is a sin, Mary, and a minister in despair is the most pitiable creature on earth.” The soft hands stroking her cheeks, charm bracelets jingling. “You must always have hope for your father, hope for his return,” as if he, too, had passed over to some other place. She remembered her father years later, after the worst was over, sitting in the garden at night, visible only by the glow of his little pipe, the tiny caldera with its rouged lip. He was invisible in the dark with his mourning clothes and black hair. After his wife’s death he never wore anything but black again.
The widow sat in her well of uninvited memory. One looks back in awe. Alone in a dim clearing with nothing but the flash of sparrows about her. No sound but wind. A dry white sky was stretched over her and seemed barely to move. It was cloud but not cloud — simply the lighted void. Is not God in the heights? And behold the stars, they, too, look up in wonder. These things came to her, these little bits of Sunday school prattle.
She rose with a pain in her gut and put away her tobacco pouch, wrapped the pipe in cloth and tucked it away too. She put the saddlebags and purse under the skirt of an evergreen tree and took the saddle and blanket from where they hung from a branch, stirrups dangling loose, and also laid these on the carpet of pine needles. Then she took her clothes off and went on pale and unsteady legs, bare-assed, into the trees, where she sat across a fallen rampike and expelled a painful, intermittent slurry from her body.
That evening she went sighing into the tent of branches and curled up with her belongings, the fur coat over her like a blanket. A lonely summer night, where snow fell in the alpine dark and lay dusty upon the leaves and grass. The meat frosted over near the dead fire; the surrounding ground was wet, ringed with snow. But the widow slept with her cheek on the stolen little silk purse, a sucked-on strand of hair in her open mouth.
This is how William Moreland found her. He had tracked what he recognized as the smoke from a pipe, expecting to find several men. He had approached cautiously, from upwind, in case there were dogs. He found nothing but a girl.
Moreland stood over the dreaming stranger for a long time, hands on his hips and a pistol at his waist.