A LONE EAGLE drifted in lazy circles, studying some unseen curiosity. The widow stood shivering at the edge of the camp. An inch of wet snow covered everything. Her boots were wet. The air so clear she could see through the trees to the range beyond, white-capped and running in a palisade away to nothing. The eagle was floating overhead now, its wings black, the pale head angled to watch her. Then it vanished in a green blur of trees, followed in a moment by specks of sparrows, shooting after the monster, peeping in triumph, as if they themselves had driven it off. A vigilance committee that lets the thief simply pass through town and be gone. The widow followed their progress, hollow-eyed and pale. She watched until all that was left was a flat white sky.
That morning, she had returned from checking her empty snares to find the camp not only empty but vacated. She had stood at the perimeter, blinking in disbelief, more shocked by William Moreland’s absence than she had been by the sudden sight of him, standing there over her as she expired, his hands on his hips. This was more unreal. Her small pile of belongings had been collected on a fallen log to keep them dry. He had left her the pipe after all. The tent was gone, the fire cold, nothing was hung on the trees or strung from ropes between them. She discovered that he had left her food, some rabbit meat, a handful of coffee grounds, and a letter explaining his inevitable flight. The letter was so filled with expressions of love that she wondered for a moment whether he had meant it for someone else.
Now she sat alone as the sun set, rain settling on her hair, and read each word again in stunned disbelief. This time her mouth didn’t move. It was like he was whispering in her ear, but meaninglessly: Love . . . adore . . . union of our spirits. Then, at the end: I cannot stay. It is too much for a solitary man to change.
Too much, yes, it was too much. There was no sign of him, and yet, when she looked, he was everywhere. Their footprints, both sets, had mackled the uneven ground, hers on his, his on hers.
How cruel now that she had really seen him, touched him. That he had been real, not another phantasm drifting greyly among the trees, a little gasp of loneliness from her afflicted mind. But a beautiful face, and a voice not merely familiar but in her bones. The Ridgerunner was gone, and she could still smell him on her hands.
She turned the paper over. There were two words there: Head west.
Which way was west? She knew, at least, the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. She looked up: no sun. Trees hove into a dark spiral above her, and beyond that, black needles of rain were coming in from heaven. There was no west, no north, no earth beneath her feet. Her face streamed, upturned, her eyes pressed shut. An enormous sob shook her. She folded his letter and slipped it beneath her clothes to keep it dry, though the paper had been folded in rain, and brought rain with it, slowly foxing as it lay against her breast. The widow staggered to their recent bed, the pressed concavity where their tent had been. She did not make a fire, but lay on the carpet of needles, cocooned again in her fur coat.
The air grew cold and still. Snow fell through the cedars and covered her, covered everything else, until the whole night world was only snow, and she but a ripple in it.
ALL THE NEXT afternoon the widow followed a stream downhill, stepping from rock to bank along its meandering edge. For two days she had been sneezing, and now her lungs were congested. She moved slowly and her back ached. From time to time she was obliged to hold her saddlebags close and lean out to spit, though she looked about her before doing so, as if some scandalized neighbour might be watching. Moss clung to the pates of riverstones, water droplets suspended among the green fibres, gleaming even in the shade. It was a steep incline and sometimes the widow went slewing on the loose earth, wheeling her free arm. The hiss of a waterfall reached her long before she found it, water curving over the final brow, beyond which rock and earth and grass dropped off in a sheer cliff. She peered over the edge to see the white stream drill off several shelves below. A pale rainbow was blown over the sloped and craggy rock face, and she looked beyond to see a meadow far below. Streaks of some purple flower ran through the distant green surface.
The widow would have to find another way down to the meadow. So she went back upstream a little, where she sat abruptly and wept, face in her hands. And when she was done, she sat in silence with her nose completely blocked and her eyes unfocused and downcast. She crouched like a dog and drank from the stream, kissing the surface and sucking the icy water up. Then she took off her boots and put her feet in. A strange burning sensation at her toes . . . and yet the water felt icy at her ankles. Curious, she pulled out her left foot to inspect it. The skin of the heel was yellow and appeared thickened, and there was a red rim around it. The toenails were dark. Her right foot was just as bad. Were her feet frostbitten? Or partially so? She rubbed gently at the sallow skin. It was like rubbing sand into her flesh. And yet when she stood and walked, even in bare feet, they felt no worse than the rest of her. Some muscles hurt, her lungs ached. The widow’s slim shoulders were especially sore from carrying all her things. As she went back upstream, she bent from time to time to snap wild rosehips from their stems and collect them in her pocket, for the rabbit meat was getting high, and she didn’t know how long it would last.
Halfway down the incline she paused to lower her bags so she could wave the dark cloth of her pants and cool herself. As she descended, the scent of the meadow below came to her in gusts and hints. Her knees trembled from exertion. She had stopped sneezing but still coughed and spat great gouts of yellow phlegm. It was as she bent to do this that she looked down to the meadow and saw a figure far below. The figure wore a light, wide-brimmed hat and sat mounted on horseback, holding another horse by the reins. He was looking up. Was he looking at her? Had he seen her? A wheeze came and went deep in her lungs, but there was no other sound. The figure remained motionless. She thought perhaps one of the horses was kicking at flies on its belly, but they were so far away she couldn’t tell for certain.
Without knowing why, the widow ducked down suddenly and crouched like a spider on the ground. Her breath came fast, and it puffed up the dirt near her face. A rock outcropping stood between her and the watcher in the meadow. For many minutes, she didn’t dare peek over it, but when she did, the figure was gone. The widow sat up, white-eyed. She hadn’t decided what she would do when she found herself near people again. Suddenly it came in at her in a rush: People going out to church, streets, houses, carriages, the crack of rabbit hunters’ guns in the fields. Police.
She pressed her face against her grimy palms. She knew she could no more retreat back into the mountains than she could go back home — not to her father, and surely not to the cabin. She froze, her fingers pressed to her eyes, and saw again the open door of her cabin, the laundry hanging from the line as if everything were all right. At twilight, the trees utterly still. Herself looking back through the open door into her own dark house. She had stood alone in the clearing, to all appearances a woman waiting to hear a sound from within the house, perhaps to hear someone calling for her. But she knew no sound would ever come.
The widow gathered up her things now and hurried along the path on trembling legs, choosing any fork that would take her away from the man on horseback.
NO MORE THAN half an hour later she found herself in a clearing in the trees, the expanse of purple meadow flowers ahead of her, and the man on horseback regarding her from his mount. She took a step backward, as if she could withdraw before he saw her. But it was hopeless. He’d followed her progress down the rock face and come to wait at the place where he knew she would emerge. He was Indian, and sat on a very basic saddle atop a massive, scarred bay. Two braids came down over his green shirt front, and his face was shaded by the wide, uneven brim of a felt hat. His expression was one of amused curiosity, and the widow suddenly knew what kind of figure she must cut: a girl with wild hair, grimy face, fusted saddlebags, muddy silk purse, and torn boots. She held the fur coat against her hip like a load of laundry. The man’s other horse was being led by its halter and it nickered at her. The widow’s mouth fell open.
“That’s my horse!” she croaked, her voice ragged with disuse. And indeed, it was the little roan, starved and sway-backed, far less beautiful than its ghostly imagined counterpart, now watching the widow with strange, flecked eyes. She had never noticed before that its eyes were flecked.
The man said nothing and his expression didn’t change. He turned both horses and started across the meadow.
“Wait!” she said. But he didn’t wait for her. “You! Do you speak English? Let go of my horse!”
The little ensemble went on through the sunny grasses, the horses’ tails swishing tiny insects up from the heads of flowers. The widow staggered after them.
“Thief!” she squawked. “Come back!”
She was quickly falling behind. “Let go of those reins!” she called out in desperation.
And to her surprise, he did let go of them. But the mare continued following him, nudging the rump of the animal before it, only occasionally looking back, reins dangling, to see the widow far behind, struggling along through waist-high grass.
BY EVENING THE man had started a fire and made himself some coffee and was frying meat in a pan. The widow sat at some remove, glowering, the delicious smell killing her. He did not look at her or speak, but she noticed that no matter where she went around the little camp, he never turned his back to her. She had collected her mare with only a little difficulty. Around its forelegs the man had affixed a hobble. As she approached, the mare kept backing up, moving just out of reach and jerking its head away. But finally it allowed itself to be captured, and she stroked its head and cooed into its face. She curried it with moss and twigs, but the experiment failed; it only made the grey hide streaked and dirty. She looked over at the man’s bay horse. Its coat gleamed. He must have taken the horses to a river and run them through it.
At last light, she found herself inching closer to the fire. He now lay with his head propped on his saddle, fingers laced across his belly. She could see his eyes under the hat. They were watching her now, not as amused as before. Something about her worried him. Had he seen her coughing and spitting? Of course he had. It was likely he’d seen her long before that, standing atop the waterfall. A strange shame filled her and she could not meet his eyes. The idea that she had been wandering like a troll above the waterfall, while someone gazed up at her — it was a horrible thought. She began to retreat into the dark when his voice came to her.
“How’d you get separated from your horse?”
To her astonishment, she understood him. He had no accent she could detect. In fact, his voice was much like her father’s, a nice voice. She didn’t reply at first. She would not tell this stranger that she had lost her mind before she had lost the horse. Finally, she settled on the most transparent answer.
“Wolves,” she said.
He nodded under his hat. “Truth is,” he said, “I don’t know why I was waiting for you to come down out of there. I should have been home days ago. I guess I was curious. And I thought it’d be a man.” The fire hissed and glowed at his feet. The soles of his boots were lit by firelight and she could see the crisp stitching in them. “Did you come from Frank?” he asked.
She stayed silent.
“Sparwood?”
She shook her head.
“All right, then. Where?” He propped himself up on an elbow. Unfortunately, she now had his attention. The widow’s addled mind stuttered away from the truth. Could an Indian get her put in jail? Probably. Would this man want to put her in jail? Impossible to tell. She lied and gave him the name of the next biggest town to hers. Strangely, this seemed to shock him.
“Granum? Are you saying you came through that pass?!” he pointed into the dark trees behind her.
“What pass?” she said.
“Those mountains there. You came right through them?” She nodded.
“Well, that’s something.” His grin was huge. “When I tell my wife that a stupid white girl just wandered through that pass . . .” He chuckled and lay back down again.
She sat cross-legged, elbows on knees, her cheeks burning with fury. He didn’t care one bit about her. She was a funny story he could tell people. He hadn’t offered her any of the fried meat. And she would be damned if she’d ask him for some now. The fire settled suddenly and a corona of infernal fireflies exploded upward. The widow tossed another branch across the glowing mass of it and glowered at the man as the green bark steamed. The warmth was gorgeous, and her withered lungs ached with each breath.
When he spoke again, his voice was already slurred with sleep. “She won’t believe it,” he said.
The wind picked up in the trees above them. The heat from the fire tormented her feet, even through the soggy boots, and so she angled her legs out into the dark. A rank smell came to her on the breeze, and she recognized it as the rabbit meat in her bags. As repulsive as it was, her stomach growled. It was warmer down on this plateau, even among the trees, even as the damp earth soaked into her clothing. Down here it was summer. She felt a pleasant fatigue invade her body as she lay wheezing in the dark.
WHEN THE WIDOW awoke, she found she had rolled in her sleep some distance from the fire, which was now going full strength. A coffee pot sat tilted among the coals at the fire’s edge, and steam issued from the sharp little spout. She was alone in the clearing. She sat looking at the fire for some time before she dug into her saddlebags for the tin cup and poured herself some coffee. She stirred it with a twig and blew on the still boiling liquid until it was drinkable. When he returned, she saw that he had been bathing. His dark hair was twisted into a rope that hung down his back. He wore no shirt, and the water that ran down his back darkened the waistband of his pants. She turned away, for she had always disliked it when men paraded around with their shirts off. Even when her own husband had removed his shirt to cut wood or work on the roof, she’d considered it prideful, vain, a kind of taunt. You can’t do this, woman — but I can. She remembered her father’s amusement when she had abused a hired boy.
“Why don’t you take off your drawers too?” she’d cried. “Why not hop around like a dirty old monkey?” And her father had laughed while the boy flushed with shame.
The widow put her cup on the ground and began to walk away into the trees.
“River’s the other way,” he said, and she amended her direction.
It was a wide, shallow creek of mountain runoff, thick with riverstones, meandering among glacial humps in the ground. Meadow grasses grew right to the edge and tipped over and waved in the current as if drowned. She washed her face and feet. A high white cloud floated thinly over the mountain peaks. Dark pines stood in perfect alignment to the heavens. The widow coughed a deep bubbling cough, then spat. She squatted among tufts of water grass, her feet braced on uneven rock, and she peed. Afterwards, she washed herself, wincing, for it was agonizingly cold. She stood by the swift-moving river and looked out across the meadow to the mountains. William Moreland was up there somewhere, hidden in mist.
She had thought she was alone, but he had come upon her when she slept. How easily he could have tiptoed past, let her lie there sleeping, dying. Instead he had waited. He had admitted to watching her sleeping face all that first night. “You had this little strand of hair in your mouth,” he’d said. A wincing tightness in her heart, just to think of it. Unbearable. She could still smell him, still hear his soft voice in her ear. The tent where they lay entwined together, her mouth against his arm. . . . The widow’s eyes welled with angry tears and she began sobbing. Turn your back, just as he did.
But how to do that? How had he done it?
When she returned, red-eyed, the man was properly dressed and his hair was braided. He gave her some hard little lumps of cooked dough. She bit into one and discovered that, while she had to chew endlessly, it contained dried berries and was delicious.
“May I have some meat . . . please?” she asked. He pointed to a rock on which he had laid out for her a blackened chunk of meat, already marauded by ants. His face said he had put it out some time ago, why hadn’t she noticed it yet? She pounced on it, blew the insects away.
“I’m taking you to Frank,” he said.
“Who?”
“It’s a town. From there you can go back to your home.” He watched her gobble the last of the meat so fast it left her hiccupping. “Or not. It’s your choice.”
They packed up their gear and she hung her saddlebags over the roan’s shoulders. There was no saddle now, nothing to strap the bags to, so she would be forced to hold them in front of her to ensure they didn’t work their way sideways and fall off as she rode. Without the saddle too, she could not mount the horse, no matter how she hopped and struggled. The man watched bleakly for a while, and eventually was obliged to dismount and come over to help her. Once she was up, he stood back and assessed her posture on the horse, but what he saw seemed to worry him. “Is that really your horse?” he asked and put a finger possessively around one of the reins.
“You don’t ride her very well.”
She glared at him and yanked the rein away. This seemed to displease him even more; his face darkened. He snatched at the halter and dragged the roan toward a beech tree that stood alone at the edge of the clearing. “You see that?” he said, pointing to a scratch in its bark. He seemed to be pointing out one of a multitude of scars.
“What?”
“That, you stupid woman. That! ” His finger pecked at the little slice. It might have been made by a knife, she could see that now. A wide Y shape, or maybe a T?
“That is a Peigan sign. And our campfire over there? I made that on top of their old one.”
“And you’re not Peigan, I assume?”
“Lucky for you.”
She understood him, finally. He didn’t trust her, didn’t think she could ride with him out of trouble, he was afraid that she would drag him down and get him killed. As if in answer, he said, “Keep up, or I’ll leave you flat.” Then he turned and mounted his horse and together they rode out into the bright meadow. Saddleless, the roan’s spine ground into the widow’s pelvis in a way she knew would soon become painful. Her belly struggled with the first solid food she’d had in days. And yet she felt well rested. She looked at this Indian’s back, gazed at the rump of his horse with its swinging tail — it had finger-waves in it like a girl’s hair. It occurred to her that this man could have taken her horse, taken all her things, left her in the mountains. But he hadn’t, and that was something. She was clearly a burden to him, and nothing more than curiosity had got him into this. She felt sure she could veer off and go a different direction and he would not try to stop her. The widow wanted to repair things somehow, but didn’t know where to start.
“What’s your name?” she called to him. He was silent. They went up over a hillock, the horses rocking their necks with each step of the incline, and lightly trotted down.
“Do you mind my asking what kind of Indian you are?” The roan strained to tug at grasses as it went and she hauled up on its reins. “You can at least tell me your name, can’t you?”
“What’s yours?” he countered.
“Justine,” she said, choosing the name of a girl she once knew. So, silence on one hand and a lie on the other; he had outdone her again. She ran her fingers through her hair in consternation. They continued along the edge of the creek together. Swallows skimmed over the grass and darted above the surface of the water catching flying bugs, and everywhere was the hum of bees. He relented a little and slowed his horse so that they were only a little off-parallel, but he radiated impatience, as if even walking the horse was something she did poorly.
“You know I’m from Cooperstown,” she said. “You know where I’m from. Why can’t you tell me about yourself?”
“Crow.” He shook his head in its mottled hat. “I’m Crow Indian. We say Absarokeh. My mother was born on the other side of that hill, right there.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but his face remained closed.
“And where were you born?”
“Baltimore,” he said.
And with that he heeled the bay into a trot so he was ahead again. The interview was over.
THE RIDGERUNNER crouched at midday in the lee of a massive cedar and waited and watched with his hunter’s patience as all around him the wind blew. Grasses swam, trees bowed and creaked, and there was a hissing in the canopy above. He was the only still thing on this mountainside.
From his vantage point he could see the clearing, his own former camp, and the cold ring of stones where once there had been a fire. Movement everywhere. It promised a glimpse of human life, maybe even some small thing blowing across the ground, and her chasing after it . . . but no. No scent but cold and pine, no voice. Here he remained, hands squeezing the leather straps of his pack. He was whispering, his lips forming half-words and the shadows of explanations, excuses passing in sequence over his face.
After many minutes, he rose and eased the enormous weight from his shoulders and rested it against the tree. And then, as if heading onstage, his face brightened falsely, and he hiked up his pants and strode into the clearing. William Moreland stood alone, hands dangling at his sides. Of course she was gone, everything was gone, every useful or comfortable thing. He had taken his things, she had taken hers. All that remained was the evidence of a camp.
So very unlike him to leave such a wreckage, for any following ranger to find. He had left too quickly. And there was too much evidence to conceal. The countless footprints, bed of pine needles in the shape of a tent’s floor, a nail hole in a cedar where he had hung his mirror and then later removed the nail and packed it, the rope burns halfway up a trunk from the tent’s guy line, the small puddles of coffee and rain, now frozen . . . and one of her bare feet expressed in mud, perfectly preserved.
He bent over this fossil, the small toes blurred by movement, but the lines of the foot intimately clear and frosted. He knew the weight of that foot in his hand. Faultless and warm. He closed his eyes, fighting an unnameable thing in himself. Then he seized the fire-blackened stones one by one and flung them two-handed into the trees.
He would erase it. All of it.