Cold Mountain Part 29

Shelter was Ada's first thought, and at every rock ledge she said, There's a place we could sleep. But Ruby said she knew a better place, or at least thought she remembered a place nearby, and they walked on.

In time, they came to a tumble of great flat rocks. Ruby cast about until she found what she was looking for: three that had fallen upon each other so as to form a lean-to, a sort of accidental dolmen with flat straight walls, a capstone fitted tight and angled back so as to shed water, leaving underneath a room no bigger than a c.o.c.k loft, but enough to sit up and shift around in. As architecture, its shape reminded Ada of the symbol for pi. Inside, the floor was thick with dry leaves.

Spring water rose from the ground not twenty yards away. All set around with chestnut and oak trees that had never been cut since the day of creation. It made as fine a camp as anyone could ever expect to find, and Ruby said that though she had not visited the place in years, it was exactly as she remembered from having spent many a night there as a child out foraging for food.

Ruby put Ada to gathering armloads of the dryest limbs she could find, and within half an hour they had a warm blaze going at the mouth of the shelter. A pot of water boiling for tea. When it was done steeping, they sat and drank it, ate a few dried biscuits and some dried apples. The rings were from apples so small as to be little more than a bite apiece but their sharp taste bound together all the best features of the past warm season.

They did not talk much while they ate, other than for Ada to say that the Georgia boy did not seem like much of a one as far as men went. Ruby said she found him not particularly worse than the general order of men, which is to say that he would greatly benefit from having someone's foot in his back every waking minute.

When they were done eating, Ruby brushed away the leaves of the shelter floor with the heel of her hand and scooped out dirt and sifted it through her fingers and held out a palm to the firelight for Ada to see. Fragments of charcoal and splinters of flint. Ancient fire and partial arrow points flawed and discarded. Flakes of old hope however slight.

Neither of them said anything, but Ada picked through the flint splinters and kept the point nearest completion and found comfort that people in some dim other time had done as they were doing, had found shelter in the rock pile and eaten a meal and slept.

The snow hissed as it fell and the temperature was dropping fast, but the fire soon heated the stones, and when Ada and Ruby wrapped themselves in blankets and burrowed in among the dry leaves and heaped more leaves atop the quilts, they were warm as lying in a bed at home. This would do, Ada thought, as she lay there. The abandoned trail through mountains and rivers. Not a soul around. The stone shelter warm and dry and strange as an elfin lodge. Though others might view it as an utterly 2004-3-6.

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bare haven, it matched her needs so much that she could just move in and live there.

The fire threw patterns of light and shadow on the pitched roof stone, and Ada found that if she watched long enough the fire would form the shapes of things in the world. A bird. A bear. A snake.

A fox. Or perhaps it was a wolf. The fire seemed to have no interests other than animals.

The pictures put Ada in mind of a song, one of Stobrod's. It had particularly stuck in her mind. She had noted it for the oddity of its lyric and for Stobrod's singing, which had been of an intensity that Ada could only a.s.sume represented deep personal expression. It took as subject the imagined behavior of its speaker, what he would do had he the power to become one of a variety of brute creature. A lizard in the spring-hear his darling sing. A bird with wings to fly-go back to his darling weep and moan till he dies. A mole in the ground-root a mountain down.

Ada worried over the song. The animals seemed wonderful and horrible in their desires, especially the mole, a little powerless hermit blind thing propelled by lonesomeness and resentment to bring the world falling around him. More wonderful and horrible still was the human voice speaking the song's words, wishing away its humanity to ease the pain inflicted by lost love, love betrayed, love left unexpressed, wasted love.

Ada could hear in Ruby's breathing that she was yet awake, and so she said, Do you remember that song of your father's about the mole in the ground?

Ruby said that she did, and Ada asked if Ruby thought Stobrod had written the song. Ruby said there were many songs that you could not say anybody in particular made by himself. A song went around from fiddler to fiddler and each one added something and took something away so that in time the song became a different thing from what it had been, barely recognizable in either tune or lyric. But you could not say the song had been improved, for as was true of all human effort, there was never advancement. Everything added meant something lost, and about as often as not the thing lost was preferable to the thing gained, so that over time we'd be lucky if we just broke even. Any thought otherwise was empty pride.

Ada lay and watched the fire shadows and listened to the sound of snow in the leaves and soon drifted off and slept a dreamless sleep, not even waking when Ruby rose to toss more wood on the fire. When Ada awoke it was first light, and she could see that the snow had slackened in its falling but had not stopped. It lay anklebone deep on the ground. Neither Ruby nor Ada was eager to get on with the day that stretched before them. They sat with the blankets around their shoulders, and Ruby blew up the coals and stoked the fire. She fried a piece of side meat and forked it out of its grease and put it on a flat rock. Then she added water to the grease and cooked a pot of grits and took the side meat from the rock and crumbled it into the pot and stirred it into the grits. In the smaller pot Ada made tea, and as they sipped Ruby told how when she first had tea, supplied by Mrs. Sw.a.n.ger, she admired it so much that she gave Stobrod a handful of it tied in a square of cloth as he went off on a c.o.o.n hunt. The next time she saw him some weeks later she had asked him how he liked it.

Stobrod had said it was no better than fair and that he didn't find it preferable to any other kind of greens. Ruby came to find out he had cooked it up with a strip of fatback and eaten it like cresses.

When they reached the trail fork, they found the Pangle boy lying alone, face up beneath the poplar.

He was covered with a mantle of snow. It lay slumped over him, thinner than on the ground nearby, and it was clear how the snow had first melted about him and then had not. Ruby brushed away the snow to look at his face, and when she did she found him still smiling, though with a look of confusion in his eyes, which might have been just the look of death. Ruby cupped her hand to his fat cheek and then touched him with her fingertips on his brow, as if to stamp him with the badge of a like outcast.

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Ada turned from him and began kicking at the snow with her boot toe. And when she did she turned up pieces of broken banjo. Then the broken fiddlestick, the frog piece dangling from horsehair. She kicked around more, looking for the fiddle, but she did not find it. No fiddle and no Stobrod.

-Where is he? Ada said.

-There's not anybody from Georgia can tell more than half the truth, Ruby said. Dead or alive, they took him with them.

They decided to bury Pangle on a little shelf of land up above the trail near a chestnut tree. The ground dug easily and they hardly needed the mattock, for only a thin rind of ground was frozen and under that the top-soil was black and loose and went down and down. They took turns with the shovel, and soon they were hot in their coats and they took them off and hung them on tree limbs.

Then they were too cold, but it was better to be cold than to wet your clothes with sweat. By the time they started hitting significant rocks they had quite a hole, though it was still two feet shallower than the six which Ada thought to be the rule of graves. But it would do, Ruby said.

They went to Pangle and each took a leg and dragged him through the snow to the grave and slid him in. They had no box, nor even a spare blanket to shroud him with, so Ada spread her kerchief over his face before they began shoveling the dirt. By the time they had covered him to where only one boot toe was left showing, Ada was weeping, though she had seen the boy but once in life, and that by firelight, and all the words that had pa.s.sed between them had been him saying Stobrod's playing had done her good.

Ada remembered her thoughts when they had buried winter cabbages, how she had made it metaphoric. But she found this burial to be an entirely different matter. Beyond the bare fact of holes in the ground, there was no similarity at all between the two.

When they had filled the grave above level, they had more dirt left, which Ruby noted and attributed to the time of the month, the growing of the moon toward full. Dig a grave a week into the wane and you'd have a swale when you were done. They mounded the moon's extra dirt over Pangle and packed it with the back of the spade. Then Ada took her clasp knife and stripped bark from a hickory sapling and sought out a black locust and lopped two of its limbs with the hand axe and lashed them together with the hickory withes to form up a cross. She stood it in the soft ground at Pangle's head, and though she did not say words aloud over him, she made some in her mind. She'd heard Ruby say locust had such will to live that you could split fence posts from the wood of its trunk and they'd sometimes take root in the postholes and grow. Such was Ada's hope for her own construction, that someday a tall locust would stand to mark Pangle's place, and that every year into the next century it would tell in brief a tale like Persephone's. Black bark in winter, white blossoms in spring.

Their hands were dirty. Ruby just cupped up snow and rubbed it between her palms and shook off the dirty water. But Ada went through the woods to the creek and knelt and washed her hands and then dashed icy water in her face. She stood and shook her head and looked about. Her eyes fell on a low rock ledge beyond the creek. It made an overhang, a shelter. The brown of the dirt stood out dark against the snow. Under the rock lip sat Stobrod, though it took a minute for Ada to make him out since his clothes matched up with the dark of the exposed earth. He was still, eyes closed, and he sat with his legs crossed, his head to the side and his hands composed around the fiddle in his lap. A little wind rose up and rattled the few oak leaves and shook snow from bare limbs. It fell in Ada's hair and onto the creek face, where it melted as it struck.

-Ruby, Ada called. Ruby, I need you here.

They stood over him and his face was the hue of the snow and he looked so meager in his parts. Such a little man. He had lost a great deal of blood through the wounds and had spit up yet more, and he 2004-3-6.

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was stained all down his shirtfront. Ruby took the fiddle from his lap and handed it to Ada, and the snake rattles shifted dryly inside it. When Ruby undid his b.u.t.tons, the blood in his shirt was black and stiff. His chest was frail and white. Ruby put her ear to it and pulled away and then listened again.

-He's yet living, she said.

She pulled apart his clothes and turned him about to survey the damage and found he'd been hit three times. Through his bow hand where he held it before him. Through the meat of his ham nigh to the hipbone. And- the most serious-through the nipple to his chest. That ball had broken a rib and scored the top of his lung and lodged in his back muscles above the shoulder blade. There was a blue lump under his skin the size of a crabapple.

In the moving of him he did not break consciousness or even moan in pain.

Ruby drew together kindling and whittled off shavings from a pine branch and struck fire from the matches. When the fire was going, she held the blade of the homemade knife in the flames. She cut into Stobrod's back and he still made no sound nor fluttered his eyes. There was just a bare rindle of blood from the cut, as if he had not enough left for the new wound to do more than sweat a few red drops. Ruby put her finger into his back and inquired around with it and then she hooked the ball out.

She reached and put it into Ada's hand and it was like a gobbet of raw meat.

-Go rinse that off, Ruby said. He'll want it someday.

Ada went to the creek and held her hand in the water and let the current run through her caged fingers. When she drew it out and looked at it, the lead was clean and grey. In pa.s.sing through Stobrod it had been pressed into a shape like a mushroom, the cap fluted and split and misgrown.

The stem end, though, was intact, cut with three precise rings during its manufacture to take best advantage of a barrel's rifling.

Ada went back to the ledge and set the bullet beside the fiddle. Ruby had Stobrod wrapped in blankets and the fire was burning knee high.

-You stay and boil me some water, Ruby said to Ada.

Ada watched her wander off through the woods, the shovel over her shoulder and her head down, looking for healing roots which she could know only from their dried stalks and husks poking up from the snow. Ada arranged stones around the fire for pot rest and went to the horse and got a pot from the sacks. She dipped it full of creek water and put it on the stones to heat. She sat and looked at Stobrod, and he lay like a dead man. There was no sign to show he lived other than a slight movement of his jacket front when he breathed. Ada wondered about his hundreds of tunes. Where were they now and where might they go if he died.

When Ruby returned an hour later, she had her pockets full of any root she could find that might be remotely useful-mullein, yarrow, burdock, ginseng. But she had not found goldenseal, which was the thing she needed most. The herb had been scarce of late. Hard to find. She worried that people were proving themselves not worthy of healing and that goldenseal had departed in disgust. She packed a mash of mullein and yarrow root and burdock into Stobrod's wounds and bound them with strips cut from a blanket. She brewed tea from the mullein and ginseng and dribbled it into his mouth, but his throat seemed clenched shut and she could not tell if any went down or not.

After awhile she said, It's too far home. He'll not make it there alive. It might be days before he can travel, and I'd not be surprised if there was more snow coming. We need better shelter than this.

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-Back to the rock lodge? Ada said.

-We wouldn't all fit. Not and have room to cook and work over him. There's a place I know. If it's there yet.

They left Stobrod where he lay while they cut long poles to make shafts for a drag sledge. They tied the poles together with rope and lashed more across for web sling and harnessed the rig to the horse.

They carried Stobrod across the creek in the blankets and put him on, but when they headed up the left trail fork with him dragging behind the horse and b.u.mping on every rock and root, they could see that their thoughts had been wrong and that the jarring would tear him apart at his wounds. So they pulled the sledge to pieces, coiled the rope, and draped Stobrod over the horse and went on slowly.

The sky was flat and grey and it hovered over their heads so close it seemed they could reach up and touch it. For a brief while, snow again emerged out of it, blown on a cutting wind. First it came in great flakes like goosedown, then faint and dry as ashes. When the snow stopped, fog welled up thick around them, and the only thing clear was that the day was falling away.

They walked for some time without speaking except when Ruby would say, Here, and then they would turn at a fork. Ada did not know which way they went, for she had long since lost certainty of the cardinal points.

When they stopped to rest, the horse stood head down, tired and miserable, exhausted from the load he was carrying and the alt.i.tude. Ada and Ruby brushed the snow off a log and sat. They could not see a thing in the fog but the nearest trees. The feel of the air, though, suggested that they were on a ridge and that there was much open air and gravity around them. Ada huddled inside her coat, trying not to think of going through another day of this or of where they might spend the night, just the next mile. Stobrod lay draped over the horse exactly where Ada and Ruby had placed him.

While they sat, two peregrines came bursting out of the fog. They flew into the shifting wind, their wings making short choppy strokes for purchase against the difficult air. They flared so close that Ada could hear the hiss of wind through the feathers. Stobrod awoke and raised his head momentarily as the birds pa.s.sed and then he stared after them vaguely as they faded back in the fog.

A line of blood ran to his chin from his mouth corner, thin as a razor cut.

-Pigeon hawk, he said, as if putting a name to the birds might help him regain his footing.

He started struggling and it seemed he wanted to square himself on the horse to ride, and so Ruby helped him. But when she let go he fell forward until his head rested on the withers. His eyes were closed and his arms stretched past his head to grip the mane with both hands. His legs swung limp below Ralph's round belly. Ruby wiped his mouth with her coat sleeve and they went on.

For most of an hour they descended a steep hillside and then Ada thought they were cupped in a valley, though she could not see far enough in any direction to verify the feeling. They crossed a marshy place and on either side of the trail huckleberry bushes grew head high. At the bottom of the valley they pa.s.sed a pool of still black water. It came up out of the fog as if a hole had opened in the world. Old dead ribbons of taupe bunchgra.s.s ringed it, and ice scalloped all around its verge like a camera iris closing. Three black ducks floated motionless in the pool's center, their heads tucked against their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. Were she writing a book of types, Ada thought, that would do for fear.

The fog was thinning some. They climbed again, just a low ridge with hemlocks growing on its spine and many were blown down with their root plates standing revealed in the air like a dissection. They descended through the trees and into a stand of chestnuts. They were moving toward a stream which they could hear but not see. It was rough walking. There was not really a trail at all, just enough 2004-3-6.

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s.p.a.ce between the trees and the ragged brush and low scrub to make way for pa.s.sage. When they came off the ridge toward a pinched creek bottom, the light had not changed, though the day felt all but spent.

Ada began to make out rectangular shapes through the trees. Huts. Cabins. A tiny Cherokee village, a ghost town, its people long since driven out onto the Trail of Tears and banished to a barren land.

Except for one rotted relic from the age of wattle and daub, the cabins were made of chestnut logs, peeled and notched and lapped. Roofed with shingles and curls of chestnut bark. A big white oak had fallen across one hut, but the rest were largely intact after three decades alone, and such was the power of chestnut timber against damp that they might remain so for a hundred years more before melting into the ground. Grey lichen grew on the cabin logs and dried stalks of horseweed and pigweed and fleabane rose from the snow in the doorways. There was not flat ground for raising much in the way of crops, so it might have been a seasonal hunting camp. Or refuge wherein a handful of carnivore outcasts had lived, nearly anchoritic. All in all, only a half-dozen little windowless cells. They were set at uneven intervals down the bank of the creek, which was deep and strong and black, its way broken by great smooth boulders with green moss grown on their faces.

In Ada's fatigue, she thought it a matter of great importance to know, without asking, on which bank of the creek the cabins stood. North, south, east, west. It would go a way toward ordering her mind congruent with where she was. Ruby always seemed to know the compa.s.s points and to find them significant, not just when giving directions but even in telling a story and indicating where an event had happened. West bank of the Little East Fork, east bank of the West Fork, that sort of thing. What was required to speak that language was a picture held in the mind of the land one occupied. Ada knew the ridges and coves and drainages were the frame of it, the skeleton. You learned them and where they stood in relation to each other, and then you filled in the details working from those known marks. General to particular. Everything had a name. To live fully in a place all your life, you kept aiming smaller and smaller in attention to detail.

Ada had only just begun to form such a picture, and she looked to the sky for help in finding direction. But it offered none, for the sky lay so close it seemed she might hit her head on it. And there were no other hints to follow. In this lush climate, moss grew on whatever side of a tree it cared to. North meant nothing to moss here. So Ada knew only that, as far as she was concerned, the village could stand on any bank of the creek whatsoever. No direction could be ruled out.

The cabins they pa.s.sed among seemed solemn in their abandonment, cramped by the watercourse and the overhanging brow of the cloudy mountain. Some of its people might yet be living, and Ada wondered how often they remembered this lonesome place, now still as a held breath. Whatever word they had called it would soon be numbered among the names of things which have not been pa.s.sed down to us and are exiled from our memories. She doubted that its people, even in the last days, had ever looked ahead and imagined loss so total and so soon. They had not foreseen a near time when theirs would be another world filled with other people whose mouths would speak other words, whose sleep would be eased or troubled with other dreams, whose prayers would be offered up to other G.o.ds.

Ruby picked the best of the cabins, and they stopped before it. They took Stobrod off the horse and made him a nest on the ground of the tarpaulin and blankets, and then they went into the hut's one windowless room. The door was made of hewn planks and had swung on leather hinges, long since broken. It lay on the floor. All that could be done to close it was to prop it in its hole. The packed dirt floor was littered with blown leaves, and they swept it with a pine bough. There was a drystone hearth, a mud-and-stick chimney. Ruby put her head in and looked up and saw daylight. But it had apparently never drawn well, and the chestnut-log roof beams were dark and shiny with years of acc.u.mulated smoke. Beneath the odor of dust, the house was still infused with the rich smell of a thousand old campfires. There was a wooden sleeping platform along one wall, a layer of grey straw still on it. They carried Stobrod in and rested him there.

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While Ruby built up a fire in the hearth, Ada went out and cut a long straight limb and trimmed it sharp with the hatchet and hammered it into the ground and staked out the horse under a cedar. But he was wet and shivering. He stood with his head down and his winter coat was pressed in dark curls to his skin from snowmelt. Ada looked at him and at the sky and judged the cold by the sting of her cheeks. Ralph might be dead on the ground by morning.

She loosed him from the stake and tried to lead him into one of the huts, but he did not want to duck his head to go through the door. She pulled at the lead rope and he lowered his hind end and backed away, pulling her until she fell forward into the snow. She got up and found a stick as big around as her wrist and she got behind the horse and hit him again and again with all the strength she had left in her, which was not an awful lot. Finally he plunged into that black door hole as if into death.

Once inside, though, Ralph was immediately content, for the hut hardly differed in dimensions or materials from a barn stall. Within minutes he had relaxed. He shook out his hide and spraddled his legs and p.i.s.sed a long and satisfying p.i.s.s. Ada fed him grain out of the cook pot and then took the pot and rinsed it in the creek.

It was almost dark and Ada stood and looked at the final sheen of light on the water. She was tired and cold and scared. This seemed like the lonesomest place on earth. She dreaded night and the moment when the campcraft was all done and she would have to wrap herself in a blanket and lie in the dark on the cold dirt floor of the ghost cabin to wait for morning. She was so tired her legs felt burnt out from under her, but she believed she could get through this if she did one thing at a time and thought of the remaining things left to be done as sequential, not c.u.mulative.

She went inside and found that Ruby had cooked a supper like to their breakfast. But when Ada put the first spoon of the greasy grits to her mouth, they would not go down. Her stomach knotted up.

She stood and went out and vomited in the snow, though about all she had left in her to bring up was black bile. Then she rubbed her mouth with snow and went inside and ate again until her bowl was empty. She sat with it in her lap, exhausted in stunned silence before the hearth.

She had forgotten to drink water for most of the day. That and the cold, the walking and the work of burying and healing had turned her mind strange so that her only wish was to seek happier visions in the fire coals. She looked and looked but found none in either the liquid shapes of flame or the geometric scorings charred in the sides of the fire logs. But the burning wood made squeaking sounds like footsteps tramping in dry snow and even Ada knew what that betokened. More ready to fall.

footsteps in the snow When he reached the place where three ways came together there was barely enough light left behind the western clouds for Inman to study signs on the ground for the story they told. The snow was marked by tracks coming up to the flat ground at the fork and then going on up the rising left-hand trail. There was black blood on the ground beneath a big poplar where killing had been done. The snow all about was churned up by the walking of people and horses. There had been a recent fire in a ring of stones beyond the poplar, and the ashes were cold but still held the smell of pork fat.

Footsteps and a drag trail led to a cross of sticks standing at the head of a raw dig. Inman squatted and looked at it, thinking this: if there is a world beyond the grave as hymns claim, such a hole makes a grim lonesome portal to it.

He was somewhat puzzled. There ought to have been two burials. And though Inman had seen men laid one atop another to save shovel work, he reckoned that was not the case here. He rose and went back to studying the signs, and he followed them across the creek to the rock ledge and thereunder he found more blood on the ground and the still-warm coals of a little fire. A pile of sodden roots 2004-3-6.

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where they had been cast on the ground with their cooking water. He picked up pieces of root and rubbed them in his hand and smelled them, and he could tell ginseng and mullein.

He set them on a rock and went to the creek and dipped up a handful of water to drink. A salamander, wildly spotted in colors and patterns unique to that one creek, moved among the stones.

Inman lifted it out and held it cupped in his hand and looked at the salamander's face. The way its mouth curved around its head shaped a smile of such great serenity as to cause Inman envy and distress. Living hid under a creek rock would be about the only way to achieve such countenance, Inman thought. He returned the salamander to its place and walked back and stood in the crotch of the trail and looked off where the tracks led. He could see hardly ten feet ahead before they faded in the dark that was settling fast. He figured Ada might recede before him forever and leave him a lone pilgrim going on and on.

The clouds hung low and thick. There would be no moon and the night would soon be black as the inside of a cold stove. He put back his head and sniffed the air and it smelled like snow. It was a matter of which was worse, to lose the track in the night or to have it covered over.

Of the two, the dark was certain and nigh, and so Inman went back to the ledge and sat and watched the last light fall away. He listened to the creek and tried to make up a story to fit the signs, one that would explain the single grave and why the two women had gone on across the mountain instead of following their own tracks home.

But it was hard to reason things out in the state he was in. Part from choice and part from necessity, Inman was fasting and his senses would not row up properly. He had not eaten bite one in the days since he had cooked the bear cub. The creek had the sound of voices in the rush of its water and the clicking of its bed stones against one another, and he thought they might tell him what had taken place there if he listened hard enough. But the voices shifted and blurred and the words had no meaning to him, try as he might to make them out. Then he reckoned he was not hearing voices at all, just words forming up in his head, and even then he could not make sense of them. He was too empty for sense.

His sacks held no food but for a few walnuts he had picked up off the ground two days previous at a place where a cabin had burned. There was nothing left of it but a cone of sooty dirt where the clay chimney had stood and a good-sized walnut tree beyond where the front of the house would have been. There had been yet walnuts on the ground under it. The black sh.e.l.ls lay inside little nests in the gra.s.s where the gra.s.s had grown long around the husks and the husks had rotted away. Inman had put what nuts he could find in his haversack, but had never got around to eating them, for the more he thought the more he reckoned that the work it would take to break them open would overbalance the sustenance he would get from them, each one holding no more meat than would be around the end joint of your forefinger. Yet he didn't throw them out, for he worried that if you put all of life to such a test it would not seem worth living. And, too, he found the sound of them comforting as he walked. They rattled against each other with the dry tock of old bones hanging in trees.

He looked at the bitter roots on the rock where he had laid them. He first thought to nibble at them, but then he picked them up and threw them into the creek. He took a walnut out of his sack and threw it in the creek too, and it made the valved sound of a scared frog plunging in water. He left the other nuts in his sack, though he intended to eat nothing until he found Ada. If she would not have him he would go on to the heights and see if the portals at the Shining Rocks would open to him as the woman with the snake tattoos had suggested they would to one with a fasting heart, empty in all his faculties. Inman could think of no reason to hold back. He doubted there was a man in the world emptier than he at that moment. He would walk right out of this world and keep on going into that happy valley she had described.

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stones into it to heat. For a long time he lay wrapped in his blankets with his feet to the fire and thought about that pair of tracks leading away.