The Choiring Of The Trees Part 24

He came to one of the abandoned homesteads northwest of Nail, in a stand of cottonwood trees and briars. Hardly a homestead: just a cabin, a squatter's shack, clearly long abandoned, although the rope on the well bucket was not fully decayed and the bucket itself, even rusted through with holes, held enough water to be drawn and inspected and found to be pure enough for washing the wound. Once the wound was cleansed, and freshly bleeding, he discovered it was deep enough to need st.i.tches. Beyond the perimeter of cottonwoods he found what he needed: a yarrow plant, like those he'd fed his sheep, but this one wild, whose leaves he crushed to smear on his wound and slow its bleeding; and a common plantain, whose leaves mashed to a pulp made a mild astringent; and a lone loblolly pine, whose pitch he transferred from one of its wounds to his own. "I need this more than you do," he had said to the tree, realizing these were the first words he'd spoken since greeting the sun the morning before. The pine would have answered him if it could: it would have gladly contributed a bit of its pitch to disinfect and protect his open wound.

Then he returned to the cabin and searched it for something to dress the wound, but there was no cloth, save the fragile, grimy remnants of curtains on one window. The interior was bare of anything but the twisted remains of an iron bedstead, and some discarded kitchen items: a battered blue enamel washpan, a broken fork, a bent tableknife. In one corner of the floor was a small pile of walnuts still in their husks, perhaps gathered by squirrels or chipmunks, but Nail had not noticed a walnut tree in the vicinity. There was a small fireplace in a chimney at one end of the room, and Nail considered making a fire in it. He considered staying awhile, letting his wound close and hoping his shoulder would stop hurting, snaring some small game to cook, taking advantage of the supply of well water. He was impatient to keep moving toward home but felt the need to recover from the river crossing.

He had to dry his soaked shoes. Even untying their laces, which had held them together around his neck during the river crossing, was nearly impossible using only one hand and his teeth. The cottonwood tree, or eastern poplar, has branches easily broken by the wind, and the yard surrounding the cabin was littered with an abundance of firewood. The brown seeds of the cottonwood have cl.u.s.ters of white, cottony hairs, hence the name cottonwood, and these, when dry, make good tinder. He spent the rest of the morning just preparing his fire: in the fireplace he arranged a pyramid of cottonwood sticks and branches over a pyramid of kindling: twigs and bark and some splinters from the wood of the cabin itself. Then on the hearth he carefully a.s.sembled the little mound of tinder: first a layer of cottonwood seed fluff, then some woodworm dust on top of that. He had to walk barefoot for an hour around the neighborhood, but avoiding the direction where he'd met the dog, until he found a small piece of flint, not indigenous to the spot but washed down by a flood from some higher elevation. He took the flint back to the cabin and held it down with his right foot beside the mound of tinder while holding the tableknife in his left hand and striking the flint until sparks brought the first wisp of smoke from the tinder, and then he knelt and blew the sparks into flame and shoved the tinder pile beneath the kindling. By noon a fire was going in his fireplace. He stepped outside to examine the smoke rising from the chimney: it was not conspicuous. The nearest neighbor might not see it.

The day was hot; he did not need the fire for warmth, but all afternoon he built up a pile of coals in the fireplace to roast whatever he could find. For lunch he cracked some of the walnuts out of their husks; every other one was dried or rotten, but the edible ones made him a meal. It had been a lot of work, with one hand, to crack the nuts beneath a rock and to pick their meat.

For dessert there were no end of wild raspberries. He was careful not to overindulge and give himself indigestion. Later in the cabin, noticing the shard of mirror still hanging on the wall, he brushed the grime from it and took a look at himself: a fright, but a comical one, with the red all around his mouth. He made no attempt to wash it off.

He fashioned himself, from a limb of Osage orange, or bois d'arc, a digging-stick, an all-purpose pointed tool for turning up roots or for spearing: he spent part of the afternoon digging up a mess of wild onions, slowed by having to use the stick with only one hand: it was more a poking-stick than a digging-stick. But he quickly acquired dexterity in wielding it, so that once, when he stumbled upon a rabbit hole just as the animal was emerging, almost by reflex he stabbed it with the digging-stick, enough to maim it, and then administered the coup de grace by using the stick as a club. He gutted the rabbit by venting it and squeezing its innards toward its middle and then holding it high overhead with his good left hand and swinging it with great force downward and between his legs, causing its entrails to be expelled. He saved the heart, liver, and kidneys, roasting those too in the fireplace, for a supper of both raw and roasted onions with rabbit meat, washed down with good well water, and another dessert of wild raspberries.

But before roasting the rabbit he had carefully stripped away and saved the tendons of the muscles, planning eventually to dry them and twist the sinews into the cord of the bowstring for his bow and arrow. He was that optimistic: that he would somehow regain the use of his right hand and arm.

Sitting in front of the cabin after supper, watching the sun go down, feeling free and safe and contented, and even burping a few times, he did not even hear the dog sneaking up on him until the dog, the same one he had encountered earlier, was within a few feet. The dog began to bay, as if it had treed a c.o.o.n. It did not come any closer, within reach of his digging-stick, but continued baying until, moments later, its owner appeared: a man with a long beard, face hidden beneath a floppy fedora, and cradling in one arm a double-barreled shotgun.

The man did not raise the shotgun to point it at Nail but carried it loose in the crook of his arm. He regarded Nail quizzically for a while before saying, "What's yore name?"

Nail was tempted to answer truthfully but paused. Could this man know that there was a wanted escaped convict by his name? Was this man's house, hereabouts, within reach of the news of the escape? For that matter, where was he? Nail had no idea, except that it was near the river; the drifting logs might even have carried him beyond Little Rock. "Where am I?" he answered.

The two questions remained there in the air between them, exchanged, unanswered, for a long moment. Did they answer simultaneously, or was the man just a step ahead of him? No, it seemed that both answers, in the form of that one word, were spoken by both men at once.

"Nail."

Then they just regarded each other with further cautious surprise for a spell until, again simultaneously, they spoke: "What?"

"I ast ye, what's yore name?" the man said.

"And you jist said it, didn't ye?" Nail said.

"Why'd ye ast me whar ye are, if you done already knew?" the man asked.

"What?" Nail said again. "You aint said, yit. Where am I?"

"Nail," the man said. "What's yore name?"

"I aint about to tell ye my last name till you tell me where I'm at."

"I done did. You need to know the name of the state too? Whar'd you float down from? This here's Arkansas."

"I know it's Arkansas," Nail said impatiently. "What part of it?"

"Nail," the man said again. "I don't need to know yore last name. What do folks call ye?"

"Just Nail," Nail said.

"That's right," the man said.

And so it went until it dawned upon first Nail and then the man that they were speaking at cross-purposes, each giving the same answer to a different question. It was Nail who finally got it figured out enough to ask, "You mean the name of this here place is Nail?"

"What I been tellin ye the last ten minutes, dangdurn it. Don't tell me yore name if ye don't wanter. I don't keer."

"My name is Nail," Nail said.

"Huh? Is that a fack now? I thought ye was funnin me." The man studied him more closely. "You got any kinfolks hereabouts?"

"Not as I know of, but you never kin tell, if it's got that name. It's a ole fambly name."

"Yo're the sorriest-lookin feller ever I seed," the man said. "What happened to yore haid?"

It struck Nail that his shaved head and his face smeared with raspberry juice made him look either injured or comical, or both. His faded and torn chambray shirt and trousers would not have given him away as a convict; and now he was glad that being in the death hole had not required him to wear stripes like the other convicts. "I had the mange," he said, rubbing his head. And then, running his hand down his cheek: "And this aint nothin but berry stain."

Gesturing with the gun barrel toward the chimney, the man asked, "You got a far burnin in thar?"

Nail nodded and asked, "This place don't belong to n.o.body, does it?"

"Belongs to me," the man said. "You wanter buy it?"

"Naw, I'm jist a-pa.s.sin through," Nail said. "I jist aimed to stay a night or two."

"Aint no bed in thar, I guess ye noticed," the man said. "But you jist come over to my place. Aint far from yere."

"I don't want to trouble ye," Nail said.

"No trouble, and I got a spare bed fer comp'ny. Come on."

So Nail went with the man, first banking the coals in his fireplace and retrieving his shoes, which were pretty much dried by now. As Nail put them on, with difficulty using just one hand, and unable to tie the laces, the man observed, "Swum the river, did ye? What happened to yore good hand?"

"I reckon I must've th'owed my shoulder out of joint," Nail said.

That night, in the man's cabin, which wasn't any larger than the abandoned cabin Nail had taken up residence in, but was in reasonably good condition, the man urged a tin cup full of some strong, fiery whiskey upon Nail, who, being the equal of any of his forebears as a connoisseur of corn liquor, coughed and gagged and declined a second helping, but the man said, "You'd best swaller all of that stuff ye kin hold, or it'll kill ye when I fix yore arm."

"You've fixed arms before?" Nail asked apprehensively.

"A time or two," the man said. "Drink up." Nail swallowed as much of the bad booze as he could force down his throat; his stomach was feeling giddier than his head. The man said, "Let's take off that shirt," then unb.u.t.toned and removed it from him, as a valet might have done. Then he asked, "You ready? Better take one more big swaller."

Nail drained his tin cup, with deliberate speed that left both his head and his stomach lightened, while the man probed and poked Nail's upper arm and shoulder, and then, quicker than Nail could think, threw a strange, complicated two-arm lock around his upper body and lunged and pulled and jerked.

Nail screamed. The pitch and volume of his agonized bellow would have surprised him had he not momentarily blacked out. When he had resumed awareness and could still feel the searing torture in his shoulder joint, he became aware of the man's words: "Jesus! I reckon they could hear ye all the way back at the stir."

Nail groaned and sighed at length, and then asked, "The where?"

"The big house," the man said. "Whar ye came from. The Walls."

Nail eyed the man, at the same instant discovering that he could again move his right arm, although painfully. "How'd ye know?" he asked.

The man held up Nail's shirt. "Use to wear one myself."

"You break out too?"

The man nodded. "But before they even finished buildin her."

Nail spent that night, and three more nights, with the man, who never told him his name. Nail knew that the only man who had ever successfully escaped The Walls and was still at large was named McCabe, so he a.s.sumed this man was McCabe, but he never asked. The coals of the fire that Nail had so carefully built in the other house were allowed to go cold. The man fed him well, catfish one night, duck the second night, more catfish the third, and the swelling went down in Nail's shoulder until he could use his right hand again. They fished together: the catfish of the third supper was one that Nail had caught, a monster. They did not talk an awful lot; they made some casual conversation about the progress of the war in Europe and casually debated whether or not the United States should join the fight. The man was pro, Nail con.

But on the fourth day the man began to reminisce about The Walls and to ask Nail questions. "Is ole Burdell still runnin the place?" he asked, and Nail told him what had happened to Burdell and how T.D. Yeager had come in and taken over, and what sort of man Yeager was. The man eventually asked, "Is ole Fat Gabe still workin in thar?" and Nail related in detail the death of Fat Gabe at the hands of Ernest Bodenhammer, privately grieving anew over Ernest's fate. But the man became so elated at the news of the death of Fat Gabe, whom he had loathed more than any man he'd ever known, that he decided to celebrate, and produced from some hiding-place a quart of genuine bottled-in-bond sippin-whiskey, James E. Pepper, which he had been saving for a special occasion or serious illness, whichever came first, and the two men consumed the whole bottle in short order and became loud and boisterous. With his shotgun and the help of his dog the man killed a possum, and they had for the fourth supper a wonderful meal of roast possum and sweet potatoes and hot biscuits, the meat fat and greasy and filling and delicious.

On the fifth day the man offered Nail the gift of the other house. The man pointed out its advantages, which were already obvious to Nail: seclusion, peace, privacy, an abundance of fish and game, and, for whatever it was worth, the man's companionship and a.s.sistance. Almost with sorrow, Nail explained why he had to get on home to Newton County. There was, he said, a lady waiting for him.

The man regretted being unable to furnish Nail with a firearm, since he had only one, his shotgun. But he gave him a hunting-knife with a sheath that could be attached to the belt. And a bota: a water bottle made of goatskin. As well as a small wad of string, some matches, and two fishhooks, and finally a paper sack containing a dozen biscuits and some bits of leftover possum meat. Nail said, "I wush there was somethin I could give ye in return."

The man pointed. "How 'bout that thar gold thing on yore chest?"

Nail fingered the tree charm almost as if to hide it. "Not this. This here was given me by that lady I spoke of, and it's all that's stood between me and goin off the deep end."

"Wal, say howdy to her for me," the man suggested, and clapped him on the back and walked him as far as the beginning of the trail that led to Plumerville. He told him how to get around the west side of Plumerville and over the old Indian boundary, toward the flatlands of northern Conway County.

Nail said in parting, "If you ever find yoreself up in Newton County, come to Stay More and visit with us."

Then he followed the directions the man had given him, skirting the edge of Plumerville without being seen by a soul. When he got to the tracks of the Iron Mountain Railroad, the same tracks over which Viridis and Rindy and Rosabone had traveled en route to Stay More just that morning, he was tempted to wait for a freight he could catch and ride to Clarksville, but his experience on the Rock Island freight had made him leery of trains, and the stretch of track between Plumerville and Morrilton was too open and straight and exposed. He headed northward from the tracks and then crossed some low hills and picked up his stride across the flatlands leading into the village of Overcup.

His shoes were not of the best: soaked by the river crossing, dried too fast by the fireplace, they had shrunk, and were too tight and pinched for him to walk in them as fast as he had hoped, and even so had given him blisters.

He camped that night on a ridge overlooking Overcup, which is the name of an oak tree, so called because the husk, or cup, of its acorn nearly covers the rest of the acorn. The overcup is not a common oak, but there is an abundance of them around the village named after them. From his camp Nail could watch the lights of the village come on, and since he had been too busy hiking to stop and hunt, he considered sneaking up to the edge of the village to grab a chicken. But that would be theft, even if the chicken was running loose, not penned in somebody's coop. Nail had never stolen anything in his life; he had never committed any crime, unless you consider his bootlegging a crime. And he was not starving; the previous night's supper with McCabe was still fresh in his mind, if not his stomach, and he had a bit of it left in his paper sack.

He ate another of McCabe's biscuits and finished off the possum as he watched the village until its lights had one by one gone out, and then he lay down on the soft earth beneath an overcup and gazed awhile at the sky and its vast expanse of starlight. A nearly full moon had begun to rise. The night was warm and clear and entirely silent except for the occasional distant baying of some dog. Nail began to sense for the first time the extent of his freedom: there was that enormous firmament of stars overhead, almost enough light to illuminate this enormous firmament of earth that surrounded him and in which he was free to roam or to lie still, as he chose, and he chose now to lie still. Then he slept.

The next morning, after two more of McCabe's biscuits for breakfast, he climbed down from the ridge and sought a good place to skirt the village undetected and gain the trail that led to Solgohachia, his next landmark. Of course he did not know the name of Overcup, nor would he come to learn the name of Solgohachia, but those were the two villages I found on topographic survey maps I used to trace his probable route. None of those villages he would skirt or pa.s.s through-Round Mountain, Wonderview, Jerusalem, Stumptoe, Lost Corner, Nogo, and Raspberry-would ever become known to him by name, except the last, because he did not encounter anyone after leaving McCabe, and, even if he had, would not have stopped to ask questions.

Solgohachia happened to be the hometown of Sam Bell, who was Nail's inmate in the death hole, sentenced there for killing four members of his divorced wife's family (Viridis had called him a psychopath), but Nail would not have known this, for he would not have known it was Solgohachia he was stopping through, nor known the Indian legend surrounding the well where he had paused to draw himself a drink of water: a chief's daughter had been married to a great warrior at this spot, and according to popular belief anybody who drank from this well would have a long and happy marriage; consequently, thousands of couples had come from miles around to Solgohachia to solemnize their weddings at this very spot, where Nail, unknowing, paused for a drink of water. Coming to and going out of Solgohachia, he found an abundance of usable arrowheads for his future bow and arrow, so he should have known that this had once been an Indian place.

Crossing through a gap of the hills between Solgohachia and Point Remove Creek, he nearly stepped on a large snake, whose checkerboard pattern might have misled a woods novice into thinking it a diamondback or a copperhead, but Nail recognized it for what it was, a nonpoisonous hognose, or spitting adder; and he took some time to observe and study it, hunkering motionless on his heels, so still the snake lost its fear of him. It was the first resumption of his nature study. All those months in the penitentiary, of all the pleasures of freedom he had missed, he had missed most his loving attention to the variety of the natural world. Nail was a naturalist of no small merit, but until now he had been too busy escaping the prison to stop and notice the welcome that nature was giving him on every hand. Almost as if Nature Herself had sensed his return to the watching of Her, She let loose a magnificent falcon, a red-backed male kestrel, what Nail would have called a sparrow hawk if he'd had anyone to call it to, and he dallied on his trek for nearly an hour near the tree in which the kestrel had its nest, watching it, and watching too the eventual appearance of the female.

Not long afterward he began the construction of his bow and his arrows. He fashioned the four-foot bow from a long stave of Osage orange, or bois d'arc (the same words from which "Ozark" derives), and the arrowshafts he made from willow. For three nights, in the lingering light after supper, he slowly trimmed and shaped the bow, careful not to whittle it with his knife but just to sc.r.a.pe it into shape. He had saved all the sinew from each animal he'd eaten, rabbits and squirrels alike, and had carefully dried and twisted it into a long bowstring. Leftover sinew went into wrapping the nock ends of the arrows and into tying the arrowheads to the foreshafts. For fletching, he used the feathers of a wild turkey he had surprised with his digging-stick used as a spear, having given up any attempt to hit a quail or partridge, both abundant but elusive.

When he had finished the construction of his bow and arrow, he spent an entire day practicing with it, slowed down on his hike by the necessity to stop and take aim and experiment with ways of holding his bow and his arrows and crouching in a shooting position.

The number of miles he covered each day diminished as the terrain became rougher and steeper: he had reached the Ozarks, and the uplifts had risen; some folks say everything above the village of Jerusalem is technically in the Ozarks; beyond that point he would certainly encounter no more flat plains. Between practicing with his bow and arrow, actually hunting with it, and struggling with the rugged inclines of Van Buren County, his progress slowed to no more than fifteen miles a day. His shoes had begun to fall apart, and he resewed them with sinew and a needle made from one of the fishhooks straightened; they still gave him blisters.

But with his new weapon he was able to kill anything alive and edible that crossed his path, or whose path he crossed: a racc.o.o.n, a pheasant, and even, while fording a stream, a large ba.s.s. He did not want for food, and he used the pheasant feathers to fletch more arrows and made himself a cap from the racc.o.o.n's fur: although the heat of summer made a fur cap unnecessary, his still-bare scalp was often chilly, and he feared getting sunstroke while walking in the broiling sunshine at midday without a head-covering. But the pheasant and the c.o.o.n had been small game; he did not feel that his marksmanship with the bow and arrow were yet sufficient to risk an encounter with a buck deer or a bear. He saw plenty of the tracks of both, and once he even saw a mother bear with her cubs, at some distance, upwind, and avoided them. Crossing over into Pope County from Van Buren County, into the wilderness near New Hope, he encountered an entire family of deer and crept up on them, upwind, and took careful aim at the buck from not more than twenty paces; he missed it with two arrows but hit it with the third, right behind the shoulder, wounding it enough to catch it and finish it off with the hunting-knife. It was a seven-point buck. He butchered it of its haunches and stuffed himself on spit-roasted venison, and then, too full to move for many hours, used the time of digestion to carefully skin the animal and prepare its hide for some future use. He carried the deerskin wrapped around his neck like a big cape thereafter, transferring it to his waist as the heat of each day came on, while he gained the headwaters of Illinois Bayou, a trackless wilderness of forest that left him feeling like a pioneer.

I have not been able to find out how the mountain settlement of Nogo got its name. I'm sure there are legends, or apocryphal attributions to some settler who penetrated as deep into the wilderness as the wilderness would allow, and who gave up in frustration because it was "no go" beyond that point. For Nail, it would become no go as well.

In a wild place called Dave Millsaps Hollow, just to the west of Nogo, Nail was picking blackberries when he discovered that he had some compet.i.tion for the berry patch: a black bear. Almost simultaneously he and the bear happened to look up from their labor of picking berries and stuffing their mouths and looked directly into each other's eyes from a distance of not more than thirty paces. Nail's first instinct was to shift his eyes about quickly to ascertain that there were no cubs around, because a female with cubs would have attacked him instantly. As it was, she...or he...just snorted, as if to challenge Nail's right to the berry patch. Nail stood his ground. The bear growled and lowered itself from its hind legs to all fours, and from that position commenced swaying to and fro while continuing to growl, its eyes locked upon Nail. He made a sudden shooing gesture with his arms and hollered, "Git!" but the animal did not git. Nail, who had encountered bears in his explorations of the Stay More countryside, guessed that the bear was about two years old and probably male, although he could not understand why the bear was not retreating at the sight of him, unless it was so possessive toward the berry patch that it did not intend to relinquish it. Again by instinct, Nail found himself reaching behind to take his bow and arrows, but even while bringing an arrow up and attaching the bowstring to the arrow's nock, he attempted once more to frighten the bear. He stomped his feet and yelled, "Git outa huh-yar!" and then lunged toward the bear and waved his arms and his bow and shouted, "Go home!" For one instant the bear turned as if to flee, but then it changed its mind and, growling, charged Nail.

Nail knew that he would not have more than one shot, as he had with the buck, so he aimed carefully for a spot immediately below the bear's chin, toward his shoulders, toward his heart, and waited the extra fraction of a second for the charging bear to get close enough to feel the full impact of the puncturing arrow. Almost in the same instant as he released the arrow, point-blank, with the bowstring pulled back as far as it would go, Nail fell to one side, lunging really, to dodge the bear's charge, but he did not escape the bear's reach. The bear swiped at Nail with claws that would have torn his face away had it not instantly felt the confounding pain of the sharp flint transfixing its vitals, and thus the full force of the bear's swipe had been arrested. As Nail fell, the bear lunged onward a few steps before crashing to the earth, howling in pain and attempting clumsily to grab with its paws the shaft of the arrow. As the bear completed its death throes, Nail watched for what seemed long minutes, his heartbeat and breathing so rapid that he had not noticed that blood was coursing from his forehead down his cheek. He had not even attended to his own wounds before he a.s.sured himself that the bear was, if not entirely dead, immobilized enough to be finished off with the hunting-knife.

But as Nail kicked the bear with his foot and prepared to plunge the knife into it, the bear made one last defense, raking a claw into Nail's leg.

When the bear had become at last motionless, Nail realized he had blood covering his face and more of it running down his ankle, and he had to stop his own bleeding before he could bleed the bear any further.

Later he dragged the bear's carca.s.s into the mouth of a cavern, or undercut bluff ledge, in Dave Millsaps Hollow, where he was almost too tired to build a fire and butcher the bear and roast some of its meat. While the bear meat was cooking on a spit over the coals, he settled down to prepare the bear's hide, although there was so much of it, the thick furry hide, that he couldn't conceive how he would need it for anything in such hot weather. But the bear's fur seemed more important to him than the meat; he was not particularly fond of bear meat, and he kept telling himself that he had only shot the bear in self-defense.

But if he wondered what earthly use he might have for a thick bearskin, he would soon discover a desperate need for it: the next morning he awoke before sunrise, feeling severely cold. He jumped up and attempted to warm himself by hopping around and clapping himself, and then built up his fire and held himself close to it, and then added more and more fuel until it was blazing and roaring, and then wrapped the bearskin tight around himself, but still it was awful cold! He could not understand: the sun had risen and the day looked just as bright and hot as any late-June day ought to be, but here he was freezing! There was nothing in the appearance of Nature to indicate that the temperature of the air had actually dropped so drastically. He considered that there might be a cold draft blowing up from some hidden crevice inside the cavern, and he moved out into the sunshine, surrounded by warm air in the morning sun, but still he began to shiver; then, increasingly, to tremble helplessly. He lay down beside his roaring fire wrapped tight in both his deerskin and his bearskin and shook so violently that he felt his chattering teeth would knock themselves out of his mouth, that every bone of his body would splinter.

His terrible chill lasted for almost an hour and then abruptly stopped, and he scarcely had time to catch his breath before he became overheated. He threw off the deerskin and bearskin and crawled away from the blazing fire into the cool recesses of the cavern, but still he felt as if he were burning up. He was tempted to hike down into the holler to search for a stream of cool water to immerse himself in, but he lacked the strength to hike because the awful heat seemed to be afflicting his brain and his energy; he felt of his forehead: it was still caked with blood from the bear's blow, but the skin was hotter than any fever he had ever had. He considered that possibly he had not cleaned and stanched his wounds well enough to prevent infection, but even the worst infection would not so suddenly give him a high fever. Would it?

His fever continued to immobilize him in agony for several hours, for most of the morning, and then, sometime in the afternoon, he began to drip with sweat. Hot as he had been all morning, he could not understand why he had not sweated during the morning, but it was afternoon before the cooling perspiration began to form in his pores and then gradually to soak him and his clothes. He wondered which of the three conditions was worse: to freeze, to burn, to sog. The same bear fur that had warmed him he now used to blot up some of the flood of lather from his skin until the fur had become as soggy as he was.

Was it beginning to darken so soon? The day was ending, and he had accomplished nothing except the helpless attention to his changes in temperature: first too cold, then too hot, now too wet, but now also too weak to do anything but lie upon the floor of the cave and collect his wits and try to imagine what had happened. This was not, he a.s.sured himself, the fever of an infection from the bear's wounding him. Had he eaten something bad? Had the bear meat contained some poison? Or had he perhaps unknowingly been bitten by a poisonous snake or reptile?

He got himself painfully up from the hard earth to search for his bota, and found it, but the goatskin bottle was empty. Had he drunk it dry during his fever? He stepped outside the cavern to begin a hike in search of water but realized he could not go anywhere; he was not just weak but increasingly dizzy. His head began to spin. Darkness was falling, not just from the setting of the sun but from something inside his head.

He fell to his knees and remained thus for a long time, he did not know how long: too tired to stand but too proud to fall over. His vision clouded. Then he saw the bed. The bed! Right over there in one corner of the cavern. How had he missed it before? Well, it wasn't any four-poster or even any kind of bedstead as such, but it was a neat stack of quilts and blankets and comforters and pillows, and even had some fresh white sheets on it! Somebody had made a bed inside the cavern. He crawled to it and heaved his body up onto it and felt his body sinking into it, and it was the most comfortable bed he'd ever been in, even if it didn't have any springs or slats or frame or anything but just this thick pile of stuffings. His hand gripped the white sheet with wonder, and then, gripping it further, he discovered that he was also gripping paper. Not just a white sheet of cloth but a white sheet of paper. He picked it up and had to hold it very close to his eyes to make out that it had letters written on it.

He squinted and managed to make out: Dear you (I cannot write your name for fear somebody else might find this), I have been coming to this cavern every day in hopes of finding you here, and I have prepared this bed for you, bringing each time I came a blanket or two, and these pillows, one for you, one I hope for me, this bed for us, when you come here. You will come here, won't you? I know you will, it is just a matter of time, but as I write these words two weeks have pa.s.sed since I came to Stay More and began to wait for you, and you have not come. This is the place that Latha said you would come to. I hope. Please come. If you are reading these words, it means you are here, and it means I will soon be with you. Lie still. Be here. The trees will sing for you until I join you. With all my love, The Lady. And there was a P.S.: Your new harmonica is under this bed.

How could this be? Although Nail had had only the rising and setting sun as his compa.s.s, and had known that he was pointed in the right direction, he had a good idea of how far Newton County was from Little Rock, and there was simply no way he could already have reached it; he had to be still somewhere in Pope County, northeastern Pope County by his calculation, with maybe fifty miles, three or four days' travel, separating him from Stay More.

But now he groped beneath the pile of blankets and quilts until his hand touched metal, and he withdrew the harmonica: an M. Hohner Marine Band Tremolo Echo, identical to the one he'd had for years and had destroyed to make a dagger. He raised it to his mouth and kissed it, and then he began to play it, and he played it through the dark hours of the night until the trees, roused from their slumber, joined their voices to his music.

Then was it morning? Or did she appear with a lantern? Or was it neither morning nor lantern but her own light, the light that emanated from her goodness? He opened his eyes, realizing he had not slept but having no idea how long he had lain with his eyes closed: he opened his eyes and there she was, kneeling beside the bed she had made for him. She was smiling but also frowning: she was shocked at his appearance, at the blood on his face from the bear's clawing him mixed with the red of the berry juice and his two-week growth of beard.

You made it! she said. But are you all right?

"I reckon not," he said. "I must be real bad sick, 'cause I don't have the least idee how I managed to git here."

She felt his brow. You're real cold, she said. Cold as death.

"Yeah, I've been either too cold or too hot or too wet for quite a spell." These words came out almost like stuttering, because of the chattering of his teeth and the trembling of his body.

Before he could protest that he looked awful and smelled worse, she climbed beneath the covers with him and held him tight and attempted to warm him. The thick quilts and coverlets piled atop them imprisoned her body heat and divided it with him, but that was not enough for both of them: she became cold herself. Together they trembled for a long time until each of them removed or parted enough of their clothing to make contact and penetration possible, and the pleasure of the contact and the penetration was so great as to make them oblivious to any cold or sickness or loneliness, and they continued it even beyond the point where they ceased being too cold and became too hot, beyond that to the point where they were both drenched with sweat, as well as the bed, and still neither of them reached the endpoint of the exertion.

Finally they had to stop, and they lay panting in a pile of wet bedclothes. She was the first to speak: I guess you can't get over the mountain.

He observed, "You caint either."

Let's rest, she said. Let's nap and then try again.

He napped. More than napped: he fell into a deep sleep without knowing that he slept, then fell out of a deep sleep without knowing that he had never slept, then discovered that he was neither shaking with cold nor melting with heat nor dripping with wet but had resumed a stable temperature and humidity. Light came from the mouth of the cavern, with full sunshine in it. There was no bed. If he had somehow got through the night without sleep, it had happened upon the bare earthen floor of the cavern: his arms and face were caked with dirt.

He had no energy whatever, not even enough to heed the urge to make water. He rolled over to one side, opened his fly, and urinated upon the dirt beneath him, shifting his body to avoid the dark puddle. He had no hunger but did have a mighty thirst; he recalled that he'd had it the previous evening but had done nothing about it, and now it was worse. He managed to get to his knees and crawl to where the bota lay, but discovered that it was empty and remembered that he had already tried it and found it empty. He attached the bota to his belt on one side and attached his hunting-knife in its sheath to the other side, donned his three furs, the c.o.o.nskin cap, the deerskin cape, the damp bearskin robe, and then took up his bow and three remaining arrows and left the cavern. Downhill from it he looked back at it, and stared long at it as if he half-expected that she might appear, and then he gave his head a vigorous shake to clear it and staggered on down and out of the hollow and into the middle fork of the Illinois Bayou, where he removed his clothing and his furs and lay in the water for a long, long time.

Just soaking all that dirt from his body lifted his spirits, and afterward, resuming his hike, he felt lighter, light enough even to make a joke about it to himself: "I ought to feel lighter; I've washed off ten pounds of dirt." He even laughed, and his laughter helped him begin to climb the mountain ahead, which, before the morning was over, would be the hardest mountain he'd ever climbed, although it couldn't have been very high. He spent nearly all the morning on his hands and knees, or rising enough from his knees to lurch upward and grab a sapling trunk to pull himself another foot higher. He reflected that if he had been totally well, he could have stood up and hiked to the summit in less than an hour, but as it was it seemed to take him all day, reaching its summit with the last of his strength, unable to stand, crawling onward. He was too tired to notice, as he attained the plateau at the top of the mountain, that he was crawling through the garden patch of a homestead. By the time the dog bounded up to him and commenced barking, it was too late to find a way around.

"Jist hold it right thar!" a voice yelled at him, a high-pitched, trembling voice trying too hard to sound stern. He looked up into the muzzle of a shotgun held by a woman standing beside the barking dog. He raised his hands, one of them holding the bow and the arrows. "Drap thet bone air!" the woman ordered him; he complied and continued to hold his hands over his head, kneeling. She approached closer. "You kin understand English, huh?" she said. "Yo're a smart Injun, huh?"

"I aint no Injun," he said.

"Take off yore hat," she ordered, and he removed the c.o.o.nskin cap, revealing his close-cropped scalp. Enough of his hair had grown back in two weeks or so to show that he was blond. The woman moved even closer but kept the shotgun pointed at his chest. "You aint, air ye?" she declared, in wonder. She appeared to be a youngish woman, or...it was hard to tell...she had lived a hard life that made her look thirty when she was hardly into her twenties. He reflected that she looked more like an Indian than he did. "What're ye doin creepin aroun in my guh-yarden with thet thar bone air?" she asked.