If you don’ eat worms, they’ll be eatin’ you.
She felt a little stronger in the morning. Clouds had come up from the southwest, again dulling the colors of the valley but warming the air a bit. There was no frost this morning and the ground was soft and moist, squishy with cold damp. Ghetel was reasonably cheerful, being warmer and not quite so famished as she had been on previous days, and even gave Mary a grand, spontaneous hug.
We’ll do all right mostly, Mary thought. But when times are at their worst, I must watch ’er.
To keep Ghetel complacent, Mary decided to devote a while to feeding before they started up the gorge this morning.
They found a quantity of the sour, fuzzy sumac berries in an old burnt-over draw, but could eat only a handful as they were brown and dusty dry and disintegrating. They flaked old shelf funguses off dead trees, gray, leathery and foul-tasting, but filling, and pulled a few water’s-edge stalks and ate their bitter bulbs. Still queasy about the eating of worms, though now resigned to it, Mary helped Ghetel hunt for grubs. They found none. But Mary remembered how Henry Lenard had used to turn up rocks to find earthworms for fishbait. And somehow the thought of healthy pink earthworms this morning seemed less revolting than that of the white grubs, which reminded her too strongly of maggots. So, in the humus-rich, leaf-covered soil at the base of the mountainside, Mary began turning rocks over, and in fifteen minutes had a palm full of glistening, reddish-pink crawlers. Ghetel, delighted, fell to the same work and soon had a good handful.
All right now, Mary told herself, don’t think, just do it. Just like a bird. She shut her eyes and put three or four in her mouth and chewed them quickly and swallowed them. They were tough and slimy and cold and strangely sourish, and left her teeth gritty. But there was no doubt: it was meat. It would strengthen her fibers and enrich her blood. She ate the rest, and, under the influence of those thoughts, they tasted more palatable each mouthful. “Eh well, dear,” she said to Ghetel, who was beaming now, “truly that was the best breakfast we’ve had in an age, say what? Y’ ready to walk now? Here, you wear the blanket a while first.” Ghetel nodded and flung it over her shoulders. Mary had noticed that Ghetel talked little to her now; since their fight, she had hardly said a dozen sentences, but would often discourse with herself in Dutch as they struggled along.
Within a few hours of walking, Mary began to notice a change in the aspect of the valley above the painted-tree creek. The mountainsides were steeper and more forbidding, and were footed right on the river’s edge. There was no level bottomland to walk on. The river tumbled furiously, glassy green and white, among boulders as big as houses, which lay at the bases of the cliffs from which they had fallen. The mountainsides soared steeply a thousand feet or more up from the roaring riverbed, darkly forested all the way from the water’s edge to their crests. Huge, water-weathered gray trees, undermined by the river’s force, lay jammed among the boulders, their gnarled roots upended, their branches in the tugging river, sometimes entangling great masses of dead bushes and reeds that had been swept into their clutches by old floods.
There were places where whole mountainsides seemed to have sloughed off and fallen into the river, leaving stark blue-gray cliff faces as precipitous as walls, hundreds of feet high, topped with full-size forest trees which, from this distance, looked tiny as blades of grass.
Ahead stood a mountainside whose entire slope from the crest to the base was covered by the scar and scree of an avalanche: an enormous slide of boulders and dirt leaning a third of the way up the mountainside, full of splintered trees and jutting root-boles, massive ash and walnut trees bent double or twisted open like segments of frayed rope by the weight and force of the rockfall; above was the bald face of new rock from which it all had come, slanting a thousand feet into the sky.
We’ll have to cross all that rubble, Mary thought. Pray it’s done all the fallin’ it’s going to do.
Inured though they were by now to the power and indifference of the wilderness, the two women felt the grim force of this gorge pressing on their senses and squeezing their hearts. To be enclosed by the walls of this gloomy, craggy, roaring canyon was like being on the floor of the den of a giant, who might step on them at any moment without noticing or caring. Mary felt as tiny as any one of the lice now making their way through the folds of her own flesh. It’s no wonder the Indians take the ridge road around it, she thought. For a moment she considered turning back to the paint-tree creek and going that way.
Nay, she thought. I’d get us lost in the mountains for sure. At least I know this awful gorge leads to home.
There was nothing so simple as walking now; it was now mostly a business of climbing, scooting, crawling and sliding over and around the gigantic rubble of the riverbed. To skirt a square-cornered rock chunk the size of a barn they would have to climb over two or three as large as cabins. Often they would find their way barred by a huge snarl of fallen trees or drifted brush, and would snake through or under these, scraping their skin, spraining joints, taking thorns and splinters, snagging and losing still more of their skimpy rags, forever afraid that their efforts would dislodge some key log and cause the whole jam to rend itself apart and crush them or drop them into the torrent below.
By midafternoon, they were in a trance of exhaustion. Mary lay face down on a huge tilted slab of gray rock. Blue-green splotches of lichen grew dim, then sharp, then dim again, an inch before her eyes, while the river drummed loud and faint and loud in her ears. She might have slept. She was not sure. But after an indefinite time she became aware that she was very cold and it was time to move.
Looking up the raging stream, between the V-shaped canyon walls, they could see range after range of such steep-edged mountains sitting with their feet in the river, each mountain a degree higher and hazier than the one in front of it, a progression of fading grays marching into the distance until they were indistinct in river mist. In the gloomy, furrowed valleys slanting up from either side of the river, ragged wraiths of mist curled and shifted upward, like a slow dance of ghosts. Now Mary began to suspect that the Indians’ avoidance of this gorge was as much from a fear of evil spirits as of terrain.
They crossed the debris of the avalanche late that afternoon. It took them an hour to climb through the boulders and rubble and dead wood. Several times, rocks loosened under their feet and bounced and crashed down into the river; worse, they heard stones clattering and bumping above them once, and hugged themselves against a jutting log, expecting to be buried in a rockfall.
The wind was cold, the stones were cold, the water, when they had to step into it and wade around the bases of bluffs, was very cold. Their skin was clammy and white and usually covered in gooseflesh. They would get hot and winded while climbing, and when they had to stop to rest, the wind would chill them immediately. They took turns wearing the blanket as they climbed; neither would wear it while they were wading; and when they dropped down to rest they would huddle together in it.
They finally found a place where a finger of land sloped gently enough that they could walk in the woods, on a cushion of dead leaves. Here they found another hollow log lying on its side and decided this would be their camp for the night. They had to shout to make themselves heard over the roar of the river. Mary wondered how they would be able to sleep in such noise. Sometimes during the day the noise had pressed so hard on her soul that she had thought she would scream and go mad. It was as constant and loud as the windstorm the night they had spent across from the burning spring. Mary thought it was making her heart beat faster. Under this constant drumming of wilderness, the faint metallic sounds of the bell were welcome, like delicate music, a civilized sound.
Here in the woods they turned over rocks and found a few more worms. They had spent so much energy climbing that Mary was hungrier than she had been yet. There had been periods downriver when they had not eaten anything for four or five days, but even then she had not been as famished as she was now. So she ate the worms this time wit
h no thought except how good they were.
Ghetel was behaving rather well. She seemed distant and distracted, but she was not giving Mary those hostile looks, and she had been following well. Really, very well, Mary thought. I may not be havin’ any more trouble with ’er. I mean if I can keep ’er full of worms.
Let’s hope there won’t be a hard freeze where the worms go deep, she thought. It’s nice to be able just to turn over a few rocks and find meat.
She was beginning to think of the worms in terms of meat now instead of as worms. That was good.
They filled the hollow log with leaves and burrowed in with the blanket. With the leaves and the blanket up around their heads, the roar of the river was muffled a bit and it was not so intimidating. As they lay together skin on skin they grew warmer, and as they grew warmer, their aches and bruises eased a little and they grew sleepy. Mary appreciated Ghetel’s body heat, and she thought a great deal about her and tried to imagine what must be in her mind. She’s truly stalwart, Mary thought. She really is something out of the ordinary.
She felt tears sting her eyes as she held the old bones close. Thou’rt close as family, she thought to the old woman. Like family, a great botheration sometimes. But what we two’ve been through’d bind folks closer’n family.
She remembered the uneasiness she had had that day so long ago, when she had been afraid to give Ghetel the tomahawk. She had been right about that. The old woman really had wanted to hurt her; she’d been out of her noggin. It wasn’t hard to understand, really. But now Mary seemed to understand that the reason she had been able to read Ghetel’s intentions was because the two of them had become so close through this ordeal. It was almost like what she had heard about twins. There was some bridge between them. We’re close as twins, you and me, because we been dependin’ on each other so long out here in these valleys where there ain’t anything else but you and me, she thought.
Aye, old thing. You’re family. And when we get home, I’ll have Will see to’t that y’have anything your heart desires, I will.
She wondered how far they had come today. Surely not more’n ten or fifteen miles, she thought, though it seemed more like fifty, all that climbin’ an’ scootin’. She smiled at the thought: Been days since I had any skin on my feet. Now my knees and my hindy end’s likewise.
Ghetel’s breathing was gurgly. She coughed in her sleep, jerking violently, enveloping Mary’s face with rancid breath and spraying it with spittle. Mary patted her gently, rhythmically on the back, as if soothing her baby.
Her baby.
For a moment she pictured her baby. Or, rather, a little shape. She could not see its face. She had been careful not to know its face. Now she could not have remembered its face if she had tried to.
She envisioned a little shape, nursing at the breast of Otter Girl.
She was slipping into sleep. She saw Will. She saw herself with Will. He was asking her where the baby was, their baby that he had never seen. There was a blank space in her mind when she fell asleep because she did not know how she would answer that when he asked her.
The valley seemed to widen as they went on the next morning. The river was about a quarter of a mile wide, running shallow, its surface roiled. The noise of its flow was less overwhelming here in this wider space. There were broad flat tables of rock to walk on and not so much climbing to do. They progressed without great difficulty for three or four miles. The sun was trying to break through the gray clouds that hid the mountaintops. They could see it as a pale smear in the dark sky, but sometimes the mist in the draws would swirl over it like smoke and blot it out again.
Something was drumming on Mary’s ears. She grew aware of it little by little, some deep rumble beyond the rushing of the river. They rounded a bend and it became louder.
“Look’ee, Ghetel!” Mary pointed. A mile ahead there was a line of greenish-white extending from bank to bank. Beyond that was a great dark mountainside topped with clouds. “A waterfall, ain’t it?”
Ghetel peered up the river, her mouth hanging open. Her lower front teeth were yellow and there was gray matter against her gums. Her lower lip was a rim of bleeding sores and scabs. She nodded and looked at Mary with a question in her eyes. Mary knew what the question was: Would the falls be another obstacle?
As they went up, the falls became more distinct, louder, more formidable. They were like a giant’s stairsteps, over which the gray-green water fell roaring five or ten feet at a drop, seething white at the foot of each cascade. The falls extended from shore to shore, broken only by a small wooded island that lay in the great pool below them.
The shore here was sand and shingle. Trees stood high out of the sand, their gnarled, grotesque root boles three or four feet above the ground where the soil had washed out from under them. As the women moved along and came opposite the island, they saw that there was a smaller island at the top of the falls, with brush growing on it. The dark water seethed with foam here in the pool. The air was wet with the fall’s mist.
Mary kept studying the falls at the right shore, where they would have to pass, to see whether there would be a dry place to climb. They could not climb where the water gushed down; they would be swept away.
It looked bad. There was no sloping ground to ascend. The falls roared over their rock shelves right at the base of a perpendicular bluff of striated rock.
No, she thought. Oh, no. We just can’t come up blocked here. Not after all this. Let’s go closer. Must be we can find a way up.
The narrow shore of shingle and sand dwindled to nothing as they crept under the bluff. Soon they were standing right in the falls’ spray, on a narrow ledge of wet rock with the foamy water swirling a few inches below their feet. They held onto the sheer rockface and stared, nearly hypnotized, at the glassy curtain of water falling beside them. Mary clung with her fingertips to the cold, wet rock, squinting up the cliff looking for a way up, her heart tripping, her skin and rags growing damp. The hissing, rumbling force of the plunging river was pounding her senses into a state of disorientation. She felt that the very cliff they were clinging to was moving, tilting with them on it. She swallowed rapidly against panic. Her mouth was dry.
“Go back!” she cried. She turned her face toward Ghetel and shouted it again. “GO BACK!”
The old woman’s face was a mask of cringing terror. She clung to the rock, frozen, afraid to move a muscle. There was no room for Mary to go around her and lead her back to safety; the ledge was too narrow. Mary was trapped on the lip of rock, her legs beginning to twitch and quiver uncontrollably, and Ghetel was frozen between her and the route back to the shore. And that awful notion of giving up, of stepping so easily off into the water and putting an end to all this suffering, was beginning to insinuate itself in her head again.
What’s it matter? she thought again.
And somehow that thought calmed her. Her legs stopped quaking.
She grinned at Ghetel. It was meant to be a reassuring smile but it was ghastly as a death’s head; she could feel her mouth corners drawn back and down against her teeth, and the strain around her eyes.
Got to move her, Mary thought. Got to. We’re both going to fall in a minute if we don’t get back.
Leaning her precious spear against her left arm, she freed her right hand to reach over and touch Ghetel’s left hand, which was locked, rigid as a root, in a tiny crevice at eye level. She patted the hand gently for a moment, then closed her hand over it and gently tried to pull it loose, to move it over a few inches and make Ghetel understand that they were to go back. But the old hand grew even harder; the fingers dug in like talons. A terrified, keening wail started coming from Ghetel’s open mouth and she pressed her face against the rock. Her eyes were wild.
Dear God, she thinks I’m trying to throw her in, Mary thought. She’ll never budge if she thinks that.
Or she’ll try to throw me in.
She took her hand off Ghetel’s. The old woman stopped wailing.
Mary search
ed her mind for something to say. Then:
“Ghetel, hon,” she yelled, “I know an easier way! I know a way around!” She forced another squinting smile, and looked past Ghetel toward the way they had come, and nodded.
The look in Ghetel’s eyes changed a bit. She shut her mouth and looked suspiciously at Mary’s face for a moment, as if not sure she should turn her attention away from her for even an instant. Mary nodded and looked downstream again, nodding emphatically.
At last Ghetel began turning her head, but kept her eyes on Mary as long as she could. Finally she was looking the other way.
Now, Mary thought. She’s lookin’ the way of safety; maybe now she’ll go. Slowly, she moved her hand toward Ghetel’s again, and lightly patted it.
At the touch, Ghetel’s head spun around and the scream started, and in the same instant she released the rock to fling Mary’s hand away. The motion nearly dislodged Mary from the face of the cliff, and Ghetel herself tottered for a moment before hooking her talons into the crevice again. An enervating shiver sizzled through Mary’s body and her heart seemed to be twitching in her neck. She clung to the cliff with both hands herself now, face pressed against the rock, the water still roaring ominously beside her. That had been too close. She breathed deeply until she could think.
Eh well. No gentle coaxing was going to do it, she realized. Sometimes there’s but one way to get through that thick Dutch head. She locked her own left hand more firmly into its fingerhold. With her right she took the shaft of the hickory stock and swung it out behind her over the water, then yelled:
“God damn’ee, Ghetel! MOVE!” And she swung the stick to whack across the bony old rump. It was not much of a blow; her balance was too precarious for that. But she struck her again, then again, yelling like a banshee: “MOVE, Y’CLOD! GET THAT REECHY CARCASS O’ YOUR’N OUT OF MY PATH! MOVE, DAMN ’EE!”