CHAPTER FOURTEEN

At first light he checked the river. In a pool off the main channel he spotted three trout lying in the current, close to the bottom. He watched them for a long while, listening to the constant, steady crash of the river downstream.

The backs of the trout remind him of broken green glass bottles he’d once seen in a building where he and Sergeant Presley had slept for the night. Wine bottles, Sergeant Presley muttered simply, as an epitaph over the heap of green glass. The Boy remembered holding a piece up, examining it in the wavering light of their fire. Careful, Sergeant Presley had warned him. Don’t cut yourself, Boy.

He found a long piece of driftwood waiting on the rocks by the river, left by the springtime flooding of that year. He returned to camp with the driftwood and after inspecting Horse’s wound, which looked bad and worse now in the bright light of morning, he dug out wet grass from underneath the snowfall and laid it near Horse’s head. Horse seemed not to notice.

He laid more wood on the fire, its wetness making white smoke erupt into the cold air.

The Boy sat down next to the smoking fire with the driftwood stick lying away from his body. Taking one end of the wood, he cut long peels of bark away from himself and soon the white flesh of the wood underneath lay exposed. He fed the soft peels of wood into the fire as he continued to bring the stick to a point. In the end, it became a sharp spear.

He returned to the pool and waited. There was no sign of the broken-wine-bottle-colored trout. He sat on his haunches watching the gentle current drift along the bottom of the rock-covered pool.

Later, one of the fish entered the pool. The Boy waited, watching it move first one way and then another. He got little flashes of white from off its belly as it turned. Finding the current, the emerald-colored trout settled into it. After a moment, when the Boy knew it would be sleeping, he raised up, leaning over the pool, the spear drawn back over his good shoulder, the point just above the surface of the water.

He waited.

He felt a breath enter his lungs and as he let the air go, when there was little left in him, he plunged the spear through the surface, catching the trout in the back, just behind its head. It bent to the left, sending up a splash of water with its wide tail, and the Boy hauled it from the pool, amazed at his prize. Its rainbow-colored flanks fell away from its wine-bottle back, the white belly pure and meaty. It was a creature of beauty.

When the catch was gutted and spitted over the smoking fire, the Boy made more herb paste and applied it to Horse’s wound, wiping away the oozing pus as best he could.

He’d tried to lead Horse to the water before doing this, but the animal wouldn’t even bother to raise his head, much less stand.

“Okay, rest then,” said the Boy and heard the croak in his voice against the deafening fall of water over rock.

When the fish was cooked, he walked while eating, back to the drawing of Sergeant Presley on the cliff wall. He’d worked on it late into the night, immune to the cold. When he’d returned to the fire, he’d felt frozen. The heat stung his skin as it warmed him. He’d thought the drawing had been complete, but now looking at it in the late-morning light he could see where features would need to be added—filled in and shaded.

In the afternoon he tried to improve the shelter, but other than laying green pine branches across the top, there was little that could be done.

You’ve got to find better shelter, Boy! If this lodge was here from before the war then chances are there are others like it.

The Boy had seen many buildings from Before built in clusters; the towns they had passed through and the cities he had wanted to visit. Clusters.

In the afternoon he walked upriver with his tomahawk and knife. His withered left side felt stiff, but he concentrated on its movements, controlling it, willing his leg to step over fallen logs instead of dragging as it would’ve liked to if he’d ridden Horse for days at a time.

He heard a loud twig snap underneath his feet.

Too loud, Boy! No go.

Everything Sergeant Presley had taught him had been graded. When the time had come for the Boy to perform a task, the standard for pass or fail was always “good to go” or “no go.” He’d hated when Sergeant Presley wrenched his mouth to the side and said, No go.

Upstream the river began to curve to the north, winding through a series of rapids. Off to the left he could see the steep, conical mountain Escondido had warned him of, where at the top a bear made its den.

It was winter now. Bears should be asleep.

There were no other lodges, or if there had been, what remained of them could not be found.

It was hard to imagine the world as a place where people could either live in cities or in the forest. What was so special about cities?

You always wanted to go there, Boy.

I did. I wanted to know what was in them.

And …

What would I have been like if I had lived in one?

Standing at the bend in the river, feeling his withered leg and arm stiffen in the late-afternoon cold as the sun fell behind tall peaks to the west, he thought of people he once knew and could not remember.

They had always lived in the cold plains. His first memory was of running. Of a woman screaming. Of seeing the sky, blue and cold in one moment, and the ground, yellow stubble, race by in the next.

Sergeant Presley had rarely mentioned “your people.”

Not like in tents, not like your people.

All gone over to animals, not like your people.

They don’t ride horses, like your people do.

That night the temperature dropped and the snow came down in hard clumps without end. He lay next to Horse, who moved little and whose breathing was shallow. At one point, the Boy was so cold he thought he should surely die.

When he awoke in the morning everything was covered in snow.

The best time to do something about a thing is to do it now, Boy!

We won’t last out here another night.

When Horse opened his eyes they fluttered.

You won’t make it out here like this, will you, Horse?

He laid his hand on Horse’s belly, feeling the heat both comforting and sickening at once.

He knew what he had to do. He had known it in the freezing night when the snow had stopped falling and the wind rushed through the pines, seeming to make things even colder than when the snow had fallen. Even the sound of the icy water falling along the rapids seemed to make the world colder.

The Boy had known in the night what he must do.

He’d waited for Sergeant Presley to tell him not to do it.

“You would say,” he thought aloud, pretending to be Sergeant Presley’s voice. “You would say it was fool’s business. That’s what you would say.”

He waited, listening to the rush of the water in the river.

He looked upriver, his eyes falling on the small, steep, conical mountain.

You would say that.

Ain’t nothin’ but a thang, Boy. Mind over matter. You don’t mind, it don’t matter.

You would say that also.

You got to kill that bear, Boy. No two ways about it.