Robert B. Parker

by Wilderness

“I don’t like it,” she said.

  “Me either,” he said, “but there it is.”

  “Well, let’s go. The sooner we find them the sooner this is over with.”

  They began to move up the trail, keeping to the right of it fifty feet, looking and listening carefully. There was wind, more than had blown since they went into the wilderness. It was not uncomfortable, but it stirred the branches as if someone were there, and it rustled the leaves as if someone were coming. They moved even more slowly and carefully. Hearing the bird and insect noises, the tree noises, the sound of their own movement.

  The noise of the woods was continuous. It was one of the things that surprised him most about the forest. It was never quiet. The great, still forest of his imagination was derived from photographs and paintings. The real forest was always alive. Birds, frogs, cicada, squirrels, and things he didn’t know of chirped and chittered and keened and hummed and grunted and rustled day and night. He was listening for human sounds.

  It took them an hour to go a mile. Newman had a red scratch starting at the corner of his left eye and running across his cheek, and Janet’s lip was puffy from an insect bite. Newman’s stomach rolled emptily as if it had overreacted to the handful of raspberries it had gotten and was now digesting more than it had received.

  They turned left and crossed the trail. It had veered toward them and they were barely ten feet from it.

  “Jesus,” Newman said, “not good. We might have walked right into them. We’re too close.”

  They crossed the trail and stopped forty-five feet into the woods on the left side of it. “We shouldn’t be walking bunched together like this,” he said. “If we blunder into them they could kill us both with one shot.”

  “I’m not going to walk alone,” she said. “I’ll get lost.”

  He looked back behind him. “Stay behind me as far as you can and still keep me in sight. Then if I’m nabbed you can still operate. You saved me last time.”

  “All right, but if I whistle like Chris taught us”—she whistled softly between her teeth, see soo—“you wait and if you don’t see me, come back.”

  He nodded. “If you get lost stay where you are. I’ll find you. Otherwise we’ll go around in circles for each other.”

  She turned away to look back of them. “Of course they could come up behind us.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You’re no safer back there. We cover each other. If I need you I’ll whistle the same way.” He smiled at her. “You know how to whistle don’t you?”

  “Just pucker up and blow,” she said. She smiled. It was an old joke from a favorite movie. And it seemed somehow to ease the oddness of their situation.

  26

  They found Karl’s camp in the early afternoon. Newman saw the orange tent through the trees. He raised his hand. Twenty feet behind him Janet stopped. Her hair was wet with sweat and stuck close to her head. There were scratches on her face. Newman gestured her forward and she came up beside him. She had the .32 in her hand. Newman put one finger to his lips. Then he pointed at the tent. She nodded. He could feel the vertigo in his stomach. His legs felt weak. He looked at her face, scratched and sweaty, without makeup, showing strong bone structure and no fear. He’d looked at the face so long it seemed somehow permanent. He felt reassured, safer with her beside him.

  They listened. There was no human sound from the camp. He put his lips close to her ear.

  “We’ll circle it,” he said. “If they are staking it out we’ll come behind them.”

  She nodded.

  “Remember,” he whispered, “you only have five shots in that thing before you have to reload. Don’t waste them.”

  She nodded again. They started very carefully around the camp. A quarter of the way around the camp’s perimeter they found Hood’s body. It was thirty yards from where he had died. It lay facedown under some low-clumped sumac. One hand was under him and the other lay palm up by his side. The fingers half closed. Ants crawled in the cup of the hand and more ants crawled around the black area of dried blood between his shoulder blades where the bullets had emerged. Death had released Hood’s sphincter control. Janet put her clenched fist against her mouth. Newman looked down once, and looked away. He put one hand on Janet’s arm and moved her away from Hood’s body.

  It took them ninety-six minutes to complete the circle. No one was near the camp.

  “Let’s get closer,” Newman said.

  Crouched, they inched closer to the clearing and stopped finally, squatting beneath the down-swooping bows of an old white pine tree, silent on the thick mulch of needles around the foot-thick base of the tree. There was a cluster of stones grouped to form a fireplace, but there was no fire. The orange tent had its flap open. A packboard lay by the open flap. Around the fireplace there were several camp cookery utensils. Starlings were pecking at something in one of the pans. Three sleeping bags, still unrolled, spread out around the fireplace like spokes from a hub. The foil wrappings of freeze-dried food were scattered about the clearing. A half-full bottle of Canadian Club stood on the ground near the tent. Two packboards leaned against the flat rock over which the stream flowed. Another packboard hung from a tree behind the tent. A ground squirrel skittered across the clearing. The sun slanted from the west now, behind them, and dust motes danced in its rays in the silent space. Fresh dirt and a mound of stones at the far edge of the clearing showed where they had buried the boy.

  “What now?” she whispered.

  He shook his head.

  “Let’s destroy it,” she said.

  He looked at her. Faintly, almost like an internal sound, a ruffed grouse drummed far off. The sound registered only at the edge of Newman’s mind. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  He looked around him. “Get kindling, dry twigs, sticks, leaves, we’ll pile them in the tent and then throw everything in there and set it going.”

  “What about a forest fire?”

  He shook his head. “Woods are green. There’s been a lot of rain. The tent is surrounded by dirt. Shouldn’t spread far.”

  “Aren’t you going to get kindling?” she said.

  “No. I want to be able to shoot when we step out there if they really were hiding and we missed them.”

  She nodded and gathered an armload of dry sticks and twigs. “Okay,” she said.

  He said, “Stay down. We’ll scooch out behind the tent and cut a hole in the back and stuff the brush in that way.”

  “What if they’re back that way?”

  “Then we get shot at. But if they’re not they won’t see us. It cuts down the odds. If we go in the front way they can see us from every place.”

  “Let’s go,” she said and handed him her knife.

  He went to his knees, the carbine pushing before him in his right hand, the knife in his left, and crawled into the clearing. Nothing happened. He crawled to the tent. No sound. The starlings continued to forage in the cookware. He drove the point of the knife through the nylon fabric of the tent and sawed a hole. No one was inside. He peered through. There was an open sleeping bag, a roll of toilet paper, a pack, nothing else. He gestured to Janet and she pushed her armload of tinder into the tent. With the hunting knife he whittled some shavings and scraps of bark from one of the sticks. He crumbled several handfuls of the toilet paper. Then he took a butane lighter from his shirt pocket and lit the paper and shavings. The flame caught the paper at once, flickered at the edge of the shavings. A tiny spiral of smoke rose. Then the flame began to nibble into the wood in a tiny black-edged crescent. Newman moved more twigs and bark scraps closer. The fire spread.

  “Let’s get the other stuff,” he said.

  They stood up, Newman’s eyes scanning the blank wood-line around them, and ran for the packboards. “Take that one on the tree,” Newman said.

  His wife shoved it into the tent. The flames were crackling now in the dry wood. The sleeping bag began to smolder. Janet ran to the other side of the clearing and picked up another packboa
rd. Her husband had two slung by the shoulder straps over his left arm. He held the knife blade in his teeth and the carbine in his right hand. He threw the two packboards into the tent through the open front flap. Janet put the last packboard in. The sleeping bag was burning.

  “Will the tent burn?” Janet said.

  “It’s nylon,” Newman said. “It should melt, and when it does it will carry the burning meltage into the pile of packs and stuff. Or it should.”

  They turned and slipped back into the shadow of the woods. Behind them the tent fabric began to shrink and then coalesce. Holes appeared in it as burning trickles of melted chemical dropped onto the fire below. The fire burned hotter. “Uphill,” Newman said.

  She followed him without a sound as they climbed over the tabletop rock and splashed through the stream that splayed across it. Behind them ammunition in the packs began to explode in rattling pops. The tent diminished into a seething wallow of chemicals and flame. The smell of it filled the woods, oddly foreign, an industrial smell in the pristine forest. The starlings flew away.

  The upgrade was steeper now as they moved up the trail, Newman first, Janet behind him. Almost at once they were out of sight of the camp, though they could smell the fire and hear the ammunition rattling off. Janet had the knife back in her scabbard. Newman had the hatchet stuck in his belt at the small of his back. He carried the carbine with both hands now, ready to fire. His hand tense on the trigger guard, listening for footsteps, fearing the sudden confrontation as the trail bent and the enemy came hurrying down toward the fire. But they met no enemy.

  They stopped to rest.

  “Why uphill?” Janet said.

  “I figure they’d be looking for us downhill, and I didn’t want to run head-on into them coming up the trail.”

  “Why wouldn’t they be looking for us uphill?”

  “Because we were downhill last they saw of us. Because like us, I bet their whole mental orientation is downhill, back toward the lake and the cottages and, you know, civilization. When we ran yesterday, which way did we go?”

  “Downhill,” she said.

  “Right. In my mind we’re on the end of a long string that stretches back to the lake but not ahead. You know?”

  “Christ, you think in such elaborate pictures.”

  “I know. And I know you don’t. I see ideas, you think them. It’s one reason we argue, I guess.”

  “Now what?” she said.

  “Now we swing around through the woods and go back down past them.”

  “Why didn’t we do that in the first place?”

  “Because we had to get away. We were in a hurry. Now we’re not. Now we can sneak slowly back and cut them off below. We can’t let them get out of here. They know who we are. We have to kill them all. If any one of them gets away we’re as good as dead.”

  “I know.”

  “Four men,” Newman said.

  “I don’t mind,” she said.

  Looking at her face in the slow-fading afternoon light, he knew she meant it. He felt the same surge of strength he’d felt before, looking at her face. The permanence of it, the hard resolve. She had an intensity of single purpose he’d never had. He could endure. But she could persist.

  “You’ve always been tougher than me,” he said.

  She smiled at him. “That’s because I’ve always had you to back me up,” she said. “You never seem to understand that.”

  He patted her shoulder. “Well it’s you and me now, babe,” he said.

  “We better start downhill before it gets dark,” she said.

  “Yeah. We don’t want them ahead of us.”

  “What if they headed straight back for the lake as soon as they saw the fire?”

  “I can’t believe they would,” he said as they began to work their way through the woods, swinging west of the trail and downhill. “They’d try to put out the fire. They’d try to salvage things. They’d look around for us. They’d get together and talk about what to do. It would take them a little while to realize they’re stuck out here with no supplies and a full day’s walk from the boats. It’s almost dark. They won’t want to blunder around in the dark not knowing where we are. I say they’ll find someplace to hole up and take turns standing guard and wait until morning.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said softly.

  He took a small compass out of his pack. “We’ll head southeast,” he said, “and keep the path on our left. That way we won’t get lost in the dark.”

  They moved as quietly as they could. It was slower going through the woods and it was dark before they were close to the campsite again. They could smell the harsh chemical smoke. He reached behind him in the darkness and took her hand. He heard human voices and they both stopped motionless. They listened. The voices went on but they were only voices. Newman couldn’t hear meaning. He put his mouth against Janet’s ear.

  “Can you hear them?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, “but I can’t hear what they’re saying.”

  “Me either.”

  “Should we try for them now?”

  “No,” he whispered. “There’s four of them and two of us and it’s dark. We want to get them when the odds are with us. When they’re in clear sight and we’re not. We don’t know where all of them are. It could even be a trap.”

  “Yes,” she whispered. “You’re right.”

  They moved along through the woods, periodically crisscrossing the trail. Every few minutes Newman stopped and checked the compass, Janet holding the flashlight with her hand over the lens and her fingers split just enough to let a small sliver of light shine on the compass. The human voices faded, and soon the chemical smell. The night sounds of the woods and the smell of the forest were all there was.

  27

  They were exhausted when they stopped. They had not slept since they entered the woods. They had been on their feet since sunrise, moving through thick forest. They had eaten a handful of berries. He could hear water running over rocks and remembered how thirsty he was.

  “We’ll stop,” he said.

  Janet came to a halt behind him and stood motionless, her head hanging, numb with exhaustion.

  “We must be a mile or so below the camp now,” Newman said. “We better sleep here or we’ll fall over.”

  Janet stood without sound. The moon was up. It filtered, nearly full, through the trees, and Newman could see dimly around him. The trail was just to his right. Across the trail were two enormous boulders, upended, carried along and dropped there in another geologic time by the glacier. He walked closer to the boulders. Janet didn’t move. Between the rocks was a space five feet wide. Newman shone his flashlight into the opening. It ran back between the two boulders for ten feet before they pressed together to form a cul-de-sac. He stepped in and straightened. The boulders were higher than his head. He could still hear the water. He stepped out from between the rocks and listened. He stepped around the rocks. There was a stream. He wondered if it were the same one. It would have to curve back, he thought. But they do that, I imagine.

  He said, “Jan, you want a drink?”

  She came silently over and dropped onto the ground. They lay on their stomachs and drank with cupped hands from the stream. When they finished they lay together on the ground for a moment. Then he got up and reached his hand down to her.

  “Up,” he said. “We’ll sleep in those rocks. There’s a nice place.”

  She lay without moving until he reached down and put his hands under her arms and pulled her up. Between the rocks pine-needles had fallen from the over-hanging trees and built up a thick soft layer.

  They shivered as they took off the packs.

  “Getting cold,” he said. They both put on the down vests and the nylon pullovers. They each ate a granola bar. She lay down and went almost at once to sleep. He felt dizzy from exhaustion, but he forced himself to stand. He went out of the refuge and with the hatchet cut several large white-pine branches from a tree behind the boulders.
He took them back between the rocks and arranged them at the entrance of the refuge to shield them. Then with the carbine beside him he lay down beside her and went to sleep almost at once.

  When he woke up it was raining. He looked at his watch, five thirty-six. Janet still slept motionless with her face on the pine-needles, her mouth open. The ground around him was still dry. It must just have started, he thought. If we get soaked we won’t get dry. He looked out through the mouth of the refuge. Nothing moved on the trail or in the woods. Above, the sky was a uniform gray. He lay the carbine down against one of the boulders to keep the rain off it as much as possible. He unbuttoned the .32 from Janet’s holster and slipped it into his pants pocket. She never stirred, her breathing steady and slow as she slept.

  He took the hatchet and went out from between the rocks, moving the pine branches aside to do so. He climbed into a white spruce that towered fifty feet above the boulders. Just above the level of the boulders he began to cut branches from the tree and drop them onto the top of the rocks. He worked for nearly an hour. The hatchet was sharp and the wood was soft. He got a thick mound of spruce branches in that time. Chris would make sure the ax was sharp, he thought.

  He slipped the hatchet back into his belt and dropped from the spruce onto the boulders. He began to lay the spruce branches in overlapping lines across the opening between the two rocks. Below him he saw Janet sit up and look up at him. It was raining harder.

  He said softly, “Good morning, bright eyes.”

  She waved at him, sober-faced.

  He laid the spruce branches across the entire opening, stopping two feet short of the point where the boulders met. The boulders were somewhat lower in front than in back, and he pointed the tips of the spruce branches in the downslant direction.

  “Is the rain still coming in?” he said to her.

  “No,” she said. “It’s good, except at the end.”

  He slid off the top of the boulder and went in under his spruce-branch thatch. It was cavelike now, and darker. Janet shivered. Her teeth were chattering. Newman gave her back the .32. Thunder rolled in the distance and several seconds later lightning flashed. Newman collected dry twigs and sticks, and using a wad of toilet paper to start it he lit a fire at the narrow end of the shelter where he had not laid the roof. He bent his body over the kindling, sheltering it from the rain as he lit the paper and fed the small flame till the sticks caught. There was a slight recess at the base of the rock, and the fire was partly shielded from the rain. The smoke crawled up along the rock and slid along the face of the boulder and drifted out of the two-foot space he’d left for it. He went outside and looked. Trees masked much of the upper part of the boulders and hung over the fire hole. The smoke thinned and disappeared in the trees. It wasn’t visible from the trail.