Going Home

by Richard S. Wheeler

  He took stock. They were protected by darkness and the curve of the hull at the stern, but he knew this ship would be a ball of fire ere long. They were far from shore and could not swim it. Their bodies were weighted by clothing and their arms would eventually give out and they would no longer hang on to the rudder or that life-saving bottom rung of the Jacob’s ladder that kept them alive.

  Darkness! When the ship started to flame, they would be exposed. No time at all.

  He guided Victoria’s hand to the dog, released his hand from the rudder and felt a surge of the sea lift him. He needed to swim around the stern. Once he could look down the side of the hull, lit by the huge bonfires ashore, he saw the great red-nosed dugouts poking into the ship like piglets suckling at the sow. They were empty but tied up, and that was the sole chance.

  Up above, he heard frenzy and looting. He swam back.

  “Got to get a canoe,” he gasped. “I might be seen. Enough light there to be the death of me. I’ll get it. Hang on here. If I can’t paddle it, come to it.”

  “Sonofabitch,” she said.

  That was her way of saying everything. He borrowed her knife, let go of the rudder again, and swam through the brutal cold to the nearest canoe, which bobbed violently on the swells of the ocean. He clamped his hand on the gunnel. No one spotted him. He worked toward the prow, staying in shadow from the coastal fires, found a braided leather rope and severed it. The canoe banged into the ship, almost crushing him. He gathered strength, heaved himself mightily, and fell in a heap into the canoe, flat on his back, peering upward, water rivering from him. A warrior stood at the rail straight above him, scarcely ten feet, staring down.

  He lay still in the black belly of the dugout. He was lying on some paddles, and slowly extricated one. The man above him turned away. Skye saw the beginning of a blaze up there, pale light. Too late, too late.

  He sat, paddled furiously, barely moving the heavy dugout.

  No alarm went up. The victors were celebrating. Skye realized they would burn this ship and all its contents, the cargo of pelts as well as the trade goods and everything else that might be useful, in a frenzied celebration of their prowess. What mattered the otter pelts, the hatchets and knives and awls and blankets and flannels and cottons and canvas when measured against victory at war?

  He paddled furiously, unable to make headway against the huge swells of the Pacific that lifted and dropped him, and pushed him farther from the brig even though he tried to stay close.

  “Skye!”

  He spotted Victoria swimming, the mutt beside her, and paddled desperately, unable to turn the dugout toward her. He thought he was losing ground, but she was gaining bit by bit. The swells separated her from sight, and he feared he had lost her, but then suddenly she was there in the faintest of light, and he wrestled her up and into the bottom, where she lay soaked and cold and gasping. He found No Name dog-paddling beside the hull, and got him aboard.

  “Victoria, paddle!”

  She was weeping and out of breath. She clambered up and took the big paddle he proffered and they stroked hard, even as the sails and ribbing bloomed orange and the crackle of flame raced up the rigging and into the yards, snapping like giant firecrackers.

  He thought they were naked there, light upon them, but maybe not. The victors were still whooping, their eyes blinded to the small struggles of two mortals and a dog in the blackness beyond the holocaust. A ship was dying, and these devils were celebrating it.

  No Name shivered, shook water off, and padded to the prow, where it set itself a guard over the ocean.

  The surf heaved much too powerfully for Skye and Victoria to steer the massive dugout away, so they drifted shoreward against their will. They best they could manage was to paddle the dugout north of the village even as they closed with land. They might be caught instantly when they reached shore. But for the moment they lived.

  All their work had brought them only a hundred yards or so north of the village, but at least blackness cloaked them there, and they were somewhat shielded by a rough and rocky shore.

  “Save our strength,” he muttered.

  They let the dugout drift until it struck an obstacle, and began careering violently as the high surf toyed with it, lifting and dropping and finally rolling it over.

  They were pitched once again into the sea, but this time there was rock under foot, and even as breakers crashed over them with frightful force, they crawled to land and lay, panting, in the blackness on the stony and hostile continent.

  He clamped Victoria’s cold hand.

  Skye peered into the sea, beholding the murder of a merchant ship. Twenty-seven merchant seamen had perished. Now the warriors were descending the ladders and gathering in their canoes. They would soon discover one was missing.

  No time, no time.

  Skye stood, pulled off his battered frock coat and wrung it. Victoria stood, undid her skirts, which were weighting her down almost to the point where she couldn’t walk, and squeezed water out of them. The mutt shook and shook.

  They were barefoot and maybe in worse trouble than ever. Sharp rock stabbed him with every step. They had nothing.

  There was little they could do but wait. He led them back from the beach and into a rocky defile where blackness swallowed them. He clambered up the rock, cursing it whenever it lacerated his feet, but eventually he found a perch where he could look down the strand at the shoreside village. It nestled around a creek that tumbled from the inland coastal range into the ocean, providing the village with fresh water.

  The warriors had loosed most of the dugouts and were paddling back to the village with easy strokes. There was no sign that they were looking for a lost canoe.

  One by one the dugouts beached on a sandy strand where a crowd swiftly dragged them beyond the high-tide line. And there the entire village stood, transfixed by the pyrotechnics on the black waters. The ship’s small store of gunpowder blew, shivering the coast with thunder as the whole burning deck lifted upward and fell sizzling into the sea.

  Maybe there was a raw, slim chance in this.

  He ducked down to Victoria, who huddled miserably.

  “We’ve got the whole village to ourselves,” he muttered.

  She didn’t need encouraging. They were as good as dead the way they were, desperately cold and barefoot, with nothing more than a small knife and no hope of rescue.

  They had recovered their breaths and made steady but slow time toward the inland side of the village, suffering the wounds of sharp grasses, driftwood, and rock on their feet. Victoria did far better than Skye, having lived in moccasins all her life.

  But at last they made the outskirts, and beheld in the dull orange light a number of cedar-planked longhouses, apparatus for drying fish, some things suspended high above the paws and teeth of animals, and much that they couldn’t fathom.

  “You ready?” he whispered.

  “That first big lodge,” she said.

  They walked in, plainly visible to anyone on the shore who might bother to turn around. But no one did.

  forty–two

  Exhaustion beset Skye. The ice water had sucked the heat from his body, and now his muscles barely worked. He stumbled toward the longhouse, helping Victoria, who shivered with every step.

  Then he paused, took hold of her and drew her tight to him, cold and wet. He hugged her.

  “Worst still to come,” he said. “Whatever happens, I just want you to know you are the greatest gift.”

  She was weeping and clung to him fiercely.

  They let go, knowing every moment counted. They found the open entry of the big cedar-planked longhouse, and penetrated fearfully. A fire burned lazily in a central pit, its smoke dissipated through portals in the plank roof. Surely this was the home of several families, or a clan. Raised sleeping areas lined the walls, and a vast array of food and equipment hung from the rafters above.

  They were not alone. Skye froze when Victoria pointed. An old man gazed at them from a p
allet. An elderly woman stared. Two others, apparently ill or old, lay swathed in blankets or skins.

  None of them said anything.

  The small warmth of the longhouse revived Skye’s spirits and body. He and Victoria needed everything, but most important were moccasins. Tentatively, they moved about, watching the old ones. The dog patrolled the dusky room, sniffing and whining.

  Victoria found moccasins, calf-high, lined with sealskin, and richly dyed. She tried them, found them loose, but kept them. She found a cedarbark skirt, and swiftly dropped her own soggy skirts and put it on, sighing.

  Skye’s search took longer, but he found some good otter-skin moccasins that fit, and gratefully pulled them over his bruised feet. The warmth was welcome.

  Swiftly they gathered more: sealskin robes, artfully sewn together; a fine bow and quiver filled with arrows; a bone awl and a bone ladle; bags of thick fat, whether whale blubber or something else Skye could not say. And a prize: a broken flintlock, the barrel twisted but the lock intact. Flint and steel made fire.

  Cedarbark rope, a fowling net, and that was as much as they could carry. One of the old men was mumbling, whining in anger, and Skye sensed it was time to flee. They had the means to live—if they could escape.

  He peered swiftly out the door, beholding the shocking sight of the brigantine burning almost to its waterline, the villagers rapt along the sandy shore. But soon they would weary of the spectacle and Skye intended to be long gone before they did.

  He nodded to Victoria, who hoisted her plunder on her shoulders and followed him. He noticed that she wisely took her soaked white-woman skirts with her, leaving little trace of their visit to the longhouse.

  He headed straight toward the coastal mountains looming not far back, and plunged into a terrible thicket of brush and vines and fallen deadwood, vaguely lit by the great fire offshore.

  Painfully they fought their way uphill into deepening blackness, feeling their way along, scarcely knowing where they were going.

  The dog tagged along, then vanished and returned, and then began an odd mewling and whining. Skye’s heart was laboring and he paused, exhausted, as the dog trotted off and returned, back and forth. Wearily, he followed the dog on its sideways course, until they burst into the creek bottoms and a clear trail mounting ever upward into the coastal mountains.

  The going went easier then, with the dim form of the yellow dog piloting them. A little moonlight cast pale hope across their path, and they continued until neither of them could walk another step.

  Skye stopped, his heart pummeling him, his legs quaking. Gratefully Victoria sank beside him.

  “We’ve come a piece,” he said. It was all he could do not to fall instantly asleep.

  “We can’t stay here, dammit,” she said. “Daylight, they come.”

  She was right. But they could rest a while more. No one would come up that steep trail this night.

  A misty fog built up, shutting away the view, and Skye feared they would make no more progress and might get soaked all over again. But the moon had vanished, and now there was nothing but Stygian darkness.

  No Name whined.

  “Can’t even see you, old boy,” Skye said.

  Silently, Victoria found the coil of cedarbark rope she was carrying, and tied a loop into one end. This she slipped over the dog’s neck.

  “Trust the spirit-dog,” she said.

  It was all Skye could manage, just to stand and shoulder his load. But in a slow fashion, one small step at a time, they let the dog lead them where it would take them. Skye dreamed of ditching the burden on his back, dreamed of rolling into that sealskin robe, dreamed of being warm. He could hear Victoria before him, her breath laboring, bearing a terrible load of her own.

  But then they stepped onto level land, a flat rocky area devoid of vegetation except for patched grass, and here the fog did not hide the moon. The dog turned away from the trail and took them toward the base of a mist-obscured cliff, to a thin dry recess in the dripping rock. The rear was barely four feet from the overhang but it would do. No mist brushed his cold-numbed face. A small animal whispered away as they ducked in.

  “Dog, I owe you my life again,” he muttered.

  Victoria sank to the rubble-strewn floor of this protected place and lifted the loop of bark rope from the dog’s neck, muttering strange Absaroka songs to the mutt.

  Wearily, he worked himself out of his soaked clothes, inch by inch, setting the torn frock coat aside, along with a ragged shirt and britches, and then rolled himself into the luxurious coil of the sealskin robe, and felt its gentle heat at once. Victoria had wrapped herself in her sealskin, and was sighing joyous little breaths of happiness. Or maybe she was crying.

  In the moonlit gloom, they inventoried their new possessions: the precious moccasins, a coil of cedarbark rope, a fowling net, a horn ladle, the battered musket with a working flint and steel lock, and the smooth, masculine bow, quiver chocked with iron-tipped arrows, and even a spare bowstring of some sort lying coiled in the quiver. One of the leather bags contained several pounds of blubber or seal fat. The other was stuffed with fishmeal, a good coarse flour that could be cooked into something.

  Victoria found her sailmaker’s knife and whittled some of the blubber and gave it to the cur, who gnawed happily on it.

  Skye found himself filled with euphoria. Soon he would drift into sleep. He had never been so exhausted. In the space of two hours they had survived the apocalypse. Death swarming over them in red-ochre masks; terror; the bitter sea that sapped their energies; an exhausting ride to shore; a time of lying numb and helpless on an alien beach; and then succor, taking from this warmaking people enough of the essentials that mortals needed to keep hearts beating in their bosoms.

  It rained just beyond their noses, a dripping whisper of discomfort. An occasional gust drove moisture upon them, but nothing could dampen their joy as they lay against the back wall, collapsed into each other, surrounded by velvety and warmth-giving fur, and alive, all three of them, against all odds.

  It was a miracle.

  Sleep overtook Skye, but a fretful one in which a hundred anxieties tormented him. He woke up frequently, afraid of the red-ochre masks of deadly hunters. But no one came in the night, and when dawn broke gray and cold and dripping, they were alone.

  His body ached. No part of him felt good. In spite of the robe, he felt chilled and wondered if he would be fevered here and die, having only escaped the very jaws of death the night before. Within his sealskin moccasins his lacerated soles pumped pain into him, and he knew the going would be hard this day. He dreaded sloshing through muck in those precious moccasins, wearing them out prematurely as the leather weakened.

  They would not have a fire. There was not a stick of dry wood or tinder in sight. Victoria stirred, threw off her robe, and stood, which was more than Skye could do.

  She eyed her soaked dress and camisole, and then set them down.

  “Too damn cold,” she muttered.

  She looked fetching in her woven bark skirt and nothing else but her moccasins, but Skye was too exhausted to respond to the stirrings of his body.

  “I’ll not wear anything,” she said.

  He enjoyed the sight of his half-naked Diana throwing the quiver over her thin bare shoulder and rolling up their few provisions inside her sealskin robe.

  It wasn’t raining, but the morning would be icy and mean. He forced himself up, discovering more aches than he had muscles, and tried to wrestle himself into his clammy britches, which clung to his hairy legs and wouldn’t pull up until he yanked violently at them. He, like Victoria, elected not to wear anything else of their wet duds, and so they started once again up the trail under a glowering heaven, making good progress until their stomachs rebuked them and they grew dizzy for the want of food.

  Yesterday’s ordeal had sapped today’s strength. They rested and trudged forward once more, going as long as they could as the trail slowly vanished and the rivulet beside them diminished
into a spring, and then a dry gully. But they were nearing the crest of a mighty ridge, so Skye pulled onward, and Victoria doggedly kept up, until at last they stood at the ridgetop.

  Skye’s spirits dropped. He had hoped to gaze down upon a mild and grassy land beyond the coastal mountains. Instead, he beheld a jumble of more mountains as far as the horizon, densely forested and impenetrable.

  They rested on the ridge, silent and bitter and lost. He hadn’t the faintest idea where he was. They needed to escape this dense forest that snared them in its thickets, but he saw no boulevard, no highway, taking them to easier places. The valley below looked impassable, so thick with brush that he knew they could never hack their way through, especially without so much as a hatchet.

  But the ridge itself looked better. It trended north and south, and was open in places where rock crowded out life. And north was the direction he was heading. North to Fort Vancouver, the nearest speck of civilization in many hundreds of miles. Walk north. Walk to the Columbia, wherever that was.

  The ridge was negotiable. Some spots were easy; some were tough, especially the steep slopes, the defiles, or the thickets of dense brush. A winsome sun improved their mood, driving the moisture out of the air, and they paused to dry their soaked duds on a black, hot, sunbaked slab of rock and rest.

  Victoria sliced thin slivers of the seal fat, but she and Skye could barely swallow the stuff. She opened the other leather bag, mixed some of the fishmeal with clear water in a small rocky pool, and made a paste. They managed to down enough of this to keep their hunger at bay, and then fed some of the fat and meal to the dog, who licked every last crumb of it and waited for more with soulful eyes.

  “I don’t know where Oregon is,” Skye said.

  “Dammit, I don’t care,” she said. “You, me, and the dog. What else is there?”

  forty–free

  They toiled through a trackless wild, the sun often hidden from sight by a dense pine canopy above, or a ceiling of brush lower down. Skye’s heart was as shadowed as his body, and he knew Victoria was wrestling with the same darkness that afflicted him. Noble firs rose higher than he had ever seen a tree grow, and water fled downslope from a myriad of springs. But they were lost in a growth so thick they could not even fathom their direction.