Boundary waters

36

Shiloh kept the fire small. A compromise between fighting the cold and risking that the stranger, should he find a way to follow her, might see the blaze. She hauled the canoe well away from the shore of the island and covered it with evergreen boughs. She built the fire in the lee of the canoe and bent close to warm herself.

She had no food. Everything she had, she’d brought in her pockets. Matches, knife, map. But she didn’t care that she couldn’t eat. She was alive. God almighty, she was alive.

She’d climbed the slippery rock wall ahead of the man who called himself Charon, hoping he’d fall. He didn’t. He was agile as a mountain goat, even with the heavy pack on his back, and he was never farther from her than arm’s reach. She made it to the top first, a few seconds ahead of him. He mounted the wall and stood poised there, the floor of the forest below him on one side, the long narrow lake Wendell called Nikidin on the other. She turned to face him. And what she saw behind him made her eyes go huge.

He glanced at her face, saw the surprise there, and spun around to confront-

A gray wolf.

The animal was tensed as if to leap at him, focused on the stranger with a fierce intensity in its yellow eyes, its teeth bared. A threatening growl rumbled in its throat.

Charon went for his gun. As his hand disappeared into his vest, Shiloh lunged at him, pushed into him with all her strength. She would love to have shoved him so that he fell to the forest floor, but her vantage point gave her only the option of the lake. As he plunged into the water a dozen feet below, Shiloh turned and fled up the trail along the ridge.

The trail led eventually to the cabin, but she didn’t stay with the trail. After fifty yards, well out of sight of the place where the stranger splashed, struggling to climb from the lake, she hid herself. Her gut said to put distance between them, but she’d lived with fear long enough now not to be shoved around by it foolishly. She pressed herself flat on the wet ground behind a low growth of blackberry vines. Two feet to her right, the ground ended in a twenty-foot drop to the lake. She knew it wasn’t a likely spot for hiding-open and with no escape. In her mind, however, she saw him running past her, bolting toward the thicker woods atop the ridge where the cover was better.

In the still, wet air, sounds carried easily. She heard him grunting as he heaved himself from the water up the rock wall. Heard him swear softly. Heard the squish of his wet leather boots and the swish of his wet jeans as he bounded up the trail toward her.

She stopped breathing and squeezed shut her eyes, as if plunging herself into a dark silent place might blind him to her. She held her breath until she began to feel dizzy and to hear only the sound of her own blood throbbing in her ears.

Then she exploded. Sucked in air like a big machine sputtering to life. And when she could hear again, she heard the sound of the man who called himself Charon running far up the trail near the top of the ridge.

She should wait, she knew. Give him time to move farther on. To be lost for good among the trees above her. But the panic she’d kept at bay finally was on her. She sprang up and leaped the blackberry vines and ran as fast as she could for the rock wall that dammed the stream. She slipped twice scrambling down but felt no alarm at the near plunges. What did she have to lose? She reached the bottom and didn’t look back as she raced for the cover of the woods. When she reached the big lake, she shoved her canoe into the water and paused only long enough to pull the knife from her pocket, whip out the blade, cut free the yellow duckie, and put two long slashes in its side. She hopped into the stern of her canoe, grabbed the paddle, and dug hard at the water.

She imagined him on the shore, aiming his gun. She felt the place between her shoulder blades where the bullet would rip through. But she didn’t risk a glance back until she was more than two hundred yards out. Then all she saw was the empty shoreline, the flat yellow at the water’s edge where the deflated kayak floated like a pat of melted butter, and, among the pines where the stream ran, a gray shape that moved low to the ground and vanished the moment her eyes found it.

She’d paddled ceaselessly, with a strength that came from a place inside her she’d never known existed. Two hours, three, she didn’t know. Somewhere along the way, the rain turned completely to snow and the gray light to a deep charcoal that was early night. She bumped into an island and realized she could go no further. With what suddenly seemed the last of her strength, she dragged the canoe from the water. With her knife, she cut evergreen boughs and hid the craft. The rain had wetted everything, but she found a fallen birch, broke off some branches, stripped the wet outer bark, and shaved some dry kindling.

She was beyond tired. She entered a place where her thoughts and actions seemed to bubble up of their own accord from some well of primordial knowledge. She realized she was humming to herself and thought probably her music had always come from the same kind of place. The best of it anyway.

Feeding the flames sparingly, keeping the fire small, she thought about the stranger, the man who called himself Charon. Why had he come for her? What purpose would her dying serve? Who wanted her dead? And what did it have to do with the work she’d hidden at the cabin? Whoever was behind it, they’d learned about the work from the letters she’d written poor Libbie. What was it she’d put in those letters that would drive someone to murder? Was it the past? She’d been so vague in what she told Libbie about the secrets of her therapy, both with Dr. Sutpen and on her own in the deep woods. The future? She’d been more explicit about that, full of an excitement she could barely contain. No drugs, no running from the past, no longer being nothing but a piece of dandelion fluff borne on the strongest wind. She was going to shape her future, change her life. Oh, she had such visions And The People-Wendell’s people, her people now-would be a part of everything.

But there could be no future until she freed herself completely from the menace she’d only just escaped, the man called Charon. It was as if the Dark Angel had stepped from her dreaming and had become flesh and blood. Well, if this was the Dark Angel, if this was the horror of the past rising, then she would be ready. This time she would fight back.

She realized she was beginning to nod, the exhaustion finally overtaking her. But there was one chore left before she slept.

She unfolded the blade of her knife. Grasping a handful of her long black hair, she severed it near her scalp. She took another handful and cut. Again and again and again. The knife moving over her whole head. Long swathes of her beautiful hair lying about her as if she were in the midst of slaughter. Hacking away. Cutting shorter and shorter. Until she could grasp her hair no more. Until there was so little left, no one could.