Deliverance

September 15th

Kept waking, and waking again, but when I was alive for good, the screen wire of the tentfront was gray and steady. Drew was deep in his sack, his head away from me. I lay with the flashlight still in one band, and tried to shape the day. The river ran through it, but before we got back into the current other things were possible. What I thought about mainly was that I was in a place where none—or almost none—of my daily ways of living my life would work; there was no habit I could call on. Is this freedom? I wondered.

I zipped the sleeping bag down and rolled out, holding my breath, my own heat rising from me and fading away as I crawled free, with one quick look upward through the owlhole. I pulled on my tennis shoes and bent toward the river sound, then stood up.

It was oddly warm and still and close, and the river was running with a heavy smoke of fog that moved just a little slower than the current must have been doing, rolling down the water in huge bodiless billows from upstream. It hovered at the bank while I watched, and overflowed, and in its silence I realized that I had been waiting for it to make a sound when it did this. I looked at my legs and they were gone, and my hands at my sides also; I stood with the fog eating me alive.

An idea came to me. I went back to my duffel bag, got out a two-piece suit of long underwear and put it on; it was almost exactly the color of the fog. My bow was backed and faced with white fiber glass, usually a disadvantage in green or brown woods but a very good thing now. I strung the bow, leaning on the live weight and resistance, took an arrow out of the bow quiver and went around behind the tents. The fog was seeping up over the canvas, swirling a little with the motion of deep water around Lewis and the others. It went back into the woods up what looked to be a long thin draw or little ravine, and I followed it, giving up my idea of waking Lewis and concentrating on being quiet. I couldn’t see far ahead, but I knew that if I stayed in the draw, all I would have to do to get back down to camp, even if the fog got worse, would be to turn around and come back down until I practically—or actually—stumbled over the tents. I concentrated on getting into some kind of relation to the woods under these conditions; I was as invisible as a tree.

At first I didn’t have any idea of really hunting. I had no firm notion of what I was doing, except walking forward carefully, away from the river and into more and more silence and blindness—for the fog was now coming up past me and thickening straight back into my face—and carrying a bow and a nocked arrow and three other arrows in one hand and fingering the bowstring with the other. It tingled like a wire in my right-hand fingers, giving off an electric current that came from the woods and the fog and the fact that hunting and pretending to hunt had come together and I could not now tell them apart. Behind the tents, before I had got into the woods, I had figured that since I had the equipment to hunt and knew to some extent how to use it, I might as well make some show of doing what I said I had come for. All I had really wanted was to stay away a reasonable length of time, long enough for the others to wake and find me gone—I thought of just sitting down on the bank of the ravine and waiting for half an hour by my watch—and then walk back into camp with my bow strung and say I’d been out taking a look around. That would satisfy honor.

But now not; not quite. I was really looking and really listening, and a good many things came together in my legs and arms and fingers. I was a good shot, at least up to thirty-five yards, and the visibility I had was not going to be anything like that in the next half hour. I could do it, if I came on a deer; I felt certain I could, and would.

The fog was still heavy, but the draw-bottom began to climb, and as I went upward there was more light, first light through the fog and then things through the fog—leaves and twigs. The walls of the ditch—which I now saw was what I was in—were not as high now, barely to my shoulders, and I could see levelly along the ground into the woods a little way on both sides. Nothing moved, and there was also the quiet of nothing being there, though I did my best not to make a sound in case there was. The wet ground helped me; as far as I could tell I caused very little sound to come into the place, and thought perhaps that technically I didn’t make such a bad hunter after all, at least for a little while.

Now I was walking up what was hardly more than a sunken track, caved in on both sides, with the last rags of mist around me. I knew I had better not go much farther or I might lose the ditch. I stopped to turn around. There was nothing in any direction I hadn’t already seen.

I started back, still looking as far off as I could into the woods rising slowly up to eye level right and left. The mist began to roll into my face in thin puffs. I was beginning to worry about walking right off past the tents into the river when to the left I saw something move. I stopped, and the fog rose exactly to my teeth. About fifteen yards from me, right at the limit of my vision, was a small deer, a spike buck as nearly as I could tell from the shape of his head. He was browsing, the ghost of a deer but a deer just the same. He lifted his head and looked directly at my face, which from his angle must have seemed like a curious stone on the ground, if he saw it. I stood there, buried to the neck in the ditch, in the floor of the forest.

He was broadside to me; I had shot a thousand targets one-quarter his size at the same distance, and when I recalled this—when my eyes and hands got together on it—I knew I could kill him just as easily as I could hit his outline on cardboard. I raised the bow.

He brought his head a little higher and lowered it again. I pulled the string back to the right side of my face and began to steady down. For a moment I braced there at the fullest tension of the bow, which brought out of me and into the bow about three fourths of my own strength, with the arrow pointing directly into his heart. It was a slight upshot, and I allowed for this, though at the range it wouldn’t matter much.

I let go, but as I released I knew it was a wrong shot, not very wrong but wrong enough. I had done the same thing on key shots in archery tournaments: lifted my bow hand just as the shot went. At the sound of the bowstring the deer jumped and wheeled at about the time the arrow should have gone through him. I thought I might have hit him high, but actually I had seen the orange feathers flick and disappear over his shoulder. I may even have touched him, but I was fairly sure I had not drawn blood. He ran a few steps and turned, looking back around his side at me. I jerked loose another arrow and strung it, but my heart was gone. I was shaking, and I had trouble getting the arrow nocked. I had it only about halfway back when he took off for good. I turned loose anyway and saw the arrow whip badly and disappear somewhere above where he had been.

I was heaving and sweating as I drew in the fog and let it back out, a sick, steaming gas. Like that, I went downhill, part of the time with my band at arm’s length in front of my face. I saw the tents—one of them, then another thing like it—as low dark patches with something structured about them, clearly out of place here.

Lewis was up, trying to make a fire with wet twigs and branches. As I unstrung the bow, the others came out too.

“What about it, buddy?” Lewis said, looking at the two empty slots in the quiver.

“I got a shot.”

“You did?” Lewis said, straightening.

“I did. A spectacular miss at fifteen yards.”

“What happened? We could’a had meat.”

“I boosted my bow hand, I think. I psyched out. I’ll be damned if I know how. I had him. He was getting bigger all the time. It was like shooting at the wall of a room. But I missed, all right. It was just that little second, right when I turned loose. Something said raise your hand, and before I could do anything about it, I did it.”

“Damn,” Bobby said. “Psychology. The delicate art of the forest.”

“You’ll get another chance,” Drew said. “We got a long ways to go yet.”

“What the hell,” I said. “If I’d hit him I’d be back in the woods now, tracking. He’d be hard to find in this fog. So would I.”

“You could’ve marked the place you shot from and come back and got us,” Lewis said. “We could’ve found him.”

“You’d have a time finding him now,” I said. “He’s probably in the next county.”

“I guess so,” Lewis said. “But it’s a shame. Where’s my old steady buddy?”

“Your old steady buddy exploded,” I said. “High and wide.” Lewis looked at me.

“I know you wouldn’t have, Lewis,” I said. “You don’t need to tell me. We’d have meat. We’d all live forever. And you know something? I wish you’d been up there and I’d been with you. I would’a just unstrung my bow and watched you put it right into the heart-lung area. Right into the boiler room. The pinwheel, at fifteen yards. What I was really thinking about up there was you.”

“Well, next time don’t think about me. Think about the deer.”

I let that ride and went to drag the stuff out of the tents. Lewis finally got a kind of fire started. When the sun began to take on height and force, the mist burned off in a few minutes. Through it the river, which we could hardly make out at first, showed itself more and more until we could see not only the flat of it and the stitches of the current but down through it into the pebbles of the stream-bed near the bank.

We had pancakes with butter and sorghum. After we finished, Lewis went over to the stream to wash out the cooking stuff. I pulled all the air mattresses out on the ground, unscrewed their caps and lay on each in turn until the ground came up to me through it and I was lying on the last sigh of air I had pumped into it the night before. We rolled the tents, wet and covered with leaves and pieces of bark, and lashed them into the canoes. I asked the others if they thought we might team up differently this time, for I was afraid that Lewis in his impatience might say something unpleasant to Bobby, and, since Bobby suddenly seemed to me on the edge of exasperation with himself for coming, I thought it would probably be best if I took him on. Drew would not have laughed, or laughed in the right way, at the cracks that were Bobby’s only means of salvaging his civility, and I figured I would.

“How about it, tiger?” I said to Bobby.

“OK,” he said. “How far can we get today, do you reckon?”

“Beats me,” I said. “Well get as far as we can. Depends on the water, and how many places we have to walk through. Everybody including the map says there’s a gorge down below here, and that sort of bothers me. But there’s nothing we can do about it now.”

Bobby and I got in and shoved off, and right away I could tell I was in for a hard time. I was not in awfully good shape myself, but Bobby was wheezing and panting after the first hundred yards. He had no coordination at all, and changed the canoe from what it had been with Drew’s steady, serious weight in front to a nervous, unstable craft that seemed bound and determined to do everything wrong, to get rid of us. I was sure that Lewis was disgusted with Bobby, and just as sure that I would be, also, before much longer.

“Easy,” I said. “Easy. You’re trying too hard. All we want to do is bold this thing straight. we don’t need to be pulling our guts out to get there. Just let the river do it. Let George do it.”

“George ain’t doing it fast enough. I want to get the hell and gone out of this goddamned place.”

“Ah, now. It’s not all that bad.”

“It’s not? Mosquitoes ate me up last night. My bites have got bites. I’m catching a fucking cold from sleeping on the fucking ground. I’m hungry as hell for something that tastes good. And I don’t mean sorghum.”

“Just steady down a little, and well get there … when we get there. It’s not going to do your cold any good to dump in this river, you can bloody well bet.”

“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s get on with it. I’m tired of this woods scene; I’m tired of shitting in a hole in the ground. This is for the Indians.”

After a while he settled down a little, and the back of his neck lightened its red. We dug a couple of strokes for every twenty-five yards, and the river moved us along. But I thought that the chances were pretty good, with my high center of gravity and his nerves, that we would spill before the day was out, especially if there were any fast stretches with lots of rocks. With the equipment and with Bobby and me, who were at least fifty pounds heavier than the other two, we were riding far too low in the water. We had too much stuff with us for the way we were teamed, and I signaled back to Lewis to pull over to the bank. He did, and we wallowed alongside the other canoe and tied up.

“Getting hot,” Lewis said.

“Hot as the hinges,” I said.

“Did you see that big snake back yonder?”

“No. Where?”

“He was lying up in the limbs of that old oak tree you went under about a mile and a half back. I didn’t see him till you were right under him, and he lifted his head. I didn’t want to make any fuss; thought it might make him nervous. I’m pretty sure it was a moccasin. I’ve heard of them dropping in boats.”

“Shit fire,” Bobby said. “That’s all we need.”

“Yeah,” said Lewis. “I can imagine.”

“Can you take on some of the stuff in our canoe, Lewis?” I asked. “We’re awful low and logy.”

“Sure. Go get the cooking equipment and the bedrolls. That ought to equalize us, just about. You can also let us have about half the beer that’s left.”

“Happy to. Everybody’s going to need something to cool off with, today.”

“Why do it just with beer?” Lewis said, unbuttoning his shirt. “It’s shallow and slow here. I’m going to get wet.”

I transferred the bedrolls and beer and the primus and other cooking equipment to the other canoe. Lewis was already in the water naked, booming overhand down the current with a lot of back showing, like Johnny Weismuller in the old Tarzan movies. He swam as well as he did everything else, and outran the current easily. Then he came back, his eyes glaring with effort at water level. I shucked off my coveralls and dived in, and so did Drew.

The river was very cold; it felt as though it had snow and ice in it, and had only just turned then to water. But it was marvelously clear and alive, and broke like glass around you and came together unhurt. I swam a little way into the current, and would gladly have given up all human effort—I was tired of human efforts of all kinds, especially my own—and gone on downstream either dead or alive, to wherever it would take me. But I swam back, a hard forty yards against the subtle tearing and downstream insistence, and stood up next to Lewis, who was waist deep with water crumpling and flopping at his belly. I looked at him, for I have never seen him with his clothes off.

Everything he had done for himself for years paid off as he stood there in his tracks, in the water. I could tell by the way he glanced at me; the payoff was in my eyes. I had never seen such a male body in my life, even in the pictures in the weight-lifting magazines, for most of those fellows are short, and Lewis was about an even six feet. I’d say he weighed about 190. The muscles were bound up in him smoothly, and when be moved, the veins in the moving part would surface. If you looked at him that way, he seemed made out of well-matched red-brown chunks wrapped in blue wire. You could even see the veins in his gut, and I knew I could not even begin to conceive how many sit-ups and leg-raises—and how much dieting—had gone into bringing them into view.

He dropped a hand on my shoulder and stirred the far around. “What do you think, Bolgani the Gorilla?”

“I think Tarzan speak with forked tongue,” I said. “I think Lord of jungle speak with tongue of Histah the Snake. I think we never get out of woods. He bring us here to stay and found kingdom.”

“Yeah,” said Bobby from the bank. “ Kingdom of Snakes is right.”

Drew came out of the river near us. “Gosh that feels good,” he said. “It really does. I never felt anything more wonderful in my life. Refreshing. You know, that’s just what it is. I feel like I can go all day, now. You better come on in for a minute, Bobby.”

“No thanks. Whenever you’re ready, me and the other Fatso will just Fatso on down, the washed and the unwashed.”

He sat with his knees drawn up, self-protective in the sun against the water-chill he could see on us. Our nipples were blue and drawn up, and my stomach muscles were beginning to heave against the moving underwater freeze. I climbed out and pulled on my sweaty coveralls. My head was fresh and cool while my body heated up, and I wanted to get back on the river before I began to melt again.

Bobby and I went over to our canoe and tried to figure out what else we might be able to transfer to the other one.

We finally ended up taking only one tent, my bow, a six-pack of beer and Drew’s guitar, for the wooden canoe was leaking a little and ours was more or less dry. We wrapped the guitar in the tent, got in and pushed off.

We rode a lot better now, and Bobby’s paddling improved a good deal because of this, and maybe because he had convinced himself that the less trouble he was the quicker we’d get off the river.

The water was calm for a long time. We made turn after turn, sometime near one bank, and sometime near the other. I tried not to go under any more limbs, and this was easy enough to do. The river spread and slowed and quieted, and we had to paddle more than we had been doing. We could hardly feel any current at all; it was very faint, and when we rested it was as though we were drawn forward by something invisible underneath us, while the water around us stood still. We could hear sound far off in front, but it kept retreating downstream. Each turn opened out only on another stretch of river, gradually unfolding its woods along both banks. A heron of some kind flushed on the right. He swept downstream in front of us, going left, then right, then left-right, dipping quickly and indecisively. He would disappear around the next turn, then, as we came around it, would spring up again from leaves where we had not seen him and muscle himself into the air on long blue wings, giving a hoarse agonized inhuman cry and making a magnificent half-turn over the river ahead of us, then start downstream again with long wingbeats, the tips of his wings all but touching the water, so that wherever he was his shadow started up under him at each downstroke, vague and misshapen with the river. This continued through four or five turns, until we came around another one like the others and did not see him. He may have veered into the woods, but I thought that most probably he had learned to sit still, maybe nearing hysterical flight once again as we approached and went past, but managing to keep that long-necked, desperate cry in his throat until we had gone.

In the new silence the river seemed to go deeper and deeper under us; the colors changed toward denser greens as the sun got higher. The pace of the water began to pick up; we slid farther and farther with each stroke. I thought to myself that anyone fighting the brush along the bank could not keep up with us.

Every now and then I glanced down at the bow at my feet, big-handled and tense-looking, and at its two arrows slathered with house paint. The big orange feathers spiraled out of them, and the emery-wheeled edges of the broadheads shone in the sun like radium. Though I would have had to do a good deal of curious balancing to string the bow, I kept looking on both sides of the river for deer, hoping that we might float in on a big buck drinking. It was something to do.

We went through some deep, quickened water and floated out into a calm broad stretch of a long turn that slid us into a dim underpass of enormous trees, conifers of some kind, spruce or fir. It was dark and heavy in there; the packed greenness seemed to suck the breath out of your lungs. Bobby and I lifted our paddles clear of the river as by a signal, and we eased through the place the way the river wanted to go. Intense needles of light shook on the ripples, gold, hot enough to burn and almost solid enough to pick up from the surface like nails.

We came out among some fields grown up six or seven feet high in grass. A mottled part of the bank slipped into the water, and it took me a minute to realize it was a snake. He went across about twenty feet in front of us, swimming as if crawling, his head high, and came out on the opposite bank without changing his motion at all, a thing with a single spell, a single movement, and no barriers.

We went on, taking long slow swings at the water. I had fitted my stroke to Bobby’s the best I could; I moved when he moved, and had got to the point where I could put my paddle in the water and lift it out at the same time he did. I thought he must surely be taking some satisfaction in the improvement, but I didn’t say anything for fear of upsetting the rhythm.

After two hours from the time the heron left us we had drunk all the beer we had. The sun was eating my bald spot, and my nylon outfit was soaking with me. My tongue began to balloon in my mouth, and my backbone was splintering through the skin; I kept touching it between strokes to see if anything had given way. The edge of the seat was digging into my right thigh, for that was the only position in which I could get a good grip on the river. All the pains began to try to link up with each other and there was nothing I could do about it.

I looked back. The other canoe was just coming around. Lewis had lagged behind us because, I suppose, he wanted us in sight in case we got into trouble. Anyway, they were about half a mile back and disappeared as we rounded another curve, and I pointed with my paddle to the left bank. I didn’t know whether they saw me or not, but I figured to flag them in when they came by. I wanted to lie up in the shade and rest for a while. I was hungry, and I sure would’ve liked to have had another beer. We dug in and swung over.

As we closed in on the left bank, a pouring sound came from under the trees; the leaves at a certain place moved as if in a little wind. The fresh green-white of a creek was frothing into the river. We sailed past it half-broadside and came to the bank about seventy-five yards downstream. I put the nose against it and paddled hard to hold it there while Bobby got out and moored us.

“This is too much like work,” Bobby said, as be gave me a hand up.

“Lord, Lord,” I said. “I’m getting too old for this kind of business. I suppose you could call it learning the hard way.”

Bobby sat down on the ground and untied a handkerchief from around his neck. He leaned down to the river and sopped it, then swabbed his face and neck down, rubbing a long time in the nose area. I bent over and touched my toes a couple of times to get rid of the position that had been maiming my back, and then looked upstream. I still couldn’t see the other canoe. I turned to say something to Bobby.

Two men stepped out of the woods, one of them trailing a shotgun by the barrel.

Bobby had no notion they were there until he looked at me. Then he turned his head until he could see over his shoulder and got up, brushing at himself.

“How goes it?” he said.

One of them, the taller one, narrowed in the eyes and face. They came forward, moving in a kind of half circle as though they were stepping around something. The shorter one was older, with big white eyes and a half-white stubble that grew in whorls on his cheeks. His face seemed to spin in many directions. He had on overalls, and his stomach looked like it was falling through them. The other was lean and tall, and peered as though out of a cave or some dim simple place far back in his yellow-tinged eyeballs. When he moved his jaws the lower bone came up too far for him to have teeth. “Escaped convicts” flashed up in my mind on one side, “Bootleggers” on the other. But they still could have been hunting.

They came on, and were ridiculously close for some reason. I tried not to give ground; some principle may have been involved.

The older one, looming and spinning his sick-looking face in front of me, said, “What the hail you think you’re doin’?”

“Going downriver. Been going since yesterday.”

I hoped that the fact that we were at least talking to each other would do some good of some kind.

He looked at the tall man; either something or nothing was passing between them. I could not feel Bobby anywhere near, and the other canoe was not in sight. I shrank to my own true size, a physical movement known only to me, and with the strain my solar plexus failed. I said, “We started from Oree yesterday afternoon, and we hope we can get to Aintry sometime late today or early tomorrow.”

“Aintry?”

Bobby said, and I could have killed him, “Sure. This river just runs one way, cap’n. Haven’t you heard?”

“You ain’t never going to get down to Aintry,” he said, without any emphasis on any word.

“Why not?” I asked, seared but also curious; in a strange way it was interesting to cause him to explain.

“Because this river don’t go to Aintry,” he said. “You done taken a wrong turn somewhere. This-here river don’t go nowhere near Aintry.”

“Where does it go?”

“It goes … it goes …”

“It goes to Circle Gap,” the other man said, missing his teeth and not caring. “‘Bout fifty miles.”

“Boy,” said the whorl-faced man, “You don’t know where you are.”

“Well,” I said, “We’re going where the river’s going. Well come out somewhere, I reckon.”

The other man moved closer to Bobby.

“Hell,” I said, “we don’t have anything to do with you. We sure don’t want any trouble. If you’ve got a still near here, that’s fine with us. We could never tell anybody where it is, because you know something? You’re right. We don’t know where we are.”

“A stee-ul?” the tall man said, and seemed honestly surprised.

“Sure,” I said. “If you’re making whiskey, well buy some from you. We could sure use it.”

The drop-gutted man faced me squarely. “Do you know what the hail you’re talkin’ about?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

“You done said something about makin’ whiskey. You think we’re makin’ whiskey. Now come on. Ain’t that right?”

“Shit,” I said. “I don’t know whether you’re making whiskey or hunting or rambling around in the woods for your whole fucking life. I don’t know and I don’t care what you’re doing. It’s not any of my business.”

I looked at the river, but we were a little back from the bank, and I couldn’t see the other canoe. I didn’t think it could have gone past, but I was not really sure that it hadn’t. I shook my head in a complete void, at the thought that it might have; we had got too far ahead, maybe.

With the greatest effort in the world, I came back into the man’s face and tried to cope with it. He had noticed something about the way I had looked at the river.

“Anybody else with you?” he asked me.

I swallowed and thought, with possibilities shooting through each other. If I said yes, and they meant trouble, we would bring Lewis and Drew into it with no defenses. Or it might mean that we would be left alone, four being too many to handle. On the other hand, if I said no, then Lewis and Drew—especially Lewis—might be able to … well, to do something. Lewis’ pectorals loomed up in my mind, and his leg, with the veins bulging out of the divided muscles of his thigh, his leg under water wavering small-ankled and massive as a centaur’s. I would go with that.

“No,” I said, and took a couple of steps inland to draw them away from the river.

The lean man reached over and touched Bobby’s arm, feeling it with strange delicacy. Bobby jerked back, and when he did the gun barrel came up, almost casually but decisively.

“We’d better get on with it,” I said. “We got a long ways to go.” I took part of a step toward the canoe.

“You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” the man in front of me said, and leveled the shotgun straight into my chest. My heart quailed away from the blast tamped into both barrels, and I wondered what the barrel openings would look like at the exact instant they went off: if fire would come out of them, or if they would just be a gray blur or if they would change at all between the time you lived and died, blown in half. He took a turn around his hand with the string he used for a trigger.

“You come on back in here ‘less you want your guts all over this-here woods.”

I half-raised my hands like a character in a movie. Bobby looked at me, but I was helpless, my bladder quavering. I stepped forward into the woods through some big bushes that I saw but didn’t feel. They were all behind me.

The voice of one of them said, “Back up to that sapli’.”

I picked out a tree. “This one?” I said.

There was no answer. I backed up to the tree I had selected. The lean man came up to me and took off my web belt with the knife and rope on it. Moving his hands very quickly, he unfastened the rope, let the belt out and put it around me and the tree so tight I could hardly breathe, with the buckle on the other side of the tree. He came back holding the knife. It occurred to me that they must have done this before; it was not a technique they would just have thought of for the occasion.

The lean man held up the knife, and I looked for the sun to strike it, but there was no sun where we were. Even so, in the intense shadow, I could see the edge I had put on it with a suburban grindstone: the minute crosshatching of high-speed abrasions, the wearing-away of metal into a murderous edge.

“Look at that,” the tall man said to the other. “I bet that’ll shave h’ar.”

“Why’ont you try it? Looks like thatn’s got plenty of it. ‘Cept on his head.”

The tall man took hold of the zipper of my coveralls, breathing lightly, and zipped it down to the belt as though tearing me open.

“Good God Amighty,” said the older one. “He’s like a goddamned monkey. You ever see anything like that?”

The lean man put the point of the knife under my chin and lifted it. “You ever had your balls cut off, you fuckin’ ape?”

“Not lately,” I said, clinging to the city. “What good would they do you?”

He put the flat of the knife against my chest and scraped it across. He held it up, covered with black hair and a little blood. “It’s sharp,” he said. “Could be sharper, but it’s sharp.”

The blood was running down from under my jaw where the point had been. I had never felt such brutality and carelessness of touch, or such disregard for another person’s body. It was not the steel or the edge of the steel that was frightening; the man’s fingernail, used in any gesture of his, would have been just as brutal; the knife only magnified his unconcern. I shook my head again, trying to get my breath in a gray void full of leaves. I looked straight up into the branches of the sapling I was tied to, and then down into the clearing at Bobby.

He was watching me with his mouth open as I gasped for enough breath to live on from second to second. There was nothing he could do, but as he looked at the blood on my chest and under my throat, I could see that his position terrified him more than mine did; the fact that he was not tied mattered in some way.

They both went toward Bobby, the lean man with the gun this time. The white-bearded one took him by the shoulders and turned him around toward downstream.

“Now let’s you just drop them pants,” he said.

Bobby lowered his hands hesitantly. “Drop …” he began.

My rectum and intestines contracted. Lord God.

The toothless man put the barrels of the shotgun under Bobby’s right ear and shoved a little. “Just take ‘em right on off,” he said.

“I mean, what’s this all …” Bobby started again weakly.

“Don’t say nothin’,” the older man said. “Just do it.”

The man with the gun gave Bobby’s head a vicious shove, so quick that I thought the gun had gone off. Bobby unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his pants. He took them off, looking around ridiculously for a place to put them.

“Them panties too,” the man with the belly said.

Bobby took off his shorts like a boy undressing for the first time in a gym, and stood there plump and pink, his hairless thighs shaking, his legs close together.

“See that log? Walk over yonder.”

Wincing from the feet, Bobby went slowly over to a big fallen tree and stood near it with his head bowed.

“Now git on down crost it.”

The tall man followed Bobby’s head down with the gun as Bobby knelt over the log.

“Pull your shirt-tail up, fat-ass.”

Bobby reached back with one hand and pulled his shirt up to his lower back. I could not imagine what he was thinking.

“I said up,” the tall man said. He took the shotgun and shoved the back of the shirt up to Bobby’s neck, scraping a long red mark along his spine.

The white-bearded man was suddenly also naked up to the waist. There was no need to justify or rationalize anything; they were going to do what they wanted to. I struggled for life in the air, and Bobby’s body was still and pink in an obscene posture that no one could help. The tall man restored the gun to Bobby’s head, and the other one knelt behind him.

A scream hit me, and I would have thought it was mine except for the lack of breath. It was a sound of pain and outrage, and was followed by one of simple and wordless pain. Again it came out of him, higher and more carrying. I let all the breath out of myself and brought my head down to look at the river. Where are they, every vein stood out to ask, and as I looked the bushes broke a little in a place I would not have thought of and made a kind of complicated alleyway out onto the stream—I was not sure for a moment whether it was water or leaves—and Lewis’ canoe was in it. He and Drew both had their paddles out of water, and then they turned and disappeared.

The white-haired man worked steadily on Bobby, every now and then getting a better grip on the ground with his knees. At last he raised his face as though to howl with all his strength into the leaves and the sky, and quivered silently while the man with the gun looked on with an odd mixture of approval and sympathy. The whorl-faced man drew back, drew out.

The standing man backed up a step and took the gun from behind Bobby’s ear. Bobby let go of the log and fell to his side, both arms over his face.

We all sighed. I could get better breath, but only a little.

The two of them turned to me. I drew up as straight as I could and waited with the tree. It was up to them. I could sense my knife sticking in the bark next to my head and I could see the blood vessels in the eyes of the tall man. That was all; I was blank.

The bearded man came to me and disappeared around me. The tree jerked and air came into my lungs in great gratitude. I fell forward and caught up short, for the tall man had put the gun up under my nose; it was a very odd sensation, funnier than it might have been when I thought of my brain as thinking of Dean and Martha at that instant and also of its being scattered, material of some sort, over the bush-leaves and twigs in the next second.

“You’re kind of ball-beaded and fat, ain’t you?” the tall man said.

“What do you want me to say?” I said. “Yeah. I’m bald-headed and fat. That OK?”

“You’re hairy as a goddamned dog, ain’t you?”

“Some dogs, I suppose.”

“What the hail,” he said, half turning to the other man.

“Ain’t no hair in his mouth,” the other one said.

“That’s the truth,” the tall one said. “Hold this on him.”

Then he turned to me, handing the gun off without looking. It stood in the middle of the air at the end of his extended arm. He said to me, “Fall down on your knees and pray, boy. And you better pray good.”

I knelt down. As my knees hit, I heard a sound, a snapslap off in the woods, a sound like a rubber band popping or a sickle-blade cutting quick. The older man was standing with the gun barrel in his hand and no change in the stupid, advantage-taking expression of his face, and a foot and a half of bright red arrow was shoved forward from the middle of his chest. It was there so suddenly it seemed to have come from within him.

None of us understood; we just hung where we were, the tall man in front of me unbuttoning his pants, me on my knees with my eyelids clouding the forest, and Bobby rolling back and forth, off in the leaves in the corner of my eye. The gun fell, and I made a slow-motion grab for it as the tall man sprang like an animal in the same direction. I had it by the stock with both bands, and if I could pull it in to me I would have blown him in half in the next second. But be only gripped the barrel lightly and must have felt that I had it better, and felt also what every part of me was concentrated on doing; he jumped aside and was gone into the woods opposite where the arrow must have come from.

I got up with the gun and the power, wrapping the string around my right hand. I swung the barrel back and forth to cover everything, the woods and the world. There was nothing in the clearing but Bobby and the shot man and me. Bobby was still on the ground, though now he was lifting his head. I could understand that much, but something kept blurring the clear idea of Bobby and myself and the leaves and the river. The shot man was still standing. He wouldn’t concentrate in my vision; I couldn’t believe him. He was like a film over the scene, gray and vague, with the force gone out of him; I was amazed at how he did everything. He touched the arrow experimentally, and I could tell that it was set in him as solidly as his breastbone. It was in him tight and unwobbling, coming out front and back. He took hold of it with both hands, but compared to the arrow’s strength his hands were weak; they weakened more as I looked, and began to melt. He was on his knees, and then fell to his side, pulling his legs up. He rolled back and forth like a man with the wind knocked out of him, all the time making a bubbling, gritting sound. His lips turned red, but from his convulsions—in which there was something comical and unspeakable—he seemed to gain strength. He got up on one knee and then to his feet again while I stood with the shotgun at port arms. He took a couple of strides toward the woods and then seemed to change his mind and danced back to me, lurching and clog-stepping in a secret circle. He held out a hand to me, like a prophet, and I pointed the shotgun straight at the head of the arrow, ice coming into my teeth. I was ready to put it all behind me with one act, with one pull of a string.

But there was no need. He crouched and fell forward with his face on my white tennis shoe tops, trembled away into his legs and shook down to stillness. He opened his mouth and it was full of blood like an apple. A clear bubble formed on his lips and stayed there.

I stepped back and looked at the whole scene again, trying to place things. Bobby was propped up on one elbow, with his eyes as red as the bubble in the dead man’s mouth. He got up, looking at me. I realized that I was swinging the gun toward him; that I pointed wherever I looked. I lowered the barrel. What to say?

“Well.”

“Lord God,” Bobby said. “Lord God.”

“You all right?” I asked, since I needed to know even though I cringed with the directness.

Bobby’s face expanded its crimson, and he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know.”

I stood and he lay with his head on his palm, both of us looking straight ahead. Everything was quiet. The man with the aluminum shaft in him lay with his head on one shoulder and his right hand relaxedly holding the barb of the arrow. Behind him the blue and silver of Lewis’ fancy arrow crest shone, unnatural in the woods.

Nothing happened for ten minutes. I wondered if maybe the other man wouldn’t come back before Lewis showed himself, and I began to compose a scene in which Lewis would step out of the woods on one side of the clearing with his bow and the tall man would show on the other, and they would have it out in some way that it was hard to imagine. I was working on the details when I heard something move. Part of the bark of a big water oak moved at leg level, and Lewis moved with it out into the open, stepping sideways into the clearing with another bright-crested arrow on the string of his bow. Drew followed him, holding a canoe paddle like a baseball bat.

Lewis walked out between me and Bobby, over the man on the ground, and put his bow tip on a leaf. Drew moved to Bobby. I had been holding the gun ready for so long that it felt strange to lower the barrels so that they were pointing down and could kill nothing but the ground. I did, though, and Lewis and I faced each other across the dead man. His eyes were vivid and alive; he was smiling easily and with great friendliness.

“Well now, how about this? Just … how about this?”

I went over to Bobby and Drew, though I had no notion of what to do when I got there. I had watched everything that had happened to Bobby, had heard him scream and squall, and wanted to reassure him that we could set all that aside; that it would be forgotten as soon as we left the woods, or as soon as we got back in the canoes. But there was no way to say this, or to ask him how his lower intestine felt or whether he thought he was bleeding internally. Any examination of him would be unthinkably ridiculous and humiliating.

There was no question of that, though; he was furiously closed off from all of us. He stood up and backed away, still naked from the middle down, his sexual organs wasted with pain. I picked up his pants and shorts and handed them to him, and he reached for them in wonderment. He took out a handkerchief and went behind some bushes.

Still holding the gun at trail, as the tall man bad been doing when I first saw him step out of the woods, I went back to Lewis, who was leaning on his bow and gazing out over the river.

Without looking at me, he said, “I figured it was the only thing to do.”

“It was,” I agreed, though I wasn’t all that sure. “I thought we’d had it.”

Lewis glanced in the direction Bobby had taken and I realized I could have put it better.

“I thought sure they’d kill us.”

“Probably they would have. The penalty for sodomy in this state is death, anyway. And at the point of a gun … No, they wouldn’t have let you go. Why should they?”

“How did you figure it?”

“We heard Bobby, and the only thing we could think of was that one of you had been bit by a snake. We started to come right in, but all at once it hit me that if it was something like snakebite, the other one of you could take care of the one that was bit just as well as three of us could, at least for a little while. And if there were other people involved, I told Drew I had just as soon come in on them without them knowing it.”

“What did you do?”

“We turned in that little creek and went up it about fifty yards. Then we shoved the canoe in some bushes and got out; I strung up and nocked an arrow, and we came on up to about thirty yards from where you were. As soon as I saw four people there, I began to shift around to find a place I could shoot through the leaves. I couldn’t tell what was going on at first, though I thought it was probably what it was. I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything for Bobby, but at least I didn’t make a mismove and get his head blown off. When the guy started getting back up on his feet, I drew down on him, and waited.”

“How did you know when to shoot?”

“Any time that the gun wasn’t pointed at you and Bobby would have been all right. I just had to wait till that time came. The other guy hadn’t had any action yet, and I was pretty sure they’d swap the gun. The only thing I was worried about was that you might get in between me and him. But I was on him all the time, looking right down the arrow. I must have been at full draw for at least a minute. It would’ve been a much easier shot if I hadn’t had to hold so long. But it was fairly easy anyway. I knew I was right on him; I tried to hit him halfway up the back and a little to the left. He moved, or that’s just where it would have caught him. I knew I had him when I let go.”

“You had him,” I said. “And now what’re we going to do with him?”

Drew moved up to us, washing his hands with dirt and beating them against the sides of his legs.

“There’s not but one thing to do,” he said. “Put the body in one of the canoes and take it on down to Aintry and turn it over to the highway patrol. Tell them the whole story.”

“Tell them what, exactly?” Lewis asked.

“Just what happened,” Drew said, his voice rising a tone. “This is justifiable homicide if anything is. They were sexually assaulting two members of our party at gunpoint. Like you said, there was nothing else we could do.”

“Nothing else but shoot him in the back with an arrow?” Lewis asked pleasantly.

“It was your doing, Lewis,” Drew said.

“What would you have done?”

“It doesn’t make any difference what I would have done,” Drew said stoutly. “But I can tell you, I don’t believe …”

“Don’t believe what?”

“Wait a minute,” I broke in. “What we should or shouldn’t have done is beside the point. He’s there, and we’re here. We didn’t start any of this. We didn’t ask for it. But what happens now?”

Something close to my feet moved. I looked down, and the man shook his head as though at something past belief, gave a long sigh and slumped again. Drew and Lewis bent down on him.

“Is he dead?” I asked. I had already fixed him as dead in my mind, and couldn’t imagine how he could have moved and sighed.

“He is now,” Lewis said, without looking up. “He’s mighty dead. We couldn’t have saved him, though. He’s centershot.”

Lewis and Drew got up, and we tried to think our way back into the conversation.

“Let’s just figure for a minute,” Lewis said. “Let’s just calm down and think about it. Does anybody know anything about the law?”

“I’ve been on jury duty exactly once,” Drew said.

“That’s once more than I have,” I said. “And about all the different degrees of murder and homicide and manslaughter I don’t know anything at all.”

We all turned to Bobby, who had rejoined us. He shook his fiery face.

“You don’t have to know much law to know that if we take this guy down out of these mountains and turn him over to the sheriff, there’s going to be an investigation, and I would bet we’d go on trial,” Lewis said. “I don’t know what the charge would be, technically, but we’d be up against a jury, sure as hell.”

“Well, so what?” Drew said.

“All right, now,” said Lewis, shifting to the other leg. “We’ve killed a man. Shot him in the back. And we not only killed a man, we killed a cracker, a mountain man. Let’s consider what might happen.”

“All right,” Drew said. “Consider it. We’re listening.”

Lewis sighed and scratched his head. “We just ought to wait a minute before we decide to be so all-fired boy scoutish and do the right thing. There’s not any right thing.”

“You bet there is,” Drew said. “There’s only one thing.”

I tried to think ahead, and I couldn’t see anything but desperate trouble, and for the rest of my life. I have always been scared to death of anything to do with the police; the sight of a police uniform turns my saliva cold. I could feel myself beginning to breathe fast in the stillness, and I noticed the sound of the river for a moment, like something heard through a door.

“We ought to do some hard decision-making before we let ourselves in for standing trial up in these hills. We don’t know who this man is, but we know that he lived up here. He may be an escaped convict, or he may have a still, or he may be everybody in the county’s father, or brother or cousin. I can almost guarantee you that he’s got relatives all over the place. Everybody up here is kin to everybody else, in one way or another. And consider this, too: there’s a lot of resentment in these hill counties about the dam. There are going to have to be some cemeteries moved, like in the old TVA days. Things like that. These people don’t want any ‘furriners’ around. And I’m goddamned if I want to come back up here for shooting this guy in the back, with a jury made up of his cousins and brothers, maybe his mother and father too, for all I know.”

He had a point. I listened to the woods and the river to see if I could get an answer. I saw myself and the others rotting for weeks in some county jail with country drunks, feeding on sorghum, salt pork and sowbelly, trying to pass the time without dying of worry, negotiating with lawyers, paying their fees month after month, or maybe posting bond—I had no idea whether that was allowable in a case like this, or not—and drawing my family into the whole sickening, unresolvable mess, getting them all more and more deeply entangled in the life, death and identity of the repulsive, useless man at my feet, who was holding the head of the arrow thoughtfully, the red bubble at his lips collapsed into a small weak stream of blood that gathered slowly under his ear into a drop. Granted, Lewis was in more trouble than the rest of us were, but we all had a lot to lose. Just the publicity of being connected with a killing would be long-lasting trouble. I didn’t want it, if there was any way out.

“What do you think, Bobby?” Lewis asked, and there was a tone in his voice which suggested that Bobby’s decision would be final. Bobby was sitting on the same log he had been forced to lean over, one hand propping up his chin and the other over his eyes. He got up, twenty years older, and walked over to the dead man. Then, in an explosion so sudden that it was like something bursting through from another world, he kicked the body in the face, and again.

Lewis pulled him back, his hands on Bobby’s shoulders. Then he let him go, and Bobby turned his back and walked away.

“How about you, Ed?” Lewis asked me.

“God, I don’t know. I really don’t.”

Drew moved over to the other side of the dead man and pointed down at him very deliberately. “I don’t know what you have in mind, Lewis,” he said. “But if you conceal this body you’re setting yourself up for a murder charge. That much law I do know. And a murder charge is going to be a little bit more than you’re going to want to deal with, particularly with conditions like they are; I mean, like you’ve just been describing them. You better think about it, unless you want to start thinking about the electric chair.”

Lewis looked at him with an interested expression. “Suppose there’s no body?” he said. “No body, no crime. Isn’t that right?”

“I think so, but I’m not sure,” Drew said, peering closely at Lewis and then looking down at the man. “What are you thinking about, Lewis?” be said. “We’ve got a right to know. And we damned well better get to doing something right quick. We can’t just stand around and wring our hands.”

“Nobody’s wringing his hands,” Lewis said. “I’ve just been thinking, while you’ve been giving out with what we might call the conventional point of view.”

“Thinking what?” I asked.

“Thinking of what we might do with the body.”

“You’re a goddamned fool,” Drew said in a low voice. “Doing what with the body? Throwing it in the river? That’s the first place they’d look.”

“Who’d look?”

“Anybody who was looking for him. Family, friends, police. The fellow who was with him, maybe.”

“We don’t have to put him in the river,” Lewis said.

“Lewis,” Drew said, “I mean it. You level with us. This is not one of your fucking games. You killed somebody. There he is.”

“I did kill him,” Lewis said. “But you’re wrong when you say that there’s nothing like a game connected with the position we’re in now. It may be the most serious kind of game there is, but if you don’t see it as a game, you’re missing an important point.”

“Come on, Lewis,” I said. “For once let’s not carry on this way.”

Lewis turned to me. “Ed, you listen, and listen good. We can get out of this, I think. Get out without any questions asked, and no troubles of any kind, if we just take hold in the next hour and do a couple of things right. If we think it through, and act it through and don’t make any mistakes, we can get out without a thing ever being said about it. If we connect up with the law, we’ll be connected to this man, this body, for the rest of our lives. We’ve got to get rid of him.”

“How?” I asked. “Where?”

Lewis turned his head to the river, then half lifted his hand and moved it in a wide gesture inland, taking in the woods in a sweep obviously meant to include miles of them, hundreds of acres. Another expression—a new color—came into his eyes, a humorous conspiratorial craftiness, his look of calculated pleasure, his enthusiast’s look. He dropped the hand and rested it easily on the bow, having given Drew and me the woods, the whole wilderness. “Everywhere,” he said. “Anywhere. Nowhere.”

“Yes,” Drew went on excitedly, “we could do something with him. We could throw him in the river. We could bury him. We could even burn him up. But they’d find him, or find something, if they came looking. And how about the other one, the one who was with him? All he’s got to do is to go and bring …”

“Bring who?” Lewis asked. “I doubt if he’d want anybody, much less the sheriff or the state police, to know what he was doing when this character was shot. He may bring somebody back here, though I doubt it, but it won’t be the law. And if he does come back, so what?”

Lewis touched the corpse with his bow tip and put his eyes squarely into Drew’s. “He won’t be here.”

“Where’ll he be?” Drew asked, his jaw setting blackly. “And how do you know that other guy is not around here right now? It just might be that he’s watching everything you do. We wouldn’t be so hard to follow, dragging a corpse off somewhere and ditching it. He could find some way to let the police know. He could bring them right back here. You look around, Lewis. He could be anywhere.”

Lewis didn’t look around, but I did. The other side of the river was not dangerous, but the side where we were was becoming more and more terrifying to stand on. A powerful unseen presence seemed to flow and float in on us from three directions—upstream, downstream and inland. Drew was right, he could be anywhere. The trees and leaves were so thick that the eye gave up easily, lost in the useless tangle of plants living out their time in this choked darkness; among them the thin, stupid and crafty body of the other man could flow as naturally as a snake or fog, going where we went, watching what we did. What we had against him—I was shocked by the hope of it—was Lewis. The assurance with which he had killed a man was desperately frightening to me, but the same quality was also calming, and I moved, without being completely aware of movement, nearer to him. I would have liked nothing better than to touch that big relaxed forearm as he stood there, one hip raised until the leg made longer by the position bent gracefully at the knee. I would have followed him anywhere, and I realized that I was going to have to do just that.

Still looking off at the river, Lewis said, “Let’s figure.”

Bobby got off the log and stood with us, all facing Lewis over the corpse. I moved away from Bobby’s red face. None of this was his fault, but he felt tainted to me. I remembered how he had looked over the log, how willing to let anything be done to him, and how high his voice was when he screamed.

Lewis crouched down over the dead man, a wisp of dry weed in his mouth. “If we take him on the river in the canoe we’ll be out in the open. If somebody was watching he could see where we dropped him in. Besides, like Drew says, the river’s the first place anybody’d look. Where does that leave us?”

“Upstream or down,” I said.

“Or in,” Lewis said. “Or maybe a combination.”

“Which combination?”

“I’d say a combination of in and up. Suppose we took him downstream along the bank. We’re heading downriver, and if we wanted to get rid of him as fast as possible, we’d bury him or leave him somewhere along the way.”

Again, his idea fitted. The woods upstream became more mysterious than those downstream; the future opened only on that side.

“So … we take him inland, and upstream. We carry him to that little creek and up it until we find a good place, and then we bury him and the gun. And I’d be willing to bet that nothing will ever come of it. These woods are full of more human bones than anybody’ll ever know; people disappear up here all the time, and nobody ever hears about it. And in a month or six weeks the valley’ll be flooded, and the whole area will be hundreds of feet under water. Do you think the state is going to hold up this project just to look for some hillbilly? Especially if they don’t know where he is, or even if he’s in the woods at all? It’s not likely. And in six weeks … well, did you ever look out over a lake? There’s plenty of water. Something buried under it—under it—is as buried as it can get.”

Drew shook his head. “I’m telling you, I don’t want any part of it.”

“What do you mean?” Lewis turned on him sharply and said, “You are part of it. You want to be honest, you want to make a clean breast, you want to do the right thing. But you haven’t got the guts to take a chance. Believe me, if we do this right we’ll go home as clean as we came. That is, if somebody doesn’t crap out.”

“You know better than that, Lewis,” Drew said, his glasses deepening with anger. “But I can’t go along with this. It’s not a matter of guts; it’s a matter of the law.”

“You see any law around here?” Lewis said. “We’re the law. What we decide is going to be the way things are. So let’s vote on it. I’ll go along with the vote. And so will you, Drew. You’ve got no choice.”

Lewis turned to Bobby again. “How about it?”

“I say get rid of the son of a bitch,” Bobby said, his voice thick and strangled. “Do you think I want this to get around?”

“Ed?”

Drew put the tense flat of his hand before my face and shook it. “Think what you’re doing, Ed, for God’s sake,” he said. “This self-hypnotized maniac is going to get us all in jail for life, if he doesn’t get us killed. You’re a reasonable man. You’ve got a family. You’re not implicated in this unless you go along with what Lewis wants to do. Listen to reason, don’t do this thing. Ed, doret. I’m begging you. Don’t.”

But I was ready to gamble. After all, I hadn’t done anything but stand tied to a tree, and nobody could prove anything else, no matter what it came to. I believed Lewis could get us out. If I went along with concealing the body and we got caught it could be made to seem a matter of necessity, of simply being outvoted.

“I’m with you,” I said, around Drew.

“All right then,” Lewis said, and reached for the dead man’s shoulder. He rolled him over, took hold of the arrow shaft where it came out of the chest and began to pull. He added his other hand and jerked to get it started out and then hauled strongly with one hand again as the arrow slowly slithered from the body, painted a dark uneven red. Lewis stood up, went to the river and washed it, then came back. He clipped the shaft into his bow quiver.

I handed the shotgun to Bobby and went and got my belt and the knife and rope. Then Drew and I bent to the shoulders and lifted, and Bobby and Lewis took a foot apiece, with their free hands carrying the gun and the bow and an entrenching tool from the loaded canoe. The corpse sagged between us, extremely heavy, and the full meaning of the words dead weight dragged at me as I tried to straighten. We moved toward the place where Lewis had come from.

Before we had gone twenty yards Drew and I were staggering, our feet going any way they could through the dry grass. Once I heard a racheting I was sure was a rattlesnake, and looked right and left of the body sliding feet-first ahead of me into the woods. The man’s head hung back and rolled between Drew and me, dragging at everything it could touch.

It was not believable. I had never done anything like it even in my mind. To say that it was like a game would not describe exactly how it felt. I knew it was not a game, and yet, whenever I could, I glanced at the corpse to see if it would come out of the phony trance it was in, and stand up and shake hands all around, someone new we’d met in the woods, who could give us some idea where we were. But the head kept dropping back, and we kept having to keep it up, clear of the weeds and briars, so that we could go wherever we were going with it.

We came out finally at the creek bank near Lewis’ canoe. The water was pushing through the leaves, and the whole stream looked as though it was about half slow water and half bushes and branches. There was nothing in my life like it, but I was there. I helped Lewis and the others put the body into the canoe. The bull rode deep and low in the leafy water, and we began to push it up the creek, deeper into the woods. I could feel every pebble through the city rubber of my tennis shoes, and the creek flowed as untouchable as a shadow around my legs. There was nothing else to do except what we were doing.

Lewis led, drawing the canoe by the bow painter, plodding bent-over upstream with the veins popping, the rope over his shoulder like a bag of gold. The trees, mostly mountain laurel and rhododendron, made an arch over the creek, so that at times we had to get down on one knee or both knees and grope through leaves and branches, going right into the most direct push of water against our chests as it came through the foliage. At some places it was like a tunnel where nothing human had ever been expected to come, and at others it was like a long green hall where the water changed tones and temperatures and was much quieter than it would have been in the open.

In this endless water-floored cave of leaves we kept going for twenty minutes by my watch, until the only point at all was to keep going, to find the creek our feet were in when the leaves of rhododendrons dropped in our faces and hid it. I wondered what on earth I would do if the others disappeared, the creek disappeared and left only me and the woods and the corpse. Which way would I go? Without the creek to go back down, could I find the river? Probably not, and I bound myself with my brain and heart to the others; with them was the only way I would ever get out.

Every now and then I looked into the canoe and saw the body riding there, slumped back with its hand over its face and its feet crossed, a caricature of the southern small-town bum too lazy to do anything but sleep.

Lewis held up his hand. We all straightened up around the canoe, holding it lightly head-on into the current. Lewis went up the far bank like a creature. Drew and Bobby and I stood with the canoe at our hips and the sleeping man rocking softly between. Around us the woods were so thick that there would have been trouble putting an arm into it in places. We could have been watched from anywhere, any angle, any tree or bush, but nothing happened. I could feel the others’ hands on the canoe, keeping it steady.

In about ten minutes Lewis came back, lifting a limb out of the water and appearing. It was as though the tree raised its own limb out of the water like a man. I had the feeling that such things happened all the time to branches in woods that were deep enough. The leaves lifted carefully but decisively, and Lewis Medlock came through.

We tied the canoe to a bush and picked up the body, each of us having the same relationship to it as before. I don’t believe I could have brought myself to take hold of it in any other way.

Lewis had not found a path, but he had come on an opening between trees that went back inland and, he said, upstream. That was good enough; it was as good as anything. We hauled and labored away from the creek between the big water oak trunks and the sweetgums standing there forever, falling down, lurching this way and the other with the corpse, thick and slick with sweat, trying to make good a senselessly complicated pattern of movement between the bushes and trees. After the first few turns I had no idea where we were, and in a curious way I enjoyed being that lost. If you were in something as deep as we were in, it was better to go all the way. When I quit hearing the creek I knew I was lost, wandering foolishly in the woods holding a corpse by the sleeve.

Lewis lifted his hand again, and we let the body down onto the ground. We were by a sump of some kind, a blueblack seepage of rotten water that had either crawled in from some other place or came up from the ground where it was. The earth around it was soft and squelchy, and I kept backing off from it, even though I had been walking in the creek with the others.

Lewis motioned to me. I went up to him and be took the arrow he had killed the man with out of his quiver. I expected it to vibrate, but it didn’t; it was like the others—civilized and expert. I tested it; it was straight. I handed it back, but for some reason didn’t feel like turning loose of it. Lewis made an odd motion with his head, somewhere between disbelief and determination, and we stood holding the arrow. There was no blood on it, but the feathers were still wet from the river where he had washed it off. It looked just like any arrow that had been carried in the rain, or in heavy dew or fog. I let go.

Lewis put it on the string of his bow. He came back to full draw as I had seen him do hundreds of times, in his classic, knowledgeable form so much more functional and accurate than the form of an archer on an urn, and stood, concentrating. There was nothing there but the black water, but be was aiming at a definite part of it: a single drop, maybe, as it moved and would have to stop, sooner or later, for an instant.

It went. The arrow leapt with a breathtaking instant silver and disappeared at almost the same time, while Lewis held his follow-through, standing with the bow as though the arrow were still in it. There was no sense of the arrow’s being stopped by anything under the water—log or rock. It was gone, and could have been traveling down through muck to the soft center of the earth.

We picked up the body and went on. In a while more we came out against the side of a bank that shelved up, covered with ferns and leaves that were mulchy like shit. Lewis turned to us and narrowed one eye. We put the body down. One of its arms was wrenched around backwards, and it seemed odd and more terrible than anything that had happened that such a position didn’t hurt it.

Lewis fell. He started to dig with the collapsible GI shovel we had brought for digging latrines. The ground came up easily, or what was on the ground. There was no earth; it was all leaves and rotten stuff. It had the smell of generations of mold. They might as well let the water in on it, I thought; this stuff is no good to anybody.

Drew and I got down and helped with our hands. Bobby stood looking off into the trees. Drew dug in, losing himself in a practical job, figuring the best way to do it. The sweat stood in the holes of his blocky, pitted face, and his black hair, solid with thickness and hair lotion, shone sideways, hanging over one ear.

It was a dark place, quiet and almost airless. When we were finished with the hole there was not a dry spot any

where on my nylon. We had hollowed out a narrow trench about two feet deep.

We hauled the body over and rolled it in on its side, unbelievably far from us. Lewis reached his hand and Bobby handed him the shotgun. Lewis put the gun in and pulled back his hands to his knees, looking. Then his right hand went back into the grave, and he gave the gun a turn, arranging it in some kind of way.

“OK,” he said.

We shoveled and scrambled the dirt back in, working wildly. I kept throwing the stuff in his face, to get it covered up quick. But it was easy, in double handfuls. He disappeared slowly, into the general sloppiness and uselessness of the woods. When he was gone, Lewis smoothed out the leaf mold over him.

We stood on our knees. We leaned forward, panting, our hands on the fronts of our thighs or on the ground. I had a tremendous driving moment of wanting to dig him up again, of siding with Drew. Now, if not later, we knew where he was. But there was already too much to explain: the dirt, the delay, and the rest of it. Or should we take him and wash him in the river? The thought of doing that convinced me; it was impossible, and I stood up with the others.

“Ferns’ll be growing here in a few days,” Lewis said. It was good to hear a voice, especially his. “Nobody’d ever come on him in a million years. I doubt if we could even find this place again.”

“There’s still time, Lewis,” Drew said. “You better be sure you know what you’re doing.”

“I’m sure,” Lewis said. “The first rain will kill every sign we made. There’s not a dog can follow us here. When we get off this river, we’ll be all right. Believe me.”

We started back. I couldn’t tell anything about our back trail, but Lewis kept stopping and looking at a wrist compass, and it seemed to me that we were going more or less in the right direction; it was the direction I would have followed if I had been by myself.

We came out upstream of where the canoe was. The water was running toward the river, and we went with it, down the secret pebbles of the creek-bed, stooping under the leaves of low branches, mumbling to ourselves. I felt separated from the others, and especially from Lewis. There was no feeling any longer of helping each other; I believed that if I had stepped into a hole and disappeared the others would not have noticed, but would have gone on faster and faster. Each of us wanted to get out of the woods in the quickest way he could. I know I did, and it would have taken a great physical effort for me to turn back and take one step upstream, no matter what trouble one of the others was in.

When we got to the canoe we all got in. Drew and Lewis paddled, and I felt the long surges of Lewis’ strokes move us as I wanted us to move. Drew fended off the low branches, and we went back to the river faster than I thought possible.

The other canoe was where we had left it, softly shaking against the bank.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Bobby said.

“Let me figure a minute,” Lewis said. “This is no time for vanity or hurt feelings. How much work can you do, Bobby?”

“I don’t know, Lewis,” Bobby said. “I’ll try.”

“It’s not your fault,” Lewis said. “But trying is not going to be enough. We’ve got to get the best combinations we can get. I expect I’d better take Bobby with me. Ed, how much have you got left?”

“I don’t know. Some.”

“All right. You and Drew take my boat. Bobby and I will take everything we can in the other one. We’ll try to keep up with you, but it’ll be better if you lead off, so that we can see you if you get into trouble. I hate to tell you, but from what little I know, we haven’t hit the rough part of this river yet.”

“The part that was going to be fun,” Bobby said.

“The part that’s going to knock your stupid brains out if you don’t do exactly what I tell you to do,” Lewis said, without raising his voice. “Come on; let’s get whatever else we can carry out of my canoe. You want out of this, don’t you?”

We took about ten minutes shifting equipment around.

“Take everything, if you can take it, Lewis,” I said. “If Drew and I have to go through these damned rapids first, I want a boat I can at least halfway handle. And I don’t want things wrapping around me in the water.”

“I don’t blame you,” Lew said. “We’ll take all we can.”

“All I want is a weapon,” I said. “I’ll take my bow.”

“I’d think twice about that,” Lewis said. “If you think tents can be bad, you wait’ll those bare broadbeads gore you a few times when you’re in the water with them.”

“I’ll take it anyway,” I said. “And I sure wish we still had that guy’s gun. Why the hell did we leave it with him?”

“The gun is better right where it is,” Lewis said.

“We could have got rid of it later.”

“No, too risky. Every mile we carried that shotgun with us would increase the danger of our being caught with it. That could be the thing, buddy. That could be the thing.”

We were ready. Drew crawled into the front of the aluminum canoe. I was glad he was there; I could work with him. He sat with the paddle just out of the river, shaking his head. Neither of us said anything until I told him to push off.

It was about four o’clock, and the thought of spending another night in the woods paralyzed me. The problems and the physical work of the burial had taken my mind off our situation, but now the thought of it and of what might happen to us surrounded me; I felt driven into it by a hammer. But something came to an edge in me, also. The leaves glittered, all mysterious points, and the river and the light on it were nothing but pure energy. I had never lived sheerly on nerves before, and a gigantic steadiness took me over, a constant trembling of awareness in a hundred places that added up to a kind of equilibrium, that made my arms move in long steady motions and showed me where the rocks were by the differences in the swirling of the water.

We moved well for the better part of an hour. Lewis was keeping up, too, driving the almost-buried canoe forward with an effort I could not even guess at. He liked to take things on himself and, because be could, do more than anyone else. And I was glad to see that in an emergency his self-system didn’t fold up on him, but carried on the same, or even stronger.

But I was also very glad that Drew and I were light and maneuverable. There were no rapids, but the river seemed to be moving faster. There was an odd but definite sensation of going downhill in a long curving slant like a ramp. I noticed this more and more, and finally it occurred to me that the feeling was caused by what the land on both sides was doing. At first it had lifted into higher banks, the left higher than the right, and now it was going up raggedly and steadily, higher and higher, changing the sound of the river to include a kind of keep beating noise, the tone coming out more and more as the walls climbed, shedding their trees and all but a few bushes and turning to stone. Most of the time the sides were not vertical, but were very steep, and I knew we would be in real trouble if we spilled. I prayed that there would be no rapids while we were in the gorge, or that they would be easy ones.

We pulled and pulled at the river. Drew was hunched forward in a studious position like a man at a desk, and at every stroke the old GI shirt he wore took a new hold across his shoulders, one which was the old hold as well.

I looked back. We had opened up a little distance on the other canoe; it was about thirty yards behind us. I thought I heard Lewis holler to us, probably to slow down, but the voice, thinly floating through the boom of wall-sound, had no authority and very little being at all.

The walls were at least 150 feet high on both sides of us now. The cross-reverberation seemed to hold us on course as much as the current did; it was part of the same thing—the way we had to move to get through the gorge.

I looked around again, and Lewis and Bobby had gained a little. They were too close to us for running rapids, but there was nothing I could do about it; as far as I was concerned they were going to have to take their chances.

As we cleared each turn, before Drew swung across in front of me I kept looking for white water, and when I’d checked for that I looked along both banks as far downriver as I could see, to try to tell if either of them was lowering. There was no white water, and the walls stayed like they were, gray and scrubby, limestonish, pitted and scabby.

But the sound was changing, getting deeper and more massively frantic and authoritative. It was the old sound, but it was also new, it was a fuller one even than the reverberations off the walls, with their overtones and undertones; it was like a ground-bass that was made of all the sounds of the river we’d beard since we’d been on it. God, God, I thought, I know what it is. If it’s a falls we’re gone.

The sun fell behind the right side of the gorge, and the shadow of the bank crossed the water so fast that it was like a quick step from one side to the other. The beginning of darkness was thrown over us like a sheet, and in it the water ran even faster, frothing and near-foaming under the canoe. My teeth were chattering; I felt them shaking my skull, as though I had already been in the river and now had to suffer in the stone shade of the bank. We seemed to leap, and then leap from that leap to another down the immense ditch, like flying down an underground stream with the ceiling ripped off.

We couldn’t make it to Aintry by dark; I knew that now. And we couldn’t survive on the river, even as it was here, without being able to see. The last place I wanted to be was on the river in the gorge in the dark. It might be better to pull over while there was still light and find a flat rock or a sandbar to camp on, or get ready to sleep in the canoes.

We came around one more bend, and at the far end of it the river-bed began to step down. There was a succession of small, rough rapids; I couldn’t tell how far they went on. About the only thing I had learned about canoeing was to head into the part of the rapids that seemed to be moving the fastest, where the most white water was. There was not much light left, and I had already made up my mind to get through this stretch of water and pull over to the bank, no matter what Lewis and Bobby decided to do.

The water was throwing us mercilessly. We came out in a short stretch between rapids, but we were going too fast to get out of the middle of the river before the next rocks. I didn’t want to risk getting the canoe broadside to the river and then be sucked into the rocks. That would not only spin us, but would probably wedge the canoe on the rocks, and the force of water against it would keep it there. And we couldn’t make it downriver with four of us in one canoe, as low in the water and hard to turn as it would be. I tried to hold Drew centered on the white water, to line him up and shoot him through the rocks; if I could get him through, I’d be with him.

“Give me some speed, baby,” I hollered.

Drew lifted his paddle and started to dig in long and hard.

Something happened to him. It looked at first—I can see it in my mind in three dimensions and slow motion and stop action—as if something, a puff of wind, but much more definite and concentrated, snatched at some of the hair at the back of his head. For a second I thought he had just shaken his head, or had been jarred by the canoe in some way I hadn’t felt, but at the same instant I saw this happen I felt all control of the canoe go out of it. The river whirled the paddle from Drew’s hand as though it had never been there. His right arm shot straight out, and he followed it, turning the whole canoe with him. There was nothing I could do; I rolled with the rest.

In a reflex, just before my head smashed face-first into the white water with the whole river turning around in midair and beginning to swing upside down, I let go the paddle and grabbed for the bow at my feet, for even in panic I knew I would rather have a weapon than the paddle, as dangerous as it would be to have the naked broadheads near me in such water.

The river took me in, and I had the bow. My life jacket brought me up, and Lewis’ canoe was on top of me like a whale, rising up on the current. It hit me in the shoulder, driving me down where the rocks swirled like marbles, and something, probably a paddle, thrust into the side of my head as Lewis or Bobby fended me off like a rock. I kicked at the rushing stones and rose up. Downstream, the green canoe drove over the broadside other one, reared nearly straight up, and Bobby and Lewis pitched out on opposite sides. A rock hit me and I felt some necessary thing—a muscle or bone—go in my leg. I kicked back with both feet and caught something solid. I must have been upside down, for there was no air. I opened my eyes but there was nothing to see. I threw my head, hoping I would be throwing it clear of the water, but it did not clear. I was not breathing and was being beaten from all sides, being hit and hit at and brushed by in the most unlikely and unexpected places in my body, rushing forward to be kicked and stomped by everything in the river.

I turned over and over. I rolled, I tried to crawl along the flying bottom. Nothing worked. I was dead. I felt myself fading out into the unbelievable violence and brutality of the river, joining it. This is not such a bad way to go, I thought; maybe I’m already there.

My head came out of the water, and I actually thought of putting it under again. But I got a glimpse of the two canoes, and that interested me enough to keep me alive. They were together, the green one buckled, rolling over and over each other like logs. Something was nailing one of my hands, the left one, to the water. The wooden canoe burst open on a rock and disappeared, and the aluminum one leapt free and Went on.

Get your feet forward of you, boy, I said, with my mouth dragging through the current. Get on your back.

I tried, but every time I came up with my feet I hit a rock either with my shins or thighs. I went under again, and faintly I heard what must have been the aluminum canoe banging on the stones, a ringing, distant, beautiful sound.

I got on my back and poured with the river, sliding over the stones like a creature I had always contained but never released. With my life preserver the upper part of my body drew almost no water. If I could get my feet—my beels—over the stones I slid over like a moccasin, feeling the moss flutter lightly against the back of my neck before I cascaded down into the next rapids.

Body-surfing and skidding along, I realized that we could never have got through this stretch in canoes. There were too many rocks, they were too haphazardly jumbled, and the water was too fast; faster and faster. We couldn’t have portaged, either, because of the banks, and we couldn’t have got out and walked the canoes through. We would have spilled one way or the other, and strangely I was just as glad. Everything told me that the way I was doing it was the only way, and I was doing it.

It was terrifyingly enjoyable, except that I hurt in so many places. The river would shoot me along; I’d see a big boulder looming up, raise my feet and slick over, crash down on my ass in a foaming pool, pick up speed and go on. I got banged on the back of the head a couple of times until I learned to bend forward as I was coming down off the rock, but after that nothing new hurt me.

I was already hurt, I knew. But I was not sure where. My left hand hurt pretty bad, and I was more worried about it than anywhere else, for I couldn’t remember having hit it with anything. I held it up and saw that I had hold of the bow by the broadheads and was getting cut in the palm every time I flinched and grabbed. The bow was also clamped under my left arm, and now I took it out and swung the beads away from me, just before I went over another rock. As I slid down I saw calm water below, through another stretch of rapids: broad calm, then more white water farther down, far off into evening. I relaxed again, not even touching the stones of the passage this time, but riding easily along through the flurrying cold ripples into the calm water, cradling the bow.

I was floating, not flowing anymore. Turning idly in the immense dark bed, I looked up at the gorge side rising and rising. My legs were killing me, but I could kick them both, and as far as I could tell neither was broken. I lifted my hand from the water; it was nicked and chopped a little in places, but not as badly as it might have been; there was a diagonal cut across the palm, but not a deep one—a long slice.

I floated on, trying to recover enough to think what to do. Finally I started to struggle weakly around to look upstream for the others. My body was heavy and hard to move without the tremendous authority of the rapids to help it and tell it what to do.

Either upstream or down, there was nobody in the river but me. I kept watching the last of the falls, for I had an idea that I might have passed the others, somewhere along. There had probably been several places where the water split and came down through the rocks in different ways; all three of them might be back there somewhere, dead or alive.

As I thought that, Bobby tumbled out of the rapids, rolling over and over on the slick rocks, and then flopped bellydown into the calm. I pointed to the bank and he began feebly to work toward it. So did I.

“Where is Lewis?” I yelled.

He shook his head, and I stopped pulling on the water and turned to wait in midstream.

After a minute or two Lewis came, doubled-up and broken-looking, one hand still holding his paddle and the other on his face, clasping something intolerable. I breaststroked to him and lay beside him in the cold coiling water under the falls. He was writhing and twisting uselessly, caught by something that didn’t have hold of me, something that seemed not present.

“Lewis,” I said.

“My leg’s broke,” he gasped. “It feels like it broke off.”

The water where we were did not change. “Hold on to me,” I said.

He moved his free hand through the river and fixed the fingers into the collar of my slick nylon outfit, and I moved gradually crossways on the water toward the big boulders under the cliff. The dark came on us faster and faster as I hauled on the crossgrain of the current with Lewis’ choking weight dragging at my throat.

From where we were the cliff looked something like a gigantic drive-in movie screen waiting for an epic film to begin. I listened for interim music, glancing now and again up the pale curved stone for Victor Mature’s stupendous image, wondering where it would appear, or if the whole thing were not now already playing, and I hadn’t yet managed to put it together.

As we neared the wall, I saw that there were a few random rocks and a tiny sand beach where we were going to come out; where Bobby was, another rock. I motioned to him, and he unfolded and came to the edge of the water, his hands embarrassing.

He gave me one of them, and I dragged us out. Lewis hopped up onto a huge placid stone, working hard, and then failed and crumpled again. The rock, still warm with the last of the sun that had crossed the river on its way down, held him easily, and I turned him on his back with his hand still over his face.

“Drew was shot,” Lewis said with no lips. I saw it. “He’s dead.”

“I’m not sure,” I said, but I was afraid that’s what it was.

“Something happened to him. But I don’t know. I don’t know.”

“Let’s take his pants down,” I said to Bobby.

He looked at me.

“Goddamn phraseology,” I said. “We’re in another bag, now, baby. Get his pants off him and see if you can tell how bad he’s hurt. I’ve got to try to get that goddamned canoe, or we’ll stay here.”

I turned back to the river. I waded in, feeling the possibility of a rifle shot die with the very last light, moving back into the current like an out-of-shape animal, taking on the familiar weight and lack-of-weight of water. Very clearheaded, I sank down.

The depth came into me, increasing—no one can tell me different—with the darkness. The aluminum canoe floated palely, bulging half out of the total dark, making slowly for the next rapids, but idly, and unnaturally slowed and stogged with calm water. Nearly there, I ran into a thing of wood that turned out to be a broken paddle. I took it on.

I swam slow-motion around the canoe, listening for the rifle shot I would never hear if it killed me; that I had not heard when it killed Drew, if it did. Nothing from that high up could see me, and I knew it, though it might see the canoe. Even that was doubtful, though, and the conviction enlarged on me that I could circle the canoe all night, if I chose, in the open.

The calm was deep; there was no place to stand to dump the water out. I hung to the upside-down gunwale, tipping it this way and that, trying to slip the river out of the factory metal. Finally it rolled luckily, and the stream that had been in it began to flow again; the hull lightened and climbed out of the water, and was mostly on top of it. I pushed on the sharp stern, keeping it going with excruciating frog legs. The current went around me, heading into the darkness downstream. I could see a little white foaming, but it was peacefully beyond, another problem for another time. I turned to the cliff and called softly out to Bobby, and he answered.

I looked up and could barely make out his face. The canoe went in to him, guided by the same kind of shove I gave Dean when he was first learning to walk. He waded and drew it up onto the sand by the bow rope, and we beached it under the overhang.

I moved onto land, not saying anything.

“For God’s sake,” Bobby said, “don’t be so damned quiet. I’m flipping already.”

Though my mouth was open, I closed it against the blackness and moved to Lewis, who was now down off the rock and lying in the sand. His bare legs were luminous, and the right leg of his drawers was lifted up to the groin. I could tell by its outline that his thigh was broken; I reached down and felt of it very softly. Against the back of my band his penis stirred with pain. His hair gritted in sand, turning from one side to the other.

It was not a compound fracture; I couldn’t feel any of the bone splinters I had been taught to look for in innumerable compulsory first-aid courses, but there was a great profound human swelling under my hand. It felt like a thing that was trying to open, to split, to let something out.

“Hold on, Lew,” I said. “We’re all right now.”

It was all-dark. The river-sound enveloped us as it never could have in light. I sat down beside Lewis and motioned to Bobby. He crouched down as well.

“Where is Drew?” Bobby asked.

“Lewis says be’s dead,” I said. “Probably be is. He may have been shot. But I can’t really say. I was looking right at him, but I can’t say.”

Lewis’ hand was pulling at me from underneath. I bent down near his face. He tried to say something, but couldn’t. Then he said, “It’s you. It’s got to be you.”

“Sure it’s me,” I said. “I’m right here. Nothing can touch us.”

“No. That’s not …” The river had the rest of what he said, but Bobby picked it up.

“What are we going to do?” he made the dark say; night had taken his red face.

“I think,” I said, “that we’ll never get out of this gorge alive.”

Did I say that? I thought. Yes, a dream-man said, you did. You did say it, and you believe it.

“I think he means to pick the rest of us off tomorrow,” I said out loud, still stranger than anything I had ever imagined. When do the movies start, Lord?

“What …?”

“That’s what I’d do. Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t …”

“If Lewis is right, and I think he is, that toothless bastard drew down on us while we were lining up to go through the rapids, and before we were going too fast. He killed the first man in the first boat. Next would have been me. Then you.”

“In other words, it’s lucky we spilled.”

“Right. Lucky. Very lucky.”

It was an odd word to use, where we were. It was a good thing that we couldn’t see faces. Mine felt calm and narroweyed, but it might not have been. There was something to act out.

“What are we going to do?” Bobby said again.

“The question is, what is he going to do?”

Nothing came back. I went on.

“What can he lose now? He’s got exactly the same thing going for him that we had going for us when we buried his buddy back in the woods. There won’t be any witnesses. There’s no motive to trace him by. As far as anybody else knows, he’s never seen us and we’ve never seen him. If all four of us wind up in the river, that’ll just even things out. Who in the hell cares? What kind of search party could get up into these rapids? A helicopter’s not going to do any good, even if you could see into the river from one, which you can’t. You think anybody’s going to fly a helicopter down into this gorge, just on the chance that he might see something? Not a chance in the world. There might be an investigation, but you can bet nothing will come of it. This is a wild goddamned river, as you might know. What is going to happen to us, if he kills us, is that we are going to become a legend. You bet, baby: one of those unsolved things.”

“You think he’s up there? Do you really?”

“I’m thinking we better believe he’s up there.”

“But then what?”

“We’re caught in this gorge. He can’t come down here, but the only way out of this place for us is down the river. We can’t run out of here at night, and when we move in the morning he’ll be up there somewhere.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty.”

“Yes,” I said. “You might say that. As Lewis might say, ‘Come on, Jesus boy, walk on down to us over that white water. But if you don’t, we’ve got to do whatever there is to do.’“

“But listen, Ed,” he said, and the pathetic human tone against the river-sound made me cringe, “you got to be sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“Sure you’re right. What if you’re wrong? I mean, we may not really be in any danger, at all, from anybody up … up there.” He gestured, but it was lost.

“You want to take a chance?”

“Well, no. Not if I don’t have to. But what …?”

“What what?”

“What can we do?”

“We can do three things,” I said, and some other person began to tell me what they were. “We can just sit here and sweat and call for our mamas. We can appeal to the elements. Maybe we can put Lewis back up on the rock and do a rain dance around him, to cut down the visibility. But if we got rain, we couldn’t get out through it, and Lewis would probably die of exposure. Look up yonder.”

I liked hearing the sound of my voice in the mountain speech, especially in the dark; it sounded like somebody who knew where he was and knew what he was doing. I thought of Drew and the albino boy picking and singing in the filling station.

There was a pause while we looked up between the wings of cliff and saw that the stars were beginning there, and no clouds at all.

“And then what?” Bobby said.

“Or somebody can try to go up there and wait for him on top.”

“What you mean is …”

“What I mean is like they say in the movies, especially on Saturday afternoon. It’s either him or us. We’ve killed a man. So has he. Whoever gets out depends on who kills who. It’s just that simple.”

“Well,” he said, “all right. I don’t want to die.”

“If you don’t, help me figure. We’ve got to figure like he’s figuring, up there. Everything depends on that.”

“I don’t have any idea what he’s figuring.”

“We can start out with the assumption that he’s going to kill us.”

“I got that far.”

“The next thing is when. He can’t do anything until it gets light. So that means we’ve got till morning to do whatever we’re going to do.”

“I still don’t know what that is.”

“Just let me go on a minute. My feeling is this. You can’t hear a gunshot that far off, with all this goddamned noise down here. After he shot Drew, he might have shot at us some more, and we’d never have known it unless another one of us was hit. I don’t have any idea how well he can see from where he is. But I think it’s reasonable to suppose that he saw well enough to know that he hit Drew, and that the canoes turned over. He might believe that the rest of us drowned, but I don’t believe he’d want to take a chance that we did. That’s awful rough water, but the fact that you and Lewis and I got out of it proves that it can be done, and I’m thinking he probably knows it. Again, maybe the reason he didn’t nail the rest of us was that by the time we got down here where we are now, we’d been carried a good ways past him, and also it was too dark. That’s our good luck; it means we’ve got at least a couple of advantages, if we can figure how to work them.”

“Advantages? Some advantages. We’ve got a hurt man. We’ve got a waterlogged canoe with the bottom stove in. We’ve got two guys who don’t know the first thing about the woods, who don’t even know where in the hell they are. He’s got a rifle, and he’s up above us. He knows where we are and can’t help being, and we don’t have the slightest notion of where he is, or even who he is. We haven’t got a goddamned chance, if you and Lewis are right. If he’s up there and wants to kill us, he can kill us.”

“Well now, it hasn’t happened yet. And we’ve got one big card.”

“What?”

“He thinks we can’t get at him. And if we can, we can kill him.”

“How?”

“With either a knife or a bow. Or with bare hands, if we have to.”

“We?”

“No. One of us.”

“I can’t even shoot a bow,” he said. He was saved for a little while.

“That narrows it down, sure enough,” I said. “You see what I mean about solving our problems? If you just do a little figuring.”

It was a decision, and I could feel it set us apart. Even in the dark the separation was obvious.

“Ed, level with me. Do you really think you can get up there in the dark?”

“To tell the truth, I don’t. But we haven’t got any other choice.”

“I still think that maybe he’s just gone away. Suppose he has?”

“Suppose he hasn’t?” I said. “Do you want to take the chance? Look, if I fall off this fucking cliff, it’s not going to hurt you any. If I get shot, it’s not going to be you getting shot. You’ve got two chances to live. If he’s gone away, or if for some reason or other he doesn’t shoot, or if he misses enough times for the canoe to get away downriver, you’ll live. Or if I get up there and kill him, you’ll live. So don’t worry about it. Let me worry.”

“Ed …”

“Shut up and let me think some more.”

I looked up at the gorge side but I couldn’t tell much about it, except that it was awfully high. But the lower part of it, at least, wasn’t quite as steep as I had thought at first. Rather than being absolutely vertical, it was more of a very steep slant, and I believed I could get up it at least part of the way, when the moon came up enough for me to see a little better.

“Come here, Bobby. And listen to everything I tell you. I’m going to make you go back over it before I leave, because the whole thing has got to be done right, and done right the first time. Here’s what I want you to do.”

“All right. I’m listening.”

“Keep Lewis as warm and comfortable as you can. When it gets first light—and I mean just barely light: light enough for you to see where you’re going—get Lewis into the canoe and move out. The whole business is going to have to be decided right there.”

I was the one. I walked up and down a little on the sandbar, for that should have been my privilege. Then for some reason I stepped into the edge of the river. In a way, I guess, I wanted to get a renewed feel of all the elements present, and also to look as far up the cliff as I could. I stood with the cold water flowing around my calves and my head back, watching the cliff slant up into the darkness. More stars had come out around the top of the gorge, a kind of river of them. I strung the bow.

I ran my right hand over the limbs, feeling for broken pieces and splinters of fiber glass. Part of the upper limb seemed a little rougher than it should have, but it had been that way before. I took out the arrows I had left. I had started with four but had wasted two on the deer. One of the remaining ones was fairly straight; I spun it through my fingers as Lewis had taught me to do, feeling for the passing tick and jump a crooked aluminum arrow has when it spins. It may have been a little bent up in the crest, just under the feathers, but it was shootable, and at short range it ought to be accurate. The other arrow was badly bent, and I straightened it as well as I could with my hands, but there was not much I could do in the dark. Holding it at eye level and pointing it toward the best of the light places in the sky, I could not see even well enough to tell exactly where and how badly it was bent. But the broadhead was all right.

I walked back to Bobby and leant the bow against the spur of stone that overhung the canoe. Bobby stepped over to me as I paid out and recoiled the thin rope that had been at my waist the whole time. I had made a lucky buy—considering that a cliff I had not counted on being involved was involved, and a rope was a good thing to have in such a situation—and I had a brief moment of believing that the luck would run through the other things that were coming. I ran the rope over and over my left thumb and elbow until I had a tight ring. I tied the ends and passed the belt that held the big knife through the coil.

“Don’t go to sleep,” I said to Bobby.

“Not likely,” he said. “O God.”

“Now listen. If you go at first light, you’ll make a damned hard target from the top of the gorge. You should be safe as long as you’re running these little rapids along here. If I’m going to get on top of the cliff, I’ll be there by then, and the odds will be evened out a little, if our man the Human Fly really does find a way to climb up there. I’ll do everything I can to see that he doesn’t crack down on you. From the little I was able to tell about the cliff before it got dark, it’s rough as hell up there, and if he misses you at one place—or if you can slip by him without his seeing you—he won’t be able to keep up with you; all you have to do is get by him and get around one turn and you’re home free.”

“Ed, will you tell me one thing? Have you ever thought there might be more than one?”

“Yes, I’ve thought of it. I must say I have.”

“What if there is?”

“Then we’re likely to die, early tomorrow morning.”

“I believe you.”

“I don’t believe, though, that there’s more than one man. I’ll tell you why. It’s not a good idea to involve somebody else in a murder if you don’t have to. That’s one thing. The other is that I don’t think there’s been time for him to go and get anybody else. He’s got all the advantages; he doesn’t need anybody to help him.”

“I sure hope you’re right.”

“We’ll have to figure I am. Anything else?”

“Yes, I’ve got to say it. I don’t think we’re going about this the right way. We may have the whole thing wrong.”

“I’m staking my life on being right. Lewis would do it. Now I’m going to have to. Let me get going.”

“Listen,” Bobby said, grabbing at me weakly, “I can’t do it. I won’t make a sitting duck out of myself so you can go off in the woods and leave us to be shot down. I can’t. I just can’t.”

“Listen, you son of a bitch. If you want to go up that cliff, you go right ahead. There it is; it’s not going away. But if I go up it we’re going to play this my way. And I swear to God that if you don’t do exactly what I say I’ll kill you myself. It’s just that goddamned simple. And if you leave Lewis on this rock I’ll do the same thing.”

“Ed, I’m not going to leave him. You know I wouldn’t do that. It’s just that I don’t want to go out there in plain sight of some murderous hillbilly and set myself up to be killed like Drew.”

“If everything works right—and if you do what I tell you to do—you won’t get killed. just listen to me. I’m going through this one more time, and it’s got to stick. I’m going to tell you what to do no matter what should happen.”

“All right,” he said at last.

“Number one, move out as soon as you can see the river well enough to get through the next set of rapids. It’ll probably still be too dark to shoot from the top. Even if it isn’t he doesn’t stand much chance of hitting you when you’re in the rapids. Whenever you’re in calm water, pull like hell for a while, then slack off; don’t hit a constant speed. If he does shoot at you, try your goddamndest to get to the next set of rapids, or around the next turn. If you see you can’t possibly get away—that is, if you see he’s got you bracketed, and the shots are coming closer and closer—dump the canoe and let it go. Try to get Lewis out, then stay with him and wait for a day, and I’ll try to bring back help. If nothing happens by that time, you’ll know I didn’t make it. Then leave Lewis and try to get downriver the best way you can, even if you have to swim part of the way. Take all three life jackets and float yourself down. We can’t be more than fifteen miles from a highway bridge. If you have to do that, though, for God’s sake remember where you left Lewis. If you don’t remember, he’s going to die. And that’s for sure.”

He looked at me, and for the first time since the sun had gone down I could see his eyes; they had some points of light in them.

“That’s about it, then,” I said. I picked up the bow and went over to the canoe near where Lewis was lying, tirelessly grinding the back of his head into the sand. I crouched down beside him; he was shaking in a certain matter-of-fact way, with the false cold of pain, and some of it came into me as he reached up and touched me on the front of the shoulder.

“Do you know what the fuck you’re doing?”

“No, creature,” I said. “I’m going to try to make it up as I go along.”

“Don’t let him see you,” he said. “And don’t have any mercy. Not any.”

“I won’t if I can help it.”

“Help it.”

I held my breath.

“Kill him,” Lewis said with the river.

“I’ll kill him if I can find him,” I said.

“Well,” he said, lying back, “here we are, at the heart of the Lewis Medlock country.”

“Pure survival,” I said.

“This is what it comes to,” he said. “I told you.”

“Yes. You told me.”

Everything around me changed. I put my left arm between the bowstring and the bow and slid the bow back over my shoulder with the broadbeads turned down. Then I walked to the gorge side and put a hand on it, the same hand that had been cut by the arrow in the river, as though I might be able to feel what the whole cliff was like, the whole problem, and hold it in my palm. The rock was rough, and a part of it fell away under my hand. The river sound loudened as though the rocks in the channel had shifted their positions.

Then it relaxed and the extra sound died or went away again into the middle distance, the middle of the stream.

I knew that was the sign, and I backed off and ran with a hard scramble at the bank, and stretched up far enough to get an elbow over the top side of the first low overhang. Scraping my sides and legs, I got up on it and stood up. Bobby and Lewis were directly beneath me, under a roof of stone, and might as well not have been there. I was standing in the most entire aloneness that I had ever been given.

My heart expanded with joy at the thought of where I was and what I was doing. There was a new light on the water; the moon was going up and up, and I stood watching the stream with my back to the rock for a few minutes, not thinking of anything, with a deep feeling of nakedness and helplessness and intimacy.

I turned around with many small foot movements and leaned close to the cliff, taking on its slant exactly. I put my cheek against it and raised both hands up into the darkness, letting the fingers crawl independently over the soft rock. It was this softness that bothered me more than anything else; I was afraid that anything I would stand on or hold to would give way. I got my right hand placed in what felt like a crack, and began to feel with my left toes for something, anything. There was an unevenness—a bulge—in the rock and I kicked at it and worried it to see how solid it was, then put my foot on it and pulled hard with my right arm.

I rose slowly off the top of the overhang, the bow dropping back further over my left shoulder—which made it necessary to depend more on my right arm than my left—got my right knee and then my foot into some kind of hole. I settled as well as I could into my new position and began to feel upward again. There was a bulge to the left, and I worked toward it, full of wonder at the whole situation.

The cliff was not as steep as I had thought, though from what I had been able to tell earlier, before we spilled, it would probably get steeper toward the top. If I had turned loose it would have been a slide rather than a fall back down to the river or the overhang, and this reassured me a little—though not much—as I watched it happen in my mind.

I got to the bulge and then went up over it and planted my left foot solidly on it and found a good hold on what felt like a root with my right hand. I looked down.

The top of the overhang was pale now, ten or twelve feet below. I turned and forgot about it, pulling upward, kneeing and toeing into the cliff, kicking steps into the shaly rock wherever I could, trying to position both hands and one foot before moving to a new position. Some of the time I could do this, and each time my confidence increased. Often I could only get one bandhold and a foothold, or two handholds. Once I could only get one handhold, but it was a strong one, and I scrambled and shifted around it until I could get a toe into the rock and pull up.

The problem-interest of it absorbed me at first, but I began to notice that the solutions were getting harder and harder: the cliff was starting to shudder in my face and against my chest. I became aware of the sound of my breath, whistling and humming crazily into the stone: the cliff was steepening, and I was laboring backbreakingly for every inch. My arms were tiring and my calves were not so much trembling as jumping. I knew now that not looking down or back—the famous advice to people climbing things—was going to enter into it. Panic was getting near me. Not as near as it might have been, but near. I concentrated everything I had to become ultrasensitive to the cliff, feeling it more gently than before, though I was shaking badly. I kept inching up. With each shift to a newer and higher position I felt more and more tenderness toward the wall.

Despite everything, I looked down. The river had spread flat and filled with moonlight. It took up the whole of space under me, bearing in the center of itself a long coiling image of light, a chill, bending flame. I must have been seventy-five or a hundred feet above it, hanging poised over some kind of inescapable glory, a bright pit.

I turned back into the cliff and leaned my mouth against it, feeling all the way out through my nerves and muscles exactly how I had possession of the wall at four random points in a way that held the whole thing together.

It was about this time that I thought of going back down, working along the bank and looking for an easier way up, and I let one foot down behind me into the void. There was nothing. I stood with the foot groping for a hold in the air, then pulled it back to the place on the cliff where it had been. It burrowed in like an animal, and I started up again.

I caught something—part of the rock—with my left hand and started to pull. I could not rise. I let go with my right hand and grabbed the wrist of the left, my left-hand fingers shuddering and popping with weight. I got one toe into the cliff, but that was all I could do. I looked up and held on. The wall was giving me nothing. It no longer sent back any pressure against me. Something I had come to rely on had been taken away, and that was it. I was hanging, but just barely. I concentrated all my strength into the fingers of my left hand, but they were leaving me. I was on the perpendicular part of the cliff, and unless I could get over it soon I would just peel off the wall. I had what I thought of as a plan if this should happen; this was to kick out as strongly as I could from the cliff face and try to get clear of the overhang and out into the river, into the bright coiling of the pit. But even if I cleared the rocks, the river was probably shallow near the bank where I would land, and it would be about as bad as if I were to hit the rocks. And I would have to get rid of the bow.

I held on. By a lot of small tentative maneuvers I swapped hands in the crevice and touched upward with my left hand, weighted down by the bow hanging over my shoulder, along the wall, remembering scenes in movies where a close-up of a hand reaches desperately for something, through a prison grate for a key, or from quicksand toward someone or something on solid ground. There was nothing there. I swapped hands again and tried the wall to my right. There was nothing. I tried the loose foot, hoping that if I could get a good enough foothold, I could get up enough to explore a little more of the wall with my hands, but I couldn’t find anything there either, though I searched as far as I could with the toe and the knee, up and down and back and forth. The back of my left leg was shaking badly. My mind began to speed up, in the useless energy of panic. The urine in my bladder turned solid and painful, and then ran with a delicious sexual voiding like a wet dream, something you can’t help or be blamed for. There was nothing to do but fall. The last hope I had was that I might awaken.

I was going, but anger held me up a little longer. I would have done something desperate if I had had a little more mobility, but I was practically nailed in one position; there was nothing desperate I could do. Yet I knew that if I were going to try something, I had better do it now.

I hunched down into what little power was left in my left leg muscles and drove as hard as it was possible for me to do; harder than it was possible. With no holds on the cliff, I fought with the wall for anything I could make it give me. For a second I tore at it with both hands. In a flash inside a flash I told myself not to double up my fists but to keep my hands open. I was up against a surface as smooth as monument stone, and I still believe that for a space of time I was held in the air by pure will, fighting an immense rock.

Then it seemed to spring a crack under one finger of my right hand; I thought surely I had split the stone myself. I thrust in other fingers and hung and, as I did, I got the other hand over, feeling for a continuation of the crack; it was there. I had both bands in the cliff to the palms, and strength from the stone flowed into me. I pulled up as though chinning on a sill and swung a leg in. I got the middle section of my body into the crevice as well, which was the hardest part to provide for, as it had been everywhere else. I wedged into the crack like a lizard, not able to get far enough in. As I flattened out on the floor of the crevice, with all my laborious verticality gone, the bow slid down my arm and I hooked upward just in time to stop it with my wrist. I pulled it into the cliff with me, the broadheads at my throat.