She hears it back up and change gears and come forward into the lane. She hears it stop somewhere just beyond the barn.
Bastards.
The sudden silence. Terrifying. She holds her hand near the baby’s mouth, ready to clamp down if she must.
Does she hear voices or is it just her overstimulated imaginings?
That sagging corner of the barn-
If they come around there they’ll be able to see her.
Come on, fool. Get out of here.
She pokes a toe back behind her and all of a sudden the wet earth gives way and she’s sliding helplessly …
Oh!
Slithering. Out of control on this slick muck.
What-?
Don’t panic it can’t be far.…
Instinct brings the baby protectively against her chest, arms shielding Ellen from the twigs and stones. But it’s a quick soft slide: a few feet of mud and her scrambling feet find purchase against polished stones.
She looks over her shoulder. The stream has parted around her boots. She’s got her feet in the water. It’s only six inches deep.
She hears, very loud, the snapping scrape of wood on earth and she knows instantly what it is: they’re opening the barn door.
It’ll take them five seconds to absorb what they’re looking at-the Jeep in the barn-and a few more seconds to realize she’s on foot and then they’ll start looking for her footprints and in this God-forsaken mud it won’t take them any time at all.…
She takes three paces upstream, turning rocks over with her boot toes, making a plainly visible swath. Then she turns, crouching, and moves downstream on careful feet, dislodging nothing, clutching the baby, murmuring in Ellen’s ear: “Old Injun trick, kid, you betchum.” Not for nothing did she sit through those awful Westerns with Daddy in the PX theaters.
She giggles.…
Hey. Calm down, Little Beaver, this ain’t no time to go all hysterical on me.
She ducks under a fallen trunk that lies jammed across the gully; she eels past the clutching arms of a bushy thicket, letting it slide back into place behind her.
Careful you don’t turn an ankle on these stones.
The stream bends around the exposed roots of a big maple. She picks her way over them, staying in the water, moving downstream as fast as she can, stopping at intervals to turn her head sideways so as to catch the breeze from behind her on the flat of her eardrum.
It’s been a while now since she’s heard their voices. Have they lost the track? Or are they right behind her, creeping up?
Don’t speculate. Don’t think at all. Just move. Keep going …
Ten minutes? Half an hour? There’s no way to measure time. Her ankles are weakening; were it not for the support of the boots she’d have caved in by now. Can’t walk on these Goddamn stones any longer. This is just going to have to be far enough.
She climbs out of the stream and leans against the bole of a tall tree, propped on one shoulder, looking back the way she just came.
“Do you think it fooled them, little girl? Think we’ve got a chance?”
Who knows. All we can do is play it out.
She finds a place deep in the woods-a fallen log to sit on. Changing the baby’s diaper, feeding her unwarmed milk, she listens to the forest.
“Just stick with your momma, kid,” she says drily, “and we’ll see what other nifty kinds of trouble we can get you into. If you want a dull peaceful life you picked the wrong momma.”