He looked worse than tired, and for once he did not protest. He simply crawled deeper into the lean-to and curled into a ball. Eve opened the bundle of clothing they had found wrapped securely in the tarp and found a coat of pa’s. With this she covered Sam, then spread an edge of the tarp it had been wrapped in over him, too. They all would have to share that tarp. The wind picked up, whispering in the leaves. Zeke turned and crawled in beside Sam, and she sat alone with Lilith.
“You think they’re gone, don’t you?” Lilith asked.
“Yes.”
“I do, too. Even if they were carried downstream pa would have found us by now from the fire’s light.”
“Lilith … what are you going to do?”
The younger girl huddled under the blanket that had been wrapped in the tarp, drawing it around her shoulders. “I don’t know. All I can do is play that old accordion and sing a little, but I like people. I want to be where there are people … where things are happening. And I want nice things, pretty things.” Eve listened to the river. How many men, through how many ages, had sat by night listening to the sound of running water? How many had sat beside this very river? She remembered some man telling pa about the strange mounds in the Ohio country, huge artificial hills made for what purpose nobody knew, by a people far and away stranger than any she could imagine. Those very people might have sat here beside this river—the Mound Builders might have sat here, or Indians, or explorers … no telling who.
She lifted her eyes to the trees. They were huge old trees, and it would be a task to clear land here. Then she recalled a glimpse of a meadow she had seen that lay behind them … only a glimpse, but a big meadow green with tall grass. Maybe no land would have to be cleared.
It was a thing to consider.
Miles away, Linus rose with the dawn and went to work on the canoe. It had taken more time than he had believed, for he had found another crack, at first unnoticed, and had gone back to the woods for another section of bark. By the time he found the exact piece of bark that satisfied him he had also forced himself to admit that he was stalling.
There was nothing about the island that pleased him, yet he was reluctant to leave. Once he started upriver, every dip of the paddle would take him away from Eve.
He wanted to see Pittsburgh, and then he wanted to go on east to New York or somewhere and see that ocean water he’d heard tell of. Must be a sight of water out there, it being bigger than Salt Lake, and some folks said it was wider than the Great Plains. He kept thinking of Pittsburgh and of that ocean sea, but in the background of all his thinking there was Eve. Straightening up from pitching the seams of the canoe, he saw a dugout approaching, paddled by two men making slow work of it. “Howdy!” The man in the bow wore a faded red woolen shirt, and had a wide, friendly grin. “You goin’ upriver or down?”
“Pittsburgh, when I get this canoe fixed.”
They rested their paddles in the backwater near the landing, and the man in the red shirt offered a chew from a twist of black tobacco. Linus thanked him and refused.
“Met some folks name of Harvey down below the falls. Terrible accident down there, they say. Friends of theirs.”
Something within Linus seemed to stop dead-still. He lifted his eyes. “Accident, you say?”
“Some folks travelin’ with the Harveys took the wrong branch of the river in the storm, an’ they went over the falls.”
“You hear the name?”
“Prescott … an’ good folks, Harvey said.” They looked at him curiously.
“Harvey said he lost a boy in a fight with river pirates hereabouts.” Linus indicated the island behind him with a jerk of his head. “He’s buried right back there. How about the Prescotts? Was anybody saved?” “Harvey didn’t know. He was twenty mile downstream and hadn’t seen any of them, so he figured they all were lost, the whole shootin’ match.” The man in the stern of the canoe spoke up. “We’d better high-tail it.” He grinned at Linus. “Way I feel, you better hurry or there won’t be any whiskey left. I aim to drink it all.”
Linus returned to his work, and finished in a matter of minutes. He lifted the canoe and shoved it into the water, then stood watching for the telltale seep of water, but there was none. While he stood there his mind was a blank … he thought of nothing, simply staring into the bottom of the canoe. Finally, he began to load his furs, taking his time and thinking as he worked, and by the time the canoe was loaded he decided he did not wish to live in a world where there was no Eve.
Within him there was a vast emptiness, an emptiness of feeling, of resolution, of everything. The girls and the whiskey of Pittsburgh no longer drew him; even the sight of the ocean seemed somehow unnecessary and pointless. She was gone … Eve was gone.
Until that moment he had not realized how much she meant to him. For years he had lived with no care but for himself. He had been free … but he had been lonely too.
Eve had come quietly into his life with her own kind of loneliness, and fearing that loneliness more than what might happen to her pride, she had come to him. Quietly and honestly she had tried to win him.
There had been no skill in her, no feminine artifice. She was frank, open, sincere … and terribly in need … as he was in need. Bitterly, he considered the years so recently past, and knew that much of his restlessness had been inspired by his own loneliness, his need for somebody, for something to care about. At first his wandering had the love of the strange, wild lands—that free, open country with its magnificent mountains, its rivers flowing from God knew where, its towering beauty … but after a while the strange lands had not been enough. He knew that now, when Eve was gone. Yet … suppose she still lived? Suppose even now she lay back there, somewhere on the banks of the river, alone and hurt?
He had lived too long in the wilderness not to know that the human body can survive all manner of hardship and torture. Every mountain man knew the terrible story of Hugh Glass, ripped and torn by a grizzly, left for dead by his traveling companions; yet he had crawled more than a hundred miles and walked more hundreds, fighting wolves for the carcass of a buffalo, and coming safely to civilization.
Every mountain man also knew the story of John Coulter, who was forced by Blackfeet to run the gauntlet, and how he broke through the line and, stark naked, raced off, pursued by the Blackfeet. He had killed his closest pursuer with his own spear and escaped, fleeing until his bare feet were mere ugly masses of blood and flesh … yet he had escaped, and he had survived. At least two men Linus had known had survived scalping … there were many such tales. He loaded the last bundle of furs and covered them with the buffalo hide and lashed it down. He was no longer thinking, he was acting swiftly, for he had to know. If she was dead, he must be sure. If she was lying back there injured and alone, he must go to her aid.
He shoved off, downstream. The falls were not bad for a man in a canoe who had run the rough water on the Yellowstone and the Snake. For a larger boat or a raft they were deceptively dangerous. He dipped his paddle deep and shot the canoe into the teeth of the rapids. She might be, she had to be alive. He glimpsed them standing on the riverbank before they saw him. He saw them, but could not quite make them out, for the canoe was shooting the chutes of the falls … then the falls themselves, and he dipped the paddle deep and shot the canoe off into space. It hit the water with a smack … a dip of the paddle, then another, and he was out of the churning pool. “It’s Linus,” Eve said, and walked to meet him. He drew the canoe up on the shore and turned to face them, and their faces told him all he needed to know—their faces and the few odds and ends they had saved from the water.
Sam looked thin and drawn, and had no business even being on his feet. It would be weeks, maybe months, before he was back to normal. Zeke looked all right, but the boy needed some age on him.