Cold Mountain (49 page)

2004-3-6

页码，206/232

He came to a black pool set round as a jar lid on the ground. Ice had rimmed it and a lone drake rode the water at its center and it did not care enough even to turn its head to look at Inman. It seemed to look at nothing. Inman reckoned the drake's world was constricting about it and that it would float there until the ice clenched at the webbing of its feet. Then, flap as it might, it would be pulled down to death. Inman first thought to shoot it and change its fate at least in minor detail, but if he did he would have to go wading to get it for he abhorred killing an animal and not eating it. And if he got it he would be left in a quandary over his fast. So he left the duck to struggle it out with its Maker and went on.

When the trail turned uphill, snow started falling again. This time it was real snow in flakes like thistledown, falling slantwise so thick it made Inman dizzy with its movement. The tracks began fading off like twilight as the snow filled them. He walked fast, climbing to a ridge, and when the tracks started to disappear he broke into a run. He ran and ran downhill through dark hemlocks. He watched the tracks fill and their edges blur. No matter how fast he ran, the footprints disappeared before him until they were faint, like scars from old wounds. Then like watermarks through paper held to window light. Then the snow lay even all around, unmarked.

The flakes still fell hard and Inman could not even feel the way the trail went, but he ran on until finally he stopped in a place where the hemlocks stood black around him and made a world undifferentiated, with no compass degree preferable to another and with not a sound but snow falling on snow, and he reckoned if he lay down it would cover him and when it melted it would wash the tears from his eyes and, in time, the eyes from his head and the skin from his skull.

Ada and Ruby slept until Stobrod began coughing wet racking coughs. Ada had bedded down in her clothes and she awoke with the odd sensation of britches twisted about her legs. The hut was cold and dim and the fire had burned down to a smolder. The light from outside was odd and upthrown and spoke of snow. Ruby went to Stobrod. He had a line of fresh blood running from his mouth corner to his collar. His eyes opened but he did not appear to know her. She put her hand to his brow and looked at Ada and said, He's burning up. Ruby went to the corners of the hut and pulled down spiderwebs until she had a ball of them in her hands; then she dug through her pouch of roots and took out two and said, Get some water and I'll make up a fresh poultice to dab on that borehole in his chest. She went and threw wood on the coals and bent to blow up the fire.

Ada gathered her hair and put on her hat to keep it up. She took the pot to the spring and dipped it full of water and took it to the horse. He drank it dry with a great sound of suction. She refilled the pot at the creek and started back. The snow fell hard out of a dull low sky and it whited her coat sleeve where she held out her arm carrying the pot. A wind blew up and flapped her collar against her face.

When she had nearly reached the hut, something, a slight movement, drew her eye upslope toward where she had entered the village the afternoon before. There, picking their way through the snow, went a flock of wild turkeys, ten or twelve of them among the bare trees of the hillside. A big male, colored pale grey as a dove, led them. He would take a step or two and then stop and probe in the snow with his bill and then move on. When the turkeys walked uphill they pitched forward, their backs nearly horizontal to the ground. Their walking looked effortful, like old men harnessed to loads with tumplines. They were slim-bodied birds, long, not at all configured like yard turkeys.

Ada moved slowly until she had put the hut between herself and the birds. She went in and set the pot down by the fire. Stobrod lay quiet. His eyes were closed and his face ashy yellow, the color of cold lard. Ruby rose from where she sat beside him and busied herself setting the water to boil and readying the herb roots.

—There are turkeys on the hillside, Ada said to Ruby as she bent over her work, peeling and mincing the roots.

file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，207/232

Ruby looked up. I could do to grease my chin with a turkey leg, she said. That shotgun's charged, both barrels. Go kill us one.

—I've never fired a gun, Ada said.

—It's about as easy a thing as there is. Pull back the hammers, point it, fit the bead in the notch, trip either trigger, and don't shut your eyes when you do it. If you miss, pull the other trigger. Clamp the gun butt hard to your shoulder, or it might break your collarbone when it kicks. Move slow, for wild turkeys have the gift to disappear on you. If you can't get at least twenty steps near to them, don't waste a load.

Ruby began mashing the root pieces against a stone with the flat of the knife blade. But Ada did not move, and Ruby looked up again. She saw the uncertainty on Ada's face.

Ruby said, Quit puzzling over it. The worst you can do is fail to kill a turkey and there's not a hunter in the world hasn't done that. Go on.

Ada climbed the slope with great care and deliberation. She could see the turkeys moving through the stand of chestnuts ahead of her and above her. They walked in the direction the falling snow was slanting on the wind. They were traversing the slope and seemed in no hurry. When the grey male found something to eat, they would bunch up and pick at it on the ground and then move ahead.

Ada knew Ruby to be wrong in saying the worst one could do was miss. Everyone in the community had heard the story of the war widow from down the river. The winter previous, the woman had climbed a tree into a deer stand and had dropped her gun and it discharged when it hit the ground so that, in effect, she shot herself out of the tree. She was lucky to have lived to be ridiculed for it. The woman had broken a leg in the fall and never walked straight thereafter, and she had two buckshot scars in her cheek like pox marks.

Thinking such worrying thoughts of poor huntsmanship and its consequences, Ada made troubled progress up the slope. The shotgun felt long and misbalanced before her and seemed to quiver in her hands. She tried to circle around into the turkeys' path and wait for them, but they shifted directions and went more directly up. She followed them for some time, climbing when they climbed and stopping when they stopped. As she walked she tried to be quiet and still in her movements. She set each foot down slowly, letting the snow muffle her steps, and she was glad she wore britches, for trying to be stealthy in long skirts and their underlying petticoats would be impossible, like walking through the woods flapping a bed quilt around.

Even with all her care, Ada feared that the birds would do as Ruby claimed and vanish. She did not take her eyes off them and was patient and eventually she closed to about the distance Ruby had specified. The turkeys stopped and swiveled their heads to look around. She stood still and they did not see her. They pecked in the snow for food. Ada guessed that was about as clear a shot as she was likely to get, so she raised the gun slowly and sighted on the trailing birds. She fired, and to her amazement a pair fell. The others took off flying low in a turmoil, and in their fright they flew downhill right at her. For a second, two hundred pounds of birds tore through the air about her head.

They went to cover in a laurel brake, and Ada stood and remembered to breathe. She thought back and could find no memory of a kick, though her shoulder felt numb. She did know—even though she had never used a firearm of any type in her life and had just the one discharge to tell her—that the shotgun's action was vague, that the trigger pull was long and had a crackle to it and that it was a matter of some uncertainty where along its travel you would find the point of tension and release.

She looked down at the scrollwork of the gun, the motif of vines and leaves and the elaborate hammers which carried out that theme. She let the second one down slowly from where it stood at alert.

file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，208/232

When Ada reached the fallen birds, she found a hen and a young cock. Their feathers had the hue and glint of metal, and one scaly grey foot of the hen was still clenching and unclenching in the snow.

Inman heard a shot at no great distance from where he stood. He pulled back the main hammer of the LeMat's to full cock and went forward. He came out from under the dense hemlock shade into a chestnut grove which sloped off toward a bold creek tumbling somewhere below. The light was low and grainy and snow was falling in the chestnuts and had frosted their limbs. He walked down into them and there was a gap in the way they grew so that the black trunks stood rowed on either side and the white fringe of limbs met overhead to shape a tunnel. Underneath was the suggestion of a lane, though no road had ever run there. The snow blew hard and smeared details. Though Inman could see clearly but three trees ahead through the blur, it seemed that at the end of the lane was a vague circle of light fringed around with snowy limbs. He held the pistol loose in his hand, its muzzles aimed nowhere in particular other than forward. His finger made contact with the trigger so that all the metal parts linking it with the hammer touched and tightened like a spark running through from one to the other.

He walked ahead, and soon a figure bloomed out of the light before him, a black silhouette arched over by tree limbs. It stood straddle-legged at the end of the chestnut tunnel and when it saw him it brought to bear on him a long gun. The place was so quiet Inman could hear the click of metal as a hammer was thumbed back.

A hunter, Inman guessed. He called out, saying, I'm lost. And besides, we don't know enough about one another to start killing one another yet.

He stepped forward slowly. First he could see the turkeys laid each by each on the ground. Then he saw Ada's fine face atop some strange trousered figure, like a mannish boy.

—Ada Monroe? Inman said. Ada?

She did not answer but just looked at him.

He was to the point that he figured, based upon experience, that his senses were not a thing to put much stock in. He believed his thought life might have gone astray so that it had no more direction to it than a litter of blind puppies in a box lid. What he saw might be some trick of light working on a disordered mind, bad spirits come upon him in form to befuddle. People saw things in the woods, even those with full bellies and steady minds. Lights moving where no lights could be, the forms of those long dead walking through the trees and speaking words in lost voices, trickster spirits in the shape of your deepest desire leading you on and on to die mazed in some laurel hell. Inman racked back the little secondary shot-shell hammer of the LeMat's.

Ada, hearing her name spoken, was confused. She let the muzzles to the shotgun droop some inches from where they had been aimed at his chest. She examined him and did not know him. He appeared to be a beggar in cast-off clothes, rags thrown over a rood of sticks. His face was drawn and hollow-cheeked above the stubbled beard, and he stared at her out of strange black eyes shining deep in their sockets under the shadow of his hat brim.

They stood wary, about the number of paces apart specified for duelists. Not clasping heart to heart as Inman had imagined, but armed against each other, weapons glinting hard light into the space between them.

Inman studied Ada for trickery from within himself or from the spirit world. Her face was firmer than he remembered, harder. But the more he saw the more he believed it to be truly her, despite the unlooked-for costume. So, having in the past taken up arms thoughtless to the consequences, he file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...

2004-3-6

页码，209/232

decided now to put them away the same. He let down his hammer and brushed back his jacket and stuck the pistol under his belt. He looked her in the eyes and knew it was her and was overcome by love like a ringing in his soul.

He did not know what to say, so he said what his dream in the gypsy camp had told him. I've been coming to you on a hard road and I'm not letting you go.

But something in him would not let him step forward to embrace her. It was not only the shotgun keeping him back. Dying was not the point. He could not step forward. He held out his empty hands palms up at his sides.

Ada still did not know him. He seemed to her some madman awander in the storm, knapsack on his back, snow in his beard and on his hat brim, speaking wild and tender words to whatever appeared before him, rock and tree and rill. Likely as not to cut somebody's throat, would be Ruby's estimation. Ada raised the shotgun again so it would break him open if she but pulled the trigger.

—I do not know you, she said.

Inman heard the words and they seemed just. Entirely warranted, and in some way expected. He thought, Four years gone warring, but back now on home ground and I'm no better than a rank stranger here. A wandering pilgrim in my own place. Such is the price I'll pay for the past four years.

Firearms standing between me and everything I want.

—I believe I have made a mistake, he said.

He turned to walk away. Go on up to the Shining Rocks and see would they have him. If not, take up Veasey's quest and walk to Texas or parts even more ungoverned, if such existed. But there was no trail to follow. Ahead of him just trees and snow and his own steps filling fast.

He turned back to her and held out his empty hands again and said, If I knew where to go I'd go there.

It might have been timber of voice, angle of profile. Something. Length of bone in his forearm, shape of knucklebones under the skin of his hands. But suddenly Ada knew him, or thought she did.

She lowered the shotgun to where it would but cut him off at the knees. She said his name and he said yes.

Then Ada had only to look at his drawn face to see not a madman but Inman. He was blasted and ravaged, worn ragged and weary and thin, but he was nevertheless Inman. Hunger's seal on his brow, like a shadow over him. Yearning for food, warmth, kindness. In the hollows of his eyes she could see that the depredations of the long war and the hard road home had left his mind scoured and his heart jailed within the bars of his ribs. Tears started in her eyes, but she blinked once and they were gone. She lowered the muzzles toward the ground and put her hammer to rest.

—You come with me, she said.

She paired the turkeys' feet for handles and grabbed them up breast to breast, and when she did their wings opened and their heads flopped and their long necks twined as if in strange inverted love. She walked off carrying the gun balanced over her shoulder, stock behind, the barrel held loosely in her upraised left hand. Inman followed and he was so tired he did not even think to offer to take some of her load.

They came curving down the slope through the chestnuts and before long they could see the creek and its mossy boulders and the village far below them, smoke rising from the chimney of Ruby's hut.

file://H:\Ebook\Charles%20Frazier%20-%20Cold%20Mountain%20(v1.0)%20[...