On the River Styx (7 page)

The boatman, who must have been in town the night
before, had probably confirmed whatever the hunter had noticed at the landing. Traver wondered if they would turn him in. He doubted it. In the prison denims, he could be shot on sight, and no questions asked—not that the hunter would require that excuse. He guessed that the latter had some right to be here, for otherwise, even in this lonely place, he would not occupy the cabin. He was probably a hired gamekeeper, poaching on the side. He would not want Traver here, and he would not want the sheriff nosing around the island either. He would want to take care of Traver by himself.

The man had come in and out of the cabin. He had the rifle in his hands, checking the action. His movements were calm and purposeful, and he gave Traver a good look at his face. It was a gaunt face, creased and hard, under heavy eyebrows, a shrewd face, curiously empty of emotion. Traver recognized that face, he had seen it all his life, throughout the South.

Ol’ Redneck kill me, do he get the chance. And he mean to get the chance.

The man went off in the direction of Snake-house, moving swiftly into the trees.

For the moment, considering his situation, Traver stayed right where he was. He watched the shrimp boat disappear along the delta. His mouth was dry, and he licked dew from the grass. Though the early sun had begun to warm him, he felt tired and stiff and very hungry, and this hunger encouraged him to loot the cabin.

Unreal in the morning mist, the trees were still. The Spanish moss hung everywhere, like silence. The man would go to Snake-house, to the landing, to pick up Traver’s trail, but it would not lead him far. Traver had
stayed clear of the sand path, moving wherever possible on the needle ground beneath the pines. Still, if he meant to loot the cabin, he should hurry. And he was half-risen when a huge blue heron, sailing above the cedars into which the hunter had disappeared, flared off with a squawk and thrash of heavy wings.

Traver sank to his knees again, heart pounding.

That was close to bein you last worldly move. I mean, he layin fo’ you, man, and he like to cotched you. I mean, he
smart
, doan you forget it, nigger. He know what you doin even fore you does it.

Traver waited again. When his heart stopped pounding, he began to laugh, a long quiet laugh that shook his big body like crying, and caused him to press his mouth to the crook of his arm. And he was surprised when tears came to his eyes, and the laughter became sobbing. He was frightened, he knew, and at the same time, he was unbearably excited.

You just a big black mule, you just a fool and a mule and a alligator all wrap into one.

He went on laughing, knowing his delight was dangerous, and all the more elated because of that. And as he laughed, he hummed to himself, in hunger.

In a while, far over toward the swamp, he heard the quack of startled black ducks, rising. When he saw their high circle over the trees, he got up on his haunches.

Could be dat a duck hawk, but most likely dat him. He over dar by Snake-house.

A string of ibis, drifting peacefully down the length of woods like bright white sheets of tissue, reassured him. Traver ran. In the open, he tensed for the rifle crack he could never have heard had it come, and zigzagged for the door. In less than a minute, he was back. He had a loaf of bread and matches, and was grinning wildly with excitement.

But now a fresh fear seized him. The hunter might return at any time, from any angle. If he did not hurry, he would no longer be able to maneuver without the terror of being seen. Traver stopped chewing, the stale bread dry in his mouth. Then he cut into the woods, loping in a low, bounding squat in the direction taken by the white man. At Graveyard-over-the-Bank, where once the cattle had been driven, penned, and slaughtered, he hid again. This place, a narrowing of the island, the man would sooner or later have to pass.

T
RAVER STALKED HIM
all that day. Toward noon, the hunter went back to the cabin. Traver could hear him rummage for the bread, and he wondered if, in taking it, he might only have endangered himself further by becoming, in the white man’s eyes, more troublesome. The man came out again and sat on the doorsill, eating. His face, still calm, was tighter, meaner, Traver thought. The rifle lay across his knees. Then he rose and went away into the woods, heading southwest toward Cottonmouth Dike, and Traver followed.

The man made frequent forays from the path, but he seemed to know that he would not surprise his quarry, that
Traver was in all probability behind him, for though he moved stealthily out of habit, he made no real effort to conceal himself. Clearly, his plan was to lure Traver into a poor position, a narrow neck or sparsely wooded place where he might hope to turn and hunt him down. He set a series of ambushes, and now and then wheeled and doubled back along his trail. He was skillful and very quick, quick enough to frighten Traver, who several times was nearly trapped. Traver hung farther and farther behind, using his knowledge of the island to guess where the hunter would come and go, and never remaining directly behind, but quartering.

He was most afraid of the animals and birds, which, hunting and hunted, could betray his whereabouts at any time.

The white man was tireless, and this intensity frightened Traver, too. He seemed prepared to stalk forever, carrying his provisions in his pocket. When he ate, he did it in the open, pointedly, knowing that Traver could never relax enough to hunt, could only watch and starve.

By noon of the second day, Traver was desperate. When the man went west again, way over past Pig Root and Eagles Grave, Traver fled eastward to the landing and gorged on the coon oysters. Sated, he realized his mistake. He had a hundred yards of marsh to cross, back to the trees, and for all he knew, the hunter had doubled back again, and had a bead on him. He had done just what the man was waiting for him to do, he had lost the scent, and now any move he made might be the wrong one. He groaned at the thought of the vanished skiff—if only he’d gotten it ashore, and hidden it in the salt grass farther down. But now he was trapped, not only at the landing but on the island.

A bittern broke camouflage with a strangled squawk, causing Traver to spin around. In panic, he clambered up over the riverbank and ran back to the trees. The woods were silent. There came a faint cry of snow geese over the delta, and the sharp rattle of a kingfisher back in the slough. Downwind, wild cattle caught his scent and retreated noisily. Or was that the coming of the hunter? He pressed himself to the black earth, in aimless prayer. The silence grew, cut only by the wash of river wind in the old-field pine.

At dark, he fled into the marsh, and tried to rest in the reeds beneath a dike. Under the moon, much later, a raccoon picked its way along the bank, and he stunned it with his rabbit club. The coon played possum. When he crawled up to it, it whirled and bit him on the ankle. He struck it sharply with the stone end of the club, and it dragged itself into the reeds. He could not see it very well, and in a near frenzy of suppressed fear, he beat the dark shape savagely, long after it was dead. Panting, he sat and stared at the wet, matted mound of fur, the sharp teeth in the open, twisted mouth. He dared not light a fire with his stolen matches, and his gut was much too nervous to accept it raw. He left it where it lay and crept back to the woods and, in an agony of stealth, to Back-of-Ocean. He was overjoyed by the lamp in the cabin window.

He finally tuckered out, Traver told himself. The man done give ol’ Traver up. Traver too spry for him.

The idea restored his confidence a little, and he chuckled without heart. He was still hungry, and he had no idea what his next move should be. Remembering the white man’s face, he did not really believe he had given up the hunt, and this instinct was confirmed, at daybreak. The boat appeared
again, and the white man met it, but he did not come out of the cabin. He stepped into the clearing from the yaupon on the other side. Traver had almost approached that way the night before. The light in the window had only been another trap.

Traver fought a wild desire to bolt. But he controlled himself, squeezing great fistfuls of earth between his fingers. He watched the hunter walk slowly to the beach and, resting his rifle butt on the silver roots of a hurricane tree, speak to the boatman. They were silent for a time, as if deciding something. Then the hunter shrugged, and shoved the boat from shore. It backed off with a grinding of worn gears. He returned to the cabin and came out of it a minute later. He had a cooked bone, and he pulled long strings of dry meat from it with his teeth. Traver stared at the lean yellow-brown of his face, the wrinkled neck, the faded khaki clothes and high cracked boots against the soft greens of the trees and the red cassina berries. He stared at the bone. The man tossed it out in front of him, then tramped it into the ground and lit a cigarette. Breathing smoke, he leaned against the cabin logs and gazed around the clearing. Traver caught the cigarette scent on the air, and stirred uncomfortably. The man flipped the butt into the air, and together they watched it burn away upon the ground. Then he shouldered the rifle and went back to the woods, and once more Traver followed.

Who huntin who heah? Traver tried to smile. Who huntin who?

The fear was deep in him now, like cold. He started at every snap and crackle and cry of bird, sniffing the air for scents, which could tell him nothing. There was only the stench of rotting vegetation, and the rank sweat of his fear.
He crept along closer and closer to the ground, terrified lest he lose contact with the hunter. In his heart, he knew there was but one course open to him. He could not leave the island, and he could not be killed. Both prospects were unimaginable. But he could kill.

Man, you in de swamp now. It you or him, dass all.

But he could not make himself accept this. He supposed he could kill a black man if he had to, and a white man could kill
him
. But a black man did not kill a white man.

Man, it doan matter what de color is, it just doan matter now. You in de swamp, and de swamp a different world. Dey ain’t nobody left in dis heah world but you and him, and he figger dass too crowded. When ol’ Lo’d passed out de mens’s hearts, dis heah man hid behind de do’. A man like dis heah man, you let him run where he de law, and he kill you if you black or white or blue. He doan hate you and he doan feel sorry. You just a varmint dat got in de way, dass all.

But Traver doubted his own sense. Perhaps this man had nothing to hide, perhaps he was hunting legally, perhaps he would do no more than remove Traver from the island, or arrest him—how could he know that this man, given the chance, would shoot him down?

And yet he knew. He could smell it. He doubted his instinct because he hated what it told him, because he wanted to believe that this man also was afraid, that a man would not shoot another down without first calling out to him to surrender.

Man, he ain’t called, and he know you heah. He quiet as de grave. And you take it in you haid to call you’self, you fixin to get a bullet fo’ you answer.

A
GAIN THAT MORNING
, he was nearly ambushed. This time a rabbit gave the man away. For the first time, Traver lost his nerve entirely. He ran back east along the island and stole out on the marsh, crawling along the dike bank where he had killed the coon, persuading his pounding heart that food was his reason for coming. But he knew before he got there that the raccoon would be gone. Black vultures and an eagle rose in silence from the bank, and there was a flat track in the reeds where an alligator had come and gone, and there were blue crabs clinging upside down to the grass at the edge of the ditch. In the marsh, the weak and dead have a brief existence.

Traver was shifting his position when a bullet slapped into the mudbank by his head. Its whine he heard afterward, a swelling in his ears as he rolled into the water and clawed at the brittle stalks of cane across the ditch. A wind of teal wings, rising out of Dead Oak Pond, blurred his racket in the brake. He crossed a reedy flat and slid into a small pool twenty yards away. The echo of the shot diminished on the marsh, and silence settled, like a cloud across the sun.

Then fiddler crabs snapped faintly on the flat. Where he had passed, their yellow claws protruded, open, from the holes.

But he knew the man would come, and he tried to control the choked rasp of his breath. And the man came, picking his lean way along the dike, stopping to listen, coming on, as Traver himself had often done, tracking crippled ducks for the plantation gunners. Against the bright, high autumn sky, the hunter’s silhouette was huge.

Traver slipped the rabbit club from his belt.

The man had stopped just short of where Traver had lain.
He squinted up and down the ditch. Though his face remained set, his right hand, wandering on the trigger guard and breech, betrayed his awareness that Traver might have a weapon.

He came a little farther, stopped again. He seemed on the point of calling out, but did not, as if afraid of intruding a human voice into this primeval silence. He bent and scratched his leg. Then, for a moment, scanning the far side of the dike, he turned his head.

Traver, straightening, tried to hurl the club, but it would not leave his hand. He ducked down and out of sight again. He told himself that the range had been too great, that the chance of a miss, however small, could not be taken. But he also knew he was desperate enough to have thrown it anyway, in agony, simply to bring an end to this suspense.

There was something else.

The man descended from the dike, on the far side. Almost immediately, he sank up to his knees, for there came a heavy, sucking sound as his boots pulled back. The man seemed to know that here, in the black resilience of the marsh, his quarry had him at a disadvantage, for he climbed back up onto the dike and took out a cigarette. This time, Traver thought he must call out, but he did not. Instead, he made his way back toward the woods.