Testament (26 page)

And that did it. The idea of a fire began to brighten her, and as soon as she had rested longer, as soon as he had made sure she was fine, they crawled back in, him rounding the ceiling so there wouldn’t be as much stress on it, digging at the walls, widening them while she pushed the snow from the opening, piling it on either side the way he had shown her to form a windbreak. He wasn’t worried about their hunters coming after them now. The snow was so deep that nothing could move around up here for very far or long. He wasn’t even worried about the dog anymore, and he was betting that the others assumed he and Sarah had died in the storm.

Certainly they should have. It was only the slightest chance that they hadn’t. But now they were going to be all right, he told himself, convincing himself. It was just going to take a lot of work. He didn’t dare think about how long the winter could be, how deep the snow could fall, how little meat there would be on the horse after everything he had put it through. He just fought to concentrate on widening the burrow, sculpting the walls and the roof, wondering if he shouldn’t have built a fire out there right away and melted snow for Sarah to drink, deciding he was right, that another storm could come up anytime, and they needed shelter before a fire, and they needed to do everything at once or not at all.

He crawled out, groping through the snow before he came upon the frozen-solid horse, deciding that since everything had to be done and the horse was immediately before him, he would do this first.

But he didn’t know how, chipping at the hide with his knife, barely penetrating it. He saw how one leg stuck out like a dead limb from a tree, and that gave him the idea, mustering his energy as he stood and jumped down on it, trying to break it at the knee. He tried three times before he heard a crack in it and saw a split in the hide at the joint. Then he sat patiently cutting at it, not sure how much his knife could take without dulling, unable to do anything about that anyway. It seemed to take an hour before he jumped once more and the lower part of the leg broke off. When he picked it up, it felt like a club in his hand, the horseshoe and the hoof unnatural as he held it.

“Take this inside,” he told Sarah.

She didn’t want to touch it.

“Take it. I need to get some wood.”

They were in a hollow circled with pine trees. The nearest was fifteen feet, but the snow was so deep as he struggled over that it might as well have been a hundred. The snow wedged up under his pant legs and his coat. He tried scooping the snow from in front of him, leaning into it to pack it down and give him footing. Nothing worked.

Dear God, I need to dig a trench.

But he didn’t have the strength.

Then rocking back and forth to shift the snow, determined to get to that tree, he felt his coat snag against something underneath, and digging down, he saw the tip of a branch. No, it wasn’t the tip, it was the jagged end from where the rest of it had already broken off, and digging farther down he came to a massive fallen trunk.

It had been there all along, just a few feet ahead of him, and leaning forward, grabbing it, he drew himself up out of the snow onto it, standing on it, able to touch the nearest ends of the pine boughs.

But these were all green. He needed to get over to the inside branches of the tree where he could snap off dead limbs and twigs and dead needles to help get the fire started. Leaning out as far as he could without falling, he grasped the thickest branch he could reach and swung out into the snow, so underestimating his weakness that he almost lost his grip, fighting to keep hold as he pulled himself hand over hand along the branch through the snow toward where the drift was not as deep. By then he was among the other branches, and easing himself down, the snow just up to his thighs here, he began snapping off the wood he needed, twigs and clumps of needles that he put in his pockets, one stout dead branch that took all his effort to tug and break. It had other smaller branches projecting from it, and plenty of twigs and dead needles as well, and it would be enough to get a small fire started that would last for a while, but he didn’t want to have to make this trip any more than necessary, and moving around the trunk of the tree, he found more branches to break off. Then climbing a short way, he broke off even more branches, but he didn’t have the strength to climb any higher, and when he found himself gripping the trunk of the tree, fighting to breathe, he knew he had to stop.

He slipped down, almost falling, into the snow, gathering the branches, tossing them one at a time toward the entrance to the burrow. The smaller ones made it easily, Sarah over there watching him, gathering them in a pile, but the bigger wider ones with shorter branches projecting from them seemed to float in the air and only made it halfway. He needed to wade over to them, throwing them again, reaching the fallen trunk hidden in the snow, stepping onto it and over it into the trough he had already made and working his way toward Sarah. She already had most of the branches together, and he was so lightheaded and tired from his effort that all he could do was sit by the entrance and struggle to catch his breath, feeling his sweat beneath his clothes, his throat burning. Sarah broke off the smaller branches from the bigger ones, setting them in a pile, carrying them in as he told her, and then he had strength enough to stand and jump onto the bigger branches, snapping them.

The sun was well down across from them, the air colder when they finished, his sweat freezing on him, making him shiver, and he was grateful to have this over, to be able to crawl back into the burrow and start to build the fire, anticipating the warmth, the smell of food.

But there was always something more to do, he told himself. Always. He would never be finished. Because as soon as he set down the square of metal, putting dead needles in a pile onto it, setting twigs on top of that and then a few finger-thick bits of wood, he realized that he had not made allowance for the smoke. There might not be much, but it would be enough to choke them out, and he needed to find a way to clear it.

At first he thought of pushing two straight branches up through the roof of the burrow, leaving a small space between them and poking the snow free from there to form a chimney. But he had already broken the branches too short, and he couldn’t force himself to go out again for more, and there was too much risk of bringing down the roof.

There had to be another way.

He had been looking at it all the time. The tree that helped form the back wall of the burrow. He crawled over to it, grabbing a branch from the pile he had gathered and digging a small hole up through the snow at its side. The branch was three feet long, and when he had gone its length, he needed to crawl in closer, turning onto his back and looking up toward the hole as he raised his arm and dug even higher. The snow fell on his face, and he kept wiping it away, blinking it out of his eyes, digging higher, and then before he expected, he was through, daylight filtered by the needled branches of the tree showing greenish-gray up there.

He crawled back to the pile of kindling, striking a match under the thickest part of the pine needles, watching them catch and crackle and spread all too fast, the twigs themselves barely catching.

But they did, and their slight flames spread to the finger-thick chunks of wood, and in a moment he had the start of a fire. Would the chimney work? He watched as a trail of smoke drifted up, gathering in the dome at the top, spreading. The smoke was sweet from the dried streaks of pine resin on the surface of the wood, and it took too long to build up so he could see if it was drifting toward the chimney. He added more twigs, more bits of wood to the fire, tensing as he set down two larger bits of wood, and in a moment they were burning as well, and he knew that the fire was going to be all right—he was just going to take a while before he had enough solid wood on it that he wouldn’t need to keep feeding it all the time.

But sweet or not, the smoke was making him cough a little, and Sarah was coughing as well, and he saw now that the dome of the burrow was higher than the entrance to the chimney so that the smoke gathered there before it drifted away. He was so lightheaded from fatigue and hunger that he had to think for what seemed too long before he knew what to do, taking a piece of wood and scooping a channel from the top of the dome to the chimney, and the smoke was drifting freely out now, the burrow clearing. It was only as he put a few more bits of wood on the fire that he thought of the extra advantage of using the tree. If Kess’s men were out looking for him, they would not be able to spot the smoke very well, hidden by the branches of the tree.

He couldn’t let himself think about it.

“How are you feeling?” he asked Sarah.

“Fine.” But she didn’t look well at all. She was warming her hands close over the fire, her face pale, shivering, and he imagined how her earlier sickness plus the strain of the last few days must have weakened her.

“You’ll feel better when you eat.”

He crawled over to her saddlebags, taking out the can of peas, grateful that they had it, wishing now that they had saved one of the cans of soup as well. He punched two holes in the top with his knife while she held it, and the lid punctured easily enough but the frozen liquid underneath held back the knife and he needed to set the can close to the fire, waiting for the liquid inside to melt enough that he could finish with the lid and get it off.

He set the part of the horse’s leg that he had broken off near the fire, close enough that it would start to thaw, far enough that the hide wouldn’t burn. In a while the liquid inside the can of peas was half melted, and he got the lid off, sprinkling some salt in with the liquid. He kept turning the horse’s leg, testing it with his fingers to see how much it had thawed. Then the peas were bubbling, steam rising, the sweet smell of them filling the burrow. Taking the can a little farther from the fire so they could cool, he whittled two flat spoons from some pieces of wood. Dipping the spoons into the can, balancing the peas on them, they blew gently at the peas, brought their mouths down and started chewing them. The spoons didn’t do much good. They were even a nuisance, but they gave him and Sarah something to fool with while they waited for the liquid in the can to cool enough for them to drink it, and anyway he didn’t want to eat too fast.

“Make these peas last a while,” he told Sarah. “Not because we want to save our food, though that’s a good idea, but we haven’t eaten in so long that we’ll bring these up if we don’t chew them properly. Chew them until they’re just a liquid in your mouth. Swallow a few and wait a while.”

He checked the hide on the horse’s leg again. It had softened enough for him to cut it with his knife. Making a slit all the way down from where the knee had been to just above the hoof, he pried at the flaps of hide, separating them from the flesh, what there was of it. Then he came to a place where the hide was still frozen and he set it near the fire again.

“I think the juice from the peas is cool enough that we can drink some. You first.”

He watched as she took a sip and rinsed it around in her mouth and finally swallowed it.

“That’s right. Take your time. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

Then the leg was thawed enough that he could pry the hide off. He spread it out on the snow by the fire.

“Have another drink from the can,” he told her.

Then he took one himself.

7

The meal lasted well into the night. He felt the juice from the peas warm his stomach. The cave itself was warming pleasantly, his chill leaving him, and he opened his coat, brushing the snow away from in there, loosening his boots, reaching up his pant cuffs to get the snow out from there as well. He ate a few peas. He put more wood on the fire, got the two empty cans from the soup they had eaten at the mine, filled them with snow, and set them near the fire. Then he ate a few more peas and drank more juice. He slit strips of flesh, muscle really, off the horse’s leg as it thawed, setting them near the fire. Then drinking some of the melted snow, giving some to Sarah, swallowing some salt, he stretched out on the saddle blankets near the fire. Sarah’s head was down near his feet so that they shared the fire evenly. He warmed the sleeping bag and opened it, wrapping it around and above them. In time he slept.

When he woke, Sarah was asleep as well, and the fire was out. It took him a while to get it going again, waking Sarah to give her the last of the juice from the peas, forcing her to take more salt. She slept almost immediately. The entrance was dark from the night out there, and he started to doze, but he kept himself awake long enough to cut a few more strips from the horse leg, and he woke periodically after that, worried about the fire.

The day was warm, another cloudless sky, the sun so stark it melted the surface of the snow. He was afraid that the top of the drift might soften enough to tumble the roof, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that, and he took advantage of the weather to work toward another tree and gather more wood.

He cooked a strip of horsemeat each for them, spitting them on the end of a stick, holding them over the fire, watching them curl and drip grease and darken, their smell a little like lamb or rabbit—he couldn’t decide which—sweet on the one hand, on the other somewhat wild. They spent the morning on the one strip each, first sucking the juices out, softening the meat with their teeth, mulching it, biting off little bits and chewing them into liquid and swallowing them.

By midday they had diarrhea. Not because the meat was bad (he was sure it wasn’t) or because they weren’t used to the idea of eating horsemeat (by then they were both ready to eat anything), but simply because they had not eaten solid food in so long that their system was rejecting it, their excrement flecked with bits of undigested peas. Once he didn’t think he was going to make it to the tree that they had selected for a latrine, and he must have had more than enough salt in him by now because his intestinal tract was loose and burning, sometimes nothing but pale mucus-clouded water coming out, the salt acting as a purgative.