Testament (27 page)

They sat weakly by the entrance to the burrow, holding themselves. He didn’t want to, but he had to keep him and Sarah eating, not much, just a little to help build their strength, and as soon as he could manage it, he crawled back into the burrow, cooking two more strips, then changing his mind and letting Sarah cook her own, testing it for her to make sure it was done, nibbling at his own. By evening the spasms had passed, and they drank melted snow, a little at a time, to replace the liquid they had lost. Night brought freezing cold, and they slept huddled close to the fire. Morning, the melted surface of the snow had turned to ice, slippery but solid, and he found that by crawling he could easily get to nearby trees for wood.

8

They were just experimenting with a thick green-needled bough for a sled when they heard the helicopter. He had gotten the idea from the slippery surface of the snow, and after they had cooked more meat and eaten it, he had taken a stout piece of wood and chopped steps through the ice into the snow all the way up one angle of the hollow, stopping at a pine tree near the top. They hung on one of the branches until they cracked it,. After twisting it off, they sat on the matted part of the bough, Sarah behind him, her arms around his waist while he pointed the branch end toward the bottom. Lifting it so he could steer, he released his footing and glided fast down in among the trees, the cold air rushing at his face, the pine trees blurring past, reaching the bottom and part way up the opposite slope before they stopped and slid back.

They sat there laughing, and after the diarrhea he didn’t want them to use much strength, but Sarah pleaded for him to do it just once more, so they climbed the steps to the top again, and halfway down, distinct above the rush of the wind and the scratching of the needles on the ice, he heard it. He wrenched the branch to one side, sliding sideways toward a pine tree. Spilling off, he scrambled to grab Sarah and drag her under low hanging branches, but she had heard it as well, and she didn’t need any guiding.

They lay on their stomachs under there, peering through the needles toward the direction of the helicopter. He couldn’t see it. It might be to their right as much as their left, above as well as below. There might be two of them, any moment swooping down over the hollow, spotting the pattern of their tracks.

No, there was only one. He saw it now. Down at the bottom of the valley, sweeping across from left to right, a small glistening speck that turned back to the left now, the chugging of its motor coming several seconds after it went whirling out of sight. Then it was back again, moving to the right again, out of sight then and in a moment working back. It was obvious what they were doing. They assumed that he had done what in fact he had almost done, which was to follow the line of least resistance and head down into the valley, following the direction of the watershed down there. They had waited this long so that in case he had survived the storm he would have had plenty of time to dig himself out and leave obvious signs in the snow. They had waited to give him confidence that they were no longer after him, so he could make mistakes.

Which he had, although the tracks around the burrow weren’t a mistake, they were a necessity, but they amounted to the same, and as soon as the helicopter had crisscrossed far enough up this slope, the hunters in there could not help but see the tracks he had made in the snow to get firewood from the trees. The hunters might not be certain at first. They would assume the possibility that a few larger animals like deer and elk had stayed in the high ground and somehow survived, leaving tracks, but they would certainly check this hollow, and he didn’t see what chance his revolver would stand against a rifle. He watched as the helicopter crisscrossed higher up the slope. It was closer now, larger. He could dimly make out its tail propeller and its bubbled dome. The periods when he saw it were less now as his angle of vision reduced the higher it came. Each time he saw it again, it was closer, more distinct, the sun glinting off its whirling blades, the noise coming to him in a roar. He could make out the bulk of two men in the bubble, and he was thinking, there must be something I can do, I can’t just lie here waiting, there must be something I can do.

But there wasn’t. He had no way to camouflage the deep sets of tracks, not with the snow frozen the way it was, and even if the snow had been soft, he would only have made more tracks covering up the first ones. He looked down at the horse’s flank showing clearly through the snow where he had dug for it. There was no way they could miss that, and while he might be able to chip some frozen snow and cover it, he didn’t have the time, the helicopter crisscrossing less than a hundred yards from them now, the roar no longer several seconds behind the helicopter but right onto it. He drew his gun, feeling Sarah tense beside him. He looked toward the helicopter, testing his aim, calculating how close the helicopter would need to come before he would have a possibility of hitting anyone in the bubble. He didn’t want to do it. He didn’t want to give his position away or let on they were still alive. But he didn’t see what choice he had. The helicopter could not fail to see his tracks, and his only option was surprise.

Then he realized that if by some chance he did manage to shoot them, that would be as obvious a sign as any that he was out here. When the helicopter didn’t come back, Kess would just send more men out here, another helicopter, and he didn’t see how he could convincingly hide the wreckage of the first one. So there wasn’t any point in shooting to keep them from finding him, only for defense. He waited as the helicopter crisscrossed closer, and then it was out of sight again. He kept waiting.

But it didn’t come back.

You’re nervous, he thought. That makes it seem longer for them to return.

But they didn’t. He could hear the helicopter clearly over there to his left, but it wasn’t getting any louder or softer, just hovering at the same pitch as if it were watching something. Then it was loud again as it came toward him, and he thought this is it, cocking his revolver as the helicopter came in sight, heading to his right.

But not across the slope, down in the direction it had come, down toward the bottom of the valley and the watershed, and he didn’t understand, and then he did as the darkness floated over them, shutting out the sun.

He crawled from under the pine boughs, realizing that he must have been registering the slight increase of wind all along, staring up behind him at the clouds. The lowest, blackest, thickest he had seen, taking up the entire sky from left to right, already one-third over the valley and rushing to complete it, their underbellies swirling, churning, the temperature dropping abruptly, wind rising, snow onto him even as he turned and grabbed Sarah and slid down the rest of the hollow to the burrow. The day suddenly became night, and in the little time they took to slide down toward the burrow, the storm was already so thick around them that they needed to grope to find the tunnel.

9

They crawled from the storm into the still, close, warm air of the burrow, fighting to catch their breath while the storm raged past the entrance, gusting snow in at them. He had to use the saddle to block the tunnel, anchoring a saddle blanket over and around it to close the remaining spaces. Then he felt secure.

“It’s only a storm,” he told Sarah.

But he wasn’t fooling anybody. He had never seen anything like it, not just dropping snow, but dumping it, unloading it, and if the wind was that bad at the start, what was it going to be like when it really had a chance to start blowing? It was shrieking out there, pushing at the saddle and the blanket, wailing to get in.

“Daddy, I’m scared.”

So am I, he thought. “It’s all right. Believe me, there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

He drew her to him and held her, staring at the blanket flapping sharply, at the saddle fidgeting under it as if the saddle were alive, listening to the constant high-pitched screaming of the wind.

Then the wind came to them muffled and the blanket stopped and the saddle, and he couldn’t keep from saying what had happened.

“The entrance is blocked. The storm’s filled it in.”

His words were flat, muffled in the burrow, and for a moment Sarah relaxed in his arms, grateful to be separated from the storm, suddenly tensing, turning to him as she realized.

“We won’t be able to breathe.”

“Sure we will. We’ve still got the airspace for the smoke. The branches up there will droop down and keep it from filling in.”

But it’s too small, he knew. No room for the cold air to come down and displace the warm. Already he could see that the fire was flickering, dimming, and they were either going to have air or heat, but not both, and he grabbed a piece of wood, crawling over to the tree at the back wall of the burrow, digging snow from the side of the tree opposite the chimney, crawling in under there, digging up, the snow falling on his face as he finally poked through. Or at least thought he did. The storm was so dark up there that he couldn’t see a change in light, but he felt a rush of wind on his face, and looking over at the fire saw it blaze a little brighter now, cold air coming down upon him. That was why they had been breathing so hard before, not from fright but from lack of oxygen.

He relaxed and crawled back to her.

“See. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Sure. Except if the storm dumped enough snow on the drift up there, the weight of it all might push the whole thing down. They’d never be able to fight their way out. They’d suffocate and die.

He couldn’t think about it, breathing already difficult again.

“We’ve just got to relax and let it pass.”

He was thinking of the layer of ice up there, wondering if it was strong enough to hold.

“It has to.” He suddenly realized that he was speaking out loud.

“What?” Sarah asked.

“Nothing. Let’s get something to eat.”

They had plenty of meat anyhow. The day before, when it had been warm and they had not yet developed diarrhea, he had broken off the other limbs from the horse, skinning them and cutting them into strips and putting them deep into the walls of the burrow before the meat had a chance to spoil. He had not been able to get at the bottom side of the horse, but the top side he had skinned as well and cut off meat, and Sarah had gathered wood, so that on those terms at least, they had nothing to worry about.

He thought he heard a cracking noise from the roof of the burrow, looked up at it, watching for stress lines, but there weren’t any, and rather than frighten Sarah, he gave her a strip of meat to cook, spitting one on the end of a stick himself, holding it over the fire. Their stomachs had adjusted well enough to food now that they didn’t need to eat as slowly, and in a while they were cooking again, wiping the grease off their mouths, the thick wild aftertaste of the meat clinging to the back of his tongue.

His eyes hurt. At first he thought that was from the wind, but then he understood that when he’d been outside, the sharp reflection of the sun had burned him, and for something to do, he set to work cutting a strip of horsehide into what looked like a blindfold, narrow thongs of leather coming around on both sides to where he could tie them in back of his head. Then he cut thin slits where his eyes would be and he had a pair of snow goggles. He cut a pair for Sarah as well, measuring them against her head as he went along, making jokes about mustaches and bandits. He had often thought of cutting his own mustache and beard off with his knife, but he had decided that it gave him protection from the wind, and thinking of that, he looked at Sarah’s wind-angered face, the skin peeling off her cheeks, furious at himself for being so stupid he hadn’t thought of wiping grease from the horsemeat over her face before they went out into the wind.

Next time.

And then he heard the crack in the roof again.

Sarah heard it too. She didn’t need to ask. All she had to do was look at him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it will. But I can’t let myself worry. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

The air grew foul from their breath and the smell of the fire and the horsemeat. They took turns crawling over to the second airspace he had dug and breathing under it. He worked to keep the fire going, worried at the same time that the heat might cause the walls to soften. He got hungry and cooked again. He slept and woke and slept again. It seemed the storm out there would never end.

10

“I never knew him. There were pictures, snapshots that my mother saved, but no wedding pictures and no pictures of the two of them together. I’m not sure if she destroyed those or if she just put them away somewhere, determined never to look at them again. But the snapshots of him alone she kept in a photo album, and sometimes she’d bring them out for me to look at. I think the idea was that, if she didn’t want the pictures of her and him around to put her through the pain again, she still figured that I ought to have some notion of what my father looked like, so once in a while she’d bring them out for me and she’d stand beside me looking at them for a little and then she’d go away and do something. They were all the same, him alone by a flower bed at the side of a building or next to some rosebushes or near a pond in a park. My mother said that they lived in an apartment in New Jersey near the military flight school where he taught. In the photographs, he always wore his uniform, his pants perfectly pressed, a crease down each sleeve of his jacket, his wing insignia on his jacket and on his cap. He wasn’t tall. He was thin, his hair not dark like mine but sandy like yours, and he had a young man’s look, his cheeks smooth. He was killed shortly after in the war.”

“Daddy?” Sarah asked him.

“What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

“I don’t want to die.”

“Neither do I,” he told her, disgusted with himself for letting the story take the direction it had. All he had wanted to do was ease her mind off things, and here he’d only reminded her. “That’s why we’re not going to.”

But the storm out there wouldn’t end. Even with the close thick walls of snow around and above them, they could still hear the shriek of the wind, and they didn’t have enough to do. Eating, watching the fire, sleeping, these things repeated themselves over and over. With no distinction between day and night, the numbers on his watch became meaningless. It could have been noon or midnight. They could have slept two hours or fourteen. The storm could have been one day or five. There was no way of knowing. He told her all the stories he could think of, about how when she was very little she had nearly lost one of her fingers on a broken pane of glass, how she had used to have nightmares about clowns, how she had loved to look at dump trucks. Then his head became so clouded that he couldn’t think of any stories anymore, and he just sat watching the fire, and then he couldn’t even do that any longer, and he mostly slept.