O Beulah Land: Book II of The Beulah Quintet

By Mary Lee Settle

O Beulah Land, the second volume of The Beulah Quintet—Mary Lee Settle's unforgettable generational saga about the roots of American culture, class, and identity and the meaning of freedom—is a land-hungry story. It follows the odyssey of Johnny Church's descendants as they leave England in search of freedom and land. One of those descendants, Jonathan Lacey, settles in the backcountry of Virginia, where he battles both Native Americans and white frontier bandits and builds the beginning of a flourishing estate named Beulah. The novel closes shortly before the commencement of the Revolutionary War, with Lacey elected to the House of Burgesses and his family line firmly established in what is to become the state of West Virginia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643362328

Book preview

PROLOGUE

O Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land,

As on thy highest mount I stand …

Chapter One

A SINGLE footprint lay alone. It seemed dropped from nowhere onto the underbrush between the black, muscular roots of the high tree which dominated the ragged, lonesome hollow. But a small hand, human, on a thin, rootlike white arm, wavered over the indent, fluttered the leaves, and the print was gone.

At twilight a raccoon licked along the dry ground, sniffing the trail made by stains of blood which had fallen as the foot had fallen, lightly; smelled and scratched like a dog, and ambled away, the color of the shadows, disappearing through a world its own color.

The night came down, and the trees were ghostly under a full moon. Tiny settlements of double lights defined their branches. Some appeared and disappeared like stars; some were as constant as planets, blinking out only as eyes blink after staring. The night stretched on, and even sleep could not blot out the universe of watchers.

Inside the tree, huddled among the brush, plumped up the way a woman would plump a pillow, a small something alive could be heard from time to time, though not seen even by the wildcats, the wolverines, the panthers that crouched on the sea of branches. That it was a woman was certain from the thin arm, from the small footprint, and now, in the lowest time of heavy night, from the catch of her breath and the wary, light way she turned as quickly on the leaves as she could, careful of disturbing the pressing nothing of the outside night—turned and listened; turned again, stopped, and listened; waited still in the black tree for the sound of moving, a footfall, the startled crack of a twig; waited for the rhythm of breathing.

She lay near sleep, staring back at the twin stars up the other side of the cut, which from time to time moved, dropped, went out like lamps, and were replaced by others. She tried to form her fear into an image: the huge, rough nose pressed against her side; the harsh grab of a human hunter; the moving shape filling the waist-high opening of the tree and blotting out the hungry watchers—forced herself to wait even for the slow kneading of the muscles of the snake across her tense, cold stomach, around her legs, or violating her thighs and crawling, as familiar as the serpent with Eve; forced herself to make these images of terror to deaden the wider fear of the silence, of the tall trees, of the blank, left-alone nothing—until the unholy scream of an animal pierced the night, when twin stars swooped down from the branches.

The morning came early still in August. The eyes of the night animals went out, fading with the first paleness which the thick trees let filter down. The whole wilderness seemed as quiet as the holding of a huge breath. The dim shapes across the gap sprang nearer, began to color from their first grayness. Suddenly the sun pierced once, from high above, a thin watery line, and the air was filled with the shrieking of birds. The woman thrashed awake and screamed as if her head itself had burst into great jostling morning noise. But she had slept.

Where there is a cut, there will be a freshet; beyond the freshet, a spring branch; beyond the branch, a creek; beyond the creek, a river, flowing and interflowing like the capillaries, the arteries, the veins of a man. Where the water flows down, sooner or later there will be men. But where it flows from, only the underbrush, the high trees, the silence, and in the midst of the silence the mountains, the Endless Mountains.

No balance here, no leveling, plumbline, measuring intelligence; just the old convulsions, making the earth’s shape. The water followed, and the animals found it, tracing the roads; and the first men, the color of forest clay, followed the animals and the water until they claimed the traces for themselves. So a single papaw falling, rolling down the banks of the forest was Newton’s law—unmeasured, undiscussed, unheard; the woods arranging themselves, like a thousand-mile-wide surrender to the law which is so inevitable that it can crush the will and mind of a man.

When the papaw fell the woman crept out of the tree, watching where her stiffened limbs set her feet, and grabbed it from the ground so fiercely with her cold hand that the smoky blue skin broke and yellow pulp squished between her fingers. Where she had come from there had been not even sweet papaws, only a choking mass of tangled and insidious laurel hugging at her dress; rhododendron run wild over and under, making a strong mat which rose almost to tree height, mile upon mile of thick snaking roots, like the unkempt head of some insane giant. For two days she had stumbled, fought, thrust her body against the unyielding mass, without food, without water, in a maze of God, leaving a thin trail of linsey behind her in the selfish, high undergrowth, while above her head and out of sight the wild moving tops of the plants lifted their handsome black-green swirls of leaves and tried to charm the sun.

Fifteen feet below the sunlight, in the darkness, for the first time a little beside herself with horror at the tunneled labyrinth, she had heard the scurry of thousands of creatures, and could not see them, except as shadows like the fear she ran from. She had fallen among the waiting coils. They had held her while she slept and woke in fits and pushed and inched painfully on through a tunnel dug with her own body against the massive spider web. Thirty-six hours later she had felt rather than seen the cut, the clearer bank, and crept into the tree exhausted, still wild with fear, covering her tracks by the habit of survival rather than because she thought any more.

If she had been going to die she would have died that night, but her natural will churned on, irresponsible to any consciousness she could muster, making her live. The will decided, and she slept, the panic dying down finally, like the last of a fever.

The woman who woke up, weak as she was, was new, made free for a time of haunting memory by shock, a different woman from the one who had blundered into the thicket. She had been a haunted, chased creature, mindless with panic, in the two weeks she had been driven east by her own fear, kept alive only by some boundless miracle that lets the nervous fawns live, or the silly, vulnerable fish. Now she was no longer running from the west, too scared to scream, with the devil at her heels. She was headed east, ready to meet the sun as it rose to guide her. But to do it, her will demanded first calmness, then food, and rest.

So after two days the papaw was welcome, and she licked its pulp from her fingers and found another and another under the glossy, heavy-bearing bush. Not thinking, she slid some of the fruit to her pocket, but where that had been was a long tear, and the soft fruit felt cool against her bare leg before she realized what she was doing.

She looked down, following her own hand, and burst into a sob, feeling up and down her body where the thicket had torn her dress into rents until it was like the garment of some mourning widow in a desert of the Bible. But no one heard the sob; like the papaw, the tears obeyed the law of God and fell among the dry leaves and the thick dust at her feet. There was no one to hear—no one but many living things who pricked their ears and rolled to sleep again, or deer who lowered their heads delicately back into the high river meadow just beyond the tree she stood by. No one to listen for two hundred miles that she knew of—except something behind her that she was aware of but could not call to mind, something tracking, inevitable as the law around her. Remembering only as the deer had remembered, conditioned to danger, she too pricked her human ears, listened, holding her sobs with her breath, and dropped down out of sight behind the papaw tree.

At last, hearing the wind sky-high above her head as it shuffled through the leaves of the forest roof, she crawled forward, for she had parted from the noise of the wind another sound, the moving river. She rose up on her knees and let her head come slowly above the high grass in front of the papaw tree, and saw that she was at last back to the river highway and on her trail.

She was kneeling on a small hill that sloped in front of her into a long, narrow meadow. Its grass was heavy and brushed with yellow by the heat of August, tall enough to ripple in waves as the wind caught it. It covered a valley broken by mounds, some so low they seemed only natural hummocks in the grass, some as high as houses. It was as if the valley had been lived in once, and died in, the dead abandoned there so long ago that a few trees, like the tree she had slept in, had taken root in the mounds and had grown huge and spread their virgin branches in great dark pools of summer shade.

Away in the distance, near a wide river bend, protected by a circle of hills like ancient earthworks, she saw deer and elk feeding and knew they had not scented the devil who stalked her, that as long as they moved and munched the meadow of the bottomland without dropping dead in their tracks she too was safe from all but the silence, which, when the day protected her, seemed to retreat high in the sunny sky above her and not to swoop near until the long shadows of evening would pull it down, a smothering blanket.

She rolled gratefully in the harsh grass and, safe in the sun, fell asleep again, not meaning to. She slept until the sun turned the shadow of the papaw tree and covered her, and she woke up shivering, not knowing where she was, and came alive to the present fear again. She was conscious only of the lost time her nap had cost, time running without carrying her nearer the misty rim of mountains in the distance. The deer flies hung about her, humming, but she had been too exhausted to know. Now, fighting them away from her face and her dirt-streaked gray legs, she got up from the grass, where her body had flattened a cradle. The animals were farther off up the river; nothing had disturbed them. It was still too early for them to skitter to their own secret night shelters. Down along the river the cane-brake shuffled in the stronger wind, which slapped her black hair against her face as she rose into it.

She ran, using the higher mounds to hide herself, watching her footing to keep from falling on those that had been so eroded by time that they were only stumbling blocks in the valley floor. She seemed to be playing hide and seek with the silence itself, hiding from something she did not bother to think about or name, as instinctive as an animal. She waded along the swampy bank to gather into a bundle what canes she could reach without falling into the water.

If she had panicked before, if she had cried, now she had forgotten. The present contained work, quick work. She snapped stalk after stalk of the high, sweet harvest, and when she trudged back two hours had passed and it was long evening. Her hands shook and bled from the sharp sticks she had dragged, painfully dropping, retrieving, in a frustrating snail’s pace across the great meadow and back into the shelter of the papaw tree. In front of it, facing the bend of the river, she built herself a cane-shelter for the night, so low that from any distance the high grass obscured it, so near to the color of the grass that it was camouflaged as carefully as the wood-colored raccoon or the shadow-dappled snake. But she respected the nameless thing she hid from. From the formless papaw she took branches, tearing from under the tree’s main branches to hide the scars, and covered her shelter with the beautiful slick leaves so that the great bush seemed only to spread a little more. Because she had slept or worked the whole day near its protecting bulk, it was familiar, and she felt safe against the strangeness around her.

She sat down now, halfway inside her shelter, for the wind had grown cooler, and stared away across the meadow, the way a woman rests between demands, dreaming beyond her work—never done, anyway. Such dreams are dangerous. Before she could stop herself she began to dream of meat, to be possessed by biting, demanding hunger which made her ears roar and her stomach contract, demanding, demanding, rejecting in a rush of yellow vomit the papaw she’d gathered for her evening meal.

She fell, half in and half out of the little shelter, not flat, for she had rolled forward from her hips and her legs were still under her, and waited until the squeezing of her stomach stopped. She whispered then, without knowing she did it; she had been alone for so long she was no longer aware of where thought left off and turned to sound from her mouth.

Gawd, but I’m hongry.

But she went on lying there, too weak to move. Up-river of her the deer stirred, but they might as well have been the shiftings of her worked imagination, growing wilder in the woods, for all the good they did her. Like the grapes of hell, they tantalized as they nuzzled in the grass.

Just as they had many times before during the two weeks, the twitching squirrels moved from where her sudden movement had frozen them, whisked and frisked down the trees behind her, nearer and nearer, to investigate the new thing that lay there, finally quiet, across the vomit of the papaw. This time she knew they were coming and stayed still, all her soul concentrated on her right hand, which she had flung beyond her head as she fell. The hand lay as still as a trap. A fly landed on one of her fingers, and, triggerlike, the finger nearly responded, but she kept it from moving, now peeking along the ground through her hair as an inquisitive squirrel came nearer, stopped and listened for nothing, like a fool, twitched its lovely tail, came still nearer. Now she sighted along her bare arm; her hand waited, waited; watching with a terrible patience, took in the details of the squirrel’s thick mat of delicate fur as it moved and parted and then was still again, took in its sloe eyes intent on the new white, rootlike thing across the ground; watched as it sat, tail hoisted like a flag, then moved over, almost touching the hand waiting as still as a stone. The squirrel sniffed; still the hand waited—sniffed again, and still it was too soon; sniffed again, now at the center of her palm. The finger and thumb snapped like a vise and trapped the squirrel by its tiny doll hand as it sprang back.

They screamed together—fine, weak, almost silent screams. Her other hand darted out, choking, choking until the tiny animal hung limp and let go her right hand where its little rodent teeth had bitten through the soft flesh of her thumb-pad until they met.

She did not remember what happened then. She sank back inside the shelter and slept again, not even remembering to set the canes in front of it to cage herself safely against the wild animals. When she woke, the sun up again, she felt better than she had for many days, and when she could find only tufts of torn fur instead of the squirrel skin she’d reckoned on to lay over her scratched leg, she thought the animals had been there in the night and torn it so savagely. Not even the blood, and her swollen, bitten hand, made her remember that she herself had done it.

So on the sunny morning of the first of September, 1755, having eaten a raw squirrel and slept, off and on, for all but two or three of the last twenty-four hours, she was strong enough in her body and in her driven mind to take some stock of herself and begin to plan.

Where she was she had no idea. It might have been, as far as she could remember, one of the valleys of the moon. She might have been born in this vast place—miles on miles of deserted wilderness, with its deep rivers, twisted creek beds, hills, its tree after tree after tree, its cold heights, its streaming lowland, and its vast, tangled, murderous rhododendron thickets. She could remember, at last, her own name—Hannah. Behind that, nothing but shadows, shifting and changing before she could turn her attention full on them. Her mind, then, seemed as vast and as deep as the forest itself, stretching away eternally on all sides, engulfing, dark, and full of things she could not see; but her memory seemed only like the long wire of sunlight that lights so little, one thing, one group of things at a time, resting on them until they are familiar, the rest—the vast rest—unknown and unexplorable; for she could no more guide her own memory than she could catch and tame the fleeting sunbeams.

She was Hannah; she was here. One thing, one startling thing more, flashed to light. Here she was as vulnerable as any beast—more so. For she had neither fleetness nor teeth nor perfect eyes nor warning nose to protect her; she had only her will to go east, and her brain—poor unlit wilderness—and the thumbed hands that lay in her lap. She knew that she must never light a fire, any more than the perpetually warring animals did; that she must not follow the side of the river where the buffalo highway ran, but must keep to the narrower valley, where there were no beaten roads to draw man on. She had realized long since, from watching the wide, deep river wind out toward the sunset, that if she went on against its current, used it like a map until it was shallow enough to cross toward the high mountains far yonder to the east, she would, if she survived, find some kind of safety. But what that safety would be she did not know; she would go on toward the mountains as we go toward death, inevitably moving, driven without choice.

Sighing, having finished her survey of herself, her needs, and the bend of the river—the near meadow still in the dawn shadow from the hills across the river—she got up and said again.

I wisht I hadn’t of et that whole crittur.

So, putting dreams away, she set about her business. She tore long strips of cane with her teeth, chewed along them until they were moister than the dew had made them, preoccupied as a woman knitting by the fire. Two basket-like soles grew in her hands while she watched the sun rise full over the hills beyond, and had to turn as it hit her eyes, and watch down-river, with the vacant look of a craftsman who lets his eyes float without focus until he needs them.

There was a new taste when she chewed, a juice from the stalks, sweet and pleasant. It stilled her hunger as she worked, and she forgot it for a time in the dear excitement of the shoes she’d planned. She sat until the sun was high and hot on her shoulders, then was ready to slip her feet into the shoes, which she had lined thick with soft grass; they were so tightly caned that they made a seven-inch-wide flat print scented with grass stain instead of her own sweat and blood. She put them on and tied them with braided grass, telling herself she must watch out for leather bark along her way, or the ungiving grass braids would cut into her tender scratched legs. She looked down critically at her two huge feet, making up her mind by habit, as if she had some choice in the matter; made up her mind, got up and walked, then almost danced, all alone there, holding the tatters of linsey aside with her hands, pleased and satisfied at the comfort. Then she laid the tall grass in layers around her legs and strapped them on as carefully as she had made her shoes—two great yellow-green hay-legs, with a little body on top.

Sweetheart, I do look a sight! Hannah grinned, embarrassed, at the papaw tree. Seeing it reminded her, and she shook herself and went to work again, made a new large pocket of cane, and strapped it to herself with a grass-braid belt. This took until noon, and she had still not eaten or been to the river to drink. Sadly she filled the pocket with papaws, meaning to tip them out when she had a chance, and went on her way down to drink at the river, hoping with all the pain of ambition fed too long on hope that she would find a little something along the way.

The summer wind was still blowing down-river, full in her face, growing hotter as she walked through the grass toward the herd of deer, which had returned to graze. They did not scent her until she was nearly on them, and even when they did the old ones only raised their heads inquiringly, then bent to food again. One great regal elk with a heavy Stuart face, and antlers like two high diagrams of the rivers of his kingdom standing against the sky, reviewed her tiny figure as she passed, disinterested but watchful as he fed, kneeling on his foreknees. A few of the fawns, which had grown big through the summer, skittered sideways and then went still and lowered heads toward their food again. That was all; they were aware but not gun-shy, as placid as cows, the bucks far gentler in the sun than any farmyard bull. Hannah noticed none of this as strange. She noticed only, measuring with her eyes, how far from the mother the silliest fawn had strayed, noticed and felt the grass along her leg, and resolved to look for sharp stones in the next creek. She stepped high through the grass on her new great booted legs, watching at every step for the snakes, as all eyes and ears as an animal; but, being a woman, she had to rest over and over as she walked the great five-mile bend to the next creek at the end of the meadow. It was only when she leaned down to put her face in the creek to drink that she found food and tools.

It took an hour to catch two little fish in a creek alive with them. But hunger has wits of its own. After trying and trying, watching and learning, Hannah dug with one of her rocks, improving on the smooth creek bank where the fish glided under little eaves in the fast falling water, half-asleep there but always out of reach. She made a small inlet of water in the bank, then, with a large stone at the inlet’s narrow mouth, pinned the fish as the current spilled them in.

To celebrate when the first fish came into the trap, she threw the papaws into the creek and watched them bobble quickly down stream. This time she had learned enough to keep a part of the second fish. She kept it back from her raw feast, wrapped it in leaves, and put it in her pocket with the few sharp flints she had gathered.

These were the activities, the slight dramas. In between them she walked, stumbled, crawled, automatically, hour after hour, changing her way without thinking as the sun wore down on her till her legs ran with sweat under the grass and she tanned a harsh brown over the gray of fatigue. She wandered blindly along the river meadows and down the restful game tracks that ran between them in halls of trees where the woods grew down to the river bank. At first she walked tentatively, with the steps of a woman used to a busy street and lost among the crowds. But, as the days passed, her stride changed in keeping with the space, the terrible freedom of being entirely, hopelessly alone. But always she seemed still to be wandering, although the direction never changed, and always she faced up the unplotted, rolling river.

She had learned finally to swim the wide mouths of the deeper creeks, like a deer, holding her water-panicked head high and strutting wildly with her hard, thin, now brown hands across the water, holding in her mouth the precious cane pocket, or its successor—for the flints cut, and she had to make the pocket and the shoes over and over, damning the time lost as she worked frantically.

This way she trudged through the first days of September, insane with monotony, fear, and sometimes forgetfulness, walking the now rarer, smaller valleys of buffalo grass, the track of time lost completely, only automatic will making her move on.

Of that time she could call to mind later only one separate scene. The bottomlands had run so long in strips between the hills and river that she stopped in her tracks at the sight of a deeper valley lying like an upturned hand between two hills across the river. The gentle place rested, with a creek like a lifeline running through it, as if God, sickened by the magnificence of the huge trees and the mountains, had lain down in mid-Creation, flung out His lovely hand, and gone to sleep awhile. She could see from the river bank the grass-thick bottom near the creek; the flat, trodden yellow ground where the animals had come so long for water; the grove of cedars on the hill behind it; the first turning maple on the hillsides beyond. She stood with her arms crossed, measuring from a distance in her mind’s eye, and frowned a little calculating frown. But the wide, calm river was between them; like Moses, she had to gaze from far off.

Even as she watched she saw upright figures move in single file down the light, sandy game track, which widened toward the creek. The glimmer of a copper pot caught the sun, and Hannah, two hundred yards away, across the river, dropped into the underbrush and lay without a sound, as if the flash of light had been a gunshot, until the wind changed and fanned her face, and she felt safe to crawl away among the trees. So she went on, more wary for a while after seeing the other human beings, then lapsed into her automatic trudge again, past the long semicircle of rock that formed a rampart of perpetually sighing falls which fanned a halo of spray across the river, past the wide basin above it where the water flowed in two great strips, one green from a long, gentle mountain valley, one brown from tearing away the mountain soil in its rush from the miles of gorge to its present peace, where it lay round high islands of rock like a wide moat combining many castles. But Hannah saw nothing of this to remember. She was too tired to do more than put one thick, grass-packed column of leg in front of the other. Sometimes what rambling thoughts she had took on a rhythm, and she would hum a little or sing the only words that ever came—

"With a ruffdom, ruffdom, fizzledom madge …"

—over and over again until she cried to get the silly words washed out of her head. So she’d go on, her face streaked with sweaty tears, for miles, with a ruffdom, ruffdom, fizzledom madge, keeping step with her song though she begged herself not to, until only sleep could release her, and for a few days she would forget, until the merciless song sneaked in again and whipped her to a march.

Every day the high mountains came nearer; she found herself climbing up and down the spurs of the hills as the water cut gently through between them, the bed not yet narrow enough for the water to slip its lead.

Once she had to climb a high cliff that jutted out over the water. It took the whole day’s light, climbing, catching, stumbling, to get across the ridge and down again. She had covered two hundred yards to the east when the night finally came, and she poked a long stick into a huge hollow fallen tree to flush the smaller animals and crawled to sleep at last.

The mountains thrust gradually higher and higher until it was only the sun of the hours around noon that she felt directly. The bare cliffs towered, reminders that the mountains were convulsions of stone, that their green trees grew hard, fought for the earth. The narrow river roared over steep falls, or past single grand table rocks, which forced the water to sing around their keels like ships striking upstream. Then, at the shoals, trout jumped high and the nervous spray jumped after them and rampaged among the rocks. The louder roar of the river meant another thing. There were no more papaw trees in the now tiny, room-sized plateaus too high to be taken at that time of year by the raging water, and the fish were too wary in the perpetual motion of their existence to float lazily into the traps Hannah made from time to time in the bank. Once in a while she found a few blackberry bushes that had not been stripped by the bears, and chestnuts half-hidden in the ground from the season before, left over by the squirrels. But not enough—never enough. She was possessed again by hunger, hag-ridden with it, at the mercy of her daydreams.

September, before the new harvest, was a cruel time to be in the mountains. Millions of animals had cleaned the ground and bushes. Once hunger drove her to a berry-packed shrub, but feeding on the bitter sleek fruit made her stomach gripe and melted her bowels. It was two days after the blank, shivering sickness before she was able to crawl on.

The mountains were turning slowly from summer green and as high as she was a snap of frost was already in the air. Here and there the sumac lay like drops of blood along the banks, and the maples blushed bright scarlet in groves, ripening in huge patches high on the south front of the mountains. But they could not be eaten; Hannah ignored their brightness and searched for food, as tenacious and single-minded as the tree-roots themselves.

At dawn one morning, on a rock table jutting above the rushing river two hundred yards upstream, two tiny figures moved, became one, moved apart again, in the early mist. What they were she could not be certain. Then a sound rose above the loud roar of the river, reverberated down the gorge against the mountainsides, caught her with the stroke of the wind. She began to move up-river herself, warily, nearer to the dancing tiny figures. The sound rushed at her again, the scream torn from an animal in pain. But, apart from the two howls, the figures seemed to be dancing silently by the noisy river; as she came near enough she saw they were bears.

Even nearer, they seemed, from across the river, to be playing. One was obviously caught by something on the rock’s surface; the other danced back and forth, out of the reach of the caught bear’s slapping paws. They could, from the movement, have been flirting, vast and affectionate. But, nearer, she saw the caught bear begin to flag, slump sideways, its neck broken by a final slap; saw, too, that down its fat belly a wide bib of blood ran. The other bear closed into the gushing chest; the blood was obviously a red signal for its greed. She stood, entranced, watching the bear feed for a while across the narrow river, then, satiated at last, wander slowly away into the woods.

She began to plan a way across the dashing water, here over shoals, shallow but swift. She went far upstream and entered where it lay in a deep pool—plunged in and fought her way across it, pulled by the heavy current, rolling, grabbing, as she let the water tumble and bruise her, carrying her downstream, but to the bank where the table-rock stood, blood-covered now, like some vast altar.

The bear had caught its foot in a fissure of the rock. Its chest was nearly gone; its guts lay in the sun. Hannah ate until her head swam, the strong fat running down her skinny body—gorged her fill as the other had. But, being more provident than the killer, she bound the liver and heart with the animal’s sinews to carry with her. Then, full, her work finished, she began to drowse, drunk with meat, until the sun struck her sprawled body, and heated the blood on the littered rock. The dangerous clarion smell of the fresh kill rising in the heat made her jump up, sober with fright, and run to the river to wash and wash the blood from herself, her hands shaking. She buried what slivers of meat were left, with the liver and the heart, covered them with a mound of rocks to protect them from the animals, and finally, clean and full, she crawled onto a low thick nest of branches and slept through the night carelessly and deeply.

Next day, from the new vantage point of the north bank, she saw that the river was bending dangerously toward the south, and that to go east she would have to leave it and steer only by the sun—leave the river and climb the ridge behind her, where the sun had risen.

It was a vast, rising corridor through a grove of thick black trees, cedar and spruce, clinging to the ascent and reaching to the sky. Under them nothing grew; only the rock showed, or the ground, brackish brown with damp needles, slick underfoot and dark. Not so much as a leaf, a vine, disturbed the mountainside. She began to climb through the black woods when she had strapped the meat to her shoulders. Twice she saw branches move, turn into long black snakes, and slip to the ground and away—as shy as she was.

At the top, hours later, she fell. Most of the meat, which had loosened from its bundle without her knowing it, worked free and, before she could catch it, bounded out of sight down the steep, slick grade. She kept on looking dumbly at the path it had taken, then rested, said nothing, bowed her shoulders a little at the inevitable and turned to what she had left. What she had clutched and held was the liver, and on part of that she made her meal.

When she dragged herself over the last slope in the evening, the melancholy black grove ended, and the comfortable sycamores, with their leaves like flat, dependable hands, stood over her in a little grove as she climbed a high flat rock which jutted over the cedars below and made a natural lookout.

The sun had almost set. Before her, casting long shadows on each slope in turn, rolling as far as she could see into the distance, stretched the vast virgin mountain range, nowhere high enough to be above the tree-line—the Endless Mountains, turning blue in the shadows of the distance. The first valley lay giddily deep