I started this in the morning, while I was resting. Then I did some more work, ate some lunch, and now it is afternoon.
The smoke has come again. It is definitely on this side of Claypole Ridge. As nearly as I can guess, about half way between the ridge and Burden Hill. That means he
I feel as if it is the beginning of the end. I must make up my mind what to do.
A strange thing. Whoever it is, he is certainly moving slowly. If he came over the ridge, as he had to do, he must have seen the valley and the green trees, because the ridge is higher than Burden Hill. You can see it from there, I know—the far end of it at least—because I’ve done it so many times myself in the old days. So you’d think he would be in a hurry. If he walked towards Dean Town, or the other way, east on number nine, he would see only the deadness, as I have seen it, everything grey and brown and all the trees like stalks. He has probably seen nothing else all the way, wherever he came from. And between the ridge and Burden Hill he is still in it. The distance is only about eight miles—yet he seems to have stopped halfway and camped.
Tomorrow morning I may go up near the top of Burden Hill, climb a tree and watch. I won’t go on the road. There is a path that goes in the same direction but is in the woods higher up the hillside. In fact the wood has quite a lot of paths. I know them all. If I go I will take one of my guns, the light one, the .22 rifle. I am a good shot with mat, better than Joseph or David, though I have only practised on tins and bottles. The big one, Father’s deer rifle, has too much kick. I have shot with it, but I tend to wince when I pull the trigger, and that throws my aim off. I don’t expect to use the gun anyway, really, I don’t like guns, I just think I ought to have it with me. After all, I don’t know what to expect.
Tonight before I go, if I go, I have to get some more water into the cave, and to cook some stuff. I won’t be able to build a fire after he reaches the valley. By day he would see the smoke, at night he would see the flames because it has to be outside. We built a fire in the cave once, and had to run outside because the smoke got so thick. Tonight I will cook some chicken, boil some eggs (hard), make some cornmeal bread, so I won’t have to eat just tinned things, at least for a while.
I could get water by sneaking to the brook at night. But I think it is safer to store some. I have six big bottles—cider jugs—with tops.
That was another thing I had to decide about when the electricity went off: water. There was—there is—a drilled well near the house, about sixty feet deep, with an electric pump. We had an electric hot water heater, a shower, bath, all that, but of course they all stopped working. So I had to carry water. You can’t lower a bucket into a drilled well; the hole is too small, so that left me a choice of two brooks. The one that flows past the cave, the one I can see from here, goes on down towards the house but then turns left into the pasture, where it widens into a good pond—a small lake, really, clear and quite deep, with bream and bass in it. The other, named Burden Creek (after my family, like the hill—the Burdens were the first to settle in this valley), is bigger and wider, also nearer to the house. It flows more or less parallel to the road, and out of the valley through the gap at the south. It is really a small river, and quite beautiful, or used to be.
Since it was nearer, I thought I would carry water to the house from that—two buckets at a time as needed. Then, just in time, I noticed something. It had fish in it, too, though not as big or as many as the pond. But the first time I went to get water I saw a dead fish floating past. I found a dead turtle on the bank. This stream flows into the valley out of a sort of cleft in the rock ridge to the left of Burden Hill—the water comes from outside, and it was poisoned. I looked a long time (I kept back from it, though) and I saw that there was nothing left alive in it at all, not even a frog or a water-bug.
I was scared. I ran (with the buckets) all the way to the pond, up to the far end where the small stream flows in. I was never so glad to see a bunch of minnows in my life! They scooted away, just as they always had. The water was all right, and still is. It rises from a spring up the hill, inside the valley, and it must come from deep underground. I catch fish in the pond all the time, and eat them; they are one of my best food supplies except in the middle of winter, when they stop biting.
I think I will definitely go in the morning, as soon as it is light. Now that I have decided, I am beginning to worry about something that I know is really foolish: how I look. How I’m dressed. I thought about it this morning when I was at the house, and I looked in the mirror, which I don’t often do anymore. I have on blue jeans, but they are men’s blue jeans (there are cartons of them at the store, but no girls’) so they don’t fit too well, but are rather baggy. And a man’s work shirt, cotton flannel, and boys’ tennis shoes. Not exactly elegant, and my hair isn’t exactly stylish—I just cut it off square around my neck. For a while I used to curl it every night—the way I did for school— but that took time, and finally I realized that no one would see it besides me. So it is straight but clean and has turned much lighter because I am outdoors so much. I think I am not as skinny as I used to be but it is hard to tell in these clothes.
But what I wonder—should I wear a dress? Suppose it
It is a man, one man alone.
This morning I went as I planned. I put on my good slacks, took the .22 and hung the binoculars around my neck. I climbed a tree and saw him coming up the road. I could not really see what he looks like, because he is dressed, entirely covered, in a sort of greenish plastic-looking suit. It even covers his head, and there is a glass mask for his eyes—like the wet suits skin divers wear in cold water, only looser and bulkier. Like skin-divers, too, he has an air-tank on his back. But I could tell it was a man, even though I could not see his face, by his size and the way he moves.
The reason he is coming so slowly is that he is pulling a wagon, a thing about the size of a big trunk mounted on two bicycle wheels. It is covered with the same green plastic as his suit. It is heavy, and he was having a hard time pulling it up Burden Hill. He stopped to rest every few minutes. He still has about a mile to go to reach the top.
I have to decide what to do.
Chapter Three
Now it is night.
He is in my house.
Or possibly not in it, but just outside it, in a small plastic tent he put up. I cannot be sure, because it is too dark to see clearly. I am watching from the cave, but the fire he built—outside the house, in the garden—has burned down. He built it with my wood.
He came over the top of Burden Hill this afternoon. I had come up to watch, having eaten some lunch and changed back to my blue jeans. I decided not to show myself. I can always change my mind later.
I wondered what he would do when he reached the top. He must have been pretty sure, but not quite, that he was coming to a place where things were living. As I said, you can see it from the Ridge, but not too well—it is a long way. And maybe he had been fooled before; maybe he thought it was a mirage.
There is a flat place where the road first reaches the top of the hill—a stretch of about a hundred yards or so before it starts descending again, into the valley. When you get just past the middle of this you can see it all, the river, the house, the barn, the trees, pasture, everything. It has always been my favourite sight, maybe because when I saw it I was always coming home. Being spring, today it is all a new fresh green.
When he got to that place he stopped. He dropped the shaft of the wagon and just stared for about a minute. Then he ran forward down the road, very clumsy in his plastic suit, waving his arms. He ran to a tree by the roadside and pulled a branch, tearing off the leaves and holding them close to his glass face mask. You could tell he
