before.
The tractor, looking bright red in the morning sun, comes out of the trees. On it, as before, holding his gun in his hand, rides Mr Loomis. The gun barrel shines like a tube of blue glass; it is the small rifle, the .22; he does not want to shatter my leg, only cripple it, because after I am caught he intends it to mend again.
The tractor comes out and behind it is hitched the tractor-cart. In the tractor-cart, tied by his leash, sits Faro. He is enjoying the ride. He has always liked to ride in the cart.
Mr Loomis stops at the store as before, climbs down, gun ready. This time he knows I am not inside, but this time I have more reason to shoot if I am hiding nearby. So he looks sharply.
He takes Faro down from the cart. It is the game they have practised. Holding the leash, he circles the store. Faro picks up my trail immediately—the freshest one, leading towards the house. Mr Loomis does not want that one.
He tries again, a wider circle, and this time it works. Faro starts retracing my morning’s route, tail wagging, backtracking easily. And suddenly this small friendly dog, David’s dog, is an enemy, as dangerous as a tiger, because I know what he is going to do. He will lead Mr Loomis a mile down the road; he will turn left and lead him up the hill and to the cave.
The nightmare lasts an hour. That is how long it takes Mr Loomis, who is not hurrying (but not limping either), to make the trip. Long before that I have run to the cave. My time there is up. I know it is. I have my cloth sack, the feed bag I brought from the barn. I throw into it what I can carry, not choosing very well because I am, stupidly, crying and because my ankle is hurting badly. I take tins of food, this notebook, a blanket, my knife, some water. That is all I can manage if I am to move quickly. That and the gun. I take the small rifle, the pump-action .22 and a box of shells in my pocket.
I have no place to go except higher up the hill and into the woods. I choose a spot overlooking the way they must pass as they approach the cave. There, waiting, ready to run again, I have the worst part of my nightmare. Because I suddenly see what I must do. Wherever I run, as long as Mr Loomis has Faro, he will find me. Therefore I must shoot Faro.
I load the gun, find a hummock for a gun-rest, and lie behind it. In fifteen minutes I see branches moving, still a quarter of a mile down the valley, still on my trail. My ankle aches worse than before, but the crying has stopped; I feel sick but my eyes are clear.
Now they are directly below me. Mr Loomis has Faro on a short leash; he is going very slowly now and limps a little; Faro is tugging. In clear view Mr Loomis stops to listen and I have a stationary target. I draw the bead, the gun is steady and I cannot miss. But at that moment Faro gives a small, impatient tug and a small bark which comes clearly up the hill to my ears. It is his bark of greeting, a soft pleasure bark for me—he knows the cave is just ahead. And at the sound, so gentle and familiar, my finger goes limp on the trigger, and I cannot do it. In the end I lower the gun barrel and they move on out of sight.
In a few more minutes they are at the cave. I cannot see them from where I hide, and I do not dare go where I can because he will be watching and if I can see him he might see me.
I smell smoke. I retreat further up the hill and look back. From the directions of the cave I see it: a thick column, rising fast as from a bonfire. I am feeling sicker—quite dizzy in fact. It is painful to walk, so I sit down and loosen my shoe.
For half an hour the smoke continues; towards the end it grows thinner and fades away. In the distance I hear the sound of the tractor engine starting. It grows fainter. Mr Loomis has walked enough for the day and is going home. When the sound has gone far away and has stopped I know it is safe, and I make my way, sparing my right foot, back to the cave.
It is hard to keep from crying again. In front of the entrance in a black and smouldering pile are the remains of all my things. My sleeping bag, my clothes, even the box I used as a table and the board I had for a bench, all are cinders. My fire-wall kicked down and scattered. My water bottles smashed. I see in the heap a part of the charred cover of
That is my nightmare. I have been in it again as I have written it. The worst part of it is that I really did decide to kill Faro. I am glad I could not pull the trigger, but that does not alter the fact. It makes me feel as much a murderer as Mr Loomis. Now there are two of us in the valley.
And in the end I did kill Faro, though not with the gun.
Chapter Twenty-four
It is raining and I am sitting in the hollow tree to keep dry. I slept here most of last night—after the rain started—and it is cramped and I worry about spiders. Even so, I woke up feeling more hopeful than I have for a long time. My ankle is almost well but the main reason I feel hopeful is that at last I have decided what to do. I have made a plan:
For several days after I was shot I was aware of very little. I think I had a fever, though I had no thermometer to find out, and my ankle swelled very large and looked bad—blue on one side and bright red on the other. I did not attempt to walk on it—it hurt too much when I put it down—but when I had to move I hopped on one foot. Most of the time I lay still, wrapped in my blanket. I slept a great deal.
Sometimes I thought I heard noises in the distance—the sound of the tractor running, the sound of hammering—but I could not be sure. Mr Loomis, if he had known it, could have tracked me down easily with Faro’s help and caught me, because I could not run. But of course he did not know it, since the injury had seemed slight, and when he last saw me I had been sprinting at high speed. He must have assumed that he had missed. So he was busying himself with other things—I would have to come out eventually—and he missed his chance.
It was during those days of sleeping that a dream began, a dream I have had many times since. At first the dream was not very clear to me—I was only aware of the sense that I had been walking in a strange place, and of a feeling of disappointment, when I awoke, at finding myself still in the valley.
People’s dreams bore me generally; before this one, I have had only a few that I remembered longer than a few seconds after I awoke. Yet this dream was more important than any I had ever heard before, or dreamed. Coming night after night, it began to dominate my thoughts, so that first I hoped and then later believed in what it seemed to tell: there is another place where I can live. And I am needed there: there is a schoolroom lined with books, and children sitting at the desks. There is no one to teach them so they cannot read. They sit waiting, watching the door. When I am sleeping I can see their faces, and I wish I knew their names. They look as if they have been waiting for a long time.
And so I decided to leave the valley. I was convinced, after the shooting incident, that Mr Loomis was insane. We would never be able to live in the same place in peace. I lived in constant fear of being seen and hunted down: the sound of pebbles sliding on the rocks, a twig snapping, even the wind in the leaves could make my blood run cold. The valley, which had been home and shelter for my whole life, seemed now to threaten me wherever I went, whatever I did.
At first my plan was very vague, really not much more than a wish that would come to me when I was too tired or sad to think of anything else. I would think of the place in the dream, and wonder where it was. From what I could remember it was not so different from places I had visited as a child; not north, because my parents and Mr Loomis had seen the deadness in the north, but maybe south. There are many valleys to the south, all with farms, a store, a school. Was it so unrealistic to think of people there, alive, afraid to leave?
I decided to go to them. I would prepare myself for a long journey and a long search. I would go as Mr Loomis had before me—wearing the safe-suit, pulling the cart. I would take the binoculars, and perhaps the gun. I would walk as far as I could each day, looking for the children in the dream.
Once I had developed the plan, and begun to realize that it was not just a wish but something that I was actually going to do, there were many things to think about. I had no idea how much food remained in the wagon,
