ants won’t get on the meat.”
Later that afternoon, Derek went back to work on the deer and finished the job of removing the skin, carrying the bloody hide to the edge of the bayou to wash it. Then he returned to the fire pit where Casey was sitting, watching the venison steaks roasting on green branches directly over the coals.
“Now I’m going to be able to make you a nice buckskin dress, to go with that pair of moccasins I’ve been working on. First this hide’s got to be scraped; then we’ll tan it with the deer’s brains. I bet you didn’t know it, but every animal has enough brains to tan its own hide. That’s how the Indians did it, and it makes the finest buckskin that can be had. I want you to watch closely, because this is women’s work and you’ll be doing the next one.”
Derek had cut some stakes from a small sapling with the axe. He used the blunt side of it to hammer them down, then laid the axe back down behind him, on top of the pile of firewood Casey had prepared earlier. Punching holes in the corners of the hide with his knife, he stretched it out between the stakes until it was tight, the hair side down, against the ground. Then he showed Casey how to scrape away the fat and bits of meat that still clung to it, using the edge of his hunting knife, turned at a 90-degree angle to keep from cutting into it.
“Here, you try it,” he said, holding the knife out to her.
“Okay, but can you give me a minute? I need to go over in the woods and use the bathroom.”
“Make it quick!”
When she was done, Casey returned to the fire, knowing she would be forced to do the disgusting work of scraping the deer hide. As she walked nearer, it suddenly struck her that Derek was totally preoccupied with the hide, not bothering to look up when she approached. His back was to her and he was bent over it on his knees, pulling the knife across it in long, two-handed strokes. She glanced at the woodpile and saw the axe. It was lying there forgotten, completely out of his field of view.
Casey realized that at last she had a chance to do something decisive about her situation. It was the best opportunity she’d had during the entire time she’d been this man’s prisoner, and there might not be another like it for a long time, if ever. There was no time to be squeamish or even let herself think about the fact that her captor was a fellow human being, just like her. There was only time to act, and that’s what she did. Without making a sound, she bent over and picked up the heavy tool, then shifted her grip to grasp the handle with both hands. She brought it back over her shoulder to gather all the strength she could muster, and swung it as hard as she could, knowing she had only one chance and that she’d better not miss or hold anything back.
She felt the shock of the impact all the way through her arms and into her shoulders. The axe blade struck with a dull thud and she could feel something give as Derek’s head absorbed the blow. His body slumped forward onto the stretched deerskin, and she wrenched the handle back to free the axe in case she needed to hit him again. But it was clear that there was no need. One of his legs was twitching, but he would never get back up. She could see that she had split the back of his skull with one blow, and she threw the axe aside in horror, turning away from a sight that she knew she would never be able to forget. She looked nervously around the clearing, as if she expected to see witnesses that would testify to this brutal murder she’d just committed, but she was all alone. She told herself again that she had done what she had to do. She’d had no choice if she wanted to ever be free to leave.
Casey stepped away from the fire pit and quickly climbed up the wooden ladder to the tree house. She began collecting the things she knew she would need, starting with Derek’s lever-action carbine, the .22 rifle, and the AK-47 with the folding stock. Then she rummaged through his backpack and found her father’s pistol. Once she had all the guns gathered up, she opened one of the ammo cans and sorted out a few boxes of shells, reading the labels to make sure she had some for each weapon. Then she opened the five-gallon buckets to go through the food supplies, and filled one to the top with bags of rice and canned goods before resealing the lid. She then put the guns and ammo in one of the big duffel bags and loaded a smaller pack with butane lighters, insect repellent, a cooking pot, a can opener, and other necessities Derek had among his gear. It took her three trips to carry all this stuff from the tree house to the edge of the bayou and load it in the canoe. Each time she walked back into the camp to get another load, she couldn’t help but glance at the body beside the fire pit, just to make sure Derek was really dead and no longer a threat to her.
The afternoon light was rapidly fading when she finally got underway in the canoe, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to go far before the swamp was enveloped in darkness. But she was determined to go as far as possible from that awful place while she could still see. She pushed off the bottom with the paddle and struggled to steer the long canoe through the twists and turns of the winding bayou. Frequently banging the bow into trees and getting the keel stuck in the mud along the edges, she made slow progress, but at least she was moving.
When the deepening twilight finally overtook her, Casey pulled the canoe onto a muddy bank and hurriedly scrounged some dry leaves and broke dead twigs off of nearby branches to start a fire. She managed to get it going before full nightfall, but there was not enough dry wood in the immediate vicinity to build it up to any size or to keep it stoked until morning. She huddled in its glow as long as she was able to keep it burning, using the can opener to open a can of mixed vegetable soup, which she placed near the flames to warm before eating it and drinking the broth from the can. In her haste to leave, she had not thought to include even one of Derek’s cooking pots as she gathered the things she thought she would need.
She had no idea what she would do when morning came; her only plan was to follow the bayou downstream. It had to come out
She sat by the fire thinking about the prospects for her future and worrying about Grant and Jessica, as well as her father and her Uncle Larry. After what she had gone through with Derek since that day he’d taken her by surprise, she couldn’t imagine that she would face anything worse. Even sitting there alone, surrounded by the blackness of the night forest with her firewood nearly depleted, she was not afraid anymore. She had turned the tables on her captor and rescued herself completely on her own, and she knew after that experience that she could overcome any other obstacles that might loom in her path tomorrow or beyond. When the fire finally burned down, she sat propped against the canoe, and finally dozed off.
She awoke with a scream, her rest shattered by a nightmare of Derek looming out of the blackness to grab her, half of his brains spilling out of the bloody wound in the back of his head like some specter from a horror movie. After that vision, she knew there was no hope of getting more sleep, so she spent the rest of the night awake, huddled against the canoe and waiting for dawn.
When the light finally came, she lost no time getting on the move again. She wanted to get to the end of the little bayou as quickly as possible, and away from the closed-in feeling of the dense forest that surrounded it. In less than an hour of paddling, she reached that goal. The bayou suddenly opened up ahead of her and its clear waters merged with the muddy brown current of a big river, which she was certain had to be a branch of the Pearl. She drifted out onto its broad, sunlit expanse, feeling as if she had suddenly stepped out of a darkened room into daylight after days of confinement. But despite her relief at the relatively wide-open space before her, she could see that she was literally not out of the woods yet. There was nothing on either bank but walls of greenery bounding the waterway on both sides, much the same as the river upstream had appeared before they turned off to go to Derek’s camp.
She resumed paddling, easing into a steady rhythm that would eat up the miles, but hoping to find a place to land soon so she could eat something and take a short nap to make up for losing so much sleep during the night. She had only rounded one big bend of the river when she came to a good-sized sandbar. Knowing now that such nice places to stop would be few and far between in the swamp, she landed and tied the canoe off to a big piece of driftwood. The warmth of the morning sun was so pleasant she stretched out immediately on the soft sand next to the canoe and fell fast asleep.
How long she slept there, she had no idea, but when she awoke it was to the sharp clang of metal on metal as something banged against the side of the canoe. At first she thought she was still in the boat and that it had drifted down the river and bumped against a log or something, but she was really too tired to care and just wanted to go back to sleep—that is, until she heard voices—
