“I’m getting the hell out of here, Doc. You’re welcome to come with me, or you can try your luck finding the way out yourself.”
For a moment neither man moved, locked in a test of wills—a test that Warthrop failed. He ran a hand through his thick hair and sighed loudly. He looked at Chanler; he looked at me. He considered the sliver of gray sky sliced off by the canopy.
“Very well,” he said, “but it is my burden.”
He slid his arms beneath the fragile form, and rose unsteadily with the wasted body. Chanler’s forehead pressed against the base of Warthrop’s neck.
“I shall carry him,” the doctor said.
TEN
Our flight to Rat Portage was painfully slow. Warthrop called for many halts to check Chanler’s vital signs and to attempt getting more water into him. Slowing the pace too was Sergeant Hawk—or rather Sergeant Hawk’s finding his bearings in the fog. It thickened as the day wore on, a colorless miasma that obscured the trail and peopled the forest with looming shadows and flitting apparitions upon which the imagination seized and ascribed portents of doom. In this gray land of muffled sound and borrowed light, our very breath was snatched from our mouths and trammeled underfoot.
By four o’clock the light had all but vanished. We made camp for the night no more than seven miles from the shores of Sandy Lake and still several miles from the grave of Pierre Larose. The doctor eased his load onto the ground and collapsed against a tree. His respite lasted only a minute or two; soon he was up again fussing over Chanler, wiping his brow, raising his head to force a bit more water down his throat, calling to him in a loud voice —but Chanler would not be roused. I gathered wood for our fire before the last of the light was snuffed out. Hawk inventoried our meager supplies, reckoning we had enough to last another five days. After that, we would have to live off the land.
“I’d planned on resupplying at Sandy Lake,” he said defensively when the doctor raised an eyebrow at this bit of bad news. “You didn’t tell me there’d be a kidnapping.”
The sergeant did not seem himself. His eyes would not stay still; they shifted right and left and back again restlessly, and he could not seem to stop wetting his lips.
“How did you manage to find him?” he asked.
“Fiddler. I thought if John was alive, Fiddler might check on him, and the odds were he would not risk it while we were awake. And my guess was right. At a little after two he came out of his wigwam, and I followed him. They had put John in a wigwam on the northern edge of the village, far removed from the others, as one might expect. It is common practice among indigenous peoples to construct a ‘sick house’ to isolate infectious members from the rest of the tribe.
“After that, it was only a matter of time and preparation. No guard was posted. I merely had to wait for Fiddler to go to bed.”
“What happened, do you think?” Hawk was staring at the opening of the tent wherein Chanler lay, the white of the blanket barely visible in the firelight.
“I can only guess,” answered the doctor wearily. “Either he stumbled into their camp or someone found him and brought him there. He was probably lost, separated from Larose—the man admitted as much in his letter to Muriel—and it nearly got the better of him.”
“It will, if you don’t know what you’re about,” agreed Hawk. His eyes cut toward the doctor. “Muriel . . . is that the missus?”
“Yes.”
“Hmm.”
“What?”
The sergeant glanced my way. “Nothing,” he said.
“Clearly it was not.”
“Just clearing my throat.”
“You did not clear your throat. You said, ‘hmm,’ like that. I would like to know what you meant.”
“I didn’t mean anything. Hmm. That’s all it was, Doctor. Just hmm.”
Warthrop snorted. He threw the dregs of his tea into the shadows and ducked into the tent to be with his patient. Hawk looked at me again, a crooked smile playing on his lips.
“And cease that infernal singing!” the doctor shouted.
The sergeant complied with Warthrop’s brusque request, and would not sing again for the remainder of our flight back to civilization. I call it ‘flight,’ for that is what it was, torturously slow though it proved to be. We were fleeing something—and we were bringing what we fled with us.
We woke on the next morning beneath an ominous gray sky. By noon a light snow had begun to fall, carpeting the trail with dusty powder that quickly grew slick; more than once the doctor nearly went down with his precious cargo. The sergeant would offer to spell him, each time rebuffed by Warthrop. The doctor seemed jealous of his burden.
It was cold and still; not a breath of wind stirred; and the snow, like the fog, deadened sound. We marched through vaulted chambers of brown and white, down desolate halls devoid of color, bereft of life. The nights fell with crushing suddenness. The daylight seemed not so much to fade as to vanish. Darkness was the true face of the desolation, its elemental substance.
More than the monotonous scenery or the miles of rough trail that crawled underfoot, that dark weighed upon us. It numbed our souls to senselessness as the cold numbed our fingertips and toes, a pitch-black tactile dark that mocked our feeble attempts to drive it away, a darkness that pressed down with suffocating force. I began to envy John Chanler and the feverish oblivion in which he dwelled.
And I worried about the doctor. Even on his worst days back at Harrington Lane, when he retreated to his bed and remained there for hours, refusing all sleep and sustenance, lost in a melancholy so profound all he could do was breathe, even those days seemed as bright as springtime compared to what he endured now. And he endured it for someone other than himself, a stunning revelation for me, who up to that point had thought him the most self-absorbed man on the continent. His face grew gaunt, his eyes receded into their sockets, his duster hung upon him like an empty garment upon a hanger. He was coming to resemble the man he was carrying.
I urged him to eat and rest, scolding him like a parent and reminding him he was no good to his friend if he succumbed to the same fate. He endured my chiding and rarely lost his temper, except on one memorable occasion when he dressed me down for more than a quarter of an hour. It might have gone on longer, but Hawk informed him that if he didn’t shut up, the sergeant was going to put a bullet through the back of his head.
After the last morsel of hardtack and cured bacon had been consumed, the sergeant shouldered his rifle and tramped into the woods, disappearing for the rest of the afternoon. We made no progress that day. Near dusk Hawk returned, empty-handed. He dropped the weapon to the ground and collapsed before the fire, muttering under his breath, swiping his mouth with the back of his hand incessantly and wetting his lips.
“Nothing,” he murmured. “Nothing. I’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing for miles.”
He lifted his eyes to the sky. “Not even a bird. Nothing. Nothing.”
“Well, we still have each other,” said the doctor consolingly, trying to lift his spirits. “You know, the Donner Party option.”
Hawk stared at him without expression, his mouth hanging open, and I thought the doctor, who knew so well his own limitations, must have been really out of sorts to even attempt humor. It was ludicrous, like a man trying to fly by flapping his arms.
Hunger became the newest member of our company, far stronger and far more resilient than the rest of us, and we were the dried bones upon which it chewed. There was no real resting when we stopped. Hawk and I would push our way into the bush, plucking berries, digging up edible roots such as Indian potatoes and toothwort, pinching the heads from puffball mushrooms, stripping bark from hickory trees, which we boiled, to soften it. (This
