'I know that now'
I will be dead soon, he had thought, and sleep took him.
But he wasn't dead yet. The thoughts of his bride had, strangely, given him strength. When he awoke, the men were gone and the forest was dark and quiet.
A raven landed directly in front of him on the bloody branch. Its wings were so large that they thumped both sides of his head as it settled. He had never seen a live wild bird this close. This was not a Disney bird. This was an Alfred Hitchcock bird. The raven's feathers were black and had a blue sheen, and the bird hopped so closely to Stewie's face that he could see his reflection in the beads of water on its wings. The raven cocked its head from side to side with clipped, seemingly mechanized movements. The raven's eyes looked intense and passionless, he thought, like glistening ebony buttons. Then the raven dug its black beak into Stewie's neck and emerged with a piece of red flesh.
He had closed his eyelids tightly so the raven could not pluck his eyes out. The raven began to strip flesh from his face. The raven's beak would pierce his skin near his jaw and clamp hard, then the bird's body would brace as it pulled and ripped a strip upward, where it would eventually weaken and break near his scalp. Then the raven would sit back calmly and with lightning nods of its head devour the stringy piece whole, as if it were a thick, bloody worm.
The thought he had, as the wind increased and his body swayed gently, was that he really hated this bird.
'I saw the same bird when I climbed your tree,' Joe said. 'The bird made me fall out of it.'
He freed himself by forcing his body up and over the branch, sliding along the grain of the wood, in the single most painful experience of his life. Disengaging himself from the skewer left him weak and trembling, and he fell more than climbed from the tree. For ten days he crawled. He had become an animal and he had learned to behave like an animal.
He tried to kill something to eat but he was hampered by his bulk and lack of skill. Once, he spent an entire agonizing day at the mouth of a prairie dog hole with a makeshift snare, missing the fat rodent though it raised its head more than forty times. So he became a scavenger
As he crawled south west, through the forest, he competed with coyotes for fresh deer and elk carcasses. Plunging his head into fresh mountain springs, he had crunched peppery wild -watercress. He had stripped the hard shells from puffballs and had gorged on mountain mushrooms, grazing in the wet grass like a cow. A thick stand of rose hips near a stream had provided vitamin C. He had even, he was ashamed to say, raided a campsite near Crazy Woman Creek and had gorged on a two pound bag of Doritos and six BallPark franks while the campers snored in their dome tent. He had seen the earth from inches away for weeks on end. It was a very humbling experience. His clothing was rags. He slept in the shelter of downed trees. He wept often.
He had purposely not crawled to a road or campsite where he could be found, because he thought to do so would be to invite his death -when the men who had already tried to kill him once found out about it.
At a ranch house near Story Wyoming, a lovely woman, a widow, found him and took him in and agreed to keep it quiet. She fed him, let him use a guest room in the bunkhouse, and gave him her dead husband's clothes to wear. He gained enough strength to walk again. She had been a tough, independent rancher and a woman of strength. She was exactly the type of rancher he had convinced himself in previous years to despise.
Eventually he was well enough to get a ride from her to the cabin. He had known about it from his youth and it belonged to a family friend who never used it. Slowly, he had initiated contact with colleagues. Britney had been the first to respond, and had come hearing groceries and communications gear. Hayden Powell said he was coming but he died mysteriously Attorney Tod Marchand didn't make it, either. Both, he now knew, had been murdered by Coble and Tibbs.
'That's a hell of a story'
Stewie shrugged and looked away His good eye was moist. Joe couldn't tell whether the retelling of his story made Stewie cry or if it was something else.
'What's that glow over there?' Britney Earthshare suddenly asked from behind them. Joe had not heard her approach.
To the west, the peak of the first mountain was illuminated by a faint band of orange.
'That's your cabin burning down,' Joe said, feeling the words catch in his throat. 'That means Charlie Tibbs is still with us.'
***
JOE'S EYES SHOT OPEN TO UTTER DARKNESS, his heart racing. Something had set off an alarm in his subconscious that had jolted him completely awake.
It took a moment to assess exactly where he was. He had fallen asleep in the camp beneath the ridge. The sky was brilliant with stars. There were so many of them their effect was gauzy There was a blue sliver of moon like a horse's hoof print.
Stewie and Britney were huddled together near Joe's boots, their arms and legs entwined. They were both sleeping from sheer physical and mental exhaustion, like he had been.
Above him, somewhere near the tree line, Joe heard a muffled snap and the rustle of something heavy-bodied in the trees.
As quietly and deliberately as he could, Joe shifted his weight so he could unsnap his holster and slip out his .357 Magnum. His mouth was dry as cotton. With his eyes wide open, he tried to will himself to see better in the dark.
There was a footfall. Was it the step of a horse? Was Charlie Tibbs on top of them already? Would Tibbs, on horseback in the shadows, suddenly appear before him?
He pulled the hammer back on the revolver, felt the cylinder turn, and heard it ratchet and lock. He raised it in front of him with two hands. Using the muzzle as a third eye, he moved the pistol as he
swept his gaze through the darkness.
A large black form disengaged itself from the gloom and passed in front of the gray trunks of the trees. There was a snort and a cough, and Joe felt his face twitch involuntarily
