closed. And I slept, though all night I was aware that my leg was throbbing.
CHAPTER 26
WHAT woke me was the sound of Pearl drinking water from a puddle which had formed at the other end of the root hole. It was daylight. Still raining. I felt very sore. My leg felt swollen and hot. The fire was out. I wasn't dry.
And I was hungry. I scooped a little water out of the puddle with my cupped hand and drank. It was muddy tasting with a nose of pine needles. I looked at the sky.
'Sun would be nice,' I said. 'Be warmer. Be drier. Be able to tell directions a lot easier.'
Pearl was sitting looking at me with the expectation of breakfast.
'Well, it's better than sitting in some quarantine pen in England, isn't it?'
The sky was lightest back where east should be. North was along the top of this slope we had climbed up in the night.
'We'll head out,' I said. 'And we'll keep an eye out for breakfast. Nature never failed the heart that loved her.'
Every few yards I would stop and listen. If they found me they'd kill me.
The fact that I wasn't Beaumont would mean nothing. Gerry was going to kill somebody, and if it were me it would please him fine. Ahead of me the land sloped down. The leg would slow me down more and more until I got it cleaned out and healing. Which meant I had better get out of the woods pretty quick or have a plan for dealing with them when they caught up with me. I wasn't going to outwalk them.
As the land continued to drop, I could see a gray glint of water through the trees. I was feeling feverish now, and turned my face up toward the rain to cool it. Pearl was a little ahead of me. She seemed to have gotten used to the rain. I don't think she liked it, but it didn't puzzle her anymore, and she had stopped turning and looking at every raindrop that hit her. Suddenly I saw her drop her head low, her belly sucked up, her neck extended, and then she charged, running like pointers do, using more of their front feet than their rear. She swerved sharply right, then back left, and I realized she had an animal in front of her. It was a groundhog.
She had it trapped in the open away from its hole. It couldn't outrun her, and near the edge of a pond it turned and crouched. Pearl swung half around it as she came up on the groundhog and grabbed him by the back of the neck.
She gave one sharp shake and broke its neck and dropped it and turned it over and began to eat it, ripping open its belly and eating the viscera.
My baby had given way for a moment to something older and more fundamental. She wasn't cute while she ate the groundhog.
Along the edge of the marsh I found some Jerusalem artichokes, and uprooted one, cut off the potato-esque tubers on the roots, peeled and ate it. It was like eating a raw potato, but less tasty. Still it was nourishment, and it beat chasing down a groundhog. I put a couple more of the tubers in my pocket for through-the-day snacking.
The pond looked like a glacial gouge that had slowly filled in over the millennia. Its surface was dappled with rain, and there were weeds, including Jerusalem artichokes, along the margin. I found an area where I could get at the water and knelt and drank some. It had the strong rank taste of vegetation. Carefully I took off the bloody bandage and washed it in the pond. I dropped my jeans. The wound was dark with crusted blood and the flesh around it was puffy and red. I found some kind of moss in among the rocks along the margin of the pond and wet it and mixed it with some mud and put it on the wound like a kind of poultice. Then I wrapped it with the wet sweatshirt sleeves to hold it in place and tied it again and pulled my pants back up, edging the trouser leg carefully over the mess of a bandage.
Pearl finished with the groundhog. I went over and looked at the carcass.
It was about half devoured. I picked it up and put it inside my jacket.
Pearl would be hungry again, and despite her initial success, I wasn't confident that she could live off the land. She jumped up to sniff where I hadstashed the carcass and rested one big paw on my wounded leg. I yelped and she dropped to the ground and backed off a yard and sat down very quickly, looking at me with her ears pricked forward and her head canted.
'Come on,' I said, and we moved north again.
I ate some chokecherries, which were quite biting, and I found some acorns which I cracked and chewed and swallowed despite the strong bitterness of the tannin in them. If I had had something to soak them in, and time, I could have leached out the tannin. But I didn't, and if I had, how good are leached acorns anyway? Later on, as we moved through the heavy cover, I gnawed at some more of the Jerusalem artichoke root. Everything I ate tasted like tarantula juice, but I knew I had to eat, and this was the bestI could find.
The drizzle was persistent. By noontime I was beginning to feel light-headed, and the pulsing in my leg was Wagnerian. I wasn't going to be able to walk for too much longer. We crossed a stream, and again I washed my wound and washed the bandages and tied them back in place. I paused and stood still, listening. I couldn't hear anything except the sound the rain made in the woods. The ground rose ahead of me and I went up it. Whenever I could I stayed on the high ground, where it was a little easier going than the hollows. I found a big old pine and climbed it clumsily; my left leg was feeling more and more useless. Except for the pain it was largely without feeling, as if the pulsing insulated it from everything else. When I got as high as the tree could support me, I wedged myself into a crotch, with one arm wrapped around the trunk and waited and watched. Below me Pearl sat on the ground, looking up. The half-gnawed groundhog inside my jacket was beginning to ripen. My hair was wet and the water dripped onto my forehead and into my eyes. I was feverish, and hot, except that I was also cold, and the effort of climbing the tree had made me more than light-headed. I was dizzy.
I took in some air, and exhaled, and did that a couple of times, and concentrated on the woods behind me, where Pearl and I had come from. Maybe a mile back was a bare patch, a basalt outcropping of maybe thirty or forty yards. I focused on it. Pearl and I had crossed it maybe forty minutes ago, and if they were behind us they'd cross it too. Not only did my trail lead that way-if they really had somebody who could follow a trail-but anyone would head for it because it was much easier going, if only for a little ways.
The acorns and chokecherries and Jerusalem artichokes rolled unpleasantly around in my stomach. The drizzle had upgraded again to a steady rain. The smell of pitch and pine needle and wetness was very strong as I pressed against the tree. A double Glenfiddich on the rocks would have been helpful. Pearl whined a little, nervously, from
