holes of the first bullet, just below the waterline. The canoe was filling up,
The next shot shattered the left strut beside her leg. The canoe seemed to buckle and founder, and then she was sideways and going down. The canoe just listed to the side and scooped itself under. In an instant she was in water so cold it seemed to clap the breath out of her lungs. She gasped, and her legs kicked in a reflex to try to lift her body out of the water. The fourth shot hit ahead of her, smacked into the water and threw up a splash so close she could feel droplets on her face.
She ducked again, putting her head under, and saw the canoe sinking far down below, looking yellowish, then green, then brown as it slowly drifted into black depths. She held her breath and swam under the surface, her hands scooping the water and her legs pulling her wet boots in a clumsy frog kick.
She saw the next bullet from under the water. It shattered the mirror surface ahead of her, not there at all one second, and then a bright silver streak made of bubbles and speed, and then lost. She came up and broke into a freestyle, swimming as hard as she could, and then her hand hit rock. She hoisted herself out, and when her feet touched, she was running. The trees started six feet back from the rocks, and then she was among them, sprinting into the woods.
She ran hard, through brambles and thickets and across glades blanketed with ankle-high plants that could have been poison sumac or ivy, scrambling higher up the side of the hill. After a time she found herself far above the lake. She lay face-down on a big rock and looked back down the way she had come, but she could see no movement in the forest below her. Then she saw the canoe.
He must have been shooting from across the lake. He had gotten into his canoe and paddled to the place where she had run into the woods. He was drifting offshore, scanning the woods and hills. Then she heard his voice. It made something in her reverberate. It was the voice she had listened to at Grand River and tried to make herself remember afterward, but now the familiarity of it made her feel sick.
'Jane!' he called. 'It’s me!'
She pressed her face against the rock, trying to disappear into it.
'I found your pack in the water. I didn’t know it was you. Don’t be afraid!'
She pushed herself backward on her belly and down behind some stunted pine trees, then looked down cautiously. His head was turned up toward the woods around the lake, looking for movement or color. She couldn’t see her pack in his canoe, and she couldn’t imagine how it could have floated back up, but she did see the binoculars. He lifted them off the floor of the canoe and began to search the hillside. She dropped to her belly again and slithered away from the rocks into the trees.
In a moment he would land and come for her on foot. She stood and ran again. The ground was slippery from the rain and every step was uphill. There was no doubt that he would follow, and she knew she was leaving tracks. She had to go for distance now, just paces that she could put between them. The trees and brush seemed to grab at her and hold her back, and at every clear space she could almost feel the crosshairs settling between her shoulder blades.
It must have been an hour later when she stopped to catch her breath. She lay down with a stitch in her side and limbs that felt like stone. She was too tired to think, but she listened and stared into the woods she had come from, trying to gasp for air without making noise.
Then the voice reached out to her again. 'Jane!' he called. 'You’re making a mistake!'
She held her breath and then realized that she had to go on, and she needed to keep breathing hard to do it. Hiding would just give him time to catch her. 'You’re alone, with no food or water!'
She sprang to her feet and ran on, higher into the woods. At noon she was at the peak of the mountain. It was bare rock, nearly at the tree line, with only scraggly pines to hide her. She moved along the ridge, trying to see him coming. If only she could find a hiding place, a cave or something. But there was nothing up here that would hide a rabbit. She started down the far slope, then rested again when she reached the heavy growth of leafy trees below.
Then she saw him. He was up on the summit exactly where she had stood, and he was combing the valley below with the binoculars. Above his shoulder she could see the barrel of the rifle and the sling across his chest.
She moved down lower on the mountainside. For once, he wasn’t lying. She had already pushed herself to exhaustion, and she hadn’t eaten or had water since midnight. In about four or five hours the mountain air would turn cold, and she was dressed in wet clothes. Even if he didn’t find her, she was going to be in trouble.
But he was carrying a pack and rifle and ammo and binoculars. All she had left to weigh her down was the knife in her belt. She could take advantage of her loss and try to outrun him. They had both been moving fast through the woods for hours now, up a fair-size mountain. If she was this tired, he must at least be feeling the strain.
Jane slipped deeper down into the forest, controlling her breathing now, stretching her legs, and shaking her arms to loosen the tightness in her back and chest as she broke into a trot. The going was easier now, all downhill, so she ran harder, trying to keep her momentum from building out of control and making her turn an ankle. She took no care to hide or stay quiet, only to build up her speed. She ran for fifteen minutes and then came to a rocky, clear streambed. She could tell it had filled up in the rain the night before because the banks were muddy, but now it was shallow again. She sloshed into it, and then realized it could help her. She rushed upstream thirty feet and took a dive up the bank to the right, a belly flop into the mud. Then she pulled her knees in and got to her feet and walked down backward into the streambed.
She looked at her work. It wasn’t bad. It looked as though she had gone up the bank, slipped, and gone on to the east. She cupped her hands and drank deeply from the stream, then hurried on downstream a hundred feet before she found a place where there were three stones she could use as steps, back up into the woods to the west.
She concentrated on picking up the pace again, her eyes always searching the forest ahead for the next twenty yards that would afford a foothold and her legs lengthening her strides to take them as quickly as possible.
She ran on for two hours before she found a rocky outcropping, like a shelf near the top of the next mountain. She gained it, chose north, and picked up her speed again. This was the place to lose him, while darkness was coming and there was nothing to retain her tracks. After half a mile, the rock and the sunlight both ran out. She kept going into the dusk until she found a huge thicket of thorny bushes in a hollow.
As night fell, she went down on her belly and crawled into the thicket below the level of the thorns and foliage. When she was fifteen feet into the middle of it, the bushes were taller and older, the spaces between them wider, and she could make better progress. She crawled another thirty feet before she found a patch of weeds. She rolled over and over on them until they were flat, then curled up, consciously relaxed each aching, strained muscle, and lay there for a moment with her eyes open. It made her feel dizzy and light to lie there staring into the darkness, as though she were floating.
The dream started as soon as she closed her eyes. She still couldn’t see anything, but she could feel that she was being held. She was in her mother’s lap, lying against her breast, her face on the soft silk, where she could smell the perfume. She could feel the smooth, strong hands gently stroking her back. 'Mama?' she said.
'Shush,' came the whisper. 'Go to sleep, Janie. You need your rest.' Her mother’s voice began to hum to her softly, tunelessly.
Jane whispered, 'How did you come?'
'I’m not out there anymore, Jane. I’m inside you now, and my mother is inside me, and her mother is inside her, all the way back. We’re all here, just like those Russian dolls, one inside the other.'
'What am I going to do, Mama?' Jane could hear her own voice, and it was the voice of a child.
Her mother treated it like the question of a child. She held her, rocked her, and said distantly, 'Whatever you can, dear.' Then the voice came from farther away, as though her mother were holding her out to look at her. 'Are you hungry?'
'Yes,' said Jane.
'You should eat,' said her mother. 'In the morning. But now you need to sleep.'
'He’s coming for me.'
'Yes, he is,' her mother said. 'That’s why you have to lie still now.'
Her mother’s arms held her and rocked her back and forth, back and forth. 'You’ll always be my baby girl.' She began to hum again, the low, breathy sound that had always put Jane to sleep.
