She moved deeper into the forest below the meadow, where the glaring evening sun hit the foliage at a low angle to make leaves glow and sink shadows into near darkness. This stand of trees was old, not replanted with one species. Each kind took its small niche and grew there. The collar of pine trees at the top of the mountain merged into the birch, maple, hemlock, slippery elm, and hickory down lower. Where the dirt beneath was deep and the thousands of years of rotting leaves and the mineral water runoff from the peaks had gathered, the trees grew tall and the taproots sunk deep. This group of maples was old and thick, this elm grove had taken hold late, the seeds maybe blown here in a storm twenty years ago, maybe carried here in a deer’s belly and dropped undigested in the right place.
The world she had lived in before, the cement, houses, and roads, wasn’t any different from this. It was wilderness, too. The planet Earth was a place where the lone hunter made his way through the wild country. There was something out there that wanted the hunter dead, and he had to defeat it or be killed by it.
The hunter’s name never changed. In the language that Jane knew best, the hunter’s name was 'I.' As she stalked through the forest, doing her best to slip between the trees without moving a branch, to step on the damp, soft forest floor where dry twigs would not crack, she became the hunter. She could not see herself, turn her eyes around and be frightened by the fact that she was only a slender girl walking alone on the deer run. She could only see where she was. What she was doing made her who she was. Her eyes, watchful, cautious, and alert, saw the trail ahead and the sky above.
As her mind projected more and more of its will and attention outward into the hunt, she obliterated Jane Whitefield. The hunter was tall, with long, naked brownish legs made strong and quick by years, of running. The hunter’s eyes had sharp, clear vision that could detect movement beside the path ahead and ears sensitive, after so many days in the forest, to any sound that wasn’t exactly as it should be. The hunter was shrewd and had fought many times against opponents who were bigger and stronger in other parts of the wild country that didn’t look like this.
Now the lone hunter slipped quietly through the North Woods, doubling back in a path parallel to last night’s run. Lake Nehasane was five or six hours away, and the hunter accepted the distance and traveled patiently, always thinking. The simple tactic of coming on the enemy in the woods and beating him in a hand-to-hand fight was not possible this time. The enemy had more upper-body strength than the hunter had, and a longer reach. Approaching the enemy across an open space would mean quick death because the enemy had the only rifle in the world right now.
She thought about the ways of using the forest. The Hodenosaunee had come here to hunt bears in the winter. They had come up on snowshoes, sometimes chasing the bear, sometimes goading it into chasing them. They moved quickly on top of the deep drifts while the bear floundered along, sinking in deep and finally exhausting its enormous strength. The old hunters had sometimes built V-shaped fences in the forest and driven herds of deer in toward the center to the narrow tip, to be slaughtered. They had also perfected a deer trap, using a bent sapling and a rope, so the deer would be hoisted in the air with the rope around its hind legs. None of those ways would work on an enemy like this one.
She walked all night, accepting the fact that there was no food. This time the warrior had a slight advantage from inhabiting a female body. The body was smaller and lighter and needed fewer calories just to move around, and had more reservoirs of stored fat among the muscles and sinews, because it was built to endure, to bear and feed children even when food was scarce. She found more berries in secluded copses in the woods, and chewed the leaves plucked from trees along the trail to stave off hunger pains, and drank from the streams. The warrior’s body had been inured to fasting by the discipline of years of fitting a size-twelve body into a succession of size-ten dresses.
When it got to be too dark to travel, she lay down near the path and slept until dawn. She stood up and walked on, always quiet, alert, and careful. She walked for the whole day, and as she did, she sometimes saw the places where she had fought her way through thick bushes, breaking branches and leaving tracks.
It was early evening when she made her way around the shoulder of the last mountain and looked down on Lake Nehasane. In the woods she painted her skin and stained her clothes with a green solution of ground moss, making stripes on her legs and arms like camouflage. When she came upon the residue of the enemy’s campfire on the rock shelf where she had once cowered at hearing his voice, she took some charcoal and streaked her face.
She looked down on the enemy’s camp on the opposite shore of the lake and studied it. The murderer had moved his tent to a stretch of shore in the center of an open space where there were no trees or brush to afford a stalking ground. The canoe was far up on the shore with the tent, where he could protect it.
Then she saw him. He emerged from a path near his camp, walked to his fire pit, and dropped an armload of wood. He carried his rifle in his other hand and a hatchet in his belt. He set the rifle aside and knelt down to build his fire, banking the wood to last the night, but she could see from the attitude of his head that he wasn’t even looking at it. He was watching and listening for her. He was at least eight feet from the rifle. He was tempting her. He had known that she would come back, because she was tired and cold and hungry. He was trying to make her come in and sprint for the gun. He knew exactly how a desperate, frightened person thought. He didn’t know because he had been one himself, but because he had made a living out of tracking and killing them. She turned away into the sheltered leaves of the forest and started to make her way around the lake toward him.
The sun was behind the western mountain when she found the place in the forest that she had been looking for. She had imagined it while she was walking and had kept going through the woods until she found it.
She used the knife and the deer antler as scrapers and dug the hole five feet wide and as deep as she could before she hit bedrock. She used her five spare arrow shafts as the frame to hold the branches and matting of grass to cover the hole. She attached the fishing line to the eight hooks and hung them carefully six inches apart from the overhanging limb of the hemlock tree. She tested the height again and again. It had to be perfect.
Then she walked back thirty feet along the trail, bent a sapling almost double, and tossed some leaves over the path beside it to make it look like a deer trap. She judged that thirty feet would give him the time to think, even running at full speed. She calculated where to leave her bow. When she had finished her work, she went through the forest making V marks with her knife in the bark of the biggest trees to mark the trail.
In the darkness just before dawn, she climbed to the side of the mountain to take another look at the camp. When she was satisfied that he was asleep, she took one last look up at the sky, where the stars were already beginning to fade. Life was good and precious, and she was glad that she had never needed to be told that it was. Many Seneca warriors had died alone in the wilderness like this. There were probably some lying unburied all around her now.
She made her way to his camp, floating like a wisp of smoke through the forest without moving a leaf or dislodging a stone. At the dark edge of the camp a few feet from the tent, she lay on her belly and watched, a shadow inside a shadow.
She listened for the sound of his breathing. She had heard it, lain awake beside him listening to it, watching over him and hoping he would survive. Now, as she listened, she heard it again, but it wasn’t right. It wasn’t coming from the tent. She slowly turned her head to follow the sound. He was sleeping in the woods behind the canoe, waiting for her to try to kill him in the tent. He would have some kind of alarm to wake him when she tried so he could come out of hiding and shoot her.
She considered for a moment. He had to see her, and when he did, she would have to be doing something he understood, or he might react unpredictably. She crawled to the front of the tent, took the last of her fishing line, and tied it to the zipper on the door flap. Then she crawled back to the edge of the woods, almost at the start of the trail she had blazed.
She gave a strong tug on the line and the zipper moved and started to come down when there was a deafening Barroom! and the front of the tent blew outward, with a three-inch hole in it. Jane leaped into the air at the sound. It was a spring gun. He had another gun! She took a step toward the tent, but her mind settled again. Either a spring gun worked when it was set off or it didn’t. You wouldn’t load the shotgun with more than one shell.
She whirled and saw him. He was coming to his feet, his hair tousled the way it had been in the mornings at Grand River, and she almost called out to him. But the rifle was in his hand and was coming up. His eyes were cold and dead and certain.
She pivoted on her toes and dashed through the space in the bushes just as the rifle cracked. The shot hit somewhere behind her. She had laid out the path carefully to wind through the thickest part of the woods, so there
