As she crossed the pine needle floor to follow, she heard a cry from a long way off to her right: “Mama!”
Was that Jacob?
When she turned to locate the sound, she saw a black-red shadow emerging from the clearing not far behind her, close enough that she could hear it panting and smell its fetid exhalation.
She stopped, hoping it would pass by her while she held herself motionless. But it stopped too, and she could see it was watching her from its cover.
Then the cry again. Her eyes moved in the direction of the sound, and she forgot for a moment that she was being stalked.
When she looked again, the shadow was gone.
Had it swept by? Where did Isaac go? Why was he crying and running away?
Where was Jacob?
Sarah, go get your brother, she struggled to say, but the words wouldn’t come out.
She woke for a moment and found herself in the still of a dark room. It wasn’t hers, and then she remembered she was in Missy Crockett’s home.
She was dripping wet; her nightgown was soaked. She pushed the light cover off and lay there exhausted, looking up at the pine wood ceiling, its rough textures becoming clearer as her eyes accommodated to the early morning light. It felt like a big coffin.
Why was she here?
Where was her family?
She tried to get up from the bed, pushing herself up by the elbows, but the room faded away again.
She was on the shore looking out at a gray chop, peering into the northern horizon, up past the huge snowcapped Olympic mountain range to the west.
What was she looking at? She knew it was out there, whatever it was that had brought her down here, facing the chill and cut. She knew she had been watching for it for a long time, and yet, she understood that she had just gotten down to the shore a few moments ago.
She saw it coming toward her place, getting bigger against the dull whitecaps, and as cold as she was already from the icy-angry gusts, a chill drove deeper straight through to her backbone.
She stepped back across the beach, unable to pull her gaze away, and then stumbled back onto a barnacle-encrusted rock, cutting the heels of both her hands.
It landed on the shore a few feet away from her and began chopping with its large beak, a massive black crow that floated halfway into the water.
It hovered over her for a moment, dripping salt water and saliva, and then swept past her up the track to her home.
She pushed herself up, tried to cry out: “Run, kids, run!” but nothing came forth. Ran up the path but could not get her footing and kept falling backward, backward again and again, back onto the stones below.
Where was Isaac?
She clawed her way up the pathway, one agonizing pull after another, and when she got to the top, she saw that her home was gone. It had never been there.
She wiped the sand off the cuts with one quick swipe and ran back down to the beach. The specter had receded and was moving away along the coast, back north. It was carrying something on its back and in its beak, and she knew they belonged to her.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
On the third day after Isaac’s burial, Emmy’s fever broke. She slept heavily for two more days, intermittently waking, alternating between delirium and mute silence. Missy Crockett, Corrine Evers, and an Indian woman named Princess Susan attended to her, bathing her and changing her linen.
Missy and Corrine brought Sarah in with them as often as possible. She was old enough to see someone struggling with a horrible illness, and the women had agreed that Sarah’s constitution was much like her mother’s, so she would only grow stronger with witnessing something as difficult as this, whether Emmy lived or died.
Edwards instructed Missy to gradually start reducing the laudanum. He had seen many women die during postpartum fevers and, believing that Emmy had a chance to survive, had kept the women working the poultices, mustard plasters, and cooling baths, watching and logging every change in her movement, color, and excretions. Emmy had lost enough blood in the miscarriage that Edwards did not believe additional blood-letting was wise or necessary, and he had been pleased that the discharges from her private areas had never changed to the sulfurous smell that usually preceded a terminal change.
So, he let her rest.
The next day Emmy woke for a few minutes while being bathed and brightened when Sarah came into her view.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Emmy was on the plain overlooking the pastures and farmland. She wore the breeches she used when working the cattle in the pens below. A cooling breeze swept up her legs and pushed orange-red maple and yellow aspen leaves swirling about her knees.
Across the plain and into the sunset, a tall man walked toward the western beach landing and disappeared over the cliff. She was now there at the embankment’s edge overlooking the shore where she had previously seen the raven specter.
The man was Isaac. But it wasn’t him. And then he was gone.
She looked northward again.
◊ ◊ ◊ ◊ ◊
Emmy awoke the next day, and after eating a few bites of her first solid food since the night of the attack, she asked Missy to take her outside.
Doctor Edwards and Ben carried her to the porch and set her on a chair prepared with blankets and a comforter. It was a warm late autumn afternoon. She could hear the cattle braying in the distance and saw a big eight-point buck walk down across the plain and back up into the woods that bordered her fields.
Corrine and Missy fussed and talked about doing a press of cider from the apples. She saw Sarah crossing the pasture with Winfield.
Edwards was watching her. He pulled her lower eyelids down, looked at the creases on her palm, felt her pulse, and stepped
