Foxfire (46 page)

The turkey was tough and pungent, but it satisfied her hunger. She ate a pilot biscuit with it, and drank quantities of the pure sparkling creek water. She dared touch none of their few remaining cans, or the flour, for Dart would need the fullest diet she could provide. How much blood did he lose? she thought. Enough for shock and ghastly weakness. But he was strong, and if bleeding did not start again, if the bullet had done no greater internal damage than appeared from the hole's position, if there was no infection...

She washed up her few utensils and doused the campfire. She made Dart drink again, rousing him only enough to swallow, and she gave him a sedative from the vial so marked. She took his gun and laid it beside her, then she crept close to him again under the blankets.

The shadows fell once more deep into the canyon, and the Pueblo Encantado glowed on the dark cliffside with its strange luminescence. But Amanda saw neither the shadows nor the Pueblo, she saw and felt only Dart.

The next morning he seemed a trifle better, his mouth was not so pinched, a faint color showed in the ash-gray of his cheeks above the stubble of black beard. She fed him coffee cream-thick with condensed milk, and bacon and pan bread. His wounded shoulder had stiffened in the night and throbbed violently. He was still dizzy and too weak to move, but his eyes followed her as she nursed him. “Thank you—” he whispered.

“Hush!” she said smiling. “Don't talk. Everything's fine. Don't worry if you hear a shot, I'm going to practice.”

She took Hugh's 20-20 and went outside. Long ago, she had gone duck-hunting with her father in South Carolina and fired a few shots, but never since. On this expedition it had not occurred to her to shoot, and neither of the men had suggested it. She had, however, watched Hugh. She knew his gun was loaded, and she intended to see if she could get a rabbit. The brush was teeming with curious jacks, remarkably tame for they had never seen human beings before. She did not manage to shoot any and she fired only twice, being afraid of wasting ammunition, but the shots produced an even better result.

She heard a startled bray, and a scuttling noise. The burro stuck his long mournful face around a clump of red-berried algerita.

“Tonto!” she cried joyfully. “It's a good thing I didn't shoot you. Come here, you little devil!”

But Tonto would not, he scampered off to the side of the canyon. Well, she thought, at least he's here, and he certainly can't get away. It's a good omen. Contentment filled her.

A strange new happiness came to her during those days of nursing Dart in the lost valley, watching him grow slowly stronger. As his strength returned he told her how to find various foods to supplement their diet.

She ranged the little canyon bringing in finds for his inspection: the soft inner bark of the yellow pine, the cliff rose or quinine bush which made a strengthening tonic, algerita berries to stew into jelly, acorns from Gambel's oak, and a low green plant for which he did not know the English name, but whose tender shoots could be cooked like spinach, and it was a prime Apache blood builder.

When he spoke to her during those days of his first recovery, it was in few words, and only of matters pertaining to their immediate joint welfare, but his voice had a humble, hesitating note she had never heard before, and he watched her lithe, graceful motions constantly, but averted his eyes if she chanced to look at him.

After the first night when his chills had passed, she no longer lay under the blankets with him, but slept across the shelter. Yet to her this was no hostile separation as it had been before. Her love demanded nothing now but his happiness and full recovery. She was content to respect his reticences and the special exigencies of his nature, and to wait.

On the fourth morning she shot a rabbit and bore it back to him in triumph. “Change of menu,” she cried gaily. “I'm getting sick of turkey soup, aren't you?”

Dart was sitting in the sun by the fire, frying bacon. He was still too weak to walk more than a few steps. He looked up at her and smiled. “Swell. Give it to me—I'll skin it.”

“Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “You can't use that arm yet.”

“I can use the hand enough to hold the rabbit, while I flay him with the other. Give it to me, Andy, it's all I'm good for. Woman's work.”

He said this not bitterly, but in the wondering, hesitant voice which was new from him.

She laughed and gave him the rabbit. “Well, you don't look like a woman, my bearded monster. Black Teach the pirate, more like.”

He grinned, rubbing his chin ruefully. “I'll hack some of this off tomorrow,” he said. “I'm sorry, I must be a repulsive sight.”

“Good Lord, no,” said Amanda, turning the bacon. “I don't mind.” Nor did she. And yet there had been a time when she minded very much, when she had nagged him into shaving twice a day, resentful that he was indifferent to her smooth, sophisticated standards. Effeminate standards, perhaps. She thought suddenly of Calise Cunningham and their first conversation together. Calise had asked why she had married Dart, and she had answered something to the effect that it was because he was big, strong, very male and different, and Calise had replied, “Then you must not at the same time resent the qualities you love.”

She had repudiated Calise's remark with blank anger. But she understood better now. For had she not after all been forever trying to change Dart, dissatisfied with the uncompromising strength she had also admired.

“What are you thinking of?” asked Dart quietly.

“About Calise,” she said, startled into the truth. She wanted no reminders for either of them of the past yet, of the world beyond the enchanted valley.

“Ah,” said Dart, and a shadow crossed his face, as she had feared it would.

“No!” she cried. “Don't think back, not of anything.”

She glanced unconsciously to the cliff dwelling down the canyon. The frozen city hung there as aloof and separate as the moon, withdrawn again into the perfect quiet which they had violated.

He skinned the rabbit in silence for a moment. “We must face it all soon, though,” he said at last very low. “There's much to be said between us.”

“Not now,” she cried, “not until you're strong enough.”

He raised his head and looked at her. There was sadness and question in his eyes. “You saved my life, Andy,” he said, “I'm still helpless without you. How can I deny anything you ask?”

She rose impulsively. She would have gone to him, telling him that when there is love there is no debt on either side, that she did not wish him humbled and uncertain, that his pride was now as dear to her as her own. But a wiser instinct stopped her. Too often in the past she had assaulted the citadel of his personality, battering her way with coarse and blunted weapons, trying to hurry him, trying to change him to a preconceived mold. She knew how painful, how deep a dislocation of all his character was the admission he had just made, and that she must take no advantage of it.

She sank back again, and picked up a handful of green shoots from off a tin plate. “I'm too hungry for deep discussion,” she said lightly, as though she had not heard him. “Shall I fry these wild onions in the bacon grease with the rabbit?—And you go back to bed now, that's quite enough exertion for a convalescent.”

Dart gave her a puzzled look, but he finished preparing the rabbit, and did as she suggested. His body would not obey his commands. He loathed the waves of blank exhaustion and the dizziness which still swept over him, and which he could not ignore as he did the pain in his healing wounds, as he had always ignored the few discomforts and ailments of his healthy lifetime. He lay down on his blankets and just as sleep overpowered him he heard Amanda singing softly out by the campfire, a plaintive waltz tune.

Her voice was small and low and pure, it lulled him and gave him pleasure. Yet he had never heard her sing before. He had not known she ever sang.

 

Five more days passed in the enchanted valley, and except for the stiffness of his wounds, Dart was nearly well. He could walk the length of the canyon now, he had managed to shoot for them another smaller and more tender wild turkey. He had bathed in the waterfall, and duly shaven off his beard. During these days of his returning strength when she no longer nursed him, they had been oddly shy with each other, like the shyness of early courtship. They spoke little and left sentences unfinished, an unexpected touch on hand or arm left them both confused and stammering. And like a golden current a newborn tenuous magic flowed between them. It was as though they had never known each other, or been together before.

On the ninth evening since the tragedy in the cave, they sat beside their campfire having dined on fried turkey breasts, stewed greens, coffee, and a whole panful of sourdough bread topped with wild honey discovered by Dart in a hollow tree when he shot the turkey.

There were no stars tonight studding the narrow strip of sky above the canyon, great mounded clouds floated and caught on the overhanging rim, and a waxing moon peered through the clouds fitfully.

“Thunder in the air,” said Dart, lighting a cigarette. “We're about due for a storm.”

“Yes,” she said. There was a hot tension in the still air.

Dart got up and fastened her poncho over the top of the shelter. He had already woven and fortified the pine-bough roof. “At least we won't get drenched in there when it comes,” he said, returning to the fire.

They were both silent, both smoking and staring at the flames.

Then Dart stretched out his long legs, leaned back against a tree trunk, and deliberately gazed up at the cliff city. It shone tonight not by its own phosphorescence but by the wan light of the fitful moon.

“We've got to face it, Andy,” he said. “We've got to talk about Hugh.”

She sat up straight, clenching her hands.
“Hugh!”
she repeated on a breaking voice. “He was evil—horrible. He tried to kill you.”

Dart shook his head, his face turned upwards to the cliff city. “He wasn't altogether sane. He tried to kill the thing he thought stood between him and—and his last chance.”

The last chance, the fabulous wealth that wasn't there, and if it had been, Hugh must have known in his soul that it would not buy back his wife; no gold would have reversed the long disintegration, or given him self-respect.

“But he was your
friend,”
cried Amanda violently. “That was one thing I always felt, was sure of.”

“Yes,” answered Dart sighing. “And yet I was no friend. I gave him nothing. There were times way back when I might have listened to him. He tried once to tell me about his wife. I was embarrassed and I shut him out.”

She was silent, wondering. What had they three found in the Lost Valley? Nothing that they had set out for. Ugliness and murder and the smell of blood and death had hidden in the bright beckoning flower, but beyond that there had been a bridge for two of them leading out of fear and into gentleness and pity.

“The Mountain Spirits had mercy on us,” she said at last. “We two were protected—and, I think, forgiven.”

He had been going on to speak of other things pertaining to Hugh, to speak of plans and arrangements they must face in the world beyond the valley, but hearin her low dreaming voice he could not. He looked across the firelight at her, seeing the beauty and the strength which he had so long denied. Not boyish, not a pretty child's face under bright curls, but the face of a warm and understanding woman.

He got up and came around the fire beside her, and he knelt by her gazing up into her wide and darkening eyes. “Am I too forgiven...?” he whispered. “For I cannot live without you now.”

Her breath came through her lips and touched his cheek as gently as the first fluttering of the storm wind in the pines. She leaned close to him, “There's no thought of forgiveness between us, Dart. There's only love.”

He picked her up in his arms and carried her into the pine-bough bed. The storm came. The thunder and the lightning roared and flashed in the canyon, but for the two inside the shelter there was no fear. The majesty of the storm mingled with the awe of their own fulfillment. Not only the union of their bodies in passion and release as it had been before, but the deeper union of the spirit as it had never been; the blinding bliss of communication when two beings for the brief, unbearable instant that is allowed, merge into one.

The storm passed, and the moon came out unhindered, flooding the canyon with silver. Silver darkened to gray, and dawn filled the canyon with murmurous mist. The birds awoke, and pale cinnamon light seeped through the leafy roof over the two who lay in each other's arms.

Amanda stirred, she raised herself on her elbow and looked down at him. His eyes were open as she had known they would be. They looked into each other's souls with recognition and deep awareness, and they smiled at each other. The smile was more beautiful than the ecstatic merging of their bodies had been.

She dropped her head and kissed his naked arm. He held her hard against his body and they listened together to the music of the dawn. They were one with the mystery of all creation, and there was peace.

A mountain thrush called his clear song from the summit of a great yellow pine, and the great symphony to which they had listened diminished as it always must into quieter, simpler melody.

Ah, stay with us forever—but it may not stay, yet it will leave behind an echo of vibration, never silenced, though sometimes in the deafening crashes of the outer life it may go unheard. And then there is still the thrush's song.

The sun mounted the overhanging cliffs and burst in redgold challenge through the doorway of their shelter, bringing even to the enchanted canyon inexorable return to system, to the exigencies of the material world.

Amanda and Dart rose together and she shivered a little in the chill mountain air. She looked at his big, lean, hardmuscled body and she cried, in contrition and in tender laughter, “Oh, my darling—I had forgotten your wounds.”