People of the Masks(95)

People shifted and whispered. Their voices began to rise.

“This is not gossip, I tell you! It is truth. Listen. Listen to me … !”





Twenty



Wren pushed a low-hanging pine bough aside and stepped into a blinding pool of afternoon sunlight Her long black braid gleamed. They had been walking in silence all day, scooping snow when they grew thirsty, nibbling at the elk jerky when their stomachs squealed. Wren kept her steps short, hoping that Rumbler could keep up, but as the day dwindled, he fell farther and farther behind. Wren turned, and saw him about twenty body lengths back. He’d been shaking since midday, but he refused to stop. While she waited for him, she basked in the warm sunlight and examined the trail ahead.

It wound sinuously around boulders taller than Wren. Deer and elk frequented this trail for snow lay like a sodden dirty blanket over hundreds of water-filled hoofprints. It would be hard going. Already her muddy pants clung to her skin like granite. Shielding her eyes, she squinted up at Grandfather Day Maker. Three hands of light remained before night.

A branch cracked, and Wren spun to see Rumbler stumble into a fallen log. A tuft of white fox fur torn from her cape perched like a tiny headdress on the branch he’d broken.

“Rumbler? Are you all right?”

He tucked his hands beneath his arms, and sank into the filthy snow. As he rocked back and forth, he said, “I’m f-freezing.”

Wren ran back to him, her soaked moccasins squishing in the muddy trail. His beautiful round face had gone as pale as a magpie’s belly, and his black eyes glittered.

“Rumbler?” She pulled off her mittens and felt his face. “Rumbler, you’re fevered! When did this start? I didn’t notice—”

“It’s—it’s m-my hands,” he said, and winced when he drew them from beneath his arms.

Wren knelt in the snow before him and took his right hand in hers, carefully inspecting it. His thumb and first finger looked all right, but the blackened tips of his second and third fingers had swollen to three times their normal size, and would have to come off. She feared she would have to take two joints from his little finger. His left hand was worse. He would lose the tips of each finger, and two from his little finger.

“I can’t b-bend them,” he said. “They hurt badly when I woke this morning. They’ve grown worse.”

“That’s because they’ve thawed.” She gently placed his hand in his lap. Fear gnawed at her. She’d brought along all the tools she would need, but the thought of cutting off human fingers frightened her. She’d severed many animal joints, the legs of water fowl, deer, bear, and a number of smaller animals like rabbits and squirrels, but they’d been dead. What if she couldn’t cut on living flesh? What if she could, and the bleeding wouldn’t stop?

“Rumbler, do you think I should—I mean, I think maybe it’s time.”

“Yes. Please hurry, Little Wren.” He bravely set his jaw.

Wren surveyed the forest. To her right, a small sunny clearing nestled in the middle of four sassafras trees. The shriveled fruits clinging to the branches had a purplish sheen. Wren said, “That spot over there looks dry, Rumbler. Let’s camp beneath those trees.”

Rumbler tried to rise, but his shaking legs wouldn’t hold him. Wren gripped his left arm and helped him up, then guided him into the sun-drenched clearing. The roots of the trees had grown together beneath the soil, pushing it up into a hillock higher than the surrounding forest floor, so the snow here had melted and drained away first. Wren lowered Rumbler to the ground at the base of the largest tree. He leaned back, and closed his eyes.

As she slid her pack from her shoulders, and dropped it beside him, Wren said, “I’m going to collect wood, Rumbler. I’ll be fast, I promise.”

“Th-thank you … Wren.”

She went to the closest sassafras tree and cracked off all the old deadwood that littered the lower part of the trunk, then trotted back and dumped it in a pile near her pack. Rumbler had his eyes closed and his lower lip clamped between his teeth.

“I’m hurrying,” Wren said. She opened her pack and pulled out her fireboard and drill. “After my mother severed frozen fingers, she stanched the flow of blood with hot coals.”

He started rocking again, back and forth, back and forth. Perspiration beaded his nose. “Just … hurry.”

When flames leaped through the sassafras branches, spitting and sparking, Wren opened her pack, and removed a coil of basswood cord, a sharp white chert blade as long as her palm and two finger-widths across, and a fire-hardened bowl.

“Could you put on some s-snow to melt, too, Wren? I need water.”