Early next morning the old man worked his way up the mountain, following the prints of the two boys. The snow was drifted deeply in places and it was hard going. He stopped often to catch his breath, leaning on the shotgun, the stock sunk cleanly through the crust to the depth of the triggerguard. By the time he reached the road he was winded and leg-weary. From here he could see out into the valley, through the stark trees standing blackly in an ether of white like diffused milk, glazed and crystalline as shattered ice where the sun probed, the roofs thatched with snow, pale tendrils of smoke standing grayly in the still air.
He could smell smoke, but he didn’t think about it until it occurred to him that it had a sharp and pungent quality about it and he realized that it was cedar burning—postwood, not firewood—elusive in the cold air, in his nostrils, faintly antiseptic.
He turned up the road and walked steadily until he carne to the cut-off to the pit. The snow was dry and powdered as marble-dust on his trouser legs. Now he could see the faint pall of smoke through the trees. The tracks turned here and furrowed in two drunken lanes, curving into the woods. He followed them, moving faster, stumbling in and out of the snow ruts, shadowed by some presentiment of ruin, into the clearing.
When he saw the smoke rolling up from out of the pit he stopped for a moment and he could feel the old fierce pull of blood in power and despair, the pulse-drum of the irrevocable act. And it was done, what soul rose in the ashes forever unknown, out of his hands now. He squatted on one knee in the snow, watching. On his face a suggestion of joy, of anguish—something primitive and half hidden. The pale eyes burned cold and remote in their hollows like pockets of smoldering gas.
He rose and retraced his steps back to the road. In the pit the amber coals glowed molten in their bed beneath the charred skeletons of the cedars.
Because the car was pulled over up the road and I couldn’t see it from the creek. And he wadn’t on the bridge when I come down but after I waded through and come out the other side he was standin on it lookin down at me and I seen him then and he said Come here. So he took your traps.
All of em ceptin one, the boy said. He’d of had to of waded to find it so I never told him about it. He took the three of em. I didn’t have but four.
Lowlife son of a bitch, Sylder said. What’d you tell him?
I never told him nothin. He said he was goin to take me to jail for trappin without license and bettin criminals. I told him I didn’t know nothin bout some criminals.
Legwater, what’d he say?
Not much. Jest sort of grinned like a possum. Yeah, he said it’d go a lot easier on me if I was to tell em about it. That it was the same thing—bettin a criminal—as bein one your ownself. Then Gifford said that was right, how I’d likely get three to five years but that if I’d hep em out and tell who it was I might get off with jest a suspendered sentence.
But they didn’t take you in?
No. He turned me loose at the forks, the store. He said soon as they got the rest of the evidence they’d pick me up and how it wouldn’t do me no good to try to run.
He sat back in the chair, finished now and waiting to know what to do, just beginning to be not so scared.
Sylder leaned toward him. Listen, he said. You know that’s all horseshit, don’t you? You know what a ass it’d make him look to come draggin a fourteen-year-old boy in? Even for helpin a runner, let alone trappin without license? He’s jest tryin to scare you. I know him. He cain’t prove no way in the world you helped me and if they caught me it’d have to be with a load, in which case they wouldn’t need nobody’s testifyin, let alone yours, and even if they did I’d swear I never seen you before in my life and you’d do the same thing so they still couldn’t bother you. It’s all horseshit, tryin to bluff and scare you into helpin him poke his nose where it don’t belong. He bothers you again you tell him nothin, tell him you’ll get him for false arrest. Cept I don’t think he’s goin to bother you no more.
He said he’d catch you anyway.
He couldn’t catch cowshit in a warshtub. It ain’t even his business; he ain’t the A. T. U. Anyway don’t you let him bother you. I’ll tend his apples for him my ownself. He knowed you didn’t have no daddy, nobody to take up for you in the first place is the reason he figured he could jump on you. He’s a lowlife son of a bitch and a caird to boot. Here, come take a look at your pup; he’s fat as a butterball. Come on, I got em on the back porch on account of it bein so cold.
The pike had been cleared some time in the afternoon so that he didn’t even need the chains after he came off the orchard road, dark now, something after six o’clock, the rear end of the car heavy and swaying low over the wheels even with the love joys set up as far as they would go. It was very cold and his toes had not yet thawed under the gas heater. He thought how the stump of a toe in his left boot was particularly sensitive, remembering again the sweep of the cutter’s lights on the stanchions of the bridge, the glazed and blinding eye of the spotlight when it picked him out, standing on the forward deck under a canopy of mangrove with his foot braced on the cleat and holding the anchor rope. When the light caught him he yelled once down into the cabin and began hauling in on the rope. The starter whirred and the motor coughed gutturally at the water, the boat jostling, already moving. He got the anchor in and watched the cutter lights. Even above the high wheening of their own motor he could hear her revving the big double Gray engines as she swung about, then voices, commands, detached and sourceless on the steamy calm of the Gulf. The cutter’s spot followed them, swamping them in light as they came out of the backwater. He might have been a ballerina pirouetting there. He could see the twin spume flaring from the prow of the cutter, rising as she took speed, and the running lights bobbing and bobbing again in the black wash of the cutwater. He heard the shots too, quite clearly, but made no association between them and himself. It didn’t occur to him that he was being shot at until a real flurry broke out and he could see the muzzleflashes minute and intermittent like cigarettes glowing and hear the pebbly thoop thoop of the bullets in the passing water. Then he jumped and started for the cabin. Instantly there came the sounds of splintering wood and then something tore at his foot and threw him to the deck. He crawled to the companionway and slid down it on his belly.