Fire Along the Sky
Page 55

On the morning Hawkeye left there had been no time or energy to feel much at all, not regret or fear or loneliness. Even at the time Nathaniel had known that those things would come later. His Hannah was about to leave home too, and the fact that Hawkeye was with her almost made up for the fact that his daughter was old enough to have chosen a husband.
The snow came fast and thick in a rising wind that was busy scouring away his tracks and all trace of the creatures that moved over the face of the mountain. He had thought to run across Runs-from-Bears, who should have come this way to walk the trap lines. No doubt Bears had started back to Lake in the Clouds a good while ago. He had more sense than Nathaniel when it came to the weather, but then most people did. Most years it didn't matter much.
None of them could remember a winter with so much snow so early, not even Curiosity Freeman, who had a memory for such things and was the oldest woman in Paradise. He was thinking about Curiosity when he came to a sudden stop.
A wounded animal makes a track all its own in deep snow, one any good backwoodsman could read with greater ease than words on a page, and Nathaniel didn't like what he saw in front of him. No sick wolf or moose, but a woman dragging her skirts along and fumbling through the drifts. That was bad enough—a woman on the mountain—but even worse was the fact that the snow was stained pink with blood.
His first thought was of his own womenfolk, but none of them would be so foolish. Just as soon as he had put that idea away he realized that Dolly Wilde had run off again, and from the tracks at least, nobody had caught up with her yet.
Nathaniel dropped the doe where he stood, an unwilling offering to the wolves who had given the mountain its name, and turned into the woods. With an impatient hand he pushed his hood back to make sure he would hear when the shouting started, as it must. The men from the village would be on their way up here with their dogs unless the storm turned into a whiteout. This time, though, Nathaniel doubted that they'd be able to find her in time. The north face of the mountain was treacherous in good weather, and that's the way she was headed.
Just past Squirrel Slough he came across a shred of shawl caught up in a hawthorn bush, proof at least that she hadn't wandered off in nothing but a night rail. With every minute he was surprised not to come across her. Nathaniel picked up his pace and his breath rose up into the swirling snow.
He skirted a windfall and then a hibernating bear jutting up from a hollow like a gently trembling hillock. Dolly's tracks went around the bear, and he was glad to see that even in her extremity she hadn't lost all her common sense, which meant that if she had got as far as the top of Hidden Wolf she wouldn't just walk off a cliff. If she was still walking at all.
In time Nathaniel began to wonder if maybe nobody realized she was gone, down at the Wilde place, because it seemed to him he was the only living thing moving on the mountain. He was considering that when he came across Dolly, sitting up against a young alder bent low with snow. She sat there as if it were summer and she had sought out the tree for its shade, as if there were no better spot to watch the world go by.
Her gaze flickered toward Nathaniel as he squatted down next to her. He took a hitching breath and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
Dolly was dressed warm, at least, which was both a good thing and a surprise. The question was, how had a woman as sick as this one managed to put on so many skirts and shawls and then walk away from the cabin without drawing attention to herself?
“Dolly?”
She looked at him from the corner of her eye. Wary, like a deer that had never seen a man before, or maybe, Nathaniel corrected himself, more like a hungry dog with a bone. Suspicious, not exactly afraid, willing to fight for what was hers.
The tip of her nose and the ears that peeked out from the tangle of her hair were the color of milky ice. Worse than that, the right side of her face and her right hand were jerking and trembling, as if to make up for the silent rest of her. The blood that speckled the snow around her came from the cuts and scratches that covered her hands.
“Dolly.” He said it louder this time and in response she closed her eyes. Her cheek muscles jumped and shivered as though she had tucked a frog up there for safekeeping. Then she rocked forward and cradled her right side with her left arm and let out a low moan.
She resisted at first, but Nathaniel picked her up. Even through the layers of wool and linen he could feel the heat of her.
All the way down the mountain she lay across his shoulder as heavy and inert as the doe he had abandoned on the trail behind him. Every now and then she tensed and began to shudder and tremble and flex like a fish on the line.
Nathaniel began to sing under his breath, a death song he had first learned from his Mahican grandfather as a boy and had sung too many times to count. In case she passed over to the shadow lands before he could get her back to Lake in the Clouds.
It was a full two days before the blizzard blew itself out and Nathaniel could start down the mountain to tell people what they must know already: there was no need to come in search of Dolly Wilde, because she was dead. She had lived for a few hours on a cot in front of the hearth while Elizabeth and Many-Doves worked to bring down her fever, but in the end she had died in a convulsion so extreme that her spine arched into a bow.
He went by back trails so as to avoid meeting anybody before he had a chance to talk to Nicholas Wilde directly. The man had a right to know first, to break the news to his little girl in his own way and time. But when he came out of the trees into the Wildes' orchard he saw straight off that something wasn't right. There was no smoke coming from the chimney though the temperature was well below freezing. The empty feeling in his gut was replaced by something much more solid, a foreboding that coated his mouth with the taste of bile.