The Outlander (9 page)

She had now spent six days and nights alone in the mountains, and still
she didn't know where she was. Yet she wasn't frightened, merely attentive.
The thing to be feared always came from within: exhaustion, unsound thoughts, ignorance,
starvation. As a child she had been dragged away from a panicking horse because she had
failed to see that it might injure her, the hired man shaking her by the shoulders,
shouting, “Do you want to get me fired?” And yet, she had been nearly
demented with terror by a dream in which her hands fell off at the wrists. That summer,
her bed had been set outside on the screened veranda where it was cool, and when she had
wakened screaming, the caged birds by the door had volleyed about their little wicker
palace. The sound of adult feet thumping down the hallway toward her, where she sat
rigid and shrill, her arms out before her, staring at her hands, still seeing them gone.
All the next day she had nursed a miasmic horror: she was unsound, dissipating, her body
unable to hold together. And the blame for it lay in dreams. This was the locus of fear
for her, a worm in the heart, where hope rotted in its dark whorls, where unwanted
visions leaped out — the darkness of her own mind. And yet here she was alone in
the wilderness, strangely content.

It was a bright, soft morning. In the sun, the air was warm enough for
bare skin, while under the trees the mare's breath blew into vapour. An arctic
chill crept the boundaries of each shadow and gusted from the deeps of the woods. The
widow rested her feet in front of her and stared down at the white and blue toes. The
mud soothed the soles of her feet and she shuffled them back and forth and clenched her
toes
into it. She eyed the sparrows glumly, imagining one cooked
upon a fire, a meal no bigger than her thumb, crackling and hissing in its small supply
of fat. There seemed to be no berries at this elevation, or if there were, they were
wizened, white, and bitter. She had not been able to find a gun or rifle in the old
woman's house. So how to kill a small animal? How to capture a bird? She had
stopped the horse at every creek and stream to gaze into the clear water, looking for
fish, minnows, anything alive. She saw nothing, ever.

Her will was strong enough, but she lacked the knowledge to help herself.
She had been trained for another life, and her mind in its dulled state turned over and
over in a mire of useless things: sonatas and études; the art of a good menu;
trousseaux; dress improvers or bustles, so outdated now. Bedtime at nine. Toast cooling
in its wire stand on the breakfast table. Alabaster skin and parasols. Weeping girls who
did not get what they wanted at Christmas. One ate and drank and got fat. One worried
about chills. Old women mistrusted the damp summer air. Death did not come this way,
lingering in the trees. It came by apoplexy. By cancer. By public hanging. Her uncle,
known to everyone as a wrathful man, had fallen to the rug in his drawing room clutching
his throat, his death caused by an outrageous grocer's bill.

By noon she had wiped the mud from her feet and calves and put on her
boots again. She went to the mare's left, stroked the long neck, and mounted.
Horse and rider went on slowly. Steam rose from the mare's rolling shoulders and
drifted past the widow's knees, but the widow shivered even as the puddles below
her glared brightly in the sun. All through the trees ran paths made by animals big and
small. The smaller the animal, and the more of them, the more
deeply
rutted the trails. The widow had discovered these natural highways at dusk one night,
the patterns highlighted for her by the deepening shadows. The red of the sunset had
imparted a hollowness to physical things, the evergreens silvered and flat in their
sleekness, and suddenly the tousled grasses revealed these animal paths, itineraries,
wandering lines of habit she had not perceived before. Rivulets and whorls where mice
scurried round rocks and tree trunks. A squirrel's stitch of hops between pines
and then with a leap, nothing. And wider, subtler erosions, where hooves and bellies had
drifted and where soft lips had torn away leaves. In the absence of any human map, and
wishing herself away from human danger, the widow turned her horse and followed these
ghostly rivers, wandering deeper into a wilderness she knew nothing about.

At dusk the light became as thin and cold as the air. There was no sound,
no echo, the mare's footfalls silent in the deep bed of cedar needles. There were
no shadows; everything lay impossibly flat to the eye.
World without end.
The
mare put its hoof on an old rotted log, and a muffled crack came from under seasons of
flowing grass and blown leaves. The widow slumped in the saddle. Hunger or fatigue? She
could no longer tell them apart. She dismounted, staggered briefly on her numbed feet,
and plopped down heavily, cross-legged, still holding the reins. Pine cones. Could she
eat pine cones?

Into the grey air there came a hint of blue, a rustling of leaves as the
wind sighed goodnight. Soon she began to see unaccountable things. In amazement, she
watched the silhouettes of dwarfs or perhaps children hurry behind trees or float with
their arms aloft as if they lay in water. The mare, too, seemed to track some movement,
its flecked eyes following
some floating thing at its knees. Nothing
there? The widow put a hand out. No, nothing there.

When night fell in earnest, she tied the horse to a branch, removed the
saddle, and sat under a tree clutching her knees, listening to the sounds around her in
the murmuring dark. Pines creaked in the wind, comically gothic. The wind hissing
through the millions of needles. And there was a repeated sound, one she took a long
time to identify: it was the mare pulling at the reins. All night, the mare pulled at
its traces to reach down and eat the grass at its hooves, the widow awake and listening,
unaware of the meaning of the struggle. The sun rose on both woman and horse, pitiful
creatures, hanging their heads like exhausted convicts.

When they were mounted and moving again, the widow aimed them uphill. In
her disordered mind, she wondered whether this was north. Was north up? In fact, the
widow did not know which territory she might be in or whether she had passed into
another world. So limited was her understanding of the land she stood in, she would not
have been surprised to see the ocean soon.
No good woman knows too much about
geography or politics.
Even her father had believed this. She tried to picture
the map her husband had hung on the cabin wall, but it had no connection to the world
she saw around her. Each American state had been filled in with a different colour, all
of them tidied together like a box of sweets. Canada itself was a broad emptiness of
circumscribed territories each holding its own name and nothing more. Assiniboia.
Keewatin. Alberta. Coloured pink, like all things British. One summer afternoon last
year, the widow had stood, hand on hip, and gazed sadly at it, trying to divine the
place of her birth, the place where her father slept, perhaps,
or
bent over his breakfast in his shirt sleeves. She scanned the strung nuggets of the
lakes and thought she might know one of them. Without cities or borders, no line to
indicate where she had come from or where she was, the widow had stared at Canada and
seen it as others did. An attic. A vacancy. A hole in the world.

Who knew what lay there? Was it this perpetual forest, dripping and
silent? The mare picked its way through knee-high fern and sprays of pale aspen sucker,
its shoulder falling as rotted roots collapsed and thick moss slid. It tore at ferns and
leaves as it went, slow and plodding. From time to time a trickling vein of icy water
came down from the summits and ran through matted grassweeds. Little pools oozed up
where the mare's hooves had been.

The widow looked about her with the ragged clarity of starvation. Clarity
and a disastrous elation. This was what church aspired to, she realized: a greatness in
the hollowing mind, brought on by dissolution.
My heart is distracted within me; I
fade like a passing shadow
. Not a soul in the world knew where she was, and
this knowledge gave her pleasure.

The widow leaned deeply to avoid a branch and nearly fell from her saddle.
She snorted with false amusement, to fool herself into feeling amused.
Tired, tired,
always tired.
She shivered in her blighted cloth while phantom snow fell and
the stars above reeled. Her mind spun in its dark bowl, seeking in vain a better way to
see. The trees heaved in the wind like reeds in a swift current, and her looping and
sourceless thoughts stuttered to a stop to see them. The world was huge, endless, and
the widow in her body was not. She was alone and lost, the weak crying of her own baby
in her ears.

She rubbed her face hard with the heels of her hands and took the pipe
from the pocket of her coat as she rode. Put it in her mouth and sucked a stale incense
from it. She would not waste a match. This calmed her, and she let the endless forest
part for her and swallow her trail. Night came on quickly as the shadows of mountains
swept up along the range. The constellations came out in a gauzy crowd above, but the
widow was slumped in her saddle beneath dripping boughs and saw nothing.
What?
she said.
Come over here
, she said.

With a start, she awoke to find it was finally dark. The mare, which had
long ago stopped of its own accord, hung its head and slept where it stood. The widow
dismounted stiffly and just stopped there, bent over by weakness, nearly unconscious.
She felt nothing of her body except a complex of inflexible sinew across her back. A
night wind hissed wildly through the upper boughs and yet no breath reached down to her.
She stood erect, then twisted her torso this way and that and felt each string of muscle
tremble. A little later she woke again and found herself rolling over on the ground,
trying to find a more comfortable position, head on the saddle, legs tucked up to her
chest.

Once starvation had begun, actual sleep became impossible. The
widow's hands and feet burned, and the burning entered her dreams and destroyed
them. She felt that no human soul was near her, no fish in the streams, no animals, no
voice. The mare stood motionless as a clay statue. There was only water and sky-high
wind. The widow felt the burden of her own existence, the endless labour of it. She had
tried to eat grasses, the soft cores of pine cones, white cold roots she'd dug up
with her bootheels. But each had caused her to sicken or vomit, and now her stomach was
inactive, carved
out. With no idea how to save herself, she lay
motionless and febrile, while all about her edible ferns waved and the hard nubs of
rosehips leaked perfume unknown. Abundance lay about her, but she starved.

Black shapes came wandering through the outer dark, huge creatures that
stopped and bent their antlered heads to the ground. The widow sat upright, weak as a
child, her mouth hung open.
Come here, horses
, she said,
come
. Clouds
drifted along the ground and took her with them, her body catching on tree branches and
dragging on the ground. She dreamed, did not dream. Covering her face, she imagined
snow, falling needles of stars.
I am not in a storybook. You are no prince. I
won't die for you.
She held something alive in her hand. It was her other
hand.

The dark shapes moved away silently, quickly, as if pursued. And then
swift monsters hurtled after them, keening, and their barks were dreadful. Cold wind ran
through her like electricity. Hands and feet burning.

BY MORNING
, the widow sat upright among fallen branches,
the forest now motionless above her. She was some distance from the saddle and
saddlebags. The mare was not in sight. She ventured outward in short spokes from her
bed, but it was obvious to her that the mare was indeed gone. Had there been wolves? She
had dreamed of running wolves. But she had also dreamed of her grandmother dragging her
by the ankle across a lawn. She stood wherever light came through the trees in pools and
shafts, and its warmth was pure pleasure. She rubbed her numb arms and face. No sound
anywhere. Strange that her heart still beat and her breath came unbidden. She hung the
saddle on a branch to dry, though there was no point — she would not use it again.
The spattered grey hide and dark ears, shoulders rolling between her knees. Even the
widow's unmoored mind could grasp the meaning of it. Without the horse, her
meandering would be slower and she would lack even an animal's attention to
progress. Survival was unlikely. She set the saddle up as a shrine, not to the lost
animal, but to herself, to the fact that she had existed.

She left her belongings and wandered aimlessly. Spider webs brushed her
face and she did not wipe them away but
let spiders cling to her and
ride a while and drop away. The sun came down in beams and shafts, and once, when she
looked up, she saw the moon hung high and pale in the blue morning. Tricky thing,
pretending to be gone when it wasn't. She was reduced to an idiot child lost in
the woods. It was with an idiot's glee, then, that she came across the tracks of
her horse, and bent to see the deep, scored prints where the animal had run and dodged
and dodged again. Other horses had run with it and diverged through the trees, hounded
by dogs. Not dogs, she reminded herself. Many wolves, harrying the horses.

The widow followed the tracks and came across a carcass. It was a big mule
deer. The body lay with its hooves toward her. From ten yards away she could see blood
pooling in paw prints in the mud, the throat and belly torn away, intestines dragged
over the ground. One leg askew.

She turned immediately and fled, staggering, with a directional acumen
that might have surprised her if she had still been capable of surprise. Dodging through
the forest with her dark pants flapping, catching trees and clawing a path round them,
slapping branches away, and falling finally upon her meagre belongings, snatching the
bayonet from its sheath, turning, and stumbling back again.