Yes, I thought with a cowardly but good feeling, they’ve had it. After all, I would have done all I could, and as a last resort could work my way out of the woods, following the river down to the first highway bridge. I was not particularly afraid of the man’s hunting me down after killing the others—though I was afraid to some extent, imagining suddenly his moving along my uncertain tracks in the windless underbrush and dark foliage—for he wouldn’t know where I was. Though he most likely recalled that there’d been four people in the canoes, one of us could easily have been drowned in the rapids; after all, the three of us nearly had drowned there. My life was safer than anyone’s unless the toothless man and I came on each other by chance.
Or unless I took a shot at him and missed. That chilled me; I felt my tongue thicken at the possibility. I thought about starting the trek out of the woods now, but the back of my mind told me that I had not gone through enough of the right motions yet; if Bobby and Lewis died, I wanted to be able to say to myself that I had done more than just climb up a gorge side and leave them helpless. But if the man I was looking for didn’t come where I expected him to after I had done my best to find him and kill him, that was not my fault. And there was not much chance that I had really guessed right. It was just the best that I could do.
There was still no light in the sky but moonlight. I turned away from the river where the land shelved back to some boulders and low trees, and felt around. Among the trees, which held the light from me, I could tell nothing except by touch. I put out a foot because I could reach farther that way. Something solid was there. I took a step toward it and was enveloped at once in branches and the stiff pine-hairs. I set the bow down and climbed into the lower limbs, which were very thick and close together, and went up until the tree swayed.
There was a little visibility through the needles, a little flickering light off the river, which the tree set twice as far off as it had been when I looked at it from the grasses at the
edge of the cliff. I finally figured out that the part of the river I could see was where it came out of the turn from the last of the rapids below Lewis and Bobby, and calmed and smoothed out, losing its own thready silver for the broadlying moonlight.
I went back down and got the bow and began to do what I could about setting up a blind in the tree. I had never shot anything—or at anything—from a tree before, not even a target, though I remembered someone’s telling me to aim a little lower than seemed right. I thought about this while I worked.
Moving as though I was instructing myself—where does this hand go? Here? No, it would be better over here, or a little lower down—I cleared away the small-needled twigs between myself and the platform of sand. It was not hard to do; I just kept taking things away from between the riverlight and my face until there were not any. When I was back against the hole of the tree, I was looking down a short, shaggy tunnel of needles; I would shoot right down that; it even seemed to help me aim. All the time I was clearing, I was aided by a totally different sense of touch than I had ever had, and it occurred to me that I must have developed it on the cliff. I seemed able to tell the exact shape and weight of anything at first touch, and had to put out no extra strength to break or strip off any part of the tree I wanted to. Being alive in the dark and doing what I was doing was like a powerful drunkenness, because I didn’t believe it. There had never been anything in my life remotely like it. I felt the bark next to me with the most intimate part of my palm, then broke off a needle and put it in my mouth and bit down. It was the right taste.
I edged around the trunk one way and another to see if I could give myself any more advantages, or a slightly wider angle from which to shoot. I did not want to tear the tree up any more; it must look like a tree, with no danger in it; it must look like the others. I had my clear shot down onto the sand, down the dark tunnel, but I could not swing more than a foot or two either way. For me to kill him under these conditions, he would have to be thinking as I had thought for him, and not approximately but exactly. The minds would have to merge.
I took my good arrow off the bow quiver, nocked it by feel and drew it back, setting my feet firmly on two big branches and getting solid at full draw, leaning to the right a little from the trunk to clear my right elbow to go all the way back. I lined up the shot down onto the open place as accurately as I could, thought for a second about shooting the arrow down into the sand to make sure of my elevation, fought off the idea with a quick springing of sweat and relaxed the broadhead out from the bow, letting my breath come forward at the same time. It bad been close; I had almost done it. Involuntary release would get me killed, and it was also likely to lose or damage the arrow so that I wouldn’t have any chance at all, if the man came. If.
I got as comfortable as I could, and decided to stay in the tree until light. I began to practice stillness, for that was what I was there for.
It was very quiet, almost out of bearing of the river; I heard the rapids upstream from me as no more than a persistent rustle, mixing, I thought as I listened, with another sound that must certainly be coming from downstream: more rapids, I would have bet, maybe even a falls. If that were true, it increased the chances of my being in the right place. Everything about it was logical, though through all the logic I still had no real belief that the man would come; it was far more likely that I had figured the whole thing wrong. I was just going through motions, even though they were the motions of life and death. I was awfully tired and not very excited, except when I thought that I might have guessed right, and I would have to get into the last motions of all and go through them: to turn that broadhead down the tunnel of pine needles on a human body and let it go, forever.
But mainly I was amazed at my situation. Just rather dumbly amazed. It was harder to imagine myself in a tree, like this, than it was to reach out and touch the bark or the needles and know that I actually was in one, in the middle of the night—or somewhere in the night—miles back in the woods, waiting to try to kill a man I had seen only once in my life. Nobody in the world knows where I am, I thought. I put tension on the bowstring, and the arrow came back a little. Who would believe it, I said, with no breath; who on earth?
It was slow waiting. I looked at my watch, but the river had killed it. My head bent forward, and seemed to want to keep on going down. I snapped awake two or three times, but slower each time, with less snap; once I leapt up out of the oldest dream of all—the oldest and most dreamlike—the one about starting to fall. For a second I had no idea what to do or to grab for, and simply put out a hand. I straightened again, wedged back, and tried to take stock once more. There was no arrow in the bow. My God, I thought, I’ve done it now. I don’t think I can get this crooked one even clear of the tree. Without a weapon I knew I would huddle helplessly in the tree, praying he wouldn’t notice me, and stay there while he killed Bobby and Lewis. I knew that I wouldn’t take him on with just a knife, no matter what advantage of surprise I had.