There was no path into the woods where I was going. It was dark there, but I could see blood, and when I couldn’t see it I could feel it, and, in some cases, smell it. I tried one last time to think like the man I had shot. He was centershot; it had looked like he was hit just under the throat, though it might have been right through the lower part of the neck. He was dying, he had no weapon, his jugular was probably cut in half. The only thing about him that concerned me was that he was trying to get somewhere he knew about: to some place, or even more pertinent, to someone. I didn’t believe this was true, but I didn’t know that it wasn’t.
And I had to find him. If I didn’t, somebody else might, and that would be the end of us, in one way or another, or at least it would be the beginning of explanations, trials, lawyers and all the other things we had tried to prevent when Lewis persuaded us to bury the first man under the ferns.
It was too dark to see from a standing position; I had to get closer to the blood. I went to all fours with my head down like a dog and the knife between my teeth, going through bush limbs one by one until I came out into an empty clearing about fifty yards wide. I could hardly hear the river now; it was only a distant, down-and-far murmur; every leaf I put between it and me diminished it.
But I had lost all contact with the blood. My head would not come up, and I felt faint without feeling particularly weak. The main trouble was that I could not think clearly. But I knew I had to do something about finding his blood again, or everything was gone.
I got up and walked out into the middle of the clearing. A badly hurt man is not going to want to fight through bushes. If he was trying to reach a definite objective, he would have used the open space. He would probably have used it even if he wasn’t. He was not in the clearing, so he had gone through it. Straight across? How straight could he have gone? I went across to the other edge, ready to look at every leaf on every bush, and began to work slowly around the border. Shafts of early sunlight were everywhere, sensitive and needled, directed at certain places for no reason, moving slightly on the ground with the wind stirring in the tops of the trees. When I was about halfway around the perimeter one of the rays moved and gave back something. It was a reddish-brown rock about the size of a tennis ball that looked exactly as though it had been hastily painted, and I had to wait a minute, my head heavying even more, before I knew what it meant. This time I knew it was not my blood. You haven’t been here yet, I kept saying to myself through the knife; you haven’t been here. I went to the rock.
It was the place where he must have given up the last of the blood that had enabled him to move. A few steps farther on into the woods I found blood on a low leaf; crawling, maybe. I thought of getting down on my hands and knees and smelling for blood like an animal again, but the possibility that he was crawling made me want to stand, and I did, though crouching and leaning over the arm that held my own blood in.
I raised my eyes along the ground over the rocks and leaves and pine needles, and twenty yards away it bunched at the foot of a dead tree. It could have been a bush or a stone, but I knew when I first saw it that it was neither. It was not moving, but the light was playing over it and it seemed not entirely inert, but alive in the same way that most of the things in the woods were alive. I walked over to it, and it was a man lying facedown, holding on to one of the roots of the dead tree. He had long thin dirty fingers, and his back was soaking with blood.
Before there was everything to do there was nothing to do. His brain and mine unlocked and fell apart, and in a way I was sorry to see it go. I never had thought with another man’s mind on matters of life and death, and would never think that way again. I just stood there looking down, breathing with the knife. Then I took it out of my face.
There was nothing in common, in the way he was lying, with any of the positions I had seen him in while he was alive, until I remembered the pose by the river in which I had most wanted to kill him. He now had that same relaxed, enjoying look of belonging anywhere he happened to be, and particularly in the woods.
I turned him over with a foot, and his hand moved around palm-up, still with the shape of the root. His face came clear.
I fell down; the knife fell away. My heart moved into my bad side and beat there, trying to throw my blood away any way it could. I put my hands over my face and went wild with terror; I could not look again. His mouth was open, and full of yellow teeth.
But was it? I crawled over to him and picked up the knife. I put it in his mouth and pried at the gums, and a partial upper plate began to come out. Did that make the difference? Did that make enough difference? I shoved the teeth back in with the handle of the knife, and took a good look. He was dressed like the toothless man in the clearing; whether exactly like him I truthfully couldn’t say, but very much like. He was about the same size, and he was thin and repulsive-looking. And, though my time close to him in the clearing was burned in my mind, I had still seen him under those circumstances, which were a lot different from these; I believe that if I could have seen him move I would have known, one way or the other. But I didn’t, and I don’t.
I took the knife in my fist. What? Anything. This, also, is not going to be seen. It is not ever going to be known; you can do what you want to; nothing is too terrible. I can cut off the genitals he was going to use on me. Or I can cut off his head, looking straight into his open eyes. Or I can eat him. I can do anything I have a wish to do, and I waited carefully for some wish to come; I would do what it said.
It did not come, but the ultimate horror circled me and played over the knife. I began to sing. It was a current popular favorite, a folk-rock tune. I finished, and I was withdrawn from. I straightened as well as I could. There he is, I said to him.
The problems came back, one by one, in sequence. I would rather drag him than carry him, but I knew I could make better time if I carried him, so I put the knife back in the case, dropped down on one knee and wrestled him across my shoulders in the fireman’s carry from boy scout days. I got up with nearly double my weight and started back toward the clearing. I went around the rock of blood that had led me there, stumbled through the bushes I had crawled in, and tried for the river with my side oozing me wet and the top of my left leg wet and drying and moistening again. The man’s body held me to the ground, and I had the feeling that when I got him off my shoulders, I would fly. Blundering through the bushes, I had no idea whether I would make it back to the river. The woods burst slowly open in front of me, across my eyes, and twenty yards ahead dropped off into still, sun-filled space from which the old noise of eternity came back.
I put him down in almost the exact place where I had shot him, and stepped to the edge of the bluff. I looked downriver first, for I was afraid to look upriver and see that unchanging emptiness, but even looking dovrnriver I could tell that the emptiness upstream was not complete, that there was something there like a mote, and I turned to it to be able to face it and make sure. Lewis’ canoe shone there, flashing frankly in the sun, riding grayly like a trout, coming out of the rapids. I looked at the dead man. You’re dead, Lewis, I said to him. You and Bobby are dead. You didn’t start on time; you did everything wrong. I ought to take this rifle and shoot the hell out of you, Bobby, you incompetent asshole, you soft city country-club man. You’d have been dead, you should’ve been dead, right about exactly now. You’re right in line, you’re going slow, you’re going slow, you’re just sitting there. If I hadn’t come up here and did what I did, you’d’ve been floating along now with no brains and no blood, and so would Lewis.