I took the knife from my belt, sliced away the nylon I was wearing from around it, and looked. Just looked, and that was more terrifying than trying to work the arrow out with my eyes closed. The broadhead had torn my side open, as it was designed to do, and if it had not gone quite as deep it would have just made a bad flesh wound, but that was not the case, and it was in me. In me. The flesh around the metal moved pitifully, like a mouth, when I moved the shaft. I put the knife against the flesh above the wound. Just cut right down, I said aloud. Cut down and cut it loose, and you’ll be able to clean the wound out in the river. It will be a lot better that way, boy.
I cut. My stomach heaved at the pain, and I cut inside the cut I had made. The woods and air were dizzy as with birds flying from all the trees straight into my face. I took the knife and turned it so the curved part of the blade was in the wound, and drove it down with both hands. I felt it grate on the shaft. This will have to be it, I said. I’m not going to cut myself any more even if I have to grab the shaft and tear it loose, and tear myself in half with it. The side of the rock was covered with blood, and I felt in my side to see if the shaft was more or less clear of flesh. The knife fell and rang on the stone. The shaft would come; I moved it through me a little more, and the wound changed. The bloody shaft was in my hands, and my side was oozing and pouring down the rock. I went down after it, the arrow still in my hands, and stood up.
There had never been a freedom like it. The pain itself was freedom, and the blood. I picked up the knife and cut one of the nylon sleeves off, the whole thing at the shoulder, and stuffed it in the wound, and then cut a long strip out of my right pants’ leg and tied it around my waist. I was thinking like a driven creature, but also like a singing one. Could I walk? What else could I do?
Walking was odd and one-sided but not impossible. I went to the edge of the gorge, which was almost straight up and down. There was no sign of the canoe, and I reckoned it had already gone by. Well, too bad. I’d wait for a while, try to find the man I had shot and bury him or get rid of him in whatever way I could, and then try to walk out.
I went back over to the rock where I had bled and threw a lot of sand and dirt on the blood, so that at least it didn’t shine. That was all the blood I planned to leave in the woods; the rest would have to be somebody else’s.
I went over to where the man had been. There was blood on a good many pebbles, and a concentration of it where be had been vomiting. I looked into the forest, and recalled what little I knew about the procedures of deer hunting: after hitting the deer with the arrow, you are supposed to wait half an hour and then follow it by its blood trail. I had no idea of how long ago it had been since I bad shot, but from what I had seen I believed he could not be far away; maybe just a few yards. I got down on my hands and knees to try to find a direction for the blood.
Wherever it had been dropped on loose sand it had sunk, and so immediately I knew that the story, if I could figure it out, would be told by rocks. He had moved toward the woods, as he would have to have done. But when I saw his blood confirming this, my confidence rose; I followed where it went, stone by stone.
At the edge of the woods I found the rifle, flat and long and out of place on the pine needles. I left it there, and drew the knife. I was on my knees, bleeding wherever I looked for his blood. Once I had to go back and try to pick up the trail again, for I could not tell which was my blood and which was his. My side had pretty much soaked the middle part of my outfit, and there was some oozing through the cloth. But I did not feel weak at all. I wondered how the blood would clot, with so much of the wound open, but a kind of numbness had set in on that side, and in the time since I’d cut the arrow out I had developed a hugging-with-my-elbow way of standing and walking that already seemed second nature; I felt I could hold myself together for a while, and didn’t think any further forward than the next pebble I didn’t think I had bled on yet.
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.