But he didn’t. He stayed, as if there might be some sort of reprieve, as if he might be hoping that from some unknown and unprobed source he might dredge up the necessary courage to walk into the swamp.
But the hope, he knew, was a hollow hope.
He had come to the end of hope. Ten years ago he could have done it. But not now. He’d lost too much along the way.
He heard the footsteps behind him and threw a look across his shoulders.
It was Kitty.
She squatted down beside him.
“Eric is getting the stuff together,” she told him. “He’ll be along in a little while.”
“The stuff?”
“Food. A couple of machetes. Some rope.”
“But I don’t understand.”
“He was just waiting for someone who had the guts to tackle it. He figures that you have. He always said one man didn’t have a chance, but maybe two men had. Two men, helping one another, just might have a chance.”
“But he told me…”
“Sure. I know what he told you. What I told you, too. And even in the face of that, you never wavered. That is how we knew.”
“We?”
“Of course,” said Kitty. “The three of us. I am going, too.”
It took the swamp four days to beat the first of them.
Curiously, it was Eric, the youngest and the strongest.
He stumbled as they walked along a narrow ridge of land, flanked by tangled brush on one hand, by a morass on the other.
Alden, who was following, helped him to his feet, but he could not stand. He staggered for a step or two, then collapsed again.
“Just a little rest,” Eric panted. “Just a little rest and then I’ll be able to go on.”
He crawled, with Alden helping, to a patch of shade, lay flat upon his back, a limp figure of a man.
Kitty sat beside him and stroked his hair back from his forehead.
“Maybe you should build a fire,” she said to Alden. “Something hot may help him. All of us could use a bit of something.”
Alden turned off the ridge and plunged into the brush. The footing was soft and soggy and in places he sank in muck half way to his knees.
He found a small dead tree and pulled branches off it. The fire, he knew, must be small, and of wood that was entirely dry, for any sign of smoke might alert the patrol that flew above the swamp.
Back on the ridge again, he used a machete to slice some shavings off a piece of wood and stacked it all with care. It must start on one match, for they had few matches.
Kitty came and knelt beside him, watching.
“Eric is asleep,” she said. “And it’s not just tuckered out. I think he has a fever.”
“It’s the middle of the afternoon,” said Alden. “We’ll stay here until morning. He may feel better, then. Some extra rest may put him on his feet.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“We’ll stay another day,” he said. “The three of us together. That’s what we said back there. We would stick together.”
She put out a hand and laid it on his arm.
“I was sure you’d say that,” she said. “Eric was so sure and he was so right. He said you were the man he had been waiting for.”
Alden shook his head. “It’s not only Eric,” he declared. “It’s not only us. It’s those others back there. Remember how they helped us? They gave us food, even when it meant they might go a bit more hungry. They gave us two fishhooks out of the six they had. One of them copied the map that Doc had carried. They fixed up a pair of shoes for me because they said I wasn’t used to going without shoes. And they all came to see us off and watched until we were out of sight.”
He paused and looked at her.
“It’s not just us,” he said. “It’s all of us…all of us in Limbo.”
She put up a hand and brushed the hair out of her eyes.
“Did anyone,” he asked her, “ever tell you that you are beautiful?”
She made a grimace. “Long ago,” she said. “But not for years. Life had been too hard. But once, I guess, you could have said that I was beautiful.”
She made a fluttery motion with her hands. “Light the fire,” she told him. “Then go and catch some fish. Laying over this way, we’ll need the food.”
Alden woke at the first faint edge of dawn and lay staring out across the inky water that looked, in the first flush of day, like a floor of black enamel that had just been painted and had not dried as yet, with the shine of wetness showing here and there. A great awkward bird launched itself off a dead tree stub and flapped ungracefully down to skim above the water so that little ripples ran in the black enamel.
Stiffly, Alden sat up. His bones ached from the dampness and he was stiff with the chill of night.
A short distance away, Kitty lay curled into a ball, still sleeping. He glanced toward the spot where Eric had been sleeping when he himself had gone to bed, and there was no one there.
Startled, he leaped to his feet.
“Eric!” he called.
There was no answer.
“Eric!” he shouted again.
Kitty uncoiled and sat up.
“He’s gone,” said Alden. “I just woke up and he wasn’t there.”
He walked over to where the man had been lying and the imprint of his body still was in the grass.
He bent to examine the ground and brushed his hand across it. Some of the blades of grass yielded to his touch; they were beginning to spring back, to stand erect again. Eric, he knew, had not left just a little while ago. He had been gone—for how long, for an hour, for two hours or more?
Kitty rose and came to stand beside him.
Alden got to his feet and faced her.
“He was sleeping when I looked at him before I went to sleep,” he said. “Muttering in his sleep, but sleeping. He still had a fever.”
“Maybe,” she said, “one of us should have sat up to watch him. But he seemed to be all right. And we were all tired.”
Alden looked up and down the ridge. There was nothing to be seen, no sign of the missing man.
“He might have wandered off,” he said. “Woke up, delirious. He might just have taken off.”
And if that were the situation, they might never find him. He might have fallen into a pool of water, or become trapped in muck or quicksand. He might be lying somewhere, exhausted with his effort, very quietly dying.
Alden walked off the ridge into the heavy brush that grew out of the muck. Carefully, he scouted up and down the ridge and there was no sign that anyone, except himself the afternoon before, had come off the ridge. And there would have been some sign, for when one stepped into the muck, he went in to his ankles, in places halfway to his knees.
Mosquitoes and other insects buzzed about him maddeningly as he floundered through the brush and somewhere far off a bird was making chunking sounds.
He stopped to rest and regain his breath, waving his hands about his face to clear the air of insects.
The chunking still kept on and now there was another sound. He listened for the second sound to be repeated.
“Alden,” came the cry again, so faint he barely heard it.
He plunged out of the brush back onto the ridge. The cry had come from the way that they had traveled on the day before.
“Alden!” And now he knew that it was Kitty, and not Eric, calling.
Awkwardly, he galloped down the ridge toward the sound.
Kitty was crouched at the edge of a thirty-foot stretch of open water, where the ridge had broken and let the water in.
He stopped beside her and looked down. She was pointing at a footprint—a footprint heading the wrong way. It lay beside other footprints heading in the opposite direction, the footprints that they had made in the mud as they came along the ridge the day before.