The old woman listened, and didn't say a great deal. Telling her made him feel a little better, but not much, and he realized the only thing that would make a real difference was telling Sarah. The crime against the company was the stealing; the crime against her was lying. The latter was far worse. He decided that tonight, regardless of what they did or did not find this afternoon, he was going to phone home. She had loved him once, and maybe she did still. At the very least she would tell him what to do, and that might be as much absolution as he could expect.
Eventually, at a time Tom's beleaguered guts told him was past midday, they got where they were going.
— «» — «» — «»—
They had been cresting a rise for a long time. Tom had absolutely no idea of where they were by now. For a time he had believed that Henrickson might be right, that the woman was simply trying to get them lost. But he watched her carefully and saw she never seemed to hesitate, even for a moment, the beat required to decide which wrong way to go. Progress had been slow but constant. She had turned this way and that, taken them around some features and over others. For a woman of her age, she was surprisingly fit. She winced occasionally, however, and twice slipped and fell quickly on her side, unable to use her hands to halt her fall; and gradually she began to get slower, and to tire.
Then she stopped. She was panting. She indicated with her head.
'It's down there.'
Henrickson walked past her and up to the edge of the gully. He looked down for a few moments, and then beckoned to Tom.
'That the place?'
Tom walked up and stood with him, looking down into the stream bed. At first it looked just like any of the others they'd passed through. Then he picked out the little area where he'd sat in the dark, then returned to the next morning. Still less than a week ago, but it felt like an eternity. As if this was some place he was bound to come back to, over and over.
'Yeah,' he said. 'That's where it happened.' That defining moment, before which everything seemed grey and indistinct.
'Good,' Henrickson said. He turned away from the edge and walked back to Patrice. 'Thank you, ma'am.'
'What was the big deal, anyway?' Tom said. 'Why did you want to come back here? Or was that just part of pretending to be something you're not?'
'Not at all,' the man said. 'Follow me.'
He turned and started walking up the edge of the gully. They followed. After five minutes Henrickson started cutting left again, through the trees clustered around the lip of the drop. In another few minutes he stopped.
Tom stared. The man had led them to the trunk which had fallen across the gully.
'Ms Anders — would you tell Tom what we've got here?'
'A fallen tree,' she said.
Henrickson shook his head, walked the last few yards to the edge, and then stepped up onto the tree. He examined the end, and then walked straight across to the other side, as if the trunk was ten feet wide.
'Both ends have been worked,' the man said, squatting down to examine the wood. 'And branches along the trunk trimmed off. It's also been pulled about twenty degrees round from the angle it fell. I'm astonished you didn't notice, Tom.'
'I wasn't well,' Tom said. This was true, but in all honesty he couldn't believe he'd missed it either. Once you'd seen it, it was so obvious.
'You can cross the river down the way for the time being,' Henrickson said, 'but come the spring it's a long, long walk in either direction. This is a bridge, and it was manufactured. Some of our forest friends put it together. Consciousness solidified. We are here, but we want to be over there. So we build a simple machine. There's your proof, Tom. Told you it would be worth the walk.'
'How do you know it wasn't just some guy? Or something left from logging?'
'Because I know this area has never been felled, and that it's unlikely a human would do the job with stone tools.' He looked at Patrice. 'Just a fallen tree, right?'
'That's all I see. Think perhaps you're seeing something in your head, not what's actually there in front of your eyes. Lots of people are like that.'
Henrickson walked back over the bridge, and one last time, he grinned. He looked up the gully.
'Have it your own way. But let's walk a little more. See what we find.'
They walked another ten minutes, keeping close to the edge of the gully. The sides grew steeper and deeper, and the stream grew in width and sound, swollen by waterfalls, winter-thin but relentless.
Finally they got to the top of the ridge, and Tom gasped.
Beneath their feet the ground fell away. To the left the river suddenly dropped out into space, to tumble helplessly into a large rocky bowl two hundred feet below. The forest stretched out in front, a craggy carpet of white-crusted green, limitless, towards Canada and beyond. Way up above was the thin, fading trail of a jet, across the remaining narrow band of clear sky. That was the only work of man you could see. Otherwise it was if we had never been here. Tom watched as cloud slowly filled the gap, until the sky was all over grey, then tilted his head back to look back over the forest.
'It's beautiful,' he said.
'Imagine when this was all there was,' Henrickson said, quietly, standing beside him. 'When nobody else was here.' Tom could only shake his head again, faced with the world as it was before words. He kept on shaking it, slowly, feeling his eyes fill up with water. He didn't know why.
'I want to thank you, Tom,' Henrickson added, and suddenly his accent was backwoods again, and he was the person Tom had thought he'd come to know. 'You tried real hard, my friend, and it's not been an easy time for you, I know. You know the weirdest thing? I've actually enjoyed having someone to talk to.'
Tom's head, shaking still, and then nodding. He looked up, saw the blurry shape of the old woman, hands still behind her back. She smiled at him, sadly, then looked away.
And then Henrickson put his hand on Tom's shoulder and pushed him over the edge.
There was a feeling of tilt, the hollow wrongness of knowing nothing was beneath, as if he was back on the bridge he had found all by himself, and the voice in his head had not been there to help him. Then the weightlessness of pure free fall, fast and brief, before he started hitting things. The collisions were not rustles or slides this time, but brief, bone-cracking impacts that spun and twisted him into a rag doll. Another momentary unbroken plummet, and then he landed like a dropped glass.