Jane felt the heat well up from her belly and move up her spine to her throat. She wanted to scream out at him, but that was what he wanted, too. She clenched her teeth and stayed still. It was like a hot iron pressed against her skin. She had taken him into hiding out of pity. He had used her, and done so with a cold, efficient detachment because he could—because she had let him. Now he didn’t even have to make up a nice lie anymore.
She was cold, wet, dirty, and hungry in a place where those conditions weren’t just discomforts but could kill her. He offered what?—to make her his slave in exchange for scraps of food and a chance to lie by the fire? It occurred to her he might not even be lying. It might appeal to him to keep her alive for a time, maybe for the whole summer, while he waited.
Then, some evening in September the sky would turn iron-gray and there would be frost on the ground in the morning. It might be a quick bullet in the head while she was still sleeping—tied up to sleep, he had said. More likely it would be a knife across her throat, the way he had done Harry. Winter would be coming and he would have to leave the mountains. Maybe he would explain it to her first: You have to understand. I don’t want to do this, but I can’t set a woman who hates me loose in the world.
Then she saw the beam of his flashlight stab into the darkness. It was incredibly bright, racing quickly across the expanse of forest. Wherever it passed, the trees lit up and threw huge shadows behind them that moved. She ducked down again and pressed her face into the dirt.
In a moment the beam passed and went out. She kept down, not daring to move. After a long time she heard his voice again, this time from farther away along the rock shelf. "Jane! I know you can hear me! I don’t want to hurt you ..."
Slowly, she crawled to the edge of the thicket, slithered out on her belly, and rose to a crouch. There was no way she could run through these woods in the darkness, so she began to walk. She had lost her compass, but now and then she could see the sky through the trees, and at some point the clouds would clear and she would be able to find the north star. She walked through the woods, not sure of the direction she had been going, not planning now, just covering ground. She knew that he would not give up. He had no reason to stop looking until he found her body. He could keep tracking her for weeks. She could be dead in two or three days.
The clouds didn’t clear. Instead, the cold wind penetrated her light shirt, bringing with it big icy drops that slapped the leaves and exploded into mist. After that, the body of the storm arrived overhead. The rain came down in an avalanche of water, plastering her wet clothes to her skin and making the trail muddy and the stones slippery.
She walked into the wind because it usually came from the west or the northwest, and because she knew that this was one thing that would be as hard for him as it was for her. She went on for hours. She was shivering, and her hands began to feel numb. At last, when she climbed onto a flat place in the middle of a grove of tall, thick trees, her foot slipped out from under her and she fell.
The ground was wet and spongy, but it didn’t feel cold anymore. She rolled over onto her back and lay there. It felt good. She hadn’t known how good it was going to feel. She knew she was going to have to get up, but not now.
This time when she dreamed, she felt her mother’s lap again. She wanted to stay there on the soft, smooth fabric, feeling the hands petting her to sleep. But then she heard something. It was a voice, harsh and hoarse. She looked up and saw, far above her in the sky, the tiny shape of a man falling. He was hundreds of feet above her, turning over and over as he fell, and he was screaming. She said, "No. No, not this." She closed her eyes tightly, but it didn’t make any difference. Her eyelids were clear.
Her father was plummeting downward at incredible speed, but the distance was so great that he just kept falling, minute after minute. She watched him, trying to will him to stop, to make the air under him thicken and hold him, but it didn’t work. It never worked. She was as terrified as he was, looking down at the ground and feeling his sensation of falling. She held her breath as he came faster and faster.
Now she could see him clearly. He was the way he always had been, dressed in a soft, worn red cotton shirt and a pair of washed-out blue jeans. He was coming head-first, his arms outstretched and his mouth wide open. He seemed to be looking into her eyes as he fell. Jane went rigid, pressed her fingers over her eyes, and braced herself for the impact.
She could hear the wind now, hissing past him and making his clothes flutter and flap. Something strong forced her hands apart as it always did, to make her see him die. Just as he was about to knife into the weedy plateau where she lay, the sound of fluttering seemed to increase, and he swung upward again, so close to her that she could feel the wind in her face.
He soared up into the sky, and she could see that he was changing. His arms were outward from his shoulders, and they were black and had long feathers. He flapped them, and it made the same wind sound, and he shot upward as quickly as he had fallen. He rose higher and higher until she couldn’t see the red shirt and the jeans anymore. He was just a black shape against the bright sky. He gave a loud cry, not a word but a shout, as though he were calling to her.
She heard another voice answer him. It was harsh and hoarse like his, and it seemed to be coming from overhead. She opened her eyes, and it was daytime, and her father was gone. She looked up at the crow. He was big, perched on a limb near the top of the tree maybe sixty feet above her head, riding on the leafy end of a branch as it bobbed up and down in the morning sunlight. He called, "Gaw," and another crow flew in, his wingspan at least two and a half feet. The sun shone on their feathers so they looked as though they had been combed with a viscous oil that put blue-purple-yellow highlights over the coal-black. She must have heard them in her sleep and invented a dream to incorporate the noise.
The crows looked friendly to her, benign. She watched them without moving until she could tell them apart. She sat up slowly and glanced around her at the other trees, and saw more crows above and streaks of white crow shit on some of the tree trunks. There were bits of wet, downy feather here and there in the weeds. She had managed to stumble into the middle of a rookery in the night. They had found her there and decided she was not a threat.
Crows posted sentries higher up than she could climb, with eyes so sharp they could see a leaf move from a thousand yards off. That was what her two friends were doing up there. If the killer came anywhere nearer than that, the cry would go up. She stood up slowly and quietly, so the sentries would not be alarmed by the prone figure popping up.
She said quietly, "Thanks, Daddy," to the crows, not because they would magically know what she meant, but because it would help them get used to the fact that she would be making sounds and moving around.
Jane now saw things with a mad clarity. So much came into her mind that she could only acknowledge that it was there, and not go over it step by step. She had been trying to fight against the enemy and the woods at the same time. She had accepted his terms of battle: that they would go deep into the wilderness and bring with them the equipment of civilization—guns, tents, boats, and compasses. Whoever brought the most and the best had the advantage. He was bigger, stronger, faster. He had all the food and the warm clothes. He had let the journey use up everything she could carry, and let the chase wear her down to nothing.