Out of the corner of her eye she saw him reach the peak of the ten-foot boulder. She saw his face turn toward her. Then, quietly, he stood up and the rifle started its steady rise to his good shoulder.
She was already half turned, and she raised the bow quickly. In her anger she pulled the arrow back until the bone tip touched her knuckle. She stared back into his eyes. In a second the right eye would reach the rifle sight. The left eye was already beginning to close, and next the gun would roar. Her fingers loosed the arrow.
It flew upward with a hiss, the feathers spinning. When it hit, she heard a chuck. The rifle fell, the hands shot upward and gripped the place where the arrow had gone in, just where the zipper sides came together below his neck. He sat down on top of the rock and his balance seemed to leave him.
He began to slide, reaching ahead of him for the rifle. She pushed off and ran toward him. It was at least twenty paces, but she was charging now, dashing along through the calf-high vegetation to get there before he could pick up the gun. She didn’t know when her hand went behind her to grip the handle of the heavy war club. When she got there his hand was on the rifle and it was coming up again. She swung the war club with all her might into the back of his skull. She heard the crack of bone and saw his head slump forward. When she swung the club into his skull again, she felt it hit soft tissue. She had done it. He was dead.
Jane drew a deep breath and threw her head back so far that the feathers in her hair brushed her spine and her painted face glared up through the leaves at the sky. Then she let out a piercing whoop of triumph and gladness.
30
Jane staggered a few feet, fell to the ground, and began to cry. She cried in gratitude that she was alive, in relief that the killer was finally dead. She wept in mourning for the little gambler Harry, who had felt a knife brought across his throat by a man he had thought was his friend, and she keened for her lost, dead lover.
Then, as the sun rose higher into the tops of the trees, her tears stopped coming. She stood up, looked around her, and knew what she was going to do. She walked back to the enemy’s camp and collected the tools she would need, then followed the path to the little stream of water that she had drunk from in the night. She rolled an old, rotten log down the bank into the stream to divert it from its course and then began to dig in the bed. The first few inches were small pebbles and gravel, and below them was mud. She packed the stones and mud against the log to make it into a dam. After an hour of digging, she was hip deep, and hit rock.
She couldn’t bear to touch his hands, so she brought up his sleeping bag, rolled him over onto it with her foot, and dragged him down to the streambed. When she had covered the body and pushed the three feet of mud and stones over him, she pushed the log away and let the stream return to its course, first washing over the grave in a little flood and then in a muddy, cloudy stream. In a few minutes the water was clear again, as though it had never been disturbed since the mountains first rose up from the earth. Then she walked back up the trail she had made for him, cut down the rest of the monofilament fishing line and the three hooks that hadn’t caught his flesh, untied the bent sapling, and filled in the hole she had dug.
She walked back to the camp, ate his food, and drank water beside the beautiful black lake. Then she tossed the paddle, the car keys, and four days’ worth of dried food into his canoe and pushed it to the edge of the lake to wait for her.
She found matches in his pack and collected all of the firewood he had gathered and built a big fire on a flat stone shelf above the water. She burned first his clothes, the wallet she had bought him with the identification that said he was John Young, then the rest of his packaged food, the tent, and the sleeping bag. She unloaded the rifle he had carried into the woods and pumped the shotgun he had used as a booby-trap to verify that it was empty, and placed them on the fire to burn off the wooden stocks and forepieces, then added the fishing pole to burn the cork handle and line and melt the fiberglass. Everything he had brought into the forest she took apart or cut into pieces and put into the fire.
When all of his possessions had burned, she brought more wood, built the fire bigger, and watched it burn to embers. She threw her bow, her arrows, and her war club into the fire too and watched them flare up and burn, then lay down to sleep on the bare ground twenty feet away.
When she woke up she saw that it was the middle of the afternoon. She walked to the edge of the lake and looked down into the water. She could see the reflection of her face, still streaked with green and black, and the black crow’s feathers in her hair. She dived into the icy water, plunging into silence and darkness, then gave a kick and an armstroke and shot up through the surface. She scrubbed herself and let the feathers float away, then climbed out and dried off in the warm sun on the rocks.
She walked to her fire and found that it had cooled. She scraped the embers off into the water with the canoe paddle, then collected the bits of metal and fire-altered plastic and put them into her quiver. As she made her last walk around the campsite to look for anything she had missed, she remembered the money. Whatever else James Michael Martin had done, he would not have been able to bring himself to leave the money. She searched the area again, then remembered that he would have hidden it before he had moved his camp, probably in the first hour after he had arrived at the lake.
She walked to his old campsite and searched in the places that fit his mind. It was not tied to a rope and put in a watertight container weighted with rocks to hang under the surface of the lake. It was not high in any of the trees close enough for him to keep an eye on it. Then she noticed that his old campfire looked different from the one in his new camp.
He had built the new one in a pit. The charred wood and ashes of this one were on a level spot near the place where his tent had been. She pushed the charcoal debris aside and dug down an inch, where she found a thick bundle sealed in a moisture-proof plastic bag. Inside the bag was the pack she had given him the night they had run to Olcott, and inside the pack was the money. The remains of a fire had been moved here and placed on top of the buried money. If something happened to him, the ones who had come for him would probably spend some time looking for the money. When they didn’t find it, they would camp and build a fire. The place they would probably choose was the site of his old fire: just add some new wood and set a match to it. After an hour or so, the money would be gone. She reached into the pack, picked up one of the green stacks, and read the white band the bank had put around it. The print said, "ten thousand dollars." There were thirty-five identical stacks of hundreds. He had been confident enough to hide all of it in one place.
Jane carried the bag of money to his canoe, pushed off, and began to paddle out of the wilderness. As she moved the canoe back up the chain of lakes, she stopped every hour or two, put down her paddle, and dropped something into the deepest places: the rifle barrel and action into Lake Lila, the shotgun barrel into Round Lake, the melted fishing pole and loose eyelets into Little Tupper, each fragment miles from the last one.