"Well, we'll have to kill several now. And you'll have to do some of it."
"I know," Newman said. "They know who we are. They'll figure out what we were doing here. If they get out of here alive we're dead."
"And the girls," Janet said, "they may well be dead too."
Newman grunted as if he'd been hit.
"So," Janet said, "let's get organized."
Newman sat behind the outcropping of granite in the woods in the dark and rubbed his temples with his left hand. As he sat the sweat cooled on his body and he felt cold.
"It's September," he said.
"What?" "Cold," Newman said, "it gets cold up here in September."
"Yes."
"They took my rifle, and pistol belt." "Take the carbine and my ax," Janet said.
"Yes, and you have the.32 and the knife. We have the jackets and the down vests. I have eleven granola bars. You?"
"Twelve."
"We ought to try and get by on one a day and stretch them out. Try to live off the land as much as we can."
"Yes."
"We'll eat one each morning. Then we'll look for berries and stuff. If we've found nothing by night we'll have another one."
"I hope we're not here that long."
"Even if we can get them, and they don't get us, we may get lost.
Neither one of us is big in the woods." "You won't get lost," Janet said. "You've never been lost in your life."
"I've never spent time in the woods." "I'll bet they haven't either," Janet said.
"I hope not."
CHAPTER 25.
They slept very little that night, though they tried, huddled together, each in a thigh-length nylon pullover.
"You try and sleep and I'll watch," Newman had said. "Then I'll wake you when I'm falling asleep and you watch."
But in fact neither one of them slept, and after an hour and a half they realized they weren't going to and they sat quiet in the dark and listened to the twittering of insects and waited for the morning. It came, finally, with a slow thinning of the darkness. The sky behind the treetops got paler. Then the trees and rocks around them began to take shape. They could begin to see where they were and what it looked like.
"We've got to sneak back to the camp and see," Newman said.
"Yes."
"You look pretty good for a broad who slept on the ground in her clothes."
"What I wonder is if they're sneaking about, looking for us," Janet said.
All business, he thought, even here. Getting in charge.
"Take the carbine," she said.
"Okay."
The sun began to rise. Newman looked at it carefully, turning his body so the sun was to his right. In his mental map he saw himself standing on the East Coast, near the Atlantic, looking at Canada, full-sized, like someone in a television commercial.
"Okay," he said, "uphill is essentially north, downhill is essentially south. To get back to the lake we want to go south, downhill, remember that. In case we're separated."
"How about the packs?" Janet said.
"We'll bring them."
"Easier to be sneaking around without them."
"But if we leave them someplace we may not find them again and we need them," Newman said. "We better bring them."
She nodded and slipped into hers. It pleased him that she did what he said without argument. Not because I said so, though, because she agreed.
"Let's go," she said.
He picked up the carbine. "I'm not even sure which way," he said. "I'd say northwest." "Which way is that?" she said.
He'd known she wouldn't know. "Bear left, uphill," he said. "Remember, uphill is north. When you face north, west is to your left."
"Why not say left and right then?"
"Because left and right are relative to the way you're standing but north and south are not." She was impatient. "Let's go," she said.
"All right, but let me go first," he said. "You tend to get lost."
She nodded and they moved out of the small clearing. It feels like I'm leaving a refuge, he thought. It's no safer here than anywhere else but because we spent about eight hours here it's familiar and it feels safer. Amazing how we adjust. Safety may turn out to be relative too.
It was full daylight. He moved very slowly through the woods ahead of her. Walking very carefully, putting each foot down thoughtfully, feeling his way through the ground bramble and princess pine that tangled underfoot. He stopped frequently to listen. The second time he stopped there was a thicket of black raspberries. He gestured at them. And they both picked and ate as many as were ripe.
"Blackberries?" she said softly.
"Black raspberries I think. The blackberry bushes are taller and these don't have that oblong blackberry look, you know."
"How the hell do you know how high black raspberry bushes are?" she said.
He shrugged. "I read it somewhere." "I'm finished," she said.
He nodded and they moved on, bearing slightly west and slightly uphill, listening. Stopping, moving very slowly a careful step at a time. He held the carbine in his right hand. His finger on the trigger guard but not on the trigger, the barrel pointing down. It was a light weapon; with the fifteen-round clip fully loaded it weighed just over six pounds and it fitted comfortably in one hand. He could even fire it with one hand should he need to.
The forest was handsome. There were white and gray birch, white pine, and oak. There were clumps of second growth saplings and the low tangle of ground vines. The ascending sun made shade and light patterns through the tree leaves. Even though it was only early September, the sumac this far north was beginning to show color. He couldn't see very far, and as he moved through the woods he looked and listened with physical effort, feeling the stress of his concentration tightening the muscles of his neck and shoulders.
As the day warmed the insects became more active and Newman stopped to put insect repellent on himself and his wife. Their hum was still frustrating but they didn't bite. Birds moved and sang in the trees and before them in the bushes. There were squirrels, too, looking to Newman oddly out of place in the woods, as if they belonged in parks and front yards. Christ, Newman thought, pretty soon I'll run into some pigeons and then I'll see a wino sleeping on a bench.
They had walked in silence and tension for an hour when they cut the trail. Here, where they crossed it, the trail was rutted slightly, and worn in some places to bare earth. He raised his right hand, palm open. Janet stopped behind him, next to his shoulder.
"Is it the same trail?" she whispered.
"Must be," he whispered. "How many can there be up here?"
"Which way is their camp?"
"I'm not sure," he said. "I can't tell if we are above it or below it.
I'd guess we're below it. If we were above it I'd assume we would have crossed that stream."
"Are you sure?"
"No, but it stands to reason. The stream was running southwest. We've been moving northwest. If we were above their campsite we should have crossed the stream."
"I still don't see why."
"Well, take my word on it," he said. "If you can't picture it, I don't have time to draw a picture for you."
She was silent.
"Of course streams will go strange ways, they follow the land." He was talking so she could hear, but in fact he was talking to himself. He often did that, talked to her so he could hear himself think. "But all we can do is go with the best guess, the most reasonable possibility."
He pointed up the trail with his forefinger, making a decisive stabbing motion with his hand, his thumb cocked.