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I keep the campsite behind me and head off in the direkshun of the road. Best to just get on it and walk back to ’em as fast as I can. I’ll hear ’em coming and can get outta the way and then I guess I’ll see if there’s any way I can save her.
Which might mean meeting them head on.
I push my way thru a row of bushes when I hear Manchee bark, “Todd?”
I turn, trying to keep from seeing the campsite. “C’mon, boy.”
“Todd!”
“I said, c’mon, now. I mean it.”
“This way, Todd,” he barks and wags his half-tail.
I turn more fully to him. “What’d you say?”
He’s pointing his nose in another direkshun altogether from the one I’m going. “This way,” he barks. He rubs at the bandage over his eye with a paw, knocking it off and squinting at me with the injured eye.
“What do you mean ‘This way’?” I ask, a feeling in my chest.
He’s nodding his head and pushing his front feet in a direkshun not only away from the road but in the opposite direkshun from the army. “Viola,” he barks, turning round in a circle and then facing that way again.
“You can smell her?” I ask, my chest rising.
He barks a bark of yes.
“You can smell her?”
“This way, Todd!”
“Not back to the road?” I say. “Not back to the army?”
“Todd!” he barks, feeling the rise in my Noise and getting excited himself.
“Yer sure?” I say. “You gotta be sure, Manchee. You gotta be.”
“This way!” and off he runs, thru the bushes and off on a track parallel to the river, away from the army.
And towards Haven.
Who knows why and who cares cuz in the moment I’m ru
“This way, Todd,” Manchee barks, taking us round another outcropping.
Ever since we left the Spackle campsite, the terrain’s been getting more and more rugged. The woods have been rising up into hills for an hour or two now and we rush up ’em and down ’em and up ’em again and sometimes it’s more like hiking than ru
Even with the bandages doing their best to hold me together, every step I take jars my back and my head and every once in a while I can’t help but stop and sometimes throw up my empty stomach.
But on we go.
Faster, I think to myself. Go faster, Todd Hewitt.
They’ve got at least half a day’s march on us, maybe even a day and a half, and I don’t know where they’re going or what Aaron plans on doing when he gets there and so on we go.
“Yer sure?” I keep asking Manchee.
“This way,” he keeps barking.
The thing that makes no sense is that we’re pretty much on the path that Viola and I would have taken anyway, following the river, keeping back from the road, and heading east towards Haven. I don’t know why Aaron’s going there, I don’t know why he’d head away from the army, but that’s where Manchee’s smelling their scents and so that’s the way we go.
We keep on thru the middle of the day, up hills, down hills, and onwards, thru trees that turn from the broad leaves of the trees on the plains to more needly kinds, taller and more arrow-like. The trees even smell different, sending a sharp tang in the air I can taste on my tongue. Manchee and I hop over all ma
I try not to think at all. I try to keep my mind pointed ahead, pointed towards Viola and finding her. I try not to think about how she looked after I killed the Spackle. I try not to think about how afraid she was of me or how she backed away like I might hurt her. I try not to think about how scared she musta been when Aaron came after her and I was no use.
And I try not to think about the Spackle’s Noise and the fear that was in it or how surprised he musta been being killed for nothing more than being a fisherman or how the crunch felt up my arm when the knife went in him or how dark red his blood was flowing out onto me or the bafflement pouring outta him and into my Noise as he died as he died as he died as he–
I don’t think about it.
On we go, on we go.
Afternoon passes into early evening, the forest and the hills seem never-ending, and there comes another problem.
“Food, Todd?”
“There ain’t none left,” I say, dirt giving way under my feet as we make our way down a slope. “I don’t got nothing for myself neither.”
“Food?”
I don’t know how long it is since I ate last, don’t know how long since I really slept, for that matter, since passing out ain’t sleeping.
And I’ve lost track of how many days till I become a man but I can tell you it’s never felt farther away.
“Squirrel!” Manchee suddenly barks and tears around the trunk of a needly tree and into a mess of ferns beyond. I didn’t even see the squirrel but I can hear Whirler dog and “Squirrel!” and Whirler-whirler-whirler– and then it stops short.
Manchee jumps out with a waxy squirrel drooping in his maul, bigger and browner than the ones from the swamp. He drops it on the ground in front of me, a gristly, bloody plop, and I ain’t so hungry no more.
“Food?” he barks.
“That’s all right, boy.” I look anywhere but the mess. “You can have it.”
I’m sweating more than normal and I take big drinks of water as Manchee finishes his meal. Little gnats cloud round us in near-invisible swarms and I keep having to bat ’em away. I cough again, ignoring the pain in my back, the pain in my head, and when he’s done and ready to go, I wobble just a little but on we go again.
Keep moving, Todd Hewitt. Keep going.
I don’t dare sleep. Aaron may not so I can’t. On and on, the clouds passing sometimes without me noticing, the moons rising, stars peeping. I come down to the bottom of a low hill and scare my way thru a whole herd of what look like deer but their horns are all different than the deer I know from Prentisstown and anyway they’re off flying thru the trees away from me and a barking Manchee before I hardly register they’re even there.
On we go still thru midnight (twenty-four days left? Twenty-three?). We’ve come the whole day without hearing no more sounds of Noise or other settlements, not that I could see anyway, even when I was close enough to see brief snatches of the river and the road. But as we reach the top of another wooded hill and the moons are directly overhead, I finally hear the Noise of men, clear as a crash.
We stop, crouching down even tho it’s night.
I look out from our hilltop. The moons are high and I can see two long huts in two separate clearings on hillsides across the way. From one I can hear the murmuring ruckus of sleeping men’s Noise. Julia? and on horseback and tell him it ain’t so and up the river past morning and lots of things that make no sense cuz dreaming Noise is the weirdest of all. From the other hut, there’s silence, the aching silence of women, I can feel it even from here, men in one hut, women in another, which I guess is one way of solving the problem of sleeping, and the touch of the silence from the women’s side makes me think of Viola and I have to keep my balance against a tree trunk for a minute.
But where there’s people, there’s food.
“Can you find yer way back to the trail if we leave it?” I whisper to my dog, stifling a cough.