“Yes,” said Vern.
“Are there lots of people somewhere who look like him?”
“There are lots of people all over the place who look all kinds of ways,” Vern explained.
“But where?” he asked. “I never seen no one but you, and that white man. Where does Lucy live? And her mam and her pap? Does Lucy have a sibling like Feral?”
Every word out that child’s mouth wrought fresh calamity inside of Vern. She’d never be able to sate his ferocious hunger for knowledge … “I’m tired, Howl, and we got a ways to go.”
“A ways to where?” he asked, his cheek bobbing back and forth against her midback, his voice raspy, nasal, and deep. Everything about Howling, from his compact, lean frame to his jaunty walk and the blooms of black hair emerging like petals from his head, gave Vern the sense of someone to be ready for, to never underestimate. “Home is back that way,” he said, leaning his body uncomfortably to point backward.
“But so’s that bad white man who was tryna burn us up!” answered Feral.
“That bad man got eated up by a animal. His body wasn’t there this morning. I checked all by myself! So we can go back.”
“Quiet, I said.”
Howling howled and Feral, too, until both of their voices grew hoarse and their bodies slumped against hers, dead weight. Vern took Feral down from her shoulders and tied him to the hip opposite Howling.
How they fell asleep on her with the rain still falling so mightily and the wind gnashing and the trees wild and thrashing and the cold cutting in deep, she didn’t understand. Vern was tired, too, but she couldn’t think of sleeping, not in this mad tempest. Nor could she think of stopping.
If she kept walking, she could pretend she had a future. Over the next hill, through the next clearing, just this many miles more. Just there, just there. Yonder, a life.
Vern walked twelve hours, then twenty-four. If she’d stopped then, she might’ve cited adrenaline for her endurance, but she didn’t. She carried her children in the woods without sleep for days, with no food and little water. She stopped only so everyone might do their business, to forage for mushrooms, and to let the babes stretch their legs. It wasn’t until the tenth day-and-night cycle of walking straight without sleep that she collapsed.
* * *
VERN PULLED HER BABES IN to her chest. They slept one to each side of her, heads crooked between her breasts and underarms. Feral, clingier than Howling, had one leg curled around Vern’s body possessively, his heel digging into her belly button. His hand gripped one of her ribs.
She’d not even made them a shelter or a pad of leaves to sleep on when she’d finished her ten-day trek. Just stopped and lay down.
Howling huffed in his sleep, and Feral squeaked softly. A white-tailed kite whistled. Behind Vern was the sound of hooves in dirt, the soft scuffing of mud and fallen leaves. She turned toward the noise, blinking in order to parse the image. Not five feet from Vern and the children was a herd of deer.
Vern’s stomach gnawed greedily. She slid out of the embrace of her children, her back flat on the ground and her feet pushing her backward. The two children rolled into each other but made no sound. Vern grabbed her biggest knife, removing it from the sheath that hung from her neck.
She rolled onto her side before moving into a low squat. After a count to three, she lunged at the closest deer and plunged her knife into its neck. Its brethren went running while it buckled under her blade. She jumped onto its back, took the knife out, and jabbed it between the shoulder blades. It went down, poor beast, whimpering all the way.
“Sorry,” she said weakly, though it was an apology with little meaning behind it. It was dead, and more of its kind would be dead in the future by her hand, by her knife. She was no sorrier than the endless rain was that had washed away her food stores, than wild boars who rooted for mice.
“Howling, Feral, wake up!” she said. “Wake up now.”
“What?” asked Howling.
“Up. Gather some kindling,” said Vern.
“Kindling?” asked Feral with his teeny-tiny voice before yawning big and wide. “No more walk?”
“Not today,” said Vern. She didn’t know about tomorrow. “Now go with Howling and get me some kindling.”
Instead, Feral squatted next to the deer. “It cry?” he asked.
“It happened too quick for it to mourn,” said Vern.
“You cry?” Feral asked.
“I’m ashamed to say that I did not.” Taking the creature’s life had been no small thing.