Yona nodded. If there were words to say after that, she did not know them. It was the most she had ever spoken with another person, the most she had learned about the personal toll of what the Germans were doing, and her throat felt thick with grief. So she touched his arm again, so that he could hear the things she wasn’t saying and understand that she was with him.
By the time they had constructed three makeshift shelters of bark and leaves, and Leon and Moshe had gathered kindling to make a fire, half of the group was already asleep, including all three children and their mother. Aleksander offered to take a turn keeping watch, and Yona sat beside the fire in the deep darkness of the wood, watching as Sulia and Miriam boiled water and pulled potatoes from one of the rucksacks. She’d never felt so hollowed out, nor so full of emotion, and she wondered how it was possible to feel both at the same time.
CHAPTER TEN
The night was clear and balmy, so the group didn’t bother to build more than basic shelters before filling their bellies with watery soup and crawling off to bed. Leib took the first watch, followed by Aleksander, and when Yona rose in the morning, the sky just beginning to glisten at the edges, she lay still for a moment, watching him move in slow, steady loops around the perimeter of the camp.
He walked quietly—not as quietly as she did after spending a lifetime in the trees, but softly enough that she understood he was a fast study. By his own admission, the forest had never been his home, but he was quickly learning its mysterious ways. The thought filled Yona with a strange blend of relief and sadness—relief because it meant she could teach him enough to help his group survive the winter, sadness because it meant they wouldn’t always need her. She had been with them for less than a day, and already she felt an unexpected attachment to all of them.
She had been right to insist they move—the longer they stayed in place during the summer, the more dangerous their situation became—but Yona also had to admit to herself that the group had fared well on their own. They had figured out a way to gather food, to tell basic poisons from basic sustenance, to build rudimentary shelter, even to arm themselves. It spoke volumes about Aleksander, Rosalia, Leib, and the others that they’d had a sense of what they needed to take from the villages and what they had to do to stay alive. Yona would help to make the upcoming winter easier, but even without her, it was possible they could all survive if they were fortunate enough to stay out of the path of those hunting them.
As Yona stood, she shivered, though the summer day was already warm. Hunting. The word lodged in her chest and throbbed there dangerously. She had hunted animals. She had been hunted by animals. But the thought of humans hunting humans—it was difficult for her to understand, and it made her feel ill.
She headed toward Aleksander, who turned and spotted her as she approached. “You should go back to sleep,” he said. “Get some rest.”
“I don’t sleep much.” It was true. Jerusza had taught her long ago that sleep, though necessary, was equivalent to weakness. Slumber left one vulnerable, useless. With the exception of her final few months, as she slowly passed from this world to the next, Jerusza had never slept more than four hours at a time, and she had often pursed her lips and chided Yona for sleeping for any period longer than that. Last night, though exhausted from the unfamiliar strain of human contact, Yona’s brain had raced with thoughts about all the things she wanted to do in the coming days. She would need to teach the group to preserve fish, to dry bilberries and cawberries for winter, to gather and store mountain ash berries and tree cranberries. She had to teach them how to hunt without weapons, which wild animals would provide the most nutrition, which frogs and snakes could be eaten, which herbs could be picked to help make food more palatable, which could be gathered to help treat ailments. She would need to show them how to build winter shelters and to catch fish when ice had crusted the ponds. They were the secrets of the forest that villagers couldn’t know, secrets that would mean the difference between life and death.
“You look troubled,” Aleksander said after a moment.
She was, of course. She felt responsible for everyone here. But then she looked back at the camp—where Ruth lay clutching all three of her sleeping children, where Oscher and Bina held each other, where Miriam slept with one arm slung protectively over a snoring Leib—and a great peace settled over her, all the questions and worries fading to a whisper. “It will be all right,” she said, as much to herself as to Aleksander.