Two Negroes, similar in dress: white cotton shirts unbuttoned, britches as ragged as if they'd fitted their legs into intertwined gunnysacks. Only as he moved to stand, to pat himself dry, did he see them sitting before him. The log beneath him yawned and George's rear end sank into the waterlogged mess. She would often forgive these absences of his only after a long, silent hug, the black ink from the trees leaving faint handprints on her dress, irritating her all over again. By now he was typically arriving home, the candle Isabelle had left on the windowsill guiding his final few steps. His worst miscalculation would still guide him to Old Ox, and although he loathed the idea of seeing any of those sorry desperate sorts in town, at the very least one of them would offer a horse to return him to his cabin.įor a moment the thought of his wife came to him. If the clouds gave out, the stars would appear, which was all he needed to map his way back home. He took a seat on a small log and waited for total darkness. Soon the need for water overtook him, the roof of his mouth so dry his tongue clung to it. His hip ached as though something was nestled there and attempting to escape. The sun, above his head only moments before, had faded into nothingness over the far corner of the valley, nearly out of sight.
It slowed him, and by the time he caught his breath and took a moment to assess his surroundings, he realized that silence had overtaken the woods. He'd developed a hitch over the last few years, had pinned it on a misplaced step as he descended from his cabin to the forest floor, but he knew this was a lie: it had appeared with the persistence and steady progress of old age itself-as natural as the lines on his face, the white in his hair.
The brush George encountered was waist-high and coated with burrs that clung to his trousers. Many of them as familiar as signposts, long studied over many years from childhood on. The large red oaks and walnut trees that surrounded his home could dim the sun into nothing more than a soft flicker in the sky passing between their branches. The land his father had passed down to him was over two hundred acres.
The animal, he was sure, was always one step away from falling into his line of sight. This had been the first of such excursions all spring, and tramping through splintered pine needles and mushrooms swollen from the morning rain, he'd come upon a patch of land he'd yet to explore in full. He'd seen the animal in his mind's eye upon waking, and tracking it carried a sense of adventure so satisfying that all day he could not bear the thought of returning home. He'd taken to the woods that very morning, tracking an animal that had eluded him since his childhood, and now night was falling. An entire day had passed since George Walker had spoken to his wife.
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