Lynn gingerly took the dirty shirt, alarmed at the heat soaking through it. She shot Stebbs a questioning glance.
“Born dead.” He drew an arm around her shoulders, bringing her closer to him. “Take the little thing a bit aways and bury it. Mother’s not doing so well.”
“She going to make it?”
“Not doing so well up here.” Stebbs pointed to his temple, then his heart. “And here.”
Lynn tucked the small bundle under her arm. Eli followed her downstream, dazed and silent. She had no idea how she was supposed to dig a grave in frozen ground with no shovel, but Stebbs had his hands full with the mother. She climbed the bank when it rose to shoulder height and chose a small clearing enclosed by mountain ashes.
“This should be easy enough to find again, if she wants to come and see it,” she said to Eli, who only nodded. His fingers were clenched tightly around the flashlight Stebbs had handed off to him. “Plus the bank is high enough here, spring floods won’t wash it away.”
There was no response. Lynn sat the little bundle on the ground, ignoring the wetness that had soaked through the wrappings onto her clothes. “Find me a good-sized stick, pretty sharp.” Eli seemed grateful for direction; he disappeared into the darkness.
Lynn waited for her eyes to adjust to the moonlight, then went back to the streambed in search of rocks. They met again in the clearing and he began hacking at the ground with the stick, opening raw wounds in the earth. Once he had a furrow dug Lynn scraped away with a flat rock. “We won’t be able to get very deep,” she said. “But we’ll cover him with some good-sized rocks so nothing will bother him.”
“Him?”
“What’s that?”
“It was a boy?”
“Oh.” Lynn thought for a second. “I don’t really know. Stebbs didn’t say.”
Eli hesitated before unwinding the motionless bundle. Lynn looked away, intent on her task. “You were right,” he said after a moment. “It was a boy.”
She grunted in response, unsure what to say. Eli rewrapped the tiny body. “He’s cold already.” His hands hovered over the little bundle that had held warmth before the night wind had ripped it away. “My brother always wanted a son.”
“He can have more. Come help me.”
An hour later, Eli laid his nephew into the small hole they’d managed to scratch out, and they piled rocks on top of it.
“He can’t,” Eli said out of nowhere.
“Can’t what?”
“My brother, he can’t have more sons. He’s dead.”
“Oh,” Lynn said. “Sorry.”
They regarded the rocks together in silence. “I feel like we should say a prayer to God, or something,” Eli said after a moment.
“A what to who?”
“Never mind,” he said. “I just feel like I should say something, you know, over the grave.”
Lynn stood next to him in the dark, aware of the heat rolling off his body in contrast to the chill around them. “I can,” she said. “If you want.”
He nodded, and Lynn took a breath of cold air before the words spilled out.
“I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.”
Even in the dark of night she could feel him staring at her as she finished. “That’s William Butler Yeats,” Eli said. “How the hell do you know Yeats?”
“I can read, and I have books,” she said stiffly.
When they got back to the camp, Stebbs was sitting by the fire, warming some soup he had brought with him. “She’s all right,” he told Eli. “But you’ve got to get her some decent shelter. You two will die down here in a month.”
“What do you suggest?” Eli asked. “She won’t leave the stream, especially now.” The image of the small, lonely grave in the moonlight remained unspoken.
“Well, it’s not a bad site, really. You’ve got fresh water, and the bank is high enough that you should be safe from the spring thaw flow. It’s not something you’d know, but the stream does go dry from time to time, so a dry summer could put you in a pinch. But there’s plenty of game here, once you learn to hunt, and gathering wood’ll be a snap now you know to get the right kind.”
Lynn wondered who was going to teach Eli to hunt. She certainly didn’t have time, especially now that Lucy was her responsibility. She opened her mouth to say as much but the sight of Eli’s face—exhausted and blank—stopped her.
“Shelter’s the priority,” Stebbs continued. “As of now. She won’t move, and you won’t make her, which means bringing the shelter to you. We can throw up something quickly in a few days, get something better and more permanent for you later, if she still won’t see sense.”
Lynn shifted uneasily at Stebbs’ use of the word we, and the encompassing wave of his arm that included her.