So what do I want? he asked himself. He couldn’t answer, so he just kept on walking, a step at a time, on and on through the woods. Trees looked familiar, moments of landscape were perfectly deja-vued. Could he be walking in circles? Maybe he would just walk and walk and walk until the warmers and the candy bars ran out and then sit down and never get up again.
He reached a large stream, of the kind the locals called a creek and pronounced crick, and decided to follow it. Streams led to rivers, rivers all led to the Mississippi, and if he kept walking, or stole a boat or built a raft, eventually he’d get to New Orleans, where it was warm, an idea that seemed both comforting and unlikely.
There were no more helicopters. He had the feeling that the ones that had passed overhead had been cleaning up the mess at the freight train siding, not hunting for him, otherwise they would have returned; there would have been tracker dogs and sirens and the whole paraphernalia of pursuit. Instead, there was nothing.
What did he want? Not to get caught. Not to get blamed for the deaths of the men on the train. “It wasn’t me,” he heard himself saying, “it was my dead wife.” He could imagine the expressions on the faces of the law officers. Then people could argue about whether he was crazy or not while he went to the chair ...
He wondered whether Wisconsin had the death penalty. He wondered whether that would matter. He wanted to understand what was going on—and to find out how it was all going to end. And finally, producing a half-rueful grin, he realized that most of all he wanted everything to be normal. He wanted never to have gone to prison, for Laura still to be alive, for none of this ever to have happened.
“I’m afraid that’s not exactly an option, m’boy,” he thought to himself, in Wednesday’s gruff voice, and he nodded agreement. Not an option. You burned your bridges. So keep walking. Do your own time ...
A distant woodpecker drummed against a rotten tree.
Shadow became aware of eyes on him: a handful of red cardinals stared at him from a skeletal elder bush, then returned to pecking at the clusters of black elderberries. They looked like the illustrations in the Songbirds of North America calendar. He heard the birds’ video-arcade trills and zaps and whoops follow him along the side of the creek. Eventually, they faded away.
The dead fawn lay in a glade in the shadojw of a hill, and a black bird the size of a small dog was picking, at its side with a large, wicked beak, rending and tearing~g6bbets of red meat from the corpse. The animal’s eyes were gone, but its head was untouched, and white fawn spots were visible on its rump. Shadow wondered how it had diqil.
The black bird cocked its head onto one side, and then said, in a voice like stones being struck, “You shadow man.”
“I’m Shadow,” said Shadow. The bird hopped up onto the fawn’s rump, raised its head, ruffled its crown and neck feathers. It was enormous and its eyes were black beads. There was something intimidating about a bird that size, this close.
“Says he will see you in Kay-ro,” tokked the raven. Shadow wondered which of Odin’s ravens this was: Huginn or Muninn, Memory or Thought.
“Kay-ro?” he asked.
“In Egypt.”
“How am I going to go to Egypt?”
“Follow Mississippi. Go south. Find Jackal.”
“Look,” said Shadow, “I don’t want to seem like I’r Jesus, look ...” he paused. Regrouped. He was cold, standing in a wood, talking to a big black bird who was currently branching on Bambi. “Okay. What I’m trying to say is I don’t want mysteries.”
“Mysteries,” agreed the bird, helpfully,
“What I want is explanations. Jackal in Kay-ro. This does not help me. It’s a line from a bad spy thriller.”
“Jackal. Friend. Tok. Kay-ro.”
“So you said. I’d like a little more information than that.”
The bird half turned, and pulled another strip of raw venison from the fawn’s ribs. Then it flew off into the trees, the red strip dangling from its beak like a long, bloody worm.
“Hey! Can you at least get me back to a real road?” called Shadow.
The raven flew up and away. Shadow looked at the corpse of the baby deer. He decided that if he were a real woodsman, he would slice off a steak and grill it over a wood fire. Instead, he sat on a fallen tree and ate a Snickers bar and knew that he really wasn’t a real woodsman.
The raven cawed from the edge of the clearing.
“You want me to follow you?” asked Shadow. “Or has Timmy fallen down another well?” The bird cawed again, impatiently. Shadow started walking toward it. It waited until he was close, then flapped heavily into another tree, heading somewhat to the left of the way Shadow had originally been going.
“Hey,” said Shadow. “Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.”
The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.
“Say ‘Nevermore,’ “ said Shadow.