Three weeks had passed since the night she had returned to the cave. She had stopped talking out loud to the cross or to the trees or to the wind. She had stopped talking to herself. But at night songs would come to her, lines from ballads Farrell had played, or music she’d listened to on the radio, or hymns that had been sung in church when she was a young girl. And without any books to read, she would repeat those lines in her head throughout the day. A song by David Gray, or Nanci Griffith, Eva Cassidy, or Johnny Cash, another by Doc Watson, or Arlo Guthrie, a hymn about walking with Jesus. She still used the crutch, and at times she was certain she would not wake up to see another morning, and then the sun would rise, and she would get up as she had done the day before, and the day before that. She would heat her water. Sometimes she would have something to eat. She had rationed the coyote meat, twelve pounds at best, for almost ten days. She’d continued to supplement her diet with the scarce pinyon nuts and juniper berries. Twice she’d killed a rabbit, and another time she’d killed a squirrel, using rocks she had thrown, and during the day when she was trying to pass the time, she would practice her aim. Once she had injured a bird, a young magpie, but she could not make herself eat it. She had carried the bird to a grove of serviceberry and left it there. She had thought about trying to nurse the bird back to health, but she had nothing with which to nurse it, and so she prayed for the bird instead, and asked for God’s forgiveness. Three days later she was certain she saw the bird again. She was fifty feet from the cave and was collecting snow for water when a magpie flew above her.
The days were getting longer, and though storms had continued to blow in from the north and from the west, the accumulation was less, and each storm would be followed by days of warm sunshine. Amy Raye would climb along the ledge to the top of the cave and look out over the canyon where she was sure she could see patches of land around the rocks. But even that small attempt would fatigue her, and her weakened limbs would quiver beneath her weight as she made her way back to the cave. And the muscle cramping had become worse. She needed salt. She needed electrolytes. She thought of the Irish Republican Army strikers who had existed for over sixty days without food, consuming only water and salt. She had gone on this hunt weighing close to one hundred thirty pounds. She had always been lean. She also knew once she had lost more than eighteen percent of her body weight, all hope of surviving would be lost. She chewed on the roots of young pinyons, even sprinkled dirt into her water, hoping to absorb some of the minerals. Still, she was growing weaker by the day.
And then during the first week of February, the temperatures had felt warmer than usual, and the sun rose full-bodied in a cloudless sky. She removed her clothes and stretched her body out on one of the large boulders about forty yards to the east of the cave, so that she could reap the full benefit of the vitamins from the sun. Her hips and elbows had become prominent, and her knees knobby. For the first time she noticed just how much her muscles had atrophied, and she knew she was entering starvation mode. Her metabolism had slowed down; her fat stores had been depleted. Her body was feeding off her muscles for energy and would soon be feeding off her vital organs as well. And in that moment with the warmth of the sun and the coolness of the rock and the mountains and cedar all around her, she knew she would be okay with whatever happened to her. And with that thought, never before had she felt so free.