Penny took off up the hill, and George ran after her in his dress shoes. They stopped at the base of a tree just opposite the barn, only about three hundred yards away from the Cottage porch. Penny climbed it in the dark and called down to him where the next hand-or foothold was: six inches left or just beside the small branch with one leaf. Soon they arrived at a high perch where two small people could sit with their backs against the tree trunk and see the barn and the Cottage, as well as the harbor and most of the clearing on this side of the hill. It occurred to him that Penny had done this before.
She said that if and when the boys found him, they would beat him until they got bored, but only below the neck. The Indian Game had no known end point other than that. Usually the runner gave up and suffered the consequences—which were better or worse depending on James’s mood—rather than living out the night in the barren woods around the clearing. The boundaries and other rules changed each time, she said, again according to James’s whim, since the oldest boy had the privilege of making the rules: only he decided how long the runner’s head start was or whether he was allowed to wear shoes or a shirt or any clothes at all. If adults appeared, birdcalls went out that were amazingly lifelike—somehow all the boys could do it. By rule, girls were excluded, Penny said, but some nights she had come out and watched the game from this tree. James always checked the hayloft first, since the younger boys always panicked and hid in the first good place they saw. Penny said they would not make that same mistake.
56
Catta left the woods and walked onto the beach. The ocean was immense. The riot of space, the stars and birds, the massive wind and water. He was sure he could see every star ever created.
The gully path had ended and they bushwhacked the last stretch of forest before emerging onto the beach directly opposite North Island, whose hills rose up across the wide channel. Conrad pulled a canoe from the woods and dragged it over the rocks to the water. Catta’s father had said they would return for him at three seventeen P.M. Catta had said What should I eat? and his father had pointed in the two directions, woods and water. Still, he could not bring himself to get into the canoe. He would not be rescued.
Dale turned toward him in the lighter darkness of the shore.
“You don’t object to following us on Baffin?”
“No.”
“You don’t object to walking?”
“No.”
“And you’re hungry?” Dale said.
“Yes.”
“Watch,” Dale said.
There was an oblong rock at the tree line and Dale knelt down and drew an invisible line out along the point of it, toward the eastern hill on North Island. He walked into the water, along that invisible line.
Catta expected him to pitch over any second, to be sucked under and away, but Dale kept walking—ten yards, fifty, a hundred, shining his flashlight down every few feet to show that the water never passed his knees. Soon Catta could see only the bobbing light, which then began to rise: Dale had reached North Island and climbed up to level ground.
“It’s a path sixty minutes before and sixty after low tide,” Smock said.
Conrad launched the canoe loaded with the three jugs, while Catta followed Smock onto the tidal road. The water was shockingly cold, much colder now than during the day. The men all had waterproof waders on, but his sneakers were soaked and heavy and he could move only slowly since, being shorter, the water rose nearly to his waist. Out in the middle of the channel, standing almost on top of the ocean, he was closer to the stars than he had ever dreamt he would be. He cupped his hands and splashed the cold seawater onto his entire body, cleaning off the dirt and blood of the other journey, the one that had taken him from the open sea to the heart of Baffin. Up ahead, Smock shouted for him to keep up, and Catta shuffled on as fast as he could.
57
Lila had never seen Billy Quick sit so quietly, or do any one thing for so long, as he worked on the fire just in front of her. He was wholly focused on arranging logs, adding sticks, small adjustments, building what appeared to be a burning tripod, a shape not unlike the wigwams from old picture books. That was a word she loved: wigwam. Years ago, a friend of her father’s had built what he called a yurt by the water all the way out on Long Island, farther even than Montauk, near the preposterous cliffs. The friend was a lapsed archaeologist, an eccentric, and there was some minor point of Asian ethnography to the yurt, although in her mind it was a wigwam. Hannah had made such a fuss about sleeping in it that her parents and the archaeologist had finally agreed to let her do it. Lila had not wanted to seem more scared than her younger sister, so she joined her. The yurt smelled like old leather (which it was), and, perversely, it reminded Lila of the enormous green chairs in the library of the Knickerbocker Club, which she was allowed to sit in once a year on her birthday, drinking hot chocolate with marshmallows. That whole night Lila was absolutely terrified—alive to every sound, afraid of the crickets even, dreading some apocalypse. Her one consolation was the bellbuoy out in Long Island Sound, a friendly noise among the imagined strangers and creaking trees. Hannah, of course, slept through the night without moving. Good morning, sunshine, she’d said, long after the sun was up. Lila doubted that her sister would have told Billy about that particular trip. It was nothing; it was barely even conversation. From Hannah’s fearless perspective, it was a lark and not a trial.
Wilkie asked a question that Lila did not hear, but she nodded reflexively and he left. She was glad to have a certain amount of space around her for a moment, and she imagined Baffin again, the same wall of trees and the same shivering. She would stay as close as possible to this pain; she owed it to Catta that if she could not change the situation, she would at the very least meditate on it unceasingly. Diana would argue that thoughts were a form of action. In front of her, Billy loudly emptied the box of firewood and threw the last bark and sticks into the fire. He turned back toward her and pointed to a little figure on the hearth he must have built while she was looking away. It was just three sticks leaning together.
“You slept in a wigwam once,” Billy said. He said it softly, intimately, in a voice almost indistinguishable from the background noise. She could easily have pretended not to hear.
“I did,” Lila said. “I loved it.”