Jack Ketchum - The Woman

From Ketchum :

Thanks to Andrew, Bill, and my partner Lucky. To Brauna for the dream. To Paula for damn near everything. To Kristy she knows perfectly well why. And to Pollyanna for direct and terrible inspiration.

From McKee :

To Ma and Pa for rearin me right, my sisters Boog, Jaye, and Angie for being great women, my brothers Kevin and Chris for not being like Cleek, and my partners in crime, Andrew, Bill, and Polly. And to you, Dallas, for showing a kid how its done.

PART ONE

ONE

The Woman has no concept of beauty.

She herself is not beautiful. Not unless power is beauty, because she is powerful, over six feet tall, with long arms and legs, almost simian in their lean strength. But her wide grey eyes are empty when they are not watchful and she is pale from lack of light, filthy, parasite and insect bitten and smelling of blood like a vulture. A wide smooth scar runs from just below her full right breast to just above her hip where eleven summers ago a shotgun blast has peeled her flesh away. Over her left eye and extending beyond her ear a second blast has left another scar. Neither her eyebrow nor her hair from forehead to the back of her ear has ever grown again.

She looks as though struck by lightning.

The Woman is not beautiful, and has no concept of beauty...

~ * ~

It is nearly dawn, the darkest hour behind her now and she has left the deep forest and the hardpack rocky trails she has walked for hours, for days perhaps, the fever bright within her, night to day and back again perhaps, all these trails so well known to her, for the beach at last. She is exposed here in the dawning but she has stopped and listened along the way and doubled back time and again so she is certain she is not pursued. They have given up.

If they have ever followed her at all in the dark. She has moved only in the dark.

Her wounds are graced with fortune so close together this time at her left side. The knife and the bullet. The crescent moon and the full moon mere inches apart. She has staunched them with mud and wrapped them tightly with her belt. There will be little blood trail for them to follow.

Still, she must heal.

There is pain. Pain that pulses through her body from shoulder to knee. That beats at her body as the waves beat the shore. But pain is to be borne. This is nothing to the pain of birthing. Pain says one thing only.

Alive.

Still, she must heal.

She scans the rocky tideline and sees it right away. The exact shape and color. Yellow-green, long flat blades torn from forests beneath the sea and now cast ashore. Glistening wet, alive and healthy. She wades into the waves, the cool tide drawing back and forth along her calves . The push, the pull. The glint off the waves. The high reek of the sea, the long smell of death. The shoreline birthing, dying.

She is immune to none of these.

The sea has always been her ally.

On a quiet night at low tide she can hear the world breathing.

She loosens her belt and drops it to her hips, careful not to lose the knife.

She goes to her knees and gently bathes her wounds until the mud is gone and her blood weeps down across her loincloth into the water. Then stands and walks to shore. She stoops and pulls some of the leaves free of their rocky trap, washes them of sand and crabshell and presses them to her wounds.

They sting. And this too is the sea.

The sea sails through her like a poison now, like a gift. Slowly the pain subsides. She gathers more leaves thick as leather and washes them and presses them to her side, lifts and rebuckles her belt around them to hold them in place.

She walks the shingle beach, eyeing tidepools for food and the cliffs above for shelter. It isnt long before she finds both. A small cache of mussels. A pair of tiny crabs. And perhaps forty feet above her fifteen yards away a narrow slit in the granite rockface, barely visible, draped in sphagnum moss the opening to a cave. The crabs she crunches with her teeth and swallows nearly whole. The mussels she palms in her hand two at a time and pummels against the rocks, flicks away the shells with her fingertips and laps the meat inside.

When shes finished she heads across the beach and climbs a narrow path to the cave.

Some ten feet from the entrance she stops. She scents the air. Pulls the knife from her belt. The knife still bears the dark brown stains of her own blood from the night before the Cow, in an unexpected bit of treachery from the last of her lost family, has stabbed her just above the hip. And paid for that with his life.

But she has caught the scent of another life.

A familiar one.

Of urine. Of wolf. The cave is marked with wolf-scent. And recent.

She knows the wolf is not normally the enemy. That most will run from her, from any human, rather than confront such an unpredictable opponent. But wolves do not tend to seek a cave unless to whelp and whelping season is over so that with this one care is necessary. She steps softly, stops, listens. Steps closer, the knife poised beside her at shoulder height, her grip firm and ready.

She stops again when she hears the scrabble of paw on rock. The wolf rising. It is less than ten feet away.

Then she hears the growling. Low and raw with intent.

This one is the enemy.

She can picture the wolf clearly. It stands facing her. Its ears are erect. The fur bristles along its massive arched back, its long legs bent for the leap. In its powerful muzzle the lips are curled into a snarl, pulled back away from the six sharp incisors used for cutting and two fangs curved inward for the ripping kill.

It tenses. She can feel it in the dark.

Knows that it can feel her too. Can smell her blood on the knife.

Inside the cave, a sudden rough movement and then the flash of yellow eyes and a hurtling grey-brown body and she leans into its rush, its dive for her throat, leans down and into and off to one side and plunges the knife down and under in a single liquid arc so that the wolf falls crashing back on its spine into the mouth of the cave, thrashing on the blade of the knife thrust up through its neck, paws uselessly tearing through emptiness while she presses her advantage, takes the knife in both her hands and heaves with shoulders, back and forearms, rips upward through muscled neck and bone into the very skull of the wolf, who whimpers once like a small kicked dog and dies.