Говард Уолдроп: Them Bones

The horse and I were left in a stinking winter wonderland.

I waited for the others to appear in the time gate.

For four days.

Something had gone very, very, very wrong. I was alone here. I had enough food for two weeks, but after that I was going to have to go the roots and berries and local wildlife route. And it looked like summer was going here.

I began to view this as a survival exercise which might last the rest of my life.

I was scared.

I’d been as far as a kilometer from the panel marker, to the bayou on the north. Where, on the second day, I had bathed, but washing here is like bathing in Comet cleanser. I had come out wet but gritty.

I’d hobbled the horse and let it graze along the side of the woods, where the sun-hardened pigeon dung hadn’t covered everything.

I had never seen so many birds and animals as I had in the last few days. Rabbits, squirrels, quail, deer, field mice. I’d heard something that squealed, and something that coughed, but nothing vaguely human. Birds hopped through the branches of the trees in riotous profusion: bluebirds, cardinals, thrushes, red-winged blackbirds, meadowlarks. Going the nuts and berries and local wildlife route wouldn’t be as bad as I had figured.

That left me with a couple of tough questions. Did I stay here and wait for the others, who might never come? Did I try to find other people, find out when I was, and get to Baton Rouge? I couldn’t change history by myself.

Had the machine malfunctioned and put me down years before the others? Worse yet, years after they had come through? We had an alternate rendezvous point in Baton Rouge. What if there wasn’t a Baton Rouge yet?

In the last two cases I’d be on my own, anyway. This whole operation had been carefully planned for everything except this. My first job had been to go through and wave off anything coming toward the time portal. I would have had other jobs in the days that followed, but they hadn’t figured on me disappearing, or no one else making it across.

I really didn’t need this grief. I’d seen enough the last six weeks, up there in 2002, to last me a long, long time.

Find people, that’s what I wanted to do.

So I made the decision. I wrote a note and left it on the panel marker. I remembered my pathfinder training, so I would notch all the trees, in case other stragglers like me showed up. The note said I was going to follow Suckatoncha Bayou downstream to the Mississippi River, and then onward to Baton Rouge.

For that was my plan.

On my maps, the Suckatoncha Bayou went north, then eastsoutheast. Flowed is not the proper word. Most people think bayous are stagnant swamps. They are swampy, but they do flow, slowly. We didn’t have a name for them when I was growing up in Mississippi, for they are found nowhere but Louisiana and southern Arkansas. Great flat stretches of water, full of stumps and snags; the confluence of many small creeks and channels, but the land is so flat they spread out for miles.

The Suckatoncha was not where it was supposed to be. The horse and I went to its margin. Then I mounted up, and we plodded along.

I never liked horses. I still don’t. When I was a kid, everybody wanted one. Except me. This one didn’t like me, and was too skittish.

When the Special Group decided to go into the past, it chose horsepower over vehicles. (Same reason we were all armed with .30 caliber weapons rather than the standard 7.62 mm rifles. If we’d landed where we should have, the 1930s or ’40s, .30-cal ammunition would be much easier to find.) This was backwoods Louisiana, which had barely entered the Bronze Age by 1930. Horses would not have attracted much attention. They could also reproduce themselves and needed no spare parts.

For a few hours we clopped along the mushy ground of the bayou’s edge. The bayou tended almost due east. It would empty into the Mississippi, but some kilometers north of where it should, according to the map.

Either my compass was broken, or I was in much worse trouble than I had ever conceived. We’d seen maps all the way back to the French occupation of this area in the late 1600s. The Bayou always flowed eastsoutheast and emptied into the Mississippi within a couple of kilometers of its (2002 A.D.) site.

For the last 320 years.

It took a long time for a waterway to change its course by that many kilometers. I must be stranded far, far into the past of this country.

If the group is back here, they’re going to have to get ready for a long haul. It won’t be just the work of a lifetime changing history. It will be the work of generations. They’ll never see to completion what they set in motion. They’ll never know.

If they’re here somewhere with me.

At sundown, I stopped for the night on a point of high ground (about a meter high). There was a little breeze there, but I knew the mosquitoes (some the size of damsel flies) would come soon. As frogs and other unnamed denizens started an ungodly chorus, I rummaged through my lurp bags for chow.

On the morning of the fifth day I came across a game trail in the pine needles. Since it skirted the margin of the swamp, I followed it.

Out on the waters, alligators the size of culvert pipes were basking in the sun along rotted logs. This morning as I pissed in the water an eight-foot cottonmouth swam by searching for frogs. Last night the noises the frogs made were unbelievable. Most of the animals seemed unafraid, only mildly wary. I thought of having frog legs for supper tonight.

A little while ago I had come upon a huge heron wading near the shore. It began to run, unfolding its wings, and began to lift itself from the water. I thought it would take forever. Then it tucked in its neck, lifted its huge legs, and spread its blue wings on the air. And was gone.

Near noon I came across a footprint on the game path. I stopped the horse. There are people here, at least. I’m not in some dim Holocene past. The print is light and has only the single outline of the sole. So we are dealing with Amerindians, or Cajuns, or a guy in his house slippers.

Now it is my turn to be wary. I speak no Amerindian dialects. (My grandfather was a Choctaw and my great-grandmother a Chickasaw. But they were the Choctaws and Chickasaws who weren’t removed in the 1800s, but the ones who owned slaves and voted and lived in brick houses. I doubted anyone in my family had spoken a native dialect for a century or more. I look Indian, high cheekbones, small hint of epicanthic folds, but I paid little attention to that while growing up. Besides, I doubt Choctaw or Chickasaw would do me any good on this side of the big river.) French? This is, after all, Louisiana, I can’t even find a bathroom in French. Some Spanish. If I’m lucky, this is after De Soto’s trip through here, and maybe they’ll speak some Spanish. My Greek will do me about as much good as tits on a boar shoat. English. There’s always English. Gestures? I never studied either Amerindian or American Sign Language.

Maybe this is just a guy in his house shoes. Maybe I’m not stranded in some unthinkable past. Maybe when I go to the river there’ll be steamboats and riverboat gamblers and telephones and cars.

Not a chance, with the bayou running straight east as an arrow into the Mississippi River.

Madison Yazoo Leake, you are on your own.

It was later and I was bathing in a creek which came out of the pines and emptied into the bayou. I had been following the footprints for a couple of hours and they looked no fresher to me. It was warm and muggy.

I had no liking for the snakes and alligators, or the silty waters of the bayou. So when I found this clear water, I was ready to clean up. The water was only half a meter deep and a meter across where I bathed. The water was cool, refreshing. I had cleaned every orifice twice. I had soaped and rinsed and now I was soaking, watching my belly hairs float.