He woke up sick. Time had gone by, days and days of it. There was rain and then there wasn’t rain. He’d run short of food and put himself on half rations, so maybe that was part of it, but sick or not, there was a war on and so he got up and had some cold hot cocoa and a pouch of some shit mixed with water, shouldered his pack and his rifle, and went out to reconnoiter. What he wanted to do was get a little farther afield and find another cabin to break into, like that day with the old lady, but the hostiles were everywhere now—you couldn’t go over a ridge and not hear their helicopters and walkie-talkies and sometimes even the barking of their dogs—and it was too dangerous, not strategic, not strategic at all. A voice told him to hump north, hump all night, every night, till he was fifty or even a hundred miles up the coast in a place where there were pristine cabins, cabins untouched since the part-timers and gray goats and summer people had left, where he could sleep and eat and shower to his heart’s content, but another voice told him that that was running and you couldn’t run forever. Even Colter, the greatest runner of them all, couldn’t run forever.
Colter came out of that river shivering so hard he thought he was going to fracture his ribs, but the way to conquer the cold was to run and so he ran. All that night he ran, knowing they’d be on his trail in the morning. They’d look for him along the river, obviously, but that wasn’t where they were going to find him. He made straight for the mountains, guided only by the stars that whitewashed the sky overhead till it got milky and gave way to dawn. How many miles he’d put between himself and his pursuers he couldn’t say, but he must have lain down then and slept in fits, expecting at any moment to hear their footfalls on the shingle that lay scattered over the slope like cast-off teeth. He was chilled through to the bone and so he found a place protected from the wind where he could hunker against a slab of rock and let the sun warm him, but of course this was problematic too, not only because every moment of delay was a moment they were potentially gaining on him, but because he had to add sunburn to all his other issues. His face and hands were like leather, but the rest of him had never seen the light of day, save on those rare occasions when he went into one creek or another for a wash. Colter gave himself fifteen minutes maybe, then pushed himself on, not yet realizing that the Blackfeet had never found his trail, which was a mercy because the more he drove himself, the sooner he got back to civilization and the better his chances of survival.
Which were slim. And for any other man, anybody other than Colter—or maybe Glass—wouldn’t have added up to anything more than zero. At any rate, Colter kept on, just as he had after he’d been wounded and left for dead by his so-called comrades, only this time he didn’t have his rifle or his knife or any means to make fire. Or even clothes. Clothes to protect him from the sun in the day and the cold at night. It was three hundred miles to Fort Lisa on the Big Horn. You could probably drive it in five hours today. But on foot, shoeless, facing into the wind, it took Colter eleven days of nearly continuous walking—and he paused only to dig up the roots of the plant known as prairie turnip or peel bark from a tree just to have something on his stomach—before he saw the palisades of the fort rising out of the plain like an assertion of might and right and well-being.
On this day, though, the present-time Colter was hungry, though maybe nowhere near in the same ballpark as what the original must have experienced on that second trek back out of the wilderness, and he went off to see what he could find. He’d put out snares for rabbits, but for some reason he’d been unsuccessful in nailing any, and then he became paranoid about the traps themselves, thinking that maybe the hostiles had found them and were waiting there for him, turning a trap into a trap. Striking out in a new direction, away from town, away from where the cabins and regular houses too sprouted up along the back roads, he went east, paralleling Route 20 but giving it a good wide berth. He wasn’t thinking of Sara, or not especially—it would be suicidal to try to get to her house—but just of seeing what was what out there, like maybe running across a daytime house on the outskirts of Willits where there was nobody home because they were at work or something like that. A place where they didn’t have any dogs. Or neighbors. Or alarms. A place where maybe they’d left a window open or a door unlocked. A garage even. A lot of people kept second refrigerators in their garages. Tools. Sometimes even guns, not that he needed another weapon, but if one came to hand—and a few rounds with it—why not?