Grief swept up on me at odd times, and slipped away with the same ease, a changing tide I had no hope of predicting. I knew the loss should have taken up my whole world, but the world kept moving, and it didn't. I'd never mourned the way other people I knew did, and I didn't now. The agony of my losses settled down into an ugly clump at the base of my heart, like silt settling out of water, and only when I started thinking did the turmoil disrupt that delicate balance and send the grief flaring out in searing pain through the whole of my person.

Over the next few days, I settled into a holding pattern, waiting for people to realize I was missing and come and find me. I slept under the tree and I sat in the sun. Sometimes I wept, curled up on my side on the hard granite, tears falling silently out of my eyes as I laid there, the suffering, grief, and pain testing the limits of my perseverance. I endured only because it was more work not to endure; my thirst brought me to the lake shore every morning, and my cold, sluggish body longed for the heat of the sun and the poor protection of my nest of pine needles.

I could hardly feel the fingers of my right hand. I knew this should have worried me, that all I could feel was the pressure of the swelling, and then the heat of infection, but I didn't have any energy for anything but grim endurance. The skin around my wounds grew hot and red, and I couldn't seem to get warm, no matter how long I laid in the sun. I lay there, shivering, chilled to the bone with my pulse throbbing through my ruined hand, and the tears fell across the bridge of my nose and onto the unforgiving granite of the mountain beneath me.

Distantly, the thinking part of my mind knew that I was dying. Sepsis was the word hospitals used for infection in the blood, the type of infection that shuts down the organs and kills you as bacteria turn your body into food. I was cold because I was feverish, and I was exhausted because my hungry, injured body was trying with desperation to fight the bacteria that had found such a warm welcome in my torn flesh. It didn't matter that I remembered the word, or that I knew why it was happening. I was dying, the same way any other animal dies when its wounds are infected beyond the body's capacity for healing.