Cover

Title Page

COLD
RIVER

William Judson

A SIGNET BOOK

This story is dedicated to
my own sweet Lizzy

Praise for
Cold River

“Full of drama and tension.”

—The Columbus Dispatch

“A natural.”

—The New York Times

“It’s refreshing to find a no-nonsense girl as the heroine…recommended.”

—Library Journal

“A novel of the indestructible will to live.”

—Hammond Times (Indiana)

“It’s just a beautiful story.”

—Cleveland Press

“The book and the youngsters win out on their own merit and there’s the ageless appeal of resourcefulness, resilience, endurance while death is nipping at frostbitten heels.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“It would make a wowser of a movie, a kind of sequel to Deliverance.”

—Pittsburgh Press

ONE

The River

NOW THAT I am older than my father, I think I understand why he always treated me the way he did. He wanted a son, but I was born instead and the doctors told him that Mama should not have any more children, so he was stuck with a daughter. Since I was all he had to work with, he did the best he could. I don’t mean to say that he sat down and figured out that was what he should do—my father was never one for sitting around thinking when he could be moving around doing. Everybody knows that. Mike Allison was head and shoulders the best guide and outdoorsman in the Adirondacks, and what’s more, he would flatten the head of anyone who disputed it.

I looked down at the Adirondack Mountains this morning. A plane was taking me from Albany to Buffalo. The snow covered almost everything below, but the big pines made black patches against the lightness of the land, and here and there I could see open water where a big lake had started to break up without waiting for the spring thaw.

All country looks the same from a great altitude. I had one of the best views in the airplane. The stewardesses always seem to think it is my first time in an airplane and outdo themselves making me comfortable. I am not as old as they think; my face is, I confess, ten years older than the rest of me, and that makes me look around seventy to those young, fresh, fragrant girls who run up and down the aisles serving coffee and milk and stronger potions to those who want them.

I have never been a drinker myself, although for some years there after the Second War, I had word that Timothy had turned to the bottle. After what we had been through together, this saddened me. Later, I learned that the stories were only half true, and I felt a lot better. Though Timothy is only my stepbrother, we have loved and trusted each other ever since that terrible winter in 1921. We’ve taken different paths in life, but it has always been a comfort to me to know that somewhere there has been a person who would drop everything and fly to me if I ever became ill or found myself in danger. Of course, I would—and have—done the same. In the matter of Tim’s drunkenness, I soon learned that these were merely stories being circulated by his jealous wife in hopes of securing a large divorce settlement, that while Tim had perhaps been out on the town with the boys on one or two occasions, he was anything but a habitual drunkard. I put that lady straight, I can tell you. After I was done, Mrs. High and Mighty was lucky to get fifteen dollars a week temporary support. We Allisons have never been much for higher education and fancy clothes, but when trouble comes, we stick together.

I do not know how many millions of acres there are now in the Adirondack Mountain Preserve. Despite the constant efforts of the land developers to chop it up for their profitable schemes, the country there has been declared “forever green.” Even with the politicians whittling away at the charter, I think that it will remain so. Our world has shrunk so small that even the greediest of us are forced to see that it is high time we stopped destroying that which cannot be replaced in our lifetimes. In Albany, where I live and work, I am known as the Dragon Lady of the conservationists, a nickname that doesn’t bother me a bit. I have bearded Mr. Governor in his den, as well as those mealymouthed little senators from downstate who buzz around, hoping to get kickbacks from the developers.

The New York Times once put my photograph across three columns of their second section when I smuggled a nesting blue heron into the governor’s office and set her up at housekeeping. She nested there for three weeks, until the eggs hatched. There were many who laughed and poked fun at me. The governor was fit to be tied, but I made my point. A swamp-drainage program near Watertown, which would have disturbed thousands of nesting birds, was not approved. I still have the newspaper clipping, which says, in part:

Elizabeth Allison, sixty-year-old nature enthusiast, confronted New York’s governor in his office yesterday and defied him to remove her and a matronly blue heron from his chambers. Miss Allison, a longtime supporter of conservation measures, was once (1921) the subject of a statewide rescue operation when she and her younger brother, Timothy, were lost in the northern Adirondack Mountains during the dead of winter.

But this is apart from my story. What I want to tell you is about Timothy and me, about the mountains, and especially about that winter of 1921 when, as the New York Times says, we were lost in the dead of winter.

I saw that frozen country again beneath the wings of my jet airliner this morning. It took only a few minutes to fly over it and leave it behind.

But in 1921 it took Timmy and me nearly three months to cover the same distance on what I now call our “interrupted journey.”

As I said, Tim was my stepbrother. My real mother died when I was three, and a few years later, my father married Pauline Hood, a widow, with one son, Timothy, who was a year younger than me.

Father had met her down in Speculator on a trip to buy winter supplies, and they came to live with us on Indian Lake. Now that there was a boy in the house, I could devote myself to my dolls and needlework and piano lessons. I didn’t, of course. Most people are quick to learn two things about me. The first is that I remember every word I hear. The most casual remark is burned into my memory for all time. This mysterious gift should have been enough to carry me to untold glories were it not for my other outstanding trait which can only be described as pure bone laziness. I never run when I can walk, walk when I can stand, stand when I can sit, or sit when I can lie down.

But the harm had already been done. Those years my father had alone with me wrought permanent harm. While I may have complained a lot, there was never a fishing trip or an overnight campout that did not finally draw me, like a fluttering moth to its compelling flame. By the age of eight, when seven-year-old Tim came to live with us, I had already become what I am today: a hopeless lover of the great outdoors.

It soon grew into a competition between my stepbrother and me. He could run faster, but I knew the shortcuts. He was stronger, but I knew how to use a lever. He could swim faster, but I swam farther.

We fought, and Tim always won. He was stronger. I could have won, but that would have meant using a trick or a hold or a fall that might have broken bones, and I decided no fight was worth it.

My stepmother, Miss Pauline (which is what I called her), was a strong, drab woman whose only interests lay in the kitchen, the garden, and the bank. She was very money-conscious, which did my father untold good, since he was the most improvident man in the Adirondacks. In those days he could get nine dollars for a first-rate beaver pelt, and trapping the stupid creatures was easier than falling off a log, but somehow my father never got around to putting in his trap line until the neighbors had already staked out the best ponds. Indian Pete, our next-door neighbor who lived two miles up the road, was the best trapper in the country. He could throw a deadfall together from an old log and some saplings and a bit of twine in two minutes flat, and next day, when he ran his trap line, there would almost always be a fox or a rabbit trapped under it. Once, when I went with him early on a Christmas morning, we found a skunk. That was the first time I ever saw Pete angry. He mumbled a string of remarks in Mohawk and used a precious cartridge to dispatch the skunk.

“Why are you so mad, Pete?”

“Skunk, him ruin fox runway. All poisoned. No more fox come here.”

“But isn’t a skunk hide worth money?”

“Two dollar. Bad cleaning. Stink up knife, stretching board.”

With distaste he picked the skunk up with a split tree branch and dropped it onto a page of newspaper he took from his pack.

“Why don’t you just throw it away, then?”

He shook his head. Pete’s hair was long and shiny black and hung down around his shoulders. “No, Missy. Killum, skinum. No throwum away.”

This was my first lesson in conservation. It has always stuck with me. Take what you need, use it all, and leave something for the next person.

Until Tim came, Pete was my only friend. I went to school down in the village, but we were too far out of town for the other children to visit us often. Sometimes I rode Charlie, our plow horse, when he wasn’t needed in the field, but usually I walked. Today, going from our old house to the center of Indian Lake takes less than five minutes by car. In 1921, walking down the lonely dirt road took Tim and me more than an hour, carrying our schoolbooks tied in an old belt and our lunches packed in brown paper bags. Bags were scarce, too, so we never threw them away, but put them in our classroom desks to take home again. Eventually, they became so stained with grease that we were ashamed and would hide them from our schoolmates who had fancy lunch boxes made of tin. When the bags were so far gone that nothing could persuade us to take them to school one more time, Miss Pauline would put them aside for my father. Then he would catch a mess of wall-eyed pike, skin them, wrap them in the greasy bags, and put them in the oven to cook. An hour later the bags were all dry and crumbly, and the fish were moist and flaky under the fork. They melted good in your mouth.

I have never really understood Daylight Saving Time. I don’t remember whether we even had it then. All I do remember is that as winter came on, the days became too short for us to get out of school and reach home before dark, even when we ran part of the way. There was always snow by then, and our boots squeaked on it. We didn’t need much light to see our way; the moon and stars were enough. If the sky was overcast, we followed the ruts and sang songs to cheer ourselves up. We talked, and I told Tim stories that I had read and could recite word for word. I would tell him an episode each evening. Sometimes when the story was coming to an exciting part, we would see the kerosene lamp shining through the windows far ahead, and slowed down so I could finish that part before we got home. Or, if I was feeling mischievous, I might take Tim to the part of the story where the adventurers hear something in the underbrush; then I would take off and run for home as fast as I could, with him chasing me. We had a rule—if he caught me before I got inside the front gate, I had to sneak down the hall to his room that night, after my father and Miss Pauline had gone to bed, and finish the story.

It was nice to have someone to talk to, and although (as I said) we fought a lot, Tim and I were true friends. He stood up for me at school, where some of the other kids got unruly when I always won the spelling bee and the other contests that called for memory. Oddly enough, my grades were not very good. Although I could remember every word I heard, I did not always understand and so often fell into error by repeating, by rote, what I had learned without understanding how step A related to step B and how both affected step C. The teacher, who had to control the first six grades all in the same room, was alternately delighted and distraught by me. He dreamed of having a statewide spelling winner but despaired when, after having recited a difficult series of verb declensions, I was unable to use any of them in a rational sentence.

“Elizabeth Allison!” he would sputter. “You don’t know your lesson.”

“You told me to memorize it,” I would answer sweetly. “I know every word.”

“But you don’t understand what you’re saying,” he would choke. Still he was on shaky ground, and he knew it. Few of his other pupils really understood what they had absorbed so painfully by rote, either.

The only time I did not like going to school was when Tim was sick. This happened often, for, despite his active outdoor life, he was not strong. He always had a cold or a fever or some kind of rash. Then I would hurry home, trying to outrace darkness and always losing. The curse of a vivid imagination is when night comes and you are alone on a country road and the tree branches are creaking in the shadows. The flap of an owl’s wings will stop your heart, and the shriek of a dying rabbit is enough to put rockets on your heels. When I staggered, gasping, into the kitchen, my father laughed at me if he was there.

“Is the Devil after you?”

“I heard something in the woods.”

“There is always something to hear in the woods, Lizzy.” My father always called me Lizzy, and so did Tim. Everyone else called me Elizabeth.

“Anyway, it was cold.”

He would laugh. “Lizzy, Lizzy, haven’t you heard anything I learned you? Nothing in the woods will hurt you unless you hurt it first.”

“That may be,” I said. “But perhaps I might hurt it without meaning to. I don’t believe in taking risks.”

This would always send him up the chimney. I was first a little girl, yet I always talked like an old lady. That was because once something was in my head, it stayed there, and I had been reading all kinds of fancy books where people talked that way.

Also, we listened to the radio. It was a funny-looking contraption, not like the radios you see today, or even like the ones we had before television. It had an earphone that you held up to your ear. There was a little control that moved a piece of metal they called a “cat’s-whisker” over a piece of quartz. When you found the station, the quartz would sometimes hold steady for as long as five or ten minutes. Then you had to hunt for it again. I had a favorite station in Schenectady. At six in the evening a man would give the news in a deep mellow voice. Since the station was more than a hundred miles away, I regarded the radio as nothing less than miraculous and revered that unknown mellow-voiced newscaster. He used words I had never heard before, words like “situation” and “prognosis” and “kilocycle.” My father did not approve of the radio and never listened to it. Miss Pauline had brought it with her, saying that one day it would be the entertainment of the world.

“No more going down to Indian Lake just to see a traveling Punch and Judy show,” she would tell us. “It will come right into the home, free of charge, for all to enjoy.” My father laughed at her, and at the time, I thought he was right. Except for the mellow-voiced man at six in the evening, there was precious little that the radio had to offer me.

In 1920 my father bought a used Tin Lizzie. I think he paid $350 for it. Noisy and bone-rattling though it was, that Ford Model T changed our lives. Now we could go all the way to Speculator for shopping without spending two days on the road with the old wagon and Charlie. Once there, we even had time to rest a few minutes in the nickelodeon, watching the latest Little Mary Sun Play. I think that’s what they called movies in those days. When I see our rugged outdoorsmen today with their $6,000, four-wheel-drive Jeeps and Land Rovers, tons of metal and complicated wiring, I have to smile as I remember our Model T. It stood seven feet tall, knock-kneed and bony. Only its mother could have loved it. But it would go anywhere and run on anything. If it was sluggish, you simply tossed some camphor balls in the gas tank. Or if you couldn’t get gasoline, it would run on kerosene and chopped-up candle wax. Neither hole nor hill stopped it. Almost all driving then was “off road,” and our flivver opened up new lakes and streams to my father’s fishing rod and trap lines. The Model T would follow old cattle trails and footpaths. It could wend its way through a pine forest almost as easily as a whitetailed deer, yet it was so light that if it dug its way into a bog, four men could pick it up and carry it to firmer ground. The tires weren’t much bigger than bike tires. By the time my father bought the car, there were some four million Model Ts in the country, and more and more of them were finding their way into our mountain wilderness. Everybody had a joke about them. One man was supposed to have asked that his flivver be buried with him because, “I ain’t never been in a hole yet where my Model T couldn’t get me out.” Spud Wilkens, who ran the garage in Indian Lake, said one traveler came in and ordered a pint of gas. “Don’t you think it ought to have more than that?” Spud asked. The traveler replied: “No, I’m weaning it.” More than once, I saw Fords go by with college boys in them, up our way camping, with stickers pasted on the side reading, “Danger! 50,000 Jolts!”

By 1921 my father had become very concerned about the growing number of tourists in the woods. “They’re going to ruin the fishing,” he predicted. “And they’ll drive the animals so far upland that we’ll never shoot another deer.”

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