During the night she moved him close to the scant coals and wrapped in her own blanket had spooned against his back and so he woke at bare dawn with her against him and he lay without moving until there was light in the treetops and she stirred behind him. Through both their blankets, he felt the long muscles of her thighs against the backs of his and her torso and breasts pressed tight to his back and one arm flat against his chest inside his own blanket. Only when he felt her wake fully and leave the dugout did he move at all, so that when she returned he was up with his blanket folded, moving his arms and legs to wake. She led him to the stream and there ordered him onto his hands and knees and held his head in her hands and lowered the wound into the shock of water, letting her fingers run over his scalp to clear the matted blood and woods-trash, her touch warm even in the cold water. When he stood he found his balance and she stepped back from him and as if accusing said, “Should have done that yesterday.”

Still breathless he said, “It would’ve killed me then.”

She gripped his forearm and he felt the bite of her nails and she said, “Don’t you tell nobody about this place, you hear me?” There was no protest before this fury and so he only nodded, once and short but looking straight into her eyes. He wanted again to touch her or say some words to her but she’d already turned and was walking away into the woods, looking back once with impatience or scorn, so he followed her because it was all he could do.

She led him in a straight line up the side of the ravine and through the woods again and he had no way of knowing if it was the same route they’d taken the night before or a different direction altogether. Then she led him across a field to a small height of wooded land until they looked down on a field beyond a road with the camp of the 2nd Vermont. He started forward, the smell of food rising from cookfires, and then turned back but she stayed in the underbrush and he said, “Come on down with me. There’s food.”

She shook her head.

“Come on. I guess I ate up all your food. Least you could let me do, it seems to me.”

She shook her head again and then said, “You go on, Mister Norman Pelham.” When he stepped toward her she held out a hand, palm raised out and flat to stop him. She stepped back, her hand still out, one step at a time until she placed a briar thicket overgrown with honeysuckle between them. He stood listening to her slipping away until no sound came from the woods and she was gone. He thought of following her back to the field on the other side but suddenly knew she would not be in sight. And so he stood there a long while and then turned and went down to the encampment.