BooksBarbecue
Back The Wilderness Between Us Save as PDF
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title
  3. Author’s Note
  4. Glossary
  5. One
  6. Two
  7. Three
  8. Four
  9. Five
  10. Six
  11. Seven
  12. Eight
  13. Nine
  14. Ten
  15. Eleven
  16. Twelve
  17. Thirteen
  18. Fourteen
  19. Fifteen
  20. Sixteen
  21. Seventeen
  22. Eighteen
  23. Nineteen
  24. Twenty
  25. Twenty-One
  26. Twenty-Two
  27. Twenty-Three
  28. Twenty-Four
  29. Twenty-Five
  30. Twenty-Six
  31. Twenty-Seven
  32. Twenty-Eight
  33. Twenty-Nine
  34. Thirty
  35. Thirty-One
  36. Thirty-Two
  37. Thirty-Three
  38. Thirty-Four
  39. Acknowledgments

“We shouldn’t talk about this, Geoffrey. Not to the others. At least until—”

Geoffrey stared at her, brow creased, bobbed his head and they walked on.

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Eight

With Clare drifting in and out of sleep, the hours passed slowly for Faye. She was entertained for a while by a pair of courting doves. Their foreplay began when they perched on a branch a short distance apart and preened themselves quietly. After a few minutes, the cock turned his head towards the hen and scooted a little closer to her, cooing as he did. She continued combing her feathers with her bill. Emboldened, he leaned towards her, pushing his beak at hers. At first, it seemed to Faye that the male was trying to engage his mate in an awkward first kiss but then, when the hen responded by placing her beak inside his, it became more of a feeding mimicry. The pecking motion continued until the hen fluttered down and landed on the ground. The cock followed and, continuing to flap his wings directly about the female, mounted her. Faye looked away out of respect for the birds’ privacy.

She crawled out of the shelter to stretch her legs a few times, but never ventured far. For a while, she leaned against a mossy tree, which, while it had fallen and now rested on the forest floor, wasn’t dead. Somehow, it had hung on to life by either growing new roots or sending those that had not been pulled from the earth deeper. Faye looked at its branches. They were verdant and strong, finding their way up to the light. Things are not always as they seem, she thought. Things that fall can rise again.

As she rested against the tree, Faye examined herself. In addition to the bloodstains, now a faded brown, her clothing was discoloured by mud and decaying vegetation. She imagined standing beneath a hot shower, washing the grime and tension from her body. How good, once Clare was safe, it would be to wash and eat. She glanced at the orange, the last of the food, lying next to Clare. Her stomach grumbled, but she knew she’d have to be okay without it.

When she noticed Clare’s eyelids fluttering against her cheeks, Faye slid back into the shelter alongside the girl. With every hour that passed, Clare seemed to fade. Faye tried not to imagine what might be happening to her if, as she feared, her organs were being starved of oxygen. She had barely managed a few sips of water since sunrise and her breathing was increasingly laboured.

Faye had read somewhere that it was possible for a person to survive for about three weeks without food, provided they had shelter and water. But that was unlikely to be the case if they were injured and, as in Clare’s case, if the injuries caused respiratory distress. Faye felt the panic rise again.