56 BECOMING

56

BECOMING

Evergreens crowding one another, the air redolent of pines, the way mostly shadowed, morning light splintering through the boughs, the trail slippery with the dead needles of the trees, the brittle scales of fallen cones crumbling under her feet. In the wake of the gunfire, the only things Vida can hear are her labored breathing and the pounding of her heart. Although the forest mantles thousands of square miles of mountains and valleys, a curious claustrophobia closes around the moment, and the sounds she makes have a hollow quality, as if she is in a barrel or a metal-walled room, running from nowhere to nowhere on a treadmill.

She is fit, but sprinting uphill on a serpentine trail, even with just fifteen pounds on her back, will tax her into physical penury sooner than she dares to consider. At all costs, she must remain positive and focused. Four-legged trackers are fast on her spoor. Gunmen are even more intent on murder than she anticipated. In her frantic ascent, she breathes through her mouth; the piney fragrance is so strong that it isn't merely a scent, but also a pungent flavor—now medicinal, now janitorial—that cloys in her throat and seems to make breathing more difficult.

She worries about the dogs, about what they might be trained to do to her and how reliably they will adhere to their training, but she also worries for the dogs. Lupo is attuned to her in a way that she can't fully understand, that perhaps no one other than the long-ago fortuneteller could comprehend. If he becomes aware that Vida is in peril and if he arrives with his pack, what might happen when dogs and wolves meet? They are of the same genus but not the same species, the former domesticated and the latter wild. When she was but ten years old, she had been told that she was the protector of Nature and all its creatures. For years, that grand lifework seemed far beyond the talents of a young woman of the mountains, a placer-mine prospector and bookworm with a taste for isolation just short of hermitism. However, day by day since José's death, hour by hour since Nash Deacon first arrived on her doorstep, Vida has awakened to a deeper truth about herself, to the possibility of a daunting and yet thrilling mission that ongoing events appear to confirm, a destiny alike to what the seer foresaw eighteen years earlier. If there is any chance that such a solemn yet magical responsibility has been settled on her, she must never allow dogs and wolves to clash or to suffer at the hands of the vicious men who pursue her.

She thinks, Have pity on those who love and are separated, on the lonely, on those who mourn, on those who fear, on all the little animals that live their lives as prey, but pity as well the animals that must kill to survive in this fallen world.

Vida has no similar obligation to pity and protect all human beings, only those who are innocent as animals are innocent, those who are humble as little children are humble, those who are kind. She doesn't believe that any of the men on her trail are innocent or humble or kind, but if one such exists among them, she trusts that she will recognize him—and be able to spare him.

If she has a magical purpose, she doesn't have magical powers with which to fulfill it. The steepening incline and a stretch of trail providing uncertain footing force her to slow from a run to a quick walk. Her breath is hot, and she has broken into a sweat. Her abdominal muscles flutter. Her calves ache.

As her effort declines, she can hear more than her hammering heart and ragged exhalations. The new sound is at first a clatter that seems distant, unnervingly like a machine gun.

However, distance is an auditory illusion, and within seconds she realizes the noise originates nearby and overhead. Not a clatter of metal against metal. A deeper throbbing. The whump-whump-whump of flogged air, the underlying howl of a turbine engine. A helicopter. Something bigger than a sheriff's department chopper. A gunship? No. They couldn't have dragged the military into this. Perhaps a rescue helicopter. County law enforcement might have one of those.

Although the day is windless, the trees begin to shiver about thirty yards ahead of her and fifty yards to her right, pine boughs billowing, branches creaking. The disturbance proceeds toward her, passes perhaps twenty yards in front of her, and moves away to the left.

Puzzled by this development, Vida halts, trying to imagine their intention. The forest is so dense that the layered branches overhead allow only flinders of sky to be seen. So little light reaches the ground that the undergrowth is minimal in this area—deciduous ferns, wiry grasses, Corsican sandwort, pale colonies of fungus; the lowest branches of evergreens are often barren witchy-looking configurations. No airborne surveillance is able to provide meaningful assistance to the search party on the ground. Surely even infrared scanning will fail to detect a heat signature here beneath the interlaced and many-storied boughs.

This is not the same sound as in the dream when she was sitting on the porch with the fortuneteller, not mysterious but distinct and easily identified. Yet it portends nothing good.

A change in the pitch of the engine noise alerts her that the chopper is executing a turn, coming back, as though quartering this area to confirm the pilot's suspicion. Or to take a second reading with some technology she can't name.

As the racket of the aircraft swells louder, Vida taps into a reserve of energy that for the moment had seemed not to exist. She springs forward, off the winding trail, taking as direct a path as the terrain and sparse brush allow. She avoids even the narrowest blades of sunlight that stab through gaps in the trees, as if they must be surveillance beams that can carry gigabytes of data to the searchers in the helo.

Although her life passes like a shadow, as do all lives, though she is but a moving shadow hurriedly navigating an architecture of stilled shadows, she feels that she is gaining substance moment by moment, becoming someone more formidable than she's been heretofore. She is exhilarated. Dogs are in pursuit of her and vicious men with rifles are taking aim and searchers in a helicopter are busy seeking, and Boschvark is scheming to kill her in some other fashion if this attempt should fail—yet she is enlivened and elated by the rising risk, currently prey but soon to become a huntress. For years, she's been uncertain of what the white-robed fortuneteller meant; then, when she understood, there had been additional years during which she doubted the woman's strange, mystical prediction could be fulfilled. All doubt is gone. She might not survive, but for a time she'll serve as the protector of nature and all its creatures that the seer foresaw. She now wears the mantle of José Nochelobo. If she's able to complete his mission, even if she perishes in the process, her short life will have been worth living. She runs, runs, runs, and all the shadows of the forest conspire to conceal her, seem to run with her like spirit guardians born out of the trees and risen from the earth, in celebration of her Becoming.

The evergreens shake, dead needles rain, dislodged pine cones rattle down through the branches, pine cones and something else. The helicopter is directly overhead.