Finn Ashford's Arc

Chapter 6 of 12

Finn slept two hours by the small fire and woke with the cold biting through his coat. The flame had burned down to coals, but the meat above it was still raw. One night of slow heat would not cure it. He needed a rack and he needed time, and he had neither if smoke kept climbing past the falls at dawn. He crawled out of the brush shelter and looked east. Gray light bled over the ridge. Up there, somewhere above the trees, the watcher in the tower could already see whatever rose off his fire. He worked fast. He cut four green saplings and lashed them into a peaked frame with cord from his pack. He stripped the otter leg bones clean and used them to brace the joints. He set the frame low over the coals, close enough to catch heat but tucked against the rock wall so the stone took the worst of the light. Above it he built a second frame from green wood, flat and wide, and laid strips of otter and fish across the rails. He banked the fire with damp moss to kill flame and force smoke down through the meat instead of up through the trees. It worked for an hour. Then the wind shifted. He smelled it before he saw it. The smoke turned and rolled out of the hollow in a thin gray rope that climbed straight above the falls. Finn killed the fire with snow and dirt in three handfuls. Too late. He climbed the rock behind his shelter and lay flat and looked east through the pines. Halfway down the ridge, in a clearing he had not noticed before, stood a low platform of fresh-cut timber lashed between two trunks. A man stood on it with a glass to his eye. The glass was pointed at the falls. At him. Finn slid down the rock. He pulled the strips off the rack and stuffed them into his coat, half-cured and greasy. He cut the lashings on the bone frame and kicked the poles into the brush. He shouldered his pack. He took the diary from the inner pocket and wrote three lines with a stub of pencil. Watcher off the tower. Forward post on the ridge. He has seen the smoke. He closed the book and pushed it back against his ribs. He did not run downhill toward the falls. The watcher would expect that. Finn went sideways along the rock, keeping the ridge between them, half-cured meat heavy in his coat and the cold pressing his wet sleeves to his arms. The camp above the falls was finished. He had bought a week of food and lost the only ground he knew. Somewhere ahead, past trees he had not yet walked, the woman who wanted him to follow her was still waiting. Now he had no choice but to move toward her.