Hawaii - James Michener [324]
His wife, who originally had advised against this ridiculous attempt to escape, now became the one who urged her husband on, assuring him: "If we can get even to the lower hills before dawn, we will be safe," and she began to formulate stratagems, one of which she put into effect as dawn broke.
"We will hide beneath those thickets," she said, "close to the road where no one will look."
"All day?" her irresolute husband asked.
"Yes. There's a trickle of water running through and I have some balls of cold rice."
They approached the thicket from a roundabout way, so as not to leave footprints leading into it, and when daylight brought travelers to the road, none saw the leper and his kokua. Nor did the police when they hurried past. Nor did the children on their way to school. All day stout-hearted Nyuk Tsin kept her man hidden, and for long periods they slept, but when Mun Ki was sleeping and his wife was awake, she was distraught by the manner in which her man shivered, for leprosy seemed to be accompanied by a slow fever that kept an infected man forever cold and stricken with trembling.
That night Nyuk Tsin wakened her husband, counted her rice balls, and started on up the mountainside. She did not know where she was going, for she was impelled by only one driving consideration: the longer they evaded the police, the longer they were free; and such a simple doctrine anyone could understand. They grew hungry, cold and weak, but she drove them both on, and in this manner they escaped capture for three days, but they approached starvation and exhaustion.
"I have no more strength to walk," the sick man protested. "I will lend you my shoulders," Nyuk Tsin replied, and that night, with Mun Ki hanging on to his wife's back, but using his own sick legs to walk whenever he could, they made some progress toward their unknown goal, but it was cruelly evident that this was the last night Mun Ki could move, so when morning came his wife bedded him down in a hidden ravine, washed his face with cold water running out of the hills, and set forth to find some food.
That day it rained, and while Nyuk Tsin sloshed through the mountains gathering roots and trying vainly to trap a bird, her afflicted husband shivered on the cold ground while surface water crept in below his shoulders and hips, soon making him wet and colder still. It was a dismal, hungry night, with a handful of roots to chew and not even a remnant of hope to rely upon; and it became Mun Ki's intention, when morning came, to crawl out to the highway and wait until the searching police found him.
But Nyuk Tsin had other plans, and in the hour before dawn she told her shivering husband, "Wu Chow's Father, stay here and I promise you that I shall return with food and help." She smoothed the damp earth about him and saw with dismay that it was going to rain again that day, but she told him to be of cheer, for she would soon return. Crawling carefully among the trees parallel to the highway, she looked for narrow trails leading off into the hills, and after a while she came upon one, well trod, and this she followed for several hundred yards until she came upon a clearing in which an almost-collapsed grass shack stood, with a three-hundred-pound Hawaiian woman sitting happily in front. Cautiously, but with confidence, Nyuk Tsin walked down the path to greet the huge woman, but before the Chinese maid could speak in explanation of her unexpected appearance in the clearing, the big Hawaiian woman asked, "Are you the Chinese who is mai Pake?"
"My husband, hidden in the ravine, is the one," Nyuk Tsin replied in Hawaiian.
The big woman began to rock back and forth on her unsteady chair, lamenting, "Auwe, auwe! It is so terrible,