Peter & Max - Bill Willingham [49]
MAX COULDN’T FIND PETER again after that night, nor was he able to find Bo or the camp where his gold waited for him to come back and retrieve it. And who knows? Those twelve purses of good Hessian marks might still be there today, patiently waiting for someone to discover them.
Like Peter, Max had also learned enough basic woodcraft from their mother to recognize many edible plants and mushrooms, and like Peter, that was how he survived those first long days and nights following the incident at the camp. During that time, unknown to either brother, their lives paralleled each other’s. Both wandered without direction, living on scavenged plants and grubs. But unlike Peter, Max didn’t remain alone in the woods for long. On his fourth, or possibly fifth, day Max stumbled into a small clearing where two of the Peep girls were huddled, more dead than alive, under the half-hollowed trunk of a giant fallen evergreen.
“Look, Dorthe, Look! Here’s Max come out of the woods like an angel to save us!” It was either Brigitte or Elfride who was pointing at him, as if he were a handsome prince come to take her away on a white stallion. In all of their past visits, Max had never bothered to learn one Peep daughter from another very well, and now in their dirty and disheveled state, it was even harder to tell them apart.
Both girls crawled out from under the fallen tree and clutched at him, frantically, the way a mother claws at a lost child who was suddenly restored to her, not quite willing to trust such a happy miracle.
“We ran and ran,” Dorthe said, tears streaming down her dirty face. “Brigitte and Elfride and I. But a creature got poor Elfride!” That cleared up the minor mystery of which daughters he’d found. “There wasn’t even any sound,” she continued, hiccupping the story out in short fragments, between sobs. “I thought Elfride just tripped, but then she said, ‘Something bit me,’ just like that. Real quiet, as if it wasn’t anything important. But then something pulled her down into a deep hole.”
“A fell beast’s den!” Brigitte interjected.
“Oh, then there was such screaming!” Dorthe said. “And ripping and tearing sounds.”
“Bones crunching,” Brigitte added. “We heard every moment of it.”
“And all the while Elfride kept calling out to us. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she cried, over and over again.”
“But we did. We ran away.” And then both girls seemed to simultaneously run out of the power to continue their account. They looked up at him, whether for forgiveness or judgment, it was impossible to say.
“Do you have any food?” Was all Max said in reply.
“None at all,” Brigitte managed to whisper, between great and gasping breaths, as if any additional wind for speaking had quite deserted her.
“Then what business can we have with each other?” Max said. Slowly, he drew Frost Taker out of its sheath.
DAYS LATER, AS HE STUMBLED again through the forest, lost and directionless, Max considered that he might have made a serious mistake where the two Peep girls were concerned. He’d taken their clothing, which he had every right to. He’d torn it into rags and stuffed them inside of his own clothes, for additional padding against the night’s chills. But he’d left their bodies untouched. It was a waste of meat on the bone, he thought. At the time he couldn’t bring himself to consider such an unthinkable sin, the eating of one’s own kind. But now he reminded himself that he was no longer of any kind save his own. He was a new creature, of which there was only one in the whole wide world. He should have recalled that back when it could have helped him — back when he stood over their ridiculously available flesh. What a waste, he thought. I could’ve feasted, but instead I go hungry. That’s what I get for clinging to compassion, which no longer has a proper place in my heart.
He stumbled and wandered, living on roots and berries, but there was never enough. No matter how much