He reached it where the water was a trickle over stones, a gentle bank of grass on either side. He hunted along it, coming to a deep pool, and here at last the banks were steep, but they were stitched with grass like the ones before. He moved farther on until there was another pool and steep banks, these of mud. A tree on his side of the pool had bare roots, their soil eroded by the water's flow. He could not step in the mud without leaving tracks. He had to grope long-legged from the grass and leaves on the top of the bank to the roots of the tree, and then he lowered himself cautiously into the stream, not daring to dislodge silt from the bottom that might linger in the pool and give him away. He slipped between the tree roots and the bank, in where there was a hollow of sodden earth above him, and then slowly, meticulously, he commenced burying himself, spreading mud over his feet and legs, scooping mud over his chest, drawing the tree roots closer to him, squirming, burrowing deep into the muck like a crab, wiping his face in it, pulling it onto him until he felt the cold wet heavy weight of it all over, breathing with difficulty, just a twig space to take air from. It was the best that he could do. Nothing more to try. An old expression came to him as a joke — you made your bed, now lie in it. So he did, and waited.
They were a long while coming. As much as he could tell, they had been two rises away when he reached the stream, and he estimated they would be fifteen minutes, perhaps a little longer, before they came to him. But fifteen minutes seemed to go, and there was no sound of them. He decided that his sense of time was off, that lying buried in the mud, nothing to do but wait, he was fooled into thinking a few minutes were a great deal more than that. Oppressed by the mud, he had much trouble breathing now. His air space wasn't enough, but he couldn't afford to make it wider: someone outside might see the hole and be curious. Moisture was beginning to condense in his nose, stuffing it like phlegm. His eyes were closed, the mud settling firmly onto his lids.
Still no sound of the searchers. He needed something to do, something to help him keep quiet and still, the pressure of the mud unnerving him, so he started counting off the seconds, at the end of each minute expecting to hear the men, sliding into another round of sixty when no sound came, expecting at the end of this minute to hear them, but still no sound. When he had gone through to sixty for the fifteenth time he was positive that things had gone wrong. The mud. Maybe that was it, maybe the mud cut off the sound of people going by and the hunt had gone past him long ago.
Sure and maybe not. If he had not heard them, they might still be coming. He couldn't take the chance of digging out to look; they might be just now approaching the stream, held up before this by thick underbrush on one of the rises. He waited, moisture filling his nose as if to drown him, frantic to breathe. The mud was pressing harder on his face and chest, and he wanted desperately to push out of it. He remembered playing by a sand cliff when he was a boy, digging into the sand to build a cave, crawling inside, then having the sudden urge to crawl out just as the whole cliff plunged down on him burying his head, him crazy with fear, clawing frenzied at the sand, worming out from under just as more sand spilled down on him. He had barely come out soon enough, and that night as he tried to sleep, he had been certain that in the sand cave a premonition of death occurred to him, that the premonition had been what spurred him to crawl out in time. Now, buried in the ooze and mud, he was thinking that if someone walked over and stood on the ground above him, a part of the bank might be dislodged, plopping down and cutting off his air space. He had the same instant premonition as in the sand cave: he was going to be buried alive, die in here. Already the moisture in his nose was completely clogging his breath. He had to get out, dear God, couldn't bear the suffocation, pushed at the mud.
And petrified, hearing them. The faint dull plod of footsteps. A lot of them. All together on top. And muffled voices, splashings in the stream, people walking up the stream. The footsteps came closer, one set of them stopping, then thundering close, directly on top, weighing on the mud, on his chest, his broken ribs, the pain. He couldn't move, hadn't been breathing. How long without air. Three minutes. If he had several deep breaths first. Two minutes then. Try holding two minutes. But time for him was so distorted, and one minute seemed like two, and he might need to breathe so much that he would squirm and shove and push out before he had to. Four five six seven, he was counting. To twenty, to forty, and as the sequence drew on, the numbers in his head linked up with his heartbeats that were coming louder and faster, and his chest was contracting, crushing. There. The mud above him budged, the pressure eased, the man on top of him moved. But hurry, not fast enough. The voices, the churning in the stream mercifully diminished. But too slow, he couldn't dig out yet. There might be stragglers. There might be someone who by chance glanced back this way. Oh Christ, hurry. Midway through the second minute, thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, throat contorting, forty-eight, forty-nine. He never got to sixty, couldn't endure it anymore, suddenly thought he was so weak-headed from the lack of air that he didn't have the strength to dig out. Push. Push, dammit. But the mud would not part, and he struggled to raise himself, to heave away the mud, and then in a gathering rush, sweet Jesus, cool air was upon him and light and he was gasping, half in the stream. Gray turned to white in his head; his chest ballooned in an ecstasy of breath, then bit sharply in his ribs, drawing in huge gasps of breath, expelling them, sucking them in violently. Too much noise. They'll hear. He quickly looked to see them.
None around. Voices and rustling in the underbrush. But they were out of sight now, gone now, at last he was in the clear, only one more hard part to go, crossing the nearby roads. He slumped against the bank. On his own. Free.
Not yet you're not. There's a hell of a lot more to do before you go near those roads.
Dammit, you think I don't know that? he told himself. There's always something more to do. Always. It never fucking ends.
Then get busy.
In a second.
No. Now. You'll have all the time to rest if they catch you.
He breathed and nodded and grudgingly propped himself up from the side of the stream, wading through the water to the exposed tree roots. He slipped mud into the hole where he had been behind the roots, arranging it so if another group came through here they could not tell that the first group had missed his hiding place. They had to think that he was deep in the hills, not close to the road.
Next, his rifle on top of the bank, he eased into the deepest section of the pool and rinsed the mud off him. It did not matter now that he was stirring up silt and dirt from the bottom that might linger; the men who had just gone through here had completely clouded the water, and if they came back or if another group came, they would have no reason to think of him. He dunked his head to clean away the dirt in his hair and wash his face, taking a scummy mouthful and spitting it out with the grit that was in his mouth, blowing his nose underwater to get rid of the mud he had sucked up it. Just because he was living like an animal, he thought, didn't mean he had to feel like one. That was from training school. Be clean whenever you can. It makes you go longer and fight better.
He climbed dripping out of the stream, chose a thin branch off the ground and used it to clean the mud from inside the barrel of his rifle, to pick dirt from the firing mechanism. Then he worked the lever on the rifle several times to insure that it was smooth, reload the shells he had ejected, and he was finally off, moving cautiously through the bushes and trees toward the direction of the road. He was glad that he had washed the mud off in the stream; he felt better, more energetic, able to escape.