Chapter XLII: A Shift in the Wind

Aragorn's progress that night was not what it should have been. He still could not strike a straight course, for that meant toiling right into the cruel wind, and his pace flagged constantly. At one point deep in the middle-night he tried to force his legs into something like their normal stride. He sustained it for only a few minutes before his head began to swim and the world tilted dangerously about him. Terrible nausea broke over his body in a mighty wave that left him breathless and disoriented and covered despite the persistent cold in a thin sheen of perspiration. Fighting the impending swoon he somehow managed to sink almost gently to his knees. He knelt there long in the snow, lost in a fog of misery. When at last the fit passed and he was able to focus his eyes again he found Gollum squatting just beyond the reach of his arm, watching him uneasily.

With hands that trembled like a palsied old man Aragorn dug out his bottle and took several small sips of the frigid water within. He closed his eyes, letting the sting of the cold ease a little beneath the shelter of his lids. Then although it was almost more than he could bear he fixed his gaze on his spiteful companion and fought to keep his voice steady as he said; 'Perhaps a slower pace will serve us better after all.'

Gollum, of course, offered no comment on the matter. His narrowed eyes were filled with a storm of swirling thoughts that Aragorn had no wish to decipher. That he had been caught in such weakness filled him with dread, and as he struggled onto his chilled feet again he knew that somehow he had to find sustenance before deprivation undid him entirely.

It was not so long a fast, really; certainly he had been without food for greater single stretches in other journeys. But for many wearisome weeks he had walked the very border of starvation, scraping together only enough to keep him on his feet and his captive in the land of the living. His stores of strength were all but depleted, and the bitter weather only served to weaken him further. Many times the energy he spent in walking was wasted in his constant shivering battle to keep from freezing. Even properly victualed he would have struggled in this cold. He could not endure much longer without relief.

That Gollum was apparently unaffected by their privation troubled his heart. What fire of determined hatred drove him on so unflaggingly Aragorn could not guess. Yet though he whimpered and grumbled and rooted hopelessly against the frozen earth he walked on, doubtless waiting with grim patience for the day when his captor's strength failed him and the opportunity to strike the next blow presented itself.

Dawn came soft and grey through clouds brewing low over distant Anduin, but the sky above the Ranger and his prisoner remained mercilessly clear; the cold unrelenting. Stumbling on and watching for any sign of wooded land amid the barren hills, Aragorn prayed wretchedly for the wind to shift. Had this driving torrent come from the river through the night, the clouds might have reached them by now. The horrifying realization that he was wishing for an east wind almost failed to penetrate the pall of famine and exhaustion. He hitched the blanket higher around his shoulders, bowed his head, pinched his eyes to slits, and trudged onward.

'Bites and stings us, precious,' Gollum muttered disconsolately, pushing up onto his legs so that he could lift his palms out of the snow. His fingers were an unhealthy bluish hue of grey, and he snivelled as he licked at their tips. 'Freezes and shivers us; bites at our bloodses, gollum.'

'You might have had a hood and mantle if you had not thrown them away!' Aragorn snapped, his fortitude breaking against the urge to berate his hateful charge. 'Next you shall complain that you are hungry, though it was you who caused us to lose what little we had.'

For a time there was silence, and then the grousing started up afresh; quieter this time, but still deliberately audible. 'Hungry, yes, bad, nassty manses. Takes us and beats us, drags us away. Doesn't stop, no, in warm countries with nice rivers. Nice rivers and fishes, gollum. Takes us North, he does, foolish manses. North and North in bitter snowses: nothing to eat, gollum. Nowhere to sleep. Snowses and ice and wicked winds, precious. Blames us, he does, that his big feet broke the ice, gollum. Whips us and hurts us, thrashings and lashings and empty stomachses. Stupid great manses, lost in the snow. Starves us, he does, precious. And why?'

'Because he cannot even feed himself,' Aragorn thought bleakly, but he did not say it. In the end, was that any excuse at all? He had indeed dragged Gollum away – if not from a land of plenty, at least from somewhere that the wind did not steal the breath from his chest and the strength from his limbs. He had taken charge of the creature, and brought him northward against his will. And as obdurate and vicious and indeed murderous as he had proved, he was still Aragorn's prisoner and with that came the responsibility to provide him with the necessities of life. He might punish sedition; he might punish escape. But if he did not contrive to feed them both, and soon, they would not long survive.

Yet on and on he walked, and it seemed as if the earth itself was thwarting him. For he came across no sign of woodlands and when at last he was driven by weariness and the mounting Sun to halt, the only shelter he could find was a tangle of stunted bramble-bushes clinging to the hillside out of little more than habit.

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His nose was bleeding again, trickling tiredly onto his lip and plucking vengefully at his sanity, but Aragorn did not bestir himself to wipe the trail away. In a vain attempt to take the ache out of the joints of his hands he had loosened the lacing of his cote and tugged his arms out of the sleeves. He sat now with them hugged to his ribs with only the fine linen shirt between his palms and the poor warmth of his chest. Gollum, wondrously enough, had actually fallen asleep with his bony spine to the root of one of the bushes, and he appeared lost in some wistful night-wandering. Dreaming of fishes and nice rivers in warm lands, no doubt. Aragorn could certainly not fault him for that, when his own mind kept slipping quite against his will into thoughts of heavy-laden tables and roaring fires in his foster-father's house far away.

The loathsome taste in his mouth persisted, coating his tongue and clinging to his gums like a miasma of some unimaginable poison. Upon reaching this debatable haven he had broken off a twig from among the brambles, shredding one tip so that he could scrub at his teeth. This availed him nothing: though the enamel was now smooth and clean the foul flavour was as strong as ever. It seemed such a senseless thing to fret about, given the far more desperate troubles he was facing. Yet somehow he could not help feeling that it was in a way the greatest injustice. If he was destined to starve in these wide white wastes, or to fall prey to his weakened body and freeze in a snowbank, why must he also die with the stink of a decaying goblin on his tongue?

Unhappily he gave in to the urge that had been plaguing him for days, and spat into the snow. His spittle was heavy and flocculent despite the care he had been taking about his intake of water. It was another sign of progressing starvation. Suddenly he despised himself for sitting here, huddled beneath a hedge like some small and frightened animal, as his remaining hours of vigour were squandered. He ought to be out in the open, braving the wind if he had to but pressing onward in search of forage or game. He knew that his chances of the former were so slight as to be almost incalculable, and his chances of the latter would not improve unless the cold eased a little, but at least he ought to try! He ought to fight; to make some small effort to extricate himself from these miserable straits. He had travelled too many roads through fortune and misfortune to believe the Bree-land adage that a man made his own luck, but he did know that the Valar smiled on those who at the very least attempted to help themselves.

Aragorn disentangled his arms from their fierce grip on his ribs and eased them back into the worn woolen sleeves. The fragments of the left shoulder seam protested but did not yield, and he fumbled awkwardly to tighten his lace. He took a long draught of water before tucking the bottle back against his side. His belt was sagging low over the bones of his hips and he tightened it to the second of its new-made notches. Then he got his knees under him and tried for a moment to appreciate that the absence of a pack was not without its small consolation: at least he did not need to heft the weight of it onto his shoulders now.

Closing his left fist over the rope, he twitched it. 'Awake!' he commanded, managing to infuse some memory of strength into his chill-hoarsened voice. Gollum snorted and stiffened, but slept on. Aragorn tugged again on the rope. 'Awake: we will not linger longer.'

This time Gollum's eyes fluttered and the lines of his wizened face deepened into a scowl. Yet he remained unmoving.

The willow-wand had fallen to earth during the fussing with the belt, and Aragorn picked it up. With a swift swing of his arm he brought it down against the bramble-stalk nearest Gollum's head. Instantly the creature had his long feet beneath him, cringing and gibbering and clutching at his skull.

'We are moving on,' said Aragorn sternly. 'The Sun is still high and so I expect it will not be pleasant for you to travel, but you have no choice. There is nothing for us here, and I will wait no longer for death to find its prey.'

Then, with an agility he had thought his legs had left in Gladden's depths, he slid out from the cover of the hedge and stood. For a moment he swayed, the giddiness of hunger threatening to topple him, but his will was set and his balance held. The wind caught a corner of the blanket that he wore, and he was obliged to turn so that it whipped back against his body. He wrapped it snugly to him in what was now a well-practiced gesture, and set a steady, plodding gait into the snow.

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It was near sundown that the wind shifted at last, bending so that it blew from the northeast. It was still relentless and insidiously cold, but as twilight gathered there could be no mistake: the clouds from the river valley were drawing nearer. Aragorn was scarcely more than hobbling now. He doubted that he had covered even two leagues in what he judged to be well over six hours. It was all that he could manage, but at such a pitiful pace it would be high summer before he reached Mirkwood – and both he and his prisoner would be dead of cold and want long before then.

His stomach had resumed its wrenching, churning and snarling as if in a final frantic attempt to convince him to lay by this foolishness and eat. He wished for the power to silence it with greater fervency than he wished for the power to silence Gollum, who was passing the time in mumbled imprecations against the weather, his hunger, and his captor. Aragorn knew well enough his peril without constant painful reminders from his sorely deprived viscera.

The shadow over the Moon fell before he felt the change in the air. The ghostly blue shimmer of the unbroken snow before him dimmed and faded into a dark downy grey. Casting his face skyward Aragorn could see the thick tentacles of the clouds stretching out to shade the moonlight. He trundled onward, but he waited, and at last it came. As though someone had stretched a great flannel blanket over the world, the bitter bite lifted from the air. The wind was muffled and the sky brought low, and the temperature all at once lifted a little. It was not warm; the air was still cold enough to freeze water, cold enough to sting in his one open nostril, cold enough that the ice in his beard and his eyebrows would not melt. But it no longer clawed with pernicious fire in his lungs. It no longer put a crust upon the film of fluid that guarded his eyes. And, if there was any good fortune to be had upon this hard road, it would no longer keep small animals from venturing out to scavenge for food.

It was a small mercy, to be sure, but it sustained him through the long night of slow and famished labour. When the land began to lighten a little – for through the heavy woolly clouds there was not much of a dawn – he began the morning ritual of scouting for trees. It was over the next hill that he found some, clustered in the lowlands like beggar-children in a deserted alley. Gollum outstripped him in the descent, and fell to scrabbling in the snow and deadfall as soon as they reached the edge of the copse. It seemed that Aragorn was not the only one who, despite many days' failure, held out a fool's hope for a different result today.

The Ranger readied his sling with care, setting the loop and forcing his stiff and cold-chapped fingers to close on the knot. He even settled a stone in the pocket of wool. If his chance came he would not squander it.

Eyes flitting to and fro and ears on alert, he crept forward. Gollum squawked indignantly as he was dragged away from the foot of a bowed old elm, and Aragorn turned to glare at him. He considered the merits of ordering his prisoner to be silent and to obey him, but he felt certain that such a command would be useless. He knew that Gollum must be mad with hunger, for he was himself, and he doubted that the creature would think his captor's plan superior to his own. He had neither the time nor the patience for a quarrel, and in any case a reluctant Gollum would be the surest hindrance to a successful hunt that he could imagine. He had to unload his sling to loose the knot on his wrist, and he fixed it to a low branch of the elm so that Gollum could continue his fruitless foraging. Freed at least for the moment of his burden, Aragorn crept noiselessly towards the heart of the little wood.

The resetting of his sling was delayed for a minute or two as he rubbed at his left wrist. The snugness of the coarse rope had chafed the reddened flesh raw and it stung now, exposed to the air. He had just given up hope of easing this latest tiresome discomfort and reached again for the stones in his pouch when he heard a shrill chittering cry somewhere above. His heart caught in his throat with hope and an apprehension that he seldom felt even in the face of a superior foe, and he flung back his head, shaking the hair from his eyes as he searched the naked branches for the source of the sound.

He spied it almost at once: a small red squirrel perched at the crux of a branch on an oak tree some twenty ells away. It had one of its forepaws in the air, and it was looking about with an alert and intelligent tilt to its head. At this distance Aragorn could not tell whether it looked healthy or no, and if pressed he would have admitted that he did not care. His fingers found the saddle of his sling without the benefit of his eyes, and he raised his right arm carefully, shifting his weight onto one foot and leaning back as far as he dared. Much was riding on this first shot, and he tried to bury both his desperation and his terror of failure. There was no room for such things in the hunt.

The first sweep of his arm was feeble, and he upbraided himself silently. Above him the squirrel let out another high, scolding call as though it too was ashamed of his failing strength. Setting his teeth he swung again. This time he could feel the weight of the stone as it whipped about his fist. At the moment when it reached the proper tangent he released his hold on the knot. The little sharp rock whistled through the air and there was a heavy, hollow thump followed by utter silence. As his eyes focused on the now-empty branch, Aragorn's first bleak thought was that he had missed his target and struck the tree instead. Then his gaze was drawn down to the dusting of snow, in which a small red body lay limp and unmoving. Scrambling like a wild dog diving for scraps, he ran to collect his little prize.

There was a brief, dreadful span of time when Aragorn thought that Gollum had managed to free himself from the tether and escape, but then he realized that in his mounting stupor of want he had found his way back to the wrong elm tree. When he reached the place where he had left his captive, Gollum was still rooting about in the rotting detritus of the previous autumn. Aragorn laid the carcass of the squirrel across the branch that had held the rope as he bound it again about his wrist. The place where the knot had been sitting was worn and ragged, and so he was obliged to shorten the length between himself and his captive. Loath though he was to do it, it was better than taking the risk that the rope would break.

Ravenous as he was, Aragorn was tempted to skin the squirrel and simply devour it raw. But reason won out, and he set about gathering fuel and laying a little fire between the roots of the elm. When it was crackling merrily he took down his game and settled cross-legged with the flames between his body and the tree-trunk. He needed warmth almost as much as he needed victuals, and his tiny blaze would answer for both. He hoped, too, that a hot meal would put a little strength back in his blood.

At the sight of the squirrel Gollum abandoned his digging and came to crouch nearby, though still well out of reach of the fire. He watched with greedy eyes as Aragorn stripped off the fur and cut away the paws and head and tail. The squirrel was not large and it was very lean, confirming Aragorn's own experience with the scarcity of food in the Wilderland this winter. He split its belly carefully with the tip of his knife, and ate the edible organs at once, raw and fresh. His stomach moaned and seemed at first to protest, but he held his rising gorge and reminded his body unsympathetically that it had been begging for something, anything, to eat for days now.

A green stick and two split branches served as a spit, and Aragorn roasted the squirrel with care. He forced himself to take his time and to do a proper job, though his innards were now awakening and his mouth persisted in flooding painfully each time he swallowed. Gollum watched every move that he made, pale eyes enormous in his emaciated face. Twin streams of spittle oozed from the corners of his mouth, and twice he made abortive snatching motions with his spindly fingers.

At last the meat was cooked and Aragorn lifted the spit from the fire. He tried to restrain himself and to allow it to cool a little, but he found that he could not. His strength of will had abandoned him entirely, it seemed, and he broke off a leg and stripped it with his teeth, burning his fingertips and scorching his tongue.

What meat there was would have been little enough for one, and that as part of a proper meal with a bit of bread and a parsnip or two to hearten it. Yet Aragorn took his knife and carefully divided the small carcass into poor portions, the one larger than the other to account for the leg he had already eaten. He had scarcely held out Gollum's share than it was gone, vanishing with sickly slurping sounds amid the sharp, scanty teeth. As he chewed Gollum muttered about scorching and spoiling and foolish manses, but he ate with the wolfish abandon that only those on the very cusp of starvation can exert.

Much as he wanted to do the same, Aragorn forced himself to linger over his meagre meal. He broke his long fast with care, chewing as slowly and as carefully as he could and relishing each morsel. Even uncured and unseasoned squirrel meat had a pleasant, nutty flavour, and the animal's leanness could not entirely disguise it. He stripped every shred of meat from the ribs and spine, and then cracked open the long bones of the limbs to suck out the fine grains of marrow within. Finally he licked his dirty fingers until he was satisfied that every last drop of grease was gone.

The fire was dying already, and he did not dare to risk building it up again. He cupped his sore hands to the fading embers and tugged his legs out from under him so that he could plant a foot on either side of the ring of ash. It did little enough to warm him, but the joints of his fingers grew more limber and the numbness in his feet retreated enough to reassure him that he had lost nothing to frostbite. His head had ceased its pounding and now felt only heavy with fatigue, and already the vile taste in his mouth was fading into memory. His stomach was still complaining, startled by the sudden boon of food and disconsolately begging for more all at once, but he ignored it. His meal had been a frugal one, but it was enough to keep him on his feet a while longer. Enough, as Bilbo Baggins had once said, 'to keep body and soul on speaking terms for another night.'

Aragorn's cracked lips curled into a faint smile at the memory of those words, spoken over an array of victuals laid out in one of the most lavish of camp-suppers he had ever seen in all his years of wandering. Trust a hobbit, he had thought then, to travel with provisions sufficient for a small army. They had both eaten well that night.

But Bilbo was far away, and hobbit-feasts were the stuff of fevered dreams. The fire had burned itself out now, and Aragorn spread its remains with the side of one boot. He shifted to lean his back against the tree, and drew in the folds of his blanket before tucking his hands away. He would rest for a time, and then they had to move on. There were many leagues yet to travel, and many labours yet to endure, but at least he had eaten a little. That was cause for gratitude.