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helmet.
    He followed the trail to Johnson, what was left of him. Blood spread from the left side of Johnson’s groin, his left leg scattered around him, bone broken and carved like scrimshaw and strewn with strips of muscle and skin. Johnson shivered, coughed, and looked lazily up at Stanley, drunk with shock. Stanley called for the medic. The blond man staggered up and then off, shouting for help. Stanley tore a strip of cloth from Johnson’s backpack and made a tourniquet. Johnson’s big long face caved in from his cheeks to his chin. His eyes fluttered.
    â€œJohnson.” Stanley shook him. But Johnson was going. Stanley took off his helmet and scooped the herb out of the lining. He opened Johnson’s mouth and pushed it in.
    But Johnson didn’t chew. Stanley opened Johnson’s mouth and pulled a third of it between Johnson’s gums and teeth. He picked off another piece and put in the red, beating hole that was once Johnson’s hip, leg. Then he moved Johnson’s jaw with his own hands, pushing Johnson’s tongue aside, grinding the herb with Johnson’s teeth. Johnson’s mouth was dry as cotton, and the herb coated the soft pink insides. Stanley stuck his finger in Johnson’s mouth and pushed the flakes, the unchewed pieces, into Johnson’s throat. Johnson gagged, sitting up and coughing, hands at his neck. The green-brown flakes flew out, covering Stanley’s face and shirt. Stanley wrapped his arms under Johnson’s chest and jerked upward. Stanley jerked and Johnson coughed and the herb chunk flew into the snow.
    â€œMedic.” The man dropped his kit beside Stanley. Stanley moved back and caught sight of the spat-out herb. It glowed in the detritus, unearthly. Stanley’s heart jumped. He reached for the glowing orange saxifrage. The medic turned, shook his head, frowned.
    Johnson was dead. The medic tagged him, took one of his dog tags, and scrambled back in the forest. It seemed wrong to leave Johnson like this, any of them like this. Maybe Stanley wouldn’t fight anymore, stay here with Johnson, work the herb into his wounds, down his throat. He could stick his knife into Johnson’s chest and massage it into his heart.
    The trees shook around him. Men shouted in the distance, the trill of bullets, explosions. Small fires baked in pockets of black trees. When another shell landed to the left of Stanley, he could feel the warmth of it on his leg. He did what he later imagined any other person would do. He ran.

1806
    They traveled in the highlands west of Reszel, Poland, Ela Zdunk and her mother, Barbara, like they always did, looking for rare species of flowers and roots. They walked miles in the mossy, swampy darkness, digging around the bases of beeches, spruces, and sycamores, bending under brushes, getting scraped by thorns and stickers and bitten by bugs. For as long as Ela could remember, the villagers visited their one-room shack outside of Reszel, the bone house, as it was called, to buy tinctures for their ailments. They had probably visited her mother for longer than the nine years she had been alive, for her grandmother had served the villagers in this capacity as well.
    Witches, they were sometimes called. But as long as the tinctures worked, no one became upset. They overlooked, or allowed, out of supposed generosity, Barbara Zdunk and her daughter to live in a hut of mud and river rocks and animal bones on a little patch of hill near the edge of the woods, where the ground was barren and cracked and the coyotes howled and nobody bothered but the gypsies, and only then for a little while. From their spot on the unprotected hill, Ela and her mother could see the thick ring of poplars and willows that surrounded the city below, the dense maze of terracotta-tiled roofs protected within it. When the customers were particularly foul or rude, Ela stood on the hill and squashed their houses between her thumb and forefinger.
    They traveled