But Meera just stares at the place in the river where the boat disappeared. There is a glazed look on her face. She doesn’t say this is the end.
“This is your fault,” is what she says.
They follow the river slowly, stumbling over the stones and tree limbs that are scattered along the bank. Meera will not speak to her, even after Susanna cleans the gash on her face. At every bend Susanna hopes to see their skiff caught on a rock but eventually the river turns and they are obliged to abandon it. If they head due north they will get to the Maumee River or Lake Erie eventually, and the Wyandot village is not far from where the two meet. But if they let themselves circle around following this stream or that they might be lost in the Black Swamp for weeks.
Susanna reties her grain sack more firmly to her back. Most of their food has fallen into the river, but she still has their kettle and their blankets and Meera has a bundle of rabbit bones in one of her pouches for soup. While they walk they must keep particular watch for anything edible: berries, plant greens, roots. She tries not to think about her aching leg.
The trees spread their branches like great wings blocking the sun. Mud sucks at her moccasins. They are in the true heart of the Swamp now, as Meera would say. Late in the afternoon they come upon small pools of oily water floating in patches: petroleum, which her mother used to call Seneca oil. Meera scoops up some in the cup of her hand to put into one of her pouches.
“Good for sore feet and sore bones,” she says.
This is the first thing she’s said for hours. To encourage her, Susanna says, “My mother used the oil to treat chilblains.”
“Chilblains? I don’t know this word.”
“Little swellings on your feet. You get them from the cold or the wet. Bigger than blisters. Beatrice used to get them a lot on her heels.”
Meera nods. “That is sore feet,” she says with the authority of a doctor.
They pick dandelion greens for their supper, and after they eat Meera scouts around until she finds four young trees arranged in a rectangle with no trees in the middle. She ties two thick branches to the trees on the longer sides of the rectangle, about a foot off the ground, and then she collects long sticks to arrange across the two branches, making a kind of platform. She has some rope and her hunting knife. Everything else they have to search for on the ground. When the rope runs out they cut vines to use as twine.
“This will be our bed,” Meera says. “We will make one every night.”
Susanna lies down on it. It is not very comfortable, but at least it keeps them from sleeping on wet ground. She can’t see the stars or the moon or anything else through the thick canopy of tree branches above them. The air feels wet when she breathes it in.
“How far do you think we’ve gone so far?” she asks Meera. “I mean, since Gemeinschaft?”
“Perhaps ten or fifteen miles.”
Ten or fifteen miles! The Black Swamp is forty miles north to south at least. How will they manage to travel twenty-five miles without a boat? The foolishness of her venture strikes Susanna again with all the force of false pride. They will never get out. She will never see her sisters or anyone else ever again. She will die here, and her last meal on earth will be boiled dandelion leaves without salt. A swarm of pinhead insects hovers over her face and although she swats them away they only come back.
“If you move about they are worse,” Meera says. But it makes no difference whether she moves or not. They have found her, and they are not going to leave.
Now, every day, they walk. The days become weeks. They carry no food since they eat every morsel they chance upon and wish for more. Their packs are lighter, that is the only good thing. But they wade through so much standing water that they have to stop again and again to pick leeches off their legs. At night Susanna becomes adept at making raised swamp beds, but even so she never feels completely dry. Sores form on her arms and legs that will not heal because of the damp. Her fingernails become as soft as skin.
They keep to the north, using the sun for direction. Somewhere Susanna loses one of her mother’s gloves, and the other one she uses to dry her feet at night. She can feel the wet seeping deeper and deeper into her skin, saturating her bones, the muscles of her heart. She imagines tiny wet spores lodged beneath her ribcage or flowing alongside the blood in her veins, a part of her now. If they come to dry ground, Meera finds a tree shadow and stops to mark the tip of it with her knife. They count out the seconds to make a quarter of an hour as the shadow moves from west to east, and then they mark the tip of the new shadow with a stick. Standing with Meera’s knife on their left and the stick on their right, they face true north. But if they can’t find a shadow they have to guess and trust their luck.
Are they walking in circles? Conflicting signs are everywhere: whole spider webs, good; broken fern leaves, bad. The constant wind through the low swamp trees is like an approaching wave that never breaks. Sometimes the trees end abruptly and they come into a small, wet, grassy prairie where swamp swallows swoop like bats hunting for insects. One afternoon Susanna hears a bugle call in the distance. At first she thinks it is just her hunger playing tricks on her, but then it sounds again.
Meera says, “Wapiti. White deer.”
Elk. “I thought they were all gone,” Susanna says. “With the buffalo.”
“They live where the grassland and trees come together. But their meat is not as good as the red deer. Also have tough skin, hard to kill.”
Meat would be manna but they find no way of getting any. Meera fashions arrows from branches of swamp oak but they all have splits or kinks and she has no straightening tool, so the arrows shoot off crookedly in ways she cannot compensate for. The best they can hope for is to stun a small animal long enough to kill it with their hands. But where are the small animals? Susanna gets excited when she sees a dead mouse lying up ahead on a fallen log, but when she gets there it turns out to be only a narrow gray leaf with a long stem curling out behind it like a tail.
Meera says, “This is like the time when we were traveling and my family went many weeks without food. Sometimes I licked cold stones for the mineral taste. We ate moss from the river. We looked for fish but found only moss.”
“I’m surprised Nushemakw didn’t leave you if there wasn’t enough food for you all.”
She wasn’t with Nushemakw, Meera tells her. This was with her real parents. “We walked across a shallow pond and there were fallen tree logs on the bottom and my mother kept slipping on them. My father carried me on his shoulders. We saw a stand of pawpaw trees on the other side. That’s why we were going there. I was crying, and my mother and father thought it was because I was afraid I would fall, but it wasn’t that, it was because I was so hungry and the pawpaws were so far away. I was so little that my father could hold my two legs across his chest with one arm. He told me that I always either cried or talked, that was my way. He said when I was older I would feel pleasure in silence, but that right now silence frightened me.”
The air is misty and wet. They are walking among cattails with edges as sharp as knives. Susanna cannot see an end to them.
“Did you ever eat the pawpaws?” she asks.
“At the other end of the pond, Nushemakw’s tribe was waiting for us behind the trees. They pointed their arrows at my people and killed everyone except for me and one boy.”
Susanna stops walking and looks at her. “Why?”
Meera shrugs. “We were enemies.”
“What happened to the boy?”
Meera doesn’t know. But when the battle was over, someone gave them both a pawpaw and also some meat. “I did not miss my parents at first. I was so eager to get food. I don’t think I really understood until later.” For a while they walk in silence. Then Meera says, “That morning, before we went across that pond, I talked to the trees. I told them how hungry I was. Then my father spotted the pawpaws. The trees heard me. And my father was killed.”
Susanna looks at her quickly, but Meera keeps starin
g straight ahead. She is so small and thin. Susanna wishes she could give her something. Food or comfort. Preferably food.
“The trees don’t care about our hunger,” she tells Meera. “I’m sure about that.”
The afternoon spills into evening with almost no change of light until suddenly the sun is gone, it is night. The next day they walk for hours without finding anything at all to eat, and Susanna begins to feel very light-headed. She worries that she is walking more and more slowly, and tries to pick up her pace. For a moment she thinks she sees Aurelia in the distance, the particular color of her hair, but it is only a tree in early turning. Still, the idea takes hold of her.
“Susanna, whatever are you doing here?” Aurelia would certainly ask her.
“I’m going to find Penelope and Naomi. They need my help.”
“Your help! Susanna, you astonish me, you do. Even if you could help them, how do you propose to find them? You have no sense of direction, you know you do not. If someone says east, you turn south. We’ve told you this often enough.”
“I don’t know. But here I am. I can only keep going.”
“Well I wish you luck! Truly I do! Now I, as you know, have a very keen sense of direction. I’ve developed it because of my birds. Those hens are smarter than anyone gives them credit for. If a wind comes up in the east they...”
A small, fine rain begins to fall. Susanna wipes droplets from her face with the sleeve of her dress as she listens to Aurelia prattle on about her birds, a speech so familiar to Susanna she could recite it in her sleep. She feels her usual spurt of irritation—Aurelia always leads the conversation back to herself. Then she catches herself and feels ashamed. Poor Aurelia. Tears come into her eyes.
“It does no good to pity yourself,” Meera says sharply.
“I’m not pitying myself!” Susanna says, and then all at once she is. If they had gone to Philadelphia like she wanted she might be sitting down right now with Lilith and Aunt Ogg for supper. Cold ham, hot tea in china cups. Her hands would be clean. Raindrops would not be trickling down her face.
“I’m hungry, too,” Meera tells her.
Susanna wipes the rain from her eyes. “I know,” she says.
The rain comes down for five days without a break, and then six. The clouds remain so heavy that they cannot use the sun for direction. Food becomes even harder to find. At night they are now too weak to make swamp beds but instead lie down on fat logs, sleeping as still as snakes so they will not tumble off onto the wet ground.
“I think we’re walking in circles,” Meera says on the seventh day.
They are sucking on reeds to try to fool their stomachs, but Susanna’s stomach is not fooled.
“Do you think we should stop and wait for the sun to come out?” Meera asks. The rain has tapered off at last but the clouds are still thick overhead.
“We need to find food. Maybe a stream where we can catch a fish.”
But when at last they come to a sunken brook its waters are muddy and shallow and without fish. They sit down to rest on a log so decayed with age and rain that it threatens to fold up wetly in the middle. Susanna looks at the sky through the canopy. The trees are still dripping but the clouds are finally moving off.
Oh well. Maybe finding food doesn’t matter, she thinks. Maybe I can just sit on this wet log for the rest of my life. Her mind has begun to feel like something suspended, a bird asleep. She rubs her thumbs over her fingernails, their softness almost mesmerizing in their oddity. At last Meera rouses herself and goes to a nearby tree. She pulls back the bark here and there until she finds what she is looking for: a couple of dark green insects as long as a man’s longest finger. Meera takes one and twists off its head and eats the body. Then she plucks the other one off the tree and holds it out to Susanna.
Susanna hesitates. Then she takes it and twists off its head.
Inside her mouth she presses the insect sideways and tries not to taste it, but a bitter and woody flavor comes up anyway. She thinks of the Bible: eating manna from heaven, which she’d been told was some sort of insect. But manna sounds pleasurable and this is not. This is more like a chore. She swallows and holds her hand out for another. They each eat four of these insects and then they chew the bark from the tree. Afterward Susanna feels strong enough to look for wild onions, which they eat slowly, making them last, and Meera lights a couple of damp torches to keep the mosquitoes away.
For a moment she turns back to look at Susanna, and Susanna is shocked to see how much older her face seems, like an old woman’s. Her eyes are set back deep in her face, and her cheekbones rise prominently around them. That is hunger.
“Meera,” Susanna asks, “why did you not stay with Green Feather?”
“Why did you not stay in your home in Severne?” Meera counters. She looks down at the ground.
“I know you considered it. You thought about it.”
She wants Meera to say, because I wanted to go with you. But Meera doesn’t say that. She pushes one torch deeper into the soggy ground, making adjustments.
The wind picks up and blows against the torches. A plane of smoke rises and then flattens like a tabletop.
“That was not my place,” Meera finally says. “My place is with my people. My uncle tribe.”
“But what if you don’t like them? You don’t even know them.”
“Like does not matter. They are my people. Once I have faced my seven demons I will find them.”
“Seven demons?” This is new to Susanna. “What are the seven demons?”
“Different for each person. My first demon was the pond with the fallen logs. This place we are in is number seven. At the end of it I will find my guardian spirit. Green Feather was not my guardian spirit.”
It seems to Susanna that if ever there was a guardian spirit, Green Feather was that. But Meera seems convinced it will be someone from her uncle tribe.
“Was Sister Consolation one of your demons?” Susanna asks.
A shadow of a smile crosses Meera’s face. “I vanquished her when I took her shawl.”
Susanna tries to count up her own demons but it feels as though she’s met with more than seven already. Her head begins to ache again and she closes her eyes. A moment later a hooting owl comes swooping down from the trees and over the brook, and as she turns her head to watch it she remembers that seeing an owl near water is an omen of death.
Aurelia sits down beside her.
“I’m worried, Susanna,” she says. “This is all so unlike you.”
“I know,” Susanna says. “I’m worried, too.”
“I’m amazed you even started this journey. Because now of course you can’t go back.”
“It seemed simple at first. All I had to do was get to Risdale. And then to Gemeinschaft. I don’t know how I got here.”
“You were tricked by that girl.”
Susanna looks over at Meera. She has fallen asleep sitting on the ground with her back against the wet decayed log. Her head bends awkwardly against her shoulder. But Meera didn’t trick her. Susanna wanted to come. She needs her sisters, that is the truth, although she worries that they don’t feel the same way about her.
“Tell me, are they all right?” Susanna asks Aurelia. “Penelope and Naomi?”
“How should I know?”
Suddenly there is a commotion in the trees. A bright, fast creature storms out of the underbrush running for its life: a young elk. Wapiti. Meera wakes with a jerk and stands up. She reaches for her knife but the elk is followed closely by two fast wolves. There is hardly time to see them before they disappear behind more trees, but Susanna can hear their progress by the crashing of branches.
“Let’s go,” Meera says.
They each pull up a torch and follow the sound of the chase. Soon Susanna hears the unmistakable cry of a creature in pain. She follows Meera through the trees as fast as she can, branches lashing her shoulders. The wolves have brought the elk down in a muddy strip between two large trees. When Susanna and Mee
ra get there, the elk is still alive with one wolf at its neck and the other at its middle. Its eyes are like clear water. It raises and lowers its head, fighting to the last. A young male.
Susanna can’t stop watching the wolves as they eat it. Beside her she can hear Meera breathing through her mouth. Each of them is still holding a lit torch, and the idea comes to Susanna that soon the wolves will not be so hungry. Perhaps they can chase them away.
And so it happens. The wolves, first one and then the other, break off for a moment to sniff the air.
“They know we are here,” Meera whispers.
“Maybe we can shoo them off with our fire.”
“Yes, we must frighten them.” But she waits, looking at Susanna, and so Susanna is the one who takes a shallow breath and makes the first lunge toward the beasts—mangy, stringy fellows, all clumpy fur and teeth.
“Shoo! Scat! Scat!” She waves her burning branch at them. Her heart is beating fast but she gives herself no time to consider her fear. Meera is only a half a moment behind.
“Off! Be off!” Meera shouts.
The wolves rear away from the burning branches but each manages to pick up a bit of fallen meat to hold in its mouth as they trot a little way off through the underbrush. When they are far enough away, Meera begins quickly to skin a section of the carcass while Susanna holds both of the torches. What Meera said before is true: tough hide. But soon enough she is able to get to the meat. Her hands are shaking and blood streams from her fingers as she cuts piece after ragged piece. They hear the wolves begin to snarl. They are ready to eat again, and feel bolder. Susanna sees four gleaming eyes among the trees. She waves the torches and they retreat a few steps but not as far as before.
Soon these wolves will be joined by other wolves. Susanna knows that they must be gone by then. When they have cut as much meat as they dare they leave in the opposite direction, making a long loop back to their camp. Susanna builds up a little fire and Meera cuts a few slim green boughs and then douses them in the muddy brook so they can use them as skewers. Their hands are covered in blood and gristle. Susanna is so hungry that she starts to eat her meat too soon and vomits before she can properly swallow. But eventually the meat is cooked through, and she makes herself eat slowly. It tastes as good as anything she has ever eaten, even without salt or bread.
Thieving Forest Page 20