Knocking on Heaven's Door

by Sharman Apt Russell

  Their luck turned when they saw the tracks of javelina. Brad led the way, grateful to be downwind, and got within thirty meters of a large family group. He hefted his spear, rose from a crouching position, adjusted his glasses, took time to aim, and launched the weapon. He missed the animal he was trying to kill. But got the one nearby!

  Clare seemed impressed as the group took off, leaving an adolescent kicking on the ground. The small-tusked male showed its gums and teeth and tried to run, the air heavy with its odor. While Clare kept watch, Brad did the work of killing and butchering, remembering to remove the musk gland before cutting out enough meat for tonight and tomorrow.

  “What now?” he had to ask afterward. Should he skin the javelina for its hide? How would they carry the bloody food?

  His guide considered. “We’ll go to the river,” she decided, putting the meat back into the carcass of the animal and deftly tying its legs into a package of about forty kilos, which she attached to an outside loop on Brad’s pack. The guts, gland, and offal were left in a pile. “It’s not far,” she assured him.

  Brad felt pleased, despite the new strain on his back, and regaled Clare with plant lore for the next hour of walking. The different species of prickly pear and how to cook them. The astringent qualities of oak. The use of mullein for bladder problems.

  They followed a game trail, a narrow path in the waist-high grass. The autumn sun was warm but not unpleasant. Eagles, vultures, and teratorns hunted in patterns across the blue sky. Quail whirled up like musical notes. Clare still kept watch, occasionally shushing him when she needed to listen.

  “Say it,” he said. “I know more than you thought I did. I know a lot about plants.”

  “Everyone knows a lot about plants,” Clare said.

  He told her how certain plants have the ability to take in toxic metals. Pennycress could store up to 25,000 parts per million of zinc. Sunflowers absorbed radioactive strontium. Sunflowers, in particular, were extraordinary. Their phytoremediation properties included …

  Her mouth quirked further up. “I admit it!” she protested at last. She was a teacher. She appreciated research.

  “Say it,” he teased.

  But “Here’s the river. Be quiet now,” she pleaded.

  Rivers, Clare reminded him, had to be approached with care. Water was where predator and prey came together. Like most rivers in the American Southwest, this one was small and ephemeral, a few braided channels shaded by sycamore and cottonwood trees, lined with cattail and red-tipped willow, widened suddenly by the flood of a monsoon. Clare made the motion for silence as she led them through a tangle of underbrush and fallen trees, a new explosion of thorny seeds attaching themselves to their leather clothes and boots. The dead javelina caught on the branches of hackberry, and Brad wanted to complain but did not. The colors of the changing leaves took some of his attention: the sycamores rusty red, the cottonwoods yellow. People thought math was black and white, numbers on a page. But when he dreamed of equations, and sometimes when he wrote them, he saw color—not in the numbers but in the relationships between numbers. Colors on a continuum like these tree leaves, bright and beneficent.

  At Clare’s insistence, they cleaned the javelina meat quickly, lingering only to scrub their hands free of blood and fill up their leather bottles for the next day. Then they retraced their steps back into the grasslands. The waterways belonged to the lions at night, Clare said, part of the agreement between humans and lions, who knew how not to get in each other’s way. When they did meet, both parties would back off slowly, the lionesses respectful although the males sometimes menaced to show their power. Since The Return, lions and humans had forged back their old relationship, as had wolves and humans. Other predators in the area could also be avoided, especially since Clare and Brad were both receivers and would sense any Paleos like the giant shortfaced bear or saber-toothed cat. Only hyenas might be a problem. Tonight, with so much wood nearby, they could put their belongings in a tree but sleep more comfortably on the ground, taking turns to keep the fire alive.

  Around the campfire that evening, Brad tried to explain his ideas about color, about numbers, about red-leafed sycamores and math—a talk he had imagined and perfected in the last hour of walking.

  But “I know of your work,” Clare interrupted him. She tended to the roasting javelina meat, pushing it out of the direct flames. “A student of mine wrote a paper on animism.” She paused. “You were mentioned.”

  Brad was distracted by the smell of fat in the air.

  “Not directly,” he said after another pause. “Not by name.”

  “No, of course not. But when I agreed to be your guide, I learned who you were. I don’t pretend to understand your equations.” Clare raised both palms to forestall more discussion on the subject. “But I appreciate what you’ve added to our … religious view.”

  Brad caught a certain tone and responded quickly. “You say religious as though you weren’t religious yourself.”

  “I believe in the science.” Clare turned the meat over.

  Brad salivated.

  “I understand the basic ideas,” Clare went on, “an all-pervading consciousness, the vast substratum, the holographic principle. But, for me, it’s abstract. Physics, not religion.”

  Brad acted shocked—and, in truth, he was. This was his guide? His spiritual leader? His own animism was deep and not at all abstract. Consciousness was everywhere, in everything, uniquely expressed. What, for example, was the unique consciousness of this oak behind him? He didn’t know. But he would be interested in finding out. What had happened to the unique consciousness of the javelina he had killed? How was the consciousness of rock different from that of javelina? Javelina from human? It wasn’t his field, and he regretted that. Math didn’t work at this level.

  “Don’t misunderstand me …” Clare sat back on her haunches.

  They were both salivating.

  “You believe in psychology,” Brad finished her thought. “Animism is good for our species. You believe in The Return.”

  “Don’t you?” Clare asked, and although they stopped talking long enough to eat, she returned to the conversation as eagerly as he did. She didn’t let him dominate, either, but had a number of strong if misguided opinions.

  “Look at what we know about the Paleolithic cave paintings.” Her lips gleamed, greasy in the firelight. “Their art had the same animals, the same style, the same perspective for over twenty thousand years. Twenty thousand years of a stable art and a stable culture. This is how we were meant to live.”

  “That’s history. That’s not the point,” Brad informed her. “The question is if we can live this way. It’s about change and flux. It’s in my equations. We can’t go back. We can’t return …”

  “Oh, muck-a-luck, that’s an insult to the elders and the Council and even the Los Alamos Three. Everyone knows we can’t return. You’re avoiding a real debate by misinterpreting the other point of view. It’s the either/or fallacy.”

  Brad realized his disadvantage, arguing with someone who taught writing. “I’m not saying …” he backtracked.

  She accused him of circular reasoning. Of begging the question. Of false analogy. Concerning The Return, she stayed firmly on point—that three uniquely different populations connected only by solarcomps and the wireless web couldn’t have stayed connected, couldn’t have achieved and maintained a common culture, if they had not been grounded in something innate to the species. Then she took the last of the meat, and he stopped talking, shocked again. She hadn’t even thanked him for their food. It had been his kill. Wasn’t she supposed to thank him?

  Suddenly and decisively, Clare said they had to sleep. Tomorrow they would be climbing into the mountains. “I’ll take the first watch,” she offered, unperturbed by their argument.

  Brad closed his eyes, imagining color. Red sycamore. Bright yellow cottonwood. Not much of the day had been what he expected, and he rather liked that. Certainly, he had not thought he woul
d spear an animal on his first try. What extraordinary luck.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CLARE

  A Second Paper, submitted by María Escobar

  I’ve decided to turn in a second paper and if you think it is better you could disregard the first paper and just count this one? I found something really interesting while doing research for this assignment and that is the fact that Pleistocene scholars think that 70,000 years ago the human species dropped to as low as 2,000 people. Now we have many more people than 2,000 although we don’t know for sure how many since we don’t know who still lives in places like Africa and China and Australia but we are still very low compared to what we were before The Return and we still carry the burden of consciousness-made-conscious in the world. Of course the Paleos are conscious too but not like humans. They are more like ordinary animals thinking about their problems and not thinking much about the future or anything other than eating and sleeping and mating. They don’t read or write, for example, which are two very important skills. It is just that we can hear what they think and feel and they can hear us which is why we don’t hunt them because they are so hard to catch by surprise.

  So it really comes back to us. Like the elders say, we are the universe reflecting on itself. We are consciousness-made-conscious of the earth. That’s something we realized with The Return and now I wonder if we didn’t also realize it a long time ago when we came close to going extinct or if it requires what we have now, our computers and radios so that we can talk to each other all the time? I think these are interesting questions that we could discuss in future papers. Another question I just thought of is why are the Pleistocene animals extinct if they were so hard to hunt?

  This reminds me of one of the Quaker stories that is told all the time here around the fire and that really seems related to this idea. George Fox was the founder of the Quaker religion and he lived hundreds of years ago when there were many billions of people on the planet and prisons where they kept thousands and even millions of people even if these people had done nothing wrong. These prisons were horrible places of disease and suffering and even children were kept there, children who had hopes and dreams and special thoughts just like me and you. One day George Fox’s wife saw a young boy hanged in the prison, strung up by a rope around his neck and choked to death. She was disgusted at this terrible cruelty and she went to her husband and said that he had to prove to her the existence of God’s love. (This was when the Quakers thought God was an actual person.)

  George Fox said he couldn’t prove the existence of God’s love. Only she could prove the existence of God’s love. “How can God prove the existence of His love?” George Fox asked his wife. “Can He speak to us through the trees? Through the animals? Through the sky? No, He speaks to us through you. He proves his love through you. How can He prove His love? He has only Thee.”

  This story is meant to show that we are the consciousness-made-conscious of the earth and that we are the ones who can speak and think and read and write and prove the existence of love. It’s a burden but it is also a gift and as the elders say, if the cost is high, so is the gift we get of this moment now.

  In the morning, Clare and Brad returned to the river, where Clare found shoeprints in the sand, two males, she guessed, and two females, mingling with the tracks of other animals. From the erosion on the heels and overlapping of a fox, she thought the humans had been here yesterday. Clare noted what else had visited this spot since then—raccoon, crane, duck, heron, hare. No lions or hyenas. No camels or horses or antelope.

  The nearness of other people required a decision. This far north, the tracks probably did not belong to her tribe. More likely, this group was ranging south from the Colorado region where she had friends and relatives: on her mother’s side, her aunt and grandmother; on her father’s side, three cousins and an uncle. When she mentioned some names, Brad nodded. He knew them, too. Like most adults, they had done their service in the lab.

  Clare sat back on her heels to think. An encounter with another group was always valuable. They might know things she didn’t—a good place to find honey, a bear’s den, a quarry of chert or obsidian. They would have already emailed news of births and deaths, divorces and marriages. But emails were public, usually sent from elder to elder or teacher to student, open for everyone to read. Face to face, there would be more details and more gossip, secrets, and entertainments. Maybe they would want to drum and dance. Have a party.

  None of that was about Brad’s quest. And her responsibility was to him, or rather to the quest itself, its shape and outcome. She was not in charge exactly—or rather, she was not in charge, obviously. They might cross the path of a giant shortfaced bear or rattlesnake or glyptodont. As they moved away from the river, certain springs could be dry. They might need to travel east instead of west, across Humptoothed Mountain instead of Easy Pass. Brad’s skills were not terrible. They would eat better than she had feared. But his thoughts wandered. He stared at the leaves. He might trip while climbing down, fall while climbing up. She might have an accident as well, Clare reminded herself. She was not in charge at all. She only facilitated.

  How did drumming, a party, fit into that pattern? Clare pretended to study the tracks that ran across the sandy bank. The morning air was crisp. She breathed in the smell of river. Gossip might be good for Brad. He was a different kind of student, living outside the tribes. Perhaps his quest involved people as much as javelinas and cottonwoods. Perhaps he needed to hear the boasts of other hunters instead of only listening to his own. Naturally, she wanted to find these hunters for her own reasons. Brad, she guessed, would rather not—for his reasons.

  “Let’s follow them.” Clare rose and nodded at the prints, with another nod to Brad that he should take the lead.

  “Why?” the man asked. What a difficult personality, Clare thought. How different from anyone else she knew. His appearance was different as well, darker than the people in Clare’s tribe, dark as a walnut tree against the winter sky. His face branched out, angular like that tree, with high cheekbones and a sharp nose sticking out from the eyeglasses. And he was tall, the long legs and arms of his African ancestry. Mostly the people in North America had interbred to a common brown skin, brown eyes, brown hair, even a common body shape. But genes still hid in odd places, and the rate of mutation caused surprises. Occasionally, you saw someone who was blonde or red-haired. Someone who had tightly curled black hair like this man, cut short in the fashion of lab rats.

  She didn’t bother to answer his question although she untied from his pack the remaining extra meat, the javelina package that she still wanted to use as a teaching lesson—what to do with the animal’s brains and skull, the multiple uses of a foreleg bone. The snarling head would bounce on her back now, since they would have to go faster if they wanted to catch up. They would have to go much faster, and perhaps that was part of this quest’s pattern, to push Brad harder. Already the decision had a consequence that seemed to be a good one.

  The hunters did not make following them difficult. They walked slowly, first along the river and then out into the expanse of grassland, meandering and not stalking prey. Brad seemed to realize he had to quicken his pace, and Clare was pleased she didn’t have to tell him that.

  This was going well, she thought, surprisingly well. No one in her group had wanted to take on this quest, and they had worked hard to flatter her into volunteering. It’s a challenge, they had said around the fire. You’re so good at this! Your students love you! Everyone was smiling. The ruse was so transparent. And everyone smiled more when she agreed—succumbed—because it was a challenge, partnering with someone who had avoided the quest for so long. And it was something different, too, the reverse of what she usually did, teaching students like María to read and write and think about the past when they would so obviously rather be out following tracks, alert in the present physical world. Here was a student who actually thought too much, read too much.

  As they walked, Clar
e looked for a sign from the hunters, something to announce who they were and what they saw. It was a habit only some people had, looping a willow branch into a circle, for example—the meaning clear: we are the Round River people. The placement of the circle might also tell where the group was going or what game they had seen. It was something to do, especially when you were outside your own hunting grounds. Clare’s cousin was a person with this habit, and she had made those loops herself when she had traveled with him and a Round River group years ago. For an entire summer, she had stayed with her relatives in the Rocky Mountains to the north, a strenuous and exciting time full of tests and competitive mountain climbing, four, five, six thousand meters! And the wildflowers! Like drinking fermented prickly pear juice. She had felt as light-headed.

  Clare looked and hoped for a loop of bundled grass. Her cousins were serious married men now, which would make them even more fun to tease, especially about that long-ago summer. They had all been camels then, all the young men and women, stupidly mischievous, playing tricks, testing, galumphing, knocking each other about in play. Too many jokes about gas and urination. Remembering, Clare almost laughed out loud. Perhaps a cousin would be with this group—why not? They were avid hunters. And if they were not these hunters, there might still be a way for her to send along a joke, something in code, something to amuse them.