by Matt Bell
Chapman wakes with a start, his fur threatening to ripple out from beneath his skin, revealing him; once his shape is back under his control, he counts the dream as one more reason never to pass a winter anywhere called territory or frontier. In the morning, the brothers strike camp eagerly, ready to be gone into the continued unscrolling of America. The spring is pleasantly warm and lushly green, but there are fewer opportunities for foraging and hunting along the roadside, new fencing leaving nowhere to pick berries or dig tubers, while the game animals are all hunted or routed or else unreachable without crossing some other man’s claim. Still Chapman whistles as he walks the crowded road west, more at ease in the company of others after his sojourn at the Worths’. Atop one quiet wagon he spies a young man absently stringing a fiddle, and he begs the boy to play his instrument loud and lively, until all in his dour company are laughing and dancing their way down the rut-pitted road. When the music stops, the cheered family invites the brothers to travel with them as far as they’d like, but Chapman weighs Nathaniel’s glower, thinks better of accepting the offer. He shakes his head and whistles on, humming a snatch of tune learned from little Eliza Worth, The Lord’s been good to me, and so I thank the Lord, an earworm carving out the rotting apple of his brain.
Chapman sings, Nathaniel scowls, the roads finally become less crowded the farther west they travel. What used to be mere days of travel becomes two weeks, then a month, the distance to be covered farther than ever before. Before they’ve planted a single tree, they’ve consumed half the provisions meant to last the summer, food eaten early because the lands they passed through were not free for Nathaniel to hunt on or for Chapman to gather other foodstuffs.
Nathaniel grows angrier with every mile, the pomace in their bags drying fast, the bad seeds getting worse. It’s May already when the brothers pass the last homestead at the edge of an undrained stand of swampland, what might be the new edge of what frontier is left in Ohio. Seeking a suitable nursery site, they discover instead more human signs: a trapline strung through the dark woods, steel-jawed traps baited with gutted rabbits split at their seams, with squirrel corpses dusted with powdered poison. Traps meant for wolves the homesteaders blame for lost cattle, missing goats; traps for wolves even before there are many cattle or goats to lose.
At first the brothers see only the loaded traps, but soon they find the wolves, trapped: wolves struggling in steel; wolves dead of bloody injuries and poison. Wolves with broken forepaws, shattered skulls; wolves with black tongues, bulged eyeballs. At the next unsprung trap, Chapman takes his walking stick and depresses the trigger plate, slamming the jaws on a poisoned rabbit left for bait. The rabbit is harder to disarm, because even with the trap sprung, anything eating of this rabbit will die.
“Brother,” Nathaniel says, “this isn’t your problem.”
“Brother,” Chapman says, uselessly tugging at the stuck rabbit, “if we don’t help, who will?”
Nathaniel huffs with impatience but doesn’t stop Chapman. All he might say has been said a million times before. That time wasted is paid in trees not planted. That without planted trees, they cannot make their fortune.
But by now Nathaniel must know a delay barely matters, if unplanted trees are its only cost.
Chapman kicks off his boots, rolls his trousers to his knees. He crouches, rocks back and forth to dig his leathery heels into the soil. His toes grip the dirt, he closes his eyes, he tugs the earth toward himself as he slips out of one skin into another. Once he’s a faun again, he reaches for the poison-dosed rabbit, digging the claws of his first two fingers into its stiff fur to tear it from the trap. It takes only a few minutes to dig the rabbit a shallow grave, his claws more than capable of loosening the forest floor. When the work is done, he slides the rabbit into its hole, smooths the dirt with the flat of his hand, rues the impossibility of keeping the harm humans do confined to any one place. No matter what he does, the poison in the rabbit will eventually find its way into some other living thing: if not the scavenging birds and mammals, then worms, maggots, the burrowing insects alive beneath the earth.
“Are we going to bury every rabbit we find, brother?” asks Nathaniel—but when Chapman turns, Nathaniel knows the answer. The trapline is laid along the same path the brothers planned to take; they discover more snares, some already sprung, some waiting, the traps coated with beeswax or animal blood, anything to cover the human scent.
Chapman quickly buries the dead. The poison will spread if it isn’t contained; the forest is a system of interlocking cause and effect, nothing can be made so discrete: a dead wolf eating a poisoned rabbit becomes poisoned itself, could poison the crow or raven who feeds on its corpse. Even with Nathaniel adding his trowel to the effort, the work is extraordinarily slow, the devastation widening. When the traps disappear, more brutal methods arise to replace them: now the brothers find sleek coyotes and slender foxes, poisoned. Then a black bear, eyes bloodshot, belly distended, breathing its last in a watery ditch; dead owls, their wings broken when they fell from the sky, their flat faces rictuses; a bald eagle, its neck twisted, a string of raw meat flagging from its beak. Along their path are innumerable deer shot through their ribs, bright red lung blood matted into fur powdered with strychnine, their bodies surrounded by dead and dying wolves, mouths foamed, steps staggered or stilled. Everywhere they go they find more carrion birds, they watch the bare heads of doomed vultures digging into so much poisonous flesh, the big black birds impossible to scare away, even to save their lives.
Defeated, Chapman and Nathaniel walk on silently, grieving in death’s wake. Chapman broods, his vision swimming with rage. Nathaniel’s gorge rises visibly. The smell of hot blood, wet rot. The fury both men feel. Right now Chapman doesn’t know if he could retake his human shape, doesn’t believe its lesser form could contain this much anger, this burning a grief.
Late in the afternoon, after the sweltering heat has turned the many corpses to stinking, festering ruin, Nathaniel raises a hand to Chapman, motions for him to stop. “Look, brother. Through the trees.” Chapman follows Nathaniel’s pointing finger: a hundred yards away, a giant of a man sits astride a coal-black horse, the man dressed in dark furs despite the heat, the horse straining to drag its overladen sledge. The horse advances slowly, whinnying its disgust or fear at the slaughter all around, the giant leaves everything behind but the wolf skins, all the proof needed to collect his bounties.
An ingenious entrepreneur, this man. Another American innovator, accepting all the collateral damage of his method, as long as he earns what he’s owed.
The giant turns in the direction of Nathaniel’s voice, leaning over his pommel to peer into the pines. By the time Nathaniel says, “Hide, brother,” Chapman is already vanished into the brush, his face burning. He’s not a violent creature, or he wasn’t before, when he lived only as a faun. But some of man’s volatility must’ve followed him back into his other shape, because now he knows he intends to hurt this trapper.
“Who’s there?” the giant says, his voice booming. He swings a leg over his horse, drops down to draw a rifle from his saddle’s scabbard. There’s a rifle in Nathaniel’s hands too but Chapman doubts it’s loaded: it’s only used for hunting, and never again in Chapman’s presence.
“Why are you doing this?” Nathaniel says, his voice choked. He steps past Chapman’s hiding place, his jaw set, a vein pulsing at his sun-freckled temple as he closes to within twenty feet of the trapper. “Why would anyone do this?”
“A dollar a pelt,” the giant replies, his voice matter of fact as he dismissively gestures at the nearest dead wolf. He spits, exposing a mouthful of missing teeth, the phlegmy wad of tobacco barely escaping his beard. “I’m going to be rich once I get all these back.”
Chapman slips tree to tree, moving closer through the shadows, shuddering whenever the wind rustles the canopy, close enough to smell the giant, his rotten slaughterhouse stench. Deciding Nathaniel’s no threat, the man sets his rifle on the ground, then pu
lls a dully gleaming knife from beneath his fur cloak. Nathaniel stares, Chapman seethes, the giant hacks the fur from a wolf’s skull, unzips the skin from the bloated torso, then begins undressing the hind legs with a series of jerks, pulling crudely until Nathaniel says, “Stop. Stop, goddamn it. This isn’t right. Look at everything you killed to skin a wolf.”
It’s not only the animal in the trap, half stripped. An overturned hawk lies bloated a dozen yards away, its wings raised in rigor mortis; a pair of coyotes lie unseen in the brush Chapman slinks through, foam leaking from muzzles pressed nose to nose as they expired.
The man sneers, a fresh dribble of tobacco crying out the side of his mouth. He says, “You’d rather someone’s sheep get taken? Someone’s calf, someone’s pig?” He stands, not picking up his rifle but brandishing the knife, the pitted blade slick with wolf’s blood. “Maybe someone’s kid, a girl in pigtails playing in the trees?”
Nathaniel raises his musket. “Stay back,” he says, his voice quavering.
How old he’s become, already fifteen when Chapman was born, then aging ahead of him while Chapman was gone in the flicker. From his hiding spot, Chapman watches quivering Nathaniel, never tall nor brawny, now reduced to sunspotted leather stretched over scrawny bones, but still brave enough to face the giant alone, with only his unloaded musket to protect him.
Not that Chapman has to let him. He lets the trapper advance another step before he violates the one rule Nathaniel gave him as a child, a rule he has until this moment hewed to without question: now the faun reveals himself with a roar, baring his sharp teeth, shaking his horns in warning. He flexes his clawed fists, he stamps a hoof; a barking grunt escapes his snarl. As the giant turns, the man’s face twists in slow, dumb horror, barely reacting in time when his terrified horse rears at the faun’s unnatural voice, yanking its tether from the ground with a jerk of its thick neck.
At the last second, the giant ducks the flying spike at the end of the whipping tether, then dodges past the horse’s panicking hooves to snatch its whipping reins. In the moment it takes him to mount his bucking horse, Nathaniel cries for Chapman to hide himself again, but it’s too late, there’s nothing Nathaniel can do to stop him, the hooved faun already trying to run down the hooved horse. The horse is fast and powerful but still tied to its sledge of wolfskins, the sledge now slamming over rocks and logs, banging against the trunks of trees.
Chapman runs steadily after, leaping over the same obstructions with ease, his body nimble, quick, happy to flow into motion; he’s never given chase before, but he’s well built for the task, his shape eager to be moving at faunish speed after months spent in a man’s skin.
Then it happens again, just as he should’ve known it would.
He’s a dozen strides back when he hears the song. He hears the beheaded singer’s terrible noise, and then he sees the first of the witches: not the woman but the panther, its yellow eyes flashing as it leaps through the air, dragging the giant from his saddle; and then the grizzly appears too, surging from a bramble to grip the horse’s throat in her jaws, knocking the animal off its hooves. The giant is the one dying but it’s Chapman who screams the loudest, stumbling to a stop as the slaughter begins. The witches have become furies, righteous protectors of these lands, come for the trapper for reasons different from why they come for Chapman, or so he at first thinks. But what if it’s not only the crimes of the past the witches seek to punish? What if the violations of this life count against him too, crimes committed against the wild world he helped undo, that he and the other settlers so carelessly uproot?
“What do you want from me?” he cries, his voice rising above the unfolding carnage. “Anything but this,” he says. “Anything to make this stop. Tell me what you want and I will do it.”
The grizzly and the panther show no sign of having heard, instead continuing their attack, the earth beneath their paws thrashed and rent and churned to bloody mud until the forest clearing is made an abattoir. The grizzly drags the horse by its throat, pinning its head to the ground while its body bucks and jerks, its hooves kicking in the air; the panther buries its dark head to the ears in the giant trapper’s opened torso, its jaws making a wet squelching sound almost loud enough to drown out his screams.
“Tell me what you want,” Chapman repeats, his voice halting now, sickened by what he sees, what he’s caused. He’d planned to hurt the giant too, had believed the trapper didn’t deserve mercy after what he’d done, but could anyone deserve this?
The dead wolves, the dead bears and deer and elk, the dead rabbits and squirrels and owls, the doomed vultures circling them all. All that death was the trapper’s fault, all that death would be paid for by his own death, coming any second now. But it was Chapman’s change that called the witches. It was the call of Chapman’s faunness that brought them here, in this moment.
He admits this even before he hears the third witch speak: the violence he sees before him is his fault too.
With the bear and the panther occupied, it’s only the woman who is also a vulture who can answer Chapman’s cries. With the singer under her arm, she turns toward the faun, her bird-self hidden inside human-enough skin, the witch-beast no less a shapeshifter than he is. When she opens her mouth to speak, it’s in a voice like underground water, the deep secret of a hidden river rushing with ancient rain-seep, its currents coldly crashing through limestone conduits. There is sense and syntax in the sounds she makes, Chapman’s sure, but the meaning of her speech remains foreign. He grows frustrated at her refusal to speak as a human would; she’s likewise visibly agitated at his incomprehension.
At last the witch’s voice falls silent as she extends her arm to brandish the singer’s head: if Chapman cannot listen, then he must see instead. For a moment there is only more ripping flesh and crunching bones, the vengeance of the witches and the world they serve; then a sudden vision takes shape, its reality born into being upon the singer’s song, a manifested glimpse of a frozen world devoid of life, a white world where all lies silent and utterly cold, where no one screams except a horse and a giant, the latter at last silenced only after he’s torn limb from limb by the bear and the panther.
Chapman can’t look anymore, can’t make himself watch whatever might happen next. Even if this is the only part of his answer he can understand, he wants it not. He turns on his hooves, fleeing this vision of bloody revenge and frozen future for the Territory he knows, for the pale body he has to wear there now, this shell of a shoeless, frightened man, who soon finds his brother where he left him, still shaking in the falling dark: here is Nathaniel, far from the melee, weeping uselessly, furiously trying to load his musket, too late, too late, too late, his terrified paralysis breaking only after Chapman yells for him to run.
John
Volunteers crowd the viewing platform at the base of the Tower, their lunching families squeezed against the railings to look down on the re-created herd of bison grazing among the original supertree groves, a habitat edged by buried electric fences, cornered by the Tower’s legs. The park is a gift to the Volunteers from Eury, at first glance as relaxing and cheering a place as any in the Farm ever was—but John knows that the park’s potential for continually attracting visitors means that the gathering Volunteers will create a continuous shield of innocents around Eury Mirov’s sure-to-be-targeted headquarters, hopefully promising enough collateral damage to pause a planned military strike.
If all goes well, that hesitation is all Eury is going to need.
John twists through the rear of the gathering, leaving the better angles to the other Volunteers. It’s barely been two days since John entered the Tower, but already the outside feels unfamiliar, strangely alien. The Volunteers’ collective oohing over the bison mixes with scattered nervous chatter about Eury’s pronouncement, but neither the cloning nor the promise of eminent geoengineering seems to provoke true anxiety or anger. These Volunteers have been rescued, their sacrifices made noble by Eury’s rhetoric, their children guarantee
d a future thought lost. John’s father was born before the twenty-first century began, when it was possible to choose to believe in growth forever, in market forces solving every social ill. Those promises proved false, but here was another come to replace them, a story by which the world might be saved, or at least made understandable again.
John finds the others leaning against a stretch of rail two-thirds of the way around the viewing platform. Julie and Noor are dressed in the muted colors of the Volunteer wardrobe, gray or blue pants, equally plain t-shirts and button-downs, and work boots; only Mai wears clothes purchased off-site, her yellow dress a conspicuous burst of color against the monochrome others. Julie and Noor look out over the bison herd, their hips gently knocking; Mai leans beside them, tossing her shiny black ponytail, laughing at a joke John isn’t close enough to hear.
It’s Cal, standing on the far side of the group, dressed in gray jeans and a pale blue shirt, her sleeves rolled to her powerful shoulders, who sees John first, the others turning toward his approach only after she speaks. “You’re late, old goat,” she says, then steps forward to pull him close, mashing her lips against his. John flushes with embarrassment; the others laugh, as always. He steps away from Cal to greets his friends, the reunion happy enough but their small talk fizzling fast. Soon they’re leaned against the rail, standing close enough for their pebbles to link up via near-field communication, their retinal displays activating at Cal’s command.
“Twenty-four hours to launch,” she says, her usual teasing good humor banished from her voice. “We don’t have much time left. Everyone seeing what I’m seeing?” She taps her temple, centering the synchronized image mirrored in their retinal displays, overlaid across the pasturing bison. “Good. This is the Tower as mapped by John’s bees, incomplete but likely good enough. Mai’s been inside for the last year—are we missing anything important?”