by Diane Cook
Dedication
For my mother, Linda, and my daughter, Cazadora
And for Jorge
Epigraph
. . . I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?
—Aldo Leopold
Get me out of here, get me out of here
I hate it here, get me out of here
—Alex Chilton
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Part I: The Ballad of Beatrice
Part II: In the Beginning
Part III: The Big Walk
Part IV: The Ballad of Agnes
Part V: Friend or Foe
Part VI: To the Caldera
Part VII: The Roundup
Epilogue
Land Acknowledgment and Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Diane Cook
Copyright
About the Publisher
Part I
The Ballad of Beatrice
The baby emerged from Bea the color of a bruise. Bea burned the cord somewhere between them and uncoiled it from the girl’s slight neck and, though she knew it was useless, swept her daughter up into her hands, tapped on her soft chest, and blew a few shallow breaths into her slimy mouth.
Around her, the singular song of crickets expanded. Bea’s skin prickled from heat. Sweat dried on her back and face. The sun had crested and would, more quickly than seemed right, fall again. From where Bea knelt, she saw their Valley, its secret grasses and sage. In the distance were lonely buttes and, closer, mud mounds that looked like cairns marking the way somewhere. The Caldera stood sharp and white on the horizon.
Bea dug into the hard earth with a stick, then a stone, then hollowed and smoothed it with her hands. She scooped the placenta into it. Then the girl. The hole was shallow and her baby’s belly jutted from it. Wet from birth, the little body held on to coarse sand and tiny golden buds brittled from their stems by the heat of the sun. She sprinkled more dust onto the baby’s forehead, pulled from her deer-hide bag several wilted green leaves, and laid them over the girl. She broke off craggy branches from the surrounding sage, laid them over the distended belly, the absurdly small shoulders. The baby was a misshapen mound of plant green, rust-red blood, a dull violet map of veins under wet tissue skin.
Now, the animals, who had sensed it, were converging. In the sky, a cyclone of buzzards lowered as if to check on the progress, then uplifted on a thermal. She heard the soft tread of coyotes. They wove through the bloomy sage. A mother and three skinny kits appeared under jaggedly thrown shade. Bea heard whines ease from their impassive yawns. They would wait.
A wind stirred and she breathed in the dusty heat. She missed the stagnant scent of the hospital room where she’d given birth to Agnes what must have been eight years ago now. The way the scratchy gown had stretched across her chest and gotten tangled up when she tried to roll to either side. How the cool air blew around her hips, between her legs, where her doctor and nurses stared, prodded, and pulled Agnes from her. She’d hated the feeling. So exposed, used, animal-like. But here, it was all dust and hot air. Here, she had needed to guide the small body—had she been five months pregnant? Six? Seven?—out with one hand while with the other she’d had to block a diving magpie. She had wanted to be alone for this. But what she wouldn’t have given for a probing gloved hand, stale recirculated air, humming machines, fresh sheets under her rather than desert dust. Some sterile comfort.
What she wouldn’t have given for her mother.
Bea hissed at the coyotes. “Scram,” she said, pitching the dirt and pebbles she’d just dug at them. But they only slid their ears back, the mother sinking to her haunches and the kits nipping at her snout, irritating her. She probably snuck off from the rest of the pack to get her young something extra, or to let them practice scavenging, to practice surviving. It’s what mothers did.
Bea shooed a fly from near the baby’s eyes, which at first had looked startled over having not made it, but now seemed accusatory. The truth was Bea hadn’t wanted the baby. Not here. It would have been wrong to bring her into this world. That’s what she’d felt all along. But what if the girl had sensed Bea’s dread and died from not being wanted?
Bea choked. “This is for the best,” she told her. The girl’s eyes clouded over with the clouds that rolled overhead.
During one nightwalk, back when she’d had a flashlight and still carried batteries to make it glow, she’d caught two eyes gleaming in her beam. She clapped her hands to scare the eyes, but they just dipped down. The animal was tall but crouching, sitting perhaps, and Bea feared it was stalking her. Her heart sped up and she waited for the cold dread that she’d felt a couple of times by then. Her inner sense of being in danger. But the feeling never came. She walked closer. Again the eyes dipped down, supplicant, like a dog obeying, but it was not a dog. She had to get closer before she could see that it was a deer with its sloped back, the peaked ears, the resigned flick of the tail. Then Bea saw another eye in the light, small, not looking at her, but quivering, unsteady. The deer heaved up and then the quivering eye wobbled up too. It was a small glistening fawn, on shaky, toothpick legs. Bea had unknowingly witnessed a birth. Quiet in the dark. Bea had come stealthily upon the mother like a predator. And the mother could do nothing in that moment but lower her head as though asking to be spared.
There were few things Bea let herself regret these days, these unpredictable days full of survival so plain and brute. But she wished she had walked another way that night, not found their eyes in her light, so that the doe could have had her birth, nuzzled and licked her baby clean, could have had the chance to give her baby a first unblemished night before the work of survival began. Instead the doe lumbered away, exhausted, the fawn stumbling after her, disoriented, and that was the beginning of their life together. It’s why, days ago, when Bea no longer felt the kicks and hiccups and flutters and knew the baby had died, she knew she’d want to be alone for the birth. It was the only moment they would have together. She did not want to share that. She did not want someone watching her own complicated version of grief.
Bea peered at the coyote mother. “You understand, don’t you?”
The coyote pranced impatiently and licked her yellow teeth.
From a far low ridge, some foothills of foothills to come, she heard a joyless howl; some watching wolf had seen the carrion birds, was signaling prey.
She had to leave. The sun was going. And now the wolves knew. She’d tracked her shadow becoming long and thin, a sight that always made her sad, as though she were seeing her own death by starvation. She stood, stretched out her sand-pocked knees, wiped the desert off her skin and ragged tunic. She felt foolish that she’d tried to resuscitate what she knew to be dead. She thought the Wilderness had cast all sentimentality from her. She would not tell anyone about that moment. Not Glen, who she thought wanted a child of his own more than he would ever admit. She wouldn’t tell Agnes, even though she thought Agnes would want to know about this sister who never materialized, would want to understand the secret particulars of her mother. No, she would stick to the simple story. The baby did not survive. So many others hadn’t. So we move on.
She turned without another look at this girl she had wanted to name Madeline. She gave that mother coyote a sharp kick, landing it against her visible ribs. The dog yelped, slunk, then snarled, but she had more pressing concerns than engaging a human insult.
Bea heard the scuffle and yips behind her. And though the dogs’ rising excitement resembled a newborn’s cry, Bea knew it was just the sound of hunger.
* * *
An unmistakable shadow of a path led toward the camp. It was hard to know if it was from the Community’s own impact, animals making their own animal trails, or a remnant of all the things the land had been before it became the Wilderness State. Maybe it was Bea alone who had blazed the trail. She visited that place as often as she could, whenever they migrated through the Valley. It was the reason she’d chosen it for Madeline. There was something subtle in that view. It seemed like a hidden valley. The depression of verdant grasses and coarse bushes lay slightly lower than the land around it so that it had a secret view toward the horizon and the inky hump of mountains there. All the land in view formed a mosaic of blurred, muted colors. It was pretty and quiet and private, she thought. A place someone wouldn’t want to leave. Again, Bea felt a fleeting relief to have Madeline poised there, instead of facing an unknowable landscape with her, a mother who felt incapable of maneuvering it with grace.
Bea could hear the voices of the others in camp. They carried across the even, empty land and dropped at her feet. But she did not want to return to them and their questions or, possibly worse, their silence. She shifted away and scrambled up boulders toward the shallow cave where her family liked to spend time. Their secret perch. She saw her husband, Glen, and daughter, Agnes, above her, kneeling in the dirt, waiting for her.
Bea saw Glen’s brow furrowing in concentration as he spun a leaf by its stem, peering at it from every vantage, pointing to something on its green spine so Agnes could see, asking her to notice some remarkable detail in its common shape. They both leaned closer to the leaf, as though it were telling them its secret, their faces breaking into delight.
When Glen saw her approaching, he waved her toward them. Agnes did the same, a generous and awkward sweep of her arm, smiling with her newly jagged tooth, chipped against a boulder. Why couldn’t it have been a baby tooth? Bea had thought, her daughter’s head in her hands, inspecting the damage under her bright, bloody lip. Agnes had held still and quiet, one tear squeezing from her eye and trailing through the dirt on her face. It was the only way Bea knew the accident had fazed her. Like an animal, Agnes froze when fearful and bolted when endangered. Bea imagined that as Agnes grew up this would change. She might feel less like prey and more like a predator. It was something in her daughter’s smile, some unnameable knowledge. It was the smile of a girl biding her time.
“This one is alder,” Glen was saying when Bea reached them. He took her hand, kissed it gently, lingering until she pulled it back to her side. She saw him glance at her stomach and wince.
He had prepared hot water in the brutish wood bowl, but now it was the temperature of the air. She squatted next to them, lifted her tunic, spread her knees. She scooped water under her skirt and gently washed between her legs, her stretched, worn folds, her splattered thighs. She felt raw, but she could tell she had not torn.
Agnes assumed the same position, her slight and toady legs splayed, splashing imaginary water on herself, eyeing Bea carefully. She seemed intent on not looking at where the baby had been.
Agnes was in some kind of mimicry stage. Bea saw it in animals. She’d seen it in other children. But in Agnes something about it disarmed her. She’d understood Agnes up until recently. Around the time the leaves last turned color, Agnes had become strange to her. She didn’t know if this fissure was just something parents went through with their children, or mothers went through with daughters, or if it was just some special hardship she and Agnes would have to endure. Out here, it was hard for Bea to dismiss things as simply normal because every aspect of their lives here was anything but normal. Was Agnes behaving normally for her age, or was it possible she believed she was a wolf?
Agnes had just turned eight but didn’t know it. They no longer marked birthdays because they no longer marked days. But Bea had taken notice of certain blooms when they’d first arrived. Then, Agnes had just turned five years old. It was April on the calendar. Bea had noted a field of violets during their first several days of walking. When she saw violets again, it seemed likely a year had passed—they’d felt the heat of summer, they’d seen leaves turn color, and they’d shivered in the snowy mountains. The snow had gone. She’d seen violets four times. Four birthdays. She knew Agnes’s eighth birthday had happened sometime since the last full moon, when she had seen violets in a patch of grass near their last camp. When they’d first arrived, Agnes had been so gravely ill, Bea hadn’t been sure she would see violets again with her daughter. But there they were, Agnes bounding through them.
Bea crept toward the back of the shallow cave. From behind a boulder, in a divot she’d hollowed out on their first time making camp here, she pulled a throw pillow and a design and architecture magazine that had featured one of her decorating remodels. It was a national magazine and the spread had been a turning point in her career, though not long after it published, she left for the Wilderness. These were her secret treasures she’d smuggled in from the City, and rather than carry them place to place, facing scorn from the others and damage from the elements, she hid them, blatantly disregarding the rules laid out in the Manual. When they passed through the Valley, which they had a few times each year, she dug out her treasures so she could feel a little more like herself.
She sat next to Glen and hugged her pillow. Then she thumbed through the pages of her spread, remembering the choices she’d made and why. Remembering what it felt like to have a home.
“If the Rangers find those, we’ll get in trouble,” Glen said, as he always said when she dug out her treasures, always so concerned with the rules.
She scowled. “What are they going to do? Kick us out for a pillow?”
“Maybe.” Glen shrugged.
“Relax,” she said. “They’ll never find them. And I need them. I need to remember what pillows are like.”
“Aren’t I a good enough pillow?” He said this so sweetly.
Bea looked at him. He was all bones. They both were. Even her belly, which had barely jutted with the baby, seemed to have immediately sunken. When she looked up at him, he was offering a small broken smile. She nodded. He nodded back. Then he staged a long, loud, languid yawn, eyeing Agnes. Agnes’s yawn followed with a big, fisted stretch.
“Big day tomorrow,” he said. “We start our trip to Middle Post. And we get to cross your favorite river on the way.”
“Can we swim?” Agnes asked.
“We’ve got to get in it to cross it, so you bet.”
“When?”
“Probably be there in a few days.”
“How much is a few?”
Glen shrugged. “Five? Ten? Several?”
Agnes huffed. “That’s not an answer!”
Glen poked her and laughed. “We’ll get there when we get there.” Agnes’s scowl was just like Bea’s scowl.
“Is everything packed?” Bea asked.
“Mostly. You don’t have to worry.”
Bea gave the pillow in her lap a tight squeeze. It was moist and smelled bitter, but she didn’t care. She buried her face in it, imagining she could transfer love to her small baby. She sighed and looked up.
Agnes was watching her, hugging the air, pretending to have her own pillow, or perhaps her own baby, and smiling the same sad smile Bea had no doubt just displayed.
The bustling and hoot-filled evening quieted as they passed through it.
At camp, a few of the other Community members were still at the fire, but most were breathing lightly in the circle where everyone slept. Bea and Glen eased down under the elk pelt they used as bedding. Agnes arranged herself, as she always did, at their feet. Her hand curled around Bea’s ankle like a vine.
“Maybe there will be some good packages at Post,” Glen murmured. “Maybe some good chocolate or something like that.”
Bea hmmed, but really she couldn’t eat things like that anymore without becoming ill, her body overwhelmed by what it used to crave in their old life.
Instead of chocolate, she wished instead Glen would me
ntion the child she’d just buried. Or she thought she wished for that. What would she say? What could she say that he didn’t already know? And did she really want to talk about it? No, she didn’t. And he knew that too.
She looked at Glen, and in the firelight saw a look of hope play on his face. He knew chocolate couldn’t soothe such bewilderment, but maybe the suggestion could do what the chocolate was supposed to. She fit herself into his arms. “Yes, some chocolate would be nice,” she lied.
All around them, Bea heard the sounds of the wild world bedding down. Ground owls cooed, and something else screeched; shadows of night fliers skimmed between the sky and the stars. As the campfire hissed itself to sleep, she heard the last of the Community walking cautious and blind from the fire to the beds and nestling down. Someone said, “Good night, everyone.”
Against her ankle, Bea could feel Agnes’s blood pulsing through her hot clutching hand. She breathed in and out to its rhythm, and it focused her. I have a daughter, she thought, and no time for brooding. She was needed here, and now, by someone. She vowed to move on quickly. She wanted to. She had to. It was how they lived now.
• • •
River 9 moved fast and swelled against its banks, and to the Community it looked like a wholly different river from the one they were familiar with. So different that they had consulted the map again, trying to match the symbols with what was now there and what their memory insisted ought to be there. They had crossed the river many times since they first arrived in the Wilderness State. From their encounters with it elsewhere, they had even considered it a lazy river, the way it turned tightly back and forth through rocks and dirt from the foothills down across the sagebrush plain. They had a usual crossing spot that they considered safe, or as safe as a river crossing could be. But it looked as though a storm had altered the bank and submerged the patch of island where they used to regroup before attempting the far bank. It was a very helpful little island. But it was gone now and they could no longer be sure where that fording spot was. Perhaps the same storm that had kept them on the other side of the mountains since last summer had also remade this river.