The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

  They lowered themselves and then the children down a small ledge to the almost nonexistent bank where greens grew, a color found almost exclusively next to rivers. The grasses, mosses, the striving trees, so thin they could be snapped between two fingers, their new spring leaves quivers of creamy green. They handed down their bedding rolls, the pouches of smoked meat, jerky, pemmican, the harvested pine nuts, precious acorns, wild rice, einkorn, a handful of wild onions, the disassembled smoking tent, their personal satchels, the hunting bows and arrows, the bag of hollowed wooden meal bowls and the chips of wood and stone they used as utensils, the precious box of precious knives, the Book Bag, the Cast Iron, the Manual, and the bags of their garbage they carried with them to be weighed and disposed of by the Rangers at Post.

  In the water, a loose log, stripped naked of its bark and limbs, bobbed and rolled past even though the nearby landscape was treeless. The log must have traveled from the foothills, the unusual torrent of water ushering it through. On a lazier river, or even a lazier part of this river, a log might have gathered farther upstream in an eddy or been nudged onto a bank. Here, it rolled in the rapids. Rapids they’d never even noticed in previous crossings, when the water was low and any whitewater was just a skimming thin hat the river rocks wore. They watched another log vault head over tail, after which Caroline took her first tentative step out into the water.

  Caroline was their river-crossing scout. She was the most sure-footed. Had the lowest center of gravity. Her toes could grip like fingers. Beautiful toes wasted for years crammed into shoes in the City. She had learned the most about how water behaved. She was good at making sense of things that seemed erratic.

  “Okay,” Caroline yelled over the rumble, her feet firm in the first foot of water, testing its pull, deciding whether to continue. “Rope.”

  Carl and Juan handed her one end of the rope, which she secured around herself and they looped once around each of their waists, Carl behind Juan, and then held the rope in front of them. The children and the other adults stood as far back as they could.

  They had already tried to ford two other spots, but Caroline, either feet out from the bank or waist deep in water, returned to the shore each time. “It’s too deep,” or “It’s too fast,” or “See that lip? There’s a pock somewhere under the water that will take us down.”

  On this, the third spot, Caroline waded out halfway. From the bank, things looked promising. She paused, her head cocked slightly, like a coyote listening for the calls of the Wilderness—friend or foe, friend or foe. Her hands hovered over the whitewater, and it broke around her body and came together again behind her. Caroline turned her head toward them, her shoulders following, a hand turned palm up, about to signal something. She opened her mouth to speak just as the tip of a log surfaced where she stood, and with a terrible thwack and splash, Caroline was gone.

  Then the river, like an awakened bear, yanked the rope and Juan went down too. He tried to dig his heels in. He bellowed as the rope wrung his waist. Carl tried to pull on his rope section, not to help Juan but to slacken the rope to avoid the excruciating thing that was happening to Juan.

  Bea stood back with the others, her hands crimped on Agnes’s shoulders. She thought about how, long ago, they always had someone stand by the rope holders with a knife to cut the rope in case something like this happened. But nothing like this ever happened, and Carl and Juan decided they were strong enough for a catastrophe like this. Besides, no one really wanted to be the one to cut the rope anyway. Still, at each river, they would have a lengthy discussion about whether to require a rope cutter or not. When they inevitably decided they needed one, no one would volunteer, so they would have to draw for it and the person who lost would shit themselves the whole time. And when nothing ever went wrong, they begrudged all that worry and work for nothing. So finally, they had decided, not that long ago, in fact, to stop mandating there be a rope cutter.

  Clearly that had been the wrong decision.

  In a move, Bea grabbed Carl’s personal knife from his belt, lunged, and cut the rope in front of Juan, releasing him to the bank, where he crumpled and howled in relief. Carl, cursing, catapulted back into the others, and then everyone was tumbled over and tangled in weeds. Caroline, presumably still on the rope and most certainly dead, rushed downriver.

  Carl clambered to his feet. “Why did you do that?” he screamed.

  “I had to,” Bea said, replacing his knife in the holder tied to his belt.

  “But I had it. I fucking had it.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  Carl sputtered, “But it was our best rope.”

  “We have others.”

  “Not like that one. It was our river rope!”

  “We can get another one.”

  “Where?” Carl cried. He grabbed his hair in theatrical frustration, looking around at the empty Wilderness. But the feeling was real. He seethed.

  Bea didn’t answer. Maybe she could talk a Ranger into giving them something as good, as long and thick. But she wasn’t going to promise that. She noted that while no one had sided with Carl, no one had defended her either. Everyone had busied themselves with some small task—inspecting their pouches, picking something out of another’s hair, eating an ant—until the moment passed. Except Agnes, who watched with unnerving neutrality.

  Bea helped Juan to his feet, and Dr. Harold hurried forward to put a salve on the rope cuts around Juan’s waist and hands. It wouldn’t do much. None of Dr. Harold’s salves did much.

  Debra and Val ran along the bank to see if Caroline resurfaced. She had, a few hundred feet downriver, her hair tangled in the branches of another log, her face submerged, her body limp. Her body and the log were snagged on something for a moment, and then were freed, speeding again down the river. There was no way to retrieve the rope. And not much to do for Caroline.

  They took a moment to regroup, drink water, pass a pouch of jerky. Debra said a nice thing about Caroline and how being their river scout had been essential to their survival here and that she would be missed. “She taught me so much about water,” Debra said, looking quite shook. She and Caroline had been close. Bea looked around at the faces of the group, working their feelings out. Personally, Bea thought Caroline had been aloof, though she kept that feeling to herself. She chewed on a knuckle impatiently while she waited for the ritualized silent moment to end.

  After all that, they argued about Caroline’s last intention. She’d turned and opened her mouth to tell them something about the crossing. But tell them what? Had her hand begun to signal a thumbs-up or thumbs-down before the log smacked her? What had her facial expression been before she’d grimaced in painful surprise? In the end they decided the spot was still the most promising place to cross, despite Caroline’s demise. Juan took over as the river scout and ventured in without a rope. Close to the middle, he turned and gave a thumbs-up. Single file they carefully shuffled out, children clinging to the backs of adults. It turned out to be quite a good spot to cross, and if it hadn’t been for that log, they all would have gotten to the opposite bank easily. Poor Caroline. She had bad luck, Bea decided.

  With the children across, the adults formed a chain over the river and passed the heavy and cumbersome items across, the Manual, the Cast Iron, the Book Bag, the garbage, the bedding, the disassembled smoker, the food pouches, the wooden bowls and slabs of utensils, then all the individual packs, one item after the other, bank to bank. And once they’d hoisted and tied and strapped back on all their gear, they started walking again. The sun dried them instantly. They spit out the silty earth kicked up by their feet. Their skin became dusted and slippery with it. Covering one nostril, they rocketed snot out their noses into the dust and trudged through the sagebrush plain that unfurled around them like a sea.

  * * *

  When their way became lit by moonlight they stopped for the night. A small fire was built, and they lay on th
e ground around it. No skins were unrolled, no pelts unbundled. The sleep wouldn’t be worth the effort. They would be moving with the dawn. When they wanted to move fast, this is how they went.

  On the horizon Bea saw the pinprick glow from an outdoor light that burned at Middle Post. They were close.

  Juan said, “Just a quick story or two,” and, yawning, began one of his favorites from the Book of Fables, which they used to carry in the Book Bag but which had been lost to a flash flood some time ago. All stories had been told so often now, they came from memory.

  The children were asleep in little mounds at the foot of the fire. Except for Agnes, who insisted that as the eldest child of the Community she ought to stay up with the adults and report on decisions made that might affect the youngest ones. There were never any such decisions made at night around the fire. She just liked staying up. Bea didn’t argue. She reveled in Agnes’s restlessness. She couldn’t forget when Agnes had been a frail, failing little girl too sick to hold her eyes open.

  Bea squatted next to Glen, who grunted up from his task.

  “How are those arrows coming along?” she asked, jostling his shoulder.

  “Arrowheads,” he mumbled. “Good.” He was distracted, trying so hard to make a good point. She peered over his shoulder. They would be useless. He’d overflaked them. Bea smiled encouragingly. Glen was a terrible hunter. He knew it. She knew it disappointed him. Carl was the true hunter of the Community and provided much of their meat. So Glen was trying to master making tools, wanting to be of use in a way he had always dreamed of being. Of course, Carl was also a master arrow flaker and they were rich in perfect arrowheads already. But she wasn’t going to point that out to him.

  Bea watched Glen’s brow furrowing in desperate concentration. Despite his shortcomings, he was having the time of his life here. All he read, as a boy, were tales of primitive life. The caveman stories of his youth were all he’d ever really been interested in. Now he was a professor, expert in how people evolved from the first upright steps to the first wheel. He knew the most basic nature of humanity, and he knew the how and why behind the onslaught of civilization. But when it came to living primitively, he was surprisingly hapless.

  They had met in the City. Bea had been hired to decorate the University apartment Glen moved into after his first marriage ended. It was shockingly large as apartments went, and she understood that he must be an important person there. As she showed him samples and talked about the placement of pieces, he told her the origin of every object she’d chosen for his home. It made her work feel important, like she was a steward of history, of usefulness. They married. He was fatherly toward Agnes, whose real father had been a worker on a weekend furlough from the vast Manufacturing Zone outside the City. Bea had liked the men on leave because they had good hands and they didn’t stick around, and she liked her life and her job as they were. And she loved Agnes fiercely, though motherhood felt like a heavy coat she was compelled to put on each day no matter the weather.

  Glen had been a nice change. She was ready for him at the time he came along. She had hoped he would change her life in surprising ways, but she never could have imagined just how much of it he could change.

  Glen was the one who knew about the study, putting people in the Wilderness State. When things worsened in the City and Agnes’s health cratered, like so many children’s had, Glen was the one who offered his help to the researchers in exchange for three spots—for him, Bea, and Agnes. Bea’s hunch had been right—Glen was important at the University, and the researchers agreed without hesitation.

  It still took almost a year of working and waiting to get the permission to place humans into what was essentially a refuge for wildlife, the last wilderness area left, to gather the funding needed, and to find other participants. They had wanted twenty skilled volunteers with knowledge of flora and fauna and biology and meteorology. A real doctor or nurse, not just an amateur herbalist. Even a chef would have been nice, but they eventually had to pad out the group with people who were simply willing to go. It sounded risky, people said. It was risky. It was uncomfortably unknown. It was an extreme idea and an even more extreme reality. More extreme than suicide, Bea remembered a mother from her building arguing. It had been a hard sell. Meanwhile, Agnes got sicker.

  During that time, when Bea cradled her sleeping daughter, she’d sometimes wonder what she would do if Glen’s plan didn’t work, or worked too late. She could think of no other options for how to save Agnes. The medicines weren’t strong enough anymore. Each cough was pink with blood. “What this child needs,” the doctor had said ruefully, “is different air.” Since there was no other air, she recommended palliative care, and Bea found herself wholly dependent on Glen and his stupid idea. Toward the end of the wait, right before they got permission—she hadn’t and wouldn’t ever tell anyone this—she had started to think ahead, to a life after Agnes. She’d begun to say goodbye. There was a terrible comfort in reaching that point. And then, with very little time to prepare, the study and the group of twenty were approved, and trying on army-issue gear, seeing doctors, providing urine samples, doing intake interviews, packing up their belongings, tying up loose ends, and then, without fanfare, leaving. Bea was stunned by the turnaround and the change, unsure whether this all was real, even as the first cold nights in the Wilderness descended on them and she found herself scrambling to protect Agnes in a new way.

  It had seemed like such a game, even on that first evening when the sun set on them before they had a fire. Even as their stomachs knotted from coarse food or, soon, not enough food. Even when their camp was first ransacked by a hungry bear. Then the first person perished, from hypothermia. Another after misidentifying a mushroom. And another from wounds sustained from a cougar. And then a climbing accident. It felt as though they’d escaped one monster by hiding in a closet, only to find another there among the hangers, claws unsheathed. They couldn’t possibly stay here, could they? It felt unreal. Some kind of terrible trick.

  At any moment she imagined Glen taking her by the wrist, turning her around, and marching her and Agnes back to the border fence, back to civilization. But that never happened. Eventually it dawned on Bea that the ground they trudged wearily upon day after day would be endless. And if they found an end, a border, a fence, a granite wall, she realized, they would just turn around. How could they ever return to the City? Agnes was like a colt, bounding, curious. And healthy for the first time in her short life. For the first time, Bea let herself believe Agnes would be long for this earth. And Bea was surviving when others had perished, others stronger than herself. It soothed her anxiety, stroked her ego. She might actually be good at this survival thing. Maybe this was the right decision. Maybe this will all be fine. Maybe we aren’t insane. It was her mantra. She thought it almost daily. She thought it now.

  Bea looked around the circle at the faces deranged by the dancing firelight. She thought there was a heaviness to the group since River 9. Since the rope. Since Caroline. No one would look at her. The jerky bag had been passed to her without comment, and taken from her too quickly. The heaviness seemed directed at her. Which she thought was absurd. People had certainly lost important things before and they weren’t shunned for it.

  There was the teacup they’d used during ceremonial moments for rituals they had made up early on for the different milestones of their new life.

  The teacup had belonged to Caroline, passed to her through a line of family members who were early settlers in the New World. It was a ridiculous thing to bring into the Wilderness, but it was fine and pretty with a chipped gold rim and a colorful coat of arms from the place those relatives had fled. It had its own carrying box of wood, lined with old crumbling velvet, where it sat snug until needed. Ridiculous, but they cherished it. In it, they might pour a tea of blossoms, or roots, or bone, depending on the ritual or the season, and they’d pass it around the fire. It felt lovely in their hands and though there were many things in the Wilderness that loo
ked delicate, really, nothing was. Hollow bird bones? Gossamer spiderwebs? Filigree-like lichen? They’re tough, hardy. The teacup, though, was truly a delicate thing, and it would make each of them delicate when it passed into their possession. And that feeling is a kind of gift when they had to otherwise be hard.

  It had been lost in the climbing accident. They were heading into the mountains for the winter because winter in the lowlands was too harsh and empty of food, while the caves and mounds of mountain snow made for good dwellings that in spring melted away any sign of them, which was like disappearing without a trace. Thomas was carrying the teacup in his pouch. As they climbed, he lost his footing and fell backwards off a ledge that everyone else had managed just fine. He tumbled down, and the bag’s contents scattered across the rocks below. When they saw the box fly and open against a rock, they had gasped, though no one had gasped when Thomas had begun falling, or as he continued to fall. No one was that close to him, except Caroline, his wife. He’d never taken to the group. He wasn’t a joiner, he’d explained pleasantly when they all first met.

  The teacup flew out into the air from its safe velvet bed, the gold rim glinting in the sun, and some of them who were close enough tried to reach out to catch it. Even Thomas reached for it mid-tumble rather than reaching for a handhold that might stop his fall.

  The cup came to rest in pieces, the porcelain dust settling like bone ash across the rock. Some gathered small shards and put them in a skin pouch as a new keepsake. But those shards cut them when they rummaged for anything, and eventually they were deposited discreetly across the landscape they walked, the shards small enough to disappear in the dirt.

  Of course, poor Thomas had continued to fall, and presumably he had died. A couple of people climbed down partway, but they couldn’t see him and he didn’t respond to their shouts. So the Community took a moment to say some nice things about him and console Caroline, and then they walked on. They didn’t perform many rituals anymore, in large part because the teacup was gone. It was true that rituals took time and effort, and the more time they spent in the Wilderness, the less they wanted to celebrate. At first, every river crossing had been notable, but now they barely wanted to mark the first of the year. Regardless, Bea knew that without the teacup there was simply no ceremonial feeling. They were just drinking tea. But still, no one spoke ill of Thomas afterward. If he’d survived, they wouldn’t have given him the silent treatment around the fire. No one blamed him for losing the cup, at least not out loud. Bea wished they’d remember that now.