by Diane Cook
He stood gazing down, toed something, knelt to inspect. Then stayed squat, running his hands over bushes, over the dirt, looking out at the view Bea had chosen for Madeline. She hadn’t thought the spot was visible from the cave. She wondered if he was in the wrong place, hadn’t gone far enough. Or, she thought, perhaps she herself had not gone far enough to be out of view. Maybe Glen had watched her bury their daughter, while she thought that it had been a private act.
Bea looked back toward camp, searching for Agnes. Her little survivor. Her strange, vibrant daughter. She was lunging at Carl with a stick. He groaned, clutched his stomach, pretending to be stabbed. With her last lunge, he fell to his knees.
“I’m dying,” he cried, overacting, his voice a ghost’s moan, his hands raising, swaying.
Agnes tilted her head at this eager, jolly, dying man. She became still before yelling, “Then die!” She spit on the ground in front of him.
Carl roared, fell over, and died.
Agnes giggled with delight as she pantomimed slicing his abdomen open and pulling out his entrails.
Bea’s eyes darted back to the horizon, looking for Glen, but she couldn’t find him. He didn’t have anything hidden, she was sure.
Bea noticed she was anxiously digging fingernails into the dirt, and now the tips were raw, slippery with fine dust. She sucked them clean and then spit brown. Before she knew it, they were right back scraping the dirt.
The Community had been on long walks before, walks they thought would never be matched. One walk in their first year had prompted someone to leave. But even though they walked almost every day, day after day, they’d never strayed into other quadrants. They’d only visited three Posts, the three that lined the map’s eastern border.
They were given their first map just after Orientation had ended, when they were packing up for their official entry into the Wilderness. Ranger Corey had driven up and tossed it from his truck window. It was a strange document that seemed to lack any sense of scale. It was covered in symbols that made it look like a child had dreamed it up.
“What are these black circles?” they’d asked him.
“Places not to go,” Ranger Corey had said with a smirk. His affect was steely and amused, but his face was young and inexperienced.
They pointed to a flat-topped mountain and an orange flag, messy and colored out of the lines. It was a Post. “How far is this?” they asked.
Ranger Corey smiled. “Dunno, haven’t figured that out yet.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a silver disk the size of his palm. “Who’s the leader here?”
“Well, we’re not going to have a leader,” Glen had said proudly.
Ranger Corey’s eyes rolled skyward. Then he surveyed their faces. “You,” he said, holding the disk out to Carl.
Carl took it and stood taller, alert, happy to be identified as a leader. “What do I get to do with this?” Carl asked, turning it around in his hand. He pressed a button along the side and it clicked. He pushed again. Click. Push. Click.
“Tell us how many paces from here to Post,” Ranger Corey said. “One click per step.”
Carl’s face instantly raged. “Are you fucking serious?”
Ranger Corey acted surprised, but he wasn’t. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’m fucking serious. Do you have a problem with that? Because you could also tell me how many paces to the nearest exit.”
Carl squeezed the clicker, trying to crush it, and lunged at the Ranger. But Ranger Corey ducked his head back into his truck and rolled the window up till it was open just a crack. “A click a step,” he cried, revving the engine and peeling away.
No doubt the Rangers had far better ways to determine distances. This was busywork, a way to turn a nice walk into a slog. To make their lives slightly less free than the Ranger assumed they wanted.
They picked a direction and walked, and within days found themselves in vast grasslands full of antelope, sitting with their legs daintily tucked beneath them or wrapped back. Some places the grass got so deep Bea could only see their ears pricked up and pivoting above the undulating expanse. There were a few hawks in trees, not riding the nice breeze on what was an unusually warm and sunny day. A few energized antelope rose up to run in frantic circles, as though chased by regret. The Community just kept walking. They were new enough then that they hadn’t understood: These were warnings. Something was about to happen. Had they turned around they would have seen the grasses flatten and reach forward, as though each blade was trying to run for its life. Once they were exposed in the middle of the parched plain, the hail and wind hit them suddenly, as though the weather had been straining behind a door that had just been opened.
They hunkered in place, flung their packs over their heads and clung to one another and to the ground, mimicking the flattened grass. Spiderwebs glistened in front of their noses, lightly wafting as though in a gentle breeze because these human bodies blocked the worst of the wind.
Around them they heard the pathetic whines of the antelope signaling to one another above the roar, until they were drowned out by the storm. And they heard the crack and crash of some reedy cottonwoods nearby splitting.
The hail was brief, but the wind lingered. The sun had begun its descent. They knew the worst was over when the hawks took flight again, whipping across the sky, their flat wings straining in the gusts. It was a game. They were showing off for a future mate or daring a rival. They flew shakily against the strong wind, then caught it and zipped away. Then they’d stop and hover as though painted there, while on the ground, Bea could barely stand up against the wind.
It was their first big storm. Spooked, they stayed put for so long a Ranger drone eventually arrived to coax them out. They trudged, disoriented and bleary-eyed, scared of putting one foot in front of the other. At their destination, Carl stomped on the clicker in front of the desk Ranger, shattering it, but not before reporting the steps, which he had begrudgingly collected.
This had happened in the first year, when many of them still had shoes, sleeping bags, when to some it still felt like one of those camping trips they’d heard grandparents talk about, something they would soon return home from, something they could shower off. It was their first storm but also their first long walk in the Wilderness. They talked about it in epic terms around the fire for seasons afterward. It was their origin story, how they’d finally come to be a part of this land. It had felt like they’d accomplished something impossible. Like they had discovered a new world. Bea remembered looking at her family, at her blisters, the toenail she’d lost, and feeling proud. In total, the journey had taken almost eight weeks. Some of them still had watches that told the time and date. Back then they felt awed that they could head in one direction for that long and not run into a dead end. They didn’t understand yet just how much land there was to roam.
Now, hunched in the cave, Bea pictured the map in her head. This walk would be much, much longer than that walk. There were three lines of upside-down Ws to cross. Three mountain ranges. A feeling of dread turned her toes and fingers prickly cold. She scratched at the back of her neck, trying to dispel the anxiety.
She saw that most of the Community had come back together. They mingled among the yellow tape. They would want to leave soon. She heard a foot slide against loose rock, and then she heard a grunt and saw the top of Glen’s head appear below her, then his face, half smiling, and then his hands and arms scrambling the rocks to reach her.
“Where have you been, stranger?” she asked even though she knew.
“Had a look around, saying goodbye to this place. In case we don’t come back.”
She smiled. “You know, we can always just head back to Middle Post.”
“We can?” Glen sank beside her, slightly perplexed, thinking she was serious.
“Of course! Ranger Bob has a guest room. He invited us to stay there whenever.”
“He did?” He scratched his head.
“No.” Bea sighed. She was pretending. It was one of th
e ways she got through a day under the relentless sky. “Not really,” she said. She expected that would end her game—Glen shooting her a quizzical look—but surprisingly, he laughed.
“Oh, okay, sure, I get it,” he said. “Hey, Ranger Bob! Mrs. Ranger Bob!”
Bea sat up straight. “Hey, do you think we could use your shower?”
“We’d need some towels. Oh, and soap. Oh, and I’d love a shave. Hey, Bob—can I call you Bob?—have you got an extra razor?”
“Hey there, Mrs. Bob, what’s good on the Screen?”
“Oooh, are those pretzels?”
They were giggling, their shoulders shaking together. Glen never fantasized about, or even seemed to miss, the coziness of their old life, of any kind of civilization. She was grateful not to have to be alone with the sour, lonely ache she now felt for it all.
“You know, I’ve been thinking,” she said, “maybe we should have gone to the Private Lands instead.” She was trying to keep the joke going, but her voice fell and she could not laugh at the suggestion like she’d meant to. It was a good joke because the Private Lands were a make-believe place as far as Bea was concerned. A fantastical place that people had talked about for as long as she could remember. A place where the living was better, easy and nice, as it had supposedly been in the past. A secret place for the wealthy and powerful, where they could have their own land and do as they wished. The Private Lands were the opposite of the City and had all the freedoms the City could no longer offer, and you either believed in it or you didn’t. It had always seemed to Bea that the number of people who believed was proportional to how bad the City was becoming. One of her aunts believed now, and still sometimes mailed her newspaper clippings about its existence, secret maps of where it could be found. Her mother had always told Bea to toss such things. “You cannot just believe what someone tells you,” her mother said. “Not without a good reason.” Her aunt’s husband had convinced her to believe and now she was dour and anxious. Before that she’d been sweet and fun. Very close with Bea’s mother. “Oh, she was a laugh before,” her mother would sigh.
Glen hooked his arm around her neck and pulled her close. “Now, now,” he murmured. “This will be fun.”
She knew that a big part of Glen believed this. But no part of Bea did. She pictured the map in her head again and saw all that unknown land, that beige parchment, all that nothing. They would be changed on the other side of it, that much she knew. Not knowing how was only one of the things that scared her.
Part II
In the Beginning
In the beginning, there were twenty. Officially, these twenty were in the Wilderness State as part of an experiment to see how people interacted with nature, because, with all land now being used for resources—oil, gas, minerals, water, wood, food—or storage—trash, servers, toxic waste—such interactions had become lost to history.
But most of the twenty didn’t know much about science, and many of them didn’t even care about nature. These twenty had the same reasons people have always had for turning their backs on everything they’d known and venturing to an unfamiliar place. They went to the Wilderness State because there was no other place they could go.
They had wanted to flee the City, where the air was poison to children, the streets were crowded, filthy, where rows of high-rises sprawled to the horizon and beyond. And because all land that hadn’t been subsumed by the City was now being used to support the City, it seemed everyone now lived in the City. Whether they wanted to or not. So while a couple of those twenty had gone to the Wilderness for adventure, and a couple for knowledge, most fled there because they believed in some way their lives depended on it.
In the beginning, they had shoes, and army-issue sleeping bags, tents, lightweight titanium cookware, ergonomic backpacks, tarps, ropes, rifles, bullets, headlamps, salt, eggs, flour, and more. They walked into the Wilderness State, made camp, and on their first morning made pancakes. They sprinkled sugar on them. They flavored their early stews with bacon. None of that stuff lasted long, though. That first day felt like a vacation in a wondrous new place. That feeling didn’t last long either.
In the beginning, their skin coloring matched that of wood pulp, riverbed sand, wet tree roots, the rich underside of mosses. Their eyes were brown. Their hair was dark. They had all ten fingers and toes. Their skin was unscarred. The dangers of the City had never been from scrapes and cuts.
In the beginning, they were written about and reported on back in the City. A group of people who had forsaken civilization to live in the wild? Why would anyone do that? Op-eds wondered what would happen to them. Mainstream journalists wondered what they were running from. Alternative publications wondered if they knew something everyone else didn’t. Regular people sent them care packages of homemade cookies, coffee, hot dogs, generally inedible by the time they opened them. Batteries, toothbrushes, pens. Useless items for people attempting to live primitively. Someone sent them a forty-pound cast-iron pot. It was a family heirloom. It had been in his closet for years, he wrote on a card. He couldn’t bear to throw it out. He hoped they would have use for it. The Ranger took a picture of them pretending to struggle to lift it. They were smiling or making pained faces. They sent the picture as a thank-you of sorts. But also as a way to tell the sender what a ridiculous gift it was for people who walk every day and carry what they own. With little discussion they voted to leave it behind. It was an obvious decision. But that night they cooked in it. And they’d been carrying the Cast Iron ever since.
In the beginning, they acquiesced to finger pricks, cheek swabs, urine samples, blood pressure readings, filled out questionnaires each time they went to Post, to see how they were impacting nature and how nature was impacting them. Their days were data to someone, though they never believed the data could be all that important.
In the beginning, they followed all the rules in the Manual, the written rule of the Wilderness State, for fear they’d be sent home. They never camped in the same place twice. They picked up all their trash, and even trash they couldn’t imagine being theirs. They buried their bones. They measured out their pit toilets to the right depth, the right length from water. They restored their fire rings to look like virgin land. Where they walked, one would hardly know twenty people had passed through. They left no trace. They drank bad water because they couldn’t always find good water, and they paid the price for that.
But that was all in the beginning.
Over time, the guns and tents and sleeping bags were wrecked. So they learned to tan skins, sew with sinew, hunt with handmade bows, sleep comfortably on the ground and in the open. The salt was the thing that lasted the longest. And after it was gone they discovered that real food tastes like dirt, water, and exertion.
Over time, they became sunbaked, darkening the way anything darkens when it soaks up rain. Their dark hair bronzed. Their eyes were still brown, but they were dry, crusty, and sunburnt too.
Over time, they learned when to hide by listening to birds. They learned to be cautious by watching deer. They thought they learned to be bold by watching a wolf pack take down a healthy moose. But then they learned how to see the almost imperceptible limp that a healthy-seeming moose was hiding. They learned to know seasons not by their watches, broken in the first few months, or by the calendar they burned early when a cold snap threatened fingers, but by what hatched, what was small and how long it took to get bigger. They learned to tell age not by size, but by the color and sheen of an animal’s coat. They learned to head for the foothills when they heard the elk’s mating bugle. And when they saw a female looking as wide as it did long, even if the snow was still high, they knew it was spring and time to trudge back to the plains. They knew the different flavors of leaves depending on the season; knew the secret sweetness of the red-tipped grasses in the fall, and the bitterness of last season’s grass, buried in winter snow but somehow still green, like how poisonous mushrooms have alluring colors. Those colors only beckon the foolish. Colors are
warnings. They learned that too. They learned what to eat by watching the animals eat.
Over time, they all came to know of some hair elastic, fork tine, frayed rope, or lonesome earring that had fallen and not been recovered in a micro trash sweep. They dug pit toilets in the wrong places and not deep enough. They camped in the same places again and again because those places felt like home. And they discovered spigots that rose out of wells or aquifers below. Spigots the Rangers might have installed to fight fires. Spigots they were not supposed to use. They took their water from these whenever they could because it was clean and they didn’t have to worry like they had worried in the beginning.
Even the study seemed to stall over time. They began to miss their seasonal Post visits because of storms. And when they would finally arrive, the equipment wasn’t working. Or the nurse wasn’t there. The questionnaires hadn’t been updated. The scientists were unreachable. Maybe they were simply studying some other aspect that didn’t require blood work, they hoped. Or maybe the scientists had ended the study and forgotten to tell anyone. What would happen to them if it had? Would they have to leave? But always at the peak of their anxiety, a nurse would appear at Post with gloves and needles, and the questionnaires would be too invasive and personal again, and everything would return to normal. Or as normal as was possible.
Over time, the media and the people in the City turned on them. After the news of the first death (Tim to hypothermia) finally reached the City, the op-eds called them selfish, heathens, even murderers, and hoped they would perish. The Rangers told them, and were not pleased with the optics. They wanted the Community to do damage control. So Juan wrote a letter to the editor to explain what their life was like and what they had learned about death. In it he told a story about how one night, early in their first year, they’d stumbled upon a runty deer curled up tight under a cluster of trees, its slender head resting on its gleaming black hooves. By morning it was gone. Three different nights they encountered it. It never ran. It would only look up at them and then rest its head again. They assumed its mother had placed it there to wait for her to return, as deer do. But on the fourth night they saw it coming out of the grasses, wobbling on unsure legs, toward the trees. Alone.