by Diane Cook
A large herd of deer spent its evenings nearby in the grasses. And though this small, orphaned deer stayed close to them, it never joined them. It did not belong with the herd for reasons only they knew. But still, it stayed close, its instinct for preservation at odds with the one for social order.
That fourth night, the temperatures dipped, and in the morning the Community woke to the grasses sparkling with frost. Some rushed to the tree and were relieved to see the small deer was gone. But then they saw it in the first tall grasses beyond the tree. It lay frozen, its neck elongated as though straining to breathe, its front legs bent as though it had knelt first in exhaustion before it collapsed. Blood pooled in its graceful ear. The other deer, some just a few yards away from the dead fawn, licked the frost off the grass tips dumbly. The Community were enraged and sickened. They threw stones at the deer. “Why didn’t you take care of this one?” some yelled. “It was a deer too.”
It wasn’t until they lost Tim to that bitter cold night that they understood. Of course, they were different from deer. But not as different as they had always imagined. That night, they knew he was suffering, but everyone was suffering. And in that moment something innate kicked in. It surprised them how easy it was to misunderstand a cry for help. Even to ignore one.
When the letter was published, people in the City were disgusted. And soon after, all the op-eds outlined the terrible deaths they wished upon the Community in the Wilderness State—burned to death in a forest fire, mauled by a cougar, wasted away from uncontrollable diarrhea. The Rangers told them about all these, gleefully it seemed. And actually, that is how a few of them died. Eventually, their numbers would dwindle to eleven. It’s not that those losses weren’t difficult. It’s just that loss was now a part of their daily life, as so many new things were.
That’s why it heartened them to see an elder animal, say, an elk, with gray in its muzzle and a slight limp, a limp that would be more pronounced if it hadn’t learned to hide it. It had survived. A good mother and herd had protected it when it was vulnerable. Hardships had been weathered by the herd. Fires flying across the plain. Floods and rock slides. Disease that jumped from elk to elk. Droughts or population explosions that meant a fight for all necessary food. Pleasures had been discovered. Bucking and kicking down a hill in its youth with other calves. The otherworldly buoyancy of its first swim. The first snows on its hooves would have been a miraculous new feeling. Only later would it have noticed the anxiety of the herd snuffling their noses beneath the soft powder, looking for food.
If the elk was male, battles had taken place. How many harems had he defended? How many bloody lashes became scars on its formidable body? If it was female, calves had been reared. Had she watched them amble off happy and healthy? Or did she have to witness the weakest succumb to a wolf pack, mewing for her plaintively? If she was the dominant, the matriarch, did she ever worry her decisions were wrong? Or feel ill-equipped to lead the herd?
And yet, each night, that animal bedded down beneath whispering trees, on dead leaves, or in grasses under the moon and stars, listening to the chatter of the owls, the cautious step of the night animals, a whole new world relatively unknown to it except in these still moments, no comfort but the comfort of the group and of having lived through one more day. No guarantees for tomorrow.
It wasn’t that different for the Community. They were living the same wild life. Of course, they could always outwit the animals. Well, almost always. The drive for survival is strong. Even the most brute creature can be clever if it means another morning under the cool light of the sun in the Wilderness State, which was the last wilderness.
Of course, now it’s gone. But let’s not talk about that yet.
Part III
The Big Walk
They came to call it the Big Walk because they walked for the duration of a whole season and a portion of the next before they even reached foothills for the very first of the three mountain ranges they were meant to cross.
On the Big Walk they passed through entirely new landscapes. Tumbled into grasslands that smelled of nutmeg after a rain. Bugling elk crowded valleys with sounds of a lost world. The animal equivalent of a haunting, lonesome whistle from the Refineries outside the City. They passed into regions of low, strange mountains, a mix of jagged licking peaks and mellow, rolling red-capped hills. From far away, some hills stood like tiered wedding cakes. Up close they were only once-solid things crumbling to pieces. Between them lay swaths of grass dotted with juniper and pinyon.
The stars at night vibrated so closely together, their cloud of light covered the whole of the sky. So much more comforting than the narrow embrace of the Milky Way.
They crossed new sage seas where all it did was rain. They didn’t know if it was the season or the climate. The wet sage smelled like its best self. Better even than its sunbaked self. It smelled clean and soapy and left the air sticky. The deer they met ran and ran and ran and ran, then stopped and looked. And after seeing them still, the deer ran and ran and ran some more. The horizon was unreachable.
They found the true desert, or it seemed to them. The soft alkali sands where they lost their tracks as the sun moved overhead, changing the texture of the land with its light. The loamy dry lakebeds, playas, smelled of mushrooms, of dark body crevices. The hot horizon floated in front of their eyes like a river of gold.
They walked for days through knee-high plants and by alkali lakes, dried and white and glazed and crackled. Up long, low slopes, then down, and the sight was always the same: another expanse of tossed brown and green sagebrush, tufted white grass, each plant distinct and curling into itself and only itself. They could walk between each bush without touching one. It was a lonely landscape.
Sometimes a tree stood stunted but conspicuous, and Bea thought, Poor thing.
The slopes they walked upon looked as though a giant had lifted the front edge of earth. Plates of land sloped up and dropped off at the end. At the zenith edge of each of them, the walkers scrambled down the escarpment to another valley floor that seemed flat as a sheet of paper. Not until their calves strained would they realize they were climbing again.
Sometimes the escarpment was high and they might climb, slide, or stumble down stories of rough land; sometimes it was just a few hundred feet, but it seemed in that drop they must be losing whatever height they’d just gained. A zero-sum landscape. But each night the air became more chilled in that high-elevation way, and so they knew that, slowly, they were rising into new mountains.
They walked mostly in silence, made uneasy by the uncertainty of where they were heading and the strangeness of the land leading them there. They saw less and less vegetation with each slope they put behind them, and Bea, rather than feeling as though the landscape was changing, felt more that it was simply disappearing from under her, and that soon she’d be walking on nothing, near nothing. The sage and grasses thinned out and the sand became loose, shifting in the wind. From the top of each rise, the whole valley floor below would seem to move as though full of ghost snakes slithering between the plants. In the immensity of the land, their faulty eyes saw movement rather than the stillness that was there. At night, when they camped, they slept poorly under the light-pricked, energetic sky.
* * *
At the end of one long day of a gradual climb, they reached the top and looked out over the next valley. Far off to the right they saw a trail of dust hanging in the air. At the head of the cloud were horses, maybe a dozen or so, running fast and together over the valley floor.
“Must be water,” said Glen.
“Let’s wait here and see if they stop,” said Carl. “We always need water, but we don’t need to walk seven days in the wrong direction for it.”
They sat. Some dangled their feet over cliff edges; others lay in between the sage. Hawk cries came from above, whining, Go away, go away. Carl and Glen stood, hands shielding their eyes, watching the horses’ progress.
Just before the edge of where they could s
ee, the dust stopped and the cloud settled. Carl lifted the scope to his eye and looked through the cracked lens. “It’s green,” he said. He pointed to a spot on the horizon where the shadows seemed slightly darker than the rest of the land. “That’s not too far,” he said, passing the scope to Glen.
Once down in the valley they followed the animals’ trail and a day later found a compact marsh circling a trickling spring. Bea had wanted desperately to hear the horses whinny or watch them be rambunctious with one another, or even have them look upon her with that disdainful gaze specific to horses, but the horses were gone now. Where they had stood, the tender stunted grasses were bent or kicked up. The ground held onto the impression of their wild hooves.
“Only take from the mouth of the spring,” Val warned. “Those dumb horses shit all over the place.” She scowled.
Bea only saw the droppings of one horse, on dry land well away from water. She watched Val angrily kicking aside clods of dirt as though they were turds.
She took Agnes by the hand and led her to the other side of the small but striving marsh. They stepped over the thin rivulets that were trying to get somewhere new but drying before they arrived. A frog jumped out of their way, and they both laughed in surprise.
“A frog,” Bea called to the others, but no one heard. It splashed forward, croaking for the companionship of another, then became lost in the marsh that was verdant on its edges and blue with mirrored sky at its core.
“Where did it come from?” asked Agnes.
Bea looked out across the bunchgrasses and sagebrush, unruly and unwelcoming.
“I think it must have always been here,” she said.
The Community waded through ankle-deep mud, browning the water in their wake, and passed forward personal bottles, skins, and a few large bladders and jugs they carried for the Community to fill at the mouth of the spring. They drank, refilled, and then harvested watercress growing wild around the edge. The sudden moisture made them feel waterlogged and dreamy, and soon they bedded down just a few hundred yards away.
In the night, Bea heard a parade of animals. The scamper of rodents. The light pad of coyote paw and the soft grind of antelope hoof against dirt. Bea was sure some antelope had stepped into their camp and then reeled back in surprise. She heard the soft push of water from snouts and tongues reaching in. She sat up and could see shapes and the faint glow of eyes around the water that shimmered in the scattered light the night brought. A crescent moon was rising, and it cast a road of light across the floor of the plain. A fire-bright sliver. It seemed impossible to illuminate so much. But she could see animals moving toward the water, could even see some of the markings on their coats.
Then she heard a taut snap behind her, a whiz next to her ear, and a second later the antelopes stampeded away from her, returning to the shadows. She turned and saw Carl, sitting up, lowering his hunting bow.
He turned to Bea and said, thick-tongued and sleepy, “Am I dreaming?”
“You almost hit me,” she hissed, touching her ear and second-guessing if he had.
Carl rubbed his eyes and peered into the dark. “Did I get one?”
“Of course not,” she snapped.
“Oh, relax,” he said, shaking off his grogginess. “You’re fine.”
Bea felt Agnes stir at her feet. She was awake. Probably Agnes had been awake this whole time because it seemed like Agnes was always awake, attentive, watching. Bea nudged her hard with her foot. “Even animals sleep, you little spy,” she said under the covers. Agnes played dead. Bea lay down again and curled up, withdrawing from her daughter, from Glen, who’d slept through everything.
She heard Carl whisper, “I’m going to see if I got one.”
She heard his tread toward the water. She heard him return, whistling.
He rustled back into his bed. “Hey, Bea,” he hissed. “I didn’t get one.” When she didn’t answer, he hissed again, “Did you hear me—”
“Shut up.”
He chuckled, pleased to have irritated her.
At her feet, Agnes squirmed to a place where some part of her was again touching her mother.
Bea closed her eyes. She heard the hum of insects, alive now in the safety of the dark. She listened for the footsteps of more animals returning to the watering hole, but she heard none. Against her eyelids, the crescent moon shone. A shadow passed quickly over her eyes, and the insects got quiet, and she knew the shadow wasn’t some wayward cloud, but was from a night flier out hunting whose presence had been exposed by moonlight. She pictured the moon in some kind of pact with all the would-be prey on the plain, and all the prey of the plain offering thanks and small sacrifices to their guardian moon. Then she pictured the night flier, alone on the wing, cursing the moon and the light and the thankful creatures below, and vowing revenge on them all.
* * *
After days of walking into this increasingly barren landscape, they crested a slope near sunset. Beyond the valley below lay a playa, a vast dried-white lakebed, its ends reaching farther than they could see. And its far side was rimmed by a high ridge dusted with snow. The ridge was a series of bulbous mounds, cleanly rounded in the way Bea rarely saw in natural landscapes. In shade now, the mounds themselves were black as coal, and probably in daylight too. But the fine cover of snow took the severe edge from them, and as Bea looked, she thought they resembled old pictures she’d seen of whale backs arcing up just before diving into ocean depths.
“This must be where the Post is,” Glen said.
But they could see no building or structure.
“In the morning, we’ll catch the sun on the roof and we’ll know,” said Juan.
“Let’s get a fire going and eat, then sleep. Then we can wake up and be done with this awful trek,” Val said.
They swept up whatever blowdown they could, branches of sage broken off and dried, a strange orange lichen crusted on many of the smaller twigs, and mixed it with starter pieces they tried to carry with them. The fire smelled medicinal and smoked more than it flickered. They made acorn cakes and heated some smoked chunks of deer, which made the meat almost juicy.
As the last residue of sunlight vanished, Carl called everyone to the fire. He squatted and drew in the dirt with a stick. He said, “There might come a time when we have to split up.”
“Why would we need to do that?” Bea asked.
“I mean it as a what-if question. I think it’s good to think through all the possibilities,” Carl said, whipping the stick into the fire, but it flew through to the other side and hit Dr. Harold.
“Ow,” said Dr. Harold.
“Sorry,” said Carl. “Bea, do you have objections to that?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Good. We move as a group now, but we should have a buddy system like we had in the beginning.”
“Can’t we just have our buddies from the beginning?” Debra asked.
“Some of our buddies are dead,” said Juan, whose buddy was dead.
“I’m also worried that different people have taken on different roles and that we each don’t know how to take care of ourselves.”
“Well, we are a group,” said Glen. “So what’s the harm in thinking like a group?”
“Because we might not always be a group,” Carl said again. “And do we know how to take care of ourselves without the others? For example, Debra and Dr. Harold usually identify the poisonous stuff, plants, mushrooms, bugs, et cetera.”
Dr. Harold said, “Carl, I really don’t think—”
“What if you’re on your own and starving? What if there’s only this one plant you’ve never seen before? What if you come upon a water source—do you know how to tell if it’s clean?”
No one answered. Not because they didn’t know but because they didn’t like Carl’s tone. It was a scolding tone, and they were exhausted and wanted to sleep.
“How do you check the potability of a water source?” Val joined in, haughtily and impatiently, trying to mask that she herself pr
obably had no idea.
“Ask the animals,” said Agnes.
Some of the adults chuckled.
Debra crowed, “So cute.”
Agnes frowned. “Ask the animals,” she repeated, lowering her voice as if to create a sense of seriousness. “Ask, Where do you drink from? And then go to where they drink. I want to try a food, I give it to them first. They eat it, I eat it. They don’t eat it, I don’t eat it. Ask, Where are you going? And they’ll tell by going there.”
“It’s a good start,” Carl said to Agnes. “But it’s just a general rule, not a way to live.” Bea saw Agnes scowl at the correction.
Carl continued. “We have different needs and different tools from animals. We have fire, so we can eat more. We have thumbs, so we can hunt better. We have different microbes in our guts, so we can drink from more rivers.”
“Actually,” Glen said, “we can drink from fewer rivers because of our microbes.”
“Well, I can drink from more rivers,” Carl snapped, “so I don’t know what’s wrong with your microbes.” Under the flickering firelight he appeared to be snarling.
Agnes sniffled as though she was crying, and Bea pulled her up and away from the circle. Glen shrugged at her as they went past.
They sat on their bed of skins.
“Are you upset?” Bea asked her daughter.
“No,” Agnes said. “I had smoke in my nose.”
That seemed as likely, if not more likely, than emotional tears, Bea thought. She found her brush in her pouch and ran it through Agnes’s hair. “You’ve gotten very tangled. We need to do this more often.”
“I don’t like it.”
“You’d like it if we did it more often. Most girls like getting their hair brushed.” Agnes’s hair was frilly and bronze. Fern hair.