The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

  Breakfast was made by Debra, and she made the best breakfasts. Agnes found a bowl in the bowl bag. The bowl she liked to use because of the knot in the wood where she could hook her finger through. No one else used that bowl because they knew she liked it. She brought the bowl to Debra, who scooped mush into it and then, putting her finger to her lips—Secret—sprinkled something over it.

  “Something special,” she said.

  There was nothing there. There never was. Debra always sprinkled nothing because there was nothing to sprinkle. Agnes knew that. But she also knew that if Debra didn’t do that, it would not taste as good, even though the only thing she added was air and maybe some dirt from her hands. Agnes couldn’t even imagine what there was to sprinkle, but Debra seemed to have an idea. Something from another time and place. Debra was oldest and had seen more ways of the world than any of them. She certainly had seen a sprinkle or two.

  “Mmm,” Agnes said as she took a bite. And Debra cackled as though she’d gotten away with something wicked.

  Agnes squatted next to Glen and put her head on his knee quickly in greeting.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he said, his face briefly rounding as he smiled, then going long again. His eyes took in the horizon.

  They would be leaving this place soon and she was glad. Soon the horizon Glen stared at would be new and he would not be looking for her mother. Glen didn’t have a replacement for her mother like she had.

  She wolfed her breakfast and licked her bowl and returned it to the bag. She sucked her spoon and put it in her sack. She rolled up their bed and tied it to Glen’s sling. She pulled her own blanket out and tied it to her sling. Her mother and Glen usually carried everything together, but she would have to help now. She was glad. She could finally show how strong she was. She felt a lightning bolt of happiness that her mother was gone. Glen appeared behind her, his arms useless by his sides.

  “I’ll do it,” she said, allowing him to just stand there. She brushed the ground, moved some stones around. Stood back a moment to take in the scene. She found a twig from a sage and tossed it into the middle of it all.

  “Perfect,” she said, clapping her hands together. The prairie dog popped its head out, offering an opinion before darting down again.

  Agnes bent her face to the hole. “It IS perfect,” she screamed.

  Glen took her by the shoulders. “Okay, he heard you,” Glen said, straightening her. She swung her sling across her torso. It was heavy, but she was determined not to show it. She watched Glen struggle under the weight of all their bedding, and made note to take on even more weight next time.

  They congregated and re-wilded the fire and kitchen area. They buried charcoaled wood and ground what they could into powder to mix into the dust on the ground. Dr. Harold collected good bones to be carried along separate from anything that was pure garbage. He made a broth with them. Everyone hated his broth.

  Carl lifted Agnes’s sling a bit off her shoulder. “Whoa,” he said. “Heavy load. What are you doing? Carrying all of Glen’s gear?” He laughed, smirking at Glen.

  Agnes jerked away, proud and mad that Carl had announced her secret. Glen’s long face returned. She scurried ahead in the direction they needed to go, and the others followed. When she looked behind, Glen was small and just beginning to move his feet. He moved slowly as though he didn’t want to leave. Agnes quickened her pace.

  She couldn’t wait to leave this place behind. She was so eager to be gone, she willed it gone from her memory. In her mind she watched the truck her mother escaped on explode in a fiery ball and disappear from the horizon. A thing she’d seen in a movie she’d sneaked one night when her mother was asleep, back in their apartment in the City. She’d seen a similar thing when lightning hit a parched tree dead center in its heart. She felt lucky to have seen fireballs twice in her short life. And now she could imagine her mother had been caught in one.

  She clapped her hands. Done and done.

  * * *

  No Ranger ever showed up at Lower Post. It was as though the Community had been sent there for no reason other than to move them miles and miles and miles away from Middle Post, their lovely hidden Valley, the looming Caldera. After what could have been one week or eight, a new directive was airdropped by drone. Coordinates on a torn page of loose-leaf to a new Post on another far edge of their map, along with the words: New Pickup Location. Carl snarled, “Pick up what?” Another area they had never been to. Between where they had been and their new Post were seven upside-down Ws. Mountains. Lots of them.

  There were plenty of other mountains on the map. They’d wintered in those. They’d summered in those. Mountains were nice areas for them to be. But looking at the map, they noticed the mountains they’d already spent time in were represented by two upside-down Ws, or four upside-down Vs. These seven new Ws were stacked on one another as though representing an endless expanse of them. The Community looked to the horizon but saw only flatness. Beyond these new mountains there was nothing drawn on the map until the Xs that marked the boundary of the Wilderness State. The rocky border ridges, the man-made berms, they assumed. Or perhaps another kind of boundary. But it was strange to see nothing in between.

  The sun was low, but it was still hot on their faces until it was wholly gone from sight. After it disappeared, the sky blazed purple, a green glint just as the last glowing sliver sank, a trick of the eye or of the light. They’d seen it before, and Agnes had dubbed it the Wizard. Carl reminded her of that now. Agnes scowled.

  “It’s just light,” she said. She wasn’t that silly girl anymore.

  Having no mother meant she was an adult now. She straightened her posture and hoped the others would notice that she was important. She led the Community across the flatlands and it was easy. She was fast and sure. Sometimes she got so far ahead they called for her to stop and wait.

  At the fire that night, Val squatted next to her.

  “I know you’re an adult now and all that,” Val said, “but you need to stay with the group.”

  Agnes blushed, and her heart skipped at this compliment and scold bundled together.

  “It’s not safe,” Val continued. “And if something happened to you, we’d all be very upset.”

  “You’re too slow.”

  “You’re too fast,” Val said. “Walk with me and we can walk the same speed.”

  “At the front?”

  “Yes, we can walk at the front. I can ask Glen if he wants to walk with us.”

  “No,” Agnes said, quickly enough that Val seemed surprised. “He wants to walk in the back. I know.”

  Val shrugged. “Okay, I trust you.” She had said it casually, but Agnes heard it as an overture full of meaning. Because trust was an adult word. And nothing was casual out here.

  They camped in place for a few sunrises and then packed up and carried on. Soon, the horizon looked muddled, no longer the sharp line they’d grown accustomed to. The brown landscape ahead morphed into white, gray, and black mounds that loomed more with each passing day. The ache in their calves grew, the sign that they were climbing.

  The land turned from dust and silt to rocks and dirt clods that broke open under their feet. Agnes scooped them into her small hands as they walked and further cracked them open in her palm, feeling the cool dirt slide between her fingers and fall with heaviness to the ground. Nothing like the fine dust that hung in the air in the desert. She breathed lightly. Her shoulders became loose. The dust, she realized, had made her nervous. The dust storm they’d choked in. The one that turned her mother into a ghost. And then, in that truck, the dust was a curtain her mother had disappeared behind. With the dust behind Agnes now, she knew unwanted surprises were behind her too.

  Soon stunted junipers appeared and so did evening rains that cooled off the land and turned the air herbal, sweet, sour, and sticky with the essence of those trees. Their evening fires were savory, and they carried the sap with them from their morning cleanup, clearing the burnt sticks, trying to crush th
em underfoot, only to get sap on moccasins or between fingers trying to fling the burnt sticks that instead stuck to their palms. The mix of heat and moisture made the trees weep, and brushing against one meant gluey clothes until enough debris matted the stickiness away.

  During one evening, camped at the edge of a juniper forest, Agnes gathered the sap in her hands and stuck her hands to many parts of her body repeatedly until the stickiness died. She hugged the sticky junipers and then struggled to pull herself off.

  As she writhed away from the tree, Sister and Brother and Pinecone walked up.

  “What are you doing?” Sister asked.

  “Playing Stickers.”

  “Can we play?”

  Agnes looked at Sister and said yes. Then she looked at Brother and said yes. When she got to Pinecone, he looked so stupid in his little deer necktie he insisted on wearing, she couldn’t help but pause.

  Tears sprang to his eyes. “Why don’t you like me?” he said in his warbled way.

  “I don’t not like you,” Agnes lied.

  “You don’t want to play with me.”

  “I don’t like your games.”

  “I don’t have games.”

  “You always want to play Shopkeeper.”

  “No! I don’t like Shopkeeper!”

  “Don’t lie, Pinecone,” Sister and Brother said in unison.

  Pinecone was born in the Wilderness, and yet he only ever wanted to pretend he was in a store working a cash register. He’d heard someone talking about it once. How they had bought something and the salesperson had been rude, long ago in their old City life. He’d then asked the whole Community to describe different stores and how a cash register worked. It was so stupid, but he put so much time into it that the adults had encouraged everyone to play the game with him. Even the adults had to pretend to shop for rocks and sage leaves.

  “Shopkeeper is the only game you like to play.”

  “I play your games.”

  “But you don’t like my games.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Okay, what about Bears and Coyotes.”

  Pinecone bit his lip.

  “Or Stick Tag.”

  Pinecone shivered. “I don’t like those games.”

  Agnes groaned. “See? Your name is Pinecone. You should want to play those games.”

  “Why because of my name?”

  “It’s Pinecone!”

  “I know!”

  “It’s from this place. It’s from your home. I wish my name was something wild like Raptor or Spotted Newt.”

  “But your name is Agnes.”

  “I know what my name is.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know. It’s a family name.”

  “It sounds like agony,” said Sister.

  “And what kind of name is Sister, Sister?”

  “It’s my name,” Sister sniffed. Then she lifted her chin triumphantly. “Your name sounds like what you are.” Her face scrunched up like she was in pain, her lips quivered, her eyes teared and danced in the back of her head. “Agnes,” she snarled.

  Agnes frowned. She didn’t want to get into a fight with Sister or Brother. Or even Pinecone, really. She hated watching the adults argue. It was not the kind of adult she wanted to be. “Okay,” she said. “All I meant is I wish I had a wild name. I’d kill for a name like Lightning or Condor. Or even Pinecone.”

  “Let’s play Kill for a Name,” said Pinecone.

  “How do you play?”

  “I don’t know. Pretend to kill for our names?”

  “Kill what?”

  “Each other?”

  Agnes shrugged. “Okay.”

  The game didn’t last long, but it was fun, and after, Agnes felt a little kindlier toward Pinecone. He was learning. Someday she would steal that necktie he’d requested Debra make him. Where he’d ever seen a necktie was unclear. But he loved it, would hunch over and swing the weight of it back and forth like a tick-tock clock.

  They went back to hugging the junipers. And then Agnes made up a new game that involved them pulling their hair back with the sap, then piling dirt clods on top to make it unstick. Agnes called it Wet Head, but for some reason the sap in the hair never unstuck, could not be coated enough to become unsticky again.

  Debra gathered them together, their hair matted in odd angles, looking like mountain cats caught in a squall. She shook her head.

  “I can cover your heads with dirt or I can cut your hair off. Your choice.”

  Around the fire that night, the children got blunt awkward haircuts and Agnes was shorn to the scalp.

  Debra clicked her tongue. “It’s even on your skin.” She sprinkled dirt and patted the sticky spots until they were smoothed over. “What were you thinking?”

  Agnes kept touching the sticky part of her head, finding short soft hairs left behind, or longer ones coiled against her scalp. She gathered the cut hair, banding it together with more sap into a great long tail.

  “Are you going to save that for your mom?” Debra asked.

  Agnes slapped the tail against her open palm, wincing at the surprising force of it. “Can’t,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “She’s dead,” Agnes said, slapping the tail again. She jumped up and whipped her hair tail around her head, whooping, and the other children gathered their hair and tried to join her. But her hair had been the longest and her tail was the most dramatic, and so they just leapt around behind her, copying her moves. She was the oldest. Her new haircut the most severe. She knew that made her the leader. She pranced and slunk and watched the children fail to embody her uniqueness. But then, as she leapt around, she saw the adults exchanging looks she took to be displeasure, and so she abruptly stopped, knowing the children would stop too. She threw her tail into the fire and marched away to bed. The children followed. Their hair burned with the juniper sap, and the smell was so terrible everyone else went to bed too.

  * * *

  The foothills rolled into something more treacherous. Jagged, brittle rock that behaved more like hardened, sculpted dirt. It crumbled underfoot or in their hands as they scrambled higher. Then more rolling land, higher meadows where they would camp for a few nights and scout to get a sense of just what exactly they were heading toward.

  In daytime excursions from camp for game or provisions, they found the animals were different. The squirrels were red, not gray or brown. The deer had bushy black tails that stood up two feet high when they ran from them. Their antler velvet was thick and black too. And they were small in comparison to the deer from the lowlands. The wolves were bigger, and the one bear she saw was brown, not black. And there were condors with wingspans as long as three people that blotted out the sun when they flew overhead. All the newness made the land feel newly dangerous.

  And yet they had found ruts cut into the land that appeared to lead into the mountains. As though once, long ago, people and their wheels had passed through here for so long and with so much impact it could not be restored or re-wilded without tearing the whole mountainside out. It was like having the way forward whispered in their ears.

  Agnes found the ruts. Early in the foothills, the Community had been following a stream, but Agnes had beelined away, and the group blindly followed. Soon they noticed their feet hugging the new grooved land.

  “Had you seen them, Agnes?” Carl asked, trying to decipher if this was luck or mastery.

  Agnes shook her head. “There will be more deer over here—see the trees?—and we want deer, so I took us here.”

  “But did you mean to follow these lines in the ground?”

  Agnes didn’t understand. “Why wouldn’t we follow these? They are easier to walk.”

  At first the move had made some of them nervous. It was risky. Juan suggested returning to the stream. They always stayed by the stream when there was a stream to stay by.

  But others sided with Agnes. Carl said, “We’ve got a burgeoning tracker on our hands.”


  At camp, they sent a party to follow the stream for a day and report what they found. The stream began farther up the mountain in an ice-blue pool. Snow-fed. Perhaps spring-fed too. A horseshoe cliff face surrounded it. No clear way through. The party returned with news of the dead end.

  Agnes smiled shyly as people patted her shoulders. Val rubbed her scalp where new hair was sprouting in stumpy patches.

  “Our fearless leader,” Val said.

  Agnes knew they felt bad for her. Motherless in the way she’d been made motherless. But Agnes had always paid attention to the small things here. The creatures. Agnes had noticed that a mother would only be a mother for so long before she wanted to be something else. No mother she’d ever watched here remained a mother forever. Agnes had been ready for this without knowing it. She hadn’t cried once and that had to mean she was ready for it. She was not a bear cub any longer, but a juvenile on the lookout for her own place in the world. And so when Val called her a fearless leader, Agnes believed her. Val saw her for what she was now. An equal.

  That night by the fire, Agnes scooted closer to adults as they discussed camp breakdown and the plan for the morning. The children yawned and squeezed juniper berries between their toes. Laughed and looked at Agnes to see if she was watching their antics. But she kept her gaze very steady on the grown-ups and tuned her ears to the conversation they were having so she would know exactly what was expected of her in the morning. She was their fearless leader after all. She’d found the trail into the mountains. And she had to make sure it would lead them to the other side.

  * * *

  By following the ruts, they avoided the white peaks that rose high above. Each time they arrived at a new threshold where the route seemed impossibly steep or rugged, the ruts led them through a gentler scene, bypassing the up-up-ups. Following rivers and streams. Sidestepping sheer rock face. There were some scrambles. There always would be. But they wondered if the Rangers knew of the ruts. If they’d wanted the Community to follow them on purpose. Or if they had simply lucked out by finding them. They wove in and around giant trees they couldn’t even see the tops of. The bark changed color and texture. Smooth white with knotty eyes, orange and scaly, then dark, almost black, like the charcoal from a dead fire. Occasionally they moved through hardened snow, their moccasined feet breaking through the iced-over sheet, cleanly making a hole through to shallow powder. They walked days through a melting snowfield made eerie by a long-ago fire. What remained were black trunks naked of branches and sharp as blades, reaching out of the snow toward the colorless sky. Beyond the snowfields, the ruts directed them to a pass where they descended into forests of lean ponderosas with feet blackened by a ground fire that had never made gains. They moved on through this clean forest over the course of a mountain summer. Then the forest thickened, and soon it was shrouded, dark and dank. So dark and dank the tips of the coarse hairs of their hides collected dewdrops. The walking here was slow. The ground was knobby with thick roots hidden under carpets of mosses. Everything chilled. Gloom settled on the group.