The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

  But it sometimes meant needing longer excursions to harvest or hunt in the places they might, in previous seasons, simply have migrated to. When Gatherers went out to harvest the pine nuts from the foothills and mountains, it meant that the rest of the Community waited in place for longer periods of time, until the Gatherers returned. Same with the Hunters, who, depending on the season, had to track game into those same foothills and mountains. Their camps stood for much longer. At one Community meeting, there was even talk of erecting a smokehouse that was sturdier. More stable. They stopped short of calling it permanent, though that’s what they meant. No one said, We can’t. Or, We shouldn’t. Or, This is totally against the rules. They just talked about it like it was normal for nomadic people to build a permanent structure in this strictly leave-no-trace Wilderness State.

  They blamed Big Walk V for that.

  Big Walk V had been a hard and grueling walk. Harder and more grueling than Big Walks III or IV, which had been worlds harder and more grueling than the first Big Walk, or Big Walk II. Big Walk V had felt like a forced march. The Rangers were like coals under their feet, their heat unbearable. Whenever they appeared, the Community had to scramble and push ahead. And it felt like the Rangers appeared whenever they had stopped to take a breath. Their resources dwindled, and they were only afforded a few stops along rivers long enough to hunt and process their kills to bulk up their food stores. So they hunted to eat each day and chewed jerky and ate pemmican and hoped their bedding, skins, and clothes lasted, and when they didn’t, they wore them in tatters.

  They lost a Newcomer newborn on that walk. The first baby born in some time. The first death in some time too. It was a surprisingly difficult loss for a group of people used to losses. Linda, who had not even wanted another baby, wept for days.

  But what more is there to say about walking at this point? It takes as long as it takes. Is as difficult as the terrain and not more. The weather varies. Though they saw new things, they were just variations on the things they’d seen on past walks. Hills that looked as though they were moving were only different from past hills because, for whatever reason, these hills looked as though they were moving faster. And in reality, none of the hills had ever moved. Their tips seemed sharper, more like horns than the tongues of past hills from past walks. They were all still hills. And the Community was still a little breathless going up them, even after all this time.

  It wasn’t that they were fatigued or bored with their surroundings. It was a privilege to experience this sameness. To be able to settle into routine. To luxuriate in one place for far too long and not be too surprised by anything. A dank, heavy-limbed forest would always be pleasurable, even if they were no longer shocked by the salamanders they found under every rotting thing. They still were going to scoop out the slippery sacs of beady eggs from every water-filled depression they encountered. Not because it was thrilling, but because they could. And because they were hungry. Had they ever really been adventurers?

  If there was a bright side to the cruelty of Big Walk V, it was that they had ended up somewhere quiet, peaceful. Somewhere, it seemed, the Rangers weren’t interested in visiting. Or maybe, they hoped, the Rangers had other things to worry about. Glen sometimes worried out loud about the study. During their third winter in and around the Basin, undisturbed by Rangers or directives to visit Post, he wondered what it meant that they weren’t checking in for questionnaires and blood work and physicals. But no one else worried. No one else missed the study.

  “I didn’t say I missed it,” Glen would insist, but he wouldn’t say more.

  Val had finally become pregnant after the last snows fell. And she was round and red-cheeked and wobbling like an acorn by the time this Ranger showed up alone on horseback. He seemed more apparition than man. It had been so long, he couldn’t possibly be real. He didn’t introduce himself.

  “You have to move along,” he muttered down from his silver speckled mare. “You’ve been here too long.”

  “And you’ve been gone too long,” said Bea.

  “We have a lot going on,” he said flatly. He closed his eyes as though remembering a nightmare. He sighed. “We work, you know. It’s not an easy job. So please let me do it quickly.” He pinched the bridge of his nose with fatigue. “You’ve been here too long. Time to move along.”

  “What’s with the horse?” Bea asked.

  “Please don’t change the subject.”

  Bea made doe eyes. “What? I want to know. I love horses.” She scratched under the mare’s chin, and the horse snorted appreciatively.

  “Research shows that trucks are too damaging to the ecosystem.”

  “You needed research for that?”

  The Ranger scowled. “Of course not. But we didn’t know the degree to which they damage it. They leave a supertrace.” His face was pained thinking about all the supertrace he’d left on the land. “So we are all on horseback now.” He slid out of his saddle awkwardly.

  “That’s a big change,” she said.

  “Lots of big changes with the new Administration.”

  “What Administration is that?” Carl asked.

  The adults all laughed at that, especially the Newcomers. While they laughed, the Ranger knit his eyebrows and took notes.

  When he finished writing he said, “Get going.”

  “We have to wait for our Gatherers to return,” Bea said.

  “Where are they?”

  “In the mountains.”

  “Why aren’t you all in the mountains with them?”

  “Because we’re here.”

  With an annoyed flourish, the Ranger opened his notebook again. “You should be gathering together,” he said through clenched teeth, furiously scribbling their trespasses. “You shouldn’t be waiting for anyone. You’re nomadic. There is nowhere you are allowed to just wait. You are supposed to one, stay together; two, keep moving; and three, do things as you move.” His counting fingers formed a two-barreled gun.

  “We have to stop to hunt and gather and process,” said Bea.

  “Besides, even nomadic people eventually settled,” said Carl. It was a very uncharacteristic thing for him to say, but he had turned an ankle that year and it had made walking a little less enjoyable for him.

  That’s when the Ranger saw their smoker. He shook his head disgustedly. “You people.” He walked around it, threw open the hooding, took pictures of it, scribbled more notes. Then, he pulled out a flask from his back pocket and a box of matches from his backpack, shook the liquid from the flask all over the smoker, and threw a match in. It lit up.

  Building the smoker had taken an entire summer of harvesting wood from the foothills and dragging the wood back to camp. They’d never done so much exhausting work. Even during the years when they had walked for what seemed like years. Creating permanence was much harder work than walking, it turned out. They watched the smoker burn. There was nothing they could do. It had definitely been against the rules.

  “Aren’t you worried about that fire spreading?” Bea’s voice quaked with anger, and maybe a little sadness.

  “Not really. My horse is fast.” He winked at Bea.

  She spit at his feet.

  “Watch yourself,” he sneered. After a little trouble and cursing, he got back on his horse. Nodding to the fiery smoker, he cried, “Not a trace!” as he galloped away.

  They hadn’t restocked their water yet that day, so the Community smothered the fire with a few skins from their beds. They gagged as the deer hair and skin smoldered and smoked.

  The next day they sent the Hunters out to the foothills for more meat.

  They worried that to move again would give up their claim on the land, though they had no claim on the land. So they did not pack up camp. They stayed put against all logic. Their instinct told them to.

  * * *

  With the Hunters off hunting and the Gatherers still gathering, Agnes and Glen were helping Debra and Jake sew. Sister and Brother and Pinecone were there too, but
they were only making knots in the sinew and then being scolded by Debra.

  Staying put had led to increased food, increased growth and girth, and the need for new clothes. For Agnes most of all. Perhaps she really had been too skinny like her mother said, but now she touched her cheeks to feel them spring back, jiggle under her fingertips. She was no longer an up-and-down arrangement of bones. Now she possessed a shape, albeit slight. She wasn’t sure anyone else would notice it, but she noticed it. When she lay down, everything felt different. Her body met the ground differently. She had grown taller too. She was now almost as tall as Val. She looked right at Val’s nose when they stood together. But she was still one of the shortest people in the Community. Much shorter than her mother, who was as tall as the men.

  Agnes watched Glen slowly peel sinew strands from a dry deer tendon. He had jowls again, and they quivered as his fingers trailed up and down the tendon. Her mother’s first order of business after she joined Carl as leader had been to reinstate Glen into the Community. Cooks weren’t allowed to cut his rations, or any of the Originalists’ rations, any longer. They claimed they never had, but the Originalists became undeniably plumper in the season that followed this new mandate. Bea even had Glen’s rations increased for a time, until he became stocky again, regained his strength, and became solid on his feet. It was required that Glen be engaged in at least one conversation per day with a member of the Community other than Agnes. Each person took a turn. It wasn’t hard for the Originalists since they’d known him so long, though it could be awkward with Carl glowering at them. And if they didn’t spend time with him, Bea glowered. It was hard to be an Originalist sometimes.

  For the Newcomers it was even harder. They really had to make an effort to think of him as part of the Community. He was always on the outskirts or walking far behind. That Agnes spent a lot of time with him and brought him food and washed the wounds he collected from tripping and stumbling had taught them he belonged in some way, but they had not really believed he was the pioneer of this group, that he’d started this Community in the Wilderness State, even though that’s what they’d been told. They always believed it was Carl, and Carl never corrected them. And even after they knew, they still preferred to think it was Carl. Carl was strong, decisive, unkind when he needed to be. They just liked Carl better. Carl’s story, as told to them by Carl, was a better story.

  But Carl, it turned out, hadn’t any grand plan for leadership. No agenda or way forward. He just wanted to be leader and have everything go through him. Once that was secured, he delighted in being the enforcer.

  Bea was the one in charge. But far from being a disruptive leader, she kept the Community abiding by rules even more stringently than they had before. “We will give the Rangers no reason to think of us,” she would say. “Our ideal is that they forget we are here.” Every rule in the Manual was followed to a T. Until the Basin.

  The sun arced over their bent heads. Agnes felt her legs getting hot. They splayed out in front of her. She paused and took a moment to drape a cloth over Glen’s head so he would not get sun-tired.

  Agnes softened sinew in her mouth as she watched Jake stitching pieces of hide together. He was making a patchwork buckskin blanket. His fingers were white from the force needed to pull the bone needle and sinew through. His hands were fully calloused. When he touched Agnes, his fingertips were as rough as dried seed pods. He said he could barely feel her skin against them. So he would sometimes trace his cheek, the tip of his nose, the inside of his wrist along her skin. Something more sensitive. He was her life mate. They had decided. They would make a family and rear their young, and then, at an age when it seemed their young could take care of themselves, they would send them away to find their own land to explore. And then they’d have more young.

  “What age were you thinking,” Jake had asked.

  “I think probably by six,” said Agnes.

  Jake paled. “What?”

  “You don’t agree?” She absorbed his silence, studied the incredulous look on his face. “I guess I could be convinced to wait till seven or eight?”

  “Agnes, that is way too young.”

  Now she felt incredulous. “Bears do it at two. Why can’t our babies?”

  “Because we’re not bears.”

  “Our babies will be better than bears!” Though she wondered if anything could truly be better than bears.

  “Weren’t you about six when you came here?”

  “Five. I think? I don’t remember.”

  “Think about when you were that young. Would you have wanted to be on your own? Finding your own food, defending against predators. You, at five or six? Alone?”

  When she first got here, of course she had been useless in the Wilderness. But that was because she was from the City. She knew beds and clean plates. She knew toilets. She knew about the predators in the City, but they were a different kind of predator, and it was a different kind of danger. She had needed time to adjust and learn about this new place. But she believed that by the following spring, she had developed the abilities and skills needed to lead the Community, if anyone would have let her then. She knew then almost everything she knew now about living here. The things she didn’t understand well were people and that hadn’t changed much. But surviving—she understood that. It had been one of the first things she understood here. Really, what else was there? Hunting, processing, tracking, water source, basic clothing and shelter, weather, the different gifts and threats from flora and fauna. Being alone on a stormy night. Being alone when you knew a big cat was nearby. Being alone when you heard footsteps and didn’t know what they belonged to. These things were hard at any age. But a six-year-old possesses logic. They can think themselves out of fear if they have to. If they are left alone to. Her mother had left her when she was maybe ten? Eleven? Twelve? That had been very hard, but not because of survival preparedness. And if the whole Community had left her, she would have been sad, but she still could have survived. What did age matter?

  “I don’t know,” she said. Jake still stared at her with doubt. “Why, what age were you thinking?”

  “Sixteen? Seventeen? Or whatever is legal.”

  “Legal? What’s that?”

  Jake hung his head in exasperation. Agnes felt her blood heating up. She did not want her children coddled. She didn’t know how old she was now. Maybe she was fourteen or fifteen or fifty-nine. Sometimes she felt older than them all. She’d been leading their walks for a long time now. And she’d been capable of surviving on her own just fine, thank you. She was brave. She was skilled. She was a watcher. She could take care of herself. And she would take care of Jake. And a baby. And anyone else who came along. Until they didn’t need her anymore.

  “Let’s drop it,” Jake said, possibly sensing Agnes was building an argument.

  Agnes had agreed. They didn’t need a parenting philosophy, as Jake called it, because every month Agnes bled.

  The Twins said she would have to have real sex to get pregnant and what they were doing wasn’t sex. Agnes knew it wasn’t real sex but didn’t know how to make it real sex. Jake thought they were too young. He thought the walking was too hard to have kids right now. The weather was too unpredictable. He was embarrassed that they would have to tell Glen. He was scared of her mother. Wasn’t a newborn a burden on the Community? There was no rush, really, he always said.

  “But you want to have young, right?” she would say.

  Jake rolled his eyes. “I call them children, and yes, I’d like to have some.”

  “Because it sounds like you aren’t sure.”

  “No, I’m sure.”

  “Okay, then.” She would reach for his pants, and he’d shackle her wrists with his hand.

  “Please, Agnes. You’re too aggressive.”

  This always stumped Agnes because she didn’t know how else to be. She tried to move more slowly for his pants, hoping that would seem less alarming to him. But he still dodged her.

  She had as
ked politely. She had made intellectual arguments. She’d offered what she knew of statistics, of the need to grow the population in the Wilderness State. To stake some kind of claim here. She couldn’t imagine an elk going to so much trouble to mate. She had even tried to trick him one day by insisting the anthill they’d been sitting next to belonged to a rare poisonous kind of ant and that they needed to undress quickly to make sure no ants were on their bodies. But she’d felt ashamed of her cunning as he stood there blushing at their nudity, trusting fully that she had only meant to protect him from ants. She had walked away, mumbling for him to get dressed. The last time they had been alone together, she had decided to be blunt. She turned around, pulled her tunic up, and pushed her backside into him, and they both tumbled over.

  He rolled away. “No, I told you.”

  She clenched her fists in frustration.

  He smiled. “Are you going to hit me?”

  “No,” she said. She hid her hands behind her back so she could relax them and pretend they had never been clenched.

  “We can do other stuff.”

  “Okay,” she had said and led him to a spot between some sage bushes, and there they rubbed together with their clothes on. It’s not that she didn’t enjoy it. She liked panting and wrestling with Jake. They giggled and squeaked like weasels at play, and they were always relaxed and gentle afterward, like they were floating on a lazy river. She just didn’t see the point of it. She had needs. And this did not satisfy them.

  Agnes slowly pulled the softened sinew from her mouth, and Jake blushed even though he had not seemed to be looking at her. She heard the return whistle of the Gatherers. The mellow toot on carved bone, in long and short bursts.