The New World (12 page)

I knew if the creature smelled us it would very easily swat us into eternity: I had heard stories at home of bears in bear-pits which, when they were set upon by dogs, dispatched six, ten, a dozen of their attackers, despite the savaging and laceration they endured in the process. But even if he had detected us—and it was clear from the way the anvil-head continued to swing slowly from side to side that he felt troubled by something as yet invisible in his world—even if he had detected us, I thought we were safe at least for the moment.

With a final cursory sniff of the air, he approached the open end of the log, folded his shaggy front legs, thrust his enormous rump in our direction, inserted his head into the hole, and snorted once or twice. This made the log reverberate very loudly. Having established himself in this way, he then proceeded to squeeze forward by means of lurching and twisting and shuddering and grappling until he was almost entirely hidden from our sight.

Natty jumped to her feet brushing leaves off her hair and face, then ran forward into the clearing. I was confused. Had I misunderstood? Was this something Hoopoe had asked her to do? Did she mean me to follow? I did not wait for her to ask. I simply jumped up and ran forward, positioning myself by the entrance to our trap while she scrambled on top of it.

Now that I was out in the open I thought the clearing looked much larger than it had done while we were hiding; the breeze seemed to blow very slowly across the open space, and the whole circumference of trees began to revolve, spinning together the faces of our friends now peering through the ferns, and the bright green leaves, and the birds, and the patches of blue sky, and the streaks of sunlight, while everything closer to hand remained perfectly still and clear:

the quaking back legs of the bear, whose fur I saw now was really black and only tipped with brown;

the family of beetles walking in line along the tree trunk until they passed between Natty's feet;

the tearing and growling that came from inside the log;

the roaring when the bear realized we were very close, and began to back out from his trap;

and Natty herself. Natty poised above the entrance. Natty with her legs braced and a spear lifted above her head. Natty with her face flushed and her hair tousled and dirty.

“Now!” I shouted, standing my ground behind the bear, jabbing at his hindquarters and feeling the point of my spear lose its way among the deep fur.

Natty did not reply, but kept in the same position with her arms raised.

“Now!” I shouted again. “Now! Stick him! Strike him!”—with Hoopoe breaking into the open behind me.

“Miss Natty!” he called. “Mister Jim!” His voice sounded oddly hollow and fluting, as if he was calling his own bird-name, or perhaps the bear's name, calling as one creature to another.

Natty paid no attention and neither did I. As the bear made another gigantic effort and finally worked his shoulders and front paws free from the trunk, I lunged forward with my spear, piercing the fur this time and wounding him. He stopped still, bellowing at the insult, and just as he turned his head, with his jaws wide open and smeared with honey, and his nose also blurred with honey and one of his eyes plugged blind with it, Natty drove downward; the point of her spear vanished into the broad neck where it met the skull.

It was a clever strike—or a lucky one—and I think must have severed the spine. The bear snapped his mouth shut and a look of great irritation came into his one clear eye, then of great sadness. All his noises stopped, his roaring and growling, and he gave a sigh as if he was settling down to snooze. He lifted his black snout, the nostrils still busily dilating and shrinking. Then he collapsed sideways, with a crash that silenced all the birds in the wood for a moment, and us as well.

I glanced along the stomach; until now I had thought of the bear as a man and called him a man in my mind, but I saw two rows of brown nipples poking through the fur, each one surprisingly long and crinkled, and each tipped with a little dot of milk.

There must be cubs nearby, I thought; well-grown cubs born last spring. I could not imagine them, because Hoopoe and the rest were swarming around us now, slapping Natty on the back and kneeling to admire her kill, running their hands through the fur and watching them disappear up to the wrist. No one mentioned the cubs, or what might become of them. Natty, who seemed flabbergasted by what she had done, and was leaning against the log to recover herself, did not know they existed.

I found a place to kneel by the head of the bear, where I saw again how much honey was rubbed over the muzzle and cheeks, and how the long teeth were yellow with honey, and how the top lip had snagged on those teeth to make an expression like a sneer. As if death did not matter, because life did not matter.

In this way Natty came to be known as Little Bear and I was Running Bear—not that I had run anywhere during our hunt, and not that Natty's new name gave a fair description of what she had done. The idea was that in killing the animal she had entered its world and become its kindred spirit. I liked this because it combined with everything that Hoopoe and the others had told me; Natty complained it made her sound like a child, when it was perfectly clear she was no such thing.

These conversations lay in the future. Our immediate task was to finish our work in the clearing by fetching long sticks and creepers from the trees around us, and building a sledge to drag our victim back to the village. When we had done this—and when we had skinned the bear so her coat could be offered to White Feather with all due ceremony, and eaten some of her meat (with the rest salted away for eating in the future), and smoked our pipe, and danced our dance—we fell back into our routines once more, which meant the days passed without me bothering to count them.

But I must not give a false impression. As the following two years rolled by, and despite my deep pleasures in the place and its people, I could not forget my old self entirely. Little by little, and then like the sea-tide that would not be turned back, a sense of restlessness grew in me. A melancholy. I suppose I had reached the limit of my capacity to feel at home in the village; I thought I should either embrace it completely and decide to end my days there, or acknowledge whatever remained of my nostalgia for England, and set off to find it again.

Natty and I spoke about these things many times in private before we decided to act on them. The journey ahead seemed so enormous, so full of dangers and threats and surprises and confusions, and these were all good reasons to delay. Another was our fear of seeming to reject Hoopoe and the rest, who had found us as strangers and made us their friends. Yet even while we hesitated we could not prevent our thoughts from taking the direction most natural to them, until at last we felt that our little tent, which had sheltered us so well, and where we had seemed perfectly contented for a long time, was in fact a crucible for plans to escape, or a refuge for painful memories of things far away.

When we could not keep our thoughts to ourselves any longer, and anyway suspected others might be able to see them in our faces, we decided to consult Hoopoe, whom we trusted to know the best way to resolve them. As things fell out, our route to this conversation—which we thought must be taken very cautiously, so as not to offend delicate feelings—turned out to be very direct.

It happened as spring was just beginning, spring 1805 as I know now, when the temperature was mild enough to make traveling a long distance seem enjoyable. I was about to say as much to Hoopoe when he came to our tent one evening after the rest of the village had already retired, and when I soon expected to be asleep myself. Natty, as I could tell from the quietness of her breathing beside me, had already dropped into unconsciousness.

When I heard Hoopoe clear his throat in the darkness, and opened the flaps of the tepee to find him waiting for me, I thought some accident must have occurred that needed our attention. And so in a sense it had. Speaking softly, and with a sort of embarrassment in his voice, he told me that while out hunting that day in the wilderness he had seen Black Cloud prowling about—but had not been spotted himself. Black Cloud and another man, who was painted with so many colors it made Hoopoe think that his own decorations were drab in comparison.

When I heard this I found myself gazing back through the dark opening of our tent, where my necklace lay in the satchel I used for my pillow; I almost thought it glowed at me, through its several layers of concealment; I almost heard it speak.

What I might say myself, I hardly knew. Hoopoe, who was usually so excitable, seemed very perplexed, pacing to and fro with the bells on his wrists and ankles making soft little chimes until I put out my hand and brought him to a halt.

After staring into my face in silence for a moment he turned away and looked toward the river.

“We must leave you now,” I said, speaking as quietly as possible so as not to wake Natty.

He shrugged, still with his back toward me.

I did not want to continue at once, thinking he might turn round and say a little about how Natty and I had become a part of his family, or some such excellent thing. But when he remained silent and then began pacing to and fro again, I understood that he did not think our friendship should be decisive in shaping our plans. We had said as much the first day we met, and I had not forgotten. Although Black Cloud and the Painted Man were only two, and two dozen of our men could be set against them, their reputation was so fearsome they seemed like an indestructible force.

“Now,” I told him. “We'll leave you now; as soon as possible. Then they won't hurt you.”

Hoopoe continued walking, his feet making a soft scratch-scratch on the dry earth.

“They may,” he said. “They may harm us whether you are here or not.”

This idea hurt me and I did my best to knock it aside. “I'm sure not,” I said. “It's us they want to hurt, not you. They'll follow us.”

“But we shall not tell them where you go.”

“They'll find out—that's their way. You've said so yourself.”

Hoopoe paused, then tried another tack. “You cannot be away from your home forever,” he said.

“I've no wish to be,” I said.

This seemed to encourage him, as though for the first time I had admitted what he already knew.

“We can set you on your course,” he said, with some brightness coming into his voice. “You must go to the east—”

“Hoopoe,” I interrupted him, without knowing what I might be about to say.

He stopped his pacing and stood close to me. The paint across his cheeks and around his eyes was dried up, which gave him the appearance of great age, like an ancient porcelain figure that has developed thousands of tiny cracks in its glaze.

“You've been very kind to us,” I told him, with a tremor in my voice; it was only a small part of the truth, but I hoped he would feel the great weight of feeling that swelled inside me.

There was no reply.

“You've been kind,” I repeated. “And I will never forget you. Neither will Little Bear ever forget you.”

Hoopoe nodded, the silhouette of his head bobbing slowly against the paler sky. I thought this would be his only response, and was about to return to our tepee and wake Natty, and tell her everything I had learned. But Hoopoe was not drawing things to a close; he was gathering himself.

“The Painted Man,” he said, looking over my shoulder where the grasses suddenly began seething as the night-wind strengthened and passed over them. For a moment I thought he had seen the eyes watching him, glittering among the dark stems, but he had only imagined them and soon looked away.

“
Berdache,
” he went on.

I repeated the word, which I had not heard before.

“
Berdache,
” Hoopoe said again. “It is what we call a companion like Black Cloud's companion. Such men do womanish things. This Painted Man does womanish things, and the work of women. But he is powerful.”

“I know that,” I told him, which was only to show that I understood what he meant, not to take it for granted. But Hoopoe doubted me.

“More powerful than you know,” Hoopoe told me, with a snarl in his voice. “That is why Black Cloud keeps him close. Black Cloud is a powerful man also, very strong in his body and like iron in his mind. But the Painted Man is powerful as well.
Berdache
, yes. He has no heart.”

This was as much as Hoopoe would allow himself to say, and although the sentences were very few, they were spoken so slowly, and with such deliberation, I felt I had been thoroughly reprimanded. Chastened enough, at any rate, to imagine Black Cloud and his companion rising from their bed, and spinning with fury when they found we had escaped; to think of them taking the direction that Hoopoe had predicted; to see them disappointed, and beginning to search for other clues; to feel the heat of fires they had lit; to hear the stamp and thunder of their feet; to remember the devastated village; to think Hoopoe and the others might soon find them rioting toward them.

For a little over two years we had hidden in safety, as Hoopoe had predicted we would. Now his protection was almost exhausted. Now Black Cloud would no longer be prevented from finding us.

I had imagined what must follow a hundred times, but never so clearly as then. And when I remember my conversation with Hoopoe again today I feel the same fear prickling though me—as though I am still lost in the wilderness, and still facing the same question as I did then: why did I not simply fetch the necklace from our tent and pass it to him? Why did I not say that in due course he must give it to Black Cloud, which would have been an end to all our troubles?

Pride, I suppose. Stubbornness. Greed. Some defect in myself, which proves I am my father's son and also the son of Adam.

More surprising is that Hoopoe himself did not suggest it. But for this I do have an explanation. I thought then, and still believe now, that he understood it would give me some authority in our travels to come. Some authority, and therefore a degree of safety as well, despite the dangers it would also provoke.

When Hoopoe and I were done, the necklace still lay in the darkness beneath my pillow. And when we had said goodnight to one another and I saw him disappear into the shadows, I did not believe his shoulders were stooped because he thought I had made a great error of judgment. He was dejected for a much larger and sadder reason. He had reminded himself of someone whose powers matched his own, or were greater than his own, but were devoted to madness and atrocity.

I did not mention this to Natty when I lay down beside her, but only because I did not have to. She had remained asleep throughout my talk with Hoopoe, and was therefore quite untroubled by such thoughts as kept me awake for the next little while. How would we find our way to the east? What strangers would we meet next? Would they treat us with the same kindness we had grown used to? When my eyes closed at last, it was not because I had found the answer to any of these questions, but because I felt overwhelmed by them.

The next morning I expected Natty to tell me we should stay and fight. I had never doubted her courage, and knew it sometimes stood in the way of her better judgment. But whether she feared Black Cloud more than she allowed herself to say, or wanted to spare our friends from troubles we would otherwise inflict on them, she did not demur when I told her what was in my mind. Lying on her back in the early light, staring upward into the brightening cone of our tent with her red shawl drawn up to her chin, she only said what I had already decided: “We must go at once.”

I felt so surprised by her straightforwardness I was almost inclined to object despite myself.

“They've been very good to us,” I said again, which sounded much less than I meant, and gave no indication of how much I would miss them.

“Of course,” said Natty. “But we've always said that can't be the reason to stay. We must leave immediately.”

“Immediately?” I repeated. “You mean today?”

“Do you think Black Cloud will wait if he knows we're here?”

I shifted my head on the pillow and felt the bars of the necklace slide together in the satchel beneath.

“And the Painted Man,” Natty went on, suddenly sitting upright. “He certainly won't wait.”

With that, as if she had just now seen the shadow of the monster spilling across the wall of our tent, she leaped up and ducked outside, smoothing her dress as she went. Her disappearance felt very sudden after the long delay of our previous conversations; it seemed almost laughable.

And remained so when I stood upright myself, and looked out to see she had gone to the river, and taken her place among the others already gathered there, who were busily splashing their faces and feet while the morning sun climbed above them.

It was the simplest picture, which I had seen every morning for months on end, and never thought would serve as the beginning of our farewell. But that is what it became: the gentlest of separations, with the women kneeling as they swept their wet hair from their eyes, and the water-drops sliding from elbows and fingers, and the river crinkled by the breeze, and the vast and level country stretching beyond, and the rust-red sky, and the thin straight line of charcoal along the horizon.

As I stared toward that far-off point, I kept myself steady by remembering that ours was the easiest sort of leave-taking, because our sorrow at leaving past pleasures was matched by our interest in what lay ahead. And I continued thinking this for the rest of our final morning, while Natty and I collected a few parcels of food, and our water-bag, and two knives, and my satchel, and a pair of blankets, and then shook hands in the English way with everyone in the village, and thanked them as warmly as possible.

When we reached White Feather, I wanted to make a more elaborate gesture. Although the withdrawn and wandering nature of his mind had made him remote to us, from the first moment in which he had appeared naked in the doorway of his tent, to this last when he appeared in his cloak of bearskin, he had smiled on everything we had done. I would have liked to show my gratitude for this as I stood before him, and felt the weight of his large soft hand on my head, but my words would never have penetrated the mists of his mind, and might have embarrassed him if they had. As a result, the seal of my life under his protection was broken with nothing more than a long look into his empty eyes.

Hoopoe we did not have to leave yet, because he had offered to walk with us for the first hour, and set us on our way. Before that, however, he took us to the river-bank, where he told us we must fill our heads with the music of the water, and its encouragement to continue, and its replenishment, so that in days to come, when we were thirsty and exhausted, we would still have the Spirit speaking to us, to help us as we traveled onward.