The New World (20 page)

In happier times we might have looked for feasts and dancing—for songs to celebrate our miracle. But partly at my insistence we did no such thing; Fire Wife remained in her tepee, dozing to recover her strength, and the rest of the tribe dismantled the offerings they had strewn around the camp, thinking they had now done their work.

Natty was very pleased by this lack of fuss, and wanted us to be on our way immediately. The Rider, however, persuaded her this would be discourteous and insisted we must stay a day longer, because there was no danger of our becoming sick ourselves unless misery was infectious. By the time it was sunset again, and we had smoked a pipe with Talks to the Wind, and then another pipe, and heard his stories of the land they had lost, and how they lost it, I thought the Rider was wrong. “Our lives are broken.” These were the words that Talks to the Wind spoke to me before we turned aside to sleep, and they settled in me as definitely as any illness has ever done. “I am tired,” he said, “and my heart is sad. I will fight no more forever.”

Others before me have written about sorrows such as these, about the ruin of the whole Indian nation, and it is not my business to record them in greater detail here. But in case I seem unfeeling, let me also remember the words that Talks to the Wind said next morning, when the Rider told us we had done our duty to custom, and could now be on our way. We had already received our instructions about where we would find our trail again; we had been embraced by Talks to the Wind and embraced him in return; I had shaken the hand of Fire Wife as politely as any English doctor; and now the warriors of the camp had pulled open the gate in their thorny barricade to bid us farewell. I thought Talks to the Wind might follow this with a final ceremony of thanks. Instead, he straightened his battered old headdress and looked out over the stony country.

“I saw the White Man,” he said, pitching his words into the emptiness. “I saw the White Man and was told he was my enemy. I could not kill him as I would kill a wolf or bear; yet like those things he came upon me. Horses, cattle and fields he took from me. Still he gave me his hand in friendship; I took it; while taking it, he held a snake in the other; his tongue was forked; he lied to us and stung us. I asked for a small piece of this land, enough to plant and enough to live upon; in the far south of our country, a place where I could scatter the ashes of my people, a place where I could lay my wife and child. This was not granted me. Now I am here. I feel the iron in my heart.”

I need hardly say that he sounded much more broken and halting than I have made him here, because the Rider was required to translate phrase by phrase. I know, too, that I have misremembered some words. But the essence of the thing I have preserved, just as I have also remained true to the promise I gave myself at the time: it would never be forgotten.

For all that, I could not help thinking that if I turned back as we rode away from the camp, I would find it had already disappeared. Knowing what I know now, safe in another country, I see this was prophecy of a kind. Talks to the Wind and the rest of them could not have stayed more than a few days longer in that barren place. Where they traveled next, and how they managed, I have never liked to imagine.

Our own circumstances were much more fortunate, but since this makes such a painful contrast with everything I have just described, I shall cover our next few miles very quickly. As soon as we found our trail to the east again we remained in dry country for two or three hours, which our ponies did not like at all, as they told us by repeatedly shaking their heads and blowing through their noses and sometimes stopping altogether. When this patch of desert ended, however, which it did quite suddenly, as if the whole landscape had been transformed by a miracle much larger than anything we had witnessed the previous day (as Natty could not resist pointing out, and I did not deny), we entered richer terrain, with tall trees and lush grasses, and streams running with sweet water.

When we made our camp I wondered aloud why Talks to the Wind refused to send hunting parties here, and so help his people. Natty told me that in her opinion the whole tribe was so dispirited they had lost the will to make the best of their existence. This sounded like a wretched sort of truth and I changed the subject, asking the Rider whether Talks to the Wind had spoken to him about this part of the country. He said they had not discussed it; so far as Talks to the Wind was concerned, it belonged with other things he could no longer call his own.

As it transpired our journey next morning was more peaceful and easy than any we had previously known. Sometimes we saw the scratch-marks of bears on tree trunks, or the prints of their paws on dry earth, but no creature ever came to frighten us. More often we found turkeys which we could easily chase through the scrub and overtake and kill for our food. Indeed, these birds were so careless of the need to protect themselves, with their gorgeous plumage and tremendous beaks and wattles, it seemed no human being could possibly have come into this region before us. I thought that if they had been allowed to prosper in their solitude, and remain untroubled by hunters, they might eventually become quite stationary in their complacence, and live like potentates.

We were only three people, but three hundred or even three thousand could not have exhausted that part of the country. For mile after mile and hour after hour we traveled through open pastures in which life teemed tumultuously. When we tired of turkey we hunted deer. When we tired of deer we ate rabbit. When we lacked for sweetness we found honey. When water tasted dull we sucked the juice from wild apples. And when we tired of eating and drinking altogether we had entertainments of other kinds. In the warm daytime, enormous flocks of cranes sailed overhead and cried down to us, encouraging us on our way; in the evening foxes and opossums appeared beside the trail to watch us ride past, and wondered what kind of friend we might be to them. The change from everything we had seen with Talks to the Wind was so marked, I felt I had entered an entirely new world, rather than a different chamber of the one I already knew.

When we had glutted ourselves in this way for a week or more, and thought our adventures would never present us with any more obstacles because the whole of America had become our garden, the Rider told us our progress would shortly become difficult again. I asked him how he knew, and he said he remembered stories from earlier days—from the time he had lived in the east—which I took to mean that we would soon have to endure a few days of drought or some such inconvenience.

But it was not another desert that faced us when we reached the end of our land of plenty; it was the opposite. An even greater abundance of trees and plants. Laurels mostly, that first grew in small clumps and then joined into a continuous forest, with some specimens as wide as barns, and others the height of church towers. Although we were pleased to have some shade after the days spent riding in the open, we were also very frustrated to find ourselves so impeded. The branches cut our bare arms and legs, which were not protected by our Indian clothes, and slashed our faces. They frightened us too, as invisible creatures scuttled from their lairs or eyed us from the shadows, making me think our enemies had caught up with us again, and were about to take their revenge.

“How long will this last?” I called to the Rider after a few difficult hours; he was now leading us in single file and did not look round, but lifted aside another whippy branch and then ducked forward.

“In our stories we called it the Thicket,” he said. “We used that word. In English.”

“The Thicket?” I repeated. “That doesn't sound very bad. A thicket isn't very bad.”

“It might not be,” he said, shielding his face from a new onslaught of twigs. “We shall find out.”

I thought this sounded a little melodramatic, but the difficulties of moving forward were now so great I let it go, concentrating instead on ducking and dodging, but nevertheless making slow progress until the sun began to set at last, and we found ourselves beside a colossal old laurel tree that had grown into a dome-shape, with a ceiling of intricate interlaced branches.

Here we tethered our ponies and made our fire and ate, and here we lay down to sleep when the first stars began to peer between the leaves. The sense of protection was so great, and the quiet so profound (once the birds had finished saying goodnight to one another), that as I closed my eyes I thought perhaps the Rider had been pessimistic. The Thicket, I told myself, was certainly a hindrance but we had survived worse; it would annoy us again tomorrow, then it would be gone.

I was still confident next morning when we continued on our way. In fact after a mile or two I began to think our ordeal might be over sooner than I expected, because the spaces between the trees had gradually become wider, and the way ahead more obvious. Just when I was about to say as much, the Rider held up a hand and brought us to a halt; we stood in a little glade, our ponies breathing heavily.

I could see at once that far from being about to leave the Thicket we were in fact about to enter it; everything we had fought through to this point was only a preparation. There was no trail whatsoever in front of us now—no trail, no track, not even the smallest winding path. Just a confused mass of leaves and tree trunks and branches all coiling together and looping through one another's arms and plaiting and matting and interweaving. To make matters worse these were ghost-trees, permanently enveloped in a swirl of mist and steam and dew and raindrops and fog.

Natty was the first to break our silence. “Is there a way round?” she asked the Rider. The conversation between them now was always plain and direct.

The Rider shrugged. “Our stories did not say.”

“You mean they don't mention it, or there isn't one?”

“They said there was no way round,” said the Rider. “They told us the Thicket runs all the way to the sea.”

“That means to the south,” she said. “What happens to the north?

“It runs all the way,” said the Rider.

“All the way where? To the North Pole? That's not possible.”

“It is our story, Miss Natty.” The Rider sounded a little crestfallen, as though he had been caught out in a lie. But he was not backing down.

“And what does common sense say?” Natty went on. “How long would it take, do you think, if we went to the north?”

She was so impatient now, I thought the Rider might refuse to answer. But he shrugged. “A week?”

“A week is no time,” I said. “We should definitely go round; we should go to the north.”

Natty wanted none of this. “A week!” she said. “A whole week!” and began urging her pony forward. “We will never get where we want, if we delay any more. We should stick where we are; look what we've come through already.”

She pushed past me and I tried to grab her arm, but she slipped away. “No, Jim,” she said, moving alongside the Rider and facing toward the Thicket. The trees breathed at her, their mist seeming more like fire than moisture; like smouldering, greenish fire; like wet flames.

There is no way through, I told myself again—and began turning aside to change our direction. But Natty saw this and would not follow. She suddenly pounded her heels into her pony and made him dash straight ahead. A little charge: five strides, six, seven, then she disappeared.

The mist billowed and settled again.

A bird screeched, then stopped.

And that was all; she had gone.

“Natty!” I shouted, but the trees turned my voice into water.

“Natty!” I called again.

“She will not come back,” said the Rider. He was astonished but also angry—because he knew what must happen next. I knew as well, but I did not accept it. Not until he beckoned to me and I came up beside him. Not until we nodded to one another, and the trees seemed to inch a fraction apart, and we rode forward together, and the mist swallowed us.

In this way began the strangest part of all my travels, when I had never felt so much at a loss. Everywhere I turned I found the same wandering smoke-trails, the same drifting steam, the same rubbery bowls of fungus, the same drip-drop of moisture, the same trickles of dew, the same muffling, the same halting, the same warm leaves slapping my face, the same groping and stumbling, the same slithering into slimy holes and bogs, the same suffocation.

“Natty!” I kept shouting continually. “Natty! Natty! Natty!” And always I heard my voice soak away from me, or else meander among the shifting lights, weakening as the echoes multiplied. This only made me shout more wildly. “Natty! Natty!” But it made no difference. There was another soft submergence and—if any answer at all—giggles and prattles and screams from the invisible birds that perched overhead in the invisible canopy.

“Here,” said the Rider at last; he was still close beside me and pointing forward, the moisture gleaming along his finger.

I saw no trace of Natty anywhere, just more tree-ghosts flouncing and flirting.

“On the ground,” said the Rider. “You see?”

He leaned out from his pony and touched a monstrous old tree trunk sprawling beside him.

I looked harder, wiping my eyes.

A dab of dew had been brushed away from the bark. And another, on the next tree. And there on the spongy ground was a run of black hoof prints.

I turned to the Rider to thank him but he did not notice; he was leaning forward over his pony's shoulder, examining the marks more clearly and deciding to follow them.

And follow them we did for the next…the next few minutes I want to say, except time ran so strangely I could not measure it. For as long as it took, that is all I can say. For the next little bewilderment, in which my existence was made of water-gurgles, and bird-trickles, and moss-slaps, and the suck of our ponies' hooves as they plunged through the sopping ground.

I knew we would find Natty eventually; I felt sure the Rider would manage it. And I thought when we set eyes on her again she would seem like a wraith, then turn back to herself as we approached. In fact it was much more sudden than that. One minute we were squeezing through a gap where a great whoosh of moss had leaked into a silvery trunk and made it glow death-pale; the next we found her in a small clearing at a standstill. Her pony was grazing and she seemed at ease, with sunbeams lancing through the mist and sparkling the dew on her hair.