Death in the Pines (11 page)

“So would you say we are surrounded by nature?”

“I might.”

“And you know that in the distance are roads, houses, and cities, stores and businesses.” She paused. “Telephone poles and electric wires. Airplanes. Cars.”

“Yes.”

“Imagine that none of those things actually exist. There is only this nature, this wilderness, and it covers the entire world, each climate and place different. Forests give way to savannas, jungles huddle against mountains, volcanoes steam and rumble, the seas wash the shores of islands, but nowhere is there anything built by humans.”

“OK.” It wasn't easy, but I tried.

After a moment she said, “Now it is a later time. Now there are people out there, small clans who move from place to place and live in tepees or mud homes or even in caves. It would take a week to walk between one settlement and another. We are here but we are, in any meaningful sense, alone.”

“Adam and Eve,” I said.

She rocked her right hand side to side in her “no” gesture. “We are not the first people. There have always been people of one sort or another, and there always will be people. But none of them are here now. Here there are only you and me, and perhaps a few of our relatives are a day's walk away. And all around is this that you call nature. Now can you imagine that?”

I gazed downhill, and in my imagination the road that had been bulldozed through the forest and around the hills filled in with vegetation, went back to woods. My car vanished. Route 12 vaporized and the trees reclaimed it. The houses turned to mist and drifted away. I envisioned the whole state of Vermont reverting to wilderness, and saw the wilderness spread across all of New England and Eastern Canada, and before it went a green wave that swallowed nearly all the humans and every trace of modern life. “I can imagine that.”

“See the entire world in its primal state.” Her voice sounded joyful, like someone remembering a happy time.

And so I did, letting the wild spread over the continent, then over the planet: cities, roads, airports all vanishing, millions of people evaporating. The world was as it had been twenty thousand years ago. And then a terrible solitude gripped me and I said, “We're alone.”

“Yes.”

I had an absurd moment of existential panic, as though I had somehow, by an act of will and imagination, erased all of modern civilization. I glanced up at the pieces of sky I could see between bare interlacing limbs, hoping to see a jet or at least a vapor trail, but I looked into a blue abyss.

“You are feeling how it would be if you had really made the world of men vanish,” she said simply.

“It feels very lonely,” I replied. I felt a curious division: part of me was five years old and worried about stepping on a crack and breaking my mother's back, and the other was a detective, an adult who looked at my childish fears and smirked, hiding his own concerns.

“Now how will we survive?” Sylvia asked suddenly. “We need food, shelter, warmth, medicine, tools.”

“We could hunt.”

“With no guns or technology. You are born naked. Your parents must make your clothing from the stuff the world around us provides, the world you call nature.”

“We could make spears. Bows and arrows.”

“What would you hunt? Where are the animals you would hunt?”

She made me acutely aware that for some time I had heard no bird sounds, no crows. No chatter of chipmunks. “I don't know. We'd have to go find them.”

“What if there are not enough animals for us to find? Not enough to keep us alive for the winter?”

“Dig for roots,” I suggested. “Find what kinds of bark we can eat, things like that.”

“And if there is not enough of that?”

“Then we'd starve.” I tried to say it lightly, brushing off a hypothetical problem, but in my stomach I felt a knot of
certainty: without game or any other source of food, I might live a few weeks, but I didn't have a lot of stored fat. In a matter of a month or less I would die. Nothing moved anywhere around us. I couldn't see anything that looked remotely edible.

Sylvia whispered, “Yes, we would starve.” She gave me that intense brown gaze of hers again. “If we have no hope, we could walk for three days to my family's camp. They will share their food with us. They will never withhold food, though they have enough only for themselves. We would then all starve, though we might prolong our own lives for a few weeks.”

“If it came to that,” I said, “I would say we shouldn't find your people and take what little they have just to gain a few more days of life.”

“Why?”

I struggled to find the words, but settled for “It wouldn't be a kind thing to do.”

“No,” she agreed. She let the silence stretch out. I wondered why she was putting me through this exercise, but it had become clear that if she had anything to teach me, she would instruct me only on her own terms. I sank into her silence, but I kept looking around, wondering how long it would be before a squirrel or wild turkey or deer would wander into sight. If I saw such a creature, then the speculation meant nothing. There would be a source of food, a source of life.

But what if there really was nothing to eat? When I was a teenager, I had read the Lewis and Clark diaries. According to them, once deer roamed the forests and fields in herds that numbered into the thousands. Now spotting one beside the road was enough to thrill a van full of tourists. I had heard that nine out of every ten Vermont hunters came home empty-handed every November.

“If this forest,” Sylvia suddenly broke in, “were our supermarket, our only food supply, what would be the most important thing we could do with it?”

“Conserve it.”

“What do you mean?”

The chill had seeped into my legs, and I was shivering. I wondered how she could seem so comfortable, dressed as lightly as she was. “We'd … take only what we needed, and we'd leave behind everything else. To reproduce, to increase, so it would be there later for us, for our children.”

“Yes. That is the imperative of noninterference. That is the first law of … conscious nature. The part of nature that exercises free will. Animals.”

“The imperative of noninterference,” I repeated. “When the white man came, he found plains filled with buffalo, forests rich with herds of deer, enormous flocks of wild turkeys, streams so full of fish that the water itself seemed alive. The settlers thought the Native Americans were stupid, letting all those resources go to waste. But it wasn't wasted was it? That was the stock ready to go on the shelves of your supermarket.”

“Not just theirs,” she said. “It supplied food for all living things, not just humans. If you had enough and made sure there was always some excess, then when hard times came you would be ready. And you must not interfere. That is most important. When humans interfere with the cycles of nature, with the life of the world, you distort the way things are, pervert the intent of the Creator.”

“And what about farming?” I asked. “Clear some forest, grow corn, beans, whatever.”

“Some of the early people did this,” Sylvia acknowledged. “Others thought it was a violation of the law of noninterference. When people became totally dependent on the things they
grew, they created a terrible imbalance. Their food increased, and they multiplied. They took the forests and changed them into more human beings, but hunger begets hunger, and they began to eat the world around them. They needed always more land and more, and so they fought other humans to take their land, to remove their competition for food. Many among those who grew and stored food died in battle.”

“But those who hunted and gathered didn't fight wars?”

“Not often, except when the farmers attacked them, or when there were huge, terrible changes in weather that forced them to move hundreds of miles to search for food. But as a rule they lived and died in the hands of the gods, surrendering themselves to the ways of the Earth, even during times of drought or famine. It is more correct, more … more noble, you might say, to surrender to necessity and die than to interfere.”

“That's a tough law, that noninterference law.”

She did not seem to hear me. “It holds even with your own family, maybe especially with them. Never interfere. That is the reason many Native Americans even today will not offer advice or tell you how you should live. If you ask them to advise you, you make them uncomfortable. Many avoid advising you by telling you stories instead.”

“Even Jesus used parables to teach wisdom.” A childhood Methodist memory floated into my mind, and I quoted, “ ‘And He taught them in parables.' He told them … not to ‘gather up food in barns.'”

“Yes,” Sylvia said, and then we lapsed back into silence. It was easy to imagine that her fantasy was true, that we were the only humans for miles around in a world still in its natural state. But what was interference, really? Where was the boundary? I asked, “Is it interference to build a tepee or to drag
dried grass into a cave to sleep on? Is it interference to fell trees and build a cabin?”

She tilted her right hand back and forth. “Birds build nests, bears have their dens. To have a home is not interference, but the way of nature, with humans as with the other people.”

“Yet we should walk lightly upon the Earth.”

She looked pleased. “That is a good thing to say.”

“And many are trying to do it. They tell us we must preserve the wilderness so future generations will have it.”

“No, that is arrogance,” she said. “It is not good if people believe the world is here only for them. It is not good to save it only so their children can use it.” She gave me a challenging look. “Tell me, do you believe that all creation has been made only for humans?”

The sun had climbed higher, and though I was still numb, shafts of sunlight were at least providing an illusion of warmth. I thought for a minute and then said, “I guess I don't see much difference. Either the world is here for us to use, or else we've claimed it all for our use. It's the same either way.”

She grunted, frowned in thought, and then said, “You know there are people who believe that everyone else is out to harm them?”

“Paranoids.”

“Paranoids. It is a kind of … illness of the mind.”

“Yes. They have delusions.”

“Have you ever known such a person?”

“Yes.” I wiggled my left toes, feeling through the cold the pull of the scar tissue. “There was a Turkish man in Germany who had built up a kind of criminal empire. His name was Ahmed, and though there were plenty of people who wouldn't have minded him dying, he really did think that everyone was trying to kill him. He kidnapped a woman from
America, and her company hired John Lincoln and me to get her back.”

“And did you?”

I tasted the sour tang of bile, remembering the glissando of Ahmed's screams when he plunged out of the hotel window and impaled himself on a spear held by a monumental bronze statue in the courtyard below. “I got her back.”

She stared at me, and when I did not meet her gaze, she said, “You killed him.”

“Indirectly.”

“And you did it to save someone else.”

“That's part of what I do. Or what I used to do.”

She rocked back and forth, making a soft cooing noise in her throat, like a mother comforting a child. “And how was this man's world, this Ahmed's world, constructed? Was he at the center of it?”

“Yes, he was,” I said, glimpsing her intention. “Ahmed simply assumed that everything everyone did was because of him. I'd say he thought of himself as not just the center of his world, but of the real world, the whole world.”

“And that is a mental illness. But how is it different from thinking that everything in the world is made just for you?”

“At least looking on the world as something made for people is positive, not negative.”

“It is the same perception. Remember what I said about how the individual squirrels are still Squirrel? The individual humans are Human. And if Human thinks the world is made for Human, then everyone is sharing the illness.”

My bones were aching from cold. “That's one way of looking at it. But what does this have to do with Jeremiah Smith?”

“The knowledge I offer you is at the center of it all.” She glanced downhill, in the direction of the river. “People are
suffering a delusion, a mental illness. The whole world is for them, the whole universe is created only for them. They are insane, and they will kill those who do not agree to their insanity, those who have wakened from the delusion and the dream.”

She seemed to want me to say something. I said, “I read once a story about the Buddha. Someone asked him if he were a god, and he said no. ‘Then are you an angel?' He still said no. ‘Then what are you?' And he said, ‘I am awake.'”

“He was a wise man.”

“I guess he was. Are you telling me that Jeremiah was killed because he was—was spiritually enlightened?”

“Was he martyred, you mean? No. But he was, as you say, awake. Some people dream they are awake, but they still are dreaming. Others really do awaken.”

“Lucid dreaming,” I said. “I've had that a few times, mostly when I was a kid. You're half awake, but still asleep enough to dream and to direct yourself in the dream. I used to fly.”

She smiled and laid a hand on my knee, not affectionately, but just as though she felt we had to make contact. “Yes,” she said softly. “In my dreams I become a bird when I'm awake-while-dreaming.”

“No, not a bird,” I said as she removed her hand with a sudden self-consciousness. “I'm still human. I used to fly like Superman.”

“It is better as a bird,” she said. “You would like it. Other than the predator birds like owls, most see from the sides of their heads, like deer, and their vision is sharp. They see more of the world than you do.” She sighed. “Prey animals see almost the whole world. Predators only look straight ahead. Humans look straight ahead. Try being a bird. It lets you see the world differently.”