The New World (13 page)

I welcomed this idea very gladly, and when he finished speaking I knelt down and took a deep gulp from the current, then wiped my face and neck and arms. When I had finished this baptism, or perhaps I should call it an absolution, I climbed onto my pony and trotted to catch up with Natty, who had already turned away with Hoopoe walking beside her. When we reached the boundary of the village we looked back to find that everyone we had left behind, including the oldest grandmother and the youngest child, had formed themselves into a fan-shape with White Feather at the center and their right hands raised above their heads. We made the same salute, then quickly turned away. If I had looked for a moment longer I do not think my resolve to leave would have weakened, but I am sure my last sight would have been less firm and clear, with my friends all flickering as though they might soon disappear from the face of the earth.

Because our ponies had grown fat during our stay in the village, they puffed and labored heavily as we rode forward, and soon broke into a sweat; Hoopoe, on the other hand, slid alongside us very easily, as if he was our shadow. For the first few miles we passed through familiar places—our hunting-grounds, which I knew as well as my own skin—and felt the breeze like the warmth of my own breath. I had never enjoyed them so much because I knew I would never see them again, and the three of us talked fondly together, as good companions will do, when they know they must soon go their separate ways.

I suppose Hoopoe relaxed like this because he did not want us to think Black Cloud might be anywhere near. But at the same time, and very urgently, he insisted we must never divert from the route he ordered us to follow. He told us that if we continued due east, always keeping the sun on our faces in the morning and at our back in the afternoon, we would eventually come to a large river, the largest of all rivers, a miniature rolling sea, where a boat would carry us south and bring us to a town full of others like ourselves. Here we would find another boat to take us back to England.

He spoke of these things, and especially of the city that would be our salvation, as a true believer might speak of heaven—with reverence and awe. He had not seen it with his own eyes, and had never met anyone else who had been there, but he knew it existed. We must be watchful, that was all; if we were watchful we would be safe, and we would reach our goal.

By the time we felt reassured to this extent, Hoopoe had kept us company for much longer than the hour he first promised, and we had reached a part of the country that was unknown even to him. If I had not suggested otherwise, I think he would have stayed with us for several miles more, because he did not want to reach the point of farewell. But in my first and final challenge to him, and as a sign of my self-confidence, I ordered him to turn back and be sure of reaching the village before nightfall. After a little resistance he relented, and Natty and I dismounted to say good-bye.

I will not linger over this scene, except to say that it forced me to squeeze together a whole range of ideas about what sorts of affection existed between us. It was friendship, certainly, a deep friendship, but not of the kind I might have made at home, with intimacies exchanged, and confidences passed between us, and a great mutual familiarity. In certain respects I felt Hoopoe was quite unknowable to me because of the differences between us. Yet I am sure we felt an unusual bond of trust, as well as interest.

When the moment came we did not even try to speak to one another but simply embraced in silence, then stood close together while our ponies browsed among the grasses, and the wind complained through the thorn bushes. I remember looking down and noticing that some of the paint from his body had transferred itself onto my hands; I did not wipe it off for a long time afterward.

Hoopoe then invoked the Great Spirit to guard us on our way, calling us by our Indian names for the last time, Little Bear and Running Bear, then rolled his head and looked straight up to heaven, which made the veins bulge in his neck as the blood pumped through them. I stared at these signs of life for a moment because they seemed very precarious. Then I also threw back my head and stared at the sky, and saw a large flock of white birds, seagulls no doubt, glittering like salt as they made their way to the coast. When I straightened again Hoopoe was already a hundred yards off. He moved fast and straight as an arrow, sometimes leaping over low shrubs, until he disappeared.

Natty was suddenly bustling and efficient. “We must find a camp for the night,” she said, collecting our ponies.

I took hold of the halter-rein she gave me, and tried to speak in the same way, to prove that despite the sadness of our parting I did not mind us being alone again. “We need to find…” I began, and meant to add “shelter” or some such word, but gave up as I looked around me. Red rock, red earth, and green scrub unrolling to the horizon on every side. It was beautiful, I could see that, but endless. Terrible in its scale and monotony. Terrible also in seeming to mock all the advice Hoopoe had given us. Keep riding east. The word “east,” the idea of east, did not seem large enough to survive in such a wilderness.

And yet for the next hour or so we rode as Hoopoe had instructed us, with the sun sinking at our backs, and our shadows stretching before us until they had reached a really extravagant length. Sometimes we reminded one another of what we hoped to find at the end of our journey. Always we chose not to speak of things we had left behind. And eventually, as though it had been prepared for us by Hoopoe, we found a place to rest among several large boulders that seemed to have been carried here and rolled together by giants—the land around them was bare except for a stubble of soft grass.

“Will he have reached the village yet?” Natty asked. By now we had tethered our ponies and watered and fed them, and made a fire to cook the meat we had brought with us. Darkness had fallen, but the moon and stars burned so fiercely, the stones around us seemed almost luminous.

“Oh, yes,” I replied. “He'll fly home.”

“He's Hoopoe.”

“Exactly, he's Hoopoe.”

“Will they miss us, do you think?” Natty poked a stick into our fire so the flames jumped up; she was frowning.

Now I could not keep the sadness out of my voice, because I missed our friends. “Why do you ask?”

She stared at her food without eating. “We could have brought them with us,” she said.

“What?” I said, pushing away my own plate. “All of them?”

“Hoopoe. Whoever wanted to come.”

“Bring them to England?”

“Why not? It's been done before.”

“But they belong here,” I said. “They wouldn't survive anywhere else. In London? Imagine it, Natty.”

“I'm trying to,” she said. “After all, we don't belong here but we're managing.”

“We are?”

“Look at us,” said Natty. I thought this hardly proved her point, seeing how poor we were and undefended, but kept quiet.

“Anyway,” Natty continued, “we were happy there. We made a home with them. Why shouldn't they make a home with us?”

“It's not the same,” I told her. “We needed their protection. They don't need ours, even supposing we could give it.”

Natty laughed. “But they do! If not now, then very soon.”

“From Black Cloud?” I said, but knew he was not all she meant.

“Yes, from Black Cloud,” she said. “And from others like ourselves.” She was speaking quietly now, as if she thought there might be ears listening in the darkness. But during the pause that followed I could only hear wind breathing over the baked ground, and a night-hawk screaming as it floated along the currents.

“We didn't choose to be here,” I said, in the same hushed voice.

“Nevertheless,” Natty said. “We're part of it.” She jabbed her stick into the fire again and a fountain of sparks rushed upward, with a few landing in the grass near where I was sitting; I soon patted them out.

I could not think how to answer this, and the longer our silence lasted, the more difficult it was to break.

“I could leave it here,” I said eventually. “I could throw it away or bury it.”

I did not need to explain that I was talking about the necklace, and Natty answered immediately. “We've decided, Jim,” she said. “That's too late as well.”

“We took it together,” I said.

“I know,” Natty said. “But if you left it here, and Black Cloud never found it, that wouldn't change anything. We took it, and that's that. We stole it.”

I reached out to touch her, and she squeezed my hand briefly, then let go. “Is that what you think now?” she said. “That we made a mistake?”

I did not answer this, but instead delved into my satchel and pulled out the necklace, polishing it quickly with my hand before holding it toward the firelight. The silver sprang to life at once, as though the air allowed the animals to breathe, and stretch, and snap at one another. When we had admired it for a moment, and Natty had run her fingers over the carvings, and lifted one of the pieces to remind herself of its weight, I slipped it back into my satchel. Neither of us spoke, not while we looked, and not when the necklace disappeared again. As we continued in silence, watching the flames gnaw at the sticks of our fire, and the different temperatures of the embers regard us with differently colored eyes, neither of us could see how to take our thoughts any further. We were thieves, we knew that, but we could not feel it in our hearts. If one of us was damned, so was the other.

I stood up and made myself busy, making sure our ponies were securely tethered, packing away the food we had not eaten, throwing more sticks on the fire, then shaking out my blanket and lying down to sleep. Natty, meanwhile, remained staring into the flames, her shoulders hunched, her Indian dress gleaming darkly in the firelight. I gazed at her, and although she did not return my look, I knew that our minds were very close.

Next morning we made no mention of these things, but ate our breakfast in silence, dowsed our fire, and removed all trace of our camp as though we expected Black Cloud would soon search for us here. Then we put the sun in our eyes, which was our only way to feel sure we were on the right path, and rode into the empty day. And the next. And the next. Perhaps for a week, perhaps two. It is difficult for me to remember, because we were soon exhausted by the sway and stumble of our ponies; by the dazzle and heat; by the wind as it whined or shuffled or rushed through the bushes; by the flat land repeating itself, or bringing us to a little ridge where the dust danced around us in spirals; by the sense of time sweeping around us like water that renewed itself endlessly, and never cared if we noticed or not.

In the midst of this desolation, the least interruption became momentous. When the breeze rose a notch, and blew strongly enough to roll a bundle of thorn alongside me for a few yards, it seemed like a great event. When a crow perched on a cactus and cocked its head to one side, and cawed at me as if to introduce himself personally, it became a thing to ponder for hours.

Eventually, just before sunset on the seventh day (unless it was the fourteenth, or the hundredth), we found something even more extraordinary. After mile upon mile of no trees, a small copse of alders, growing in a hollow of the ground about fifty yards across. Natty and I dismounted and led our ponies between the trunks without even consulting one another; when we lay down on the bed of dead leaves we could not imagine ourselves in greater safety.

We dozed for a while, an hour maybe, and were beginning to think about making our supper, when I heard a murmur in the sky to the west, which I thought must be another flock of gulls returning to the coast. I crept to the edge of our shelter to get a clearer view, and saw at once that the birds flying toward us were not gulls but smaller, with gray-blue backs and wings and russet breasts.

But it was not their colors or their size that made me stop and stare. It was their numbers. For they were gathered into such gigantic flocks they had almost obliterated the setting sun. Clouds, in fact, would be a better word than flocks—clouds that continually broke apart and joined again, sometimes surging upward in a billowing mass, sometimes sinking toward the earth and crashing through shrubs and bushes, stripping whatever food they could find there.

Then Natty came up beside me and we heard them, the murmur of wings becoming a rush, the rush becoming a roar, the roar turning to thunder, and the thunder breaking into a cacophony of coos and whistles and squeals and flutters and flaps and scratches and scrapes when the first arrivals landed overhead. As the weight of bodies began to accumulate, the trees began to collapse, snapping and splintering with more and more birds fighting for space. Hundreds of birds. Thousands of birds. And thousands more arriving all the time. Millions of birds. All whizzing and whistling as they rubbed together, their feet scrabbling, their wings clapping and colliding and fluttering.

By now I had grabbed Natty by the hand, shooing birds out of my way, battering them, shouting that we must collect our things and our ponies, and quick, quick, get them out of the wood before they panicked and broke away.

They did not panic. They rolled their eyes and snorted and tugged at their reins, but they came with us, then let us climb onto their backs again and ride off with our heads bowed down because a hundred, five hundred, a thousand more birds were still swirling toward us, aiming at us apparently, diving at us with their wings extended on their final glide, until we reached open ground and turned round to watch how it ended.

With branches snapping inside the wood like gunfire, and these broken spars and timbers all turning white as the birds relieved themselves, the wood was no longer a wood but a snow-field. But still with more birds arriving. An enormous scarf of them stretching all the way to the horizon, wavering and undulating and blackening. Flesh and blood, feathers and bone, and all as fluid as pouring grain, cascading into a store that could not possibly hold such a quantity. Any more, I thought, and the wood will explode, what remains of the wood, and we will be showered with feathers and leaves and bones and bark and claws and beaks and little shining eyes.

Yet I still could not turn away, not until the last light had faded from the sky, and the last few thousand birds had squeezed into their places, and the whole immense flock had finished its arguments and conversations, its greetings and goodnights, and fallen asleep. Quite suddenly, in a second or two. Fast asleep. A moment later, and the silence of the wilderness rolled back. A silence that felt complete and boundless, but in fact was stitched together with sounds belonging to other, quieter creatures, which knew the tempest had subsided, and now they could continue with their own more secretive lives.