The New World

by Andrew Motion

  It was like all bees’ nests, which I had sometimes seen before in England, but a marvelous thing nonetheless, with little compartments all very intricately made, and ten or a dozen bees wading among them as if they were drowning in sweetness.

  Then the next part of our labor began. One of the men had brought with him a satchel filled with leaves, and these were used to wrap a section of the honeycomb, so that we could take it back to the village as a treat. The remaining piece Hoopoe gripped in both hands (while several bees continued to fly about, as if tethered to their home by invisible strings), ordering us to stand behind him so that he could inspect the clearing and find what he needed.

  This was a hollow log lying among the ferns, a trunk that had fallen years before and lost all its branches as well as most of its core. Once Hoopoe had led us to inspect this apparently useless object, which was about fifteen feet long and four in diameter, he told us to drag it toward the center of the clearing, remove all the remaining fragments of wood, fungi, beetles and other bugs from the inside, block the narrower end with branches, then deposit the half-honeycomb near the center of the tunnel, making sure we left a trail that led into the open air.

  As we did this I understood we were making a trap for our bear and baiting it. Less clear was how we would kill him, once we had managed to lure him in the first place. But I did not like to ask Hoopoe and he did not bother to explain. From the expression on his face, which was perfectly grave and yet mischievous at the same time, I knew he was absorbed in a sort of game, and preferred it to remain mysterious.

  I had plenty of time to imagine how it might be resolved. For once our preparations were finished, and the honey carefully installed, and the trail laid, we retreated from the clearing into the undergrowth, where Hoopoe told us to cover ourselves with fern leaves and to lie down as quietly as possible for as long as necessary.

  He said this while throwing a suspicious glance toward me and Natty as though he doubted our ability to do as he asked, which of course made us all the more determined. I suppose it must have been early afternoon by the time we had finished hiding ourselves, and I suppose it was another two or three hours before we had any reason to stir, and for that long time I do not think I have ever made less noise in my life. When spiders tiptoed into my nostrils I did not so much as wrinkle my nose. When ants decided to investigate my ears I did not mind. When a tickle began to torment my leg, and grew until it became a sort of mania, I ignored it—and so eventually drove it away. Natty was the same. Although she was no more than a foot away from me, she kept so silent she might have been in England; I did not even hear her breathe.

  But I did hear, when the softer light of evening began to sink through the wood, and the songs of birds around us changed from occasional warbles into the more united chorus of boasts and warnings and farewells that occur everywhere in the world at such a time, another sound that made my heart catch in my throat. At first it was very faint, a low rumbling or groaning, such as an old man might make when his joints ache and he thinks no one is nearby to hear him complain. Then the noise grew and developed a note that had less objection in it and more appetite, like the sound a hungry man might make while rubbing his stomach because he expects there will soon be food on the table.

  This told me our prize must be close, so I allowed myself the smallest degree of curiosity. I lifted my head a fraction. I opened my eyes a crack. And I saw at a distance of seven or eight yards a bear shoving his way through the ferns and into the clearing, then pausing to sniff the air for a moment before shambling forward again to inspect the trail of honey that glittered at the entrance of our trap.

  I had seen drawings of bears before this, and real bears fishing in the river, as I have mentioned. But I had never before been so close to one. I felt amazed. Humbled would be a better word. Although only half my height at the shoulder when standing on all fours, the body was enormously thick and weighty, the head rather disproportionately small, and the back parts unfinished-looking and blunt, which is the case with all animals lacking a tail. The coat: the coat was magnificent: a dense tawny mat like soft thatch that trembled with every step and seemed continually to scatter infinite points of light. So were the eyes magnificent: little bronze fires that burned with a passionate disparagement of the world. So were the claws magnificent, curling as yellow as butter among the fur that covered what I should normally have called feet but in fact were gigantic woolly stumps.

  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. H
e 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.

  CHAPTER 16

  Our Second Exodus

  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?