Death in the Pines

by Thom Hartmann

  “I’ve heard that life on Earth goes through periods of great extinctions,” I said. “We’re seeing another one begin.”

  She shook her head. “Over the last seventy million years, perhaps one species went extinct every four or five years, but other species would replace them. The last time so many unique species were lost was when the great dinosaurs died. The world came close to losing all its life then.”

  “How do you know all this?” I asked. “You say you don’t use a telephone. Have you been educated? Did you go to college?”

  She looked at me in silence. Outside I heard a crow’s harsh complaint and the answering chatter of a chipmunk. A log shifted in the stove and I could hear Sylvia’s slow breathing, the same rhythm as her rocking chair. Dust motes floated in the slanting rays of sun coming through the east-facing window. She said slowly and with a faint tremor in her voice, “My people hear the screams and feel the pain of those who die.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  She looked at the rug again. “Your scientists say that there have been five great extinctions on this planet since life began. We have entered the sixth.” She glanced back at me. “I have not been to college. I learned this from Jeremiah Smith.” She took a deep breath. “When these great deaths occur, those at the top of the pyramid of life, those who have stolen, exploited, and hoarded, will die too.”

  “Us?”

  She nodded. “And that is why you must promise me. Will you promise to do all you can to revive and awaken the Mother?”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “Mother Earth.”

  “I’m not sure what I can do.” The pan on the stove made a little clatter as the water began to boil. A faint haze of steam floated above it, causing a rainbow sheen as the prismatic droplets split the sun into its component colors. “I’d be willing to promise, but one man can’t—”

  “That will come later,” she said. “But now you must promise.”

  “OK, I promise to do what I can. Although I’m still not sure what that means.” I frowned. “Are you—are you trying to hire me? You want me to take on a job as bodyguard to the Earth?”

  I’m not sure, but I believe she smiled. “Something like that.”

  I had to smile too. “There are hundreds, thousands of people dedicated to saving the world, and some have millions of dollars. What can I do that they can’t?”

  She stood up and walked to the door, pushed it open, just a few inches, but far enough to spill in the cold air. I felt it on my cheeks and hands. She stared through the crack as if seeing something in the remote distance. “This is not about saving. Those people will fail because they are trying to save something. There is nothing to save.”

  “Then I don’t understand.”

  “No.” Her glance had that almost physical impact. I felt it in my chest and stomach. “You are trapped because you think the same way they do and view the world as they do. You must change first. You are, are—deaf, blind, lame. You must cure yourself first, and then you can help.”

  “Now I’m really confused.”

  She pushed the door wide open, went across the porch and down the three steps onto the snow. “Get a blanket. Put on your coat. Follow me.”

  WWHDTD? I suspected that Henry David would have serenely followed such a guide, perhaps to the surprise of his stodgier friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. Well, hell, I’d been patting myself on the back not so long before, seeing myself as a Thoreau for the twenty-first century. So I pulled my jacket from its peg and reached for the top blanket on the bed. Before my hand closed on it, the cell phone chimed in its charger and I picked it up to answer.

  “Oakley Tyler,” I said, not recognizing the number.

  “Jerry Smith,” he said. His voice sounded unsteady. “I’m at the office, at my paper. Look, I need to talk with you about your investigating my grandfather’s death.”

  “When?”

  I heard him sigh. “I can meet you in Montpelier. The diner at the corner of State and Main. I need some time to clear my desk. Noon?”

  “If I’m not there at the stroke, wait for me.”

  “No problem. You’ll find me there.”

  I grabbed the green wool army blanket and draped it over my shoulder. Then something made me leave the phone connected to its charger, though the battery should have already been full. Somehow I did not think that Sylvia, or Henry David, would approve of it. I stepped out into the freezing morning air.

  11

  Sylvia was walking away from me, into the forest. The sky arched a deep clear blue overhead. Above the treetops I made out the distant shape of Burnt Mountain, twenty miles east of us, looking as if it were no more than a mile away: the air was so cold that the moisture had frozen out of it, leaving it as deceptively transparent as the air of the high desert.

  I floundered a little when we hit a series of drifts, but ahead of me Sylvia didn’t even seem to notice the change in snow depth. She walked on, surefooted, not even sinking into the snow, not even crunching the crust as I did. Her walk had that lithe fluidity of a Native American, taking all the weight on the whole foot, not coming down heel-first and punching through as I did. And I doubted that she weighed more than a hundred pounds, a lot less than my one-eighty.

  Though the air felt well below zero, the sun was warm on my face. She led me through hardwood growth and around a stand of pines until we came to the same outcrop of rocks where I’d first met her. She stopped and said, “Spread out the blanket. We’ll sit on it.”

  I did as she asked and she sat, facing the river, somewhere down there below us. I knocked snow from my boots and sat beside her, cross-legged. I could smell the deer hide she wore, the odor bringing me images of a night forest, animals panting from having run a long way, a fawn nuzzling her mother’s teats, eager for the warm milk.

  Sylvia sat quiet and immobile, her breath slow, spine straight, gazing ahead at the treetops down the slope, where the forest floor slanted down to the river. I wanted to talk, but I didn’t think she’d welcome that. I began to shiver. Here the trees shaded us, and I missed the warm touch of the sun.

  After what might have been two or three minutes, though it seemed longer, she said softly, “Do you see what is around you?”

  I kept my voice as low as hers: “I see the forest. I see some places where the snow has drifted or melted and the ground shows through. I see where the snowmelt froze over there, making a little rivulet of ice. I can’t see the river, though I think I can hear it under the ice.”

  “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?”