The New Wilderness

by Diane Cook

  Then, on their heels, the horn of the Hunters, which Carl had fashioned out of a rock sheep’s ridged, pearly horn.

  Agnes bounded up, pushed the wet sinew into Jake’s hand. “I did a really good job with this one.”

  “You better have.” He smiled shyly at his palm, where the sinew glistened with her spit.

  The Hunters and Gatherers arrived, and Agnes could see four jackrabbit heads, their limp ears flopping with each step. A deer lay across Juan’s shoulders. Ahead of them Joven walked with his deer, probably so they wouldn’t get spooked from the scent of the dead one.

  Joven’s deer were a mother and juvenile that had recently crept closer to the border of the Community’s camp in the Basin. They were probably looking for protection from predators and were hoping the Community wasn’t one. One morning, Joven went out and fed them pine nuts. He had been told not to, but he didn’t listen, or perhaps he did not want to follow the rule. He was young. He was a Newcomer. He had other ideas.

  The adults had a long meeting about Joven and the wild deer he was feeding, arguing for or against breaking the rules. Some insisted that when they needed the deer for food, it would be a good resource. The deer made Joven happy, and usually he was a somber little boy. But others simply said, “We can’t domesticate wild animals. Even if it’s an accident. We’ll get in so much trouble.” “But they’re already hovering around us,” the pro-deer camp argued. “At what point do they just become ours?” “When we feed them,” said the anti-deer camp. “Well, they’re already fed, so they’re already ours.” The pro-deer camp cheered and the anti-deer camp booed, and they got so loud and angry Carl and Bea had to make a call. They decided to let the deer stay.

  “Our first foray into animal husbandry,” they said, putting on cheerful faces.

  “Which is not why we’re here,” said Debra, the anti-deer camp leader. “This is really bad precedent, people.” She shook her head.

  “Well,” Carl said, “we’re also supposed to be leaving this Basin once in a while, so if you want to follow the rules, why don’t you run along.”

  “Oh, shut up, Carl,” Debra said, and she stepped toward him angrily. But Frank stepped toward her as she did. He was imposing. He somehow got bulkier the longer he was here, rather than waste away as most everyone else had. Debra stepped back. She’d been right, though. Domestication was very against the rules. Even Agnes had read this rule. It was rule number two on the second page of the Manual.

  Now the deer shadowed Joven everywhere while keeping a wary distance from everyone else.

  Joven took the deer round to the sleeping circle, where they munched on sage and then lay next to his bed and curiously nosed the deerskin bedding. They lay their gentle necks over his torso when he slept.

  The Community got to processing what they had brought back. Linda lit the smoker. They’d patched it after the fire. It worked almost as well. Skinners skinned the rabbits, then scraped hides. Carl and the Twins worked on the deer. Carl had the strength to wrestle its bulk, but the Twins had the finesse to work clean in the skinning and gutting and butchering. Everyone could process a deer, but their hides were immaculate and their cuts were beautiful.

  By the middle of the night they’d gotten meat into the smoker. Hides had been scraped, soaked, and stretched before they lost the sun. They made cuts by firelight. They formed a chain of hands to move strips from the fire to the smoker to be hung.

  Then they tumbled into bed, where the smaller children were already asleep.

  At first light, after only a few hours of sleep, five Rangers rode into camp on horseback. They were different Rangers than the one Ranger who had visited before. They wore new uniforms. Gone was the Ranger green. These new uniforms were a watery blue. Crisp white handkerchiefs circled their necks. Their badges were the only thing that announced they were still Rangers, though the Community recognized some of them.

  The Rangers carried rifles, slung over their shoulders. And when they hopped off their horses, they held the rifles up, ready.

  “What’s going on here?” Carl stretched and rubbed his eyes. His words were garbled by a yawn.

  “We’re here to move you off this land,” one of the Rangers said. He was likely the head Ranger. His horse was the tallest one, and he wore a different hat from the others.

  “No, I mean, what’s with the outfits? They’re new.”

  “They’re not outfits. They’re uniforms.”

  “Well, they’re new.”

  “So they are.” The head Ranger stood up a bit taller. It seemed he liked the new look, liked the starchiness of the clothes. His boots were new too.

  “You look like an army.”

  “We have a new mandate.”

  “What’s the mandate?”

  The Rangers gave one another long, meaningful looks. The head Ranger spoke. “That’s classified.”

  “How come?”

  “Because it’s classified.”

  “No, how come you have a new mandate?”

  “There’s a new Administration.”

  “That was fast,” Carl said.

  The Community laughed.

  “Don’t get smart,” the head Ranger said. “You need to move along. As you’ve been told. Repeatedly.”

  “Just once, actually,” said Bea.

  “Once is more than enough. Oh, for fuck’s sake.” The head Ranger’s shoulders fell as he spotted Joven’s deer lying with him in his bed. “What are those?”

  “What are what?” Bea asked. The deer stood up on their twiggy legs and hovered over Joven, who sat up in his bed and rubbed his eyes. They all blinked at the Rangers.

  The head Ranger pointed at the deer. “Those.”

  “Oh, just some deer,” said Bea.

  “They look awfully comfortable around you.”

  “We were just about to get them to shoo.”

  “You’re not supposed to do that.”

  “Do what? Get them to shoo?”

  “Stop it. You’re not supposed to have deer following you around like dogs.”

  The deer stood plucky, their ears taut, as though they knew they were being talked about.

  A bearded Ranger ran at the deer, but they merely bowed their heads.

  The Rangers looked to Carl.

  “It just sort of happened.” Carl shrugged.

  The mother deer bent toward Joven and nuzzled her nose into his clenched fist until he opened it. The deer licked his palm.

  “They do that for the salt,” Joven explained in his small, high voice, his velveteen hair shining in the sun.

  The head Ranger shook his head. He withdrew a pistol from his holster. “You know I have to destroy these.” He turned to Carl. “Unless you want to do it yourself. Are you the head guy around here?”

  Carl scowled.

  Bea stepped up. “I am,” she said.

  “They’re not wild anymore. It’ll give the others the wrong idea,” he said and cocked the pistol. The deer stared steadily at the gun in his hand, hoping it was food. Their big eyes quivered in their sockets, their ears twitched, taking in all the nature around them, all the signs and signals. It looked to Agnes like they were smiling.

  “Jovencito, ven acá rápido, rápido,” Linda hissed, urgently wagging her hand at her side.

  But the head Ranger swiftly strode the few paces to the deer and shot a bullet in the juvenile’s head, then the mother’s head, and they dropped and shook on the ground, kicked up dust, grunted and mewled, then stopped.

  Joven held very still, trying to blink away his shock. Quiet tears fell. The deer had fallen next to him. One of their tender necks lay across his ankle. He had blood on his chest and above his eye. Pooling in his bed. Linda ran to him.

  The head Ranger cast a victorious look at the boy. “The kid must really like deer,” he said.

  Carl lunged at him, but Bea put her body between them.

  The head Ranger looked back at his men. “This is contraband, so I guess we’ll need to take it with.�
�� He twirled his finger, and the four other Rangers picked up the animals and flung them across their horses’ backs. The deer hung limp, their tongues red and lolling, blood burbling from the bullet holes as though from a ground spring. The horses whinnied nervously. They did not like the weight of death on their backs. But the Rangers did not mount. They turned back to the Community, holding their rifles across their chests.

  The head Ranger said, “Well?”

  “Well, what?” Bea said.

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “An apology?”

  The Rangers laughed, and Bea laughed haughtily with them.

  “Not happening,” the lead Ranger said.

  “Some instructions then, I guess.”

  “Start packing.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you just going to stand there and watch?”

  “Oh, we’ll help a little,” he said and smiled. The Rangers went to the smoker, the repaired and functioning and in-use smoker, and set it on fire again. Then the Rangers mounted their horses and rode off.

  The Community used several more skins to extinguish the fire. They inspected what was left to salvage. They tidied up the camp and made breakfast and stared dumbly at the campfire as the children, minus Joven, yelled and wrestled around them. No one made a move to pack. Instead, they had the Hunters return to the foothills the next day for an overnight or two, to replace the skins they’d just sacrificed in the fire and the meat they’d lost in the smoker.

  Two mornings later they heard an incessant mechanical whir as the wind in the Basin picked up. In the distance, zipping low toward them, they saw a helicopter. Soon they were spitting dust from their mouths and covering their ears and eyes. The helicopter hovered above them. A raspy megaphone blared down.

  “You have been ordered to clear this camp immediately.”

  “We can’t sleep first?” Carl yelled up.

  “You have been ordered to clear this camp immediately.”

  “Oh, it’s not a real helicopter,” Frank said. “It’s too small. It might be a drone.”

  “It’s too big to be a drone,” said Carl.

  “But it’s too small to be a helicopter.”

  “Maybe drones are bigger now.”

  “Maybe helicopters are smaller.”

  “It’s just a fucking Ranger toy,” said Val.

  A loud noise—a thumping, clanking, grinding, shrieking noise—followed, and they all covered their ears.

  All the birds bolted away from the bushes. The children cried.

  “You have been ordered to clear this camp immediately,” they heard over the industrial din.

  They looked around at one another.

  Bea sighed loudly and yelled, “Well, it seems the time has come to say goodbye to our pleasant Basin.”

  They all nodded. They covered their ears and dragged themselves around camp packing things away. They had been there a long while. They no longer remembered how best to pack it all. They had accumulated too many things. How had they accumulated so much? How had they accumulated anything other than food? It took them two days to pack. By then the Hunters had returned. There was nothing to do with their kills but leave them for scavengers. They had no time to skin, butcher, strip, soak, stretch, smoke, and dry. A total waste. They walked around camp looking for micro trash, and the whole time what they now called the metal bird hovered above them, screeching for them to get out, leaving a few times for, they assumed, fuel or power, though they couldn’t imagine from where.

  When they finished, they stood under the metal bird and looked up, shielding their eyes.

  “Now what?” Bea yelled.

  A yellow light blinked on its belly as though relaying the message. “Await instructions,” it intoned, and then it zagged away, leaving them with a phantom echo of the screeching soundtrack in their ears. They sat on their buckskin packs and waited. Later that day, a small but fast-moving cloud of dust emerged from the horizon. They heard the whinny of horses and the clomp of hooves. It was the five Rangers, their uniforms as crisp and clean as before. The head Ranger wordlessly handed Bea an envelope.

  Inside was a new directive: We are opening a new Post! Travel to the Caldera summit for the grand opening event! There were hand-drawn balloons in the corners of the paper.

  “You’re throwing a party?” Bea said.

  The head Ranger shrugged. “Sure, why not? How often do we open up a new Post?”

  “Why are you inviting us?”

  The head Ranger smiled hard, with all his teeth. “Well, because the Post is for you.”

  “Is the party on a specific day?”

  “No, we’ll just have it when you get there.”

  “So you’ll just be ready to party?”

  “Yes, do you have a problem with that?” He had tired of the conversation.

  “Do you have any idea how long it will take to get here?”

  “For me, it’d take about six weeks of good daily mileage. For you?” He chuckled. “Six months. Minimum.” The other Rangers laughed hard behind him.

  The adults nodded, but this idea was lost on Agnes. “How many moons is that?” she asked.

  The head Ranger snorted. “Many. I’ve never seen anything move slower than your caravan.”

  Bea rolled her eyes. “Yeah, yeah, so we’ve heard. You know, we’re carrying a lot of stuff.”

  “Well, maybe you should pare down. I’m sure real nomads didn’t have so many possessions.”

  “We are real nomads.”

  The Rangers laughed hard again.

  Bea crossed her arms. “We’re also walking with children and they slow us down.”

  Agnes’s face burned. She stomped her foot. “We do not! I’m the one who has to wait for you.” She felt tears rising. She was a good leader.

  “I’m not talking about you,” her mother snapped. “I’m talking about the children.”

  This stunned Agnes. She had not known that her mother thought of her as something other than just a kid. She thought her mother only saw her as that strange girl imitating her in a cave. Her mother dismissed her, and then other times exalted her abilities. She rarely seemed happy that Agnes was leading, but never interfered. It had originally been Carl’s idea, and it had begun when her mother was gone. But her mother could be dismissive with everyone. So perhaps being treated like that simply meant her mother thought of her as a peer.

  Bea eyed the head Ranger skeptically. “Our map doesn’t really show the Caldera, not in any useful way.” She looked in the envelope. “Is there a new map?”

  “You’ll get a map when you need a map,” he said, and without any warning he pointed his rifle into the distance and fired. The sound flew away from them, across the Basin, stopping at nothing, shaking dry sage branches and alarming the bugs, voles, birds who were still around.

  The five Rangers on their horses corralled them like cattle. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” they hollered.

  Startled into action, Bea led the Community stumbling across the Basin. She wouldn’t let Agnes do it alone, keeping a step ahead of her no matter how fast Agnes tried to go.

  Over the course of what must have been half of the fall, the Rangers shepherded them away from their pleasant Basin. At sundown, the Rangers would disappear and reappear at morning to keep the Community moving. They marched them back into those high desert places where they’d spent so many years. They walked them deep into the sage sea, favoring bad camp spots over good ones. They bypassed good water sources, only offering them slow, slight streams, or larval standing water. Where they walked them, the game was scarce. And so was shade. It was hard to imagine the route choice wasn’t intentionally cruel. The head Ranger had a habit of whistling all day atop his horse as the Community dragged themselves forward.

  They were far from the Basin now. Delivered back to the emptiest high desert where they didn’t have the impulse to idle. One night the Rangers left and did not show up the next morning. Or
the morning after. They left behind a new map and they never returned. They’d done their job.

  * * *

  The Originalists had seen the Caldera when they had first arrived. Day one. Not because it was so close to Middle Post—though it was certainly not distant—but because it was so tall and lonely in its height. It sat heavy on the horizon, an upside-down triangle, white in winter and green in spring, the tip-top point broken off, creating a catchall for anything that might stumble in. Well beyond it was the first mountain range they’d ever explored. The range was a shadowy hump on the horizon. The Caldera stood alone.

  Agnes remembered it as a white hat atop the bald, sunburnt head of the high desert. The endless desert, its ruddy dirt and camphor scent after a rain. Its errant arms of sage and brush and grasses. Then there it was. A triangle hat belonging to a dunce.

  “It’s like a pyramid of snowballs,” they explained to the Newcomers, who had never seen it.

  “Like a colorless kite stuck in the sand.”

  “A geometric marble end table.”

  “A slice of white pizza, with the tip bit off.”

  “White pizza,” murmured Patty.

  But the only thing the Originalists had ever really known about the Caldera was that it was off-limits.

  In their previous map there’d been a black circle where the Caldera would have stood. And black circles meant do not enter.

  On this new map, the Caldera was at the top center, a white triangle with a red flag sticking out of its concave top. All around it were messy green triangles for trees.

  “Didn’t the maps used to have actual information on them?” huffed Val, her arms wrapped around her bulging stomach.

  “Don’t start with the maps again,” Bea said.

  “It’s just that they’re always wrong. Who’s their mapmaker? One of their fucking kids?”

  “It has all the info we need. Water is marked, it has topography, and all the landscape types are color-coded. What else do you need?”

  “Well, what’s all this?” Val said, waving her hand around a swath of space between where they stood and the Caldera. It was the color of the parchment the map was printed on.