Thieving Forest (29 page)

They are sucking on reeds to try to fool their stomachs, but Susanna’s stomach is not fooled.

“Do you think we should stop and wait for the sun to come out?” Meera asks. The rain has tapered off at last but the clouds are still thick overhead.

“We need to find food. Maybe a stream where we can catch a fish.”

But when at last they come to a sunken brook its waters are muddy and shallow and without fish. They sit down to rest on a log so decayed with age and rain that it threatens to fold up wetly in the middle. Susanna looks at the sky through the canopy. The trees are still dripping but the clouds are finally moving off.

Oh well. Maybe finding food doesn’t matter, she thinks. Maybe I can just sit on this wet log for the rest of my life. Her mind has begun to feel like something suspended, a bird asleep. She rubs her thumbs over her fingernails, their softness almost mesmerizing in their oddity. At last Meera rouses herself and goes to a nearby tree. She pulls back the bark here and there until she finds what she is looking for: a couple of dark green insects as long as a man’s longest finger. Meera takes one and twists off its head and eats the body. Then she plucks the other one off the tree and holds it out to Susanna.

Susanna hesitates. Then she takes it and twists off its head.

Inside her mouth she presses the insect sideways and tries not to taste it, but a bitter and woody flavor comes up anyway. She thinks of the Bible: eating manna from heaven, which she’d been told was some sort of insect. But manna sounds pleasurable and this is not. This is more like a chore. She swallows and holds her hand out for another. They each eat four of these insects and then they chew the bark from the tree. Afterward Susanna feels strong enough to look for wild onions, which they eat slowly, making them last, and Meera lights a couple of damp torches to keep the mosquitoes away.

For a moment she turns back to look at Susanna, and Susanna is shocked to see how much older her face seems, like an old woman’s. Her eyes are set back deep in her face, and her cheekbones rise prominently around them. That is hunger.

“Meera,” Susanna asks, “why did you not stay with Green Feather?”

“Why did you not stay in your home in Severne?” Meera counters. She looks down at the ground.

“I know you considered it. You thought about it.”

She wants Meera to say, because I wanted to go with you. But Meera doesn’t say that. She pushes one torch deeper into the soggy ground, making adjustments.

The wind picks up and blows against the torches. A plane of smoke rises and then flattens like a tabletop.

“That was not my place,” Meera finally says. “My place is with my people. My uncle tribe.”

“But what if you don’t like them? You don’t even know them.”

“Like does not matter. They are my people. Once I have faced my seven demons I will find them.”

“Seven demons?” This is new to Susanna. “What are the seven demons?”

“Different for each person. My first demon was the pond with the fallen logs. This place we are in is number seven. At the end of it I will find my guardian spirit. Green Feather was not my guardian spirit.”

It seems to Susanna that if ever there was a guardian spirit, Green Feather was that. But Meera seems convinced it will be someone from her uncle tribe.

“Was Sister Consolation one of your demons?” Susanna asks.

A shadow of a smile crosses Meera’s face. “I vanquished her when I took her shawl.”

Susanna tries to count up her own demons but it feels as though she’s met with more than seven already. Her head begins to ache again and she closes her eyes. A moment later a hooting owl comes swooping down from the trees and over the brook, and as she turns her head to watch it she remembers that seeing an owl near water is an omen of death.

Aurelia sits down beside her.

“I’m worried, Susanna,” she says. “This is all so unlike you.”

“I know,” Susanna says. “I’m worried, too.”

“I’m amazed you even started this journey. Because now of course you can’t go back.”

“It seemed simple at first. All I had to do was get to Risdale. And then to Gemeinschaft. I don’t know how I got here.”

“You were tricked by that girl.”

Susanna looks over at Meera. She has fallen asleep sitting on the ground with her back against the wet decayed log. Her head bends awkwardly against her shoulder. But Meera didn’t trick her. Susanna wanted to come. She needs her sisters, that is the truth, although she worries that they don’t feel the same way about her.

“Tell me, are they all right?” Susanna asks Aurelia. “Penelope and Naomi?”

“How should I know?”

Suddenly there is a commotion in the trees. A bright, fast creature storms out of the underbrush running for its life: a young elk.
Wapiti
. Meera wakes with a jerk and stands up. She reaches for her knife but the elk is followed closely by two fast wolves. There is hardly time to see them before they disappear behind more trees, but Susanna can hear their progress by the crashing of branches.

“Let’s go,” Meera says.

They each pull up a torch and follow the sound of the chase. Soon Susanna hears the unmistakable cry of a creature in pain. She follows Meera through the trees as fast as she can, branches lashing her shoulders. The wolves have brought the elk down in a muddy strip between two large trees. When Susanna and Meera get there, the elk is still alive with one wolf at its neck and the other at its middle. Its eyes are like clear water. It raises and lowers its head, fighting to the last. A young male.

Susanna can’t stop watching the wolves as they eat it. Beside her she can hear Meera breathing through her mouth. Each of them is still holding a lit torch, and the idea comes to Susanna that soon the wolves will not be so hungry. Perhaps they can chase them away.

And so it happens. The wolves, first one and then the other, break off for a moment to sniff the air.

“They know we are here,” Meera whispers.

“Maybe we can shoo them off with our fire.”

“Yes, we must frighten them.” But she waits, looking at Susanna, and so Susanna is the one who takes a shallow breath and makes the first lunge toward the beasts—mangy, stringy fellows, all clumpy fur and teeth.

“Shoo! Scat! Scat!” She waves her burning branch at them. Her heart is beating fast but she gives herself no time to consider her fear. Meera is only a half a moment behind.

“Off! Be off!” Meera shouts.

The wolves rear away from the burning branches but each manages to pick up a bit of fallen meat to hold in its mouth as they trot a little way off through the underbrush. When they are far enough away, Meera begins quickly to skin a section of the carcass while Susanna holds both of the torches. What Meera said before is true: tough hide. But soon enough she is able to get to the meat. Her hands are shaking and blood streams from her fingers as she cuts piece after ragged piece. They hear the wolves begin to snarl. They are ready to eat again, and feel bolder. Susanna sees four gleaming eyes among the trees. She waves the torches and they retreat a few steps but not as far as before.

Soon these wolves will be joined by other wolves. Susanna knows that they must be gone by then. When they have cut as much meat as they dare they leave in the opposite direction, making a long loop back to their camp. Susanna builds up a little fire and Meera cuts a few slim green boughs and then douses them in the muddy brook so they can use them as skewers. Their hands are covered in blood and gristle. Susanna is so hungry that she starts to eat her meat too soon and vomits before she can properly swallow. But eventually the meat is cooked through, and she makes herself eat slowly. It tastes as good as anything she has ever eaten, even without salt or bread.

“We should sleep up in the trees tonight, with the rest of the meat,” Meera tells her.

They can hear more wolves howling and fighting. Meera finds two trees with horizontal limbs a good ways up from the ground. Up in her tree, Susanna wraps her arms around the massive wet branch, too exhausted even to worry about falling. She rests her cheek against its rough bark. The moon is higher and smaller now. She can feel her heart beat against a raised knur in the wood.

What would her mother say if she could see her? Aurelia is right, she has changed beyond recognition. Susanna closes her eyes. She lost something a long way back, and it’s more than just her mother’s glove. But she’s gained something, too. Stealing meat from the wolves was her idea, and she was the one who rushed at them first. In the distance, she can hear them snap at each other like her sisters quarreling over some triviality. Is the porridge burning? Whose turn is it to feed the pig?

“Good night, Susanna,” Meera calls softly from her tree. “Don’t fall off your branch. I don’t think there’s enough
wapiti
for them all.”

The next morning Susanna is awakened early by the cold and by an uncomfortable stiffness throughout her body, particularly her neck. She’s hungry and thinks instantly of the elk. How weak they were last night! They should have been more aggressive with the wolves and taken a larger share of the meat.

A low mist rises from the ground as Susanna climbs down out of the tree, thinking she will go back to look for anything she can scavenge. It’s very early and Meera is no doubt still asleep. However Susanna is not altogether surprised to see Aurelia sitting among the ferns at the base of her tree.

“Where are you going?” Aurelia asks her.

“To look for bones. For soup.”

“Well I might as well go along, too,” Aurelia says, standing up. She pats down her dress. “Gracious, what a strong smell this place has. I don’t know how you can stand it! But of course they say that one can get used to anything by and by, and a good example of that I suppose is you, Susanna. Just look at you, sleeping up in a tree!”

As always, Aurelia can lay down sentence after sentence without seeming to take breath. Susanna only half listens as she picks her way through the trees. Everything looks different in the pink light. Is this where they turned?

“And eating that deer after the wolves got hold of it!”

“Elk,” Susanna tells her.

But as usual Aurelia pays no attention to a correction. “You are like a vulture now, Susanna, you are, yes, or one of those terrible creatures the Black Swamp has created, half of this and half of that. Like the swine wolf I told you about. Now, as it turned out, that swine wolf was a good creature, he really tried to help me, so I suppose the lesson there is...what is the lesson? Well, I suppose the lesson is that you never know how events will shape a creature. But I beg you, heed my warning, I mean to say, scavenging from wolves! You are already losing part of your person and becoming part of something else. Half person, half something else. But what, I wonder? A bird of prey? An Indian?”

“An Indian is a person,” Susanna tells her, offended.

“Oh, you know what I mean.” Aurelia laughs.

“Indeed I do not,” Susanna says as stiffly as she can.

“Oh, your pride! Penelope really used to shake her head over you and your fussy ways. How you hated Severne. Susanna, goodness, I’ve just figured it out! Your problem? You are not satisfied with where you are. That’s it! Never satisfied. And that’s why you’ve found yourself here in this desolate bog. It has nothing to do with Penelope and Naomi. You are not going someplace, you are leaving someplace else.”

Is this true? Susanna looks up at the mist settling among the tree branches like soft fur. Certainly she never hid the fact that she did not want to live in Severne. And she did not want to be a missionary, either, but no one could expect her to want that. Could they?

“I don’t believe it,” Susanna says. But maybe she does.

“Over here,” Aurelia tells her. “There it is.”

The elk carcass lies in the mud among the twigs and old leaves, nearly picked clean. All the organs, the rib meat, the shank—gone. The head is turned north with spaces where its eyes had been, and a few small feathers are crushed into the hollows between bones. So the birds have come, too. Aurelia stands with her feet apart looking down at it, her small nose wrinkled. She would never do what Susanna has done. She is still pretty, her hands smooth and white.

“Aurelia, please don’t leave me,” Susanna suddenly says.

“Oh, you don’t need me. Now Susanna, when you get out of here make sure to cut yourself a new dress, and mind that you make it soft, cut it out of some nice, soft material, so you can feel the wind. That’s what I miss most, the feel of wind on my skin.”

“Susanna!”

She turns her head. Meera is coming out from among the trees with her blanket over her head, carrying Consolation’s shawl and Susanna’s grain sack. She comes up beside Susanna and looks down at the elk.

“There’s nothing left,” Susanna tells her.

Flies cover the carcass and the bits of gristle left on the bone shimmer blue. Meera opens her pouch and they both look at the meat they still have. It is such a small amount. Susanna looks back at the elk. There is nothing to salvage.

“We won’t get out of here, will we,” she says.

Meera says, “That’s not true.”

“You’ll never meet your guardian spirit. We’ll die here. We’ll starve.”