The Echoing Woods (pt. 3)

The Child Wolf

In retrospect, there were many signs that pointed to the special nature of the child Sara. It was only natural that she would be the next one to be allowed into the echoing woods, to complete what Sa had been unable to finish.

The land still bore the memory of the recent rebellion. It had been a long conflict, one in which massacres had succeeded massacres and in which entire settlements had been destroyed. Almost all of the buildings had been razed to the ground, and the land had become emptier than it had ever been. The Indians had united under one leader, Crying Eagle, and they had managed to push the settlers out and reestablish control, trying to recover what they felt they had lost. The few settlers who had escaped, and they were very few, had been driven south, but in the coming years, armies had been sent once again, and with them, new allies.

The natives of the county of Lagunas had historical grievances that antedated the arrival of the settlers. In particular, they had fought with the nations of the south, although these were conflicts that had left little impact for the southern tribes fought during the summer months, then retreated to the south in the winter. They took with them very little, other than slaves and war trophies, and these conflicts were fought in cycles that recurred on a regular basis.

When the European settlers came, they had the help of these southern nations, people who had been more completely incorporated into the ideology of the settlers. Yet they still conserved the memory of their long ago battles with the nations of this central region, the people of the prairies that bordered the mountains. And while they lacked the advantage of the intimate knowledge of this terrain, they had superior weapons, and they were led by the military leaders who infused in them the zeal of a religious crusade. The rebellion, which lead to a period of brief recovery, was ground down in the subsequent war and, after twenty years, was almost entirely crushed.

Thus, after garrisons had been established in the ruins of the old settlements, the remaining peoples who had been unable to flee were forcibly reincorporated into the life of the new settlements, and they were forced to reconstruct what they had destroyed before. Buildings were constructed once again, and a livestock economy was revived in the grasslands. The soldiers that formed the basis of these garrisons brought families with them, and they were given grants of land, and slowly, a network stretched out to reach once again to the edges of the echoing woods. The land was fertile, and the herds of buffalo were quickly culled, until the great migrations became just a shadow of what they had been before. The seasons of migration came to an end for the native inhabitants, and those who had survived and who accepted the faith of the settlers, learned to live in the small settlements, and to become laborers, an underclass that slowly lost contact with its cultural roots as it learned a new language and left behind old customs.

But the lore of the land continued for a time, and it was nurtured with a special zeal by the old ones, who came to see in the white wolf a possible symbol of rebellion. The wolf was still sighted, from time to time, and the woods remained as impenetrable as ever. It was said that these wolves represented the only stable connection with their past, and the only possibility to return to the old ways.

Many of the old ones took up the custom of visiting the woods and standing on the edge, speaking to the trees and telling them of their suffering. They were careful to avoid a pitying tone, for they remembered that pity involved a recognition of weakness, and they felt this would diminish them in the eyes of these creatures. But they told them of the many warriors that had died, both during the running battles of the second arrival, and after the conquest, when almost all the able-bodied men had been massacred, leaving only old ones, women and children.

They spoke into the woods, and told of how their children were separated from their parents, and forced to learn new tongues as they labored in the new estates. The women were also subject to abuse, of a type that was almost too shameful to recount, and the remaining people were discouraged in their traditional rituals, and were forced to wear new clothing, and to eat new foods. They spoke of waiting for a new leader, one that could hold what the past one had foolishly lost in his attempts to conciliate with the settlers and the tribes of the south, and they shared their stories of how Sa, the old man-wolf who had been invited to enter into the echoing woods so long ago, had spoken of the white wolf as a protector.

It was true that the settlers seemed as unable to penetrate the woods as the native nations had been in the past. The woods were still as impenetrable and enigmatic as they had ever been, and the fires that blazed at night were still seen. It seemed that, alone out of everything else, only the woods and the sky and the weather had changed. Everything else was destined to end.

And it was true that the settlers talked about venturing into the woods, not so much to exploit the materials and the game, but because they viewed them as a bastion of possible resistance, and in all probability, the abode of a hidden tribe that had likely escaped the notice of the settlers in the past. From time to time soldiers were dispatched, with unwilling and desperate native guides, but these parties never returned. They would venture into the woods, groups of a dozen or more men, following the river into the woods, but nothing was ever heard from them again. This was taken as proof of the existence of a hidden nation, one that was hostile to the settlers and that assuredly constituted a threat to the settlers, and plans were made to mount a much bigger force of hundreds, planning as they did first to set fire to the edges, in the hopes that they could destroy as much of the woods as they could.

The old arriero Felipe San Ramón was to be a part of this group. As an old man he had been brought to the grasslands with the new armies, and he wasn’t a native of the region. He was, in truth, more sympathetic to the remnants of the local nations that were suffering under the new regime, for although his ancestors had belonged to the native groups that had constituted the historical enemies of the people of the grasslands, he remembered the many indignities that his people had suffered, as they had been forced to accept the ways of the settlers. He had grown old working with livestock, and had been enlisted to work as an arriero, ferrying cargo over long distances with the help of pack animals. He had three burros who had served him well, and as someone who had little ties to the land, was enlisted naturally to accompany the expedition that was being organized to subdue the tribes of the interior, as the settlers so firmly believed were dwelling deep within the woods.

FelipeSan Ramón did have a granddaughter, a young girl named Sara. She was not his biological daughter, but instead an orphan he had encountered during while accompanying the settlers in their resettlement expeditions, and he had taken pity on her. She had been a solitary figure that he had found, huddled on the upper branches of a tree, shivering and silent, with great deep dark eyes. She was unusual as well because of the reddish cast to her hair, and were it not for her quiet cough, when he had stopped to rest under the tree, he would surely never have noticed her.

Felipe tried to coax her to come down, but she resisted. She was pale and dirty, and how she had managed to feed herself he had little idea, unless she chose to forage from what she found in the grasslands. She was adept at trapping birds, and he had never seen anyone more adept at handling a slingshot. She evidently did not cook the meat that she caught, but ate it raw, and it might have been that her handling of this game and her wiping her bloodied hands on her hair gave her the wild cast that he perceived. Why she would have revealed herself to him he had little idea, other that the fact that he was, by all appearances, an inoffensive old man.

Felipe offered her food from his stores, and water. He called out to her in the Spanish he had learned from the settlers, and in the language of his fathers, and in the little he had managed to learn of the language of the people of the grasslands. She gave no sign of having understood, but looked at the handful of cornmeal that he offered to her, and the nuts and dried meat that he carried with him. He set them aside for her, and he took pity on her, for otherwise, he would not have lingered under that tree for the next day, speaking to her quietly, telling her of his life, of his parents in the days when they had lived free, wandering in the desert lands, that beautiful land that seemed to reflect his essence.

He named her Sara, from whatever hidden impulse he could not acknowledge, maybe because he liked the sound of that name. And during that entire day and night, he rested, when he wasn’t talking to her, and he came to tell her that, if she wished, he would take her with him, to find her people if she were still looking for them, for one thing was certain, she was of the grasslands, her physical features and the shape of her face and nose and her color told him that much.

Felipe decided to leave without her having once climbed down from the tree branches. She would cough from time to time, and he offered her water, leaving it in cup, and showing her how to drink. He was certain that she had eaten and drank from what he had left out for her, but he never managed to catch her at it, for it must have been while he dozed, and she was so stealthy that he heard little other than the cough.

When he left, he invited her one last time, then retook his path, with his three burros. He was pensive as he left, and regretted that he couldn’t communicate with her, but he had neither the time nor the supplies to remain out there for a prolonged period. He continued on that long road through the empty grasslands with his cargo, that must reach the next settlement within a week, and he had already wasted a precious day, although somehow he felt comforted by having been able to talk about his life to someone who didn’t view him with pity or disgust, and who listened without interrupting and ordering him to keep quiet.

When he stopped for the night, and started his fire, and heated his food, combining the corn meal with hot water, and digging into his supply of dried meat, after tending to his burros, he settled in to look at the night sky, covering himself with an old blanket. After having put away his dishes, and after having draped the blanket around his shoulders as he sat next to the fire, he heard a quiet cough in the darkness. He turned and noticed the quiet presence of the girl, Sara, who was standing at the edge of the shadows, on the other side of the fire, watching him as she had done perched on top of the tree they had both left behind. Without a word, he drew out additional food, and extended to her a cup of the warm wine he had saved for himself, and set it out for her to eat. He wasn’t surprised when she quietly sat down and devoured the food eagerly. For her to allow him to see her eating seemed like a gesture of trust, and he accepted it without speaking. He then added more branches to the fire, and unpacked another blanket, as well as an old shirt that he indicated she should put on, and he settled back and dozed almost immediately. He was ordinarily a very watchful and cautious man, but he trusted her.

She was there the next day, tending to the fire, and when he opened his eyes and gazed at her, this small child of seven or eight years of age, more animal than human, she smiled.

 

 OGRomero © 2013
(Copyrighted by OGRomero, 2013)