Wiping his greasy mouth on his sleeve, Béka cleared his throat to summon our attention. The chitchat and marrow sucking stopped at once. “We have angered the people, and there will be no rest for a long, long time. It was wrong to lose that boy, but worse still was bringing him to camp in the first place.” We had heard this speech many times before, but Onions, his favorite, played the Fool to his Lear.
“But they have Igel. Why are they so mad?” she asked.
“She’s right. They have Igel. He’s their Oscar,” Kivi said, joining the chorus. “But we don’t have ours. Why should they be mad? We are the ones who have lost.”
“This is not about the boy. They found us, found our home, and now bury it under asphalt. They know we are here. They won’t stop looking for us until they find us and drive us from these woods. A hundred years ago, there were coyotes, wolves, lions in these hills. The sky blackened with flocks of passenger pigeons every spring. Bluebirds lived among us, and the creeks and rivers were fat with fishes and toads and terrapins. Once it was not unusual to see a man with one hundred wolf pelts drying by his barn. Look around you. They come in, hunt and chop, and take it all away. Igel was right: Things will never be the same, and we are next.”
Those who had finished their meals threw the bones in the fire, which sputtered and crackled with the new fat. We were bored by doom and gloom. While I listened to our new leader and his message, I noticed some of us did not accept his sermon. Whispers and murmurs ran along the circle. At the far end of the fire, Smaolach was not paying attention, but drawing in the dirt with a stick.
“You think you know better than me?” Béka yelled down to him. “You know what to do, and how to keep us alive?”
Smaolach kept his eyes down, pushed the point into the earth.
“I am the eldest,” Béka continued. “By rights, I am the new leader, and I will not accept anyone challenging my authority.”
Speck raised her voice in defense. “Nobody questions the rules . . . or your leadership.”
Continuing to make his map, Smaolach spoke so softly as to almost not be heard at all. “I am merely showing my friends here our new position, as I estimate it from the time traveled and by calculating the stars in the sky. You have earned the right to be our leader, and to tell us where to go.”
With a grunt, Béka took Onions by the hand and disappeared into the brush. Smaolach, Luchóg, Speck, Chavisory, and I huddled around the map as the others dispersed. I do not remember ever seeing a map before. Curious as to how it worked and what all of the symbols represented, I leaned forward and examined the drawing, deducing at once that the wavy lines stood for waterways—the river and the creek—but what to make of the perfectly straight line that crossed the river, the bunches of boxes arranged in a grid, and the jagged edge between one large oval and an X in the sand?
“The way I see it”—Smaolach pointed to the right side of the map—“there is what’s known and what’s unknown. To the east is the city. And I can only guess that the smell of the air means the city is heading our way. East is out. The question is: Do we cross the river to the south? If so, we cut ourselves off from the town.” He pointed with the stick to the set of squares.
“If we go south, we would have to cross the river again and again for supplies and clothes and shoes. The river is a dangerous place.”
“Tell that,” Chavisory said, “to Oscar Love.”
Luchóg offered an alternative. “But we don’t know that another town might be somewhere over the other side. No one has ever looked. I say we scout for a place on the other side of the river.”
“We need to be near the water,” I volunteered, and put my finger on the wavy lines.
“But not in the water,” Speck argued. “I say north and west, stick to the creek or follow the river till it bends up.” She took the stick from his hand and drew where the river curved to the north.
“How do you know it bends?” Chavisory asked.
“I’ve been that far.”
We looked at Speck with awe, as if she had seen the edge of the world. She stared back, defying anyone’s challenge or disbelief. “Two days from here. Or we should find a place near the creek. It dries up in August and September some years, but we could build a cistern.”
Thinking of our hideaway beneath the library, I spoke up. “I vote for the creek. We follow it from the hills into town whenever we need supplies or anything. If we go too far away—”
“He’s right, you know,” said Luchóg, patting his chest and the empty pouch beneath his shirt. “We need things from town. Let’s tell Béka we want to stay by the creek. Agreed?”
He lay there snoring, slack-jawed, his arm flung over Onions at his side. She heard our approach, popped open her eyes, smiled, and put a finger to her lips to whisper hush. Had we taken her advice, perhaps we would have caught him at a better time, in a more generous mood, but Speck, for one, never had any patience. She kicked his foot and roused him from his slumber.
“What do you want now?” he roared through a yawn. Since his ascension to leadership, Béka attempted to appear bigger than he was. He was trying to imply a threat by rising to his feet.
“We are tired of this life,” said Speck.