“Because they’re there and we can,” said the girl. So they ate those blueberries as well.
The book went on to describe two other incidents of this kind among the tribe, each increasing in degree. A carpenter decided to cut down two trees instead of one, because “more is better than less, and because I can.” A hunter killed two rabbits, though he was only hungry enough to eat one, because perhaps the extra meat would come in handy later on. When later came and the hunter wasn’t in the mood for rabbit, he left the poor, discarded creature’s body lying in the dirt, untouched. “I could kill it and so I did,” the hunter said. “And there are plenty more rabbits where that one came from.”
But then the forest, which had been so plentiful and yielding of its resources to the tribespeople, grew stingy and unaccommodating. The clear stream water turned bitter and sat uneasily on the stomach. The blueberries shriveled on the bush. The trees refused to yield to the ax, and the rabbits, when shot and skinned, offered up only the thinnest slivers of meat, which the starving children fought over brutally. There was at this point in the book a two-page illustration that more than once gave Edie nightmares: half a dozen children, three boys and three girls, each grabbing for a share of a shriveled leg of rabbit, mouths contorted with hunger and rage. Drool dangled from exposed teeth; a fork’s tines skewered a grabbing hand.
The children were very, very wicked was the only line of description.
The once-happy tribespeople, withered by hunger and twisted with cold because they could no longer build shelter, or burn wood in their fires, became panicked, and they started waging war on one another, diminishing their numbers. One among them, an elderly woman who remembered the light of their earlier glory, fled in the night to seek out the shaman who lived on top of the mountain. If anyone could explain to the tribespeople what had set them on this path to ruin, it was he.
The shaman told her that the hunter, in killing and discarding the second rabbit, had earned the curse of its spirit. That curse—Yeye ambaye ni zinazotumiwa teketezwa, “He who consumes is consumed”—was carried out for the spirit by a demon, Vimelea, who could only be cast out of the human realm if the surviving tribespeople would withdraw back to their village, salt the earth in a perimeter around it, and vow only to venture into the woods when the greatest necessity required it.
Some of the tribe agreed to the shaman’s plan; others dismissed it as folly. And so half the group returned with the old woman and the shaman to the village, and the shaman walked out from the village center until its central spire was barely visible. Then, ever keeping the village center just in sight on his left, he began his slow procession to mark the perimeter, laying down the line of salt and chanting the ceremonial words, Sisi hutumia tu kile tunachotaka, “We consume only what we need.” When, many, many hours later, the ends of the Salt Line joined to make a circle, he rested. It was done.
The curse, for those within the village, was lifted. They grew healthy and plump once more, and their numbers increased, but never so much that they were forced to live outside the perimeter, or to take from the surrounding forest two things when one would suffice. Those who had not believed the shaman, however, continued to be subsumed by Vimelea’s curse. Some tried, when no other option was left to them, to return to the village—but the salt that kept the demon out also kept them out, for the demon was inside them now, and all that was left for them was death.
In the forest, the water ran sweet, and the blueberries and rabbits came back in abundance. The last of the cursed tribespeople eventually disappeared, and their punishment was to live on eternally not as human spirits, but as tiny, crawling, bloodthirsty things, the lowest of the forest’s low. Because they still carried within them a piece of the demon Vimelea, they would forever try, whenever one of their former tribespeople entered the forest, to steal back some of the life force they had lost the day they mocked the shaman. In this way, the villagers were reminded of the dangers of taking the forest for granted, and they never ventured long or far away from home. And they lived, safe within the Salt Line, happily ever after.
—
The Shaman and the Salt Line, whose pseudonymous author and illustrator, B. A. Trist, never made a public appearance, outraged everybody. The fundamentalist Christians complained that it advocated paganism. The atheists were angry that it subscribed to biblical, Noah and the Flood–style distinctions between good and evil. The liberals were bothered by the implication that inner Zoners were somehow morally superior to the unfortunate souls who were on the wrong side of the Salt Line in the zoned America’s first dark days, and the conservatives disliked the book’s Marxist “each according to his need” subtext, which was indoctrinating children as young as five into socialism. The environmentalists claimed that it painted a too-pretty picture of zone policy toward natural resources, given that outer-zone contract corporations such as Environ and the Valley Corporation continued to rely on poor labor sources, mostly from the Gulf and Midwest Zones, for logging, mining, drilling, manufacturing, and large-scale cattle factory operations, no longer answerable to most pre-zone regulatory policies. The academics critiqued its lazy (and inaccurate) appropriation of the Swahili language. And yet, despite these arguments—perhaps because of them—the book became ubiquitous. Every library had it, every elementary school classroom. If you went into your doctor’s office and perused the low-built, brightly painted children’s table, it would be there beside the Tabkins and the abacus and the pedestal with plastic rings of diminishing size. Most children, even Gulf children like Edie, owned it, and those children grew up with the notion of a literal line of salt before they were later told, by parents and schoolteachers, that the “Salt Line” protecting most zone perimeters were actually borders where, during the eradication, controlled chemical burnings had taken place, and so the earth was “salted” in the symbolic sense of having been purified, rendered uninhabitable. Then, over the course of a decade, the Wall was erected, and the TerraVibra soon followed, emanating its pulse fifty kilometers eastward, a layer of protection that no other zone, even New England, could boast.