Page 48 of Dark Tides
“How d’you ever find your way?” Edward gasped, taking a sip of water. “This whole forest goes on forever and it all looks the same.”
“I’ve been out this way a few times,” Ned said. “And I was raised on a mire, I learned as a boy how to find little tracks and remember them.”
“You hunt here?”
“No. We’ve got no land rights here and the People like to keep it for themselves, they don’t want boot prints on their paths and guns banging off in their forests and frightening the animals. This is their lands, not ours. Though some of the townsfolk are trying to buy here.”
“You don’t come here for beaver pelts?”
Ned shook his head. “It’s been trapped out,” he said. “Long before I got here. They say that when we first came here there was a dam in every stream: thousands of beavers. Now they’re all gone. The dams are breaking, the lakes behind them are draining away. If you take all the beavers you lose the dam, you lose the lake and that changes the rivers, and so you get no beaver. That’s why they call us stupid.”
“It’s got to be farmed,” William insisted. “Anything else is wasteland.”
“Maybe some land ought to be wasteland?” Ned suggested. “Maybe God made it like that for a reason?”
“?‘Increase ye, and be ye multiplied, and fill ye the earth, and make ye it subject; and be ye lords to the fishes of the sea, and to volatiles of heaven, and to all living beasts that be moved on earth and be ye lords, or rule ye,’?” William quoted Genesis.
“Amen,” said Edward.
Ned nodded. “Amen. Are we ready to go on?”
“When will we meet with the savages?” Edward asked.
“When they want,” Ned said with a smile. “They’ll have been watching us ever since we started on this trail.”
Edward hunched his shoulders. “How could they?” he said. “We’ve gone in silence.”
Ned laughed shortly. “Not to them,” he said. “To them we’ve sounded like a fife-and-drum band marching through the woods.”
“We’ve barely spoken,” William protested.
“The deer know, don’t they?” Ned said. “The deer heard us from the first step? The People know the woods as well as the deer.”
“Can’t you order them to show themselves?” Edward said irritably.
“Nay, they’re free men on their own lands.”
They said nothing more as Ned led the way on a path which was no wider than his shoulders, putting one foot before the other, his English boots making clear marks in the mud where moccasins had left no trace.
They went past a deep hole, like a posthole, and Ned paused for a moment, cleared a vine which was trailing across it, and turned to go on.
“Just give me a moment to catch my breath,” William said.
As they waited, Edward idly poked a stick in the side of the hole; the sandy gray soil spilled inwards.
“Don’t do that,” Ned warned him. “It’s important to them. They keep it clear and open. You saw me weed the vine.”
“What is it? A posthole? Out here?”
“It’s a story hole,” Ned replied. “And a signpost.”
“Which?”
“Both. Something happened here, someone was injured during a hunt, or a man asked his wife to marry him, or a woman gave birth, or there was an accident or a meeting or something. So they make this hole at the side of the track so that everyone remembers what took place here. Then, when they’re telling someone where to go, which track to follow, they tell them to turn at that story.”
William was puzzled. “It’s like a way marker, but a register as well?”
“Yes. It’s easy to remember, and to teach the children: their lives are mapped on the land, going back hundreds of years. The Lord only knows how long they’ve walked these trails. The story of their lives is on the land. Their history is their geography.”
