Claire Holroyde - The Effort

Wanato had come to learn many things about Ned: his stubbornness, humor, and indigestion, but the things that he most admired were Ned’s capacity for empathy and wonder in all situations.

“You should read poetry,” Wanato told him, although he had no idea how that could be possible now.

The Brazil nuts (which were really seeds) were oily to the touch and delicious. Zhen said she lost count of how many Wanato and Dewei both doled out, they were that good. Wanato furrowed his brows as his hands kept moving.

“Wayãpi can count up to four,” he told her. “After that, we say there is ‘a lot.’”

Zhen laughed and hid her smile behind one hand.

“Then there is much we can teach one another,” she said.

Wanato looked over at her and went still. There had always been so much to teach and learn, but too few would listen. Wanato spent his adult life hitting up against the wall of ignorance on all sides and almost gave up.

“Lesson one from us Wayãpi,” he said, and pointed to the grove. “Save these trees!”

In the days before the comet, it was illegal to destroy Brazil nut trees because they created such a valuable export. But laws alone weren’t enough to protect them and their delicate ecosystem. Brazil nut trees only bore fruit in virgin forests where the right pollinating bees could thrive. The trees only bore children where the agouti could eat its seeds with its sharp rodent teeth and bury the others for later.

Saving the Brazil nut tree was a lesson his dead friends Zé and Maria knew well. There was one of these trees on the federal land that the couple harvested. Zé named it the Majesty for its immense splendor and once fended off illegal loggers with a shotgun when they tried to invade. It was a war with the Great Hungry Machine on one side and the Majesty, the tree of life, a giver instead of a taker, on the other.

Wanato could remember Zé—everything wide: his face, his eyes, his nose, his smile, those hats he always wore with tufts of gray hair spilling out—as he handed Gustavo a pencil drawing of the Majesty for the cover of his poetry collection. Wanato could picture him at the end of his TEDx Talk, before he thanked the live audience and exited the stage. He said, “It’s in our hands, and we have the future before us—and we have to decide.”

“Meus amigos,” Wanato muttered sadly, and brought another Brazil nut to his lips. My friends…

THEIR BELLIES SWELLED and got to work digesting rich proteins, fats, and fiber. Ned ripped farts and groaned about his stretching stomach. They couldn’t have set off hiking even if they wanted to. Moving a safe distance from the grove and its falling pods, they lay down and huddled in pairs under two nets that kept the mosquitoes and cockroaches off their faces.

“We got lucky,” Zhen whispered. “So many will starve. Millions. Billions .”

“All the people left in the cities,” Wanato agreed.

He could remember the first time he walked through a city as a young man. There were more people in Macapá than he imagined even existed. He asked Father St. John, What is feeding all these people? He had only known the forests, rural farms, and even frontier towns with gardens and chickens running underfoot, but the city had no way of producing food, not that he could see.

“Both you Debbie Downers better shut up and go to sleep,” Ned growled.

WANATO DIDN’T KNOW how much time had passed before he woke and pulled back the mosquito netting. Zhen was already standing alert and looking up. Windows in the canopy revealed a clear sky.

“I’ve counted the days and hours,” Zhen stated, still looking up, “down to T-minus zero to detonation of our spacecraft’s nuclear payload.”

“Is this it?” Ned whispered, desperately trying to read Zhen’s shadowed expression. “Is the comet coming to hit us? Is this the end?”

The forest was eerily silent. The insects and frogs all watched and waited. There was a flash of light that burned an afterimage they tried to blink away. Dewei sat up and opened his mouth, but Zhen shushed him.

“Do you feel that?” she whispered.

Wanato felt vibrations in his chest and ears. Fiery streaks suddenly zipped across pockets of sky in the canopy. Leaves, branches, and insects rained down from high above.

“Meteors!” Zhen gasped. “Those are shattered pieces of the comet. We hit it!”

More meteors burned trails toward the horizon. Ned tilted his head all the way back.

“Hope it hurt, fucker!” he shouted up, laughing and crying.

Wanato watched the sky blur through his tears. How could he not be grateful to the comet, now that it was deflected? UD3 had succeeded where he had failed; it brought the destruction that could save Indigenous peoples and their forests from extinction, if only they could remember their traditional ways. It had also brought a civilization that was poisoning itself to a halt; it saved humans from themselves. Nothing by any stretch of his imagination could have been so effective.

After the meteor shower ended, the sky glowed with a strange light that was strong enough to cast shadows.

“Do you see that aurora?” Zhen asked in the silence. “It’s charged particles from the nuclear blast reacting with the Earth’s magnetic field. The comet would have impacted Earth by now. It’s been deflected.”

The aurora looked like an alien sunset on another planet—or a sunrise.

“This is not the end,” Zhen said to Ned, with a lump in her throat. “This is our second chance.”

She shot her fists up high. Afterward, she said she could feel all the people of the Effort and all the remaining survivors under the same glowing sky lifting their squeezed fists and screaming, the many becoming one victorious.

THE GLOW HAD faded into familiar stars by the time they set off with as many of the Brazil nuts as they could carry. Without pain from starvation, without the fear of death and ultimate destruction, they could ignore difficult questions for the time being and just enjoy life itself. They joked and smiled. Zhen told the group stories about the Effort and the spacecraft they all built together. When Ned pulled back a curtain of flowering vine, hundreds of small butterflies scattered into the air. Zhen gasped and clapped in delight. Dewei also found a colony of flared, golden mushrooms growing on a decomposed log.

“Gustavo! Food! Food!”

The young man could now pronounce their names and string several English words together. Dewei pointed to the mushroom colony, eager to please their leader, but Wanato shook his head. Ned asked if the mushrooms were poisonous. Wanato shrugged and said he only knew that the Grandfather People didn’t eat them.

“For hunter-gatherers, your Grandfather People were pretty spoiled,” Ned grumbled.

Wanato shrugged again and smiled. His ancestors could afford to be picky when they knew how to make bows and poison-tipped arrows, how to grow cassava in bad soil, and how to scrape off the poisonous peel of the root and soak it to make caxiri beer, flat bread, porridge… there were so many things the Grandfather People knew.

By the middle of the dry day, they hadn’t passed any streams and their canteens were empty. With one misery abated, they felt another creep in, trading hunger for thirst. Wanato knew they had to reach water soon as they descended a slow incline.

“Will you take off that ridiculous Mets hat?” Ned snapped at Zhen.

They all had racking headaches from dehydration. Zhen stopped to cock her head and think, then said simply, “No.”

But she didn’t budge. They all stopped moving.

“Now what?” Zhen finally asked Wanato. “What will happen to the three of us? Do we stay with you and your people until it is safe to leave the forest and return?”