Dave Eggers - Heroes of the Frontier

When they reached a stand of birch trees, though, some sense of purpose seized the dog, and she led them down a steady slope until they heard the sound of rushing water. Follow brought them to a narrow stream cut through a tight valley, and drank deeply from the rushing water.

“Mom?” Paul said. “Where do languages come from?”

He wanted to know why there was Italian and Hindi and Swahili, and not just English, and why they spoke English, and was English the best language? Josie made a brief stab at the origin of languages, the vicissitudes of distance and isolation in the formation of foreign tongues. People living far from anyone else, she explained, as they were, might be the sorts of people who created their own tongue. They could, she said, create their own words for anything, and to demonstrate, she held up a rock in the shape of a man’s head. “I could call this kind of rock tapatok, for example,” she said. “And from then on all the people who came after us would call it tapatok .”

Ana picked up a rounder rock. “I call this Dad .”

“Dad is already a word,” Paul said. “And why would you call that Dad?” His mood darkened, and Ana took note. Paul went down to the water to pet Follow, taking her into his tiny lap. Ana followed, then was distracted by something else, her head tilted. She took a few steps forward, stepping into a grassy bouquet of wildflowers, dropped the rock and pointed up.

“Waterfall.”

There, cut through the cliffside above them, was a narrow white plume falling from fifty feet above. They all wordlessly agreed to walk to the waterfall. When they got close, the volume was far greater than it had seemed from the path. For a moment the falling water seemed utterly sentient, falling with joyous aggression to the earth, spitefully suicidal. The spray reached them first, and they stopped, sat, and watched the waterfall’s ghostly white fingers. In the wall of mist, rainbows shot off like birds taking flight. Follow kept her distance.

Josie strode to the waterfall, stepping on the wet stones, trying to find a way not to soak herself, and when she was close enough, she put her hand under the flow, feeling its strength and its numbing cold.

“Can we drink it?” Paul asked.

Josie’s instinct was to say no, of course not, but already the woods had calmed her, opened her, so she did something that she wanted to do but normally would not have done. She took their thermos out of the backpack, emptied it, and then held it under the rush. Immediately her hand was soaked, her arm was wet to the shoulder, and the bottle was full.

She turned to Paul and Ana, seeing their astounded faces, and raised the bottle to the sun and sky to see if it was clear. Josie and her children saw the same thing, that the water was perfectly transparent. There were no particles, no sand, no dirt, nothing. Josie brought it to her lips and Paul took a quick intake of breath.

“Is it good?” Paul asked.

“It’s good,” she said, and gave it to him.

He took a sip and smacked his lips. He nodded and handed it to Ana, who drank without caution. After she took her fill, Paul asked, “Are we the first to drink from this?” He meant the waterfall, but Josie took some liberty with her interpretation. This water, flowing at this moment? Yes, they were the first.

The days were like this, each was miles long and had no aim or no possibility of regret. They ate when they were hungry and slept when they were tired, and they had nowhere to be. Every few days Ana would ask, “Are we living here?” or “Are we going to school here?” but otherwise both children seemed to sense their time in the cabin was a kind of respite, apart from any calendar, that there was no inevitable end. In the mornings, Paul and Ana drew and played board games and cards, and near noon they walked to the waterfall, to splash in the shallow water. They were in the woods now, and the woods were unbreakable. Ana acted nobly, and her face shone with an otherworldly glow. Children, Josie realized, are truly like animals. Give them clean foods and water and fresh air, and their coats will be shiny, their teeth white, their muscles supple and skin bright. But indoors, contained, they will become mangy, yellow-eyed, riddled with self-inflicted wounds.

In those long days at the Peterssen Mine, Paul and Ana made bows from bent sticks and rubber bands. They created and destroyed dams in the river, they piled rocks to make walls and rock castles. They read by candlelight. Josie taught Paul how to start a fire in the hearth. They napped some afternoons, and other afternoons they explored the buildings of the old mine, the midday sun coming through the porous roofs in white bolts, dozens of tiny spotlights illuminating dust and rust and tools not held for a hundred years.

There were a hundred uncomplicated hours in every day and they didn’t see a soul for weeks. Was it weeks? They no longer had a grasp of the calendar. During the day all was quiet but for the occasional scream of a bird, like a lunatic neighbor; at night, the air was alive with frogs and crickets and coyotes. Paul and Ana slept deeply and Josie hovered over them, like a cold night cloud over rows of hills warmed all day in the sun.

They were growing in beautiful ways, becoming independent, and forgetting all material concerns, were awake to the light and the land, caring more about the movement of the river than any buyable object or piece of school gossip. She was proud of them, of their purifying souls, the way they asked nothing of her now, they slept through the night, and relished the performing of chores, liked to wash their clothes — and they were immeasurably better now than they were in Ohio. They were stronger, smarter, more moral, ethical, logical, considerate, and brave. And this was, Josie realized, what she wanted most of all from her children: she wanted them to be brave. She knew they would be kind. Paul was born that way and he would make sure Ana was kind, but to be brave! Ana was inherently courageous, but Paul was learning this. He was no longer afraid of the dark, would plunge into any woods with or without a light. One day, on her way back from the woods, she caught the two of them on the hillside near the cabin, both barefoot, gently shushing through the shallow leaves with their bows, watching something invisible to her. She turned, scanned the forest, and finally saw it, a ten-point buck, walking through the birches, his back straight and proud. Her children were mirroring it on the other side of the hill, unheard by the deer. They had turned into something else entirely.

All along she had been looking for courage and purity in the people of Alaska. She had not thought that she could simply — not simply, no, but still — create such people.

—

But the food ran out one staple at a time. First they were out of milk, then juice, and were drinking only water, first from the bubbler then from the waterfall. They went through the vegetables, then the apples, and finally the potatoes. They lived on nuts, crackers and water for two days before a trip into town was unavoidable.

“We’ll go tomorrow,” Josie said.

“I don’t want to go anywhere,” Ana said.

The thought of driving the Chateau again, and exposing herself to the road, to the prospect of meeting anyone who might still be pursuing her family, filled her with a crippling dread. To reduce the risk she went out to the garage with a screwdriver, planning to remove the license plates. She was halfway there when she heard Paul calling.

“A map!” he yelled as he flew down the path to her, Follow running behind.

“Is this where we are?” Paul asked. He had it spread out on the ground between them. It was a dense thing, showing every foot of elevation, a maze of green lines, numbers and jagged paths, but they found the mine on it, and finally they arrived at the exact location of the cabin. “We’re here,” he said.