Savage Boy

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You’ve got to find better shelter, Boy! If this lodge was here from before the war then chances are there are others like it.

The Boy had seen many buildings from Before built in clusters; the towns they had passed through and the cities he had wanted to visit. Clusters.

In the afternoon he walked upriver with his tomahawk and knife. His withered left side felt stiff, but he concentrated on its movements, controlling it, willing his leg to step over fallen logs instead of dragging as it would’ve liked to if he’d ridden Horse for days at a time.

He heard a loud twig snap underneath his feet.

Too loud, Boy! No go.

Everything Sergeant Presley had taught him had been graded. When the time had come for the Boy to perform a task, the standard for pass or fail was always “good to go” or “no go”. He’d hated when Sergeant Presley wrenched his mouth to the side and said, “No go.”

Upstream the river began to curve to the north, winding through a series of rapids. Off to the left he could see the steep, conical mountain Escondido had warned him of, where at the top a bear made its den.

It was winter now. Bears should be asleep.

There were no other lodges, or if there had been, what remained of them could not be found.

It was hard to imagine the world as a place where ­people could either live in cities or in the forest. What was so special about cities?

You always wanted to go there, Boy.

I did. I wanted to know what was in them.

And …

What would I have been like if I had lived in one?

Standing at the bend in the river, feeling his withered leg and arm stiffen in the late-­afternoon cold as the sun fell behind tall peaks to the west, he thought of ­people he once knew and could not remember.

They had always lived in the cold plains. His first memory was of running. Of a woman screaming. Of seeing the sky, blue and cold in one moment, and the ground, yellow stubble, race by in the next.

Sergeant Presley had rarely mentioned “your ­people.”

Not like in tents, not like your ­people.

All gone over to animals, not like your ­people.

They don’t ride horses, like your ­people do.

THAT NIGHT THE temperature dropped and the snow came down in hard clumps without end. He lay next to Horse, who moved little and whose breathing was shallow. At one point, the Boy was so cold he thought he should surely die.

When he awoke in the morning everything was covered in snow.

THE BEST TIME to do something about a thing is to do it now, Boy!

We won’t last out here another night.

When Horse opened his eyes they fluttered.

You won’t make it out here like this, will you, Horse?

He laid his hand on Horse’s belly, feeling the heat both comforting and sickening at once.

He knew what he had to do. He had known it in the freezing night when the snow had stopped falling and the wind rushed through the pines, seeming to make things even colder than when the snow had fallen. Even the sound of the icy water falling along the rapids seemed to make the world colder.