The Savage Girl - Alex Shakar [139]
Dan turns back to Walter. “See you got a bird.”
“Threw itself on my arrow.”
The shaman nods somberly, then leads them back to the rest of the group, who are now sitting cross-legged in a circle. All of them are already painted and topped with down. The women’s bottom lips are pierced in the traditional three places, and the holes have small sticks stuck through them; the large holes in their earlobes are filled with red and yellow flowers. Their breasts have already begun to make peace with gravity, aureoles turning toward the ground. The owner of the breasts she’s staring at waves, and Ursula looks up, embarrassed. The woman’s name is Giselle; they’ve talked before. Giselle makes room for her and Walter in the circle.
Walter begins to pluck the bird, doling out feathers that the tribes-people proceed to dip in paste and affix to their shoulders in fanlike patterns. Dan walks into the middle of the circle, carrying a long stilt-palm root and a wooden bowl full of powder. He sits down and snorts some powder from his pinched fingers, then packs the end of the tube with the stuff and holds it out to a tribesman, who guides it to his mouth. Dan blows on the other end while the tribesman inhales. He then repacks the tube and holds it out to Giselle.
“What kind of drug is this?” Ursula asks.
“Ground-up epene seed,” Walter says. “A hallucinogen.”
“Very trippy,” Giselle croaks, massaging her throat.
The tube comes Ursula’s way, and she declines. It moves on to Walter.
“So are you looking forward to going back?” Giselle says.
Ursula looks at Giselle’s prismatically decorated face. “I know I’m going to miss this place,” she says.
“Why don’t you stay, then, join the tribe?”
Ursula follows the smoke rising from the fire. The sky is beginning to cloud over, soaking up the forest moisture for the afternoon rain.
“Giselle,” she says, “where will you go when the forest is gone?”
“What are they going to do, run their bulldozers right over us?” After she speaks her eyes betray a glimmer of uncertainty, as though her question had been posed in earnest. But then she smiles, gathering in the mounting euphoria of the epene seed. “Let ’em try,” she decides. “We’ll give ’em a faceful of darts.”
For all these people’s apparent flakiness, Ursula knows this isn’t an idle threat. They will defend this place however they can. They’ll make of their bodies links in the human chain and fight for every last tree. And at night they’ll sleep soundly, secure in that rarest of modern-day certainties, the conviction that their lives, if not necessarily helping the world, at least aren’t making it any worse. For these reasons Ursula finds the invitation to stay with them more than a little tempting, but she knows this isn’t her tribe. Her tribe, she’s pretty sure, is back in Middle City, and in other cities and suburbs and towns—a tribe of scattered, isolated individuals, a tribe that doesn’t yet know it is a tribe. With any luck, though, she’ll find at least a few of its members. And in the meantime, she has her plans. Back at the station she has a small box containing a few sample materials she’s culled from the forest over the last few months—cloudy cocoons, diaphanous webs, blood-red root systems, pale fungal threads—and even more important, she has her sketchbooks, filled with studies for the new work she’s planning, not a painting this time but an installation. The webs, she imagines, will ensnare. The cocoons will pacify. The roots and threads will connect the webs to the cocoons. It will be a system by turns breathtaking and baleful, but not, in the end, incomprehensible, not inescapable. From an outside vantage point—a platform, she imagines, at the far end of the room—the work will be wholly graspable in a single insight, a single moment of recognition. In this way she believes, it will be empowering. In this way, it will give people the courage to go on trying to understand and master all those other forces acting on them that at first seem too pervasive and too insidious ever to take on.
Squatting on his haunches, the