Description:
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, TIME, ESQUIRE, VOGUE, LA TIMES, SLATE, HARPER'S BAZAAR and others
“Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."—NPR staff pick
“Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel."—Los Angeles Times
“Glorious…surroundings come alive in prose that lives and breathes upon the page." —Boston Globe
A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, TIME, ESQUIRE, VOGUE, LA TIMES, SLATE, HARPER'S BAZAAR and others
“Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."—NPR staff pick
“Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel."—Los Angeles Times
“Glorious…surroundings come alive in prose that lives and breathes upon the page." —Boston Globe
A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for The Vaster Wilds:
“I know of few other writers whose sentences are so beautiful and so propulsive. The girl embodies a furious onward motion, as does the prose.” —New York Times Book Review
“[A] thrilling historical adventure. . .the existential themes at the heart of Lauren Groff’s fifth novel—the rawness of life, the precious inner-workings of nature, the drive to continue on in the face of challenges—are as timely as they come.” —TIME, "Top 10 Books of 2023"
"Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."—NPR
“Holds tension and sows mystery on every page.”—Vulture
“Groff’s seventh novel begins with a high-octane escape. . . .Though the white-knuckled tale of this young woman. . .Groff enlivens the dark crevices of colonial history. But the ambitions of The Vaster Wilds are loftier than this—in fact, they’re downright cosmic. . . .The result is an ecstatic transformation—one that’s a haunting and holy experience to read and behold.”—Esquire, "The 20 Best Books of 2023"
“Transcendent. Mesmerizing. Dazzling. Incandescent. Audacious….All of those descriptors are accurate and none of them are sufficient to describe just how spectacular [Groff’s] new book is.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel… Groff’s world is Darwinian, but she doesn’t chronicle the survival of the fittest; she convinces us instead that even the unluckiest among us can find a way to the blessings of peace, quiet and freedom.” —Los Angeles Times, "13 Best Novels of 2023"
“Glorious…Groff imagines a natural world where humans adapt to its contours rather than conquer them… We don’t need a hero’s tale of domination and plunder to fix the environment. We need more stories of how becoming part of the natural systems that surround us may help us survive. The Vaster Wilds is a terrific addition to a developing canon of our continued existence.”—The Boston Globe
“Lilting, whispered…poetic.”—Wall Street Journal
“Groff’s fiction is usually identified as ecological and feminist, which it certainly is, but it is theological too…Nature is Groff’s muse as well as her deity. Her prose, always alive and sensuous, is hit by an extra electrical charge…Groff has written the gospel.”—The Atlantic
"A rollicking adventure story, quick-paced and snappy and frequently funny…impossible to put down...This book is exquisitely attuned to the experience of being a human body within nature...Stark, vicious, and transcendent, The Vaster Wildsis the best book I’ve read all year. It’s a triumph.” —Vox
“Magnificent…a cosmic adventure story in which the state of the main character’s soul is just as important as the fate of her body.” —Slate, "Top 10 Books of the Year"
“Groff’s depictions of the untrammeled natural world, in all its beauty and brutality, are gorgeously rendered, as is the psychological portrait of her indefatigable protagonist, whose light blazes and then dims as her fortunes change… [I] found myself transfixed, and awestruck by the end.” —Literary Hub
“Groff skillfully weaves the girl’s past into her forward flight... As she travels farther and farther from the fort, Groff draws the reader ever closer to naming the reason for her flight. It’s a stunning revelation, followed by an even more stunning ending. Full of wonder and heartbreak, The Vaster Wilds is a dazzling journey.”—Tampa Bay Times
“Groff creates a thrilling journey.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Mesmerizing. . .a stupendous imagining of early colonial America, and about the resilience of one young girl to survive despite all odds.”—Town & Country
"Engrossing. . . The Vaster Wilds explores themes that are mainstays of Groff's work: faith, nature, what it means to be a woman in the world— and the ingenuity it takes to survive there."—San Francisco Chronicle
“Breathtaking… It is impossible to overstate how spellbindingly she renders the grim reality of wilderness survival… It is not a story for the faint of heart, but it is also not without its softness, its triumphs, its aching moments of benediction and sheer beauty.” —Chapter 16
“Suspenseful and sweeping.”—Southern Living
"Part-adventure, part-fable, classic Groff."—The Millions
“[A] page-turner with a built-in engine. . .once you slip into its rich rhythms, it’s an engrossing and rewarding journey.”—Vogue, "Best Books of the Year"
“Illustrate[s] a fluid, almost cyclical understanding of history, and faith’s sticky place within it.” —Elle
"[An] absorbing, visceral study of survival." —Vanity Fair
“Groff’s portrayal of the wilderness is not only raw and violent but also filled with moments of profound beauty and realization. As the girl navigates the forest, her journey becomes an allegory for the broader themes of environmental stewardship, the illusion of escaping the past, and female vulnerability in a male-dominated society. . .The contrast in these narratives showcases Groff’s versatility as a writer, her skill in creating intense, emotionally charged stories that challenge readers, and her insight into the historical and cultural forces shaping women’s lives.”—Scientific Inquirer
“Extraordinary. . .Groff builds and maintains suspense on multiple levels, while offering an unflinching portrayal of her heroine’s desperation and will to survive. This is a triumph.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Groff's seventh book, a captivating survival story, starts off running. . . .this wholly enveloping book has. . . deep examinations of faith, dominion, and human nature; Groff's seemingly joyfully related, seamless period prose; and the time-collapsing sense of reading a text channeled directly from the mind of a long-ago-living, breathing woman facing extraordinary circumstances.”—Booklist, Starred Review & "Best of 2023"
“Groff’s imaginative journey into a distant time and place is powered by a thrumming engine. . . Immersion in the girl’s experience provides a virtual vacation from civilization. . . The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep. . . Lauren Groff's fifth novel, set in Virginia in the early 17th century, is a classic study of solitude and survival that stars a teenage girl fleeing starvation—and the scene of a crime.” —Shelf Awareness
“I know of few other writers whose sentences are so beautiful and so propulsive. The girl embodies a furious onward motion, as does the prose.” —New York Times Book Review
“[A] thrilling historical adventure. . .the existential themes at the heart of Lauren Groff’s fifth novel—the rawness of life, the precious inner-workings of nature, the drive to continue on in the face of challenges—are as timely as they come.” —TIME, "Top 10 Books of 2023"
"Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."—NPR
“Holds tension and sows mystery on every page.”—Vulture
“Groff’s seventh novel begins with a high-octane escape. . . .Though the white-knuckled tale of this young woman. . .Groff enlivens the dark crevices of colonial history. But the ambitions of The Vaster Wilds are loftier than this—in fact, they’re downright cosmic. . . .The result is an ecstatic transformation—one that’s a haunting and holy experience to read and behold.”—Esquire, "The 20 Best Books of 2023"
“Transcendent. Mesmerizing. Dazzling. Incandescent. Audacious….All of those descriptors are accurate and none of them are sufficient to describe just how spectacular [Groff’s] new book is.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel… Groff’s world is Darwinian, but she doesn’t chronicle the survival of the fittest; she convinces us instead that even the unluckiest among us can find a way to the blessings of peace, quiet and freedom.” —Los Angeles Times, "13 Best Novels of 2023"
“Glorious…Groff imagines a natural world where humans adapt to its contours rather than conquer them… We don’t need a hero’s tale of domination and plunder to fix the environment. We need more stories of how becoming part of the natural systems that surround us may help us survive. The Vaster Wilds is a terrific addition to a developing canon of our continued existence.”—The Boston Globe
“Lilting, whispered…poetic.”—Wall Street Journal
“Groff’s fiction is usually identified as ecological and feminist, which it certainly is, but it is theological too…Nature is Groff’s muse as well as her deity. Her prose, always alive and sensuous, is hit by an extra electrical charge…Groff has written the gospel.”—The Atlantic
"A rollicking adventure story, quick-paced and snappy and frequently funny…impossible to put down...This book is exquisitely attuned to the experience of being a human body within nature...Stark, vicious, and transcendent, The Vaster Wildsis the best book I’ve read all year. It’s a triumph.” —Vox
“Magnificent…a cosmic adventure story in which the state of the main character’s soul is just as important as the fate of her body.” —Slate, "Top 10 Books of the Year"
“Groff’s depictions of the untrammeled natural world, in all its beauty and brutality, are gorgeously rendered, as is the psychological portrait of her indefatigable protagonist, whose light blazes and then dims as her fortunes change… [I] found myself transfixed, and awestruck by the end.” —Literary Hub
“Groff skillfully weaves the girl’s past into her forward flight... As she travels farther and farther from the fort, Groff draws the reader ever closer to naming the reason for her flight. It’s a stunning revelation, followed by an even more stunning ending. Full of wonder and heartbreak, The Vaster Wilds is a dazzling journey.”—Tampa Bay Times
“Groff creates a thrilling journey.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Mesmerizing. . .a stupendous imagining of early colonial America, and about the resilience of one young girl to survive despite all odds.”—Town & Country
"Engrossing. . . The Vaster Wilds explores themes that are mainstays of Groff's work: faith, nature, what it means to be a woman in the world— and the ingenuity it takes to survive there."—San Francisco Chronicle
“Breathtaking… It is impossible to overstate how spellbindingly she renders the grim reality of wilderness survival… It is not a story for the faint of heart, but it is also not without its softness, its triumphs, its aching moments of benediction and sheer beauty.” —Chapter 16
“Suspenseful and sweeping.”—Southern Living
"Part-adventure, part-fable, classic Groff."—The Millions
“[A] page-turner with a built-in engine. . .once you slip into its rich rhythms, it’s an engrossing and rewarding journey.”—Vogue, "Best Books of the Year"
“Illustrate[s] a fluid, almost cyclical understanding of history, and faith’s sticky place within it.” —Elle
"[An] absorbing, visceral study of survival." —Vanity Fair
“Groff’s portrayal of the wilderness is not only raw and violent but also filled with moments of profound beauty and realization. As the girl navigates the forest, her journey becomes an allegory for the broader themes of environmental stewardship, the illusion of escaping the past, and female vulnerability in a male-dominated society. . .The contrast in these narratives showcases Groff’s versatility as a writer, her skill in creating intense, emotionally charged stories that challenge readers, and her insight into the historical and cultural forces shaping women’s lives.”—Scientific Inquirer
“Extraordinary. . .Groff builds and maintains suspense on multiple levels, while offering an unflinching portrayal of her heroine’s desperation and will to survive. This is a triumph.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Groff's seventh book, a captivating survival story, starts off running. . . .this wholly enveloping book has. . . deep examinations of faith, dominion, and human nature; Groff's seemingly joyfully related, seamless period prose; and the time-collapsing sense of reading a text channeled directly from the mind of a long-ago-living, breathing woman facing extraordinary circumstances.”—Booklist, Starred Review & "Best of 2023"
“Groff’s imaginative journey into a distant time and place is powered by a thrumming engine. . . Immersion in the girl’s experience provides a virtual vacation from civilization. . . The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep. . . Lauren Groff's fifth novel, set in Virginia in the early 17th century, is a classic study of solitude and survival that stars a teenage girl fleeing starvation—and the scene of a crime.” —Shelf Awareness
About the Author
Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Groff ’s work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I.
The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at angles.
In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness.
Over her face she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slight, both bony and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker, to root and string and fiber and sinew. Even so starved, and blinded by the dark, she was quick. She scrabbled upright, stumbled with her first step, nearly fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast and over the frozen ruts of the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight.
Swifter, girl, she told herself, and in their fear and anguish, her legs moved yet faster.
**
These good boots the girl had stolen off the son of a gentleman, a stripling half her age but of equal size, who had died of the smallpox the night before, the rash a rust spreading over the starved bones. These leather gloves and the thick cloak the girl had stolen off her own mistress. She banished the thought of the woman still weeping upon her knees on the frozen ground in the courtyard inside that hellish place. With each step she drew away, everything there loosened its grip on the girl.
Yet there was a strange gleam upon the dark ground of the field ahead, and as she moved, she saw it was the undershirt of the soldier who a fortnight earlier had been caught worming his body slow from the horrors of the fort and toward the different horrors of the forest. He had made it halfway to the trees when in silence a shadow that had lain upon the ground grew denser, grew upward, came clear at last as the fearsomest of the men of this country, the warrior two heads taller than the men of the fort, who made himself yet more terrible by wearing upon his shoulders outstretched a broad dark mantle of turkey feathers. He had lifted with one hand the creeping fearful soldier by his hair and had with a knife cut a long wet red mouth into the man's throat. Then he dropped him to spill his heart's blood into the frozen earth and there the dead man lay splayed ignoble. All this time, he had lain unburied, for the soldiers of the settlement had become too weak and too cowardly in their hunger to fetch the body back.
She had passed the dead man and his reek had drawn itself out of her nostrils and she was nearly to the woods when she stumbled again, for the thought of these two men gave rise to thoughts of other men who lurked perhaps in the woods, men out there hidden and awaiting her. And now, as she peered before her into the dark of the forest, she saw a man crouching in ambush in ever deeper blacker shadow of each tree, perhaps a man with a knife or an ax or an arrow and cold murder in his eye.
She stopped her running for a breath, but she had no choice, she took her courage up again and she ran on.
And as she ran each imagined man in passing revealed himself to be mere shadow again.
She had chosen to flee, and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known, the child Bess, who had been born into her care when she was herself a small child of four years or so, her innocence, her understanding of who she was, her dreams of who she might one day be if only she could survive this starving time.
Think not of it, girl, she told herself, think not of it, else you shall die of grief.
And she did not turn back to look upon the gleam of the fort's fires as they painted the night sky above in red. She was unlettered but was deep devout, a good and a pious girl, and she had listened when the ministers read from the holy book, she had tracked their words and taken them whole in long phrases into her knowledge. She had learned the lesson of only forward movement from the wife of Lot, who had glanced backward once as she was fleeing the destruction of sodom and by her weakness and the wrath of god had been transformed to a pillar of salt.
Only when she was inside the forest did the wind remove its hands from her cheeks and from under her skirts. It was warmer among the trees but by no means warm. She stopped and pressed her forehead to the rough skin of a pine and the harshness of it on her skin held her there. What light that could have fallen from the sky did not fall at all, as the heavens above were covered by a thickness of cloud. The forest before her was as dense as pitch, though pocks of snow did gleam in the pits of the trees. Her breath was ragged and with effort she quieted it. She let the silence seep back into her, into the forest, and it smoothed over the memory of her crashing footsteps, and she wondered if she had been loud enough to have waked the men of the fort or the original men of this forest. The men known, the men unknown. Either could be creeping near to her even now.
She listened over the scrape and bow of the wind, cold trunk rubbing trunk in a tuning of fiddles, but she heard no footsteps and no breaking twigs. Though the lack of sound was no real solace.
At last, when her blood calmed in her ears, she heard the stream not far from her, the water rasping under its shell of ice. She pressed forward as fleet and soft as she could, and when under her foot she discovered the slickness of the ice, then the narrow aisle of stony bank where the stream ran swollen in the spring, she followed it northward, grateful to escape the sharp grasping twigs and bushes that snatched at her face and her clothing.
**
Into the night the girl ran and ran, and the cold and the dark and the wilderness and her fear and the depth of her losses, all things together, dwindled the self she had once known down to nothing.
A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past.
It was also true that with no past, the girl thought, a nothing could be free.
In time, her mind that had been shocked in flight began to move into thinking again.
She became aware of eyes upon her.
And though she imagined that they were the hostile eyes of men, they were in fact the eyes of the forest itself watching this new form of creature with its wheezing breath and crashing footfall and bitter human reek, all the night birds and the roaming creatures stilled in silent wonderment as the girl went past. And even when the creatures could no longer see or hear the running girl and the last scent of her distress faded in their immediacy from the noses of the crawling beasts, when only a trace of her could be scented upon the leaves and dirt and snow displaced by her feet, the forest's sense of time shuddered and jerked forward, and the rip that the running girl made became healed, and the ordinary business of the creatures' hungers was reawakened behind her. Only hours after she had passed through the forest, she became to them a strange dream barely remembered in the urgencies of the moment.
**
It was perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, there was no way to tell, but a long thick expanse of time spent running northward up the stream bank, when the girl saw a deeper darker shine near where her boot fell, a softness of the ice beneath, and she knew it to be water freed from its frozen crust, openly flowing. She bent and took off her leather gloves with her teeth and pressed her unworking hands between her legs until they had thawed enough to bend, then she opened the sack that she had been carrying in one stiff fist, reached in and took the pewter cup she had stolen, dipped it into the running water, and drank deep. The cold sliced down the center of her like the tip of a knife. It made her ache. Her teeth chattered in the bones of her skull. Her stomach, which had been empty these four days, protested at its new fullness of water. She replaced the cup and tied the sack to her waist, lifting her cloak and gowns to put it against her skin so she could feel it on the flesh of her body and would be comforted by having it always near. She wanted to sink down into the small heap of snow to sleep, her head swam and pounded, but she could not do this she knew, and she pressed herself on again, forward, away, farther.
And as she ran she prayed in her soul: O god, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light riseth up for the godly, grant me in all my doubts and uncertainties the grace to ask what thou wouldst have me do that the spirit of wisdom may save me from all false choices and that in thy light I may see light and in thy straight path may not stumble.
She listened for anything, for the low moan of a night bird as emissary of the divine, a shifting quality of wind that would speak its will to her, but in response there were only the noises of her passage and the cold wind playing against the disinterested forest.
And thus she ran again, and while running as soft as she could, she remembered the solace of song and thought perhaps it could heat the edges of her fear until it melted within her.
So only inside herself she sang as brightly as she knew how, the spring clad all in gladness doth laugh at winter's sadness fa la la la la la la la la la la and so on.
She knew many songs, of course, but this was the only one that came forth to meet her, quite a strange absence of song there was inside her mind, as once a lifetime ago she had been a dancing quipping singing little fool and hundreds of songs she had known. But she knew that a fool could only exist where there was indulgence and freedom enough for laughter and so it was natural that in flight all of her other songs had dissolved. Still, this one song gave what comfort it could, though in such exigency such comfort was small.
The moon had begun to show its face and the woods were bands of light and dark with snow passing in its streaks beneath.
Something tore in the skies above and the new downsifting snow was no longer needles of ice as it had been when she had first escaped the fort but had become now soft slow flakes that began to collect upon the old surface of snow and to obscure the steps she had made behind her.
Thank you good snow for your aid, the girl thought.
Press on, girl, the snow said, in falling.
**
It was not long afterward that the voices descended to her from the sky.
At first, she could not distinguish what they said, but soon they spoke to her louder and slid into the mistress's tones, scolding. Wicked sprite, verminous bit of stuff, thou last least unlettered Zed, who fled thy duty in thy mistress's worst need. For it is said thou must submit thyself unto the elder, yea all be subject one to another and be clothed with humility, for god resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble.
So the voice of the mistress hissed to her out of the dark forest.
And forgetting herself the girl said aloud into the falling snow, Ah but does the good book not say also to escape to the mountains lest ye be consumed?
And she laughed because she knew it did say this and that she had won the point.
But the forest grew wary at the laugh, this new noise made within its sleeping stillness, and the girl had to slap her own cheek to hush herself and goad her body forward.
The mistress's voice fell itself a flake and the girl in her running left it behind her.
The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at angles.
In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness.
Over her face she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slight, both bony and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker, to root and string and fiber and sinew. Even so starved, and blinded by the dark, she was quick. She scrabbled upright, stumbled with her first step, nearly fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast and over the frozen ruts of the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight.
Swifter, girl, she told herself, and in their fear and anguish, her legs moved yet faster.
**
These good boots the girl had stolen off the son of a gentleman, a stripling half her age but of equal size, who had died of the smallpox the night before, the rash a rust spreading over the starved bones. These leather gloves and the thick cloak the girl had stolen off her own mistress. She banished the thought of the woman still weeping upon her knees on the frozen ground in the courtyard inside that hellish place. With each step she drew away, everything there loosened its grip on the girl.
Yet there was a strange gleam upon the dark ground of the field ahead, and as she moved, she saw it was the undershirt of the soldier who a fortnight earlier had been caught worming his body slow from the horrors of the fort and toward the different horrors of the forest. He had made it halfway to the trees when in silence a shadow that had lain upon the ground grew denser, grew upward, came clear at last as the fearsomest of the men of this country, the warrior two heads taller than the men of the fort, who made himself yet more terrible by wearing upon his shoulders outstretched a broad dark mantle of turkey feathers. He had lifted with one hand the creeping fearful soldier by his hair and had with a knife cut a long wet red mouth into the man's throat. Then he dropped him to spill his heart's blood into the frozen earth and there the dead man lay splayed ignoble. All this time, he had lain unburied, for the soldiers of the settlement had become too weak and too cowardly in their hunger to fetch the body back.
She had passed the dead man and his reek had drawn itself out of her nostrils and she was nearly to the woods when she stumbled again, for the thought of these two men gave rise to thoughts of other men who lurked perhaps in the woods, men out there hidden and awaiting her. And now, as she peered before her into the dark of the forest, she saw a man crouching in ambush in ever deeper blacker shadow of each tree, perhaps a man with a knife or an ax or an arrow and cold murder in his eye.
She stopped her running for a breath, but she had no choice, she took her courage up again and she ran on.
And as she ran each imagined man in passing revealed himself to be mere shadow again.
She had chosen to flee, and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known, the child Bess, who had been born into her care when she was herself a small child of four years or so, her innocence, her understanding of who she was, her dreams of who she might one day be if only she could survive this starving time.
Think not of it, girl, she told herself, think not of it, else you shall die of grief.
And she did not turn back to look upon the gleam of the fort's fires as they painted the night sky above in red. She was unlettered but was deep devout, a good and a pious girl, and she had listened when the ministers read from the holy book, she had tracked their words and taken them whole in long phrases into her knowledge. She had learned the lesson of only forward movement from the wife of Lot, who had glanced backward once as she was fleeing the destruction of sodom and by her weakness and the wrath of god had been transformed to a pillar of salt.
Only when she was inside the forest did the wind remove its hands from her cheeks and from under her skirts. It was warmer among the trees but by no means warm. She stopped and pressed her forehead to the rough skin of a pine and the harshness of it on her skin held her there. What light that could have fallen from the sky did not fall at all, as the heavens above were covered by a thickness of cloud. The forest before her was as dense as pitch, though pocks of snow did gleam in the pits of the trees. Her breath was ragged and with effort she quieted it. She let the silence seep back into her, into the forest, and it smoothed over the memory of her crashing footsteps, and she wondered if she had been loud enough to have waked the men of the fort or the original men of this forest. The men known, the men unknown. Either could be creeping near to her even now.
She listened over the scrape and bow of the wind, cold trunk rubbing trunk in a tuning of fiddles, but she heard no footsteps and no breaking twigs. Though the lack of sound was no real solace.
At last, when her blood calmed in her ears, she heard the stream not far from her, the water rasping under its shell of ice. She pressed forward as fleet and soft as she could, and when under her foot she discovered the slickness of the ice, then the narrow aisle of stony bank where the stream ran swollen in the spring, she followed it northward, grateful to escape the sharp grasping twigs and bushes that snatched at her face and her clothing.
**
Into the night the girl ran and ran, and the cold and the dark and the wilderness and her fear and the depth of her losses, all things together, dwindled the self she had once known down to nothing.
A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past.
It was also true that with no past, the girl thought, a nothing could be free.
In time, her mind that had been shocked in flight began to move into thinking again.
She became aware of eyes upon her.
And though she imagined that they were the hostile eyes of men, they were in fact the eyes of the forest itself watching this new form of creature with its wheezing breath and crashing footfall and bitter human reek, all the night birds and the roaming creatures stilled in silent wonderment as the girl went past. And even when the creatures could no longer see or hear the running girl and the last scent of her distress faded in their immediacy from the noses of the crawling beasts, when only a trace of her could be scented upon the leaves and dirt and snow displaced by her feet, the forest's sense of time shuddered and jerked forward, and the rip that the running girl made became healed, and the ordinary business of the creatures' hungers was reawakened behind her. Only hours after she had passed through the forest, she became to them a strange dream barely remembered in the urgencies of the moment.
**
It was perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, there was no way to tell, but a long thick expanse of time spent running northward up the stream bank, when the girl saw a deeper darker shine near where her boot fell, a softness of the ice beneath, and she knew it to be water freed from its frozen crust, openly flowing. She bent and took off her leather gloves with her teeth and pressed her unworking hands between her legs until they had thawed enough to bend, then she opened the sack that she had been carrying in one stiff fist, reached in and took the pewter cup she had stolen, dipped it into the running water, and drank deep. The cold sliced down the center of her like the tip of a knife. It made her ache. Her teeth chattered in the bones of her skull. Her stomach, which had been empty these four days, protested at its new fullness of water. She replaced the cup and tied the sack to her waist, lifting her cloak and gowns to put it against her skin so she could feel it on the flesh of her body and would be comforted by having it always near. She wanted to sink down into the small heap of snow to sleep, her head swam and pounded, but she could not do this she knew, and she pressed herself on again, forward, away, farther.
And as she ran she prayed in her soul: O god, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light riseth up for the godly, grant me in all my doubts and uncertainties the grace to ask what thou wouldst have me do that the spirit of wisdom may save me from all false choices and that in thy light I may see light and in thy straight path may not stumble.
She listened for anything, for the low moan of a night bird as emissary of the divine, a shifting quality of wind that would speak its will to her, but in response there were only the noises of her passage and the cold wind playing against the disinterested forest.
And thus she ran again, and while running as soft as she could, she remembered the solace of song and thought perhaps it could heat the edges of her fear until it melted within her.
So only inside herself she sang as brightly as she knew how, the spring clad all in gladness doth laugh at winter's sadness fa la la la la la la la la la la and so on.
She knew many songs, of course, but this was the only one that came forth to meet her, quite a strange absence of song there was inside her mind, as once a lifetime ago she had been a dancing quipping singing little fool and hundreds of songs she had known. But she knew that a fool could only exist where there was indulgence and freedom enough for laughter and so it was natural that in flight all of her other songs had dissolved. Still, this one song gave what comfort it could, though in such exigency such comfort was small.
The moon had begun to show its face and the woods were bands of light and dark with snow passing in its streaks beneath.
Something tore in the skies above and the new downsifting snow was no longer needles of ice as it had been when she had first escaped the fort but had become now soft slow flakes that began to collect upon the old surface of snow and to obscure the steps she had made behind her.
Thank you good snow for your aid, the girl thought.
Press on, girl, the snow said, in falling.
**
It was not long afterward that the voices descended to her from the sky.
At first, she could not distinguish what they said, but soon they spoke to her louder and slid into the mistress's tones, scolding. Wicked sprite, verminous bit of stuff, thou last least unlettered Zed, who fled thy duty in thy mistress's worst need. For it is said thou must submit thyself unto the elder, yea all be subject one to another and be clothed with humility, for god resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble.
So the voice of the mistress hissed to her out of the dark forest.
And forgetting herself the girl said aloud into the falling snow, Ah but does the good book not say also to escape to the mountains lest ye be consumed?
And she laughed because she knew it did say this and that she had won the point.
But the forest grew wary at the laugh, this new noise made within its sleeping stillness, and the girl had to slap her own cheek to hush herself and goad her body forward.
The mistress's voice fell itself a flake and the girl in her running left it behind her.
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The Vaster Wilds: A Novel
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Visit the Riverhead Books Store
The Vaster Wilds: A Novel
Product ID: U0593418409
Condition: New
Type: Paperback
BHD757
Price includes VAT & Import Duties
Availability: In Stock
Quantity:
|
Order today to get by 7-14 business days
Delivery fee of BHD 2. Free for orders above BHD 20.
Imported From: United States
At BOLO, we work hard to ensure the products you receive are new, genuine, and sourced from reputable suppliers.
Every product in the BOLO catalogue is sourced through our Verified Global Supply Network of verified sellers, authorized distributors or directly from the manufacturer.
Each product undergoes thorough inspection and verification at our consolidation and fulfilment centers to ensure it meets our strict authenticity and quality standards before being shipped and delivered to you.
If you ever have concerns regarding the authenticity of a product purchased from us, please contact Bolo Support. We will review your inquiry promptly and, if necessary, provide documentation verifying authenticity or offer a suitable resolution.
Your trust is our top priority, and we are committed to maintaining transparency and integrity in every transaction.
While we strive to display accurate information, variations in packaging, labeling, instructions, or formulation may occasionally occur due to regional differences or supplier updates. For detailed or manufacturer-specific information, please contact the brand directly or reach out to BOLO Support for assistance.
Unless otherwise stated, all prices displayed on the product page include applicable taxes and import duties.
BOLO operates in accordance with the laws and regulations of Bahrain. Any items found to be restricted or prohibited for sale within the Bahrain will be cancelled prior to shipment. We take proactive measures to ensure that only products permitted for sale in Bahrain are listed on our website.
All items are shipped by air, and any products classified as “Dangerous Goods (DG)” under IATA regulations will be removed from the order and cancelled.
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Description:
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, TIME, ESQUIRE, VOGUE, LA TIMES, SLATE, HARPER'S BAZAAR and others
“Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."—NPR staff pick
“Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel."—Los Angeles Times
“Glorious…surroundings come alive in prose that lives and breathes upon the page." —Boston Globe
A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.
ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2023
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, TIME, ESQUIRE, VOGUE, LA TIMES, SLATE, HARPER'S BAZAAR and others
“Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."—NPR staff pick
“Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel."—Los Angeles Times
“Glorious…surroundings come alive in prose that lives and breathes upon the page." —Boston Globe
A taut and electrifying novel from celebrated bestselling author Lauren Groff, about one spirited girl alone in the wilderness, trying to survive
A servant girl escapes from a colonial settlement in the wilderness. She carries nothing with her but her wits, a few possessions, and the spark of god that burns hot within her. What she finds in this terra incognita is beyond the limits of her imagination and will bend her belief in everything that her own civilization has taught her.
Lauren Groff’s new novel is at once a thrilling adventure story and a penetrating fable about trying to find a new way of living in a world succumbing to the churn of colonialism. The Vaster Wilds is a work of raw and prophetic power that tells the story of America in miniature, through one girl at a hinge point in history, to ask how—and if—we can adapt quickly enough to save ourselves.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for The Vaster Wilds:
“I know of few other writers whose sentences are so beautiful and so propulsive. The girl embodies a furious onward motion, as does the prose.” —New York Times Book Review
“[A] thrilling historical adventure. . .the existential themes at the heart of Lauren Groff’s fifth novel—the rawness of life, the precious inner-workings of nature, the drive to continue on in the face of challenges—are as timely as they come.” —TIME, "Top 10 Books of 2023"
"Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."—NPR
“Holds tension and sows mystery on every page.”—Vulture
“Groff’s seventh novel begins with a high-octane escape. . . .Though the white-knuckled tale of this young woman. . .Groff enlivens the dark crevices of colonial history. But the ambitions of The Vaster Wilds are loftier than this—in fact, they’re downright cosmic. . . .The result is an ecstatic transformation—one that’s a haunting and holy experience to read and behold.”—Esquire, "The 20 Best Books of 2023"
“Transcendent. Mesmerizing. Dazzling. Incandescent. Audacious….All of those descriptors are accurate and none of them are sufficient to describe just how spectacular [Groff’s] new book is.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel… Groff’s world is Darwinian, but she doesn’t chronicle the survival of the fittest; she convinces us instead that even the unluckiest among us can find a way to the blessings of peace, quiet and freedom.” —Los Angeles Times, "13 Best Novels of 2023"
“Glorious…Groff imagines a natural world where humans adapt to its contours rather than conquer them… We don’t need a hero’s tale of domination and plunder to fix the environment. We need more stories of how becoming part of the natural systems that surround us may help us survive. The Vaster Wilds is a terrific addition to a developing canon of our continued existence.”—The Boston Globe
“Lilting, whispered…poetic.”—Wall Street Journal
“Groff’s fiction is usually identified as ecological and feminist, which it certainly is, but it is theological too…Nature is Groff’s muse as well as her deity. Her prose, always alive and sensuous, is hit by an extra electrical charge…Groff has written the gospel.”—The Atlantic
"A rollicking adventure story, quick-paced and snappy and frequently funny…impossible to put down...This book is exquisitely attuned to the experience of being a human body within nature...Stark, vicious, and transcendent, The Vaster Wildsis the best book I’ve read all year. It’s a triumph.” —Vox
“Magnificent…a cosmic adventure story in which the state of the main character’s soul is just as important as the fate of her body.” —Slate, "Top 10 Books of the Year"
“Groff’s depictions of the untrammeled natural world, in all its beauty and brutality, are gorgeously rendered, as is the psychological portrait of her indefatigable protagonist, whose light blazes and then dims as her fortunes change… [I] found myself transfixed, and awestruck by the end.” —Literary Hub
“Groff skillfully weaves the girl’s past into her forward flight... As she travels farther and farther from the fort, Groff draws the reader ever closer to naming the reason for her flight. It’s a stunning revelation, followed by an even more stunning ending. Full of wonder and heartbreak, The Vaster Wilds is a dazzling journey.”—Tampa Bay Times
“Groff creates a thrilling journey.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Mesmerizing. . .a stupendous imagining of early colonial America, and about the resilience of one young girl to survive despite all odds.”—Town & Country
"Engrossing. . . The Vaster Wilds explores themes that are mainstays of Groff's work: faith, nature, what it means to be a woman in the world— and the ingenuity it takes to survive there."—San Francisco Chronicle
“Breathtaking… It is impossible to overstate how spellbindingly she renders the grim reality of wilderness survival… It is not a story for the faint of heart, but it is also not without its softness, its triumphs, its aching moments of benediction and sheer beauty.” —Chapter 16
“Suspenseful and sweeping.”—Southern Living
"Part-adventure, part-fable, classic Groff."—The Millions
“[A] page-turner with a built-in engine. . .once you slip into its rich rhythms, it’s an engrossing and rewarding journey.”—Vogue, "Best Books of the Year"
“Illustrate[s] a fluid, almost cyclical understanding of history, and faith’s sticky place within it.” —Elle
"[An] absorbing, visceral study of survival." —Vanity Fair
“Groff’s portrayal of the wilderness is not only raw and violent but also filled with moments of profound beauty and realization. As the girl navigates the forest, her journey becomes an allegory for the broader themes of environmental stewardship, the illusion of escaping the past, and female vulnerability in a male-dominated society. . .The contrast in these narratives showcases Groff’s versatility as a writer, her skill in creating intense, emotionally charged stories that challenge readers, and her insight into the historical and cultural forces shaping women’s lives.”—Scientific Inquirer
“Extraordinary. . .Groff builds and maintains suspense on multiple levels, while offering an unflinching portrayal of her heroine’s desperation and will to survive. This is a triumph.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Groff's seventh book, a captivating survival story, starts off running. . . .this wholly enveloping book has. . . deep examinations of faith, dominion, and human nature; Groff's seemingly joyfully related, seamless period prose; and the time-collapsing sense of reading a text channeled directly from the mind of a long-ago-living, breathing woman facing extraordinary circumstances.”—Booklist, Starred Review & "Best of 2023"
“Groff’s imaginative journey into a distant time and place is powered by a thrumming engine. . . Immersion in the girl’s experience provides a virtual vacation from civilization. . . The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep. . . Lauren Groff's fifth novel, set in Virginia in the early 17th century, is a classic study of solitude and survival that stars a teenage girl fleeing starvation—and the scene of a crime.” —Shelf Awareness
“I know of few other writers whose sentences are so beautiful and so propulsive. The girl embodies a furious onward motion, as does the prose.” —New York Times Book Review
“[A] thrilling historical adventure. . .the existential themes at the heart of Lauren Groff’s fifth novel—the rawness of life, the precious inner-workings of nature, the drive to continue on in the face of challenges—are as timely as they come.” —TIME, "Top 10 Books of 2023"
"Part historical, part horror, part breathless thriller, part wilderness survival tale, The Vaster Wilds is a story about the lengths to which we will go to stay alive."—NPR
“Holds tension and sows mystery on every page.”—Vulture
“Groff’s seventh novel begins with a high-octane escape. . . .Though the white-knuckled tale of this young woman. . .Groff enlivens the dark crevices of colonial history. But the ambitions of The Vaster Wilds are loftier than this—in fact, they’re downright cosmic. . . .The result is an ecstatic transformation—one that’s a haunting and holy experience to read and behold.”—Esquire, "The 20 Best Books of 2023"
“Transcendent. Mesmerizing. Dazzling. Incandescent. Audacious….All of those descriptors are accurate and none of them are sufficient to describe just how spectacular [Groff’s] new book is.” —Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Lauren Groff just reinvented the adventure novel… Groff’s world is Darwinian, but she doesn’t chronicle the survival of the fittest; she convinces us instead that even the unluckiest among us can find a way to the blessings of peace, quiet and freedom.” —Los Angeles Times, "13 Best Novels of 2023"
“Glorious…Groff imagines a natural world where humans adapt to its contours rather than conquer them… We don’t need a hero’s tale of domination and plunder to fix the environment. We need more stories of how becoming part of the natural systems that surround us may help us survive. The Vaster Wilds is a terrific addition to a developing canon of our continued existence.”—The Boston Globe
“Lilting, whispered…poetic.”—Wall Street Journal
“Groff’s fiction is usually identified as ecological and feminist, which it certainly is, but it is theological too…Nature is Groff’s muse as well as her deity. Her prose, always alive and sensuous, is hit by an extra electrical charge…Groff has written the gospel.”—The Atlantic
"A rollicking adventure story, quick-paced and snappy and frequently funny…impossible to put down...This book is exquisitely attuned to the experience of being a human body within nature...Stark, vicious, and transcendent, The Vaster Wildsis the best book I’ve read all year. It’s a triumph.” —Vox
“Magnificent…a cosmic adventure story in which the state of the main character’s soul is just as important as the fate of her body.” —Slate, "Top 10 Books of the Year"
“Groff’s depictions of the untrammeled natural world, in all its beauty and brutality, are gorgeously rendered, as is the psychological portrait of her indefatigable protagonist, whose light blazes and then dims as her fortunes change… [I] found myself transfixed, and awestruck by the end.” —Literary Hub
“Groff skillfully weaves the girl’s past into her forward flight... As she travels farther and farther from the fort, Groff draws the reader ever closer to naming the reason for her flight. It’s a stunning revelation, followed by an even more stunning ending. Full of wonder and heartbreak, The Vaster Wilds is a dazzling journey.”—Tampa Bay Times
“Groff creates a thrilling journey.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune
“Mesmerizing. . .a stupendous imagining of early colonial America, and about the resilience of one young girl to survive despite all odds.”—Town & Country
"Engrossing. . . The Vaster Wilds explores themes that are mainstays of Groff's work: faith, nature, what it means to be a woman in the world— and the ingenuity it takes to survive there."—San Francisco Chronicle
“Breathtaking… It is impossible to overstate how spellbindingly she renders the grim reality of wilderness survival… It is not a story for the faint of heart, but it is also not without its softness, its triumphs, its aching moments of benediction and sheer beauty.” —Chapter 16
“Suspenseful and sweeping.”—Southern Living
"Part-adventure, part-fable, classic Groff."—The Millions
“[A] page-turner with a built-in engine. . .once you slip into its rich rhythms, it’s an engrossing and rewarding journey.”—Vogue, "Best Books of the Year"
“Illustrate[s] a fluid, almost cyclical understanding of history, and faith’s sticky place within it.” —Elle
"[An] absorbing, visceral study of survival." —Vanity Fair
“Groff’s portrayal of the wilderness is not only raw and violent but also filled with moments of profound beauty and realization. As the girl navigates the forest, her journey becomes an allegory for the broader themes of environmental stewardship, the illusion of escaping the past, and female vulnerability in a male-dominated society. . .The contrast in these narratives showcases Groff’s versatility as a writer, her skill in creating intense, emotionally charged stories that challenge readers, and her insight into the historical and cultural forces shaping women’s lives.”—Scientific Inquirer
“Extraordinary. . .Groff builds and maintains suspense on multiple levels, while offering an unflinching portrayal of her heroine’s desperation and will to survive. This is a triumph.” —Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“Groff's seventh book, a captivating survival story, starts off running. . . .this wholly enveloping book has. . . deep examinations of faith, dominion, and human nature; Groff's seemingly joyfully related, seamless period prose; and the time-collapsing sense of reading a text channeled directly from the mind of a long-ago-living, breathing woman facing extraordinary circumstances.”—Booklist, Starred Review & "Best of 2023"
“Groff’s imaginative journey into a distant time and place is powered by a thrumming engine. . . Immersion in the girl’s experience provides a virtual vacation from civilization. . . The writing is inspired, the imaginative power near mystic.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Combines visceral detail and magisterial sweep. . . Lauren Groff's fifth novel, set in Virginia in the early 17th century, is a classic study of solitude and survival that stars a teenage girl fleeing starvation—and the scene of a crime.” —Shelf Awareness
About the Author
Lauren Groff is a three-time National Book Award finalist and the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Monsters of Templeton, Arcadia, Fates and Furies, Matrix, and The Vaster Wilds, and the short story collections Delicate Edible Birds and Florida. She has won the Story Prize and the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Groff ’s work regularly appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and elsewhere.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I.
The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at angles.
In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness.
Over her face she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slight, both bony and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker, to root and string and fiber and sinew. Even so starved, and blinded by the dark, she was quick. She scrabbled upright, stumbled with her first step, nearly fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast and over the frozen ruts of the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight.
Swifter, girl, she told herself, and in their fear and anguish, her legs moved yet faster.
**
These good boots the girl had stolen off the son of a gentleman, a stripling half her age but of equal size, who had died of the smallpox the night before, the rash a rust spreading over the starved bones. These leather gloves and the thick cloak the girl had stolen off her own mistress. She banished the thought of the woman still weeping upon her knees on the frozen ground in the courtyard inside that hellish place. With each step she drew away, everything there loosened its grip on the girl.
Yet there was a strange gleam upon the dark ground of the field ahead, and as she moved, she saw it was the undershirt of the soldier who a fortnight earlier had been caught worming his body slow from the horrors of the fort and toward the different horrors of the forest. He had made it halfway to the trees when in silence a shadow that had lain upon the ground grew denser, grew upward, came clear at last as the fearsomest of the men of this country, the warrior two heads taller than the men of the fort, who made himself yet more terrible by wearing upon his shoulders outstretched a broad dark mantle of turkey feathers. He had lifted with one hand the creeping fearful soldier by his hair and had with a knife cut a long wet red mouth into the man's throat. Then he dropped him to spill his heart's blood into the frozen earth and there the dead man lay splayed ignoble. All this time, he had lain unburied, for the soldiers of the settlement had become too weak and too cowardly in their hunger to fetch the body back.
She had passed the dead man and his reek had drawn itself out of her nostrils and she was nearly to the woods when she stumbled again, for the thought of these two men gave rise to thoughts of other men who lurked perhaps in the woods, men out there hidden and awaiting her. And now, as she peered before her into the dark of the forest, she saw a man crouching in ambush in ever deeper blacker shadow of each tree, perhaps a man with a knife or an ax or an arrow and cold murder in his eye.
She stopped her running for a breath, but she had no choice, she took her courage up again and she ran on.
And as she ran each imagined man in passing revealed himself to be mere shadow again.
She had chosen to flee, and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known, the child Bess, who had been born into her care when she was herself a small child of four years or so, her innocence, her understanding of who she was, her dreams of who she might one day be if only she could survive this starving time.
Think not of it, girl, she told herself, think not of it, else you shall die of grief.
And she did not turn back to look upon the gleam of the fort's fires as they painted the night sky above in red. She was unlettered but was deep devout, a good and a pious girl, and she had listened when the ministers read from the holy book, she had tracked their words and taken them whole in long phrases into her knowledge. She had learned the lesson of only forward movement from the wife of Lot, who had glanced backward once as she was fleeing the destruction of sodom and by her weakness and the wrath of god had been transformed to a pillar of salt.
Only when she was inside the forest did the wind remove its hands from her cheeks and from under her skirts. It was warmer among the trees but by no means warm. She stopped and pressed her forehead to the rough skin of a pine and the harshness of it on her skin held her there. What light that could have fallen from the sky did not fall at all, as the heavens above were covered by a thickness of cloud. The forest before her was as dense as pitch, though pocks of snow did gleam in the pits of the trees. Her breath was ragged and with effort she quieted it. She let the silence seep back into her, into the forest, and it smoothed over the memory of her crashing footsteps, and she wondered if she had been loud enough to have waked the men of the fort or the original men of this forest. The men known, the men unknown. Either could be creeping near to her even now.
She listened over the scrape and bow of the wind, cold trunk rubbing trunk in a tuning of fiddles, but she heard no footsteps and no breaking twigs. Though the lack of sound was no real solace.
At last, when her blood calmed in her ears, she heard the stream not far from her, the water rasping under its shell of ice. She pressed forward as fleet and soft as she could, and when under her foot she discovered the slickness of the ice, then the narrow aisle of stony bank where the stream ran swollen in the spring, she followed it northward, grateful to escape the sharp grasping twigs and bushes that snatched at her face and her clothing.
**
Into the night the girl ran and ran, and the cold and the dark and the wilderness and her fear and the depth of her losses, all things together, dwindled the self she had once known down to nothing.
A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past.
It was also true that with no past, the girl thought, a nothing could be free.
In time, her mind that had been shocked in flight began to move into thinking again.
She became aware of eyes upon her.
And though she imagined that they were the hostile eyes of men, they were in fact the eyes of the forest itself watching this new form of creature with its wheezing breath and crashing footfall and bitter human reek, all the night birds and the roaming creatures stilled in silent wonderment as the girl went past. And even when the creatures could no longer see or hear the running girl and the last scent of her distress faded in their immediacy from the noses of the crawling beasts, when only a trace of her could be scented upon the leaves and dirt and snow displaced by her feet, the forest's sense of time shuddered and jerked forward, and the rip that the running girl made became healed, and the ordinary business of the creatures' hungers was reawakened behind her. Only hours after she had passed through the forest, she became to them a strange dream barely remembered in the urgencies of the moment.
**
It was perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, there was no way to tell, but a long thick expanse of time spent running northward up the stream bank, when the girl saw a deeper darker shine near where her boot fell, a softness of the ice beneath, and she knew it to be water freed from its frozen crust, openly flowing. She bent and took off her leather gloves with her teeth and pressed her unworking hands between her legs until they had thawed enough to bend, then she opened the sack that she had been carrying in one stiff fist, reached in and took the pewter cup she had stolen, dipped it into the running water, and drank deep. The cold sliced down the center of her like the tip of a knife. It made her ache. Her teeth chattered in the bones of her skull. Her stomach, which had been empty these four days, protested at its new fullness of water. She replaced the cup and tied the sack to her waist, lifting her cloak and gowns to put it against her skin so she could feel it on the flesh of her body and would be comforted by having it always near. She wanted to sink down into the small heap of snow to sleep, her head swam and pounded, but she could not do this she knew, and she pressed herself on again, forward, away, farther.
And as she ran she prayed in her soul: O god, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light riseth up for the godly, grant me in all my doubts and uncertainties the grace to ask what thou wouldst have me do that the spirit of wisdom may save me from all false choices and that in thy light I may see light and in thy straight path may not stumble.
She listened for anything, for the low moan of a night bird as emissary of the divine, a shifting quality of wind that would speak its will to her, but in response there were only the noises of her passage and the cold wind playing against the disinterested forest.
And thus she ran again, and while running as soft as she could, she remembered the solace of song and thought perhaps it could heat the edges of her fear until it melted within her.
So only inside herself she sang as brightly as she knew how, the spring clad all in gladness doth laugh at winter's sadness fa la la la la la la la la la la and so on.
She knew many songs, of course, but this was the only one that came forth to meet her, quite a strange absence of song there was inside her mind, as once a lifetime ago she had been a dancing quipping singing little fool and hundreds of songs she had known. But she knew that a fool could only exist where there was indulgence and freedom enough for laughter and so it was natural that in flight all of her other songs had dissolved. Still, this one song gave what comfort it could, though in such exigency such comfort was small.
The moon had begun to show its face and the woods were bands of light and dark with snow passing in its streaks beneath.
Something tore in the skies above and the new downsifting snow was no longer needles of ice as it had been when she had first escaped the fort but had become now soft slow flakes that began to collect upon the old surface of snow and to obscure the steps she had made behind her.
Thank you good snow for your aid, the girl thought.
Press on, girl, the snow said, in falling.
**
It was not long afterward that the voices descended to her from the sky.
At first, she could not distinguish what they said, but soon they spoke to her louder and slid into the mistress's tones, scolding. Wicked sprite, verminous bit of stuff, thou last least unlettered Zed, who fled thy duty in thy mistress's worst need. For it is said thou must submit thyself unto the elder, yea all be subject one to another and be clothed with humility, for god resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble.
So the voice of the mistress hissed to her out of the dark forest.
And forgetting herself the girl said aloud into the falling snow, Ah but does the good book not say also to escape to the mountains lest ye be consumed?
And she laughed because she knew it did say this and that she had won the point.
But the forest grew wary at the laugh, this new noise made within its sleeping stillness, and the girl had to slap her own cheek to hush herself and goad her body forward.
The mistress's voice fell itself a flake and the girl in her running left it behind her.
The moon hid itself behind the clouds. The wind spat an icy snow at angles.
In the tall black wall of the palisade, through a slit too seeming thin for human passage, the girl climbed into the great and terrible wilderness.
Over her face she wore a hood drawn low, and she was slight, both bony and childish small, but the famine had stripped her down yet starker, to root and string and fiber and sinew. Even so starved, and blinded by the dark, she was quick. She scrabbled upright, stumbled with her first step, nearly fell, but caught herself and began to run, going fast and over the frozen ruts of the field and all the stalks of dead corn that had come up in the summer already sooty and fruitless and stunted with blight.
Swifter, girl, she told herself, and in their fear and anguish, her legs moved yet faster.
**
These good boots the girl had stolen off the son of a gentleman, a stripling half her age but of equal size, who had died of the smallpox the night before, the rash a rust spreading over the starved bones. These leather gloves and the thick cloak the girl had stolen off her own mistress. She banished the thought of the woman still weeping upon her knees on the frozen ground in the courtyard inside that hellish place. With each step she drew away, everything there loosened its grip on the girl.
Yet there was a strange gleam upon the dark ground of the field ahead, and as she moved, she saw it was the undershirt of the soldier who a fortnight earlier had been caught worming his body slow from the horrors of the fort and toward the different horrors of the forest. He had made it halfway to the trees when in silence a shadow that had lain upon the ground grew denser, grew upward, came clear at last as the fearsomest of the men of this country, the warrior two heads taller than the men of the fort, who made himself yet more terrible by wearing upon his shoulders outstretched a broad dark mantle of turkey feathers. He had lifted with one hand the creeping fearful soldier by his hair and had with a knife cut a long wet red mouth into the man's throat. Then he dropped him to spill his heart's blood into the frozen earth and there the dead man lay splayed ignoble. All this time, he had lain unburied, for the soldiers of the settlement had become too weak and too cowardly in their hunger to fetch the body back.
She had passed the dead man and his reek had drawn itself out of her nostrils and she was nearly to the woods when she stumbled again, for the thought of these two men gave rise to thoughts of other men who lurked perhaps in the woods, men out there hidden and awaiting her. And now, as she peered before her into the dark of the forest, she saw a man crouching in ambush in ever deeper blacker shadow of each tree, perhaps a man with a knife or an ax or an arrow and cold murder in his eye.
She stopped her running for a breath, but she had no choice, she took her courage up again and she ran on.
And as she ran each imagined man in passing revealed himself to be mere shadow again.
She had chosen to flee, and in so choosing, she had left behind her everything she had, her roof, her home, her country, her language, the only family she had ever known, the child Bess, who had been born into her care when she was herself a small child of four years or so, her innocence, her understanding of who she was, her dreams of who she might one day be if only she could survive this starving time.
Think not of it, girl, she told herself, think not of it, else you shall die of grief.
And she did not turn back to look upon the gleam of the fort's fires as they painted the night sky above in red. She was unlettered but was deep devout, a good and a pious girl, and she had listened when the ministers read from the holy book, she had tracked their words and taken them whole in long phrases into her knowledge. She had learned the lesson of only forward movement from the wife of Lot, who had glanced backward once as she was fleeing the destruction of sodom and by her weakness and the wrath of god had been transformed to a pillar of salt.
Only when she was inside the forest did the wind remove its hands from her cheeks and from under her skirts. It was warmer among the trees but by no means warm. She stopped and pressed her forehead to the rough skin of a pine and the harshness of it on her skin held her there. What light that could have fallen from the sky did not fall at all, as the heavens above were covered by a thickness of cloud. The forest before her was as dense as pitch, though pocks of snow did gleam in the pits of the trees. Her breath was ragged and with effort she quieted it. She let the silence seep back into her, into the forest, and it smoothed over the memory of her crashing footsteps, and she wondered if she had been loud enough to have waked the men of the fort or the original men of this forest. The men known, the men unknown. Either could be creeping near to her even now.
She listened over the scrape and bow of the wind, cold trunk rubbing trunk in a tuning of fiddles, but she heard no footsteps and no breaking twigs. Though the lack of sound was no real solace.
At last, when her blood calmed in her ears, she heard the stream not far from her, the water rasping under its shell of ice. She pressed forward as fleet and soft as she could, and when under her foot she discovered the slickness of the ice, then the narrow aisle of stony bank where the stream ran swollen in the spring, she followed it northward, grateful to escape the sharp grasping twigs and bushes that snatched at her face and her clothing.
**
Into the night the girl ran and ran, and the cold and the dark and the wilderness and her fear and the depth of her losses, all things together, dwindled the self she had once known down to nothing.
A nothing is no thing, a nothing is a thing with no past.
It was also true that with no past, the girl thought, a nothing could be free.
In time, her mind that had been shocked in flight began to move into thinking again.
She became aware of eyes upon her.
And though she imagined that they were the hostile eyes of men, they were in fact the eyes of the forest itself watching this new form of creature with its wheezing breath and crashing footfall and bitter human reek, all the night birds and the roaming creatures stilled in silent wonderment as the girl went past. And even when the creatures could no longer see or hear the running girl and the last scent of her distress faded in their immediacy from the noses of the crawling beasts, when only a trace of her could be scented upon the leaves and dirt and snow displaced by her feet, the forest's sense of time shuddered and jerked forward, and the rip that the running girl made became healed, and the ordinary business of the creatures' hungers was reawakened behind her. Only hours after she had passed through the forest, she became to them a strange dream barely remembered in the urgencies of the moment.
**
It was perhaps minutes, perhaps hours, there was no way to tell, but a long thick expanse of time spent running northward up the stream bank, when the girl saw a deeper darker shine near where her boot fell, a softness of the ice beneath, and she knew it to be water freed from its frozen crust, openly flowing. She bent and took off her leather gloves with her teeth and pressed her unworking hands between her legs until they had thawed enough to bend, then she opened the sack that she had been carrying in one stiff fist, reached in and took the pewter cup she had stolen, dipped it into the running water, and drank deep. The cold sliced down the center of her like the tip of a knife. It made her ache. Her teeth chattered in the bones of her skull. Her stomach, which had been empty these four days, protested at its new fullness of water. She replaced the cup and tied the sack to her waist, lifting her cloak and gowns to put it against her skin so she could feel it on the flesh of her body and would be comforted by having it always near. She wanted to sink down into the small heap of snow to sleep, her head swam and pounded, but she could not do this she knew, and she pressed herself on again, forward, away, farther.
And as she ran she prayed in her soul: O god, by whom the meek are guided in judgment, and light riseth up for the godly, grant me in all my doubts and uncertainties the grace to ask what thou wouldst have me do that the spirit of wisdom may save me from all false choices and that in thy light I may see light and in thy straight path may not stumble.
She listened for anything, for the low moan of a night bird as emissary of the divine, a shifting quality of wind that would speak its will to her, but in response there were only the noises of her passage and the cold wind playing against the disinterested forest.
And thus she ran again, and while running as soft as she could, she remembered the solace of song and thought perhaps it could heat the edges of her fear until it melted within her.
So only inside herself she sang as brightly as she knew how, the spring clad all in gladness doth laugh at winter's sadness fa la la la la la la la la la la and so on.
She knew many songs, of course, but this was the only one that came forth to meet her, quite a strange absence of song there was inside her mind, as once a lifetime ago she had been a dancing quipping singing little fool and hundreds of songs she had known. But she knew that a fool could only exist where there was indulgence and freedom enough for laughter and so it was natural that in flight all of her other songs had dissolved. Still, this one song gave what comfort it could, though in such exigency such comfort was small.
The moon had begun to show its face and the woods were bands of light and dark with snow passing in its streaks beneath.
Something tore in the skies above and the new downsifting snow was no longer needles of ice as it had been when she had first escaped the fort but had become now soft slow flakes that began to collect upon the old surface of snow and to obscure the steps she had made behind her.
Thank you good snow for your aid, the girl thought.
Press on, girl, the snow said, in falling.
**
It was not long afterward that the voices descended to her from the sky.
At first, she could not distinguish what they said, but soon they spoke to her louder and slid into the mistress's tones, scolding. Wicked sprite, verminous bit of stuff, thou last least unlettered Zed, who fled thy duty in thy mistress's worst need. For it is said thou must submit thyself unto the elder, yea all be subject one to another and be clothed with humility, for god resisteth the proud and giveth grace to the humble.
So the voice of the mistress hissed to her out of the dark forest.
And forgetting herself the girl said aloud into the falling snow, Ah but does the good book not say also to escape to the mountains lest ye be consumed?
And she laughed because she knew it did say this and that she had won the point.
But the forest grew wary at the laugh, this new noise made within its sleeping stillness, and the girl had to slap her own cheek to hush herself and goad her body forward.
The mistress's voice fell itself a flake and the girl in her running left it behind her.
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