The Vaster Wilds

Too ill to block out her bad memories, the girl begins to ruminate upon her mistress’s second marriage to the minister, analyzing the devastating effect it had on the household. She remembers that his demands and cruelty quickly made him unpopular in the house. He further cemented the girl’s dislike when he forced the mistress, Bess, and the girl to come along with him to the colony in an attempt to gain more wealth. In the colony, the mistress could no longer disguise her age with makeup, and Bess gave up on living entirely. When Bess died, the girl grieved deeply, washing and caring for Bess’s body all by herself. The night after Bess was buried, she woke to find the minister and the mistress’s cots empty. She went to investigate and discovered them and some others eating Bess’s body. Enraged, the girl attacked the mistress, but the other colonists dragged her off. Running back to the house, she gathered as many useful things as she could and made ready to escape the fort. The minister caught her as she was about to slip beyond the walls of the palisade. He tried to strangle her to death, but she was able to stab him and escape, running out into the forest. Now dying from smallpox, she regrets having murdered someone, but she holds a much deeper regret for the indignity that Bess’s body suffered.

The girl hears the flapping of wings and thinks that an angel may have come. Instead, it is a vulture, and she is happy to see it, because it means that her own death is near. Looking up to the sky, she thinks on all the wonders of the natural world that she has seen and suddenly feels the world expand around her. She feels herself split and sees a vision of her second self.

Her other self sits up and opens her eyes. This second self manages to pull herself to the bank of the river, where she finds and eats a fish that the mother bear has discarded. This version of her remains ill for a few days more, struggling along in the immediate area by eating fish from the river. When she has recovered slightly, she moves along the river to find a sheltered and raised embankment where she can live. She builds a small stone house. As this version of herself grows stronger, she is able to build a sod roof and weave a willow-and-vine door. She cleans herself and experiments with building traps for game as her body slowly heals. She passes the summer surviving, and in the fall, she sees her reflection and laughs, realizing that she looks 60. She tells stories to herself to survive the winter. When winter ends, she is weakened, but she knows she will survive.

At times she is overcome by the beauty of the world around her as she ekes out a bare form of survival from year to year. She knows that the Indigenous population of the area is aware of her existence and tolerates her but has no desire for further contact. She decides that if they came to kill her, she would at least get to have other humans as her last sight. She accepts this, for she knows herself to be an imposition. After many years, when she is in her thirties, this second self succumbs to death. The voice in her head asks if she regrets her life or her loss of faith, and she says no, but she does regret not having attempted to make her way to the Powhatan people when running from the fort.

Meanwhile, the version of the girl dying of smallpox thinks of the men from whom she fled at the river and wonders if they were actually trying to help her. She realizes that if they had helped her, they would have brought disease into their village. She is grateful that this did not happen, for she would never have wanted to be the cause of so much death. Even so she wishes that she could have had someone with whom to live a full life. Thinking again on the vision of her second self, she imagines her second self’s death. Contemplating the true nature of all living things, she comes to the conclusion that there isn’t God, and there isn’t nothing. Instead, there is something else beyond both of those things. She sees a vision of her second self attempting to fish in the winter, slipping and falling on the ice and landing on her hatchet. The second self crawls back to her hut and pulls the hatchet from her side; surrounded by a pool of her own blood, she feels herself slip away. Imagining this second self’s life, the girl realizes that although there is beauty in survival, surviving alone is not a life she would choose.

The girl’s breathing grows more and more ragged. The vulture nears, and then other vultures join it. They feast on her dead body. Animals carry her bones to scatter them around the forest. In her rib cage, an oak tree will spring up, becoming a giant of the forest.

The moment of the girl’s death is filled with wonder at the changes of spring growing around her. Her final thought is of an ant that crawls on her forehead. She hopes that it will rejoice in its one brief but beautiful life. At the end, there are no angels or demons or ghosts, just the good wind blowing over the world.