The Feral Years

Between sixteen and eighteen I learned everything I would ever need to know about surviving the world. Everything after has been application.

The Naumkeag people who had not been killed and had not been absorbed had made themselves invisible in a way I was only beginning to understand at sixteen. They lived in the margins, between the English settlements and the deep woods, in the places the colony had not yet decided it needed. Sings moved among them with the ease of someone who has learned that invisibility is not the same as absence: she was still there, she simply declined to be convenient for the people who would have preferred otherwise.

I learned this from her. It is perhaps the most useful thing I have ever been taught.

We hunted. In the winter we moved toward the coast where the cold was different, more salt and less bone. In the summer we went deeper in, following the deer. I learned to dress a kill with the speed that comes only from necessity; there is no sentiment in hunger. I learned which plants were food and which were death and which were, under the right circumstances, both. I learned to start a fire in the rain. I learned how long you could stay still before your legs stopped cooperating.

Sings taught me these things the way she had always taught me things: by doing them while I watched, and then watching while I tried, and never once expressing impatience when I was slow.

Between sixteen and eighteen I had no name worth keeping. Sarah was already mostly gone. She had begun to die with Abigail on Gallows Hill; what was left lived in the woods and grew more comfortable there by the month. I was not yet Betsy. I was something in between, still warm, still mortal, still hungry in the ways the mortal are hungry, still capable of being cold.

I have not been cold since 1697. I have missed it exactly once, in the winter of 1875, in a house in Tucson where everything I loved was gone. I sat in the dark and thought that the cold was the one honest thing left in the world and I had lost even that.

But that comes much later.

What I want you to understand about the feral years is not the difficulty but the opposite: they were the first time in my life that the world and I had come to terms. The world asked only that I survive it. I was good at that. I am still good at that. Of all the things I was in those two years, I was most completely myself.

Everything after has been a costume of one kind or another. Useful costumes. Convincing costumes. But costumes.

The girl in the woods was the only version of me that did not need one.