Death in the Pines by Thom Hartmann Page B

chatter of chipmunks. “I don’t know. We’d have to go find them.”
    â€œWhat if there are not enough animals for us to find? Not enough to keep us alive for the winter?”
    â€œDig for roots,” I suggested. “Find what kinds of bark we can eat, things like that.”
    â€œAnd if there is not enough of that?”
    â€œThen we’d starve.” I tried to say it lightly, brushing off a hypothetical problem, but in my stomach I felt a knot ofcertainty: without game or any other source of food, I might live a few weeks, but I didn’t have a lot of stored fat. In a matter of a month or less I would die. Nothing moved anywhere around us. I couldn’t see anything that looked remotely edible.
    Sylvia whispered, “Yes, we would starve.” She gave me that intense brown gaze of hers again. “If we have no hope, we could walk for three days to my family’s camp. They will share their food with us. They will never withhold food, though they have enough only for themselves. We would then all starve, though we might prolong our own lives for a few weeks.”
    â€œIf it came to that,” I said, “I would say we shouldn’t find your people and take what little they have just to gain a few more days of life.”
    â€œWhy?”
    I struggled to find the words, but settled for “It wouldn’t be a kind thing to do.”
    â€œNo,” she agreed. She let the silence stretch out. I wondered why she was putting me through this exercise, but it had become clear that if she had anything to teach me, she would instruct me only on her own terms. I sank into her silence, but I kept looking around, wondering how long it would be before a squirrel or wild turkey or deer would wander into sight. If I saw such a creature, then the speculation meant nothing. There would be a source of food, a source of life.
    But what if there really was nothing to eat? When I was a teenager, I had read the Lewis and Clark diaries. According to them, once deer roamed the forests and fields in herds that numbered into the thousands. Now spotting one beside the road was enough to thrill a van full of tourists. I had heard that nine out of every ten Vermont hunters came home empty-handed every November.
    â€œIf this forest,” Sylvia suddenly broke in, “were our supermarket, our only food supply, what would be the most important thing we could do with it?”
    â€œConserve it.”
    â€œWhat do you mean?”
    The chill had seeped into my legs, and I was shivering. I wondered how she could seem so comfortable, dressed as lightly as she was. “We’d … take only what we needed, and we’d leave behind everything else. To reproduce, to increase, so it would be there later for us, for our children.”
    â€œYes. That is the imperative of noninterference. That is the first law of … conscious nature. The part of nature that exercises free will. Animals.”
    â€œThe imperative of noninterference,” I repeated. “When the white man came, he found plains filled with buffalo, forests rich with herds of deer, enormous flocks of wild turkeys, streams so full of fish that the water itself seemed alive. The settlers thought the Native Americans were stupid, letting all those resources go to waste. But it wasn’t wasted was it? That was the stock ready to go on the shelves of your supermarket.”
    â€œNot just theirs,” she said. “It supplied food for all living things, not just humans. If you had enough and made sure there was always some excess, then when hard times came you would be ready. And you must not interfere. That is most important. When humans interfere with the cycles of nature, with the life of the world, you distort the way things are, pervert the intent of the Creator.”
    â€œAnd what about farming?” I asked. “Clear some forest, grow corn, beans, whatever.”
    â€œSome of the early people