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Tom told us one afternoon that “knowledge is power.” I know that everyone says that, that it’s an old saying. The reason I’m writing it down now, though, is because I think I finally understand it.
See, Tom taught us all sorts of stuff. He taught us how to hunt and stalk; how to track and how to confuse someone if they’re tracking us. He taught us about plants we might find out in the Ruin—the ones you can eat, the poisonous ones, the ones that can be used for first aid. He taught us about how to read the landscape like a book. He said that nature was always trying to tell us something, and all we had to do was slow down, stop for a moment, and pay attention. He taught us how to listen to the wind and the things it says when it moves through different kinds of trees and through the summer grass and over rocks.
He made us read books on anatomy. Factoid: It takes eight and a half pounds of pressure per square inch to break the adult male elbow. Kind of cool, kind of disgusting.
We learned a lot of stuff like that.
We also learned how to use spiderwebs to fight infection, how to make shoes out of tree bark and leaves, how to walk so quietly that we could come right up to a deer and pet it without spooking it.
He taught us to always leave the forest the way we found it.
He gave us reading lists of stuff that had no connection to fighting. Poems and plays and essays about what it means to be a human being. We spent one afternoon just mixing colors from pigments we collected in the forest.
It was Morgie who finally asked him why we were learning all that crap (his word choice!) instead of just training to fight. Benny got all tense, because I guess he thought Tom was going to get mad, but Tom didn’t.
Tom asked a question that really surprised us. The answer made me cry, though not right then. Later, when I was alone.
Tom asked Morgie, “Why are you training to be a samurai? What’s the point?”
Morgie got all defensive, the way he does, and said that we were training to fight zoms and to stop people like Charlie and the Hammer.
Tom kept pushing him. He said that wasn’t enough of an answer. He asked us all what we were fighting for. “What,” he asked, “is the purpose of a samurai?”
That seemed like an easy answer. Benny said, “?‘Samurai’ means ‘to serve.’?”
Tom nodded and said that was a definition, but not an answer. Who did we serve, and what did we serve?
It kind of caught us all off guard. We didn’t know how to answer.
After we all kept saying the wrong things, it was Chong who figured it out.
He said, “People think that learning to be a samurai means learning to fight and kill.”
Tom smiled and said, “But . . . ?”
“But we’re not learning how to kill,” Chong continued. “We’re learning how to be alive.”
Benny was nodding as he said it, and I think even Morgie got it.
Dead & Gone
(Five years before Flesh & Bone)
1
Sometimes survival is a feast. Sometimes it’s rainwater in a ditch and a bug.
The girl knew both kinds, and all the kinds in between.
Out here, you had to learn every
kind of survival or you stopped learning. Stopped talking. Stopped breathing.
The hunger, though—that never goes away.
Not while you’re alive.
Not after you’re dead.
