Earth Abides

Chapter 1

Perhaps it was that same day or perhaps it was only that same summer or perhaps even it was another year…. When Ish looked up, he saw, very clearly, a young man standing in front of him. The young man wore a neat-enough pair of blue jeans with copper rivets shining brightly, and yet over his shoulders he wore a tawny hide with sharp claws dangling from it. In his hand he held a strong bow, and over his shoulder was a quiver with the feathered ends of arrows sticking from it. Ish blinked, for in his old eyes the sunshine was strong.

“Who are you?” said Ish.

The young man answered respectfully, “I am Jack, Ish, as indeed you yourself well know.”

The way he said “Ish” did not indicate that he was trying to be unduly familiar with an old man, thus calling him by a nickname, but rather it carried something of great respect and even of awe, and as if “Ish” stood for much more than merely the name of an old man.

But Ish himself was confused, and he squinted, peering more carefully, because at short distances he no longer saw clearly. But he was sure that Jack should have dark hair, or perhaps turned somewhat gray by now, and this one who called himself Jack had long wavy yellow hair.

“You should not make jokes with an old man,” said Ish. “Jack is my oldest son, and I would recognize him. He has dark hair, and he is older than you.”

The young man laughed, but politely, and said, “You are talking, Ish, of my grandfather, as indeed you yourself well know.” Again the way in which he said “Ish” had a certain strange sound to it, and now Ish noticed also the strangeness of his other repeated words, “as indeed you yourself well know.”

“Are you of the First Ones?” Ish asked. “Or of the Others?”

“Of the First Ones,” he said.

Then, as Ish still looked, he was puzzled that the young man, who was certainly not a child, was carrying a bow instead of a rifle. “Why do you not have a rifle?” he asked.

“Rifles are good for playthings!” the young man said, and he laughed, a little scornfully perhaps. “You cannot be sure of a rifle, as indeed you yourself, Ish, well know. Sometimes the rifle works, and it makes the big noise, but other times you pull the trigger, and it only goes ‘click.’” Here he snapped his fingers. “So you cannot use the rifles for real hunting, although the older men say that this was not so in the long past years. But now we use the arrow because it is sure, and never refuses to fly and besides,” here the young man held himself proudly, “besides, it is a matter of strength and skill to shoot with the bow—but anyone, they say, could shoot with a rifle, as you yourself, Ish, well know.”

“Let me see an arrow,” said Ish.

The young man took an arrow from the quiver, and looked at it, and then handed it across.

“That is a good arrow,” he said. “I made it myself.”

Ish looked at the arrow and felt the weight of it. This was no plaything for a child. The shaft was nearly a yard long, split cleanly from a billet of flawless straight-grained wood, and then rounded and smoothed. It was well feathered, with pinions of some kind, although Ish could not see well enough to know what bird had yielded the feathers. By feeling, however, he could tell that they were arranged carefully so that the arrow in flight would spin like a rifle-bullet, and thus keep its true course and carry farther.

Then he observed the arrowhead, again more by feel than by sight. The arrowhead was very sharp both at the point and along the edges. Ish nearly pricked his thumb. It had the bumpy yet slick feel which told him that it was of hammered metal. Though he could not see very clearly, he made the color out as silvery-white.

“What is that made of?” he asked.

“It is from one of the little round things. They have faces on them. The old men have a name for them, but I do not remember exactly. It is something like corns.”

The young man paused, as if to be told the right word, but when he had no reply, he went on again, being obviously eager to show off his knowledge about arrowheads.

“We find these little round things in the old buildings. Often there are many—many—of them in the boxes and drawers. Sometimes they are rolled up together in bundles like short round sticks, but heavier than sticks. Some are red and some are white, like this one, and there are two kinds of the white. The one kind of white—the one that has the picture of the hump-backed bull—we do not use those because they are harder to pound.”

Ish considered, and thought that he understood.

“And this white one here?” he asked. “Was there a relief—picture—on this one?”

The young man took the arrow from Ish, and looked at it, and then handed it back.

“They all have pictures,” he said. “But I was looking to see if I could still make out what picture was on this one. It has not quite all gone because of the hammering. This was one of the littlest ones, and it had the picture of the woman with the wings growing out of her head. Some of them have pictures of hawks—but not real hawks.” The young man was talking very happily. “Others have men; at least, they look like men—one with a beard, and one with long hair hanging behind him and another with a strong-looking face, without a beard and with short hair, and heavy-jawed.”

“And who—who do you think—were all these men?”

The young man glanced both ways, as if a little nervous.

“These—oh, these—yes! These, we think—as you yourself, Ish, well know—these were the Old Ones that were before our Old Ones!”

When there was no thunder from heaven and when the young man could see that Ish was not displeased, he went on:

“Yes, that must be it—as you yourself, Ish, well know. These men, and the hawks, and the bull! Perhaps the woman with the wings growing from her head sprang from the marriage of a hawk and a woman. But, however it is, they do not seem to mind our taking their pictures and hammering them up for arrowheads. I have wondered about it. Perhaps they are too great to care about little things, or perhaps they did their work a long time ago and have now grown old and weak.”

He stopped talking, but Ish could see that he was pleased with himself, and liked to talk, and was thinking quickly of something more to say. He, at least, had imagination.

“Yes,” the young man continued, “I have an idea. Our Old Ones—they were the Americans—made the houses and bridges and the little round things that we hammer out for arrowheads. But those others—the Old Ones of the Old Ones—perhaps they made the hills and the sun, and the Americans themselves.”

Then, though it was a cheap trick to play on the young man, Ish could not resist talking in double meaning.

“Yes,” he said, “I have heard it said that those older Old Ones produced the Americans—but I rather doubt that they made the hills and the sun.”

Though he could not have understood, perhaps the young man caught the irony in the tone, and so said nothing.

“But, go on,” Ish continued then. “Tell me more about the arrowheads themselves. I am not interested in your cosmogony.” He used the last word in good-humored malice, knowing that the other would not understand it, but would be impressed by its length and strange sound.

“Yes, about the arrowheads,” the young man said, hesitating a moment, and then regaining confidence. “We use both the red and the white. The red are good for shooting cattle and lions. The white are for deer and other game.”

“Why is that?” Ish asked sharply, for he felt his old-time rationalism stirring at the thought of all such magic and hocus-pocus. The question, however, seemed only to surprise and confuse the young man.

“Why?” he asked. “Why? How could anyone know why? Except you yourself, Ish! This matter of the red and white arrowheads is merely something that is. It is like—” He hesitated, and then the sunlight seemed to catch his attention. “Yes, it is like the sun that keeps on going round the earth, but naturally no one knows why, or asks why. Why should there be a why?”

Having said these last words, the young man was obviously very pleased with himself as if he had propounded some great philosophical dictum, although undoubtedly he had spoken only in great simplicity. But when Ish turned the matter over in his mind, he was not sure. Perhaps even in this simplicity there was a depth. Was there ever an answer to “why”? Did not things just exist in the present?

Yet, Ish was certain, a fallacy lurked somewhere in the argument. A sense of cause-and-effect was necessary for the life at the human level, and this matter of the different-colored arrowheads was a proof of it, not the contrary. Only the sense of causation here was faulty and irrational. The young man was maintaining an absurdity—that cattle and lions could be better killed with copper arrowheads hammered from pennies, whereas deer were better killed with silver ones hammered from dimes or quarters. Yet there could obviously not be enough difference in hardness or sharpness to matter. Only, in these primitive minds, the secondary matter of color had in some way come to be considered—this was rank superstition!—the determining factor.

Deep within him, Ish again felt his old hatred of loose thinking boil up.

Though he was an old man, still he might do something.

“No!” he said, so sharply that the young man started. “No! That is not right. The white arrowheads and the red! One just as well as….”

Then, slowly his voice trailed off. No, he thought, that was not the way it was destined to be. He heard a rich contralto voice saying to him, “Relax!” Perhaps he might persuade this young man named Jack, who was undoubtedly a remarkably intelligent and imaginative young man, possibly even somewhat like that little one named Joey. But what would it accomplish? Only, perhaps to make the young man confused and ill at ease among all the others. And what was really the difference? At least, copper arrowheads were not less effective against lions, and if the bowman thought them more effective, the thought gave him courage and steadied his hand.

So Ish said nothing more about the matter, and smiled at the young man reassuringly, and looked again at the arrow. Another thought came to him, and he asked:

“Can you always find plenty of those little round things?”

The young man laughed merrily, as if this were a strange question.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “There are so many that if all of us spent all our time pounding out arrowheads, still we should never run short.”

Ish considered. Yes, that was probably true. Even if there were a hundred men in The Tribe by now, there must be thousands and thousands of coins readily to be found in tills and cash-boxes, even in this one corner of the city. And if the coins should be exhausted, there would be thousands of miles of copper telephone wire. When he had first made an arrow, he recollected, he had imagined that The Tribe would revert to stone arrowheads. Instead they had taken a short-cut, and were already fashioning metal. So perhaps The Tribe, his own descendants, had already passed the turning-point, were no longer forgetting more old things than they were learning new things, and were no longer sinking toward savagery, but were maintaining a stable level or perhaps gradually beginning to win new security. By showing them how to make bows, he had helped, and he felt greatly comforted.

Then, having finished looking at the arrow, Ish handed it back. “It seems to be a very good arrow,” he said, although he did not really know much about arrows.

Nevertheless the young man smiled with great happiness at this praise of his arrow, and Ish noted that he made a mark on it before he put it back into the quiver, as if he wished to know it and distinguish it from other arrows after what had happened. Then, as he still looked at the young man, Ish felt a sudden great love for him, and he had not been so moved for a long time since he had been sitting as an old man on the hillside. This Jack, who was of the First Ones, must be Ish’s great-grandson in the male line, and he was also Em’s great-grandson. So, as Ish looked, his heart yearned outwards, and he asked a strange question:

“Young man,” he said, “are you happy?” The young man named Jack looked startled at this question, and he glanced in both directions before answering, and then he spoke.

“Yes, I am happy. Things are as they are, and I am part of them.”

Ish began to think of what this might mean and to wonder again whether the words had been spoken only in simplicity or whether there was some deep philosophy behind them, but he could not decide. At his trying to think, the fog seemed again to move in at the corners of his brain. But still he recollected vaguely that the words—strange as they were—had a ring of familiarity about them. He had not perhaps ever heard those exact words before, but they were words that someone whom he had once known might well have spoken. For in his words the young man had not questioned, but had accepted. Ish could not recall this person exactly, but he remembered softness and warmth, and warm feelings flowed through him.

When he came out of his reverie and looked up again, no one was standing in front of him. In fact, Ish would have been unable to say surely whether the young man named Jack had been there that same day, or whether this was now some other day, or perhaps even another summer.

Chapter 2

He awoke so early, one morning, that the room was still in half-darkness. He lay quiet for a moment, wondering where he was, and for a moment he thought that he was a small boy again and had crawled into his mother’s bed for comfort in the early morning. Then he realized that it could not be so, and he thought that if he stretched out his hand he would find Em lying there beside him. But that was not so, either. Then he thought of his young wife. But no, she would not be there either, for long ago he had given her to a younger man because it is right that a woman should bear children so that the tribe will increase and the darkness draw farther back. So then at last he realized that he was a very old man, and was lying in the bed by himself. Nevertheless, it was the same bed and the same room.

There was a strange dryness in his throat. After a minute he slowly got out of bed, and uncertainly on his old stiff legs he walked to the bathroom for a drink of water. As he went into the bathroom, he stretched out his right hand, and flipped the electric-light switch. It made the familiar click, and suddenly the room was brilliant to his eyes. Then after a moment he found himself in the half-darkness of dawn again, and he realized that the electric light had not flashed on. It had not so flashed for years, and would never again—and the familiar click had merely fooled his old brain, so that for a moment the room had seemed light. All this did not bother him, because it had thus happened before.

Also, when he turned the stiff faucet-handle at the washbowl, no water gushed out merrily. Then he remembered that years ago the water had ceased to run.

He could not get his drink of water, but he was not so much thirsty as merely bothered by that dryness in the throat.

After he had swallowed a few times, he felt better. When he stood by the bedside again, he hesitated, sniffing. He could remember many changes of smells through the years. Far back there had been the smell of a great city. That had given way to the clean smell of green things and growth. But that also had yielded, and now there was about the old house a smell of age and decay. That smell, however, was familiar and was not bothering him. What he was trying to assay was a kind of dry smokiness. That dryness, he considered, had made him wake up so early. But he felt no fear, and crawled into bed again.

A steady wind was blowing from the north. It tossed the pine trees that now grew closely around the house, and the branches swished and knocked against the windows and against the walls of the house.

The noise kept him awake, and he lay there listening. He wished that he knew the time, but he no longer kept a clock wound. Time in its old sense of appointments to be kept and things to be done—all that had long since ceased to exist, both because the way of life had changed and because he himself was so old as to be almost out of life. In certain ways he had already, as it seemed, passed from time to eternity.

Now he lay by himself in the old and half-ruined house. The others slept in other houses, or in good weather lay in the open. Perhaps they felt that ghosts walked in this old house. Well, perhaps! To Ish himself the thoughts of those who had been long dead were often more immediately present than the bodies of those now living.

Though he had no clock, the half-light told him that the time could not be much before sunrise. Perhaps he had slept as long as an old man needed to sleep. He would lie there, turning himself over occasionally, until the sun had risen, and someone—he hoped it would be the young man called Jack—came to bring him his breakfast. There would be a well-braised beef bone on which he could suck, and some corn-meal boiled into a mush. The Tribe took good care of him, an old man. They let him have corn-meal though that was something of a rarity with them. They sent someone to carry his hammer and help him outdoors, so that he could sit on the hillside when there was sunshine. Often the one who came to help him was Jack. Yes, they took very good care of him, even though he was a useless old man. Sometimes they grew angry with him and pinched him, but that was only because they thought he was a god.

The wind still blew, and the branches brushed and slapped against the house. But he had apparently not slept as much as he needed to sleep, and after a while he drowsed off, in spite of the noises.

The cuts in the hills and the long embankments for the roads—they will still show as narrow valleys and ridges even after ten thousand years have passed. The great masses of concrete that were the dams—they will remain like the dikes of the granite itself.

But the steel and the wood will pass quickly. The three fires will take them.

Slowest of all is the fire of rust that burns at the steel. Yet give it some short centuries, and the high trestle that spans the canyon will be only a line of red soil on the slopes below.

Faster by far is the fire of decay that feeds on the wood.

But fastest of all is the fire of the flames.

Then suddenly someone was shaking him hard. He awoke with a great shock. As he focused his old eyes, he saw that the person who was shaking him was the young man named Jack, and that Jack’s face was tense with fear.

“Get up! Get up quick!” Jack was saying. With the shock of the sudden awakening, Ish’s mind seemed clearer than before, and both his body and his mind reacted faster. He moved quickly, pulling on some clothes. Jack helped him. Smoke was heavy in the room now, no longer a mere smell. Ish coughed, and his eyes watered. He heard a crackle and a dull roar. They went downstairs quickly, and out the front door, and down the steps toward the street. Only when he was out of the house did Ish realize how strongly the wind was blowing. Smoke rolled before it, and bits of burning leaves and bark swirled along.

Ish was not surprised. He had known always that this must happen some time. Every year the oat-grass grew tall, and then ripened and dried where it stood. Every year the bushes of the deserted gardens had grown more thick, and the dead leaves had fallen among them. It was only a question of time, he had always known, until some hunter’s campfire would escape from him, and with a strong wind driving it, the fire would make a clean sweep on this side of the Bay, as it had on the other.

Just as they reached the sidewalk, the thick clump of underbrush around the next house to the north suddenly went up in a roar of flame so that Ish shrank away from the heat. Jack began to hurry him along the sidewalk away from the approaching fire, and just at that moment Ish realized that he had forgotten something although he could not remember just what.

They came to two other young men who were standing there looking at the approaching flames. Then Ish remembered.

“My hammer!” he cried out. “Where is my hammer?”

As soon as he had cried out, he was ashamed of himself to have made so much fuss about a trifle in a time of emergency. After all, the hammer was of no importance. Then he was amazed to see what a tremendous impression his words had made upon the three young men. They looked at each other as if they were panic-stricken. Suddenly, Jack dashed back toward the house, even though the bushes in the garden itself were now beginning to smoke.

“Come back! Come back!” Ish called after him, but his voice was not very strong, and he was half choking on account of the smoke.

This was a terrible thing, Ish was thinking to himself, that Jack should be burned in the fire about such a small matter as a hammer.

But then Jack came running out. His lion-skin cloak was singed, and he himself was rubbing at some burns where sparks had fallen on him. But otherwise he was not hurt. The other young men seemed strangely relieved that he was carrying the hammer in his hand.

Obviously, they could not stay where they were very long because the flames were bearing down upon them.

“Where shall we go, Ish?” one of them asked. Ish felt that this was a strange question for anyone to ask of him, who was only an old man and would scarcely know what to do as well as the young ones would. Then he remembered that they sometimes asked him which direction they should take for their hunting. When he did not answer, they pinched him. He did not like to be pinched, and so he thought hard now, as to which way they should go. The young men themselves, he realized, could outrun the fire, but he himself would not be strong enough. So he thought more intensely than he had thought for a long time, both because he wished to save his own life and the lives of the young men, and also because he was afraid that they would pinch him. Thinking so intently, he remembered the bare flat rock where they had carved the numerals of the years in the time long ago. Round this flat rock were other high rocks where nothing grew, and in the spaces among these rocks they could find shelter because nothing was there to burn.

“Let us go to the rocks!” he said then, being sure that they would know what rocks he meant.

Even though the young men helped him, Ish was very tired when they got to the safety of the rocks. Once they were there, however, he lay quietly, panting and recovering his strength. The fire was soon burning all around, but among the rocks they were not in danger. There was an overhang to the one rock, and another tall rock close by, so that they were almost in a cave.

As he lay there, Ish dozed off with his weariness, or perhaps it was more as if he had fainted, because his old heart was pounding wildly after the dash ahead of the flames. But after a while he came to himself, and lay there quietly, and his mind seemed closer than it had been for a long time.

Yes, he thought, it is now the dry autumn, and the time of bad fires because of dry north winds. And this is the autumn following that summer when I first came to know Jack, and talked to him about the arrowheads. Since then Jack has been the one who has chiefly taken care of me, as The Tribe at its meeting has undoubtedly ordered him to do. After all, I am very important. I am a god. No, I am not a god. But perhaps I am the mouth-piece of a god. No, I know that I am not that either. But at least they give me care, and I have comfort, because I am the last American.

Then again, since he was exhausted from his flight in front of the flames, he fell asleep, or perhaps fainted.

After a while he came to himself once more. He could not have been unconscious for very long, for he heard the flames still crackling. When he opened his eyes, all he could see was the grayness of the rock-overhang above him, and he realized that he must be lying on his back. He heard little noises of scuffling and the playful growls of a dog.

But now with this return to consciousness his mind seemed even clearer than before, so clear indeed that he was startled at first, and then a little frightened. For he seemed to know all the past and all the future too, as well as what was actually present.

“This second world—it has gone too.” The thoughts flickered through his mind. “I saw the great world go. Now this little world, my second world, is going. It is going by fire. This fire that we have known so long—fire that warms us; fire that destroys us. They used to say that because of the bombs we would go back and live in caves. Well, here is a cave—but we have not marched by the road that anyone imagined. I survived the loss of that, my great world, but I shall not outlast the destruction of this, my little world. I am an old man now, and also my mind is too clear. I know. This is near the end. From the cave we came, and to the cave we return.”

Just as his mind had grown clearer, so also his sight seemed clearer than usual. After a while, feeling stronger, he sat up, and then he could see all the others. At first he was surprised because there were not only three young men but also two dogs. He did not remember having seen the dogs before. They were ordinary dogs of the kind used for hunting—not large, long haired, mostly black with some white on them, a kind of sheep dog, he supposed they would have been called in the Old Times. They were intelligent dogs, and even well-mannered. They lay quietly now in the cave-like overhang of the rocks, and did not make any excitement of barking.

Then Ish looked at the young men. Since now, all at once, he seemed to see the past and the future as well as the present, he could look more clearly at the young men for the mixture of the past, present and future that they really were. Their clothing was like Jack’s. They had soft, well-fashioned moccasin-like footgear of deer-hide; they also wore blue jeans with bright copper rivets in them. Above their waists they had only the tawny lion-skins with the dangling paws and the claws still attached. Each one of them had his bow and quiver of arrows, and each wore a knife at his belt, although they could not make knives. One of them had a spear with a shaft as tall as himself, and extending above the shaft, a spear-head. When Ish looked at it more carefully, he saw that it was really an old butcher-knife with an eighteen-inch blade. The blade had been socketed into the end of the spear-shaft, and since the blade was very sharp-pointed, this was a formidable weapon for the close fighting.

Then at last Ish looked at the faces of the young men, and he saw that they were different from the faces of the men of long ago. These faces were young, but also they were calm, and they seemed to bear on them few lines of strain and worry and fear.

“See!” said one of them, and he was nodding in the direction of Ish. “See—he is better now! He is looking around.” Ish realized that the voice was kindly, and he felt a great love for the young man even though a little while ago he had been afraid that that particular one would be the first to pinch him.

Something else that was strange also, Ish thought now, was that after all these years the young men still talked a language which people had once called English.

Only, as he considered more carefully, he realized that the language too had changed. When the young man had said the word “see,” the sound was not quite as it should be. Instead it sounded more as if it were “tsee,” or perhaps, “tchee.”

Some smoke was drifting in between the rocks now, so that they coughed a little. Outside, there was a great crackle of flame; a clump of trees or a near-by house must be burning. The dogs whined a little. Yet the air remained cool enough, so that Ish was not afraid.

He wondered what had become of all the others. There must be several hundred people in The Tribe now. The labor of asking questions seemed too much, and he could tell from the calmness of the young men that there could have been no disaster. Most likely, he thought, the others had left at the first threat of fire, and perhaps only at the last moment Jack had remembered the old man—who was also a god—who was sleeping alone in the house.

Yes, now it was easier merely to sit and look and think, without asking questions. So he looked at the faces again.

Now one of the young men was playing with a dog. He put out his hand, and then jerked it away quickly, and the dog snapped playfully and growled. The dog and the young man seemed almost to meet at the same level, and both seemed happy. One of the others was carving a piece of wood. The sharp knife bit deeply into the soft wood, and a figure took shape as Ish watched. Ish smiled quietly to himself, for he saw that the figure had wide hips and generous breasts, and he realized that young men had not changed altogether. Though he did not even know their names, except for Jack, yet they must all be his grandsons or great-grandsons. Here they sat in the cave-like gap between two high rocks, and they played with a dog or carved lusty little images while outside the fire crackled. Civilization had gone years ago, and now the last of the city was burning around them, and yet the young men were happy.

Was it all for the best? From the cave we come and to the cave we go! If that other one had lived, if there had been others like him, it might have been different. Again he thought of Joey—Joey! And yet would that have been better? He wished suddenly that he could live for a long time still—for a hundred years more, or even a hundred after that. All his life now he had observed the ways of the peoples on the earth, and he wished that he could still observe in the future. The next century and the next millennium would be interesting.

And then for a while, in the way of very old men, he merely sat quietly, not sleeping, and yet not quite thinking either.

Again, in that day each little tribe will live by itself and to itself and go its own way, and their differences will soon be more than they were even in the first days of Man, according to the accidents of survival and of place….

Here they live always in awe of the Other-world, and scarcely dare make water without a prayer. They have skill with boats among tidal channels. To eat, they catch fish and dig clams, and gather seeds of wild-grasses….

Here they are darker-skinned and talk another language, and worship a dark-skinned mother and child. They keep horses and turkeys, and grow corn in the flat by the river. They catch rabbits in snares, but have no bows….

Here they are still darker. They speak English, but say no r’s, and their speech is thick. They keep pigs and chickens, and raise corn. Also they raise cotton, but make no use of it, except to offer a little to their god, knowing it from of old to be a thing of power. Their god has the form of an alligator, and they call him Olsaytn….

Here they shoot with the bow, skillfully, and their hunting-dogs are trained to give tongue. They love assembly and debate. Their womenfolk walk proudly. The symbol of their god is a hammer, but they pay him no great reverence….

Many others there are too, each differing. In the distant years after these first years, the tribes will grow more numerous and come together, and cross-fertilize in body and in mind. Then, doubtless, blindly and of no one’s planning, will come new civilizations and the new wars.

After a while they grew hungry and very thirsty. Since the fire had now died down in places, one of the young men sallied out. When he came back, he was carrying an old aluminum tea-kettle. Ish recognized it as the one which had been kept at the near-by spring. The young man offered it first to Ish, and he took a long drink of the cool water. Then the others drank.

Afterwards the same young man pulled a flat tin can out of the hip-pocket of his blue jeans. The label had long since fallen away from the can, and the metal was well rusted. The three discussed vigorously among themselves whether they should eat whatever might be in the can. Some people had died, one of them argued, from eating out of cans. They argued vigorously, but did not ask Ish’s advice. If there was a picture of a fish or some fruit on the outside of the can, then you knew that that kind of food was inside. But even, one of them declared, a rusty can might be dangerous when you knew what was in it, for in some way, if the rust went clear through the can, then what was inside might be spoiled.

As Ish, who was not in the argument, could have told them, the obvious thing to do was to open the can and see in what condition the food inside might be. But being a very old man and having gained some wisdom with life, he realized that they were arguing merely for the fun of it, and that eventually they would get around to a decision.

After a while, indeed, they hacked the can open with one of the knives, and inside was some reddish brown material. To Ish it was obviously a can of salmon. They smelled at it inquisitively, and decided that it was not spoiled. Also they inspected the inside of the can, and found that no rust had penetrated through it. They divided the salmon, and gave a share to Ish.

Ish had not seen or eaten any canned salmon for a long time. The meat looked much darker to him than it should look and it was lacking in flavor. But its taste—or lack of taste—he decided, might be partly the result of his own dullness of palate at his age. If it had not been so much trouble to talk, he would have liked to deliver a lecture to the young men about all the miracles that lay behind their eating this little snack of salmon. The fish must have been caught many years before, probably off the coast of Alaska, a thousand miles and more from the place where they were now eating it. But even if it had not been so much trouble to talk, still he recollected he could not even have made the young men understand what he was talking about. They had seen the ocean, perhaps, because it was not very far from where they lived, but they would have no conception of a great ship sailing the ocean, and they would have not known what he meant when he talked of a thousand miles.

So he ate quietly, and let his eyes rove from one of the young men to another. More and more often, however, his eyes came to rest upon that particular one who was called Jack. Life could not have been altogether easy for Jack. He had a scar on his right arm, and, unless Ish’s eyes deceived him, the left hand had suffered some kind of accident and was a little twisted. Yes, Jack must have suffered, and yet his face, like those of the others, was clear of lines and free in all its movements.

Again Ish felt his heart yearn toward the young man, for in spite of the scar and the twisted hand the young man seemed child-like and innocent, and Ish was afraid that at some time the world would strike back hard against him and find him unprepared. Once Ish recollected that he had asked a question of this young man named Jack. He had asked him, “Are you happy?” And the young man had answered in such a strange way that Ish had doubted whether he had understood what the words meant. That was the way the things happened over all these years; though the language itself had not changed more than a little, yet there were ideas and differences that had gone out of people’s thought. No longer perhaps did they make that sharp distinction between pleasure and sorrow that people had once made in the times of civilization. Perhaps other distinctions too had faded out.

So Jack may not even have understood the question exactly when he had replied then: “Yes, I am happy. Things are as they are, and I am part of them.”

But at least merriment had not gone out of the world. As Ish rested beneath the rock-overhang, he saw the others playing with their dogs or joking with one another. They laughed easily and often. And, as that one still carved at his wooden figurine, he whistled a tune. It was a gay tune, and Ish remembered its lilt but not its name or the words to sing with it. Yet it brought to him a feeling of small bells, and snow, and little glowing red and green lights, and festivity. Yes, that must have been a gay song even in the Old Days, and now it sounded gayer than ever. Gaiety—that had survived the Great Disaster!

The Great Disaster! Ish had not thought of those words for a long time. Now they seemed to have lost meaning. Those people who had died then would now be dead anyway, from mere passage of time. Now it seemed to make little difference whether they had all died in one year, or slowly over many years. And as for the loss of civilization—about that too he had long doubted.

The young man still whistled gaily, and Ish thought that he could remember the words “Oh, what fun it is…” He could ask the young man about the words. As he sat there in the deep cleft between the two rocks, however, Ish still found himself too tired to bother asking questions. Nevertheless his mind was clear. It was frighteningly clear, and he could not remember when before he had been able to think so deeply in behind the surface of things.

“What is all this?” he thought to himself. “Why is my mind so keen today?” He thought that perhaps it might be from the shock of being pulled out of bed so roughly and forced to leave the burning house. But he was not sure. All he knew was that he thought more clearly than he had been able to do since he could remember.

Still he wondered at the faces of the young men and their confidence, when outside everything was burning. Though Ish could not solve that problem, yet he thought much about it, and had various ideas. Perhaps, he thought, the difference lay somewhere in the difference between civilization and the times in which they now were living. In civilization, he thought, these young men would have all been considering one another as rivals, because in the days of civilization there were many men. They did not think much about the world outside of them because man seemed to be greatly stronger than all that outside world. So they thought mostly about how they could get the better of other people, and so they were likely not to trust each other altogether, not even brother and brother. But now, he thought, when men are very few, each of these young men wanders freely with his bow in hand and his dog at heel, but needs his comrade close at call. Nevertheless Ish did not know, and though his mind thought very clearly and very deeply in those hours, still he was not sure.

By mid-afternoon the fire had swept past them, and was burning far off to the south. They left the shelter of the rocks; avoiding places where the fire was still smouldering and where embers lay hot, they made their way southward down the slope of the hill gradually, without much difficulty. Evidently the young men knew what they were doing. Ish did not bother to ask questions because he needed all his strength merely to keep moving. They waited for him patiently, and often they helped him, letting him rest his arms across their shoulders. Toward evening, when his strength was failing, they made camp near a stream. Because of some freak of the wind and also because of the greater growth there, the fire had left a small spot unburned.

A little water was running in the stream-bed. The larger game all seemed to have run before the flames, but many quail and rabbits had taken shelter along the stream-bed, and the young men, scattering with their bows, soon came back with plenty of food.

One of them, apparently out of mere habit, began to make a fire with a bow-drill. But the others laughed at him, and soon gathered together some still glowing and smouldering sticks from where the fire had swept through.

After he had eaten a little and felt stronger, Ish looked around, and saw by the gutted ruins of a great building that they had camped on what had long ago been the campus of the University. Though he was still tired, he stood up curiously, and made out the shape of the Library a hundred yards or so distant. The trees around it had burned, but the building itself was still intact. Nearly all of its volumes, the whole record of mankind, would probably be still available. Available for whom? Ish did not try to answer the question that rose so spontaneously in his mind. In some way, the rules of the game had changed. He would not say whether they had changed for better or for worse. In any case, the Library—its preservation or its destruction—seemed to make very little difference in his thoughts now. Perhaps, this was the wisdom of old age. Perhaps, it was only despair and resignation.

“This will be a strange place for me to sleep tonight,” Ish thought. “Will the ghosts of my old professors move before me after all these years? Will I dream of a million books passing in endless procession, looking reproachfully upon me because after so long I have begun to have doubts in them and all they stood for?”

That night, however, though he often woke and was cold and envied the young men sleeping soundly, yet between times of waking he slept well and had no dreams, because he was very tired from all that had happened during the day.

Chapter 3

In the dawn, when he awoke finally, he was weak but clear-headed.

“This is very strange,” he thought, “because in the last few years I know that frequently I have not been wholly conscious of what was happening, and that is the way a very old man often is. But now, as it was yesterday, I see everything very clearly. I wonder what this can mean?”

He watched the young men making breakfast ready. That same one was whistling gaily at the same tune, and again it brought to Ish the thought of little bells and happiness, although he could not remember its name. But still his mind was clear—“clear as a bell,” the old words came to him, since the idea of bells was already with him.

“I have heard,” he thought, putting the thoughts into silent sentences, as he had always had a habit of doing, and now as an old man was more prone than ever to do. “Yes, I have heard, or more likely I have read it in one of all those books—at least, from somewhere I have got the idea that a man’s mind becomes clear just before he is to die. Well, I am very old, and it is likely enough, and nothing certainly to be unhappy about. If I were a Catholic now and if things were different, I should wish to confess.”

Then by the little stream, with the smell of smoke still in his nostrils and with the old University buildings looming up around him, he thought for a moment of his life, and considered what he had piled up of sins and of virtues. For he realized that a man should make peace with himself, even though all conditions changed, and that a man should face the question of whether in his life he had satisfied the ideas which he had built up within himself as to what he should be, and that all this was not a matter of priests and religion but of a man himself.

After he had considered his life, he did not feel perturbed. He had made mistakes, but also he had sometimes done the right thing, as always—or at least in general—he had tried to do. The Great Disaster had placed him in a position for which he had no training; still he had accomplished certain things, and had lived, he trusted, not altogether ignobly.

Just then one of them brought him a morsel of something that had been roasted on a stick before the fire.

“This is for you,” said the young man. “It is the breast of a quail as you yourself, Ish, well know.”

Ish thanked him politely, and chewed at the meat, being glad that he had teeth left. The smoky tang of the open fire was in the meat, and the taste was delicious.

“Why should I consider dying?” he thought. “Life is still good, and I am the last American.”

But he did not bother to comment on anything that was happening or to ask questions as to what they would do that day. He felt in some strange way drawn from the world, although he was still so fully conscious of it.

After breakfast there came a shouting from farther down the stream, and soon a newcomer arrived. There was a long talk then, but Ish did not pay much attention. He gathered, in general, that the whole tribe was moving toward a place where there were some lakes and where the fire had not swept. It was very good country, according to what the newcomer said. The three young men who had been with Ish were at first inclined to argue about this, because they had not been consulted in the decision. But the other explained that the whole question had been put up before the assembly of The Tribe, and so decided. The three then yielded, granting that what The Tribe had decided was binding upon them also.

Though this was doubtless a very small incident, Ish found it particularly gratifying. That was something which he had taught them long ago. But the thought, though it was pleasant, also brought him sorrow and even embarrassment when he remembered Charlie.

Soon they made preparations to begin the march, but Ish was so weak that he could hardly walk at all. The young men then decided that they would carry him pickaback by turns, and so they started. Carrying him, they managed to move more rapidly than they had moved on the preceding day when he had walked. They made jokes, one with another, about how light an old man grew to be—happy jokes with a lusty vein running through them, as to why an old man was so light. But Ish at least was glad that he was no great burden upon them; in fact, one of them said that to carry the hammer was as heavy a load as to carry Ish himself.

Once they were moving in this fashion, perhaps the joggling of being carried pickaback affected Ish, and he found the fog again creeping in upon his brain. He did not even know just where they were going or in what direction they were moving. Only, now and then, some incident stood out clearly before him.

After a while they passed out of the burned area, and came to a part of the city past which the fire had swept, leaving it uninjured. From the dampness in the air which made him shiver a little Ish realized that the wind had changed and that this area must be close to the Bay. There were ruins of factory buildings in this section. Once he noticed the paralleled rust lines of a railroad track. Everything was much grown up with bushes and some tall trees, but the long dry summers had prevented the country from returning to forest, and so there was always a good deal of grassy expanse through which the young men had no difficulty in finding a way. Often, moreover, they followed the actual lines of streets where the asphalt still showed in places, in spite of the weeds growing up through its cracks and the grass encroaching upon its sides where the blown dust of all these years had supplied a skin of soil to the surface. But generally the young men seemed to steer more by the position of the sun or by some distant landmark than to make their way along the lines of streets.

As they were passing a thicket, something caught Ish’s eye, and he reached out his hand and cried for it, suddenly, as a child might. The young men saw what he was doing. They stopped, laughing merrily, to humor him. One of them went to get the thing for which he had cried out. When they brought it, Ish was delighted, and now they laughed at him as if he really were a child, good-naturedly.

Ish did not mind. He had what he wanted. It was a scarlet flower—a geranium, which had adapted itself to the new life and lived through these years. It was not the flower but the color, Ish realized, that had given him that sudden pang and made him cry out. There was not enough red in the world anymore. Being old, he could remember a world in which dyes and lights flamed with scarlet and vermilion. But now the world had sunk back into a quiet harmony of blues and greens and browns—and reds no longer blazed everywhere.

But as he jogged along pickaback, he lost the sense of what was happening, and when he came to himself again, they were all seated on the ground taking a rest, and somewhere he had dropped the flower. Now, as he looked up, his eyes saw something a little distance away, and when he focused, he saw that it was a road-marker. It was shield-shaped, and he read U.S. and CALIFORNIA, and in large numerals, 4 and 0. He was so unused to seeing numerals that it was a moment before he could put the two together and form on his tongue the word “Forty.”

“This, then,” he thought, “this road which I can barely make out because of all the things growing on it, this is old U.S. 40—the East Shore Highway. It used to be six lanes wide. We must be heading toward the Bay Bridge.” And then again he did not remember clearly anything more.

There was still another incident of that morning’s march which came to him clearly out of the dimness of the fog pressing in around him. Again they had halted, but this time they were not sitting. The young man called Jack was carrying him at this moment, and as Ish looked out over Jack’s left shoulder, he saw the one with the spear right in front of them; one on each side, stood the two other young men, each with his bow half-drawn and an arrow nocked ready on the string. The two dogs crouched at heel, and they were growling deeply. Then, looking farther on, Ish saw a huge mountain-lion in the path.

The lion crouched, threatening, on one side. And on the other side, the men and dogs stood their ground. Thus they remained for perhaps a dozen breaths.

Then the one with the spear said, “He is not going to spring.” He spoke quietly and in a matter-of-fact voice.

“Shall I shoot?” said one of the others.

“Don’t be a fool!” said the one with the spear, calmly.

They all went back a little way, and made a detour off to the right, making the dogs keep close at heel, so that they would not rush off and alarm or disturb the lion. In this way they went around the lion, leaving him possession of the direct way, but avoiding trouble. Ish wondered greatly about all this. As far as he could see the men were not afraid of the beast but were merely avoiding trouble, and on the other hand the beast did not seem to be afraid of the men. Perhaps it was because there were no more rifles being used, or perhaps it was because there were so few men that a lion rarely saw one and could not realize how dangerous these not very dangerous-looking creatures could be. Or perhaps, if the young men had not been encumbered with a helpless old one, they might have attacked.

Yet certainly he could not help thinking that the men had lost that old dominance and the arrogance with which they had once viewed the animals, and were now acting more or less as equals with them. He felt that this was too bad, and yet the young men were going along just as unconcerned as ever, cracking their little jokes and not feeling that they had been at all humiliated by having to detour the lion, any more than if they had to detour around a fallen tree-trunk or a ruined building.

When he next began to pay attention, they were approaching the bridge. Ish became interested, and again he wished that he could tell the young men something of the Old Times, of what the bridge used to be like when traffic was pouring across it in both directions and all six lanes were so full of whizzing cars that you could not have run from one side to the other and remained alive.

Now, however, as they slowly walked up the long approach and came to the first span on the East Bay side, Ish could see that the bridge as a whole, though rust-covered, was still intact. The pavement, however, was badly gone to pieces, and whole sections of the highway sagged a little, and some of the towers were noticeably out of line.

At one place they had to walk for a few feet across a single girder which offered the only passageway. Looking down from the young man’s back, Ish could see clear down to where the waves were slushing back and forth, and he noticed that the metal of the bridge, where salt water had splashed on it for all these years, was deeply corroded, and sagging and breaking.

This is the road that no man finishes traveling. This is the river so long that no voyager finds the sea. This is the path winding among the hills, and still winding. This is the bridge that no man crosses wholly—lucky is he who through the mists and rain clouds sees, or even believes he dimly sees, the farther shore.

After that, Ish was not sure of anything again until at last he realized that he was sitting on something hard and leaning against something hard, and that his feet were very cold. Next he knew that somebody was chafing his hands, and then slowly he came into consciousness.

He found that he was sitting on the pavement at the edge of the bridge, propped against the railing. The first thing that he really noticed was his hammer on the pavement in front of him, the handle pointing stiffly in the air. On each side of him, a young man was chafing one of his hands, as if trying to get some blood back into them. The other two young men were near also, and they all seemed greatly disturbed.

Ish realized that his feet and even his lower legs were cold, or perhaps they had really lost all feeling in a kind of cold that might be called deathly. He knew then, his mind again becoming clearer, that he had not been merely passing through one of his lapses of old age but that he must actually have suffered some kind of seizure—a stroke or a heart attack—and that the others were frightened.

He saw Jack moving his lips as if he were talking, and yet making no noise. A strange thing to do! The lips moved more and more vigorously, as if Jack were shouting. Then Ish realized that he himself was not hearing. This thought did not pain him, but rather pleased him, because he knew that he would now not have the world press in upon him, as it must always upon a man who can hear.

The others began talking, that is, moving their lips in the same way, and Ish saw that they were trying definitely, even desperately, to tell him something. He shook his head, puzzled. Then he tried to tell them that he could not hear, but he realized that he did not have control over his speech. This disturbed him, for he realized that it would be a nuisance to live in the world when he could not communicate by talking and when nobody could understand what he wrote.

The young men had been very respectful and friendly all day. But now they became irritated. They gesticulated, and Ish could see they were insistent that he should do something, and were even frightened that he might not be able to do it. They made gestures toward the hammer, but Ish did not feel it worthwhile to try very hard to understand.

Soon, however, the young men were even more insistent, and then they began to pinch him. Ish felt the pain because his body was still sensitive, and he cried out, and tears even came to his eyes, though he was ashamed of that, and felt that it was not fitting for the last American.

“It is a strange thing,” he thought, “to be an old god. They worship you, and yet they mistreat you. If you do not want to do what they wish, they make you. It is not fair.”

Then, by thinking hard and by watching their gestures, he thought that they wanted him to indicate one of them to whom the hammer should be given. The hammer had been Ish’s own for a long time, and no one had ever suggested that he should give it to anyone else, but he did not care, besides he wished them to stop pinching him. He could still move his arms, and so with a gesture he indicated that the young man called Jack should have the hammer.

Jack picked up the hammer, and stood with it dangling from his right hand. The other three then drew off a little, and Ish felt within himself a strange pang of sorrow for the young man to whom the hammer had descended.

But at least they all seemed to be relieved, now that the inheritance of the hammer was settled, and they did not bother Ish any more.

He rested there quietly then, as if he had done all in this world that he needed to do, and had made his peace. He was dying on the bridge, and he knew it now. Many others, he remembered, had died on that bridge. He might have died there many years before in some mere crash of automobiles. Now he had lived clear out of his own world, and still he was dying there. One way or another, he now was contented. He half-remembered a line which he had read in some book at some time during all those years when he had read so many books. “Men go and come…” But that was trite and meaningless without its other half.

He looked now at the others, although there was a little mist before his eyes and he could not see very well. Yet he noticed the two dogs lying quietly, and the four young men—three of them apart from the other one now—who squatted on the bridge in a half circle around him, watching. They were very young in age, at least by comparison with him, and in the cycle of mankind they were many thousands of years younger than he. He was the last of the old; they were the first of the new. But whether the new would follow the course which the old had followed, that he did not know, and now at last he was almost certain that he did not even desire that the cycle should be repeated. He suddenly thought of all that had gone to build civilization—of slavery and conquest and war and oppression.

But now he looked beyond the young men, toward the bridge itself. Now that he would soon be dead, he felt himself more a companion of the bridge than of the men. It too had been part of civilization.

A little distance off, he was surprised to see a car standing, or what was left of a car. Then he remembered the little coupé which had been parked there during all those years. Now the paint had weathered off almost entirely; not only were the tires flat but also the springs had grown weak, so that the whole car had settled downwards. All its upper parts were white with bird-droppings. Curiously, although it was a matter of no importance, he could still remember that the owner of the car had been John Robertson (with a middle initial which was E. or T. or P., or something like that) and that he had lived on one of the numbered streets in Oakland.

But Ish let his gaze rest upon the little coup only for a moment. Then his eyes moved higher, and he saw the tall towers and the great cables, still dipping in perfect curves. This part of the bridge seemed to be in a good state of preservation. It would apparently stand for a long time still, perhaps during the lives of many generations of men. The railings, the towers, and the cables—all were rusted red. But he knew that that rust must be superficial. The tops of the towers, however, were not red, but were shining white with the droppings of generations of seagulls.

Yet though the bridge might last still for many years, the rust would eat deeper and deeper. The earthquake would shake the foundations, and then on some stormy day a span would go down. Like the man, so the creation of man would not last forever.

He shut his eyes for a moment, and imagined the whole sweep of the hills around the bay, though he could not turn his head to see them. They had not changed their profile since the destruction of civilization; as measured by man’s time, they would not change. As far as the bay and the hills went, he was still dying in the same world to which he had been born.

Opening his eyes, he now looked and was able to see the two pointed peaks at the crest of the ridge. “Twin Breasts” they had once been called, and the sight of them made him think of Em, and even further back, of his own mother. The earth and Em and the mother all mingled in his dying mind, and he felt glad to return.

“But, no,” he thought, after a moment, “I must die as I have lived—by the light of my own mind, by what light it gives me. Those hills, though they may take the shape of breasts, they are not like Em or like my mother. They will receive me—they will receive my body—but they will not love me. They do not care. And also I am one who has studied the ways of the earth, and I know that the hills themselves, though men call them eternal—they too are changing always.”

Yet as a weary and dying old man, he needed something toward which he could look and from which he could expect no change. He was cold now around the waist, and his fingers were numb. His sight was fading.

He fixed his eyes on the distant hills. He had tried very hard. He had struggled. He had looked to the past and to the future. What did it matter? What had he accomplished?

Now certainly it made no difference. He would rest, and he would return to the hills. And they—in comparison at least with the passing of man’s generations—remained without changing. And if the shape of the hills was like the shape of a woman’s breasts, perhaps that too was not without its meaning and comfort.

Then, though his sight was now very dim, he looked again at the young men. “They will commit me to the earth,” he thought. “Yet I also commit them to the earth. There is nothing else by which men live. Men go and come, but earth abides.”