The Vaster Wilds

The girl continues running until her body moves beyond exhaustion to a state of exhilaration. She sees more visions, mistaking a root for a horse and trees for chimneys, and is briefly comforted by the idea of home before the visions vanish. She arrives at a river and is comforted to realize how unlikely it is that anyone from the fort has followed her. As the sun rises, she takes shelter in a crevasse between some boulders and tallies her supplies. She has a hatchet, two blankets, a knife, a pewter cup, and some flint. There was no food for her to bring.

Once she is warm enough, she ventures out from her crevasse to get some pine boughs and bring them back into the hole. Trying desperately to spark the flint and light the boughs, she prays to God to help her but is initially unsuccessful. Finally, the boughs catch the spark. She covers her hole with one of her blankets and wraps herself in the other, then realizes that she is warm for the first time in months. The firewood at the fort ran out months ago, and the wood that came from tearing down the houses was reserved for the gentlefolk, not for servants like her. She falls into a sleep so deep that she would not awaken even if she were to be discovered by a beast or the soldier that was dispatched to follow her.

As the girl sleeps, members of a local Indigenous community collect water from the frozen river by cutting a hole in the ice. In comparison to the girl and the desperate conditions of the colonists in the fort, they are dressed warmly, comfortably, and cleanly, for they are knowledgeable about the best ways to use their environment and thrive within it. The girl sleeps on, smelling their food in her dreams. Despite the warmth, she has night terrors that have troubled her throughout her life. Upon waking, she is disconcerted and struggles to adapt to thinking only of herself, as her first instinct is still to look after Bess, the daughter of her mistress, who has since died.

Now, she worries that she is being followed and laments the uncaring nature of the world. She exits her hideout and debates whether to follow the river or to attempt to cross it even though the ice is melting. As she drinks from a hole in the ice, she finds a frozen fish and thanks God for the gift. Too weak to carry the fish after using her hatchet to pry it from the ice, she kicks it to her crevasse and eats it. The last time she ate was four days earlier, when she snuck out of the fort to find edible roots, cooking them in a stolen kettle to feed the dying Bess. Despite her efforts, Bess would not eat. The mistress and the minister to whom the girl was in service attempted to take Bess’s bowl for themselves, but the girl drank it in anger. Unwilling to loudly punish her and advertise the fact that they had access to hot food, the minister instead punched the girl to punish her for eating it. Now, the girl eats the fish slowly, attempting to reintroduce her body to food.

The girl has eaten half the fish when it thaws and begins to move. Horrified to realize that she has been eating it alive, she beats the fish to death and continues to eat, consuming all but the bones. Though the food makes her ill as her body reawakens, she knows she has staved off starvation for the time being. Heartened by the miracle of finding the fish, she decides to attempt a river crossing. She waits until night but is eager to leave, feeling that she is being followed. She is comforted by the idea of death by drowning, which she sees as a more pleasant and poetic death, and she is also comforted by the thought of joining Bess if she should die.

The girl sets out onto the river and breaks into a run as the ice begins to crack. Reaching the other side safely, she delights in being alive. The ice breaks apart entirely as she moves on through the forest. She passes near to an Indigenous village but avoids it. Meanwhile, a man with a reputation for being merciless is sent from the fort to “hunt down the murderess servant who had run away” (43). He arrives at the river and sees that the ice is not safe to cross. He thinks of how he had wanted to corner the girl alone in the fort and regrets that he will not be able to pursue her further. He had dreamed of strangling her to death, just as he once did to a sex worker in London. He also laments the lack of opportunity for private interpersonal violence in the colony, and he sees the raids conducted against the Indigenous people as a godly duty. He attempts to return to the fort, but he is discovered and killed by members of a Powhatan village that he had previously raided.

The girl continues on, relieved that the river is between her and the men of the fort. She fears encountering the Powhatan people. In the fall, the colony had a tenuous peace with them, and a Powhatan princess came to the fort with gifts of food. The girl recalls watching the well-fed Indigenous visitors curiously, but she did not approach them. As winter came, the colonists’ stories of the Powhatan people became dark and fearful; they were afraid of the Powhatan people’s vastly superior ability to survive. Thinking on these stories now, she remembers the tale of a soldier from the fort who raped one of the girls from the Powhatan village. The settlers said he was kidnapped by Powhatan women and flayed alive. The girl feels sympathy for the Powhatan girl who was raped, for she has also experienced sexual violence. She thinks about the brutal punishments for criminals that she witnessed in London. She also recalls the women and children who vanished from the fort; the men said they were stolen by members of the Powhatan village, but the girl suspects that they left to protect their children. She knows that some of the men besieging the fort were Englishmen themselves; they had fled the fort and joined the Powhatans as the situation became more dire.

The girl continues on through the night, feeling happy in her solitude despite her remaining fears. She comes across a pair of antlers locked together: evidence of a mutually deadly fight between two stags. A mist settles upon the forest, making everything damp and cold. The girl finds it too dangerous to continue and stops to rest. She tries to light a fire, but the tinder is too damp to catch. Unable to rest due to the cold, she resolves to collect any dry tinder she sees and waits for the mist to lift. She thinks about the journey on the ship from England. Unlike the others, she was not seasick, and her mistress claimed that she might have some seafaring blood in her. The girl had been abandoned at the poorhouse as a newborn and was taken into her mistress’s house as a four-year-old girl. Her mistress was convinced that the girl’s mother could only be a sex worker, and she also believed that the girl has a foreign heritage due to her darker complexion. The girl liked the new idea that her father could have been a sailor.

During the journey, she eventually attracted the attention of a young Dutch sailor. They had sex, which pleased and empowered the girl. This surprised her, for her previous sexual experiences had been violent and terrifying. Glorying in her newfound joy with the Dutch sailor helped to alleviate her hatred for the minister, her mistress’s new husband. The sailor shared an orange with her, and she dreamed of a life with him in the new land they were traveling to. A three-day storm hit the ship, and the girl tied herself to Bess and clung to the netting, protecting them both. After the storm, the girl discovers that her sailor was swept overboard while looking for her. The whole company mourns and despairs further upon arriving to find a starving settlement instead of a thriving one. The girl is consumed by the loss of her sailor and the life they might have built together. Now, these memories fall away, and the girl remains on the ground in the misty forest.