Perhaps We Are Going Away, Ray Bradbury
Perhaps We Are Going Away
It was a strange thing that could not be told. It touched along the hairs on his neck as he lay wakening. Eyes shut, he pressed his hands to the dirt.
Was the earth, shaking old fires under its crust, taming over in its sleep?
Were buffalo on the dust prairies, in the whistling grass, drumming the sod, moving this way like a dark weather?
No.
What? What, then?
He opened his eyes and was the boy Ho-Awi, of a tribe named for a bird, by the hills named for the shadows of owls, near the great ocean itself, on a day that was evil for no reason.
Ho-Awi stared at the tent flaps, which shivered like a great beast remembering winter.
Tell me, he thought, the terrible thing, where does it come from? Whom will it kill?
He lifted the flap and stepped out into his village.
He turned slowly, a boy with bones in his dark cheeks like the keels of all birds flying. His brown eyes saw god-filled, cloud-filled sky, his cupped car heard thistles ticking the war drums, but still the greater mystery drew him to the edge of the village.
Here, legend said, the land went on like a tide to another sea. Between here and there was as much earth as there were stars across the night sky. Somewhere in all that land, storms of black buffalo harvested the grass. And here stood Ho-Awi, his stomach a fist, wondering, searching, waiting, afraid.
You too? said the shadow of a hawk.
Ho-Awi turned.
It was the shadow of his grandfather’s hand that wrote on the wind.
No. The grandfather made the sign for silence. His tongue moved soft in a toothless mouth. His eyes were small creeks running behind the sunken flesh beds, the cracked sand washes of his face.
Now they stood on the edge of the day, drawn close by the unknown.
And Old Man did as the boy had done. His mummified ear turned, his nostril twitched. Old Man too ached for same answering growl from any direction that would tell then only a great timber fall of weather had dropped from a distant sky. But the wind gave no answer, spoke only to itself.
The Old Man made the sign which said they must go on the Great Hunt. This, said his hands like mouths, was a day for the rabbit young and the featherless old. Let no warrior come with them. The hare and the dying vulture must track together. For only the very young saw life ahead, and only the very old saw life behind; the others between were so busy with life they saw nothing.
The Old Man wheeled slowly in all directions.
Yes! He knew, he was certain, he was sure! To find this thing of darkness would take the innocence of the newborn and the innocence of the blind to see very clear.
Come! said the trembling fingers.
And snuffling rabbit and earthbound hawk shadowed out of the village into changing weather.
They searched the high hills to see if the stones lay atop each other, and they were so arranged. They scanned the prairies, but found only the winds which played there like tribal children all day. And found arrowheads from old wars.
No, the Old Man’s hand drew on the sky, the men of this nation and that beyond smoke by the summer fires while the squaws cut wood. It is not arrows flying that we almost hear.
At last, when the sun sank into the nation of buffalo hunters, the Old Man looked up.
Birds, his hands cried suddenly, are flying south! Summer is over!
No, the boy’s hands said, summer has just begun! I see no birds!
They are so high, said the Old Man’s fingers, that only the blind can feel their passage. They shadow the heart more than the earth. I feel them pass south in my blood. Summer goes. We may go with it. Perhaps we are going away.
No! cried the boy aloud, suddenly afraid. Go where? Why? For what?
Who knows? said the Old Man, and perhaps we will not move. Still, even without moving, perhaps we are going away.
No! Go back! cried the boy, to the empty sky, the birds unseen, the unshadowed air. Summer, stay!
No use, said the Old One’s single hand, moving by itself. Not you or me or our people can stay this weather. It is a season changed, come to live on the land for all time.
But from where does it come?
This way, said the Old Man at last.
And in the dusk they looked down at the great waters of the east that went over the edge of the world, where no one had ever gone.
There. The Old Man’s hand clenched and thrust out. There it is.
Far ahead, a single light burned on the shore.
With the moon rising, the Old Man and the rabbit boy padded on the sands, heard strange voices in the sea, smelled wild burnings from the now suddenly close fire.
They crawled on their bellies. They lay looking in at the light.
And the more he looked, the colder Ho-Awl became, and he knew that all the Old Man had said was true.
For drawn to this fire built of sticks and moss, which flickered brightly in the soft evening wind which was cooler now, at the heart of summer, were such creatures as he had never seen. These were men with faces like white-hot coals, with some eyes in these faces as blue as sky. All these men had glossy hair on their cheeks and chins, which grew to a point.
One man stood with raised lightning in his hand and a great moon of sharp stuff on his head like the face of a fish. The others had bright, round tinkling crusts of material cleaved to their chests which gonged slightly when they moved.
As Ho-Awl watched, some men lifted the ganging bright things from their heads, unskinned the eye-blinding crab shells, the turtle casings from their chests, their arms, their legs, and tossed these discarded sheaths to the sand. Doing this, the creatures laughed, while out in the bay stood a black shape on the waters, a great dark canoe with things like torn clouds hung on poles over it.
After a long while of holding their breath, the Old Man and the boy went away.
From a hill, they watched the fire that was no bigger than a star now. You could wink it out with an eyelash. If you closed your eyes, it was destroyed.
Still, it remained.
Is this, asked the boy, the great happening?
The Old One’s face was that of a fallen eagle, filled with dreadful years and unwanted wisdom. The eyes were resplendently bright, as they welled with a rise of cold clear water in which all could be seen, like a river that drank the sky and earth and knew it, accepted silently and would not deny the accumulation of dust, time, shape, sound and destiny.
The Old Man nodded, once. This was the terrible weather. This was how summer would end. This made the birds wheel south, shadowless, through a grieving land.
The worn hands stopped moving. The time of questions was done.
Far away, the fire leaped. One of the creatures moved. The bright stuff on his tortoise-shell body flashed. It was like an arrow cutting a wound in the night.
Then the boy vanished in darkness following the eagle and the hawk that lived in the stone body of his grandfather.
Below, the sea reared up and poured another great sail wave in billions of pieces which crashed and hissed like knives swarming along the continental shores.
The end
1953
