Page 92 of The Forest of Lost Souls

With Sam accompanying him, Two Moon moves south, pausing to study the ground in those places where the grass has not taken hold, looking for flat stones that would mean nothing to most people but that he can read.

Although this plateau is remote in more than one sense, the three dogs have evidently been here before, as their master sought the solace of no company but theirs. Sam probably has thrown a ball for them on the plateau or a Frisbee, for they chase one another and gambol as though celebrating memories of prior visits.

By contrast, the wolves hang back, remaining close together and alert, troubled by some quality of the plateau or maybe anticipating a sudden threat.

At the moment, no wind is blowing. The high tableland lies in an expectant stillness.

Blue Edge blades with Blue Pulse flaps quietly carve the air, floating Boschvark toward the site where tens of billions of dollars will soon begin to fall through the air and into his deep pockets. Better yet, this will be only one of several projects like it that will make him the richest man in history.

Perhaps it’s inevitable that he should think of José Nochelobo at this time, in this place. Mack Yataghan had recorded the fool’s speeches, and Boschvark had listened to them obsessively, until they were burned into his memory. Although Nochelobo is nownothing but cold ashes in a bronze urn, Terrence Boschvark hates him with a singular passion. His enduring resentment ripens into anger as the dead man’s words play through his mind.

Huge amounts of cobalt are essential to this technology. Little children in the Congo and other poor countries are forced to dig for it in narrow passageways that collapse on them. Kids as young as four. Thousands of enslaved children are the right size needed in these crude mines, these hellholes. They die by the hundreds, and those who survive will have short lives because of the contaminants they’ve inhaled.

Boschvark has inarguable answers to Nochelobo’s objections. He could have mounted the stage and debated the fool. But he is not a showboater like Nochelobo. He does not enjoy the spotlight and is a man of humility. He could have said that the children come from a culture where they will be enslaved whether they’re sent to the mines or not. Because their work has value, they are better fed as long as they can work. If the injuries they sustain are minor enough to allow them to go back to work, they receive medical care in a country where there is otherwise no such care for the masses. Forced laborimprovestheir lives. Yes, some die, but get real.Everybodydies. No one lives forever. What matters isn’t the length of life but the quality of the life you live. Choke on that truth, José.

In all of history, has there ever been a man more infuriating than José Nochelobo, more certain of his virtue, more irrational in his aims?

Anger is not an adequate response to such a stupid and prideful man. The mere memory of him enrages Boschvark.

He despises the bleeding-heart tone that made Nochelobo’s followers swoon. The beloved football coach preyed on his audience’s gullibility.Construction of wind farms in the ocean are killingwhales in record numbers, whales and dolphins. Already, the massive blades of modern wind turbines kill millions of birds every year. By the time this technology is built out, entire species of birds will be slashed into extinction. These aren’t picturesque old Dutch windmills, my friends.

You want us to make them picturesque? Boschvark would have liked to ask the idiot. Do you realize what that would add to the cost of a project and how much it would diminish each turbine’s output? Paving the ocean floor with enough concrete to support thousand-foot-tall windmills isn’t likely to kill a significant number of whales. They’ll adapt. Whales love concrete. They live happily surrounded by it at SeaWorld. Everything adapts when it must. If anything’s killing whales, it’s the wavelength of the sonar used to map faults in the ocean floor before construction, screwing with the whales’ natural guidance system. But we won’t be mapping forever. After a few years, at most a decade, we’ll be done with that, and the whale population will recover. You can’t totally transform the world’s power-generation technology without a few stupid whales freaking out and throwing themselves onto a beach to give the tree-hugging crowd something else to feel guilty about.

Sam Crockett swings the mattock once, twice, three times, and then steps back to allow Two Moon to do some light work with the collapsible shovel.

Remaining at a respectful distance from the men and their solemn task, Vida realizes that she and Sun Spirit are holdinghands, as might two sisters who are long accustomed to providing comfort and courage to each other.

The granddaughter of Eternal Fawn says, “It is sad to say that my people, not just Cheyennes, but those of all the ancient nations, have long forgotten or ceased to care about this place. They build casinos. They TikTok and tweet and lose themselves in the forests of YouTube. They learn only what Google allows them to know, and year by year the past becomes to them less than it really was. The past was real, I think more real than the present. These days, so many are educated into ignorance, entertained by shallow amusements that drain from them the very substance of themselves, until they seem to have become ghosts long, long before their deaths. I’m only thirty-four, but out there in the world that Two Moon and I have left, I feel like a cranky granddam who has lived a century and sees the newer generations living for nothing but oblivion. Only deep in the forest do I feel young and hopeful.”

The helicopter is in whisper mode as it floats through the day, but Boschvark is filled with a noisy rage that is escalating toward an even noisier inner fury. Vector, Trott, Rackman, and Monger would not be dead if Nochelobo never existed. Belden Bead and Nash Deacon would not be dead. The project would have been underway if Nochelobo had not instigated litigation against it.

He regrets that Nochelobo is dead, but only because he’d like to kill the sonofabitch again, this time not with a nerve toxin delivered by an air-rifle dart but with his own hands.

He is unable to evict the voice of Nochelobo from his head.To generate the power needed for this one country in an all-electric age and to do it with this primitive technology, we’ll need to cover at least three hundred twenty thousand square miles with wind farms, which is four times the size of South Dakota or as vast as nearly all the states along the Eastern Seaboard.Everywhere coast to coastwill be uglified.

Boschvark would have replied: No, no, no. Not everywhere. Maybe half the country, but not everywhere. Besides, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What about that, huh? What about all of us who think thousand-foot-tall wind turbines are beautiful?

Seething through Boschvark’s memory, José Nochelobo’s voice declares,The low pulsation of the massive hundred-forty-foot blades will agitate every creature in nature, with consequences we can’t know. Already, people living within a few miles of wind farms experience migraines, insomnia, a greater incidence of high blood pressure, and other health issues.

Wimps! There were people who complained about the noise of the first trains, the first planes, rock and roll. They’ll get used to it or they’ll move, or we’ll put them somewhere they aren’t bothered by noise.

Dead to the world but alive in Boschvark’s brain, Nochelobo says,Because the resin blades regularly fail but are so hard they can’t be ground up and recycled, we’ll require thousands of new landfills to bury them and the millions of lithium and sodium-ion batteries that also can’t be recycled.

Propagandist! That objection deceitfully ignores the fact that building and operating big new landfills, manufacturing an infinite supply of batteries, and strip-mining the third world for the rare-earth minerals needed for all those batteries willcreate many jobs. Many, many, many jobs. And profits. Among Boschvark’s investments are landfills, battery makers, and mining companies. He knows a lot about how many jobs will be created. He has projections that show enormous profits. All those new workers mean more taxes paid and therefore more subsidies for landfills, batteries, and strip mines. It’s like the cycle of life. It’s a beautiful thing. If Nochelobo weren’t dead, if he were yammering to an audience, Boschvark might mount the stage and give him the what-for.

“Less than five minutes to the plateau,” Yataghan announces.

After a brief and shallow excavation, Two Moon and Sam move about a hundred yards south from the first site and set to work once more.

The women follow, no longer hand in hand. Vida has retrieved her crossbow. Lupo and his wolves draw closer but remain wary, sniffing the air and surveying the plateau with what seems like suspicion.

Again Sun Spirit halts at a distance from the men, and Vida follows her lead. Tradition must be respected here, old ways that were meaningful to those who lived by them, sacred rituals. It’s important for those of us who follow our ancestors to grant dignity to them, because our lives also pass like shadows; in yet a little while, all will be consummated, perhaps sooner than we expect.

“Long before Columbus,” Sun Spirit says, “and for centuries after he came to these shores, many indigenous tribes—you now call them ‘nations’—lived in this territory, came and went and returned, this tribe dominant and later that one, and later stillanother. They were not nobler or more peaceful than those who came after them in later centuries and from other continents, and if they were much closer to nature than we are, it is only because they had no choice, lacking the amenities of modern life.”

Vida recalls the nations her uncle spoke of. “Cheyenne, Ute, Arapaho, Apache, Shoshone.”

“Those and many others,” Sun Spirit says. “They’ve been wildly romanticized. Although they sometimes lived in tolerance of one another, they more often oppressed one another, went to war with one another, enslaved and killed one another—for they were human. When we deny their nature, we also deny their humanity and minimize the complexity of their lives. Like human beings throughout history, they could not get rid of a feeling of the uncanny, of a sense that there is an unseen dimension to life and something that comes after. They all thought this place sacred, and it was the one piece of ground over which they never fought, for each nation had its own section of this tableland that served as a burial ground. That has been long forgotten by many—and now, judging by what you’ve told us, the truth is being concealed by those who covet the place. In those far times, they didn’t call it the Grand Plateau. It was the Land of Spirits Waiting. Waiting to be called from this world to another.”

---