“You’re strong!” he said and laughed.
They were silent as the man inspected Håkan’s blisters.
“Where are you from?” he asked, rearranging his glasses when he was done.
“Sweden.”
The man was both gratified and troubled by this answer. Gently tugging at his beard and squinting, he seemed to reach into the past and finally said something that sounded very much like “My name is John Lorimer” in Swedish. Håkan lit up. Lorimer kept talking in a dream version of Håkan’s mother tongue—a language that was and was not Swedish, that sometimes felt familiar but suddenly would become incomprehensible, that evoked home only to stress, immediately after, how remote its foreign sounds were. Later, Lorimer would explain that it was a hodgepodge of German and Dutch, patched together with English.
Laboriously, in his jargon of mixed tongues, Lorimer told Håkan that when they had spotted him walking stiffly with his arms outstretched in front of him, some thought that he was a devil. As they approached him and saw his dark skin, others believed he was an Indian. When they were close enough to see he was in fact covered in congealed blood, they were all convinced he was fatally wounded. Håkan did not seem to notice them, but when they tried to take him to the wagon to dress his injuries, he fought them fiercely, and it took three men to subdue him. Soon after that, he passed out and remained in a delirious haze for six days. Lorimer was baffled to find no significant wounds after washing away the dried blood.
In Swedish marbled with English, Håkan gave a brief account of his ordeals, beginning with the Clangston woman. He urged Lorimer to stay clear of her men and told him he would leave the convoy in the morning since his pursuers would not hesitate to murder everyone in the party to get him. All he needed was food and water, if they could spare some. Lorimer would have none of it. Håkan was to remain under their protection until he had fully recovered and they had made sure that he was beyond the woman’s reach. Their convoy was headed east anyway, at least until reaching its next destination, the great salt lake of Saladillo, after which Lorimer and his men would turn south. In the meantime, Lorimer said, he would like to be taught Swedish. And anyway, he could also use an assistant. Håkan looked at the heads in the jars with apparent concern. Lorimer laughed, told him not to be alarmed, and explained that he had caught those creatures for the benefit of man.
With proper food, drink, and rest, Håkan made a swift recovery. Soon he was out with the five men who assisted Lorimer in his labors and escorted him for his protection. Håkan, in charge of their spare horses and burros, rode next to Lorimer as often as he could, and they taught each other their languages. Lorimer was a fast learner, and his eagerness to practice Swedish came to the detriment of Håkan’s English, but after such a long time sloshing in the slippery sludge of foreign sounds, Håkan welcomed the solid words of his mother tongue.
Originally from southeast Scotland, John Lorimer had traveled to America with his family at the age of eleven. They had started a farm in an unsettled land whose name Håkan could not retain. Mr. Lorimer had wanted John to become a priest and had him recite entire books of the Bible from memory and prepare biographical sermons delivered to the family each Sunday before dawn. John, however, with his love for all things wild, preferred terrestrial to celestial matters. By a nearby thicket, the boy built a city of sorts (moats, ramparts, streets, stalls) and populated it with beetles, frogs, and lizards. He covered the walled structure every night and inspected it every morning, noting which creatures had vanished or died, which had moved from one compartment to another, which were feared by the rest, and so on. He worked tirelessly on his animal city until his father, suspicious of his long absences, followed him to the thicket, kicked the structure to the ground, stamped its inhabitants flat, and flogged him with a switch made from the branch of a nearby tree. It had been—he remembered the branch clearly and later had learned its name—a yellow birch. While whipping him, his father whispered that he would have to atone for his blasphemous pride—God, and God only, had the power to create a world; any other attempt was an arrogant insult to His work. A few years later, John was sent to university to study theology, but soon botany and zoology (disciplines Håkan at first found perplexing) had displaced divinity. Shortly after that, he traveled to Holland to study under one of Europe’s leading botanists, Carl Ludwig Blume, whose name Håkan would afterwards remember for being amusingly fitting for his profession. Having completed his studies, John returned to America with the intention of classifying species of the West that had never been described or named. In the course of his investigations, Lorimer had come up with a theory for which, he said, his father, now long dead, would not have lashed him with a birch switch but crushed him under an oak beam. Over the course of the following weeks, in broken Swedish, and with the aid of his jarred specimens, new animals they caught along the way, and the ancient creatures they found crystallized in rocks, Lorimer would patiently explain his theory to his mostly silent but quite obviously baffled new friend. His purpose, he said, was to go back in time and reveal the origin of man.
Knowing that Håkan had experience with sage hens, Lorimer suggested that they start there. He asked Håkan to kill one by wringing its neck and then pluck it. Sitting in the narrow shade of the wagon, Lorimer cut into the bird with a small sharp blade and opened it up like a book. He showed Håkan its broken spine and explained why that fracture (as opposed to a broken wing or leg) had killed it. They followed the vertebral column to the brain, and Lorimer told his friend that everything we do, from breathing to walking, from thinking to defecating, is governed by that cord traversing our upper body. Håkan was profoundly moved by this revelation and knew it to be true without requiring further evidence. He could not say why this utterly new notion regarding organs he had never heard named before was correct, but watching the open bird on the ground, he had no doubt. Håkan had never looked at an animal that way. It seemed so clean, simple, and orderly—that he happened to be ignorant of the laws governing that harmonious system was unimportant. He asked Lorimer a great number of questions and ventured a few theories of his own.
Lorimer appreciated his new student’s ardor, and as the weeks passed, that first lesson was followed by many others—conducted mostly in English since neither of them knew the anatomical terms in Swedish. Soon Håkan was dissecting all sorts of animals by himself. In his big, gentle hands, the scalpel delicately skated over the small gem-like organs, and he proved to have an extremely refined intuition concerning their function and their relationship to one another. After a few dozen dissections, he had mastered the rudiments of the mechanics of bones, understood the workings of muscular filaments and springs, had a basic grasp of the architecture of the heart, had mapped the main blood vessels, and was able to identify the ducts and sacks of the digestive tract. His infallible confidence with surgical instruments and the clarity with which he perceived, in one single glance, the internal organization of a body led him to discover (discreetly guided by Lorimer) an astounding fact—all animal life was, in essence, the same. And once and again, Lorimer concluded his demonstrations of this truth by drawing Håkan’s attention to the spine and the brain.
Their small caravan moved on, leaving a trail of slashed birds, dogs, reptiles, and rodents.