"Out of Eden" by Frances Monro

Out of Eden

By Ché Monro

There is a river that flows out of Eden, and after the fall we followed it to the east, in the direction of the rising sun. The land became stony as the river entered a gorge and once we'd made it around the first bend and out of sight of the angel with the flaming metal stick we stopped and sat on a boulder to pick the thorns and pebbles out of our feet. The ground was hard and we were neither of us use to travelling. I looked at Adam but he remained silent and sulky and he refused to meet my gaze. I could tell that he blamed the whole thing on me.

That night we were hungry and I longed to return to the garden and fall at his feet and beg for forgiveness from the Lord, but Adam was stubborn and said it would do no good. He was probably right, and in any case I could not leave him. We spent an uncomfortable night in nests that we made out of leaves and in the morning we began to learn how to survive in this strange new world in which we found ourselves.

There were no fruit - we didn't understand that at the time but it was early spring - but we saw a bear fishing in the stream with it's paws so Adam got a stick and tried to catch fish of his own. Amazingly, after a couple of hours he succeeded in pulling a fish out of the stream, and chasing another into the shallows. We hacked them up and ate them raw, sucking the juices from the flesh. They tasted strange to us, but then, we had never eaten meat before.

As we walked along I found some seeds of wild grasses that could be eaten - we did not know it at the time but this was rich country, well watered and covered in trees, teeming with game and filled with edible plants, otherwise we would certainly never have survived. That night we experimented with tearing branches from the trees and using them to make a crude shelter. Adam remembered the angel with his burning stick and dreamed of making fire of his own to scare away the wild beasts that we heard roaming the night outside, but he didn't know how. Instead we clung together under the branches and made love for the first time since the fall.

That was the second day of our wandering.

The next morning I was hungry and restless so I paced up and down across the little beach where we had camped by the stream. I was worried about my nakedness - A few days before I'd had no concept of what the word meant, but then in an instant my whole world changed. We'd tried covering ourselves with leaves, but leaves were too small and they tore too easily. I had noticed the fur and feathers that covered the animals which we saw and I thought that there might be some way that we could wear them too, if only we could get hold of them.

Looking back, it seems a trivial thing now, when truly immense problems of survival faced us at every turn. But back then I had no way of knowing - eating the fruit had given us knowledge of Good and Evil, but no knowledge at all of the world. I knew that my nakedness was wrong, and shameful, but I didn't know how to fix it.

Adam was keen to try hunting animals too. He agreed that we might wear their fur, and he wanted to know if their flesh could be eaten. He gathered several fist sized round stones from the stream and practiced throwing them at a tree until he could make them pound into the wood with smashing force. He announced that he would hunt an animal and kill it with his rocks, he was quite confident that this would be easy to do. Naturally he didn't catch anything that day.

Luckily I found some tubers that I though I recognized from the garden. They were slightly different to the ones I was used to, but they were edible, with small starchy bulbs on the roots. They weren't very satisfying but they grew in profusion along the stream and they were something to munch on as we made our way along the riverbank.

Over the next few days clear that our diet wasn't sufficient for our needs. A few roots and grass seeds, the rabbit which Adam finally managed to crush with his rocks - which was totally nauseating and disgusting, a fish that we occasionally managed to pull out of the river with crude spears, these were not enough to live on, and by the fifth or sixth day we were staggering along with light heads and aching stomachs.

The ravine had opened out into a wide plain, teeming with large, unfamiliar animals. We felt small and alone, but we had to go on, had to find food. It was starting to seem as if there could be no possible destination for us except death from hunger when we met the others. We were crossing a grassy clearing in the thin woodland when a small figure leaped up from behind a bush and began waving a spear at us in an unfamiliar tongue. Adam raised his rock and prepared to throw, but I cried "No! Don't you see, it is a person."

And indeed it was. We had found the others, or rather, they had found us.