The Animal Wife (29 page)

 

You whose fire makes the stars
You whose song splits the black ice
You whose breath makes the snow
You whose dancefire is the moon
We call You with the voices of geese: hariak! hariak!
We call You with the voices of lapwings: wiri! wiri!
We call You with the voices of eagles: kiriar kee!
We are burning fat.
Fat is in the smoke.
Come for it, host of the springtime,
Come from Your long sleep.
In Your own voice we call You,
Hona! Hona! Hona!

 

Then from the darkness by the coldtrap came a roar, which rose very loud, then fell, then rose again as Father whirled something on a string around his head. At the frightening sound, Muskrat forced herself into the circle beside me. Pinesinger turned to look into my face. Even in the dark her eyes showed white. "What is it?" she whispered. It looked like the shoulder blade of a large animal, carved and scraped to look like the blade of a spear. But I didn't know what to call it. When Pinesinger saw that I couldn't answer her, she leaned across me to ask Andriki.

"A voice," he said. "The Bear's."

"Can this be so?" whispered Pinesinger, listening.

But as suddenly as it began, the great voice stopped, and Father stood over the fire. Naked to the waist and thin from winter, his big, gaunt body looked for all the world like a skinned bear. In one hand he held the blade, now silent. From the other, which he raised high and opened, he dropped a withered string of yellow-brown fat on the fire. Before bursting into flame, the fat sang in the voice of a mosquito. "Fat is burning. Fat is in the smoke," sang the rest of us. "Come for it! Come!"

I sang too, yet even as I called out to the Bear, I couldn't help but ask myself where Father might have found a strip of fat. We had none. Had he brought it from the Char River? He had no other meat in his hunting bag. Then a thought struck me that made me blink my eyes: in a willow thicket across the lake lay a carcass, the tiger's moose. Had Father robbed the tiger?

I had no time to think this over, because just then Father threw the pine branches on the fire. The singing grew stronger, the drumming and clapping grew faster, and the voice of the Bear, booming from the blade now whirled by Maral, grew so loud it hurt. Almost hidden by the cloud of smoke and steam that billowed from the pine branches, Father calmly washed his hands with coals. Then, lifting coals to his head by handfuls, he set his hair on fire. Tossing his head so that the sparks flew, he poured coals over his arms, over his shoulders, until we smelled his burning skin and hair. When we heard his skin sizzle like meat, my aunts screamed like falcons. Then suddenly, in the cloud of smoke, Father vanished. He had been there in front of us, but he was gone.

The singing died, and silence filled the lodge so that we heard each other breathing and the snapping of pine pitch in the fire. In the smoky dark, we looked around. I saw Pinesinger's eyes, with the whites showing, on one side of me and Muskrat's eyes, also with the whites showing, on the other side. "Hona!" said Maral.

"Hona," said we all.

"Sing," said Maral to the women. So, their voices pulsing like hornets' voices, the women again took up the song.

Some of the men made their way under the cloud of smoke to the coldtrap, where they crawled outside. I followed. Under the black sky the wind sang with the Bear's voice in the little spruce trees around the lodge. I smelled rain and the lake—water smells. I smelled the pine smoke from the smokeholes when the wind whirled it to the ground. I smelled burning hair; Father had been here.

Near the door to the coldtrap, we sat on our heels, waiting for Father. Inside the lodge the hornet voices died and the women were silent. We heard the wind in the trees and the broken ice on the lake. A fox called twice, its spring song. Very far away, over the Hills of Ohun, surely at the little lake where I had captured Muskrat, we heard the voices of geese as a long string of them flew down in the dark. Then, over the black rim of the hills, under the low clouds, rose the moon. It was the old moon, the waning moon, with the ghost of the new moon tight against it. Up it came below the clouds like an otter swimming to the surface of a lake, an otter with a kit in her arms.

For a moment the old moon flooded the windy clearing with light. Then it rose higher, behind the clouds, and the gloomy darkness closed in around us again—but not before I noticed, on the path of white ice on the way to the lake, the pale form of a person stretched out on his back. We hurried to him. It was Father. He was unconscious. His body was rigid, his teeth were clenched, and his eyelids were squeezed shut. His harsh breath, which was labored and rasping, echoed the wind in the trees. None of us touched him, and none of us spoke. I looked at his skin to see the burns. Perhaps it was the dim light, but I saw none. I looked at the sky, at the clouds that hurried past the moon, I listened to the wind flying through the spruce forest, strong and near, weak and far, strong and near again, and I thought of Father's spirit flying through the night sky, wind-tossed like a raven, hunting with the Bear. We sat on our heels to guard his body.

We waited a long time. When at last his spirit came back to him, Father sat up with his face in his hands. Then he wiped his eyes; then, looking almost like himself again, he shifted his weight to sit on his heels with the rest of us. Only when he spoke could we hear from his voice that his trance still clung to him.

"I have seen the Bear," he said. "He gave a message. It is this: the next time we hunt a bear, we must leave its head where we kill it, with fat between its teeth. And we must not break its bones for marrow. When we finish eating, we must scatter the bones. That is what He told me. If we do as He asks, He will show us where to find food in winter and where to find women and ivory in summer. He will help us. Hona."

"Hona," we answered. I thought for a time about what Father had told us, then said "Hona" again.

Slowly Father rubbed his face. His trance didn't want to leave him. Patiently we waited in silence while the wind forced itself through the trees. We felt raindrops. Time passed. "Hi," said Father at last, without raising his eyes. "The Lily is coming."

Startled, we looked up. At first we saw nothing, so we looked very carefully for the huge, dark shape, perhaps hiding under the low, spreading branches of a tree. But there was only the flickering moonlight and the wind moving the branches. Yet my skin prickled—my hair rose slowly on my arms and neck. Father was right about the Lily. I knew he was on his way.

We all knew it and we waited, our heads raised, listening. We heard the wind in the pines, the ice moving on the lake, Father's wolf pup crying by the lodge where we had tied him, and the sound of Father's heavy breath. I wanted to feel fear, but I couldn't feel anything; instead my mind seemed flat, like the surface of a pool. Fish or eels might be under the surface, but none broke it. In my head, secret, shadowy thoughts must have been lurking, thoughts I didn't want to think. So I thought of the animals in the woods—of the wolves with two of their children missing, the wolves on their way to a new den; of the reindeer, who kept trying to escape us; of the she-moose who had picked her way to Narrow Lake only to be killed by the Lily; and at last of the Lily himself, eating more meat than three men could carry and resting beside the bones. Suddenly my mind's eye saw him crouched under the lowest branches of a hemlock, watching, waiting, then leaping as he had leaped at the moose, with his ears turned back, his tail stiff, and his strong arms and fingers stretched out, reaching.

"Hi," said Father a second time. "The Lily is here."

And he was. Behind Father the clouds grew thin and moonlight shone through, very pale and dim, but not so dim we did not see the huge black form on the white ice of the path, and two huge, round, pale eyes. The tiger was standing not a spear's throw from us.

It must have come to all of us together that our spears were still inside. I reached for a piece of firewood. Of course I didn't throw it. Rather, I grasped it so tightly my fingers turned numb.

Slowly Father straightened his legs and stood up. With his trance still on him and the tiger watching, he turned around. "What now?" asked Father in a soft voice, facing the tiger. "Have you come for your fat? The Bear has it. He helps us. He might help you if you gave Him something. But you eat everything greedily and by yourself. You think only of your stomach. Be high-minded as we are high-minded and forget your piece of fat."

The Lily listened, watching Father with round eyes. When Father finished speaking, the Lily let his jaw open so that the tips of his two lower eyeteeth showed white like the ice in the moonlight. Then his gaze faltered. He dropped his head slightly and turned his ears so that the white spots on the backs showed. All of us could see that Father had shamed him. Soon his pale eyes blinked, then vanished. As secretly as he had come, he was gone.

***

Later, after the lodge was quiet, after we were rolled in our deerskins trying to use what was left of the night, we heard something crying. It was Father's wolf pup again, still tied outside the lodge. He must have been asleep for a while, or else afraid of the tiger, because for a long time he had been quiet. We had forgotten him. Not wanting to leave my sleeping-skins or the warmth of Muskrat's naked body, I tried to ignore the muffled sound. For a while I did, and I had almost fallen asleep when suddenly, in the middle of a cry, the wolf's voice stopped. His silence made me more wakeful than his crying had. What had happened? Listening carefully, I sat up. The pup began to make many joyous squeaks, as if something was exciting him. Seizing my spear, I hurried through the coldtrap. Muskrat followed.

Now high, the otter moon swam behind the clouds. By its light we saw a large gray wolf with green eyes standing over the pup, her head lowered, looking at us. At the knees of the large wolf, the pup's green eyes, smaller and much closer together, also looked at us. I threw my spear. As it flew over the large wolf, the green eyes blinked and the gray shape vanished. The large wolf had leaped away, quiet as smoke. The pup cowered. When I picked him up to bring him inside, I saw that the sinew string that had tied him was bitten through. I held up the string in the moonlight so that Muskrat could see how close Father had come to losing his wolf pup.

But Muskrat was looking east, toward the Hills of Ohun, her bony legs and winter-shrunken buttocks dark in shadow, her two round breasts and her great round belly softly shining in the pale light. She gave me a chill, my naked woman. She reminded me of the little figures shamans sometimes carve in bone, the figures of Ohun that are placed in the graves of women who die in childbirth to remind those women why they were sent to stay among us, and why after a short rest in the Camps of the Dead they must come back to try again.

Then I thought of Father's trancing spirit and of the bath of red coals that had made his spirit fly out on the wind. I thought of large animals, and meat, and hunting, and burning fat, and the sun. All of those are men's things, strong things, fire things, with life and death in them. Yet there beside me was my woman, a moon thing, cold, perhaps, naked and poor and still very thin from winter, but alive like the moon with a fresh moon inside, with a fresh life coming from the Camps of the Spirits. There beside me, paying no attention, stood my naked moon-washed Muskrat, leaning back to balance the weight of the baby in her belly and the thin white milk in her breasts.

L
ATER THAT NIGHT
, after our singing ended and we had gone in the lodge to sleep, rain began. The walls of the lodge were thick; the storm didn't wake me. Not until I crawled out of the coldtrap after dawn did I hear the last of it—the wet wind in the spruce trees, the rainwater dripping from the branches, the waves against the shore.

Getting water was Muskrat's work, but she had been so frightened by the tiger that she refused to go. Instead of trying to make her go, I went in her place. I didn't want to draw attention to her, not from Father. As I went, gusts of cold wind wet my face. The path to the lake, pressed to ice by the many passing feet, now stood alone and white in the woods. The rain had made it very slippery. Surely, I thought, in spite of what Andriki had told me, Father would not want to go far from the lodge that day. But when I hurried into the lodge with the dripping waterskin, I saw that Father was ready to travel and that the other people were rolling up their packs. "What's wrong?" I whispered to Rin.

"Can't you see what's wrong?" she asked crossly. "It's cold and dark here because your woman didn't bring enough fuel. We want to cook and eat the other marmot before we travel, but we have no fire."

Hurt by Rin's anger, I said, "My woman brought fuel. How was she to know we would be singing? Was it her fault that we burned it all?"

"Whose fault if not hers?" asked Rin.

I said no more. After all, Rin's anger was pointed not at me but at Muskrat. I left the waterskin by the dead ashes and in a dark corner quietly spread my sleeping-skins, getting them ready to roll into a pack. But when I had the skins smoothed out, Muskrat lay down on them. "Get up. You pack. We go," I whispered. Slowly Muskrat shook her head. "I think she's afraid of the Lily," I said, turning to Father. "Must I force her?"

"The tiger, the tiger," said Father, no longer bothering to call him the Lily. "Are you women, that he worries you so? Unlike us, he is lazy. He wants to sleep in the bushes with his carcass, eating his fill each time he wakes. What of you, Kori? Has he also frightened you so badly that you can't get wood?"

I didn't know what to say to this and from habit turned to Andriki. But I could see from the way he stopped tying his pack that he was as surprised as I was. "Hi, Brother," he said to Father. "What now?" But Father was getting his spear and his ax. Seeing that he might go for wood just to shame me and Muskrat, I took my ax and hurried outside.

I had not gone far among the dripping spruce trees when I heard soft footsteps behind me. Half expecting the Lily, I turned. It was Father. "Wait, Kori," he said. "I'll go with you."