The Animal Wife (8 page)

Then suddenly I knew—her foot was like mine! It was like a huge human foot, the ankle bones, heel bones, the arch and toes, lying inside a clumsy mammoth moccasin. As if wearing moccasins stuffed with grass, she had walked on tiptoe, with her heel making the fetlock, her toes pressed down on the round pad that was the sole of a mammoth's foot.

Then I looked at her front foot. The bones were not quite as clean as the bones of her hind foot, but foxes had picked the flesh through her wrist and down into her foot. Then I saw that it was not a foot but a huge hand that had carried her weight, a hand with a cupped palm and five spread fingers. She had balanced herself on the tips of her fingers, just as a person might if walking on all fours.

I looked around at the inside of her, up at her ribs, back at her hips. Near where I was sitting, her unborn mammoth children, about as big as I was, would have curled. For a long time each one would have lain there, then been born, then gone. It gave me a strange feeling.

When the dusk was very thick, another mammoth, a bull, came silently to the pool. I guessed he was there because I smelled him, and I thought of his great weight poised on his toetips and fingertips. No wonder he moved so quietly. Later I heard him spraying himself. Much later I heard him sigh, and later still I heard him flicking a few drops of water around the surface of the pool. For him too the night was passing slowly. In full darkness two herds of cows and calves came to drink and rinse their bodies. Perhaps the bull had been waiting for them; he eased himself in among them, then left with one of the herds.

The rhino came. Perhaps I was dozing when the hyenas stole up for a look at me. I felt them rather than heard them—the hairs prickled on my arms, and I opened my eyes to see, dark against the darkness, a hyena's blunt snout in the opening in the carcass. Was the Bear guarding me? The hyena drew back. He didn't come in.

At last came the dead, still part of night, when nothing moves, everything is quiet. No bird called; no frog disturbed the water. Even the air was still. I fell asleep and dreamed that something was sitting beside me. I wasn't afraid—far from it, I slept peacefully. I dreamed that day was coming, and in my dream I woke up. Then I saw that the light was not from the sun but from the last thin crescent of the Strawberry Moon just lifting over the horizon, red in the mist over the pool. And the person beside me was Father. He was sitting on his heels with his knees tight against his body in the small space, and he was watching me. I must have started. He pointed with his lips to the far side of the pool, where something was moving.

In my dream I grew very excited—the start of a hunt, when the game is in sight. Carefully I crept outside. Father quietly followed me. We stood up. The trails, the water, and the grass were dark in the shadowy, moonlit haze. I saw that the animals across the pool were horses—the same little herd of the night before, now with a mare missing. In single file they moved up to the water. Then some of them dipped their mouths, while others kept watch nervously. I knew they were remembering what had happened to them the night before. They were thinking about me.

Then I saw that something else was standing among them—a human figure, a small woman, her body naked, her head and shoulders hidden under thick, loose hair. While the horses took their places at the water's edge to drink, she turned her pale face toward me. She alone seemed to see me. The horses and the woman were very quiet. I heard only the drops of water falling from the horses' mouths when they raised their heads.

Soon the woman dropped to one knee and, bending low, put her lips to the water and drank too. Then the horses left in single file through the moonlit haze, their shapes growing thin as they moved deep into the mist. In silence, the woman followed the horses as the grass and the distance swallowed them.

In my dream a drifting scent of sweat reached me, telling me that the horses were made of warm flesh. But the woman? The sight of her had kept me standing still, made me forget my spear and all about hunting. Who was she? I looked around to ask Father. Then the calling of a curlew woke me, and I saw the hazy, slowly brightening sky. Father wasn't there.

***

In camp I found people ready to travel. Pinesinger was sitting on her pack, looking impatient. They had been waiting for me. We soon left, going slowly, looking carefully for the lions. Andriki led us, watching the brush ahead. Behind him came Pinesinger, who kept watch to the right. I came next, watching to the left, and behind me came Father, keeping watch behind, where most likely we would see the lions.

When the day grew hot and we were far away, I slowed my pace so that Father and I fell behind the others. I wanted to tell him my dream.

He listened calmly, and when I had finished he said, "Just so. It's a strong place, Uske's Spring, a shaman's place. The animals go there. People go there, just as we did. Birds go there. And spirits go there. All go there to rest and drink. Our trails meet at Uske's Spring."

By then it had come to me that the woman I had seen was Uske. I said so. But Father said, "Uske is another name for Ohun. The woman with the horses was a spirit—maybe one of the people whose camp you found, maybe just a horse."

"The yellow mare I killed?"

"Who knows?" said Father.

Well. All day as we walked I thought of Uske's Spring and the things I had seen—the horse's teeth and feathers left behind by strangers, the huge hands and feet of the mammoth, and the dream-woman who might once have been a horse. We had seen much there and might have seen more if we had stayed. So it was sad to leave, but how could we not? Pinesinger wanted to leave, and at the time Father's love for her was so great that he couldn't refuse her.

W
E WENT NORTH
from Uske's Spring to the Hair River, going straight, taking the shortest way to water. Father's cave and all its people were several days' travel downstream from the place where we came to the Hair. If Father, Andriki, and I had been traveling without Pinesinger, we would have kept right on going. But Father was feeling very thoughtful of Pinesinger, who had rolled around noisily with him in his bedding every night since we had left Uske's Spring. For that, of course, he was grateful. He made us stop at the river to let her rest.

We spent an afternoon there. We stripped and scrubbed ourselves with sand, then undid our braids and washed our hair. The fast water foamed over us and carried our filth downstream. Out on a sandbar we picked lice from each other's drying hair. It was very nice there in the sun, sheltered from the wind by the sides of the ravine. Dragonflies hovered over the water, and herds of black and yellow butterflies crowded at the water's edge, slowly fanning their wings and drinking. Lapwings stood idly on the sandbar, and two families of brown geese floated in the eddies, watching us. My skin felt cold and clean.

On the riverbank we turned our clothes inside out to let the sun heat them, then rubbed and brushed them with juniper to scrub the lice out of the seams. Sunset found us naked on the bank beside a little fire we had made from a cedar tree cast up by the spring flood. There were mosquitoes, but when these began to bite we rinsed ourselves and the biting stopped. We ate our fill of sedge root, snails, and watercress, and also divided one frog killed by Andriki—nothing, really, just a few little bones to suck. The sun went down to show the new moon already high—the Long Grass Moon, very thin but strong and very bright.

There is always food along a riverbank during the Grass Moon. By the Hair, the brambles at the top of the ravine had huge, juicy black berries on them. Mother used to call these dewberries. Father and Andriki called them brambleberries. By day we walked among the brambles, picking and eating as we went, and in the evening we climbed down the ravine's steep side to dig sedge root and to sleep by the water. In some places the side of the ravine was so steep we stayed away from it, lest it crumble or lest we miss a step and fall to the rocks below. In other places it sloped so gradually that game trails led down it, trails used by mammoths and bison, saiga, reindeer, roe deer, spotted deer, and horses, lions, hyenas, dholes, and foxes—all the animals of the willow scrub near a river and all the animals of the open plain. Father and Andriki were very proud of this. There was no hunting land like their summer hunting land, the south bank of the Hair River, they told me and Pinesinger.

One day near the end of our journey, Father talked of the people we would find at the cave. We were walking into the wind, following a game trail along the edge of the ravine. Father went first, then Andriki, then Pinesinger, then me. To pass the time on a long day of walking, I kept my eyes on the steady back-and-forth swinging of Pinesinger's hips and my mind on the memories stirred by it. Pinesinger knew it. Every now and then she would wiggle herself like a gosling.

Father couldn't turn his head because he had to watch where he was going, but he talked as he strode forward, and the wind blew his words over his shoulder. He wanted us to know about his people before we met them.

"I and my brothers are the sons of one man by two wives," he began. "My full brother is Kida, much younger than I. Andriki's full brother is Maral, who is older. I am the eldest. I am the headman of everybody. With our kin and our in-laws, we two pairs of brothers and our sons use these high plains by the Hair, which are the summergrounds of more grazing animals than anyone can know.

"Maral and I found the cave where we live in summer. Before we used it, lions used it. When we found lion sign, we gathered fuel and filled the cave with fires. When the lions tried to come in, they found too much smoke and too many coals, so they knew people had taken the cave and they went away.

"Soon after, even people far away heard how we were killing mammoths near this cave. They heard of the meat and the ivory that came from those mammoths. Everyone who knew of the cave envied us because we owned such good hunting.

"My brothers and I had already started marrying our wives. We found women at the Fire River, also at the Black River and later at the Char River. Men from those places wanted to join their groups with our group, because of our meat. And we wanted to join with their groups. Our summer hunting is the best anywhere, but our wintergrounds are the same as anyone else's—sometimes the animals take shelter in our woods, and sometimes they don't. If they don't, we starve. That's why we made sure to marry women from places with good winter hunting.

"Now we have in-laws who share our hunting lands, and in return we share their hunting lands. Now if there are no animals on our wintergrounds, we go to our in-laws. They take us in. My marriage to your mother, Kori, let us hunt on Woman Lake, but Woman Lake is far. My marriage to my wife Yoi lets us hunt on the Char River. The Char is also far, but it is better. So that we could be well tied to the Char, my two nieces married the two sons of the man who owns the hunting there. Today his people sometimes spend the summer by the Hair. We give him ivory."

Never before had I heard so much about Father's people. Never before had I given them much thought. As I listened I worried, wondering what all the people would think of me, and how I could remember anything from the tumble of names that Father soon began to call out over his shoulder. I knew I wouldn't remember any.

Or so I thought until Father, now not so far ahead of us that he had to raise his voice, spoke of a girl named Frogga. "She's the daughter of my half-brother Maral with his second wife," he said. "Her lineage is mostly from the Grass River. She'd make a good wife for you."

A wife! And I had been thinking I wouldn't remember the names of Father's people. Frogga's name didn't leave my mind from then on. A wife!

"Soon after her birth," said Father, "Maral and I began to speak of a marriage between you. We could have promised her to someone from the Black River, it's true, but we don't want to give away all our women. We asked ourselves where else we would find someone for you. My brothers and I got wives from the Fire River, but you couldn't—most of the unmarried women there are in your lineage, thanks to your mother and her kin. Well. Now that you're here, we can speak of the marriage with Frogga more seriously. Maral favors it."

We walked along in silence for a while. Father seemed content. He had finished speaking and strode forward, looking calmly this way and that. I felt on fire. I was forming in my mind the image of a beautiful girl with a long braid of black, gleaming hair. But Andriki seemed to be struggling with doubt. "You've forgotten Aal," he said at last.

"Aal? What about her?" said Father.

"She may not agree."

Father turned his head for a quick, reproachful glance at Andriki. "You may not know it, but I've already spoken of this marriage to Bala. Bala favors it too. Anyway, he has nothing against it."

"Yes, but Aal," insisted Andriki. "She's not the same as Bala."

"What are you getting at?" asked Father.

"Well," said Andriki, "Bala must have told her of your plan. As we were leaving, she said she thought it senseless to betroth young people far ahead of marriage. She said if death took one of them, the other people could never agree how to undo the betrothal exchange. Gifts would get mixed up, and no one would know who owned what. I wondered at the time why she said such a thing to me."

"Well," said Father, "it does sound as if Bala told her."

"She's the mother. She'll want a large gift," said Andriki. "Will Maral be able to find one for her?"

Father was silent for a time. He walked steadily, his eyes on the trail, but his thoughts must have been busy. At last he said, "Aal wants something. So her words have something hidden in them. She usually means more than she says."

"You know her best," said Andriki.

Father thought some more. "It's her necklace," he said at last. "Did you see it?"

Andriki thought for a while. "I saw a necklace on her the first day we came. After that I didn't see her wearing any necklace," he said.

"That's right," said Father. "She was probably hiding it from us. The important thing is that she keeps that necklace at all. It was my marriage gift to her. Later I tried to have it made part of a marriage exchange that I began but never finished for a woman of Pinesinger's lineage. That's the secret!" said Father.