The Porcupine Year (2 page)

A
s she floated toward morning, underneath the canoe, Omakayas put her sleepy fingers on the beads at her throat. She was dreaming of Nokomis, her grandmother. Nokomis had worn these red beads ever since Omakayas could remember. One day, she had put her arms around her granddaughter and said, “My girl, you are becoming strong and generous. You are going to become a woman sometime this year. I give you my red beads.”

“What do I get?” Pinch had asked. “I'm fearless, handsome, and truly kind!”

“Here, chew this,” said Nokomis, and she'd given him a strip of dried meat.

Pinch was delighted. “You can't eat beads,” he said, walking off with his mouth full.

Now, dream and memory mixed, and Omakayas touched the smooth, round beads at her throat. Maybe her red beads were going to be useful? Or maybe Pinch was just hungry. That was a sure bet!

Omakayas was no longer a little girl. She was that creature somewhere between a child and a woman—a person ready to test her intelligence, her hungers. A dreamer who did not yet know her limits. A hunter, like her brother, who was beginning to possess the knowledge of all that moved and breathed. A friend who did not know how far her love might extend. A daughter who still winced at her mother's commands and who loved and shyly feared her distant father. A girl who'd come to know something of her strength and who wanted challenge, and would get it, in the years of her family's exile from their original home—the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker.

That place was in her heart, even now, as she touched the red beads at her throat and began to wake so far away, curled for warmth next to her irritating brother.

“Puuu, hiyn! You stink!” She rolled away from him toward the crack of light under the canoe. Lifting the canoe's edge warily, she examined the shore. Empty. Gingerly, she crawled out. Behind her, Pinch was waking grumpily.

“How can I stink if I was washed in a crazy rapids? You're the one who stinks.”

This was just normal talk with them and didn't mean anything at all. The two had started their days together with mild insults even before they left the island. To speak pleasantly to each other would have shocked the whole family. A family both of them missed very much at this moment.

Pinch crawled out from under the canoe, too. His hair, stiff and wiry, stuck in all directions. He was an unusually strong boy, which was why he had tested his strength with the bow, and also tested his sister's patience by hunting at night.

“I wish we were back on the island,” he said, sighing with self-pity. “At least I'd know where we were!”

Suddenly he popped his eyes out at Omakayas, who laughed. Despite his troublesome ways, Pinch could always make her laugh. Plus he was a practical boy and was already planning how to get back to his family—he was, after all, very hungry.

“Let's just walk back,” he said. “We'll go along the river.”

“And leave our canoe?”

“It's old!”

“Gaawiin, it's still good!”

“It's heavy!”

“You big baby! Deydey and Old Tallow made it. Nokomis finished it off. What do you think they'll say if we leave it?”

“We'll come back for it.”

But Omakayas was stubborn and refused to leave the canoe behind, even though they'd be unable to paddle it up the roaring stream and would have to carry it through the heavy growth by the river.

“Pinch, there's no choice. We must portage the canoe back to camp. They'll be waiting.”

“Well, of course they'll wait for us,” said Pinch, hurt. “Mama couldn't get along without me.”

“You mean me,” said Omakayas.

“Do we have anything to eat?”

Pinch's voice was small and wistful; he sounded like a little boy, not the warrior he pretended to be. He sat down on a log, looking out over the lake, and scratched his head. Then he threw himself onto the ground and groaned. “I'm getting weak.”

Omakayas looked around them. She still had her woman's knife, secure in its beaded sheath at her belt, along with her fire-steel. Sometimes she carried loops of sinew along with the knife, but she'd already checked and found that she had none. She could have used the sinew to set a snare, maybe catch a rabbit, roast it if they got brave enough to make a fire. Her mouth watered at the thought. She was hungry, too. She went to the lake, put her face down to the clear surface, and admired the tiny colored pebbles on the bottom. She cupped her hands and drank, then smoothed her hair back and rebraided it quickly.

“If you're trying to make yourself beautiful,” Pinch called, “give up, it's no use, come on back. I see breakfast!”

“What?”

Omakayas scrambled back to Pinch's log, where he was still lying flat on the ground, looking up into the trees. He pursed his lips up and pointed with this gesture into the budding leaves. Tucked into the crook of a branch, a porcupine, or gaag, rested. It was only a baby but looked quite plump and would certainly be tender, stewed up in a porcupine soup.

“All we have to do is knock it from the tree,” said Pinch in a pleased voice. “I'm just lying here trying to do it with my thoughts.”

“That could take a while, brother,” said Omakayas. “Your thoughts are feeble. I think we should try a stick.”

“Good idea!”

Pinch got up, his hair now even wilder, full of leaves, and the two searched the fringe of woods until they found a good long stick that would serve as a knocking pole. Pinch climbed into the lower branches of the tree, then edged himself up a little higher, and Omakayas fed the pole up to him. The gaag was still sleeping. It made no move to get away from them. The gaag's main protection is of course its quills, and not many animals will climb after them to eat them. Pinch's poking stick surprised the baby—it opened its little black eyes and then tried to dig its claws into the bark. After a few more jabs and pushes,
the stick sent the gaag tumbling down—unfortunately, the porcupine bounced off Pinch.

“Yii, yii, oyii!!!”

Omakayas heard her brother's screams of pain, but she ignored them in order to get the porcupine. She rushed to the creature as soon as it landed, turned it over with a shorter stick, and prepared to plunge her knife swiftly into its soft underbelly and heart. A gaag has a sweet, trusting, bewildered little face and this one was so small—she didn't really like to end its life. She paused. But Omakayas was very hungry, so she lifted her knife. The gaag breathed out and closed its eyes, as if it knew it was doomed.

Pinch climbed down from the tree, whimpering a little, and cried, “Stop!”

Omakayas froze and took her knife away from the creature.

“Sister, are you heartless?
Look at me!
”

Omakayas turned to look at Pinch and, perhaps heartlessly but certainly helplessly, laughed. There he stood, his hair every which way, full of leaves, and gaag quills across his shoulders and down one arm. There were quills in his cheeks and even one sticking from the end of his nose.

“Ahhh, ahhhh,” Omakayas could not contain herself. The laughter overwhelmed her. She fell on the ground, then had to force herself up, saying, “Brother, I pity you, but you look…ahhhh, ahhhh.” The quill on the end of his nose undid her and she fell down laughing again.
“Hiyn, brother, I am sorry for you. Let me help.”

Pinch was savagely pulling the quills out with his own fingers, screaming with every one. In his pain, he grabbed the quills so carelessly that they stuck his hands. Now his fingers were also quilled.

“Oh, Quillboy, my brother, let me help you. Please, be still.”

But first, Omakayas lifted her knife yet another time to deal with the little porcupine, which was trying to sneak away. To her surprise, Pinch, or Quill, as he'd be known once this story was told, said, “No, leave it.”

“Gaawiin, I'm hungry!” said Omakayas.

“Me too, but I'll catch something else,” said Pinch.

“What do you mean?”

“A warrior does not take revenge on the helpless,” said Pinch solemnly. “I shall spare its life.”

“Well, I'll leave it for now,” said Omakayas, eyeing the juicy creature, “but once you suffer the removal of these quills you may decide to revenge yourself. This porcupine wasn't all that helpless.”
Pinch let his sister pluck out the quills with careful fingers, making a noise as each one came out.

“Ow! Wah! Ow-wahee-
oooh
!”

Omakayas put each quill on a piece of bark until she had a little stack, and when she was finished she meticulously wrapped the quills in the bark and put them in the pouch at her waist.

By now the porcupine was watching them curiously, no longer interested in leaving. Quill plucked a little soft bark from the base of a green stick and gave it to the trusting creature. It made a happy little clucking sound and began to munch.

“Perhaps,” he said in a portentous voice, “this will be my medicine animal.”

“I will make you something with these quills, to honor your great battle with the gaag,” said Omakayas.

“Ahhh, sister, you do me too much honor,” said Quillboy. “Way too much. I wish you'd just forget about the battle, but let's keep this little gaag.”

“Alas, I can't forget,” said Omakayas. “The memory of your fierce display is burned into my heart!” It was bad of her, but she still wanted to laugh. Now poor Quillboy was pocked with little holes all over his arm and shoulders. The hole in his nose made him even more ridiculous.

“You look like you were in a battle with a thousand miniature warriors. And they hit you with their arrows. Tiny ones.” Omakayas twisted her face to stop her laughter,
but a snort escaped. She pretended to control herself. “My brother, I am in awe of the great deed you did today!”

“Then I'm making a fire,” said Pinch. “Give me your striker. If our enemies discover us, I'll quill them to death. I am not Quillboy, but Quill. Just Quill. The great Quill! We're going to feast on my courage now.”

Omakayas turned, though she didn't much feel like killing the little porcupine. She lifted her knife one last time.

“No! Don't kill my porcupine! I'll find some other food!”

Pinch strode out into the lake until the water was thigh-deep. Omakayas was exasperated with her brother's odd behavior and was now even hungrier. Pinch stood dramatically in the shallows and said, “Look!”

He plunged his hand down and, to his shock, came up with a fish.

“What?” he said, gaping at the fish in his hand. He ran to shore. “How? Look, sister! The porcupine is definitely a helping spirit!”

Omakayas looked down at the little porcupine. It gazed shyly up at her. It blinked. You really can't pet a porcupine, thought Omakayas. What would Quill do with it?

Quill threw the fish at Omakayas's feet with an annoying grunt, just like the grown-up warriors sometimes did when they killed a moose or a massive beaver.

“It's not that
big
a fish, Quillboy,” said Omakayas.

“Did
you
ever catch a fish with your bare hands?”

“No,” said Omakayas. She banged the fish against a rock and proceeded to clean it with swift expertise.

“I didn't think so,” said Quill.

After they had roasted the fish and eaten it, Quill reached out and grasped the porcupine's front paws and swung the little creature onto his head. The porcupine dug its dull claws into the mass of knotted Quillboy hair, and soon, to Omakayas's amazement, it went to sleep.

A
s soon as they'd eaten, the two set out with full stomachs and new energy. They hoisted the canoe, turned it over, and set it on their shoulders. The porcupine, amazingly, balanced easily on Quill's head. Its tail hung down Quill's neck, but the quills couldn't pierce his thick hair. Quill had made cushions of moss to place upon their shoulders where the canoe rested heaviest, and as they walked along Omakayas felt fine. This wouldn't be so bad. Easy enough, maybe, if they stuck to the older parts of the forest along the river, where there was less undergrowth to tangle them up.

Quill and Omakayas walked all morning. The sun was
just overhead when they heard the roar of the rapids they had traversed the night before. Curious, they set the canoe down in the woods. Omakayas saw that the porcupine was still stuck to her brother's head. She was now getting used to it.

“That porcupine looks better than your usual hairdo,” she said.

Quill just nodded, as if she'd given him a compliment. The porcupine held on.

“Sister, let's go see where we were in that rapids,” said Quill. “I'm starting to forget already.”

“It went so fast,” Omakayas agreed. “Like a dream. I can't remember much about it either.”

As they walked toward the sound of the water, their words were soon drowned out by the noise. Getting closer, they began to feel a little puffed out over, then more than proud of, what they'd come through. They even turned and grinned at each other, nodding as if to say, We're river warriors! Ahau! They felt this excitement up until the moment they broke through the underbrush and saw the river.

Their mouths fell open. They forgot to breathe, forgot to swallow. And they knew. It wasn't them. It could not have been them or any expertise they had. Nobody could have made it out of what they saw, not alive. A ragged and ever changing wall of water twisting with power surged out at them. It was uncanny, killing, and a terrible marvel
all at once. In its mouth, there was no possibility of any life surviving. None at all. Yet here they were. Saved by the spirits, Manidoog, kept safe by the Gizhe Manidoo, the greatest and kindest one, or perhaps by the whim of the chill Manidoog who lived in the stones.

Whatever had saved them was beyond and greater than any human strength or skill. They saw this at once and stood mute at the sight.

As they stood there, a small figure rose on the opposite bank. To both of them, it looked at first like a small child with a hairy head. They crouched low. The little person moved his arm, as if making an offering to the rapids, and they saw that he was proportioned like a fully grown Anishinabe man. He was dressed in buckskins and knee-high makizinan, and his hair stuck out all over, like Quill's
hair. At the sight, Quill put his hand up to his head, thinking exactly that thought.
You're like me
. Luckily, he remembered not to touch the porcupine. Then the little person stepped backward and was gone. Just like that.

Omakayas and Quill looked at each other, wide-eyed. They mouthed the word
memegwesi
together, then nodded and smiled and looked back at the raging water. He was, perhaps, the spirit who had helped them through. Omakayas had only one thing that she could give—the red beads around her neck, the ones from her grandmother, Nokomis. They were hard to relinquish. But slowly, she took them off, crept as close to the river as she dared, and placed them on a rock where the memegwesi would surely find them once they left. Only after they'd turned away, and got back on their path, did she remember how the beads had appeared in her morning dream.

JIIBAYAG

T
he day went on and on. They got lost, and they stumbled this way and that, beneath the canoe. Finally Omakayas agreed to hide the canoe safely in the woods. She decided that they could find their camp more
easily if they walked to the river, doubled back, and eased their way along the shore. They were on the same side of the river as their camp, but somehow, in trying to find easier ways to carry the canoe, they'd gone past their family. And now it was beginning to grow dark. Soon night would fall and they'd have to spend it on the cold ground. Suddenly, they realized where they were. Camp was just ahead! Eagerly, Omakayas and Quill made their way through the bush. But they stopped short, hearing from their camp the awful cries and wails, the unmistakable sounds of disaster and of mourning.

Chilled, they grabbed each other's arms.

Someone had died in the time they'd been gone—both of their hearts skipped. They froze. Who could it have been? Was it Nokomis—old and vulnerable? Surely not Mama, or Deydey, and not Old Tallow, who was tough as leather and unkillable. Not one of them. But there was their beautiful older sister, Angeline, who'd barely survived smallpox, and Fishtail, her husband, who'd nearly died back then, too. Omakayas shook now, shuddered, for she had already lost her baby brother to that terrible visitor. She did not want to climb the mountain of grief again. Animikiins, Little Thunder, and his father were also traveling with them—perhaps an accident had occurred. And there was the tiniest one, Bizheens, the little lynx with his watching eyes. He was a quiet and clever baby boy just learning to speak and even more
devoted to Omakayas than to Mama.

Dagasana, nimishoomis, Gizhe Manidoo
, Omakayas closed her eyes and prayed. She knew that she could not survive the loss of a little brother, not again. But the truth was she didn't think that she could survive the loss of anyone.

And Quill clearly felt the same. Tears trembled in his eyes.

“Let's sneak up on them,” he whispered to her, “and find out who it was before we enter camp. I can't bear it. I'm afraid my heart will burst out of my chest!”

“Mine hurts too, already. I'm so afraid, brother, just like you.”

And so the two crept close and hid in the bushes just outside the camp, fearful as mice, wary and timid as rabbits, horrified. Lumps in their throats, hearts beating painfully, they listened as Nokomis raised her hands in the air and spoke. From where they were, they could tell that Nokomis was still breathing quickly, as if she had run through the woods. Her back was turned from them. But she was definitely alive. Omakayas was glad she could not see her beloved grandmother's grieving face.

“When I found these on the rocks, I knew what had happened,” she cried, holding something out to show the rest of the family. There was a beat of silence, and then a wild cry. It was a strangled scream, a high-pitched bleat, and it came from the tough old woman who had once saved Omakayas's life—Old Tallow.

“Gaawiin, it cannot be!” Mama's voice—then pandemonium. It was impossible to tell who was there and who was not. The yells of sorrow were all mixed up into one barking wail.

“I can't tell who died,” Omakayas was crying hard now. “I don't know what to do.”

“I know!” whispered Quill.

“What?”

“It's us!”

“Us?”

“Nokomis holds your red beads out, I see it now. She found them on the rock.
It's us that were killed
.”

“Let's go.” Omakayas's heart lifted with happiness and she strained forward, but Quill grabbed her arm.

“No! Wait!”

Unbelieving, Omakayas shook away from her brother. He looked crazy with the porcupine on his head, and he was actually grinning. With a sinking heart she knew that he had an idea, one that would surely get them in trouble.

“There will
never
be a chance like this one!”

“No!” Omakayas shook his arm, then punched him. She knew him well. What mischief was in his mind! It all happened so quickly—he could go from inconsolable sorrow to plotting a joke in one instant. Somehow, he could make her forget that her family's hearts were breaking just beyond the fringe of bushes. He could make her curious about what he was thinking.

“I'll be right back!” said Quill. “It's just the right time of evening to scare them. I'm going to sneak my hand into Mama's pack and take a couple of handfuls of her white flour. We'll powder ourselves up and walk back into the camp as ghosts, as jiibayag!”

“No!”

“Yes! They'll talk about this joke so much we will be famous! Oh, they'll never forget!”

In spite of herself, and even knowing how stricken her family was, Omakayas did something that she would regret for many years to come. She let herself be persuaded.

“I don't know. Wewiib! Hurry up before I change my mind!”

Quill was gone and back so quickly that she hardly had time to think.

“This is wrong,” she mumbled as Quill smoothed the flour on her face and arms.

“But
very
funny,” said Quill, patting the flour onto himself, turning his cheeks white, then throwing some flour up onto the porcupine, which licked its little mouth in appreciation.

“We look like chimookomanag.”

“Except white people don't wear porcupines on their heads. Okay. Let's go.”

As she stepped into the camp behind her brother, Omakayas knew that this was a very bad idea, and yet,
something in her was thrilled. It was the
chance
of the situation. The opportunity for a wild joke, just given to them!

The two walked into camp.

Quill stood with a strange, vacant, dead-spirit expression. The porcupine's quills went up. Its eyes gleamed in the white flour. Quill moaned a little, and waited until he was noticed. Omakayas stood with him, immediately stricken when she saw that they'd succeeded in horrifying their family beyond Quill's wildest hopes.

Bizheens howled. Mama cried out. Deydey's eyes flew wide open. Nokomis dropped to the earth with her hand on her chest. Angeline grabbed Fishtail. Animikiins and his father, Miskobines, stood stock-still, mouths gaping.

But Old Tallow never missed a beat. She sicced her dogs on them.

The dogs wouldn't attack Omakayas, whom they loved. They knew Old Tallow had a special place in her heart for the girl. But they jumped on Quill and knocked him flat, then went off howling when the porcupine swatted them with its tail. As soon as everyone realized Quill was a real boy, not a ghost, Mama ran up and slapped him on the head and hugged him at the same time. Deydey narrowed his eyes and scowled. Angeline furiously turned away and went back into the wigwam. Fishtail, Animikiins, and Miskobines all grinned with admiration.