The Sacrifice (7 page)

She was beginning to despair when she discovered some stalks that looked like a plant she knew. But they also looked like another, poisonous plant. She dug out one of the clustered roots and rinsed it in the river, but still she was not sure.

She had little choice. She tore off part of the root and chewed it a long time before she could swallow. It was tough and woody, but the flavor was not unpleasant. Her stomach began to snarl for more, but she must eat only a little at first, in case the plant was poisonous. She dug up all the plants in her path that she recognized as edible, and a few she was uncertain of. She left them in a heap on the riverbank while she wandered off in search of other food.

In the pines along patches of snow she came upon a kind of mushroom she knew. She recognized them easily because they often followed snowbanks and had oddly wrinkled bodies. She popped one into her mouth, but as she bit down she thought again, and spat it out. They must be cooked, she seemed to remember. She made a pouch of her severed sleeve by knotting the bottom, and stuffed it with mushrooms.

She dropped her roots into the sleeve as well and drank again from the river. Drink as much water as you can, the wise ones often said; it keeps your blood thin. She drank some more, thinking that in her situation she should be especially careful to keep her blood thin.

The sun was slanting across the sky, and she had never felt so tired. She must prepare a fire and cook her food. She must also find shelter before the sun dipped behind the mountains and left the valley dark.

For her fire she cut a willow shoot that she hoped was dry enough for a spindle, and found a fragment of aspen to use as a hearth board. She knelt down, setting aside some dry grasses and bark for tinder, and a few buffalo chips she had gathered.

But even as she placed her hands on the drill she knew she would not have fire tonight, or any night soon. With her wounded arm and shoulder she could not drill with enough power to kindle a fire.

She lowered the sleeveful of roots and mushrooms into one of the boiling pools, hoping this would do. She left them weighted to the edge with a rock while she searched for a place to build her shelter.

She chose a site close by, in a small opening in the woods halfway up a hill near the river. It was difficult to find pine branches, for most were up high on the trunks, where she could not hope to reach with only one good arm. She turned to cutting up the tiny new pines that grew on the fringes of the forest. With her injuries, it was slow, hard work. She dragged the little trees with pitch-sticky hands up to the site of her new camp and tossed them in a stack. The sun set and the valley darkened. She worked as quickly as she could to strip some of the trees and build a crude frame of them. While she struggled to lash the pieces together with baby branches, she thought again of Grasshopper. It was amazing that he managed so well with only one arm.

The dead, steaming flat glowed in the moonlight, and the veins of water running across it shined and murmured all around as she picked her way toward the sleeve of roots and mushrooms.

She was trying to guess how long it had been since her last meal when, looking up from the ground, she saw a bear dipping a paw into the pool. It was the reddish-gold grizzly she had seen driven out of the meadow that first morning. She was close enough to see the muscles in his shoulders rippling as he dragged the sleeve from the water. Suddenly he reared up on his hind legs and circled with his muzzle, seemingly confused by her scent.

She dared not move. No one could outrun a grizzly, and the only trees in the valley were skeletons, dead and nearly limbless. She could not climb them, and there was nowhere to hide.

With a grunt the bear dropped to all fours and, ripping the leather open with a nibble, began to chomp uncertainly at the contents.

“That's mine! Get away from there!” she shouted desperately.

The bear stopped, startled.

The girl was startled, too. Tentatively, she raised her good arm and tried to look menacing. The grizzly weaved uncertainly but did not approach any closer. She roared at him. The bear shook his head like a wet dog, turned, and sauntered away. He splashed through the river and meandered along the other side into the distance.

She stood still until he disappeared over the shoulder of a hill.

There was little left of her meal. The shredded sleeve told of the danger of the bear's teeth. She scraped up the dripping remains.

The scraps of mushroom and roots were soggy and bland, and they bloated her stomach. Exhausted, she crawled under her shelter and, twisting to the left, eased onto her side on the pine-bough bed. The familiar, spicy scent comforted her a little as she lay watching her breath and listening.

The tall, limber pines creaked and groaned with the wind in their crowns. They grunted like bears and bleated like terrified buffalo calves.

She found herself longing to hear the real voice of another living creature. She listened hard for a long time for the howl of a wolf or coyote, but heard nothing.

The spirit who had led her to this place must have been Born-great's ghost. How foolish she had been to hope that any gods would take pity on her. She lay shivering on her side. She had always felt alone in the world, but never so alone as on this night.

10

Back home with Grasshopper she used to play at bringing down birds with rocks, but within a few days her burned skin had turned to rawhide, making it nearly impossible to bend her arm, and, using her other arm, she made wild throws.

Although she spent her days gathering and eating roots and mushrooms and anything else she could find, as one moon melted into the next, her bones rose to the surface and grew heavy. At first she chose her foods carefully. She followed the grizzly's example. When she came across plants from which he had nipped off the tender tips, she tried them. Wherever he had left a few roots behind, she dug them up. She cooked everything she was uncertain of in the hot springs in the hope that this would make it safe to eat. But she did not have the grizzly's acute sense of smell or his powerful shoulders and claws for digging, and as her stomach screamed more sharply to be filled, she no longer concerned herself with boiling, or even sorting poisonous from edible. She ate constantly while she foraged, and her gut was racked with cramps and diarrhea.

Wherever she came upon willows she peeled off the inner bark and ate it. She scraped the pith out of weed stalks, and before long she was eating the leaves and stalks, too. She rolled rocks and logs over in search of ants and grubs. She even welcomed the mosquitoes that attacked her in larger swarms every day, for she slapped at them and ate them, too. She tried to trap squirrels and mice, but she was grateful if she could find their caches of seeds and pine nuts.

For the grizzly often arrived before her. Though she seldom saw him, she often came upon a gaping pit where he had raided some small animal's burrow, or ripped-apart logs emptied of insects, or torn-up earth where great quantities of roots had been devoured.

As if in mockery of her, elk and moose and even deer often passed nearby, and sometimes stopped to graze, grown used to her presence and unafraid. She tried to creep close enough to one of the newborns to attack it with her knife, but each time, the animal seemed to sense her intent and would skip out of reach just before she sprang.

This is what she had come to: a starving wretch unfeared even by infants. She might as well be back at the village fighting the dogs for the camp's leavings. But she would rather starve to death than face the humiliation of going back to her people empty-handed.

One evening she was lying on a slope above the riverbank, unable to force herself to keep foraging, when she heard a great tramping and snapping of branches. With an effort she lifted her head to see the grizzly emerging from the pines a hundred paces down the river.

She was downwind and the bear had not noticed her. She lay still. His reddish-gold coat rippled in the early evening sun as he ambled across the grass and into the river. He slapped at the water for a moment, then dipped his snout in and came up with a flopping brown fish in his jaws. He gobbled it down and splashed about for more.

The girl watched hungrily. Fish! That was the one thing she had not tried. She had never eaten fish, but it took all her strength to keep from plunging into the river after them this instant. She dared not move until the grizzly left.

Although he was not having much success, he was patient. Sometimes he seemed to have trapped a fish under his great paws, and would dunk his head under, but seized only a mouthful of water. His head dipped down again and again and nearly every time came up empty. She saw him catch two more fish, and fought the urge to rush out and rip them away from him.

Finally, as the sun was setting, the bear tired of his efforts and climbed out of the river, shook himself, and lumbered into the brush.

The girl stumbled down the hill and into the icy water. The fish were not easy to see; now and then a gleam caught her eye and she lunged at it. Once, by waiting endlessly with her hands motionless in the water, she touched one, but the slippery creature wriggled out of her grasp.

The sky faded and began to darken, and still she had not caught a single fish. Winded, and shivering with cold, she lay back on the bank to rest, but was so flooded with panic that after only an instant she returned to the hunt with renewed urgency.

She stood peering into the water until the moon rose, and its reflection on the water blotted out the secret world of the fish.

She heaved her body out of the bitter water into the night air.
I am starving to death,
she thought, and was startled to hear her voice. Gasping and shivering, she scrambled on hands and knees over the ground, trying to find something, anything, that had not already been dug out and eaten. She stuffed a fistful of grass into her mouth, but had to spit it out again to breathe. Thoughts, sensations, images spun through her mind: the elk meat she had left behind … Bull's snorting … Grasshopper's blood-brown moccasins … Chews-the-bear's pipe smoke … his story of a winter that was so hard the villagers had to eat their dogs, and finally their tepee covers and clothes.

Her clothes—she could eat her clothes! She bit into the remaining sleeve of her buckskin shirt, but could not tear it.

An owl's call interrupted her frenzy.

She crouched as if in fear of an attack. Her eyes darted about the treetops. Born-great's ghost. He was watching her from somewhere high in the pines.

His eerie call floated down to her again.

“Why must you destroy me?” she cried.

The owl said nothing.

“I did not mean to kill you!” she screamed. “I did not know. I was only a child.”

She fell to her knees, gulping for breath, clutching her hair. “I was only a child … I wanted … I wanted it…” Her face clenched in a grimace as she let the long-forgotten truth trickle out.

“I wanted that medicine,” she moaned. “Not to break it. I only wanted what you had …

“It was an accident,” she whispered in amazement. “I did not murder you.

“It was an accident,” she shouted up at the owl. “You have no right to torture me this way! It's true, I wanted you dead, but I did not mean to do it.”

She clawed along the ground until her hand closed around a broken branch. With her uninjured arm she hurled it wildly at the trees. It crashed into some low branches and tumbled back to the ground. But there was a whooshing of great wings above and the owl's moon shadow glided across the ground and up and over her, and disappeared behind.

The wind died, and there was no sound but the muffled rush of the river. Light-headed, she squatted down. Delirious thoughts swirled around her.

A scream jolted her to her senses. There was a crashing, the bellowing of a bear, crunching, and another scream. She strained but heard nothing more. The sounds had come from beyond the little mountain that flanked the other end of her valley.

The grizzly has brought down some game, she thought. Newborn elk, perhaps, or moose? What she would not do for just one mouthful of meat!

She stood up shakily. She
could
have meat. She could take some from the bear. “It is not over yet, Born-great,” she whispered, and fighting her light-headedness, she stumbled as quickly as she could along the riverbank toward the mountain.

Although a swollen half-moon lit her way clearly, the sky was growing light by the time she reached the other side of the mountain. The bear had long finished eating, and there was no sound from him. She knew he was resting somewhere near his kill, ready to defend it. In an instant he could be upon her, crushing her neck in his jaws. The risk was dizzying.

But something was forcing her to keep placing one foot ahead of the other. Unsteadily, she walked as silently as she could, searching for tracks, blood, anything that would lead her to the carcass. Over the crest of a ridge, she came upon it: a trail where something had been dragged across the pine needles. Head pounding, she followed the lay of trampled plants to a spot where the grizzly had raked up branches, soil, and leaves to protect his kill. She dropped to the ground, panting. The pile of scraped-up debris lay not twenty paces away. From it jutted the jagged, glistening end of a bloody broken bone.

Water flooded her mouth. She ached to charge the carcass and tear into it with her teeth.

But she did not know where the bear was; she could only pray she was downwind of his bed. Her best chance was to creep up to the kill, quickly cut away as big a hunk of meat as she could, and run.

She slid her knife from its sheath and gathered her courage. Her breath was coming so hard and fast she feared the grizzly would hear it.

She ran to the carcass and clawed away the branches and dirt until she saw hide, and thrust her knife into it.

She froze as if she had plunged the knife into her own body. The hide was buckskin.

For an instant she scraped at the bloody debris, then instead yanked up the jagged bone. It was a completely stripped shin, dangling from the knee by a tendon. Above the knee flapped the remains of a buckskin legging, over a human thigh.