Our tepees were much closer to the encampment than they had been in the old “place of corn growing”, and we often saw people who belonged to the tribe. Mother told us that when we could not avoid going near them—for instance, if we met them on a narrow path where there was no place to hide—we were to walk straight past and pretend not to see them. She made us promise that even if one of them spoke to us we would never answer.
Ninee sometimes went down to the encampment, but only when she thought Mother was with us and wouldn’t know about it. Food was left for us every evening, on a flat rock at the top of the cliff; so it was difficult to understand why we had to keep away from the tribe, when they were friendly enough to provide us with everything we needed… even fine deer-skin for tunics and coloured beads to decorate our moccasins. The Chief was my father; yet my Mother never told us anything about him and we never saw him except in the distance.
Sometimes Mother took us into the mountains during the hot weather. At night we slept under the stars and she would tell us stories about them: how each star was a torch set in the sky by someone who had entered the Land beyond the Sunset, and how the larger ones were two torches that belonged to two people who loved each other very much; so we knew there would only be one new star when Raki and I were dead.
There were several different places where we could go when our bodies grew too old to be exciting to live in any longer. I thought the nicest was the Land beyond the Sunset, which is sometimes called the Land without Shadows, where there is no winter and the flowers never wither nor the trees lose their leaves. The rivers are always summer warm, and you can swim in them with the freedom of fish; through those woods you can run swift as a deer; in that sky you share the horizon of eagles.
Before you can enter the Happy Hunting-Grounds, where live the Great Hunters whose younger brothers are the Lords of the Trees and the Lords of the Animals, you have to answer the challenge of Great Grizzly, Great Trout, Great Deer, and even Great Gopher. If you have betrayed any of their people, they make you return to Earth to seek forgiveness. Great Pine and Great Silver Birch question you too: if you have deliberately hurt a tree, or used it for the centrepost of your tepee without being properly grateful, they also send you back to learn kindliness. Each Lord of the Trees has many spirits who look after his forests; they are very powerful, but kind unless you annoy them.
Ninee believed in demons, and was always threatening to send them to punish us when we were disobedient. She was so good at describing them that sometimes it was difficult to be sure they would not happen. There were fat ones who hopped like toads, and thin ones with sharp teeth, who hid in thickets and were always ready to pounce when you went past. The most horrible were like enormous bats, with bloated, furry bodies, who dropped from trees and smothered you if you went out of the tepee at night without asking permission. When Mother discovered that Ninee had been telling us about demons she was so cross that Ninee wept and then sulked for days.
Raki and I agreed that being with Mother was even better than being by ourselves. She never tried to stop us climbing trees, as Ninee did, but showed us how to swing from one branch to another and how to be careful not to rely only on one hold at a time. She taught us how to recognize all the different birds, and to imitate their calls so well that they often answered us. When we were seven she gave us our own canoe, which we kept down-river where there was a long stretch of water without a rapid. She taught us how to carve and to use bow and arrows; and always realized that Raki and I must do everything together to enjoy it.
She was with us when we found the grizzly cub. His mother must have been killed by a hunter, for otherwise she would never have deserted him. He was curled up beside a rock, whimpering because he was cold and frightened. Mother carried him home; at first he wouldn’t eat, but she made a little bag of doe-skin and taught him to suck goat’s milk through it. He was different from other grizzlies, for he had a white blaze running from his right shoulder down the fore-leg. We called him Pekoo, and when he got used to us he followed us everywhere, and whimpered on the bank when we went out in our canoe.
There were only three “specially forbidden things”: going too near the encampment, speaking to any of the tribe, or nearing the sound of a particular waterfall which fell into a pool in the forest. Mother said this pool was a very magical place and that we were not old enough to go there yet. As she so seldom told us not to do anything, we accepted these as being things she knew about and we didn’t; and we were nine before they began to seem important.
We had found a new way up the cliff above the river, and had crawled along a narrow ledge until it widened enough for us to be able to lie on it. Far below we could see the encampment; the air was so still that the smoke of the watch-fire was straight as a pine, and the man sitting beside it looked small as a gopher.
“I have got an idea,” said Raki.
I interrupted him, “So have I!” Let’s both say it at the same time, so that we can be sure we both thought of it first.”
He picked up a stone, as he always did when he wanted to be sure we really had thought of the same thing, and threw it as far as he could—which was a long way, for he was very good at throwing and the hill being so steep helped a lot. When it stopped rolling we both said, “Let’s have an adventure with finding out about people in it!”
“I’m glad you had it too, Piyanah. I wasn’t sure I ought to tell you about it until I had found out if it was very dangerous.”
“If you had done it without me it would have been dangerous…being without each other always is.”
“Not always,” said Raki. “Remember how I found the grizzly’s cave the day you cut your foot and couldn’t come with me?”
“That doesn’t count,” I said firmly, “because the grizzly wasn’t in it. If it had been, you might have been too silly to run away before it got cross.”
“We needn’t bother about that, because it isn’t the grizzly day, it’s now, and as ‘now’ is when we’ve decided to find out about people we had better make a plan. The best thing to do when you start having a new adventure is to decide which the most dangerous part is likely to be, so that you will know what to do if it happens, and not have to decide when you may be in a great hurry.”
“That’s not very difficult,” I said, “for if it’s a nice, small Danger, you go on with what you’re doing and pretend not to notice it, and if it’s an extra large Danger, with teeth or a horrid noise, you practise running, in the opposite direction, and forget it ever happened.”
Raki sighed. “You can’t always go on doing that, Piyanah. Mother has told you, and so have I, that pretending dangers aren’t really there is quite often very silly and hardly ever at all brave.”
I thought he was probably right, so I said, “Well, when it stops me doing the things you do, I’ll stop it, but I like being comfortable, and if I start thinking about all the things there are to be brave about, I mightn’t be brave at all. Then you might start having adventures without me…and that’s the most uncomfortable thing I can think about.”
“Do stop talking, Piyanah. I’m trying to think.”
“So am I; and I’m wondering at the same time.”
“Well, don’t.”
“But you can’t help wondering if you’re doing it…and anyway it’s an important wonder. Why does Mother let us go out all day by ourselves…and at night too if we want to, except when there is a full moon: why does she let us climb trees, even unfriendly ones: why does she tell us never to be afraid of animals, even mountain lions: why does she let us have our own canoe and even go down the small rapid alone: why does she let us do nearly everything we want to, except go near the encampment or speak to any of the tribe? Why? That’s my wonder…and you needn’t be surprised that it’s important, because I told you it was going to be!”
“Perhaps the Chief’s children are always kept away from the others.”
“No, they’re not. I heard Ninee talking to Mother, when she thought I was asleep; she thinks it’s wicked of Father to let Mother and us live away from the tribe. Ninee only stays here because she promised she would; she says she misses being with the other squaws.”
“Then perhaps they hate us, and Mother is afraid they would kill us if they got the chance.”
“I don’t believe that. No, Raki, of course they don’t hate us. We’ve often been quite close to hunters, and they could easily have killed us if they had wanted to, and do you remember when we met the file of Braves, and honestly hadn’t got time to hide; they didn’t hate us, Raki.”
“Then why did they turn away as though they couldn’t bear to look at us?”
“Because they were frightened. I know it sounds silly, but I know they were frightened of us.”
“How do you know?”
“Because two of them didn’t turn away, and their eyes were dark and wide open, like Pekoo’s were until he got used to us.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” said Raki slowly. “I’ve thought so too, sometimes, but it seemed too silly to be likely.”
“Let’s make sure we’re right, and then instead of asking Mother why we mustn’t go near people—and that’s the only question she will never answer—we can say, ‘Why are people frightened of us?’ and she’ll probably tell us before she realizes it’s a new way of finding out the same thing.”
“But she’ll probably say, ‘Of course they are not frightened of you,’ …and that will make us feel silly, as I did after I boasted of killing the deer with the arrow you made for me, and she wouldn’t believe me…and I thought she would have to when she saw the body. And then she found it had been dead for days and was full of maggots.”
“Don’t think about that,” I said hastily. I hated thinking about it myself, for it had been my fault that Raki thought he had killed the deer. It had gone bounding off, and I suppose I imagined I saw the arrow sticking in its shoulder. We searched for it all day, and when we saw the dead deer…we knew it was dead because a buzzard was sitting on its head, I convinced him that it was the same one, and hurried him back to tell Mother about it before he had time to look properly. It was such an uncomfortable memory that I buried it, in a hole I had been scratching in the sandy ledge, and put a white stone on it to remind me not to dig it up again.
“There’s one way we could make quite sure about their being frightened, talking very loudly so that they couldn’t help noticing us, and if you’re right and they’re frightened, they will hide, or pretend to be too busy to see who we are.”
“And if I’m not right?” I asked, feeling anxious because it had only just occurred to me that this adventure would include doing the most dangerous of all things, quite slowly and on purpose.
“If you’re not right, I expect we shall be full of arrows.”
“Full enough of arrows to be dead?”
“Quite dead, I expect; but that won’t matter because Mother says the Great Hunters will welcome us to their country, and it’s more exciting there than it ever is down here.”
“Well, if we’re both full of arrows, it won’t matter at all,” I said…and hoped that Raki thought I meant it.
Neither of us spoke until we were climbing the path which led up from the encampment. I wondered if Raki had been as frightened as I had, or if he had even found it equally difficult not to run. Would an arrow have felt like being stung by a hornet…only even hotter and sharper? I hoped that I should never find out!
“I am glad that’s over,” said Raki. “Were you frightened too?”
That “too” made me love him even more than usual. “Horribly frightened,” I said, glad to be able to admit it without shame. “Nothing really happened, but it was horrible.”
“Which did you think was the worst part?”
“Do you mean the worst of the things that happened, or the worst of the things I was expecting?”
“The things that happened.”
“When the old man by the fire looked straight at us and pretended we weren’t there…he pretended so hard that I began to believe it. I thought that arrows might be quite different to hornets and so we had been killed without us noticing. I daren’t look back in case I saw our bodies lying on the ground. I pinched myself so hard that it still hurts…to make sure I wasn’t only a spirit.”
“It wouldn’t matter much if we had been, so long as we didn’t notice being killed.”
“Oh yes, it would,” I said. “Mother says that it’s very important to know when you’re dead…for if you don’t, instead of asking the Great Hunters to let you go to their country, you wander about, feeling lonely…and getting so cross with people for not seeing you that you get more and more disagreeable. That’s why some dead people hide in the shadows and make frightening noises to chase you away from the places where they live.”
“Then I hope it never happens to us.”
“It won’t, because we’ll never forget to ask the Great Hunters to look after us.”
“Does anybody?”
“Of course they do, or there wouldn’t be so many spirits. Mother says you don’t get anything until you ask for it. I expect the spirits were people who thought they got carried up to the Happy Country without doing anything about it for themselves: as though they were worms, and the Great Hunters behaved like hungry birds who swooped down and carried them off. Was it frightening to you, Raki…our adventure, I mean?”
“Yes, very. My worst bit sounds much sillier than yours.”
“Which was it?”
“Did you notice the two small children playing in the dust near the large tepee?” I nodded, and he went on, “Well, they saw us, but they weren’t surprised or frightened, until a woman came out of the tepee; and when she saw us she ran to the children and snatched them up and fled into the tepee as though we were a pair of angry grizzlies.”
“So small children aren’t frightened of us,” I said slowly, “but women are, and the old man pretended we weren’t there. Why, Raki?”
“We shall have to ask Mother.”
“She will be angry: we have done the worst of all the ‘specially forbidden things’.”
“But her being angry won’t last nearly so long as our not knowing.”
“We had better think about it first.”
But we didn’t have to think, for I looked up to see Mother standing waiting for us, on the rock from which you can look down into the encampment. She didn’t seem angry, but as though she were suddenly very tired.
“So you have been there,” she said. “I knew I couldn’t keep you away from them much longer.”
It no longer seemed a brave adventure. It was as though we had deliberately done something mean and unkind. My eyes felt as though they had got sand in them, and I knew that if I wasn’t very careful I might cry. Raki took my hand and held it, hard. “It was my idea,” he said. “I shouldn’t have let her come with me.”
“No, it was my idea, really it was.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “It isn’t your fault that the tribe is stronger than a woman…even if a woman loves her children very much, she can’t protect them from the tribe.”
“They didn’t hurt us, Mother. It wasn’t at all important…we thought it was going to be a tremendous adventure, but we walked through the encampment and nothing happened.”
“Are you sure?”
“Quite sure, Mother,” said Raki. “Nothing is changed by our having been there.”
“You don’t want to know why you are different?”
“Yes, of course we do,” I said, “but knowing can’t do us any harm.”
“I was older than you are when I knew,” she said softly, as though she were speaking to herself. “Would I have been happier if I had never seen beyond the water?” She sighed, a deep sigh as though she put down something very heavy which she had been carrying a long way. “Of your own choice you have done the first of the ‘specially forbidden things’; now you shall do the third. I will take you to the Place of the Falling Water, and tell you what I saw there…and why, because of that seeing, you and I are ‘different’.”