After the Choosing, I kept away from the Squaws’ Tepees, for I disliked being reminded that I was female; and I made Raki repeat his promise that he would never let me go to live with them.
“Of course you’ll never be a squaw!” he said indignantly. “We two are a pair, like two chipmunks, or two grizzlies, or two of anything that isn’t stupid enough to belong to a tribe.”
“The terrible thing is, Raki, that the squaws don’t realize that the laws are unfair…they look on them as something which can’t be altered, like the winter being so long and cold. You happen to have been born a boy, and so, if you wanted to, you could be first a Young Brave, and then a Brown Feather, and then a Scarlet Feather, and then an Elder, or even a Chief. But all that a girl can expect is to be Chosen…which is probably very disagreeable, and then to have babies…and if those are boys, they are taken away from her just when she’s grown really fond of them and they are old enough to be interesting. Then, years and years later, she could become one of the Old Women, and enjoy bullying the younger ones and telling them horrible and unlikely stories. Males have got everything and females nothing; even the worst-off man has a better time than any woman.”
“Not the Naked Foreheads,” said Raki.
“Well, they hardly count,” I said unfeelingly. “If they choose to go in for their silly ordeals and then fail so that everyone despises them, they can’t expect pity.”
“They can’t help being born into the tribe,” objected Raki. “At least no one expects anything of a woman, but if a boy happens to be naturally afraid of things, it must be terrible to know that he has either to do them or lose all privileges. I talked to a Naked Forehead yesterday; he was so surprised that I spoke to him as an equal that I thought he was going to cry. He couldn’t climb rocks without getting giddy and falling, and they wouldn’t let him do some other trial instead…at least they offered to let him take his canoe down the Great Rapid, but he thought that was even worse than climbing. So eventually the Elders declared he would never win a feather and so must become a Naked Forehead as he would never be worthy to wear the tribal mark.”
“Apart from being ashamed, the Naked Foreheads don’t have such a bad time, do they?”
“They have to take orders from the Old Women…though they oughtn’t to mind that, of course,” he added hastily, “and they have to do all the scavenging, and carry game the hunters have killed, and clean and skin the deer.”
“Why shouldn’t they do it? If they didn’t, the women would have to.”
“You don’t understand, Piyanah; for a man, it’s shaming to have to do things like that.”
“It’s just as disagreeable for women to have to do them, and if women aren’t ashamed, it only shows they’ve got a little more sense than I thought.”
“Naked Foreheads can’t take a squaw at the Choosing.”
“Do they ever father children?”
“No, and if they get even a little interested in a woman they are branded on the forehead…and I think other things happen to them as well, and they are then exiled from the tribe.”
“Perhaps I had better try to remember that Naked Foreheads are not really men, and then it will be easy to be nice to them.”
“Do you hate all men, Piyanah?”
“I like a few of them, but they are people like us who got into a tribe by mistake. The ones who enjoy the laws of separation are enemies. …I wish I could turn them into slugs and then squash them with a heavy stone!”
Braves made their own arrows, but all the other skilled crafts were done by the Half-brothers, men who had been injured and could no longer fight or hunt, but earned their right to the protection of the tribe in other ways.
Tannek, the canoe builder, could only hobble leaning on a stick, for the muscles of his right leg had been torn by a mountain lion; below the knee it was withered and the toes curled under like claws. No one was so wise as Tannek in the selecting of birch-bark, or in knowing the grain of wood to make the ribs, or in choosing the sinews, which go to the making of a canoe.
Raki and I often went to watch him working on the one he was building for us: he carved a pattern of feathers on the prow and made the paddles, one for each of us, from red birch. In a canoe he forgot he was a cripple, and took us down rapids that until then had been forbidden to us. He named the rocks, telling us how to recognize their characters; which ones were kindly and fell sheer into deep water, and which pretended to be harmless and then thrust out a jagged ledge just under the surface to rip open the canoe of the unwary. He taught us to know water by its colour and where to watch for eddies; how to paddle so quietly that we left only a ripple that might have marked the passage of a moor-hen; how to make a canoe leap forward even against the current, and where to cross to the other side of the river, using the flow instead of fighting against it.
The Half-brothers each had a small tepee of their own in a clearing up-river from the main encampment. Tannek’s tepee smelt of new wood and deer-sinews, except when he was boiling fish-glue and then there was no room for any other smell.
Minshi, who was much older than Tannek and rather surly, was also lame. He would never speak of how he lost his foot, but one of the boys told Raki that he had been burned in a prairie fire and a demon had prevented the wound from healing until the foot rotted off. He made all the pottery, except some of the roughest food-bowls used by women, and beside his tepee he had a small pit full of red clay which was brought by canoe four days’ journey down-river. From this he made water-jars, the bowls used by the Chief and the Elders, and everything considered worthy of decoration. Most of the decoration was wavy lines and dots and sometimes a row of little crosses. Tannek had warned me that they meant snakes and stars and even birds and animals, so I was able to admire them properly, which pleased Minshi so much that he gave me some of the clay to make a food-bowl for Raki. Shaping it was much more difficult than it looked, but Minshi said the unevenness didn’t matter and he put it into the oven, a hole in the ground lined with stones, with a fire above it, to bake until the colours were set. Pigments were made from special rare clay, yellow and a dark, rich red. This was baked, ground to powder, and then mixed with white of egg. It was not always easy for Minshi to get enough eggs, so Raki and I used to find them for him…usually along the river bank; they had to be fresh or else they spoiled the final colours.
Narrok, the tribal drummer, was also a Half-brother, for he was blind…though neither of us realized this until we had seen him several times, because he walked fast and without hesitation. Tannek told me he lost his sight through the ordeal which he hoped would have made him a Scarlet Feather, the highest honour to which any Redskin can attain, and before that he had been a famous tracker. Gradually, pace by pace, he learned the ground in every direction from his tepee, so that he no longer had to rely on a guide.
Raki and I had been up-river in our canoe and were returning in the early evening when we heard the muffled beat of a drum. We took our paddles from the water and drifted in silence to listen where the sound came from. It seemed to come from a thicket of young alders on the south bank, so we tied the canoe to a tree growing by the water and crept through the undergrowth until we reached a glade.
Narrok was sitting on the trunk of a fallen tree with the drum between his knees. He was tapping it with his long, flexible hands, the rhythm steady as the heart of a man asleep, and my heart steadied to the same beat. His eyes were open; they seemed to see us, and beyond to a far horizon. The sound belonged to the trees, and to the water and the rocks, and to us, as though we were all part of a living body whose heart was the Great Hunters. The rhythm changed: it spoke of courage, and splendid battles, and the war cries of Braves in victory. Then it grew slower and heavier: it was after the battle, and Death Canoes were going down-river to their last sunset…the Chief was standing by the “pool of falling water” holding my mother in his arms before he gave her to the Before People. I felt a tear slide down my cheek, and yet the sadness of the drum was beautiful as the crying of curlews through the mist of a winter evening.
I do not think he can have heard us, yet when his hands let the drum fall asleep, he said:
“There are two people listening…young and happy. Is it Raki and Piyanah?”
We came forward and sat on the grass beside him.
“I am glad you understand the language of the drums,” he said. “There are very few who understand. What did they say to you?”
I tried to tell him about the trees and the rocks being part of a living being who is the Earth, and of the joy of battle and the sorrow which followed after.
He smiled. “So I have not betrayed my drum. When my eyes said they would no longer serve me, I asked the Great Hunters that I might learn to use my inward sight. For a long time I thought they had not heard me, for the night in which I lived remained unbroken. The tribal drummer was old and could no longer keep rhythm from dawn until sunset…and I was young, and blind…and useless. It was the Chief who asked me to learn the language of the drums in service to the tribe; and for the first time the long night was a kindly darkness.
“I am no longer blind, Piyanah. There are eyes in my hands, and they know the texture of bark and of leaves, the colour of a stone, the humour of a plant, whether it is sad or singing. Out of the darkness I have made a little Earth: I know each path and where the trees are spaced; even if I walk a long way I know what the next pace will bring, turf or gravel or smooth rock to my feet. And in the drum I can see battles which have been forgotten, and mountains we have never crossed, and sunsets which belong to the generations.”
“Can you see the Before People?” asked Raki eagerly.
“Are they the Singing People…who laugh, and are young even when their bodies grow old?”
“They must be the same,” I said. “They had white houses, and trees with yellow fruit, so heavy that I could only hold one of them between my hands.”
“I cannot remember their houses…only their songs. I hear them always behind the voices of my drum, between their sound and silence.”
After this, Narrok was our friend, but he told us not to tell anyone that we talked to him. “For,” he said, “it is only with you I wish to share my silence.”
His loyalty to the Chief would not let him speak against the tribe, but he let us understand that he, too, felt a stranger among them.
“I loved my mother,” he said, “but she never told me the name of my father, only that he was a Scarlet Feather. She made me promise to be worthy of him…she died soon after I went to live with the boys, so I could not ask her to release me from my promise. I was a Brown Feather when I was seventeen, though I found it difficult to remember the importance of endurance, to believe that a cliff was a challenge to the climber and not a curve against the sky to be enjoyed.
“Perhaps that is why my eyes deserted me, because I refused so many things they brought me and kept them about such ordinary tasks. They told me to delight in a flock of white birches on the mountain-side; and I said to them, ‘Birches? How far are they from the river? Is their bark ready for canoes?’ They showed me trout, fluid as water among the reeds; and I said to them, ‘Where is the exact place to cast a fish-spear?’ They showed me a doe, standing with one forefoot lifted in dappled shade; and I said to them, ‘She is in her third year; meat for the cooking-pot.’ They showed me the river in flood; and I said to them,’ The pack-ice will make it too dangerous for canoes; our journey must be delayed three days.’ My eyes offered me joy, but I valued them only because they were useful in little things that do not matter to the spirit.”
“When did your eyes go away?” I said.
“At the Gathering of the Thirty Tribes, which takes place every seven years. The Braves vie with each other, and the Chiefs boast which of them has the most wearers of the Scarlet. To earn the title of Scarlet Feather you must be a full member of the tribe and then pass an ordeal to prove that you have overcome fear. The ordeal is chosen by the Chiefs in council, and they make very sure that it tests you to the utmost. At the Place of the Gathering there is a rock above the river, called the Eagle Rock. It leaps from the water the height of twenty men standing on each other’s shoulders, and the pool below it is so narrow that only a perfect dive can end in safety.
“Many had died there in the past. I thought beyond the water I might find the land of the singing; but if this was denied to me I should have fulfilled my promise and wear the Scarlet in my forehead-thong. I knew as I fell towards the pool that I was too far from the rock. I felt my hands break the surface; then a dull blow and a whirling darkness…a darkness that has gone on and on. …There was no welcome for me beyond the water, so I wait here until the drums of the Great Hunters tell me I am free to go.”