I was never sure what Gorgi told Kekki and Barakeechi, and the others who had begun to be friendly, but they changed towards me so completely that if I had not recognized their faces I should never have believed they were the same people. Every day I liked them still better, and it was so restful not always to be on my guard that I felt twice as strong as I had ever done before.
There was an extraordinary relief in being able to admit that the smell of warm intestines when I had to gralloch a deer made me feel sick; and, instead of laughing, Barakeechi did it for me, unless one of the other boys, who might tell Dorrok, was there. Even a cut foot hurts very little with a friend to share a grumble, and sympathy brought quicker healing than green salve.
We agreed that in front of the others we must hide our friendship, for we who belonged to the future tribe had secrets which could not be shared by people content with the Separation. Some of the older boys must have suspected, for instead of ignoring me they tried to be tormenting. It was a moment warm and beautiful as a sunset, when I saw Kekki being held down by four of our future Braves while they painted him with fish-glue and rolled him in burrs: then they pegged him down, like a drying hide, by thongs tied to his wrists and ankles, until the glue set hard. I stopped Tekeeni putting belly-berry into another enemy’s food-bowl, for I knew he wasn’t sure how much of it was safe. They had tried the same joke two years earlier, and the victim had squatted until he nearly died of exhaustion.
After that the enemies kept away from me; which was lucky, as Raki did not seem to think the jokes were funny; I felt rather ashamed of having enjoyed them, though he agreed that sometimes it was necessary for a Chief to be firm.
As Na-ka-chek seldom spoke to us, Raki and I decided that so long as we went on training for the feathers we could prepare for our tribe without asking his permission about details, and that it would be a good idea for Gorgi and the others to have a chance to know some of our squaws.
Rokeena could walk quite a long way if she went slowly, so I was able to meet her without Nona or the women finding out. She was very shy at first with Gorgi and Tekeeni, but soon got used to them, though she still tried to hide her scarred leg. It was Tekeeni who cured this fear; instead of pretending not to notice it he showed her a bad scar on his arm, where he had fallen on a fish-spear when jumping from a slippery rock, and said it was a better scar than hers because it was longer. After that Rokeena talked about her leg with him as though they were two girls comparing the patterns of their moccasins.
Through Raki and Rokeena, I came to know the life of the Squaws’ Tepees almost as well as if I were living there myself. Only women over seventy years could claim to know how to propitiate demons, and this claim was the real source of their power. Demons did not seem very intelligent, for the bad ones were sent scuttling away by a small packet of herbs worn under the right arm for three days; and even those considered specially dangerous, which crept up the nostrils and jumped about inside the head causing great pain to their unwilling host, were often killed by five drops of porcupine oil in the left ear, if at the same time certain magical words were whispered into the other. The flesh of water-rats was prized for coughs, and beavers’ bones, dried and crushed to a fine powder, must be given to a child whenever it loses a tooth, otherwise the second teeth will not grow properly.
One of the first laws we made for our tribe was that there should be no Old Women, for if we could not survive without their medicines we would only be wasting time in starting out. Dorrok had promised to teach me how to treat a broken bone and the way to sew up a jagged wound with gut and a bone needle. I already knew how to pin a flap of flesh in place with a long thorn, but it did not always heal very cleanly.
I was surprised when Rokeena asked how our tribe would have children if we did not take at least one of the Old Women with us. “What use would they be?” I said. “Raki told me that no woman over thirty-two ever has a baby.”
“It is when the baby is born that the Old Women are needed,” said Rokeena. “The mother and the baby both die unless the proper rituals are carried out.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said firmly, for the prospect of taking a person like Nona with us was impossible to accept. “There can’t always have been Old Women…certainly not among the Before People, and animals manage perfectly well by themselves.”
“No one under seventy must go near a mother or her baby until it is seven days old. If it is a male child, the belly slits open downwards from the navel, and only if the wound is properly bandaged can it heal without a scar.”
“I could learn to bandage,” I said, “and so could Raki.”
“But we couldn’t get the right bandages. They have to be steeped in water to which a lot of secret things have been added. …I know they use salt, but there are many other things as well. They must be kept in the dark except at the full moon when they are exposed to her rays for three nights…so that the moonlight soaks into them and blinds the demons. The baby has to be bandaged too, as soon as it is born, otherwise a demon can use the body for its own.”
“Rokeena, you must try to stop believing in demons! Tree spirits, cloud and fire spirits, are quite different. …they are messengers between us and the Great Hunters, and always friendly…unless one is rude to them, and of course one never is. But demons are invented by Old Women…and I shouldn’t be surprised if the Elders help them.”
“Don’t say that,” she said, and there was real fear in her voice. “Don’t say that, for one of them might be listening.”
“An Old Woman, or a demon?”
“A demon: they are everywhere.”
I began to feel cross with her. “Raki cured your leg, and that should be quite enough to convince you that he is much stronger than demons.”
“I know Raki is stronger…and so are you,” she added hastily. “I only meant that it’s no use pretending demons don’t exist.”
“They don’t: unless you believe in them. They are like death-berries: they don’t jump off a branch and dive down your throat…if you ignore them, they are quite harmless. Unless you learn that, Rokeena, we shan’t be able to take you into our tribe.”
“Please don’t say that, Piyanah! If you won’t say that, I’ll tell you a very important secret…which proves that demons are real. The Old Women would kill me if they knew, so I shouldn’t dare to tell you if I wasn’t worthy to join your tribe.”
I knew she really meant ‘Raki’s tribe’, but I only said, “What secret?”
“All babies don’t come out of a slit in your belly! Before I fell and hurt my leg I was in the woods when I heard someone groaning. It was a young squaw: she had torn off her tunic, and was lying doubled on her side, and there was a baby on the ground beside her…it was a female baby and it was crying. I forgot that if anyone goes near the Birth Tepee they bring death with them, and I ran towards her. She saw me and screamed at me to go away…but my shadow had already touched her. I ran, but I had seen her belly, and there was not even a mark on it.”
“Why didn’t you tell Raki? He has been trying to find out about babies because he knows it will be important to us, but no one will tell him anything.”
“I didn’t tell him because I knew he was happier not believing in demons. I know they are real; because the squaw never came back to the tepees.”
“What happened to her? What happened to the baby?”
“I think, though I am not sure, that one of the other women took the baby…there was a new one and no other squaw had been away to the Birth Tepee.”
“The mother died?”
“Yes, the demons killed her. I killed her, because I saw them both before the baby was seven days old. That’s why I knew the demons were angry when they threw me out of the tree, and why I couldn’t believe that Raki was going to cure me. I didn’t know then that Raki was so strong and wonderful.”
I heard Gorgi whistle and knew that it was time for me to go back. I told Rokeena that I would meet her again as soon as I could arrange it, and that until then she had better say “I don’t believe in demons” forty times every night before she went to sleep.
Raki, having to be with people like Rokeena! I was more sorry for him than I had ever been…my Raki, having to live with squaws who were so stupid! It was good to be Piyanah who was training to be a Brave, and knew that only fools and squaws believed in demons. I paused with my hand on the rough bark of a spruce, to thank the tree spirit for his protection.
Since Raki had been upheld by the Chief over letting Rokeena leave the tepee and be taken into the sunlight, and none of Nona’s warnings of disaster had come true, the Old Women tried to avoid open conflict with him. Instead, they contented themselves with telling even more terrifying stories to the girls who were weak enough to listen, and we knew that if they had been in charge of the cooking-pots our tribe would have been made from skeletons.
Raki had found women’s work easy, though if a single thread of a blanket he wove was crooked or the wrong colour, an Old Woman would pounce on the defect like a toad snapping at a fly; and they examined his moccasins in search of a misplaced bead that would make the pattern different from the second of the pair, with the eagerness of dogs rootling for fleas. The fact that Raki never burnt the food was a particular disappointment to them, and they began to believe that all men are born with the skill of women as well as their own, but are too proud to make use of it. It amused us that they never realized we had learned to prepare food, with many mistakes, in our little valley, and that Mother had taught us to embroider moccasins and set the threads straight on the loom.
They must eventually have decided that Raki had demons at his command who were stronger than their own, for they even pretended not to know that the girls who wanted to join our tribe sometimes left the tepees at dawn and did not return until sunset. Dorrok must have known that Gorgi and our other friends often joined the girls to help Raki teach them the things which would make them worthy of tribal brotherhood; but we were never sure whether he had consulted Na-ka-chek about it, or decided on his own responsibility that we should be allowed to carry out our plans without interference.
At first the boys were surprised that girls found it difficult to use a bow, but I explained to them that I had only been able to do it even when I first joined them because Raki and I had always done the same things. Gradually the girls became skilled with arrows, and about half of them showed real ability with a fish-spear. In some ways they had curiously strong bellies; one of them, called Cheka, who was only thirteen and very shy, gralloched a stag, and instead of being sick, as I expected, she let the guts run through her fingers as though she were admiring a new forehead-band. In a short time they all became good trackers, for this had always been a tradition with them…no doubt if I had had to look forward to being taken into the woods by a stranger I should have taken even more interest in learning the cunning necessary to a quarry!
Some of the boys did not like it when I said that they must learn women’s tasks, but they agreed to try when I told them that in our tribe no kind of work would be considered inferior to any other. Gorgi found that he enjoyed making moccasins, and Tekeeni fringed quite a creditable tunic…though he admitted that he only did it to please me. I remembered Gorgi saying, “May the Great Hunters be thanked that Piyanah cannot make a law by which men and women both have to bring forth children,” and that led to a discussion as to what our laws would be.
“No man need take a squaw,” I said. “But if he does, he has got to accept her as an equal and let her share his life; and he must also share in the trouble of looking after any children they may have.”
“Can he have more than one squaw?” asked Tekeeni, and one of the girls said quickly, “Can a squaw have more than one man?”
“No,” said Raki firmly, “they can’t. Duck pair only once, and we have always been told that Great Duck is one of the wisest of the Lords of the Animals.”
“A stag has several hinds,” objected Tekeeni.
“That’s why stags fight each other,” I said. “I think Raki is right. We ought to start with the same number of men and women, so that they can all have a chance of pairing if they feel like it.”
Then Kekki said, “When women are allowed to share the hunting, who is going to stay behind to look after the children…or will that be done by Naked Foreheads?”
“There will be no Naked Foreheads,” I said. “At least, if any of them want to come with us, they are going to be given a fair chance like everyone else.”
“But someone has got to do the scavenging.”
“I know: that someone might be you, or Gorgi, or whoever can best be spared from something needing more skill.”
“But you said we could all choose what we most wanted to do,” said one of the girls, “and no one enjoys cleaning cooking-pots or scraping hides.”
At this, Cheka said, “I like cleaning fish and things,” and then she dived into embarrassed silence because everyone turned to look at her in amazement. She was the girl I had seen gralloch the stag, so I decided to arrange for her to have plenty of the same strange amusement…the sight of her fingering the steaming guts was still a distasteful memory.
“But who is going to do the scavenging?” repeated Kekki, who was always apt to ask the same question several times until he was quite satisfied with the answer.
“We have arranged that,” said Raki, who until then had left most of the talking to me. “Every moon we shall meet in council, to decide who has been the most, and the least, useful to the tribe during the previous moon. The ten who were most useful can do exactly as they like during the next moon, and the ten who have done the least for the rest of us can act as Naked Foreheads during the same period.”
Gorgi then asked, “What happens if the first ten all want to sit by the river and do nothing?”
“It depends on what kind of ‘nothing’. If they seemed just to be sitting, but at the same time were thinking, they might find an idea that was more valuable to the tribe than ten stags. If this proves to be so, they can go on thinking as long as they like. It is the amount of help they have given by which they will be judged…if the help is small, they can do scavenging, so that the tribe can be grateful to them because the encampment doesn’t smell of rotting fish, or all the other smells that need burying.”
“Who will do the choosing?” said Gorgi.
“Piyanah and I will always be in the council, as the Chief, and with us shall sit four others, two men and two women…selected because they have the most feathers.”
“Oh, are we going to have feathers too?” said Rokeena, gazing at Raki with awe as she always did.
“Yes, but our feathers are going to be real. The white feathers will be the most honoured, for they can be won only for an idea, or a memory of the Before People, or something time does not spoil, which can be used to hold the bridge over the Canyon even in a thousand years. Yellow feathers can be for ideas too, but ideas which affect things we can touch: such as a better way of building canoes, or making pottery, or curing pelts; and they can be earned for discovering a new use for a plant, either as a food or for its value as a salve; or how to make a broken bone mend more quickly. Green feathers show that you have talked with a spirit and heard a message from the Great Hunters: it doesn’t matter whether it’s a tree spirit, or a water spirit, or just a friend who happens to be dead. You also get a green feather for killing a demon, either by teaching someone not to believe in them, so that they shrivel up and vanish in disgust, or else by finding them when they are disguised as rattle-snakes and squashing their heads with stones…a white stone is the best for this, but a stick will do if you haven’t got anything else.”
I looked at Rokeena to be sure she was listening…she was, and I reminded myself to ask her whether she had talked herself out of believing in demons yet. Then Raki went on:
“Brown feathers will still mean a proven skill in something which adds to the protection and well-being of the tribe, and Half-brothers will also wear brown feathers, for it is quite as important to make a cooking-pot as to fill it with meat. The women, or men, who do the cooking can earn a brown feather too, if their special skill has increased the pleasure and health of those they feed. We shall still have scarlet feathers, which can only be won by some special act of courage; but in our tribe they will have to be gained in doing something of real value, not just as a proof that the wearer has risked death for no reason. You could win our Scarlet by rescuing someone, from a grizzly or from drowning in the rapids. If I had been the Chief I should have given a scarlet feather to Dorrok when he climbed down a precipice to rescue a fawn which had fallen down on to a ledge. It was starving to death, while its mother stood watching and wouldn’t leave even when she heard Dorrok coming. He never told anyone, and seemed to think that he was a traitor to the tribe because he had risked becoming crippled, and useless as a Brave, for something that didn’t matter. But it did matter to Dorrok, for I saw his face when the hind was licking her fawn and when he watched it trotting after her into the woods…and yet he thought he should be ashamed of weakness. And it matters to us, for I hope that Dorrok will come with us when we go to our own place of the corn-growing, to find the peace of the Feathers of Truth.”