Now that Raki and I were Young Braves, Na-ka-chek said that we could undertake the ordeals of the brown feather without waiting until we were seventeen. We hated being separated even more than we had done before the Birch Grove, so we accepted his offer eagerly…it might reduce the last year we must stay apart by several moons, and the Brown Feather had the right to claim his squaw!
The ordeals had to be undertaken alone, although the training for them was in company. I did not recognize how much I had relied on the presence of Gorgi or any of the others until I discovered how much more difficult it was to drive myself beyond what had seemed the limit of my endurance, or to make myself choose the more difficult of two ways up a cliff, without having someone to share his courage with me. And I knew it was not only their courage I wanted, but their admiration…the swift reward of pride felt by a friend, or the envy of someone who still refused to accept me as an equal.
The first ordeal sounded very easy…if someone else did it: to take a canoe up-stream as far as one could travel in three days. A Brown Feather watched your progress, but you never saw him. Dare you collapse exhausted, or was Dorrok watching, ashamed because you displayed this weakness? We had many other tests of endurance in canoes, but always a definite landmark had been assigned which must be reached in a given time. Knowing the distance you could say, “Only one more bend of the river: only two hundred more strokes…only one hundred, before I can drop into the deep sleep that follows hard endurance.” But now I should not know how much was expected of me: would I dare to sleep a quarter of the time between sunrise and sunrise, or must it be a much briefer rest than this? If I went too far on the first day, should I be so tired on the third that I made little progress, and so betrayed that I had not learned how to use my strength to the best advantage?
Raki had completed this ordeal and returned to the encampment the night before I was to start, but Dorrok forbade me to see him, so I had no idea how far he had been.
I left at dawn and did not reach a rapid until the evening. The canoe was heavy to carry alone on the portage, but the bank shelved gently and gave firm footholds. This was further than I had ever before reached in one day, so I decided it would be safe to eat some of the bread and pemmican I had brought with me and then to rest until moonrise.
The river was low, for the autumn rains had not yet begun, so by keeping close to the bank where the current was sluggish I could drive the canoe steadily forward. Only the even beat of my paddle broke the stillness. To keep the strokes at an even pace, I listened to one of Narrok’s drum rhythms inside my head; it would have been a waste of breath to sing aloud. There was a long stretch of river through open country and the moon laid a path for me to follow over the black water. Sometimes a fish rose with a splash, or a coyote barked in the distance; then again there would be only the faint sigh of my paddle leaving the water.
I slept in the canoe for a little while before dawn: I had tied it to the bank, intending to sleep on the ground, but the grass was sodden with dew and I could not find any other shelter from the chill wind. I wished I had brought a second tunic to sleep in, even though its extra weight might have delayed me, for I was too cold to sleep properly.
After sunrise I went on up-stream. The canoe seemed heavier at the next portage: perhaps because my feet kept on slipping in the loose gravel beside the rapid, or else my arms were getting tired. By noon I was so sleepy that I tied the canoe to a tree which overhung the water and dived until I felt more refreshed. I made myself chew some pemmican, though I was not hungry, and then lay on a sun-hot rock, longing to go to sleep but knowing that if I did so it would be sunset before I woke. If someone had been with me we could have slept in turn while the other watched, and this would have made the journey much easier.
Again I allowed myself to sleep until moonrise, but when I woke, the moon was high and I knew precious time had been wasted. Still half blind with sleep, I stumbled down the bank and dragged the canoe into the water. The paddle was heavy, as though it were made of cedar instead of birch. It was difficult to keep my strokes at an even rhythm, and several times I veered off the course and knew I had lost several paces of distance in needless effort.
A scream tore through the dark woods. “It is only a badger,” I said aloud. But did a badger ever make a noise like that? A noise like a child in pain or terror? I wanted to reach the next bend which would hide me from the source of the noise. I quickened my stroke. The moon was obscured by clouds and only a fitful silver broke the darkness. I knew I ought to rest, but I kept on; to avoid going near the woods that suddenly held terror for me. I could not land on the far side of the river for a low cliff fell sheer into deep water where the current was swift.
The canoe jarred against something and nearly capsized. “Of course it is only a submerged log,” I said loudly. “You are not a squaw who believes in water demons! You did not see a hand clutch at the prow, Piyanah. It was only a shadow. …It was not a hand; if you think it was, you must be dreaming.”
The sound of my voice scolding me only made the darkness wider and deeper…and it was not a friendly darkness.
“If you are too much of a coward to land, you will have to go on paddling, Piyanah, or else you will drift backwards on the current. Do you want Dorrok to be ashamed of you? Do you want to betray Raki and the Feathers, just because you are too lazy to paddle a little further?”
My shoulders ached as though they had been flogged. I began to chant a war song, to keep in rhythm, to keep awake. I saw a bar of yellow light reflected in the water: gradually the darkness dissolved to show the grey ghosts of trees, kind ghosts with whom singing birds were not afraid. Mist swirled up from the water like smoke. If it had only been smoke! Smoke of a fire by which I could sleep and be warm; smoke of a cooking-fire that would give me hot broth instead of a strip of pemmican I was too weary to chew.
The canoe was too heavy to drag up the steep bank, so I had to go on until I found a strongly rooted bush where I could make it fast. I could find nowhere dry to sleep; even under the trees the ground was sodden, but I saw a drift of dead leaves and crawled into it to get warm. “I must only sleep a little while; tomorrow I can sleep…not now. Tomorrow at dawn I can sleep.”
It was noon before I woke: a noon which blazed with the heat of autumn whose flames had already begun to colour the woods. I dived into the water, but did not waste strength by swimming. The long sleep had refreshed me: I was greedy for bread and even pemmican was pleasant to chew.
At sunset I had to rest, but dared not sleep. I took a sharp thorn, and when I felt my eyelids getting too heavy for me to hold them open I drove it into my leg until I jerked into wakefulness. It is difficult to lie completely relaxed, so that your muscles can gather strength, when the ground is cold and hard; when rain is dripping off the trees, slow monotonous rain which makes it more difficult for your body to refuse the sleep for which it aches, sleep that it knows will be punished by the sharp pain of a thorn. I began to hate my body for tempting me to sleep, and to hate myself for being so unkind to it.
The rain stopped before moonrise. The canoe slid forward between dark ranks of trees that were no longer menacing. I pretended that they were people who had come to see whether I was worthy of the Feathers.
“They are sneering at you, Piyanah. Listen, they are saying that Piyanah is a squaw who pretends to be a Young Brave. Tell your arms, Piyanah; tell the muscles of your back and your thighs that if they plead with you to let them rest the watchers will hear and mock you. Do not betray me, my arms! Look, the moon has travelled a long way across the sky. Watch for the dawn which will soon come to tell you that we have won our rest. No, Piyanah, you must not look back; you will see the reflection of the sunrise in the water ahead. They should call it the Land beyond the Sunrise, that land where people go when their night has been long, and they are so very weary. Count the strokes, Piyanah, each hundred shall make a filament of your brown feather. On and on. …The beat of the paddle is getting slow as the heart of a dying man. I can hear a rapid. Will the sunrise release me before I reach angry water? I shall never be able to carry the canoe even if there is a wide path without any rocks to climb. The moon is still very bright. No, Piyanah! It is the dawn; the dawn, Piyanah!”
I was close to the bank: I think if I had been in midstream I should have collapsed and let the current snatch from me some of the distance I had gained. I watched my hands making the canoe fast to a tree that grew close to the edge of the water. Slowly and deliberately my feet climbed the bank. I fell face downwards on the kind turf, and sleep wrapped me like a robe of beaver pelts.
I thought I was dreaming. There was a fire, and the smell of food cooking; and I was lying on a heap of dry grasses and covered with a blanket. I sat up and saw Dorrok putting another log on the fire; beyond him the river was red with the setting sun.
“Raki came as far as this, and so did I,” he said. “None of the others came further than the place you reached at sunset yesterday. I thought you would reach the same place as Raki and I. That is why I waited here for you.”
“So you are not ashamed of me? Oh, Dorrok, I am so glad!”
“No, Piyanah,” he said gently; “I shall never be ashamed of my Chief.”
I had already killed five stags which were beyond their fifth year, so Dorrok said I need only kill a grizzly to fulfill my ordeal of the hunter, and that with my tracking and woodcraft he was already satisfied.
Hunting a grizzly would probably follow much the same pattern as when I had found Pekoo, but now I should not have Gorgi and Tekeeni with me. If the grizzly attacked, I should have no hope of rescue; if I were wounded too badly to make my own way home, I should die, alone. The grizzlies were my friends; now I had to kill one of them to prove I was a hunter.
I think I should have failed in this ordeal if I had not seen the body of a child who had gone into a grizzly’s cave. It was crushed to a bloody pulp, but the face was unmarked except by terror. The track of the bear which had killed her led into the mountains: and Dorrok granted me the right to avenge her death.
For sixteen days I followed these tracks; twice I saw him in the distance, a solitary male with no white marks, so I knew he was not Pekoo. He was wary, and every day moved to a new feeding-ground. Several times I tried to approach him, but though I kept in close cover he always moved on before I could get within bowshot.
Would he never choose a cave where I might hope to ambush him? The first snows had fallen. Very soon I should have to go back to Dorrok and admit failure. Unless Dorrok let me kill a spring bear I should have to wait until next autumn before I could hope for the brown feather, the brown feather and Raki.
To hunt a bear at night was against all the rules I had been taught, and I shall never be sure why I attempted it. I had come to a place where there were many large boulders scattered on the open mountain-side. I knew the bear was hiding among them, but to follow him there would be to give him every advantage. It seemed madness, but I knew it was the only way to avoid another year of separation.
I walked slowly up-wind; arrow notched to the bowstring, tomahawk hanging ready from my belt. I asked Great Bear and Pekoo to forgive me for punishing this outlaw of their tribe. Perhaps they heard me and held him in sleep, for I saw him stretched out, half hidden by the denser shadow of a boulder.
A bar of moonlight fell across his shoulder, giving me a clear target to try the difficult shot to the heart. …He tried to struggle up with the arrow buried under his foreleg. …Then he lurched over on his side and blood trickled out of his mouth.
I waited with another arrow notched, but he did not move. I crouched, watching him until his eyes slowly opened. He did not blink, but was he watching me? Slowly I crept nearer: his eyes had begun to glaze, so I knew I should not be one of the hunters who die because they think a wounded grizzly is dead.
I hacked off the fore-paws, which would prove I had fulfilled the ordeal and earned the claws to wear on my neck-thong. Then, before I left him, I asked Great Bear to take him back into his tribe, for the feud between his people and ours was ended.
I put the bear’s paws into the leather sack I had used for bread; on the third day I tied the thong more tightly round the neck of it, to try to keep the smell at bay. Every night I made a fire, and at dawn sent smoke signals to tell Raki I was on my way home. I knew how eagerly he would watch for the smoke, as I had watched when he was winning his bear’s claws during the previous moon.
The mountains were already covered with snow, and even on the lower slopes it lay in the deeper gullies. Only two more ordeals remained—the winter journey, and the climbing of The Listener, the highest mountain of the range. I knew Dorrok would not let me attempt The Listener until the spring, but this did not matter because Raki and I could not be given our brown feathers until the ritual ceremony of the Sowing, which took place before the Moon of the Choosing.
To spend seven days alone in the great cold sounds very easy; seven small wooden tokens branded with the tribal mark sounds a trivial burden. But each token must be put in one of the seven places chosen for the ordeal, to prove that you have been there; and you must spend the seven days without the companionship of fire.
Cold can be more cruel than cougars: it can gnaw fingers from your hands and cripple your feet; it can rot away your ears and your nostrils; it can be venomous as a rattlesnake and scar like fire. It was bleak comfort that Raki and I were to start the ordeal on the same day, for the places allotted to us were so far apart that there would be no hope of either of us reaching the other in time if we sensed the stealthy approach of this quiet, white death.
We both chose the same kind of clothes: knee-high moccasins lined with beaver pelt; fur caps which covered the forehead and ears; and two tunics, the inner one furlined, the outer of oiled leather. We should carry our food, bread-sticks and pemmican, rolled in a blanket between our shoulders. Dorrok had advised us each to take a tomahawk, for cutting branches to make shelters, and a sling, which might be a means of getting warm, raw flesh which would help us to resist the cold.
We did not need to be reminded to take a second pair of snow-shoes, for we remembered the Young Brave who last winter had not returned from this ordeal. Gorgi and I were there when the melting snows gave up his body. He wore only one snow-shoe; we never found the other which had betrayed him to the drift. Cold sometimes grows jealous of the living, but it is kind to the dead: the Young Brave looked as though he had only just gone to claim the right of entry to the Happy Hunting-Grounds.
The ordeal began at dawn. The first stage was easy, so I should be able to reach it in time to make a shelter before sunset. There was a clear, pale sun, and no wind. It might have been any ordinary day instead of the first of the seven days. Fresh snow scrunched underfoot, and the trees, wrapped in their white blankets, were solemn as Elders in council. I saw a snow-hare, and was glad that I was neither cold nor hungry enough to need a kill: it sat up on its haunches and then bounded away across the unbroken whiteness. Later I saw a stag. He stood to watch me; then walked quietly down a narrow track as though he knew I had not come as a hunter.
By noon there was real warmth in the sun. I took off both tunics so that my body could store the gentle heat against the night. I left the first token in a cleft of a high rock, then cut some pine boughs to make a shelter and spread more of them to lie on. There was a level space, from which it was easy to sweep the snow, protected on the windward side by the rock. If fire had not been forbidden, it would have been a friendly place; but I slept soundly, and woke hoping that Raki had been even more comfortable.
Until the fourth day the weather remained kind: then it began to snow. Under the trees I was protected, but in the open the rising wind drove into my face: the heavy flakes clung to my eyelashes and made it still more difficult to see the way. I think that if this stretch of country had not been very familiar I should never have found the next stage, for only those rocks whose sides were too steep to allow foothold to the snow were safe landmarks. The snow tried to drag me down, and swallowed my tracks before I had gone more than ten paces forward. Here there were no trees to give me branches for a shelter, so I cut snow into blocks and built them into a hollow circle; three tiers of these and then my blanket stretched over the top and weighted with stones. I knew that if the storm grew into a blizzard I might be buried, but if I stayed out on the exposed hillside I should never survive the knives of winter.
I dared not sleep, for I had to guard my hands and feet from the frost demons which crept up to attack them, keeping constantly alert to rub them with snow when they began to lose feeling. Pain is safety in intense cold, for numbness soon drifts into the greater numbness of death. When I felt the demons luring me to sleep, I stumbled outside, to swing my arms and stamp my feet until I felt the blood running free as water under ice.
I had to dig my way out in the grey dawn, and was so cold that I killed the first snow-hare I saw. Its blood was warmth, and salt, and life; the drops brilliant as a scarlet feather against the snow. I hated the cold that had driven me to colour its creeping whiteness with the bright blaze of death; hated it even more than I hated myself for betraying the hare who was also trying to withstand the challenge of the winter.
That night I huddled in a shallow cave and scraped a sleeping-place in the fine gravel of the floor. The snow had stopped, but there was still a high wind. Icicles hung from a branch which swept down over the narrow entrance and clattered against each other with the sharp sound of a skeleton hanging in a tree; a skeleton whose sinews still held the bones into a semblance of life. The idea of the tinkling bones grew stronger, until I could almost see the skeleton of the Black Feather whom Raki and I had found five moons after the battle. He must have climbed the tree to hide, and wedged his body into the crotch between two great branches, while the blood, which still stained the bark, slowly drained from his wounds. Even though he was a Black Feather I hoped that he had died before the buzzards came to clean his bones.
I felt myself sinking into the cold, and tried to send my spirit to our little valley to find out whether Raki was already waiting for me. If he had been trapped by the cold it would be so easy to join him; for the cold was kind unless you fought against it. To sleep would be so easy; to sleep would be to find myself in the warmth of our valley where it was always summer. I thought I could see the corn-cobs lying where we had left them. I called, “Raki! Raki!” But no one came down the path by the stream or from the friendly woods to answer me. If Raki had been there he would surely have come. “Raki must be alive!” I said aloud. And the icicles seemed to whisper, “Raki is alive.”
I stood up, stamping my feet, swinging my arms until feeling returned to my hands and I could move my fingers. “Because of Raki I am stronger than the cold! He is my fire, my sun, my warmth; for love is stronger than cold, and separation, and darkness.” I slept; and when I woke the snow outside was brilliant with sunshine and the sky a strong blue. I took off my sodden tunics and spread them on a rock to dry. The light and heat that were part of Raki soaked into me and gave me their strength. I knew that the Lord of Winter had challenged me, and because I had met his challenge I had been accepted as a friend.
I set off in a clean white world which blazed with light as though it reflected the watch-fires of a thousand tribes. I knew that Raki and I would both return to the encampment in safety; that every night I should find trees to give me shelter, that I should see the stars steadfast in the sky, while the grey clouds of death lurked beyond the mountains.
I knew this was true, and on the seventh day it was so. As I came down the western slope to the circle of tepees I saw Raki coming down the path from the east.
Never had a winter passed so slowly, but at last we heard the thunderous cracking of the ice as the river began to move with the urge of spring. I knew that soon The Listener would be ready to hear my challenge for the last ordeal. I had often been on the lower slopes of the mountain, climbing from steep slopes of scree into the high moraine; and the previous summer Gorgi and I had reached the foot of the last towering pinnacle, that looked like a finger of a Great Hunter pointing the way to his home. Raki had made the ascent in the autumn; I knew it must be very difficult for he was frightened for me. I promised to send a smoke signal when I began the climb and another as soon as I was safely down. Raki could not come with me, for the ordeals must always be undertaken alone; but he was going to wait near the foot of the precipice with Gorgi and Tekeeni, who had also passed this ordeal while I was hunting the grizzly. If they did not receive the second smoke signal they would know I must have fallen and come to find me.
The rock was honest, so that even a toe-hold would bear my full weight, but nowhere was there a ledge wide enough to rest on, so a precarious balance had to be maintained without a break. There was not even a thorn bush on the whole smooth expanse above me to give an illusion of safety. The whole of me was contracted to the urgent need of smoothly changing my weight from one hand to the other. I forgot every other texture except the wind-polished surface of rock as I desperately searched for a small projection or narrow crack strong enough for me to dare a shift of position. Once I nearly fell, and had to cling by one hand to a knife edge, which cut the palm so deeply that blood ran down my forearm and splashed my cheek before I could draw myself up to a safer hold.
An eagle dived out of the sky, so close that I could feel the wind of its wings. I hung motionless, knowing that if it attacked I should fall sheer to the rocks below. Twice I heard the sweeping of its wings, and waited for the deadly tear of its beak. Then it soared, until it became a dark fleck against the hard blue sky.
Because my left hand was slippery with blood it was increasingly difficult to keep a firm hold. I had been climbing in shadow, and for a long time had not dared to look down in case it made me giddy. Suddenly I realized that the sun was shining full on me. The knowledge that I must be nearing the top gave me courage to lean outwards so that I could see directly above me. There was a narrow ledge leading upwards and to the right. It was no wider than the palm of my hand, but after the sparse holds it seemed secure as the path beside a river. It led me out of the shadows, to the pinnacle rock which crowns The Listener.
Relief was so intense that I had to lie down, for my legs refused to carry me any further. My teeth chattered as though I was very cold, but I could feel sweat trickling down my body. It was not yet important that I was now one of the Brown Feathers, for they loved endurance and I only craved rest; rest on safe, flat ground where there could never be a danger of falling.
Then I thought of Raki, and of how there were no longer ordeals to keep us apart. Weariness was forgotten. I stood upright, my hands upstretched to the sky, and gave thanks to the Great Hunters who in love had brought me nearer to their country even than the crest of their Listener.