Miyak, three years old and so like Raki that by looking at either I could see the man as a child or the child as a Chief, was teaching his sister to crawl. Already our children recognized a close friendship, and in them we were well content that the future of the Heron was secure. Raki and I were sitting in front of our tepee, looking across the cultivation to the river. It was evening: smoke was rising from the cooking-fires, and we could see men and women working together in the fields. I was sharing their contentment, already such a rich harvest of our sowing. Raki must have known that mine were long thoughts. He said gently:
“It is autumn, and we know that the winter will be kind. The woods will sleep lightly, for here snow is only a ghost that vanishes with the coming of the sun. If Na-ka-chek could be with us now he would be happy.”
“He is often here, Raki. Miyak saw him yesterday. He told me he had been talking with an old man who wore a Chief’s headdress, like ours, but with feathers that shone, ‘like moonlight on water.’”
“Was Miyak frightened?”
“Why should a child be frightened of his grandfather?”
“I was foolish to expect it: I had forgotten that children who are born in love know that they who live beyond the sunset are their friends.”
“Raki, sometimes we think we have done very little since we came here. There have been no feats of endurance, no actions to make a legend at the Gathering of the Tribes yet we have achieved many small things; and though feathers may be small, together they can make the wings of the morning.”
“What are these new feathers?”
“They have become so familiar that they seem ordinary and unimportant: women working with their husbands, men and women laughing together, singing together—even weeping together.”
I paused to watch Gorgi walking down the hill with Cheka beside him, their son on his shoulder, their daughter clinging to her hand.
“Ordinary things, Raki—men and women going down to the river with their children. Yet you could search the Thirty Tribes and not equal that sight.”
Raki put his arm round my shoulders. “Look, my Piyanah, at the reflection of another feather you have won for them. A man carrying a baby in his arms and a woman standing waist-deep in the river mending a fish-trap.”
“It is your feather, Raki, more than mine; or did we both win it at the same time? To us, such an ordinary law, but to strangers inconceivable; that men and women should recognize that in spirit they are already both male and female, as they will be when they enter the Land of the Great Hunters. Now in this recognition they can choose whatever work is closest to their hearts. They know it is nothing strange that a man should be happier—and so more useful to the community—looking after children, or cooking, or making tunics; or that a woman should be a mighty hunter, or skilled with words. Children live with their fathers and mothers and are happy…if I had to look forward to separation from Miyak when he is seven, the years would be only divisions of desolation.”
“We have given men and women to each other, and children to them both; but what have we taken away? The pride of endurance for the sake of endurance: and instead we have given them the strength to follow the ideas in which they believe. We have taken away the comfort of superstition; and given them the certainty that the Great Hunters are close and real. We have taken away the protection of impassivity; and given them kindliness in company. A rich exchange.”
“You forget that because there are no Naked Foreheads, warriors sometimes have to act as scavengers.”
Raki laughed, “It is better to be a scavenger than a Scarlet Feather who is proud of being remote from his kindred. Now the Heron are more eager to win a white feather than once they were for the Scarlet, for they have learned that an idea may be more powerful than arrows against the Sorrow Bird.”
“It must have been a great battle,” I said softly, “between the Heron and the Sorrow Bird. And the Heron won, Raki. Perhaps only Narrok, who knows the language of the drums beyond the sunset, heard the cry of the Sorrow Bird in her dying. ‘They have killed me, the People of the Heron, for they have learned to answer the Question of the Great Hunters—How many people are happier because you were born?’”