1

MY NAME WAS YANAN and my story began where it ended, in Graylag’s lodge on the highest terrace above the north bank of the Char River. The lodge was big, with two smokeholes instead of one, and very well made, the best I’ve ever seen. Graylag built it with his three brothers before his brothers died, while they were all still young. The pit of the floor was dug deep. The walls were braced with the legbones of mammoths, which in turn were braced with boulders and wound with spruce branches tied on with strips of reindeer hide, which shrinks when wet, so wind didn’t move the lodge and rain didn’t make it leak. Water drew it tight.

The arch of the roof was made of cast antlers forced together as if the deer were fighting, and was so high that only a few of the men had to stoop when they stood up. Over the spruce branches and antlers were hides, and over the hides were strips of sod. The lodge was so strong that people, or any amount of snow, could stand on it without breaking it, and so thick that weather came in only through the smokeholes. Thieving animals never came in, since we kept a dead spruce to pull, butt end first, into the door of the coldtrap.

On top of the lodge Graylag and his brothers put a wonderful thing, a group of very long antlers from huge spotted deer almost never seen around the Char. Each antler was almost as long as the lodge, and standing on it, they looked like a grove of birch on a low hill, or like a herd of spotted deer lying down. The antlers stood out against the sky and could be seen far up and down the river—a sight that always told us we were reaching home.

Behind the lodge, a low cliff rose to the plain, so storms from the north blew over us and the south-facing rock cast sunlight on the lodge all day. Below the lodge, other terraces fell away to the floodplain of the river, where roe deer and sometimes horses browsed the willow scrub. The river was fast and shallow, and rushed around boulders so, except in the coldest part of winter, holes of open water showed in the ice. From our lookout in front of the lodge, we could watch for red deer or horses or reindeer following their trails down the terraces to drink.

On the south side of the river grew a wide spruce forest where bearded lichen hung from the little trees. In winter we hunted the reindeer who sheltered among the trees eating the lichen until The Woman Ohun sent them on their long spring walk back to the open plains. The forest was crossed through and through with trails, those made by reindeer and also by us, since in winter Graylag made the young people of the lodge gather firewood every day.

In the east, where the river rose, stood a range of hills with larches and pines on their south slopes. The hills were far, almost half a day’s walk from the lodge, yet when Graylag and the other men could not kill reindeer, we went to these hills to gather pine nuts and to look for the dens of sleeping bears. When we dug out a bear and killed it, its meat fed us for a long time, perhaps the length of a moon.

In the west, the Char River joined the Black River and ran north. Every spring, when the reindeer were gone and pine-singers filled the woods across the river, when deerflies and mosquitoes filled the lodge, when the terrace stank from our feces and other foul things that lay thawing in the melting snow, we followed the rivers to the steppe to find the reindeer again. There, on the banks of the Grass River, we camped together with many other people from lodges far from ours, lodges belonging to Graylag’s kin on the upper and lower Black River.

Graylag owned the winter hunting for many days’ walk in any direction along the Char. He and his kinsmen owned the summer hunting everywhere on the huge steppe drained by the Grass River. Wherever Graylag went, we followed, because he owned the meat.

The handsign for headman is the raised right thumb. All my life this sign made me think of Graylag, because like a thumb he was short and strong. I’ve been told that his first wife was also short, but I never saw her, since she died before I was born. His next two wives were his brothers’ widows, both as tall as he. The other men were taller. But as the right thumb is the strongest, most important finger, Graylag was the most important of us. He was also the eldest, with white hairs in his beard and at his temples. And he seemed tall, standing straight with his chin raised as if he faced the wind.

Clasped hands are the sign for a lodge, for marriage, and for strength, since the fingers are the joined antlers of a roof and also the joined people who live under it. So I will show with my hands about the other people of our lodge and how we lived together.

The hand palm down with fingers spread is the sign for men. If I count the grown men of the lodge on the backs of my fingers, I find eight. On my right hand I find a man on every finger—Graylag himself, his two sons, Timu and Elho, his brother’s son, Raven, and his daughter’s husband, Crane. On my left hand I find Father and his nephews, The Stick and his brother, The Frog.

The hand palm up with thumb and fingers tight together is the sign for women, water, and berries. So I count the grown women on the pads of my fingers and find six. On the first and second fingers of my right hand I find Graylag’s two wives—Ina, who was Father’s sister, and Teal, who was a shaman. On the third finger is Graylag’s daughter, Owl, and on the fourth finger is his nephew’s wife, Bisti. On my left hand are Father’s two wives—my mother, Lapwing, and her sister, my Aunt Yoi.

Fingernails are the sign for children, because nails look like children’s faces in the hoods of their parkas. On my fingernails I find five children, two on the left hand for me and my spoiled sister, Meri, and one each on the right hand for Junco, for her brother, White Fox, who was almost grown, and for Graylag’s little grandson, a baby born to Owl.

Those were the people of our lodge, the people I’ve shown on my fingers. Now I clench my fists, because a fist is the sign for fire. As I have two fists, in our lodge were two fires. One was at the back, in the warm end, and the other was in the front, in the cold end by the door. The people named on my right hand slept at Graylag’s fire in the back, because they were Graylag’s family and Graylag owned the lodge, while the people named on my left hand slept at Father’s fire by the door, because they were Father’s family and Father was just the brother of one of Graylag’s wives.

Men own the meat, so men own the places where we find meat—the hunting grounds, the lodges, and the hearths inside. Women own the families, the lineages. The people of a lineage are not joined to a place, but like milkweed seeds are scattered over the world of the living or clustered in the Camps of the Dead.

So the opening fist is the handsign for lineage and also for milkweed. As my fists open I see my own lineage, the largest in the lodge. Some of us are on my left hand—Mother, her sister, my sister, and I. Others are on my right hand—Graylag’s younger wife, Teal, and their son, Elho. Mother and Teal belong together because their mothers were sisters. Before them, their mothers’ mother had sisters who had children, and these people too were in our lineage, but they didn’t live on the Char. I didn’t even know them.

Again I open my fists. Now I see Father’s lineage—Father and his sister, Ina, elder wife of Graylag, with her two grown sons, Henno The Stick and Kamas The Frog. Again I open my fists, and again and again. My fists are like milkweed pods with a few seeds clinging. Seven times I find lineages in Graylag’s lodge. In the sixth lineage I find Owl and Timu, two of Graylag’s children, and Owl’s little baby, Graylag’s only grandchild. But in the last lineage I find, like a single seed caught by its tuft of hair, just one person—Graylag himself, alone since the death of his brothers.

Again I clasp both hands, making the sign for a lodge. Again in my hands are strength and marriage, our group with our lineages joined. So we are solid. So the locked antlers in our roof make the lodge solid over our heads. And so Graylag’s people of my right hand and Father’s people of my left hand once lived together.

When I was a girl, I liked our lodge the way it was and was satisfied with the people in it. But the grown people were not satisfied, since some of our men had only one wife, some had no wife, and some were widowed. My cousins, The Stick and The Frog, once had wives and even children who were drowned crossing Char Lake, snatched under the spring ice by The Woman Ohun.

By listening to the grown people one night in winter, a night I remember very well, I learned that our men could not find wives among the women we met in summer when we followed the reindeer to the steppe. The women we met there were married or else were in the same lineages as our men, with mothers who were sisters, or mothers’ mothers, or even grandmothers’ mothers. So said the adults who crowded together, sitting on their heels around Father’s fire.

This surprised me. On summer nights Graylag’s sons, Timu and Elho, often visited two women secretly to have coitus with them. Thinking that everyone knew, I reminded the adults of those women. “What about Tunne and Lilan?” I asked.

The words were not out of my mouth before the adults fell silent. Round-eyed like owls, they stiffly turned their firelit faces toward me, making me feel I had said far too much. Father stared. Mother showed me the palm of her hand, threatening to slap if I said more. And Aunt Yoi very stealthily reached down in the dark where no one could see to give me a terrible pinch that brought tears to my eyes and left a blue mark on my thigh for days after.

Graylag, however, looked sideways at his sons. “I hope my kinsmen know less about their wives than Yanan knows,” he said.

“Some things are better unknown,” said Father.

Speechless at first, Elho and Timu soon began shouting. “Yanan shouldn’t speak until she gets sense!” cried Timu. “Are we animals, that a child talks about us freely?”

I tossed my head to show him I thought nothing of his words. “You must be an animal! You look like an animal!” I said.

For this Mother clapped her hands loudly like a slap, so I dropped my eyes to show I would be quiet. But as the adults began talking again, I stole a glance around the fire, thinking that the other children might have liked my joke. Just as I hoped, Junco and White Fox were snickering at Timu. Only my little sister wasn’t laughing. Ready to nurse at any moment, she sat between Mother’s knees, face to face with the two bare breasts in Mother’s open shirt. Too young to like my wit and daring, Meri looked triumphant, as if Mother had really slapped me.

In their usual way, the adults must have decided to overlook what I said, to pretend nothing had happened. Very soon they took up the talk of summergrounds again, and then I heard something I didn’t like at all. We might not follow the reindeer to the Grass River this summer, but might visit some campsites at the place where the Fire River drains Woman Lake. There, people were saying, we might find unmarried women.

Anxiously, I listened to the adults. I knew very little about that place except that some people from our lineage lived there and it was very far. I hoped we wouldn’t go. No one likes strangers, and to me all the people would be strangers, kin or not. But the adults were now counting the quarter moons we might see along the way. A decision had been made. We were going!

What about the distance? I wanted to ask. It took us almost the length of a moon to reach our summer campsite on the Grass River. To reach the Fire River would take much longer. I hated to think of walking so far, crushed by the weight of a heavy pack while my sister sneered down at me from her place on Father’s shoulders. I hated to think of the number of days we would spend hungry, cold, and wet, bitten by mosquitoes and scratched by heather. All this only so that men could find wives? Why couldn’t the unmarried men go by themselves?

Sad, I wanted to ask Mother if we really had to walk so far. But Mother was cross with me now, and I knew better than to speak. Instead I listened, and heard more. Not only would men find wives, but we would tie ourselves to their fathers’ lodges. This would be good, said Graylag. Who could say why or when we might need to use new hunting grounds?

We would also collect presents owed us from a marriage exchange. Many of us had been promised presents for the marriage of Graylag’s daughter, Owl. Graylag was owed an obsidian knife. Owl’s brother, Timu, was owed ivory beads already carved and drilled for stringing. Owl herself was owed amber beads and special rainbow feathers from the necks of Woman teals, the birds who nest in the reeds by Woman Lake. Years had passed, and no one had seen those presents. This year we would get them at last.

Mother sighed. “It’s been so long since we visited our kin at the Fire River that we don’t know who’s dead or who’s living,” she said. “Perhaps our people don’t use their old summerground. If not, how will we find them?”

Father answered. “Won’t they make trails? Won’t their fires smoke? We’ll find them the same way Graylag and his brothers found women when they went to the Fire River. The same way we found you. We just went. There we found you. You didn’t hide from us.”

“Do you expect to find three unmarried women at the Fire River?” asked Teal. “Three women are too many to expect.”

Three? That also surprised me. I thought at least four men—Timu, Elho, The Stick, and The Frog—had no wives. Not to mention White Fox. But I knew I shouldn’t ask questions, so I listened, hoping that Teal would name the men.

She didn’t. “Perhaps my son won’t find a wife there,” she went on, speaking of Elho. “Too many people at the Fire River are in our lineage.”

Then everyone began to talk, naming the women they remembered at the Fire River and tracing their lineages. I was bored by the talk, since most of the people named seemed to be dead. The only lineage I knew was my own, and at that, just the people of our lodge. Also, the only one of us being mentioned was Elho. If he couldn’t find a wife, I didn’t care. I waited for the talk to turn to Timu, hoping to hear that no wife could be found for him either. But the talk of lineages passed over Timu to Father’s nephews, The Stick and The Frog.

Graylag interrupted the long lists of names. “You must expect trouble finding unmarried women,” he said to Teal. “You talk as if trouble surprised you. If finding husbands and wives was easy, we wouldn’t have to give so many presents to our in-laws.”

“We give too many presents,” said Timu. “And for what?” He gave me an angry look I didn’t understand. “I’ve heard of men who don’t give presents. Those men capture their wives!”

“Horses do that, not people!” cried Teal.

“Capture!” said Graylag. “Listen to him! Take care, Son! One of those big hungry women at the Grass River will pick you up and run away with you.”

Now everyone laughed at Timu, me most of all. Even my sister, Meri, showed all her little teeth, although she didn’t understand why. But Timu looked ashamed. He hadn’t meant to joke, but to remind us of other people’s customs. So Graylag put an arm around Timu’s shoulders and said in his kindly way, “We must all wait for wives. Yours is growing every day. Soon you will sleep in her deerskin, and my kinsmen at the Grass River will be glad.”

People laughed again, but I was startled. Timu had a wife? Was that why his name wasn’t in the talk of lineage? Curious, I pulled at Mother’s sleeve. When she looked down I whispered, “Timu’s wife—who is she?”

Mother blinked in mild surprise. “Why, Yanan,” she said, “she’s you!”

I must have shown how much this shocked me. Mother looked at me strangely. Suddenly my face grew hot, and I leaned back from the fire so the light wouldn’t shine on me. I wanted to hide until my thoughts stopped spinning.

I didn’t want to be married at all, and here I was and hadn’t known. Couldn’t someone have bothered to tell me? I looked at Timu across the fire. You? The skin began to crawl on the backs of my thighs. He would make me have coitus with him! His arms would pin my elbows and his breath would smother me! A baby would grow inside me until I suffered as I had seen other women suffer! I would bleed! I could die!

I looked up at the bleached antlers in the arch of the roof, their sharp tines white in the firelight. Usually I saw life and strength when I looked at the antlers, but that night I saw rutting and fighting. I looked at all the many things wedged among the tines—Father’s hafted greenstone ax, Mother’s flint knife, Aunt Yoi’s ivory necklace that she never let me wear or even touch, a necklace given her by Timu’s sister, Owl, in a marriage exchange. Perhaps my marriage exchange! Suddenly tears filled my eyes. Surely I was the person exchanged for that necklace! Who else but me? And Aunt wouldn’t let me touch it! Nobody cared what I wanted or thought! I would die in childbirth while people praised Aunt Yoi for the necklace.

I looked from the necklace to the hole in the roof, where gray smoke curled like a cloud against the dark sky. Suddenly a herd of red sparks rushed up to the hole, each on its own path, all knowing the way. How did they do it? Did something scare them? Did the wind lift them? Or did they just go of their own free will to find places in the sky? They must die there, I realized, since we never see them later. They don’t become stars, because stars are white. I thought of all the things I didn’t understand that no one would explain to me. Aunt Yoi had worn the necklace ever since I could remember, but not one person had ever said why.

I looked across the fire at Timu, who had forgotten his embarrassment while everyone made more jokes about the hungry woman. In fact, he too was laughing. “She’ll sit on you,” said Elho. “You won’t get away.”

Suddenly, still smiling, Timu looked straight at me. My face burned! I dropped my eyes as if Mother had slapped her hand over them, and then, staring at my feet in great confusion, I wrapped my shirt around my legs and pulled it tight.

 

Before I knew I was married, I thought of Timu and his half-brother, Elho, almost as if they were children. Gathering firewood was their work as well as Junco’s and mine. If they didn’t help us, we didn’t wonder where they were or what else they might be doing—we only wondered how to get the adults to scold them for leaving the work to us.

But after I learned that Timu was my husband, although I pretended never to notice anything about him, in fact I noticed more than ever. When we were gathering wood I listened for his voice or for the sound of breaking branches to show where he was; I looked for his tracks in the snow. I seemed always to know where he was, as if I could feel him. I didn’t like it, and became uncomfortable.

Timu felt a difference in me. After all, he had known we were married all along, so his thoughts didn’t change, as mine did. “What’s wrong with you?” he would ask. “Am I a stranger? Stop staring.”

Before I knew I was married, I never gave a thought to other people’s marriages. I knew married people had coitus in the dark, under their deerskins at night when other people were supposed to be sleeping, but I never saw anyone have coitus, and tried not to think about how people did it or why. Down at Graylag’s end of the lodge, Timu’s sister, Owl, and her husband, Crane, sometimes showed that they were having coitus by an accidental change in their breathing or by a grunt or a sigh which would escape one of them. The rest of us were supposed to take no notice of the noises.

I never thought about the older adults. Since I never imagined my parents having coitus, I never wondered why Father preferred Mother to my Aunt Yoi, so that he almost always chose to sleep with Mother, forcing Meri and me to sleep with Yoi. That Father preferred Mother seemed natural—Meri and I preferred her too. Mother was nicer than Yoi, who always spoke to us sharply, sometimes pinched if we displeased her, and when asleep selfishly turned her back and pulled the deerskin over herself, leaving us in the cold. If we instead of Father had first choice, we would sleep comfortably in the warm curl of Mother’s body while Father struggled for the deerskin with Yoi.

But after I learned I was married, I became more curious about my parents. Surely they had coitus. I was stupid to think they might not. Perhaps Father would rather have coitus with Mother than with Yoi. This unpleasant idea would explain why he always chose Mother. And also, I thought, it would explain why Yoi was childless.

Graylag, on the other hand, slept with both wives at the same time. Teal and Ina once pierced sewing holes in three reindeer skins, so the skins could be laced together, as if with a seam. Like the three parts of an enormous parka, this sleeping-skin opened out in three pieces, and under it Graylag slept with a wife on each side. Yet Teal was the only one of Graylag’s living wives to have a child with Graylag, and their son, Elho, was a child no more. Might this mean that Graylag and his wives did not have coitus?

I seemed to need knowledge that I didn’t want and had no way to get. People said that coitus before initiation harmed girls, so I knew I wouldn’t have to lie with Timu for a while. Initiation followed menstruation, and mine hadn’t come. But I saw how my menstruation must have been in Graylag’s mind when he told Timu of men waiting for their wives to grow up, and I saw how Timu must be waiting for me to menstruate, thinking about me in a way I hadn’t realized, and didn’t like. His waiting made me uneasy and confused, and began to fill my mind whenever I had nothing to do. I found I didn’t always hear when people spoke to me. Mother took to rapping her knuckles on my head and accusing me of daydreaming.

But of course, if Timu was thinking of me, I was also thinking of him. One windy day in the woods, Elho and White Fox, Junco and I were standing around a spruce that Timu was cutting. His little ax marks ringed the trunk, and every now and then his chopping would loosen a flake, yellow and stringy with the cold. With each loose flake the trunk got weaker. We were waiting to push the tree over, but my mind wasn’t on the work. Instead I was watching Timu. I saw how wide his shoulders were under his parka, and how his eyes were dark but had lights in them, and how his big hands were grasping the ax powerfully. Perhaps I was standing too near him, for he turned suddenly to look into my face. “Get back,” he said rather proudly. “I don’t want my ax to hit you by mistake.”

In earlier times I would have jeered at him, saying that he was boasting, or that he chopped like a woman, or that since the tree seemed safe from his ax, so would I be. But now no jeers came. I simply took a few steps back, just as he had asked. This he noticed. Dropping his ax, he grasped the trunk, and with his parka straining handsomely over his shoulders, he forced the tree, popping and cracking, to the ground. The moment he started, the rest of us threw our weight onto the tree, but Timu was ahead of us. Before we could rightly get hold of it, he had it down. As all of us could see, he was strong.

 

That winter, when the full Moon of Roaring rose into the long blue dusk, a new hunter came to the Char valley. One night in the lodge, when the adults were all talking loudly about finding women at the Fire River, Graylag suddenly reached across some of us and grasped Father’s arm. Seeing that Graylag was listening carefully, the rest of the adults stopped and listened too. Far away we heard a voice: “Aa-a-oo-ong.” We strained our ears but heard nothing more. Were we mistaken?

Not bothering to put on outer clothes, we crawled one by one through the coldtrap and stood up to listen, chilled by the night wind. Above us the stars were coming out. We heard the wind in the spruce trees and the river under the ice. And then, far away among the eastern hills where the Char rose, where a pale yellow light now showed that the moon was coming, we heard the voice again: “Oh. Oh. Aagh. A-aa-oong.” A tigress! A tigress calling a tiger!

We listened for his answer, but none came. We waited, standing close to the lodge for shelter from the gusting wind, straining our ears for the answer. A long time passed, but we heard no more that night, not even from the tigress.

The following dusk we heard her voice again, clear but faint in the cold hills, very far away. She called “Aagh! Aagh!” as if she was angry. In the still night we heard her perfectly, an unhappy, echoing, booming sound: “Oo-o-o-oo-ooong!” May she always be lonely, we thought. But the next night her calls were answered by a tiger, and then we began to see huge round tiger tracks on both sides of the river.

This made us very careful whenever we went into the woods to gather fuel. But by now we had gathered all the dead wood within easy distance of the lodge. We tried to remember the trees we had ringed to kill, but we couldn’t find all of them. So because our search for wood took us far, we tried to walk slowly, watching the thickets carefully and looking closely for tracks, since tracks aren’t easy to find on bare, frozen earth or crusty snow.

One day in the woods, when the sky was hazy and the air seemed to be getting warm and full of snow, I climbed the south side of the Char valley and went into the low, rolling hills beyond. There, to my surprise, in a long patch of snow I found fresh tracks, not of a tiger but of my Aunt Yoi. She had walked there quickly, all alone. The sight amazed me, since I thought all the grown women had gone to gather pine nuts in the hills half a day’s walk upriver.

Aunt Yoi seldom gathered firewood, since this was the work of children, and Aunt was not one of the adults who liked to help the children. Was she lost? Curious, and even a little worried, I followed her trail. Not far beyond, her tracks vanished on hard, bare, windswept ground. Then, among some little trees, I found them in the frost. But now someone else was following her. I looked at the new tracks, each footstep neatly printed over my Aunt Yoi’s, and saw that they were Timu’s.

I felt relieved. Yoi was gathering firewood after all, helping Timu. Thinking no more about it, but watchful for the tiger, I followed the two sets of tracks over the crest of the low hill. Here, on a bare, south-facing slope, I saw both people had knelt and rolled together! And not so long ago! The red grass stalks were freshly bent, their coats of frost broken. The sight shocked me, and set my thoughts spinning. Coitus! Timu and Yoi had had coitus. Right here on the red grass, Timu had done with Yoi what he did with the women on our summergrounds. Had he been married to me last summer? I didn’t know! Since he now was, should he be with my aunt? Again I didn’t know! But Aunt Yoi! She shouldn’t be with Timu! She was married to Father!

Unhappy and confused, without much dry wood, I hurried back to the lodge. There I found Yoi alone in the dim light from the smokehole, calmly working her awl in the leather of a moccasin she was making for Father, boring a row of holes for the needle. My face hot, I threw down my firewood and started out again, feeling great confusion. As I left I caught her watching me, her eyebrows lifted, her eyes curious and cool.

That night I watched Yoi and Timu for a sign of what had happened between them—an exchange of glances, perhaps, or a touch—but neither took any notice of the other. I watched Father for suspicion or anger, but he was talking with Graylag about the tigers. I watched Mother, feeling that if anyone knew the truth about her sister, she knew it, but Mother simply drowsed, having walked since midday carrying Meri and a large bag of pine nuts. So I tried to put the memory of the crushed red grassblades out of my mind.

For a few days the two tigers stayed mostly in the pine woods and open meadows of the hills, hunting the red deer by day, roaring together by night. After a while we heard no more calling. But soon we began to find the tigress’s footprints in the spruce woods of the river valley. We then knew that the tigers must have made the red deer wary, hard to hunt, so that the tigress, at least, was now hunting our reindeer.

During a spell of fine weather Father and his nephews killed a reindeer doe, but by the time the meat was gone, not even Graylag could get near the little herd to kill another. The tigress, said Graylag, was teaching lessons to the deer, giving them frights and making them shy.

Without reindeer, we feared hunger. By now the Moon of Cast Antlers was in the evening sky, and a few cast antlers lay on the snow in the forest—a sign that the reindeer would soon start their spring journey to open ground. Before dawn one morning when I took Meri to the spruce grove we used as a latrine, I found a one-antlered doe scraping her tongue on someone’s frozen urine—another thing the deer do, for reasons of their own, before they leave in the spring.

Whether the reindeer went or stayed, they were now too wary to hunt. Graylag wondered whether we should leave soon, traveling early to the Fire River, hunting for game and searching for winterkilled carcasses to eat along the way. If not, he said, we should go into the hills and dig out a sleeping bear whom we had been saving since autumn. He was the only bear whose tracks we found leading to his den after the first snowfall, which proved that he lacked experience, or he would have gone inside his den when the snow began. Then snow would have covered his tracks instead of showing them plainly. The adults decided to kill and eat him, and to begin our long trip later.

The next day was clear, so we started our hunt early, leaving Timu’s sister, Owl, with her nursing baby; also Junco’s mother, soon to give birth, and my sister, Meri, too bothersome to carry and too young to keep the pace. Since there was a tigress somewhere nearby, Graylag told his son Elho to stay behind with the women but not to use his spear on the tigress unless she tried to come into the lodge. And when Elho was told to stay, Aunt Yoi decided to stay too. “I’m sick,” I heard her say to Mother.

Our way led east into the hills, to a pine wood on a slope that we reached in the afternoon. After looking about for a while, Father found the den under the roots of a pine, by a little hole melted by the bear’s breath in the snow. Sending Junco and me to gather firewood so we would keep out of the way, the adults took their antler picks to the frozen earth that hid the bear. We hadn’t gone beyond the first row of trees before we heard a roar, and hurrying back, we saw the young bear on the snow, blood bubbling and squirting from his nose and mouth, with everyone’s spear sticking out of him. From the side he looked like a hedgehog. In the sky the ravens screamed, calling other ravens.

During the long twilight we ate our fill. Then some of us slept, but most of the adults sat awake by the fire. Not long after dark, four hyenas came by. We heard them whooping as if they were trying to scare us, then saw their blunt dark snouts and wide green eyes in the firelight. “You are few! We are many! Be gone,” shouted Father. To see us better the hyenas bobbed their heads, but they didn’t leave. “Go!” shouted Father, grabbing up his spear and taking a step toward them. They moved off slowly, looking at us over their shoulders. During the night they came back three times, trying to catch all of us sleeping. On their third visit Graylag threw burning sticks at them.

In the morning we tied the meat in bundles and started the long walk back to the lodge. Under the heavy loads, the women traveled much more slowly than the men. Soon all the men were out of our sight and at last even out of our hearing. So we didn’t hurry, since we knew we would arrive long after them. As we got near the lodge, we heard everyone shouting at once. Knowing that something was wrong, we began to trot, and arrived breathless to find everyone crowded around Father and Aunt Yoi.

Father seemed to have forced Yoi to one knee, and now was standing over her, holding her braid to twist her head painfully. I had never seen him so angry. “What of the gifts?” he was shouting. “Who will return the gifts I gave for this woman? I’m talking to my wives’ lineage—to your wife Teal and your son Elho! Where is Elho? Where is he hiding?”

“There’s time enough for Elho,” said Graylag reasonably. “Be calm, Ahi. You can have your gifts back, if you want them.”

“I want them!” shouted Father. “I have no more use for this woman.” He yanked upward on Aunt Yoi’s braid.

“Let go,” said Mother firmly, struggling out of her pack and hurrying forward to catch Father’s arm. Meri ran to Mother, screaming. Father flung his arm so that Mother stumbled backwards. I ran to Mother’s side, ready to fight Father. Now both parents turned on me. “What?” cried Mother. “What has this to do with you? Get away before I get angry.” So I crept away, to sit unseen with Junco at the edge of the group, where we looked at Yoi past other people’s firmly planted legs.

Aunt Yoi was strangely calm. Father’s grip on her braid kept her chin down and her head still, but except for her eyes, which were wide open and fixed on Mother, her face showed no emotion. She sat quietly on her foot, one knee on the snow, the other raised, with her hands in her lap. For a woman as quick to pinch and slap as Yoi, she wasn’t giving Father much of a fight.

In the group around Father and Yoi, Teal and Mother joined arms. The two women had their heads together, watching thoughtfully. Perhaps they were wondering how to deal with the trouble. Presently they moved next to Father, and speaking softly and soothingly, they pried his fingers from Aunt Yoi’s braid. Yoi crouched low until Mother led Father aside, then she jumped up and, pushed forward by Teal, ducked into the lodge. The rest of the people began to look around for Elho.

When Aunt Yoi was safely out of sight, Mother asked Father what was wrong. Father said that as he and the other men had come along the trail, they had overheard Yoi joking and laughing with Elho in the woods. When Father stopped to listen, he heard Elho call Yoi “wife,” as men sometimes call women with whom they might have coitus. Very angry, Father shouted at them through the trees. They didn’t answer, and instead ran away in different directions. Father dropped his pack and followed Yoi, caught her, and dragged her home. She denied doing anything wrong with Elho. She denied that Elho had called her “wife.” She even denied that she had run away from Father. This was so ridiculous, claimed Father, that he had to laugh. “Where is Elho, if I’m lying?” he asked.

I heard a pebble or a bit of ice roll down from the trail above the terrace, and looked up to see movement in an evergreen thicket. Deer were passing, circling up the sloping cliff to stay far away from the lodge. Suddenly many pebbles scattered downward. We heard scrambling feet. The deer were startled, hurrying. In a moment Elho appeared on the trail down the cliff, as if he were on his way back from hunting. He hadn’t been hunting, of course. He didn’t even know about the deer until he crossed their trail. “Waugh!” he cried when he saw their fresh tracks.

My father and his were waiting for him. Taking him by the sleeves, they drew him aside, talking to him angrily but too quietly for the rest of us to overhear. Whatever they said, Elho pretended to be surprised. Timu, I noticed, also widened his eyes, looking innocently from one person to another as if he had no idea what the trouble was about.

After a while Yoi came through the coldtrap, pushed out by Teal, who still wore her parka and her knee-high moccasins but now dragged a spear. Calling to Mother, me, and Elho, Teal set off for the woods with Yoi behind her. By the spear Teal carried and by the pair of firesticks thrust in her belt, I could see we were going to be gone for a while but not for the night.

Teal walked proudly, without ever looking back or slowing her pace, sure that the rest of us were following. Behind her, Elho walked defiantly. Behind Elho, Yoi walked more slowly than the others, so that a gap widened in the line. Mother carried Meri, and I closely followed Mother, noticing how dark the woods were growing and how I was the last person in the line.

We came to a clearing. Once a hemlock twice as tall as a man had grown here. Now it lay on its side under a dusting of snow. While the rest of us broke branches off it, Teal took out her firesticks and rolled a fire.

Even the last red glow of the sun was gone from the sky. We smelled snow. It was a night to think of animals who hunt, and sure enough, in the hills beyond us we heard wolves. We listened, noticing how far the wolves were from us, wanting to hear whether the woods around us were empty or something was waiting there. I hoped we would hear the tigress far away, so we could be sure she wasn’t near us. But after the wolves stopped calling, we heard only the wind.

At last Teal spoke. “We at this fire are one thing,” she said, “the kindred of Sali at Graylag’s lodge.”

Sali? Uneasy, I crowded with Meri against Mother. Sali was Teal’s mother, and in life had been a shaman like her daughter. But after her death Sali became a dangerous spirit whom I hated to hear mentioned in full daylight, let alone on a night like this, out in the dark, windy woods.

Teal was still speaking. “In the name of Sali Shaman,” she said, “I want my son and my kinswoman to tell me why they called each other ‘husband’ and ‘wife.’”

No one spoke. Our little fire snapped a spark, and far away in the woods one of the wolves called again. The rising wind moaned in the branches of the hemlocks, and Teal said, “I’m waiting.”

At last Yoi leaned forward. “Aunt,” she said to Teal in an appealing voice, “every night Ahi chooses my sister. He doesn’t come to me. My sister has two children. I have none. Isn’t this Ahi’s fault?”

“So you would get a child with your kinsman?”

“No, Aunt. We didn’t try to get a child. We played. Your son is young. I’m young, and I’m lonely.”

“Doesn’t your husband have two widowed nephews? Who else are The Stick and The Frog? If you must ‘play,’ as you say, can’t you play with your husband’s kinsmen instead of your own?”

“Aunt! Those men are ugly! I don’t want them! And since they’re my husband’s kinsmen, wouldn’t they tell him what they had done with me?”

“Who else do you play with?”

“No one, Aunt,” said Yoi.

“Why do you lie, Sister?” asked my mother, very angry. “Are we your in-laws, that you must lie? Timu was your lover too. We know it. Admit it!”

“Timu was my lover too,” said Yoi.

Teal stood up, so that her face was lit from below by the fire. Leaning on her spear, she looked down at her son and said, “Elho? What about you?” But Elho just lifted his shoulders and shook his head. He wouldn’t speak.

For a moment Teal said nothing, but looked down at Elho scornfully. “Now listen to me,” she said at last. “You, Elho, and you, Yoi. Yanan, look at me. Lapwing, make Meri face me. Even Meri should hear this. Look at me when I speak to you.”

So all of us, even Meri, looked at Teal’s face. She said, “We here are the lineage of Sali. Sali was my mother. Her sister was the mother of Lapwing and Yoi. I want to know why you, Elho, and you, Yoi, who are the children of sisters, should act like a husband and wife! If a child came of your games, it could be put to death.”

Angrily Teal stared down at Elho, then at Yoi. Ashamed, they looked at the ground. After a moment Teal went on. “When I lived on the Fire River,” she said, “a girl was born without arms. People knew she was surely gotten by a kinsman, so they put her out in the snow for hyenas.” Teal waited, giving us time to imagine the scene in the snow, then asked, “Why do you think coitus is forbidden within a lineage?” By now even Meri looked worried. Teal stared down into Elho’s eyes. In a low voice she whispered, “Where is your sense? Do you think that because Ahi hasn’t yet gotten a child from Yoi, you couldn’t?”

Elho couldn’t meet Teal’s eyes. Yoi stole a glance at Mother. But Mother leaped to her feet to stand by Teal. “You don’t answer!” said Mother. “Yet people of your lineage have already suffered from doing what you did. I will tell you of Sali and her kinsman. This story of your lineage is also the story of Sali’s death!

“Sali loved her kinsman but hated her husband. Her kinsman got her with child. One winter night in her husband’s lodge, Sali went into labor. So that her child would be clean of the taint, she asked help from her sister, our mother. She asked her sister to shed blood for her, to beg help for the baby from The Woman Ohun.

“When her husband heard what Sali was asking, he guessed what she had done. He wouldn’t let her sister help her. ‘If the child is spoiled, it is spoiled,’ he said. ‘We won’t change it.’

“Although she was in great pain, Sali wanted to spite her husband. She called out the name of the child’s father for everyone to hear. Then her husband knew he had guessed the truth. He pressed his foot against Sali’s vulva so the child couldn’t come.

“People tried to pull him away. ‘The baby will die,’ they said. ‘I want it to die,’ said Sali’s husband. ‘And it will die. If it’s born, I’ll make Sali kill it. If she dies and it lives, I’ll kill it. I’ll dash its brains on a rock, just like a hare.’ That night, Sali and the baby died together.

“After Sali died, her husband divorced her. He told our old people to give back his marriage gifts. But the old people refused, saying that what had happened wasn’t their fault. He tried to get presents from Sali’s kinsman-lover, but this man ran away to a place none of us knew, to his wife’s relatives. No one has seen him since.”

Mother sighed deeply, making a cloud of breath. “Now I’ll tell you why people fear Sali,” she said. “After her death, we began to see her in the woods. Then we knew she wasn’t going to the Camps of the Dead, as other spirits do. Instead, we saw, she meant to stay among us. Surely she was very angry at us for letting her lose her life.

“Next fall her husband found the carcass of a deer in a thicket. While he was gathering up the scraps of meat, a tigress attacked him. The old people told him the tigress was Sali, who had left the carcass as bait. So for the rest of his life, her husband knew he was in danger. He later died of sickness and his spirit went to the Camps of the Dead, but we don’t think that Sali knows he’s dead, because she still hunts for him on the trails and riverbanks.

“We know because we see her in the woods or following a river, anywhere between Woman Lake and the glacier. Sometimes she comes in human form, naked and carrying a stillborn baby. Sometimes she comes as a tigress with a cub in her mouth.” Mother sat down on the far side of the fire from her sister. “That’s all,” she said. “I’ve finished speaking.”

“Who is the tigress in this valley?” asked Teal, looking first at Yoi, then at Elho. “Is she Sali? Has she come to punish you for spoiling our lineage? Has she come to protect you from Ahi?”

“If the tigress kills any one of us, she will punish our lineage,” said Mother. “If she kills Ahi, she will protect you from his anger. Are we to lose our lives or our husband because of your doings? Did you think you could hide your play from a spirit?”

Yoi and Elho had no answers for these questions. They looked at the woods, as if the tigress were watching us. The wind blew stronger, moving the branches of the trees and filling the air with the first flakes of snow. “Now,” said Teal, taking off her parka, “we will do what must be done.”

Dropping her parka in the snow, she took off her shirt, untied the sinew thread that held her braid, and shook out her hair. Then, half naked in the falling snow, her bare skin red in the firelight and striped with shadows from her swinging hair, Teal threw back her head and pulled a flint knife from the top of her knee-high moccasin. Slowly she drew the blade up the inside of each of her arms and across the pads of all her fingers. Beads of blood sprang from the tracks of the knife.

Sweeping her hair from her face, Teal set her blood-stained fingers at the midline of her forehead and drew her hands apart, marking herself with streaks of blood in the same pattern as the black stripes on a tiger’s forehead. Then, taking a deep breath, she gave a full-throated tigress’s call: “Aa-oo-oong!” While the echoes of the call died in the woods, none of us moved or breathed. I found that I was trembling. Again Teal called as loud as she could, “Aa-oo-oong!”

This time, from far away, the tigress answered, short and startled: “Aa-ng!”

Teal held her arms over the fire, letting her blood splatter on the coals, making puffs of steam. Looking up at the sky, she called, “Blood is in the smoke! Come for it! Take it for those who will be born. Do not harm them!”

Now we listened very carefully, hearing the gusts of wind in the hemlocks and the hissing of the blood; a smell seemed to fill the clearing as the blood boiled away to nothing on the burning sticks. Suddenly the tigress called again: “Aaa-ooong!”

“Good,” said Teal. “Stand up, Kindred of Sali. Open your shirts.” So we stood and opened our shirts. Carefully Teal pressed the tip of her knife against Mother’s breastbone, then Yoi’s, then Elho’s, then mine, then Meri’s, catching on her thumb the drops of blood and flinging them into the fire. In the distance the tigress must have been listening for an answer, and getting none, she must have decided to learn for herself who else was in the forest, because now we heard her again, nearer. “Aaoong!”

“There,” said Teal. She picked up a little of the new-fallen snow to wash her arms and face. “Since the tigress is coming, we should go.”

“Aaoong!” roared the tigress from our side of the river, her call echoing from the high bank. She was coming!

But Mother wasn’t ready to leave. “The people in the lodge may hear the noise tonight and guess what we’re doing,” she said. “Even so, it would be better to admit nothing.”

“Yes, Sister,” said Yoi hastily. “Let’s go.”

“You brought us here,” said Mother. “Now finish what you began.”

“The tiger, Sister,” said Yoi, biting her lips.

Mother ignored this. “You should tell our husband that Timu was your lover,” she said. “Timu can’t deny it. Ahi doesn’t want to think you had any lover. He might rather believe part of the truth than all of it.”

“Ahi knows about Timu,” said Yoi, looking anxiously toward the edge of the woods. “He pulled my hair until I told him. And he knows about Elho because he heard us together.”

“He told me he heard you talking.”

“He did. He guessed the rest.”

“Talking isn’t coitus. What if you have a child and he kills it? Tell him he guessed wrong.”

“If you like,” whispered Yoi.

“Please, Mother! Let’s go,” I begged, pulling Mother’s sleeve.

Mother paid no attention. “I’ll tell him the same, Sister,” she said, calmly settling Meri in the sling on her back. Elho, Yoi, and I, expecting to see shining green eyes at any moment, would have run for the lodge by ourselves if we weren’t afraid of the trail. “But,” Mother added slowly, “when I lie, I’ll also say something true. You risk all of us by acting as you did—all of us and perhaps an unborn child too. If Ahi decides to beat you, I won’t interfere. The truth is, you make me very angry!”

“I’m sorry!” cried Yoi.

“Being sorry doesn’t do any good,” said Mother.

A third time we heard the tigress, now very clearly. We thought we even heard a rattle of breath in her throat. “You can scold them later, Lapwing,” said Teal. “Let’s go.” And we did, hurrying quietly through the snowy woods, leaving the fire for the wind to scatter and leaving the clearing to the tigress, if her curiosity brought her so far.

 

When we reached the lodge and went inside through the coldtrap, we saw that most of the others were still awake, sitting quietly around the two fires, waiting for us. The adults met each other’s eyes, but no one spoke. Timu—wide-shouldered, strong, tall person though he was—sat beside his sister in the back of the lodge with his head bent as if he was ashamed, while Junco and White Fox stole triumphant glances at him. As Yoi came through the coldtrap, Father and Graylag slowly raised their chins and gazed at Timu coldly and thoughtfully. They seemed to have given him quite a scolding. He alone, I saw, was going to take the blame for lying with Yoi. The adults didn’t even like to think of Yoi and Elho together.

Beside Timu, his sister looked up angrily when Elho came near. But Elho went innocently to his sleeping place and soon rolled himself in his deerskin. As Yoi stood up from crawling through the coldtrap, Father stretched out his hand to her and drew her down beside him. Later they too rolled themselves into a deerskin. Very late at night we heard them whispering, and after most people were asleep, Meri and I, allowed for once to sleep with Mother, heard Aunt Yoi and Father making the struggling, breathless noises we weren’t supposed to hear.

 

Although the trouble caused by Yoi and Graylag’s sons seemed to pass, in fact people still thought about it. After being nice to Yoi for a while, Father began to watch her suspiciously, and once even stalked her to learn whether she went where she said she was going—to the latrine. His finding her there shamed both of them.

My cousins, The Stick and The Frog, seemed to see Aunt Yoi with new eyes. Once they had treated her with great respect because she was married to their uncle, but now they ran their eyes up and down her as if they were trying to imagine having coitus with her themselves. Father noticed this and began to make angry jokes. “You ugly pair, how do you think a woman could want either of you?” he once asked.

“He who has eaten can’t believe others are hungry,” Cousin The Frog answered. “Why do you with two wives make fun of me?”

Many people, Graylag among them, seemed not to want to understand that Elho had done anything more than joke with his kinswoman, so no blame fell on Elho. But people blamed Timu all the more. Graylag seemed to want to make Timu do hard jobs, like pegging out and scraping the bearskin, although the skin froze solid and to scrape it Timu had to spend the day on his knees, holding the icy scraper with bare hands. Both my parents and even my cousins gave him angry looks, as if he had wronged all of us. Even Meri stared at him! And my Aunt Yoi treated him almost as if he had forced her, so coldly did she speak to him. Only his married sister, Owl, seemed to stand by him. If he looked sad and sat alone in the dark part of the lodge, she sat with him, her head by his as they spoke in low voices.

Every day, when I went with the other young people for firewood, I tried to talk to Timu, to tell him that I, at least, knew the truth—that although he and my aunt might have done something wrong, his half-brother and my aunt did something terrible. One day I found myself alone near him, and I looked up at his face. “I know about my aunt,” I whispered. “She told us everything.”

But Timu turned angrily away from me. “Am I a woman, to talk of your aunt?”

In earlier times Timu’s sulky words would have delighted me. “You must be a woman! You look like a woman!” I could have shouted. But though the wasted chance hurt me, I was more hurt by the sight of Timu suffering unfairly. So I let him be.

 

One night we heard above the lodge a hurried, exciting sound like a lot of people talking at once. Geese! Graylag was already asleep under his deerskin, but the sound woke him, and he got up to sit naked by his fire. Eyes half shut, he listened with his face raised as if to let the sun warm it. When the sound faded, he smiled at all of us and said, “Listen to them! Hear how their headman keeps his people together in the sky. Even in a wind they travel, even in the dark! They are many! They are brave! And they’re going to their summergrounds, the same as we will do.”

Just as hearing someone laugh can make others feel like laughing, so we suddenly felt happy because of the geese and Graylag. Suddenly the moaning east wind made me think of asparagus and sedge root, and the sight of Father already sorting through his tool kit, getting it ready to pack, made me think of wading thigh deep in a rushing river, catching salmon with my hands.

That very night we made our packs to leave for the Fire River in the morning. Mother began to sing a Fire River song: “Save my life, hunters! Kill ten horses, one for each of my fingers! Save my life, hunters! Kill ten ground squirrels, one for each of my fingers!” The song went on with “kill ten mammoths, kill ten reindeer,” so easy to learn that soon many of us were singing. The trouble started by Yoi and the bad feelings that followed seemed to vanish like frost in the sun, and as soon as the sky was light we left, walking in single file down the terraces to the river, crossing the river mostly on boulders, taking just a few steps on the rotting ice, just this one last time.

At a bend of the river I turned to look at the lodge, not knowing what would happen to us before I saw it again. Like a low mound of earth with a grove of trees on it, the rounded roof held the high, up-reaching antlers, very tall against the gray sky. A raven, I saw, was perched on the uppermost tine. And from one of the smokeholes came a billow of heavy yellow smoke, all that was left of the gift of burning bearfat we threw in the fire for a spirit who watched over our lodge.