THE NAME OF THE SPIRIT who ate our burned bearfat was Marmot. He was Graylag’s brother and Ina’s first husband in life. At the time of his death Teal captured his spirit in a shaman’s net made with powdered feathers, burned ocher, and the burned red vine of a gray pea that grows in clearings. In this way she made him her spirit-slave, for use not just in our lodge in winter but at our summer campsites as well. So now I think the raven I saw on the roof when I turned for a last look at the lodge was probably not a real raven but Marmot in the form of a raven, Marmot ready to travel.
I met Marmot on a bright, cold, moonlit night one year in early fall. On that night, although I was still a young woman, I realized I was dying. The other people in Graylag’s lodge must have realized it too, since by the time my body was dead and my spirit had wiggled free of it, some people around me were crying, and Teal had prepared a spirit-net, which she threw over me. The next thing I knew I was fighting hard but was caught like a hare, and soon I found myself on the roof of the lodge among the shafts of the huge old antlers, tall and black against the moonlit sky. At the far end of the roof a boyish man-spirit squatted on his heels, wearing a shabby deerskin shirt, ragged trousers, and worn moccasins. I, on the other hand, was naked, because earlier, perhaps unwisely, I had let the people help me out of my clothes.
At first I hardly saw this man-spirit. Made desperate by my struggles, I was looking frantically for an owl. Ever since my childhood I had been told that birds guide spirits to the Camps of the Dead. But just as the grub-eater bird won’t wait to lead a person to a beehive, no bird will wait long to guide a spirit. The grub-eater flits away if the honey hunter isn’t ready, and the guiding bird leaves to do something else if the spirit isn’t there.
As I stood naked on the roof, I was dismayed to hear a gray owl booming deep in the woods across the river. Surely that was the bird who would have led me. I heard the owl’s voice again, farther away this time, and saw that Teal’s net had held me back too long. My guide was gone. I was a spirit-slave, just like the young man-spirit. Never again would I be Meri’s sister or Graylag’s daughter-in-law or Timu’s wife. I might never even find the Camps of the Dead, where the elders of my lineage could give my spirit to a bird to bring to a newborn child. Down in the lodge beside the good fire, where my bed used to be, I heard people talking about my burial. Not for a long time had I felt so much like crying.
At the other end of the roof, the young man-spirit watched me with round eyes, making me uneasy with his stares and curiosity. I knew who he was, of course. All my life I had heard about the spirits of Graylag’s brothers who helped the people of our lodge, and who else but Graylag’s brother could this man-spirit be? At last I looked straight at him. “What should I call you?” I asked rather sharply, then wondered if I should have spoken more respectfully. He was, after all, the most senior member of the lodge, and I was one of the youngest. Perhaps I should have called him by his mother-name, Child of Soossi, as I would have called Graylag if I needed to be very respectful.
But the young man-spirit didn’t seem to notice disrespect. “Marmot,” he answered simply.
“Well, I am Yanan, Child of Lapwing,” I said.
“I know,” he said. “I know all the people of this lodge. I was one of the people who started this lodge. I was killed by winter, giving my life to hunt food for the others. Did they tell you?”
In fact they did not. Or if someone did, I hadn’t paid attention. The lodge had spirit-helpers, and once in a while we burned fat for them—that was all I knew. But now I saw how my ignorance could hurt Marmot’s feelings, especially since he seemed to be waiting hopefully for my answer. “Oh yes, they told me,” I answered. Then I wished I hadn’t lied, because Marmot looked disappointed. Perhaps he would have liked to tell the story.
Time passed, and neither of us spoke. I looked around at the woods and sky, full of wind and bright moonlight. Free from my braid, my hair whipped my face, but I didn’t feel cold. Even so, I would have been happier in my clothing, and I asked Marmot where his clothing came from. “They’ll bring yours outside tomorrow,” said Marmot.
“Could I go inside to get it now?”
Looking down through the smokehole, Marmot pointed with his lips at a bundle of jointed pine and bears’ teeth tied menacingly to the lodgepole, a charm against spirits. “By now you know you’re not feeling hunger or cold,” he said, “but if you go inside the lodge, the charm will cause pain all through you. They want us out here, not in there with them.”
At dawn the people came through the coldtrap, dragging behind them the corpse of a thin young woman. They also carried picks to dig a grave, since the earth was not yet frozen hard. The body was mine, of course. The people behind it carried all my things.
Later, by the cold smell of freshly turned earth I found the grave, and took out of it the spirit of each piece of my clothing. When I put on the spirit-clothes, I felt better. But that night when I heard the people talking about me, I was hurt at what they thought to say. “What of the necklace we buried with her?” asked Timu’s sister, Owl. “That should have been my necklace, since it was promised me in Yanan’s marriage exchange. I once told Yanan to make the gift first and finish the work later. If she had, when she died she would have been working on my necklace, not her necklace, and the beads wouldn’t have been wasted in her grave.”
“Wasted?” cried my sister, Meri. “You call them wasted?”
“Yanan was away a long time,” said Owl. “Do you remember how tough and dirty she was when she came back? She was almost like an animal. No wonder she didn’t understand giving.”
Meri lost her temper. “You’re the one who’s like an animal,” she said, and a fight began. Angry to hear his sister insulted, Timu leaped to his feet and said that Meri was the animal. Meri cried. Other people joined the quarrel, some taking Meri’s side, some Timu’s.
“Leave my sister alone!” I shouted down the smokehole. “If you make her cry, you’ll be sorry!”
But no one paid any attention except Marmot, who said, “Never mind their quarrels. You don’t belong with the people anymore.”
Of course he was right. Things were no longer the same. I leaned my head back and looked up at the sky where the Reindeer Moon, very high and far away, floated in thin clouds. When I trusted my voice, I said to Marmot, “Tell me then, Marmot, where do I belong?”
“In the air,” he said.
In the air? The puzzling, matter-of-fact answer made me turn for a close look at him. “Why in the air?” I asked.
“Where else?” he asked. “There are only four places you could be. You could be in the Camps of the Dead, which are owned by the lineages. Or you could be in the lodges or campsites, which are owned by the people. Or you could be out on the steppes and tundra or in the forests or lakes, which are owned by the animals. The only other place is the air, which is owned by the shamans. Your sister is in a lodge. You’re in the air, since you were caught by a shaman.”
“You’ll see soon,” said Marmot. “Look at the sky.”
“I am looking at the sky,” I said. Around the moon was a faint white ring—the track of The Bear tramping a bed in His den.
“The Bear is going to His winter’s sleep,” said Marmot. “The people are thinking of hunger. My wife,” he added, speaking of Ina, “will soon have Teal up here to ask for our help. My wife doesn’t like hunger.”
“She’s Graylag’s wife now,” I said, feeling much more at ease with Marmot. He must have been feeling more at ease with me. Raising his eyebrows, he gave me a long look that said, I am the senior of us, so don’t correct me.
Later that night, when Marmot lay wrapped in his deerskin by Graylag’s smokehole, as if asleep, I looked through the other smokehole and saw the people building a big fire. When they took off their shirts—all but some of the women, who kept their shirts to hide their little babies from the strong things that would soon be going on—I knew the people were about to help Teal trance, and I threw a bit of snow to waken Marmot. “Marmot!” I whispered. “They’re starting!” Marmot got up and with his deerskin draped over his shoulders came to sit on his heels beside me. Now both of us looked down into the lodge.
In the darkest place at the back we saw Teal, dressed in her shaman’s shirt with fringe on the sleeves like birds’ feathers. While she loosened her braid and painted her face with ocher, the people began to clap and sing:
Calling The Bear’s head! Hona!
Calling The Bear’s neck!
Calling The Bear’s hump! Hona!
Calling The Bear’s back!
Calling The Bear’s legs! Hona!
Calling The Bear’s feet!
Feet turn toward us,
Bring animals toward us.
Hona! Wiri! Hona! Wiri!
You of the double trail,
Fat is in the smoke!
Hunter of bees,
Come for what we give you!
You whose trail crosses the sky,
Come for it! Come!
Suddenly we heard the high scream of a falcon. It was Teal, dancing from the back of the lodge, singing in a bird’s voice over the voices of the people. “Hariak! Hariak!” she sang in the voice of a goose, flinging her arms wide like a bird’s wings and beginning to turn, slowly at first, then faster and faster as she sang in the voices of a lapwing, a woodcock, a kestrel, and a mosquito. As the thin voice of the mosquito died in her throat, she tore off her shirt and threw it down, threw herself onto her hands and knees, washed her chest and arms with burning coals, and set her hair on fire.
On her feet, she began to turn again. Soon she was spinning, her burning hair standing out from her head, sparks flying to all corners of the lodge and up the smokehole to the sky. Suddenly Teal fell forward into the open arms of the singing people. Carefully they laid her on the floor, squeezing out the last smoldering sparks in her hair and gently rubbing her back.
We spirits then saw something the people couldn’t see. Teal’s back split lengthwise and her spirit began to wiggle through the split, as a springfly wiggles out of its casing. When her spirit broke free, it flew up the path of the smoke, chasing the sparks through the smokehole. Then in the cold air over the lodge Teal stood in front of us, transparent but faintly shimmering, like heat.
“Greetings to Teal Shaman,” said Marmot as he sat on his heels.
“Greetings, Honored Spirits,” said Teal, looking proud although she was about to ask a favor. “In the name of The Bear, I ask your help, since we are getting hungry. The reindeer don’t come. We find nothing to hunt. As in life you hunted animals, help us hunt animals.”
“We hear you, Teal Shaman,” said Marmot.
In the lodge below us, around Teal’s prone body, people were calling her name. “We will be grateful,” said Teal, her voice growing faint. “We promise you a gift.” Then she vanished. Down in the lodge we heard her murmur as she came out of trance.
We then heard something sizzle and smelled something good. Marmot became alert. “Here’s our gift!” he said, putting his tongue into the smoke. I did the same and got a little taste of fat!
What happened next surprised me. Marmot stood up and stretched his muscles. “Well?” he said, looking down at me. So I stood up too. Marmot turned his back as if to step off the roof, and then, before my eyes, he vanished. Where he had been standing I saw the haunches of a large gray wolf sliding down the sloping roof. On the snowy ground below, the wolf nosed at some scraps of bone thrown away by the people, then ambled toward the woods.
Suddenly my head filled with strong odors. I smelled the bodies of many different people, their hair, their sweat—I smelled the urine of a baby, deer meat dead for many days, burning feathers and woodsmoke. I smelled snow in the air, cold spruce needles, river ice, and open, moving water, and I caught a whiff—a warm, sweet, tickling whiff—of a nearby birch mouse! Where was it?
Then my skin prickled between my shoulders and my eyes stretched wide—I smelled the strong male smell, the heavy fur, the breath, the feet, and the anal glands of a male wolf! Although the power of the strange smell frightened me a little, it also drew me. I felt myself sliding from the roof. Spreading my fingers and toes to slow myself, I looked down at my feet and saw that I too had turned into a wolf.
Slowly, holding my head and tail low and folding my ears as politely as I knew how, I stepped carefully toward the large male. With his ears stiff and his tail raised slightly, he watched me come. Wanting no trouble, I let myself sink to the snow. Marmot took my nose in his teeth, and giving my head a downward push just strong enough for me to feel it, he looked right into my eyes with his frank, rather friendly yellow eyes. Then he let me go. I sneezed, he turned and trotted off, and I picked myself up from the snow and followed him.
Running as a wolf was very easy. I found myself leaping over rough places on the trail almost as if I were flying. I saw how this was the right way to travel fast and far at night, to find out everything about the Char valley so we could tell the people. And when we started off, we seemed about to do just that.
But as time went by and we got farther from the lodge, I found myself thinking less about the people—except that they were telling the truth when they said there was nothing much to hunt—and more about the few trails of scent we crossed, all of them too stale to follow. Perhaps the people were hungry, but I was now hungry too. The scent of a hare ahead of us filled my mouth with saliva. Excited, I ran faster, passing Marmot without knowing that I did. But suddenly I was caught by a blow on the shoulder. Marmot didn’t want me ahead of him, so he had given me a shove. Obediently I fell behind.
On a high bank overlooking the river we stopped. We were only a short way from the lodge, and could still smell, on the spruce trees by the trail, the stale odor of some people who had passed this way recently. But by now the smell seemed sour and dangerous, and made my skin prickle. Much more interesting was Marmot’s marking the place with a scat. I soon squeezed out a scat of my own and with much satisfaction looked at the two together, quiet in the grass. We are here, the scats said, showing the land of our makers, our place, our pack, our hunting. Let those who find us know this and take care.
And then, softly at first, Marmot began to sing. Starting high, his perfect note grew loud, lasting long, and at last fell, a great, stirring cry that sent a shock of excitement through me. With all my heart, and all the breath in my lungs, I joyously threw my voice after his voice, singing low as he sang high, so that my song rose as his song fell. Shivering with delight, I sang louder than ever as we sent our voices through the width of the sky, up to the moon, out to the far corners of the valley where our echoes rang!
The joy of singing cleared our minds completely of the slightest thoughts of any of the people. In fact, when the song was over, we felt so pleased with ourselves that we had to touch noses, to wave our tails, to smile and thank each other. Ah! Now I felt hopeful! Now my heart was ready for anything! Now I would help Marmot do whatever he wanted and follow wherever he led!
But as we began to lope in single file along the rim of the valley, we stopped as quickly as we started—stopped in our tracks, because far away we heard the voices of other wolves, also singing. Their calls could only mean that they had heard us and now wanted us to hear them!
We held our breath, so carefully we listened. A deep voice, a loud, low, female voice, we heard singing above the others—but so many others! Oh, there were several loud, strong males! And other females! And a youngster—last spring’s pup! With my hair lifting on my shoulders, I looked uneasily at Marmot. Those singers were many and strong! That, of course, was what they wanted to tell us, we with only two voices!
Marmot’s hair was standing, but he didn’t seem worried. Instead he looked long in the direction of the large pack, then lifted his nose to test the air. I too tested the air with a quiet sniff, to learn what I could from Marmot. No real fear there, although a trace of annoyance seemed to rise from his skin.
Well, the large pack was in the southeast, in the hills where the river rose, and we were heading west, along the north rim of the valley. We would have to turn back if we wanted to meet the other wolves. But of course we had forgotten all about turning back. We meant to keep going, and didn’t want to meet them.
Our hackles up, we touched noses again, just to be sure we could count on each other. Then, on a frozen grass tussock chosen by Marmot, we carefully placed marks of urine, scratched backwards to draw the attention of any newcomers, nosed our marks, and marked again, first me, then Marmot. It almost seemed as if four had marked here, something those other wolves might think about if they ever came this far!
With that we turned our minds to serious hunting, and ran loping through the draft of air that rose from the valley. Marmot ran first, carrying his tail rather high. I followed, my eyes on the pale fur of his rump, which showed me the way in the moonlight. Low to the earth among the little, sparse trees that grew on the valley’s rim, the yellow moon shone, sinking. Ah? Did I smell roe deer? Yes, but not strongly; two roe deer had passed this way just after dark. Their pellets of dung were already frozen. We ran on.
It soon became clear that Marmot knew the country. In the form of a wolf he must have ranged around the Char valley many times before. In life I had thought I knew the country as well as anyone could, but now I saw that what I had known was mostly the people’s many trails and the places they led to. It was also soon clear that Marmot knew what to look for. All the other animals who used the trails seemed to leave sign on them, urine or scats or marks of musk or rubbings of chin glands or tail glands or scratches on the earth or on the bark of trees—boastful warnings to others of their kind. But Marmot too nosed these signs with interest.
The larger the sign, the more care he took with it. When I saw him tasting the scat of an old he-bear, I did the same, and found a carrion flavor, as if the bear had found and eaten meat. That had meaning, since we were not finding much to eat anywhere, alive or dead. The meaning wasn’t clear to me but seemed clear to Marmot, since he surely knew the old bear’s range. I saw that I had much to learn about the Char valley before I would know as much as Marmot. The carrion flavor was a start.
By dawn we found ourselves on the eastern shore of the frozen Char Lake. Far out on the wide stretch of snowy ice, between the pink moon setting in the west and the red light gathering in the east, we saw something moving. Three things! Three reindeer! Bulls, they were, all trotting, their breath steaming, their chins high to balance their sweeping antlers, the masses of white hair on their chests and shoulders swaying. Oh!
For a moment Marmot and I stood gazing at them. Then, unable to check myself, I rushed them. With a grunt of surprise Marmot bounded after me and we ran side by side across the open lake. Up went the tails of the three bulls as they raced for the lakeshore, leaving behind them a great cloud of snow. The next thing I knew, the bulls were almost on the shore, going faster than I would ever have imagined. The sight took away some of my speed—my headlong dash became a discouraged trot.
Then suddenly, beside me, Marmot stopped still. His head and ears rose but his tail drooped. I looked where he looked, and my tail sank too. Dashing at the reindeer from the shore came a gang of hyenas.
And what now? One of the hyenas leaped at the foremost reindeer. The bull kicked and spun around, showing his antlers to the hyenas, but the hyenas were all around him, grabbing at his nose and hindquarters. Although he kicked fiercely and slashed with his antlers, a hyena took a bite out of his haunch. The bull’s two friends didn’t slow their pace for a moment. While the wounded bull bellowed and kicked at the many hyenas who now grabbed at him, the pacing legs of the other two bulls quickly carried them out of sight.
We couldn’t stop ourselves from moving closer. Some of the hyenas were busy snatching bites from the bull’s hind legs and belly, gulping pieces down in case the rest of him managed to escape. A few of the largest hyenas didn’t loosen their jaws to eat but kept their teeth sunk in the bull’s nose and legs. The gobbling hyenas got in the way of the determined hyenas, who at last jerked the bull to his knees. Above the whoops and snarls I heard the bull’s last bellow choke to a gurgling, hopeless grunt.
It made me sad, that sound did. It should have been ringing in our ears, not the hyenas’. We saw the bull first, and we ran at him first. Now we had to watch others eat him.
We couldn’t leave though. The smell of blood, of opened muscle, of bared, fresh bones, even the smell of crushed evergreen from the torn intestine, was too much for us. Inside my mouth, my saliva stung. I ate some snow. It was tempting to try to steal from the hyenas, but they were so big and so many, and they were so noisy and so often turned in our direction just to show us their teeth, that though we ran back and forth for a while hoping to find a way to the carcass, every scrap of it, even the antlers and the bones, went down their throats. We would have to give up and hunt somewhere else if we wanted to eat.
We went back to the river to hunt horses. We found a herd near the trees at the edge of the floodplain, but with a great stretch of hard, flat ground before and behind them, so however we came toward them, they could easily bolt away. Their smell was everywhere, but their dark, furry bodies were hard to see beside the dark trees. These horses must have known that there weren’t many reindeer to keep hunters busy, since they acted as if they thought themselves in terrible danger, always snorting and throwing up their heads.
And all of a sudden, with bloodthirsty screams, the stallion attacked me! My whole attention had been taken up with a mare in the distance, and I didn’t even know the terrible horse was near me until, like avalanching rocks, his heavy hooves whizzed by my head! I tucked my tail and dodged for my life with the stallion pounding after me, his teeth bared. How I hated horses!
We slunk away, hiding ourselves in the willow scrub along the river. Here we found the faint smell of horse in a thicket drenched in tiger musk. While I looked behind us, Marmot nosed the place very carefully, his neck stretched, his eyes wide. At last he crept into the thicket, where I heard him chewing. I followed. He was chewing a hoof. I ate a lone, frozen scrap of meat, then chewed on the hoof after Marmot dropped it, but my hunger wasn’t satisfied.
One night later, after I had forgotten that we were anything more than a pair of wolves who badly needed food, we suddenly smelled woodsmoke with another smell inside it—something wonderful, delicious, like marrow in a bone. Our mouths watering, we quietly, cautiously, followed the smell and found ourselves in the shadows of the moonlit trees that circled Graylag’s lodge. Inside the lodge the liver of a roe deer was cooking!
We were so hungry and the smell was so good that in spite of the bloody, bitter fumes of human beings, we crept to the lodge from the rear, then scrambled up onto the roof, where the liver smell was rising, so delicious that I felt a little faint. But on top of the roof we found something even better than the smell—we found strips of deer meat hanging from the antlers! In no time we were jumping, pulling down and gobbling the strips!
Inside, someone must have heard our feet scrabbling. We heard muffled shouts, then saw people popping quickly from the coldtrap like pellets from a startled deer. “Get gone!” a deep, loud voice rang out. “Go on!” and “Get out!” cried other voices, while spears and bits of wood and snow began to fly by us. We leaped off the roof and dashed halfway up the trail behind the lodge.
But suddenly Marmot stopped and turned around as if he remembered something. Then he vanished and I stood alone beside his footprints on the moonlit snow. I waited, but nothing happened. So I put my nose in the air and howled a long, loud call that rose quickly at the beginning to show my surprise and fell slowly at the end to show my loneliness. Nervously, hopefully, I listened for an answer, but heard only bits of snow dropping from the trees and the sudden hrou-ou of an owl. At last I remembered who I was—nothing but Teal’s spirit-slave—and slowly, sadly, I scrambled downhill to the lodge.
I must have changed to human form without noticing, because when I looked down at my feet while I climbed to the roof, I saw on my legs my spirit-clothing, my knee-high moccasins and trousers. And huddled by Graylag’s smokehole, with his spirit-deerskin wrapped around him, was the human form of Marmot. Annoyed, I sat down by the other smokehole.
“Why did you leave me alone?” I asked him.
“I was hungry. Do you see this meat hanging here?” Of course I saw the meat. In the form of wolves, Marmot and I had just been trying to steal pieces of it. I didn’t bother to answer what seemed a pointless question, but simply stared at Marmot as if he hadn’t asked. “Well,” he went on, seeing that he wasn’t going to get any help from me, “the meat belongs to the people. They won’t let wolves or any other animal have any of it. But they’ll burn some for spirits. That’s how we’ll get a share.”
As usual Marmot was right. Before long we smelled fat burning. “Here it comes,” said Marmot, dropping on his hands and knees to hold his open mouth above the smokehole. I did the same, and got a little taste.
“They didn’t give much,” I said, after cleaning my lips with my tongue.
“They don’t have much,” said Marmot. “When they get more, they’ll give more.”
Again Marmot was right. A few days later, large herds of migrating reindeer began to ford the partly frozen river far downstream. All the men and women except the nursing mothers crawled out of the lodge armed with spears and axes, and without any help from us went to slaughter the deer as they struggled between the open water and the ice. After two days the people came home carrying forequarters, hindquarters, necks, and ribs, then went back again for more. Then strips of meat hung so thickly on the antlers and cast such a heavy, bloody smell that all day the ravens called in the sky to other ravens, bringing flocks of them from far away. And all night the woods around the lodge seemed alive with animals moving in the cover of the trees—first the large pack of wolves from the hills to the east, later the hyenas from Char Lake.
Dangerously outnumbered, what could the two of us do but withdraw to the woods, out of the way of the greedy robbers who swarmed over the roof to snatch meat? I couldn’t help but start when I suddenly noticed the tigress crouched low under a spruce branch, looking with round eyes at the hyenas as if she disliked them. I was relieved to see her thin haunches and long tail vanishing among the trees as she went away to hunt her own deer.
However, although the two of us were as helpless as the tigress against the many thieves, the people were not. Like hornets from a nest, they kept rushing from the coldtrap whenever they heard toenails scratching on the roof.
Between trips to clear the roof, the people sang to praise us. If we had handed them the meat ourselves, they could not have been more grateful. “We will live,” they sang. “We will eat fat. Our mouths will shine. Our lodge will grow and our children will be many. Find fat in the smoke as our thanks.”
Were they sending a large gift? Hurrying to the smokehole, we smelled a vapor of reindeer fat rising. Ah! The smoke was thick with it! As in life we might have sat ourselves down at a fireside for a heavy meal, we eagerly sat beside the smokehole to catch the greasy vapor on our fingers. Under our heels the roof trembled with the strength of the singing. “How simple these people are,” I said.
“We’re simple too,” said Marmot, exploring his palms for the last greasy traces. “Look how easily we’re satisfied.”