ALTHOUGH I WAS still young when we went to the Fire River to find wives for the unmarried men, I remember parts of our trip very well. I remember looking back to see a raven on top of Graylag’s lodge, and then looking up to see flock after flock of geese in the gray sky, below the high clouds. Where the geese came from, none of us could say. But Father knew that after flying all night, the flocks were on their way to rest and eat in the marshes of the Black River. Should we go there and try to kill some? he wondered. Graylag found the thought tempting, but said that the marshes were very far. Too far, said the other adults. The geese could leave before we got there. We decided not to go, knowing that before we reached the Fire River we would often think of those geese hungrily.
This became so. Although we brought our bear meat, we also looked for food along the way. Sometimes we found pine nuts or evergreen cones with kernels, but more often we found carcasses—sometimes the kills of wolves or hyenas, which we drove off; sometimes winterkills we found by watching the sky for ravens. Some evenings we went hunting, and every night we set out lines of snares, but each day’s travel didn’t always bring us to a good place to find food. Many days we didn’t eat enough, and after the bear meat was gone, some days we ate nothing, or just snow. So I remember hunger.
I also remember walking. Soon after we crossed the Char, the adults settled into their regular, distance-eating stride, which carries them on and on as if the journey can never end. They didn’t mind that there was no trail to follow, but took turns breaking trail. They didn’t talk or sing, or complain about their packs. The bitter wind didn’t make them cold, and hunger didn’t make them tired. If their feet were wet, they ignored their feet. If the sun grew hot, they just opened the fronts of their parkas. The bad thing was that they expected the children to do as they did, and wouldn’t let Junco and me walk together lest we start talking, forget to walk fast, fall behind, and cause a gap in the line. If an adult caused a gap in the line, the other adults were very polite about it. But if I caused the gap, I was shamed and scolded and made to walk in front of Mother so she could force me to keep up. And not a word of complaint could I speak, either. If Mother even thought from the tone of my voice that I wanted to complain, she would draw in her breath sharply: a warning.
I remember some of our camps. At the start of our journey, while we walked by the Char’s southern floodplain, we sometimes found groves of hemlocks which made perfect shelters. I loved to sleep under the hemlocks, protected from weather by their thick branches, comfortable on their beds of dry needles, dizzy with their sweet, cold smell. And bits of their gum were tasty to chew, or made wonderful sparks in the night’s fires.
When we reached the plains, we had to take shelter wherever we found it—beside rock ledges or in thickets—whatever protected us from the wind. If we couldn’t find thick, sheltering bushes, we made little shelters like bushes out of branches thatched with grass or heather. And whenever we camped, Meri and I always wanted Father to choose Yoi so we could have Mother, and we were happy that he often did.
I remember many things about Mother. I remember how at the start of our trip, when we passed the place where the Little Char River leaves Char Lake, she noticed open water and decided to bathe. At least it was the warmest time of a sunny day. Mother made everyone stop walking while she and Yoi took Meri and me to a rapids. There they made us take off our clothes and scrubbed us in water so cold we couldn’t catch our breath to scream. After that, Mother and Yoi stripped and waded in. Without any of their heavy clothes, their naked bodies looked very thin, like the bodies of animals after being skinned—like bears, perhaps, but smaller. Mother and Yoi crouched and scrubbed themselves, then stood straight to undo their braids. Suddenly I noticed that their bodies looked different. Yoi’s belly was flat, sunk between her hipbones. Mother’s belly bulged and her navel stuck out. She was pregnant!
That was in the early spring, when the Icebreaking Moon was a waning crescent and the first mosquitoes of the year began to trouble us, just before our way led through the mixed birch and evergreen wood over the hills beyond the Char. We crossed those hills to a very wide plain where many herds of animals grazed and where, at night, we heard hyenas and lions. When the Icebreaking Moon left the sky and the new rim of the Moon of Foals showed in the afternoon over the plain like a woman pregnant in the springtime—thin, with a huge moon in her belly—our way crossed a steep range of rocky hills. On the south slope of this high land we tried to find a stream called the Spring River. Sooner or later it led to the Fire River. But in the hills the stream was very small. We couldn’t find it. So Mother and Teal went to look for it, since the country was familiar to them from their childhood. Teal took Elho with her. I would have liked Mother to take me, but she wouldn’t. Instead she made me stay to mind Meri. After Mother and Teal were gone, I thought about that. At first I felt hurt, as if Elho were being rewarded for the bad things he and Yoi had done. But soon I saw that Teal had taken Elho because she didn’t want to leave him behind with Yoi. Mother didn’t need to keep her eye on me. I felt proud of that.
After they were gone, Junco and I went to gather bristlecones for the tasteless wooden kernels we thought would be our only food that night. We heard the sound of water, followed the sound, and found a pool with tiger tracks around it. Perhaps I was not worthy of the trust Mother seemed to have placed in me, but I reminded Junco that since the people in camp had no water but snow, we could be sent all the way back to fill a waterskin at a scary time of evening, if we told about the pool. Junco agreed, so we said nothing.
Late that night, when we were all sitting at a small fire burning the feathers off a ptarmigan, I heard footsteps crunching softly on the pine needles. Something large was moving slowly, pressing one foot, then waiting, then another foot. In the cold air I noticed a strong, musky scent, and in the darkness of a clump of evergreens I saw a cloud of breath. Scared as I was, I couldn’t resist scaring Timu. “Behind you,” I whispered to him. “Is something there?”
Timu turned, then leaped to his feet. Then everyone leaped up, snatched spears and axes and branches from the fire as the tiger showed himself between two trees, looking at us. He was enormous—as tall as a bison, I thought, with a face as broad as a man’s body. His white chest and striped shoulders were wide and heavy, and his fur was very thick. His eyes were partly shut and his mouth was partly open so the tips of his lower teeth showed. “Uncle! Old One!” said the men. “Go back. The ptarmigan is ours.”
But the tiger wasn’t looking at the smoldering bird. He was looking at us, and seemed to be listening to us too. His ears were partly turned in our direction. “Go now,” said the men. “Our spears will hurt you.” But the tiger seemed to be filling his nostrils with our scent and his eyes with the sight of us. In time he twitched his ears so we glimpsed the white spots on the backs, turned his head slightly, and then, with a few slow paces, moved his great body between the trees, his shoulders high, his long, strong tail curved low. Only his terrifying musky smell remained behind him.
Our camp was no good, we could see that. We wouldn’t sleep with him nearby, and we wouldn’t be able to hunt. A tiger his size would have the game as shy as warblers. Now Junco and I had no choice but to tell the whole story of finding the pool and his tracks. The other people were quite angry at us for keeping such a secret, but what could they do? The pool was the source of the Spring River, which Mother and Teal had gone to find.
The adults decided to leave camp as soon as it was light. If we didn’t meet Mother and the others, they could find us later from our tracks. Or so said Father and Graylag, spreading out their sleeping-skins and rolling their firesticks and axes inside them.
I didn’t like to leave without Mother. Plucking Father’s sleeve, I said so. But he said kindly, “Your mother is all right. We’ll find her.”
“No, Father,” I said. “I’ll wait here for her.”
“You?” said Father. “Alone here?”
I made up my mind not to show the way to the pool. But the others never bothered to ask me. By dawn they had figured out where it must be and left in single file, straight for it. Stubbornly, I stayed sitting by the embers of the fire while the sky in the east turned pink. As Father was about to move out of sight behind a clump of trees, he turned to look back at me with a little smile. I saw that I couldn’t wait alone, so I got up and followed, down the southern slope of the hills while the sun rose.
As we kept just east of the tumbling stream which was the Spring River, we saw a figure among the birch trees ahead of us, a man carrying on his shoulder the foreleg of a horse. The man was Elho and the meat was part of a stallion, he said, the gift of people who were camped about two days’ travel down the Fire River, where it flowed onto the steppe. Mother and Teal were now with those people and had sent Elho back for us. Since we had eaten nothing but pine kernels and ptarmigan for many days, we gathered fuel, rolled a fire, and sat down to cook the meat while we heard what Elho had to tell us.
About twenty people were camped along the river, said Elho. All of them were strangers. Not even Teal knew the men, and no one knew the women either, except that a few were related to people in our lineage. We looked at the present they had sent us. One foreleg for so many of us from so many of them seemed almost stingy. And although their women had welcomed our women, the men had made Elho uncomfortable. Their speech, he said, was strange.
“Your news is disappointing,” said Graylag, looking rather uneasily at the foreleg. “What did these people tell you?”
Elho hesitated a moment. The rest of us glanced around at each other, distressed that he was having trouble choosing words. “They weren’t really unfriendly,” said Elho at last. “But they told us that our kinsmen don’t come here anymore. Instead they go from their lodges to camps on the steppe, to the calving grounds of the mammoths by the Hair River, very far ”
“How do these men know that?” asked Graylag, scowling.
“One was the widower of a woman of my lineage.”
“A widower?” asked Father. “Who has died?”
“Tchene?” said Elho. “I didn’t know her.” The adults looked at each other and shook their heads. They didn’t know Tchene either. “Mother and Aunt knew Tchene,” Elho added. “They cried very much to hear that she was dead.”
“What else?” said Graylag.
“When I asked how long it would take us to find our kinsmen if we traveled there slowly with women and children, they told me it would take more than the length of a moon.”
Thoughtfully, Graylag rubbed his lip. “Did you learn where the strange men came from?” he asked.
“From winter lodges in the west,” said Elho. “If we left from here now, taking our direction from the Reindeer Stars, we would reach there when the Reindeer Stars start down to their winter shelter.”
“Very far,” said Graylag, still thinking. “Why are they here?”
“To fish.”
“Have you news of other people?”
“Yes,” said Elho. “Out on the steppe, hunting mammoths, are two big groups of people from lodges in the northeast. The strangers don’t know them but think they’re from the lower Black River.”
“Ah!” cried Graylag. “Two big groups from the Black River? Aren’t all the people along the Black River related to me?”
“I don’t know all your kinsmen,” said Elho reasonably. “There was no way for me to learn more.”
“No,” said Graylag happily. “I will ask them myself. Now we must go, to thank them for this good meat.”
And so we did. Two days later we came over a rise of ground and saw the smoke of the strangers’ fires. We walked slowly until we could see the tops of their grass shelters, then we put down our packs, and the men of our group went off to meet the men of their group, taking with them a winter reindeer skin to show our thanks very generously for the rather stingy present the strangers had sent to us. Our men left their spears, their axes, and even their knives behind, to show their peaceful way of thinking. I would have liked to run ahead of the men to see Mother, but Father wouldn’t let me. “When we meet strange men, we must greet them quietly, without confusion. How else can they be sure we come in peace?”
In the afternoon sunlight, the rest of us sat by our packs and dozed. In time the men came back with Mother and Teal, followed by one of the strangers. He was a tall man, Father’s age, with braided hair, a beard, and brown eyes. His shirt, his trousers, and his moccasins looked very much like ours but he wore a necklace of pierced seeds and deer’s teeth of a design I didn’t know. He too had put away his weapons, and his empty hands hung at his sides. He nodded to us politely, then opened his mouth and began to say such thick words that I gaped. I could hardly understand him, and had never heard such ugly speech. “Greetings to the women” is what I think he was saying. “You are welcome. The hardhead trout are running. We ask you to make your camp near us on the river so you can share the fish.”
Catching myself gaping, I tried to think why he sounded so terrible. Where we said fff, he said vvv. Where we said ssh, he said zzh. Where we said th, he said dth, and where we said p, he said bvb. Our speech was clear and right. His was all wrong and muddy. How did his people know what he meant? Glancing around, I saw Junco and White Fox, Timu and Owl, all with puzzled looks on their faces, all getting ready to laugh. Elho stood by, enjoying the surprise we were getting. But the adults held themselves very straight and stiff, their eyes flashing dangerously from one to another of the young people, so we knew to pull long faces and pretend nothing unusual was happening. The moment the stranger left, though, leading some of our people away with him to find a campsite, we laughed and imitated him. Timu and I, in fact, jumped to our feet and pretended to be the stranger and his wife having an argument. I thought we sputtered and grunted just like he did, and we must have been quite funny, since Junco, Owl, and White Fox laughed until their tears came.
We made a nice camp at a distance from the strangers’ camp, hiding our half-dome shelters in the long grass of the plain by the river, under a hazy sky where swallows flew, catching things too small for us to see. We burned bleached, dry wood and even bleached bones washed up on the riverbanks, and bison dung we found on the plain. For the first few days our men sat at the strangers’ camp talking with their men while their women went out along the river and over the plain with us. Teal and Mother already knew their women, most of whom (unlike their men) came from lodges on the shores of Woman Lake and so of course spoke naturally.
Spring had come to the lowland by the Fire River. Like a bear, Mother led us along the bank, nosing out asparagus and fern fronds and many other kinds of good spring foods to eat.
And fish! By now the Moon of Foals was rising at the end of night, carrying in her belly the Moon of Flies. When the spring moon’s back turned north, the whitefish started running! With the strangers’ women, we took off our moccasins and trousers, rolled up our sleeves, and waded in the rapids to catch whitefish with our hands. Otters, kingfishers, an eagle, an osprey, and some bears came to fish too. If we saw a bear, we laughed and pushed each other toward it and splashed and screamed. Before the Moon of Flies was a crescent, the women knew all about each other and were kissing and calling each other “Sister.”
It was different with the men. They spent the first few days sitting and talking, not only in the day but far into the night. We brought them fish, sedge, goosefoot sprouts, and bulrush shoots. They ate without looking at their food, but kept their eyes fixed on each other. Their words, whether the good speech of our men or the ugly speech of their men, sounded stiff and guarded, as they carefully measured how much they told each other.
Then one night Graylag came back to our fires very excited. He had learned, he said, that he knew the mammoth hunters on the steppe, as he had hoped. One of them was Chelka, none other than his father’s little brother. If Chelka was there, Graylag might know some of the other men, and because no group is too big for mammoth hunting, the mammoth hunters would welcome him. Graylag spoke quickly and his eyes shone. It seemed clear that when the strangers went to join the mammoth hunters, he would go with them.
After a time the whitefish grew fewer, then stopped running. We still saw hardhead trout but these were not as plentiful as whitefish. We worked hard but caught only a few. The time of plenty at the Fire River was ending. Now we would go.
On the last day the strange men decided to take our men hunting for meat to eat on the trail. One group invited Father to hunt with them in the willow brakes along the river for a musk deer, a small animal that is hard to find, since it lives alone, walks out at night, and by day hides in a form like a hare. The strangers wanted to keep the meat but offered the rest to Father.
Father accepted gladly. A musk deer’s hide, taken off the carcass like a shirt turned inside out and knotted at the elbows, knees, and neck, makes a good waterskin. On a trip across the plains we would need a good waterskin. Also, a musk deer’s tusks look pretty on a necklace, and its musk can be rubbed on snares. So Father was in a very good mood when he left in the morning with the strangers.
But that night he didn’t come home. After dark the rest of us began to worry. The strangers were back—we heard them talking at their fires. At last Graylag called the men of our group together and they strode off to visit the strangers, to find out what had happened to Father or to fight. The rest of us listened, and soon heard Graylag and the strange men shouting with laughter. It sounded as if there was a joke on Father.
Then Graylag and the rest of our men came back, relaxed, laughing, and carrying the musk deer skin, which they handed to Yoi as a gift from the strangers, since her husband couldn’t give it himself. He was still on the far bank of the river.
According to the strangers, Father had been so eager to get a musk deer that he had waded across to hunt on the far bank. While he was there the river rose suddenly, and he was caught. Meanwhile, the strangers found and killed a musk deer on the near bank. Stranded, Father watched them do it.
In the middle of the night, Father came home. His clothes were wet, his braid was loose, and his face was drawn and strained with anger. The strangers had persuaded him to cross the river, he said, knowing that the water would rise. During the night four lions had come to find him. He had seen their eyes in the moonlight, and had stood up to tell them to go. Just then he had heard a burst of laughter from the strangers’ camp, laughter that showed how much the strangers were liking this.
The noise had startled him and spoiled his speech to the lions. Distracted, he had turned his head. Noticing this, the lions had moved toward him, giving him no choice but to jump in the water. He was swept downstream and dashed against rocks, and although he finally managed to pull himself out on the near bank and make his way back to us, his ax and firesticks were gone.
Balancing his spear, which he had managed to keep while he was in the water, Father stared toward the camp of the strangers. Perhaps because it was so dark, since our fires were low, or perhaps because Father looked funny, like a wet animal that drags itself, ashamed, from a river, the men of our camp didn’t see how angry he was. Or perhaps they wanted to joke away his anger. Anyway, they laughed at him. “You should see yourself, Ahi,” said Graylag. “Where are you going with that spear?”
Father turned and stared at Graylag. “Where am I going? I’m going home. Get up and make your packs,” he said to Mother and Aunt Yoi. “We’re leaving as soon as it’s light.”
At first we didn’t believe he meant it. Mother and Yoi just looked at him in amazement. “What’s wrong, Ahi?” Mother cried. “Did someone hurt you?”
“The strangers robbed us of the skin, and now Graylag makes fun of me.”
“No one robbed us!” said Mother. “They gave us the skin. Look! My sister has it. They gave it to her.”
“And what was she doing while I was gone, that strangers should give her a skin?”
Many people began to shout at Father. Yoi tearfully said she had done nothing. Mother begged him to sit down until his anger left him. Meri cried, and I shouted at Meri. The noise brought several of the strangers, all men, who began to laugh when they saw Father in his wet clothes. Meanwhile, Graylag spoke in a low voice to Father’s two nephews, The Stick and The Frog, who then took Father’s spear away from him.
“Let everyone go away now,” said Graylag. “We will leave Ahi to dry his clothes. There’s no need for anger. We will talk in the morning, to put an end to this.”
But in the morning Father threw the musk deer skin on the fire and made us roll up our packs. His sister, Graylag’s wife Ina, came over to reason with him, begging him to stay. But he pushed her aside. To her sons, his nephews, he said, “You may come with us or stay with Graylag and your mother. But if you stay, remember that you don’t know the people you’ll meet on the steppe. As these strangers treated me, perhaps those strangers will treat you.”
Father’s nephews were shy of strangers. Why not? Those two young men were afraid of their own hurtful nicknames. Cousin The Stick had a withered, useless right arm and a left-handed throw with a strange twist to it, and Cousin The Frog had a broad face with popping, yellow-brown eyes so like a frog’s that Timu could always make people laugh by offering him flies. When Father began to make his pack, his nephews began to make their packs too.
At last Graylag himself came to sit by Father, cheerfully at first. But slowly he grew more annoyed, as Father stubbornly refused to listen to him. “Whoever wants to go with those strangers may go,” said Father. “But no one must go.”
In the end Father and Graylag agreed that Graylag with his wives, his sons, his daughter and nephew and their families would follow the strangers to the mammoth hunters. In the fall they would probably start back to the lodge on the Char, bringing as much ivory as they could carry. Father and the rest of us would visit the lodge where Father was born, a lodge that was abandoned long ago but had good winter hunting, which might be useful to us all someday. We would go there to learn how the hunting seemed, and meet Graylag on the Char next winter. “So be it,” said Graylag. “Then we’ll meet again before the snow.”
“Come, all of you,” said Father. “The day is growing old and we’re still here talking.”
What could we do? As Mother said later, “The raven waits for the tiger,” meaning that no matter how clever the rest of us may be, the hunter makes the decisions. The decision had been made, so we stood up, and with many tears for all the people we were leaving behind, we followed him.
We walked a long way. The sun grew hot, and deerflies found us. My pack seemed to want to bury me, and my feet hurt. Since the earth was very rough and stony, Father must have thought to try higher ground, because we climbed the edge of the valley. At the top I turned and looked back at our old camp and saw, very small and very far away, Junco, Timu, Elho, and White Fox still looking after me. When they saw me turn, they waved!
And so began our summer. Father’s old lodge, I learned, was on the Pine River, about half as far northeast of the Char as the camp on the Fire River was southwest. And we couldn’t travel fast because of Mother, who had to eat and rest often because her pregnancy was well along. We spent a good part of each day finding food, looking for blueberries and raspberries and bearberries. And each night we stopped early to set snares. I soon realized that we couldn’t reach the Pine River before early fall.
Aunt Yoi and my cousins must have realized the same thing. One night after we made camp we told our thoughts to Father. He agreed. But he had never really thought that Graylag could be back on the Char by next winter. As Father saw it, Graylag might spend the winter with the mammoth hunters and we might spend it in Father’s old lodge. Then I suspected that he and Graylag were only pretending when they said they would meet in the winter. Without telling the rest of us, they may have thought of separating their groups for a while. This made me as sad as I could be, since I knew I would find no one of my age for a year or more, and would have no one to talk to but Meri!
One day we came to a birch grove where Mother made us stop to gather birch fiber. We stripped every birch in the grove and scraped the brown inner fiber. Mother put it in her pack. After that, it seemed, we covered less distance every day. One night at our fire, The Stick and The Frog remembered that they had traveled between the Fire River and the Black River in ten days’ time. They were sorry, I’m sure, that our group was so slow. But Mother was slow because she was soon to give birth.
On the morning of the day we started down the northern slope of the hills between the rivers, Mother’s labor began. All morning she lagged behind the rest. I lagged with her. From time to time she would lean on her digging stick and blow the loose hair from her braid out of her eyes. Even with her huge belly she seemed small to me, under the gray sky, against the dark of the hills behind her. Her face, always smooth and pleasant, was full of pain. I remember her telling me that when I was born, her water broke into her trousers, and her trousers hardened up afterwards so she had to throw them away. Sure enough, in the middle of the morning she stopped to take off her trousers and roll them into her pack, then went on barelegged. Presently her water broke with a gush down her legs. She stood in a pool of it, and in a cloud of its faint smell. Mother and I began to dig up the wet earth with our digging sticks, then carried the mud to a place far from the trail. “We’ll stop here,” said Mother.
She began to look for a place to hide, and finally chose a spruce with low branches that made a shelter so thick that only heavy rain would get through. We gathered moss for her to sit on when she leaned against the tree, and got out the birch fiber to soak up the blood. She brought her firesticks out of her pack and asked me to roll a fire. I found wood and tinder and began to roll, but I was still learning how to do this difficult thing, and my fire wouldn’t start. Finally Mother left her place and came, crawling painfully, to do it for me.
Then she crawled back and braced herself against the tree, with her parka over her shoulders and a pad of her birch fiber between her legs. “Sit down. Keep still,” she said, and I did.
After a while she told me to get up again and bury with fresh soil the spruce needles and earth soaked by more of her birth-water. I did, then sat down to wait again. I didn’t dare watch Mother, who sat with her head on her arms, but I listened to her panting; her breath seemed to whistle in and out of her mouth. When I smelled blood, I stole a glance, and saw that her fiber pad was soaked with it. She used a stick to push the pad away from herself. “Bury that too,” she told me. While I did, she made herself another.
The woods were very quiet. No birds sang; not even wind rustled the trees. The sky was overcast—we couldn’t see the sun, but we knew it was by now late in the day. I began to feel afraid. Were we making a great smell? Would we attract a bear? A tiger? I tried not to think about this, but when the sky grew dark I began to hear soft footprints all around us, and I tried to take Mother’s hand. “Leave me alone,” she said in a weak, cross voice, and she brushed my hand away.
Soon we were sure we heard footsteps, and Yoi appeared on the trail. She had come back to look for us at last. “Oh,” she said. “No one thought it would be today. How is it, Sister?”
“It’s starting,” said Mother between her teeth.
“The men have camped already, far ahead. Can you walk to them?”
Mother shook her head. “No,” she said. “Just let me be.”
But Yoi looked worried. “Yanan,” she ordered, “run ahead and tell your father to move the camp here.”
So then I had to start after Father all alone, when the valleys were already filled with dark, at the time of day when the animals start their hunting. I knew if I thought about it I would be too frightened to go, so I tried not to think about it, but just took my digging stick and set off at a trot.
The trail wasn’t a good trail made by mammoths but by simple reindeer, who hate to follow each other exactly so go slightly different ways. Yoi hadn’t bothered to tell me about a fork she had taken in the trail. Hares had used it since, so I had trouble finding Yoi’s tracks. By the time I did, it was almost too dark to see at all. I groped along, feeling with my feet for the bare hardness of the trail or the spruce-needle softness of the edge of the trail, trying to remember when the moon might rise, even in the clouds. Then my fear found me. Like a spark in tinder, it began to grow until it was like a flame. I was afraid for myself, alone in the dark woods, and afraid for Mother, alone with only Yoi and a little fire, in pain and in danger.
Yoi, I then saw, was also afraid of the trail and had sent me instead of going herself. I am only Yanan, I thought, alone in the woods, but if a tiger comes for me I will hit him as hard as I can. I cracked my digging stick against the trees so that a tiger would know he would be hit very hard if he came near, and I kept walking, and in this way I arrived at Father’s camp.
I found Father and his nephews on their feet, looking for us. “Where are the others?” they demanded angrily, as if it were my fault that I came alone. When I told them, they slowly began to pack up their things. Cousin The Frog had just put a strip of dry fish on the fire and wanted to cook it. Cousin The Stick’s waterskin was empty. He handed it to me to fill for him at a stream which he said was nearby. Meri was tired and cried when I told her to get ready to travel again. When I tried to fix her clothes and her braid she cried more, and Father’s nephews told me to let her be. Then I sat by the fire and fixed my eyes on the horizon while my anger at the men burned. When the fish was cooked, I refused to eat any.
Father and his nephews then put most of their bundles up in the trees, and when the moon rose and we started, they carried only small packs, spears, and axes. Meri and I followed, Meri with a pine-cone doll and I with the waterskins, now heavy and cold. For a very long time they slid back and forth against my legs as we walked in silence. Meri cried for me to carry her. “Crying?” I whispered. “Do you want to bring a tiger?”
Father turned around, picked her up, and put her on his shoulder, where she looked down at me with a nasty, babyish pout. In the past I might have told Father she was teasing, or said something mean to her, but tonight I didn’t have the heart. I was too hungry and too tired on that dark trail where even Father had to walk slowly, almost feeling his way. For a moment I tempted a smile from Meri by playing hide-the-eyes.
The moon rose very high, the wind blew in the trees, and the branches made a scratching sound. We sometimes heard our own footsteps and our own breathing, and we heard animals several times—reindeer thumping their front feet. I smelled the spruce needles in the night air, and a whiff of carrion—Cousin The Frog’s dried fish. Then I smelled smoke—Mother’s fire—and in a moment we came to her camp.
Both Father’s nephews went to sit by the little fire, which was burning very low, but Father and Meri and I crept under the overhanging spruce branches where Mother sat with Yoi. Mother was now supported between Yoi’s legs, leaning against Yoi’s body. We saw that Mother’s eyes were shut and her face was twisted with pain. She made no sign that she knew we were there. Yoi looked at Father with tear-swollen eyes, and reaching across Mother’s large belly, lifted the edge of her shirt to show that a tiny foot stuck out of Mother’s body.
Mother’s belly suddenly seemed to grow tall. She held her breath, her back arched and her head rolled, and the tiny leg came out to the knee. Yoi rubbed the belly until Mother seemed to relax, the leg drew back in a trickle of blood, and again only the foot was showing.
“The head should come first,” whispered Father.
“Yes,” said Yoi.
“Why don’t you fix it?”
“I can’t. I don’t know how.”
“Have you ever seen this before?”
Yoi shook her head and Father went quickly to sit with his nephews. They spoke in whispers. We sat in silence. The only sounds were branches cracking as The Stick built a shelter. Even Meri was quiet, looking from Mother’s face to Yoi’s face and sucking her thumb. When Mother stiffened with another pain, Yoi stroked her face and hugged her.
“Is it coming feet first?” Mother whispered.
“Yes,” said Yoi.
“We must turn it,” said Mother. “Let me lie down. Then let Yanan do it. Her hands are small. Yoi, you help her.” And so, very gently, Yoi lay Mother down flat on her back.
I brought a new torch and lit a fire right under the spruce branches. The flames leaped up and singed the spruce, but the needles were green and didn’t burn. By the light I saw big clots of blood clinging to Mother’s thighs and darkening the pile of moss and fiber under her. More blood was draining from her body, but the little foot was gone.
Mother said, “Slide in your hands and try to turn it. Push its feet toward my head. Look, like this.” She showed me her cupped hand. So I knelt in front of her, shut my eyes, and did as she said.
The baby was so soft that at first my fingers were too coarse to feel it. Then I found something small between my fingers and realized it was the tiny foot, with toes. Suddenly my hand was squeezed terribly, crushing against the baby until my fingers became numb. The force moved the baby slowly down my wrist until the underarm was caught by my thumb. I held the little body and opened my eyes. Now, beside my arm, were two small feet.
“No,” said Yoi.
“Try again quickly,” said Mother, “before the pain.”
So I pushed until my hand disappeared almost to the wrist, while Yoi pushed the side of Mother’s belly. “Turn, Little One,” she cried softly to the baby, as if, inside, it could hear, and do as she said.
“Can you feel the face?” asked Mother. “Can you feel the head?”
Something lumpy slid by my fingers. The face? “Yes, I can feel the face,” I said.
“Slowly take out your hand,” said Mother. “Now,” she whispered, and her muscles tightened very tight. This time we saw the top of the baby’s head and with the next few pains the head came out. Even in the dark I could see its face, all wrinkled. Most babies come out looking down at the ground, but this one was facing up, facing me.
“The head is out, Sister,” whispered Teal.
“With your hand,” said Mother, “turn the shoulders.” She was talking to me, but Yoi took over again. Yoi understood this kind of birth, and she sent me out for more fiber.
When I left the shadow of the spruce, I found that the sky was turning gray and the dawn sounds of the woods were starting. Father and The Frog were dozing by the fire. The Stick was awake. “Yes?” he asked me.
“The baby is coming,” I said. Father woke up, rubbing his eyes. “We need birch fiber.”
Father pointed to a pile of freshly peeled fiber, which I took back to Yoi. Under the tree I saw a tiny pale form between Mother and Yoi, and when I knelt to look at it, I saw that it was a little girl, lying perfectly still with a huge, twisted cord attached to the middle of her belly. Painfully, Mother asked Yoi to help her sit up. She reached out her hands. Yoi and I pulled her to a sitting position. She picked up the baby and moved the tiny arms, then put her face to its face and breathed in its mouth. Suddenly the baby trembled and gasped, a very faint sound. Yoi took out her knife. “Not yet,” whispered Mother. “Wait for the heart to leave the cord and go in the body.” Yoi waited, watching, then cut. Blood oozed from the stumps. Then Mother braced herself on one arm and held the baby with the other, while Yoi pushed hard on Mother’s belly. The afterbirth gushed out.
“Bury this,” said Yoi to me. So I buried all the birth matter. Father and his nephews then came cautiously to look at the baby. We brought Mother a drink of water, but she was fast asleep.
All day we rested, making one long trip with the waterskins to a stream. More fog settled on the hills. A few animals walked past us late in the day—reindeer moving down the slopes. Father and his nephews took spears and went after them, but the forest floor was so deep in sticks and cones that they couldn’t go quietly. The reindeer heard them.
Mother lay with the baby under her deerskin. My mind was with the baby inside the cape, where I could see her tiny fists and her face with its closed eyes. Sometimes we could hear her make a little sound, sucking or starting to cry, but mostly she slept. And I had helped her! She must have been glad to be born at last, with the terrible squeezing stopped.
Shortly before dark, rain started. We crowded into the two spruce-branch shelters that The Stick had built and watched the rain put out our fires. Late at night Mother asked me to bury a new pile of blood-soaked fiber.
A spruce forest is a bad place to find food, although we all went looking for it. We found mushrooms and some gray peas in a clearing, but nothing more. The men set snares and caught a squirrel with tufted ears. All of this we ate in one meal. After it, Mother herself buried many pads of fiber.
On the third day after the birth, Father asked Mother how soon she would be willing to travel. She wanted to go soon. She didn’t like the forest because there was no food in it. “Hunger is making me sick,” she said. So we divided her pack into our packs, leaving her with nothing to carry except the baby in a sling inside her shirt, and we took up the trail.
All day we walked down out of the hills, toward the swamps on the upper reaches of the Black River. The reindeer trails were no use to us now—we took a direction for the east side of the swamps, about a day’s walk. Travel was difficult because the hills were rocky and steep and the footing was unsure. By midafternoon Mother was walking behind Yoi, and then behind Meri. When she was next to me, I walked more slowly to keep pace with her.
When I offered to carry the baby, I thought Mother would refuse, but she gave me the soft little body to put inside my shirt. I felt very proud and important. No one looking at us would know we were two; the person would see only me. Yet I could feel the baby inside, tickling me softly as she moved.
Near the end of the slope, Mother undid her belt and removed her trousers. We were both frightened to see that they were wet with blood and that her fiber pad was soaked with it. She buried the pad by the trail. Then, making a fresh one from more of the fiber, she dressed again and we walked on slowly.
But soon I saw that blood was running down her legs and showing in her footprints. “Mother,” I said, “look at the ground.” She looked down and saw it, and started to cry. I couldn’t remember ever seeing her cry before.
“What is happening to me?” she whispered.
“Let’s hurry,” I begged, catching her hand and trying to pull her along the trail. “The others will help you.” She tried to follow, but soon she had to lean on my shoulder. I put my arm around her waist, and we struggled along the narrow trail side by side.
Inside my shirt, the baby began to cry. “We must stop now. Give her to me,” said Mother. Sitting on her heels, she opened her shirt and gave her breast to the baby who, feeling the nipple touch her cheek, groped for it with her mouth. She found it, sucked hard, and then began to cry again. “We’ll rest,” said Mother. “After I sit still, my milk will come.” She waited a moment as if gathering her strength, then added, “Meri is betrothed to White Fox. You should know that.” She touched her necklace. “His parents gave this.”
Then suddenly Mother collapsed. She was sitting one moment, lying crumpled like a deerskin the next moment, with the poor baby lying near her on the ground, screaming. I screamed too. “Mother! Mother!” But she lay still, mouth open, eyes shut. Some flies settled on her. On the ground where she lay was a large pool of blood.
Nothing made sense. I didn’t know what to do, and no thoughts came to me. I stood still. Then I thought, She must have a drink of water, and taking the waterskin out of my pack I started to look for a stream. But the baby’s screaming stopped me, and I went back. The baby lay naked on the ground, her tiny hands in fists, her feet waving, her face all wrinkled with crying. I picked her up and put her in my shirt. She held her breath, and suddenly the world was quiet—I heard the droning of the flies. Then she cried again, this time muffled by my shirt. I thought, I must run to get Father. Holding the baby against me, I ran down the slope as fast as I could, and when the branches whipped my face I didn’t feel it. But suddenly I thought of Mother, all alone, with no one to protect her, waking to find no one there, not even the baby, and I turned around and ran back.
I found Mother trying to sit up, and I took her hands to help her, but she lay back without speaking. When she tried to moisten her lips with her tongue, I could see that her tongue was almost white. Finally she whispered, “Stay with me.”
And I said, “I will.”
When Father and Aunt Yoi finally returned to look for us, the shadows of the reeds were long. Mother lay still in a patch of faint sunlight while flies tasted her skin at the corners of her mouth and eyes. On the ground her blood was spoiling, making a heavy, foul smell. The baby, exhausted, no longer cried. I wondered why Father and Yoi had taken so long to come back, but I felt numb myself, almost dead; I couldn’t find the words to ask. Father stood staring at us. Yoi seized Mother’s hand and began to rub it, meanwhile calling Mother’s name: “Lapwing! Lapwing! Sister! Sister!” But Mother’s spirit was almost free of her body, off for the sun’s place in the west, and only when the baby began to cry again did her spirit look back for a moment, to make her eyelids stir.
Suddenly a blow struck the side of my head, and then two more. I saw lights, and threw up my arms to protect myself. Yoi was hitting me. “You worthless girl!” she screamed. “Why didn’t you run after us? You lazy, worthless, thoughtless animal, not worth the food you eat!”
Father caught her arm. “Stop!” he said. “She did right. This is no time to quarrel.”
But I could say nothing. I couldn’t even cry. I wished I had done as Yoi said.
Giving his pack to Yoi, Father lifted Mother onto his back, and we followed him down the trail. The baby began to cry faintly, without stopping, until Yoi turned around to face me and angrily held out her hands. I gave her the baby and she gave me Father’s pack, which made me go so slowly that by the time I reached the little shelters that Father’s nephews had made while waiting for us, Mother was dead. Already the others had straightened her clothes and tied her arms and legs tightly against her body. Like a bundle, she lay stiffly at the edge of camp with staring, half-open eyes.
Meri ran up to me. “Where’s Mother?” she asked.
“She’s there.” I pointed. “She’s dead.”
“That’s not her,” said Meri. “That’s Aunt Teal.” And I could see that Mother now looked a little like Teal—her cheeks were stiff and her eyes hollow, which made her face look square, like Teal’s, not smooth and round, as hers used to be. It seemed to me that her spirit was not near the camp any longer, although it is said that the spirit of a woman who dies from childbirth waits for the newborn child.
Aunt Yoi had soaked a piece of deerskin in water and was letting the baby suck it. When I came into camp, she sobbed and held out her arms. “Who will help me? I have no mother, no father, no sister, no one now,” she cried. I stared at her. Meri also held up her arms to me so I could lift her. When I did, she clung to me.
I heard chopping, and looking through the bushes, I saw Father and his nephews crouching with digging sticks, making a grave. They worked long after the moon rose, stopping to eat the last of the fish and part of a large root that Aunt Yoi had gathered. Then they went on digging. When their sticks hit the deep earth that never thaws, the blows of their digging became clear and sharp, and we knew from the sound that their work was nearly finished. I filled a waterskin and brought it to Mother, and in the moonlight Yoi and I washed her face and combed and braided her hair. On her braid we tied her ivory pin. Then, weeping, Father carried her to her grave and put her inside.
As he did, Yoi and Father’s nephews all shouted at once. “Stop! That’s wrong!” they cried. Father turned his tear-stained face to look at them. They were pointing in different directions. “Face her there,” they said.
Slowly Father looked at the moon and the slope of the hills, and said carefully, “I’m facing her right. She was born on Woman Lake.”
“She was born on the Fire River!” said Yoi.
“Were you there?” asked Father angrily. Of course, being younger, Yoi had not been there. She stared at Father but didn’t speak. Father turned to his nephews. “Were you there?” he repeated.
“No,” admitted The Stick.
“You see?” said Father. “She had a winter name for an animal, to honor The Bear. So she was born in a lodge, not on the summergrounds on the Fire River. Her father lived in a lodge on Woman Lake. Yes?” He stared angrily at Yoi, who shrugged. Father then turned back to the grave and looked at Mother for a long time in silence before dropping her parka down on top of her.
Although we realized too late that we couldn’t be sure where she was born or whether she was facing the right way, we threw the rest of her things into her grave: the strings of her pack, her belt, her scraper, her twine, her awl, her bone needle, her bison horn full of tinder, her flint knife with its perfect edge, and her antler necklace with pendants, the betrothal gift for Meri.
Then Father, weeping, threw earth on his head, and drawing his own knife, cut a gash on his chest. “See how I grieve for you, Lapwing,” he said. He held out his arms to Yoi and said, “Give me the baby.” Yoi took the baby from her shirt and handed her to him.
The Stick and The Frog turned their faces away while Father carefully set the baby down beside Mother. Father took Mother’s deerskin and was about to spread it over both of them when I suddenly snatched the baby and put her quickly inside my shirt. “I’ll feed her, Father,” I said. “Let me take her.”
He looked at me for a long moment. Fresh tears ran down his face. Then he turned back to the grave to cover Mother with the deerskin and began slowly to push in the earth. The cousins didn’t wait but went to gather stones to mound over the grave. They asked me to help them, but I couldn’t.
I stood with the smell of the fresh earth in my nostrils, listening to the sound of it falling, handful by handful, on the deerskin. Inside my shirt the baby cried faintly, on and on. No one mentioned the baby, and when the grave was full and covered with stones, we returned to our fire.
The moon was sinking, huge and red as it lowered itself to the hills where we had been when all this began, when the baby was born. By the faint light I found the bit of root that was my share of our food. I took a bite and chewed it hard. When it was a paste I put some on my finger and smeared it on the baby’s mouth. She sucked my finger eagerly the moment she felt my touch, but her face slowly wrinkled and she began to cry again. Yoi opened her shirt and put the baby to her breast. The baby sucked quickly for a while, then suddenly fell asleep. I went to lean on Father’s shoulder where he sat by the fire, and fell asleep as if I too were dead.
Before dawn the baby’s crying woke me. Yoi was holding her loosely, almost angrily, and when I reached out my hands, Yoi dropped the baby into them. I tried to put a paste of chewed root into her mouth, but she didn’t swallow it. Instead she began a steady, weak crying like a wheeze.
“She should be with Lapwing,” said Cousin The Stick. “Without milk, she can’t live.”
“Yoi fed her!” said Meri.
When we were ready to travel, Yoi asked to carry the baby again. “No use asking. I won’t carry your pack for you,” I said.
Yoi took out her breast. “You took her from her mother, but you can’t quiet her,” she said. We looked at each other full of anger, then both drew back quickly as if we saw something dangerous.
Yoi was right: the baby cried less if it could suckle. Yoi’s breasts, although high like a girl’s, were full-grown even if they had no milk. My breasts were just starting to show. Yoi tied the baby’s sling under her shirt and we walked all day without stopping or speaking, getting farther and farther from Mother in her grave.
When the baby was quiet, I thought of Mother, unable to follow us, curled under the earth, all alone. She would be there in the fall, when the birch trees near her would drop their leaves on her grave. She would still be there in winter, in the spring, a year from now still there. However far we traveled, she would never join us or feel our warm fires or see the good sun. Her mother too was buried somewhere, I realized, never having thought of this before. Alone in a wood, not even by a trail? I didn’t know.
When the baby was crying, I cried too. We stopped near the end of the day to gather food and eat, and we tried to feed her again. All of us tried, but Yoi’s breasts were still empty and the baby wouldn’t eat paste. At sunset she stopped crying. I thought Yoi’s milk had come at last.
We walked all the next day and at night camped at the eastern edge of the marshes, on a small, wooded island that stood above the wet. Our campsite was thick with pine needles smelling of summer, very sweet. We didn’t make shelters but simply rolled ourselves in our deerskins by the fire.
Toward morning Yoi said, “She’s cold,” and held the baby out for us to see. When we looked, we saw that she was dead.
Yoi simply laid her by the fire, naked, still, her spirit lost, as Mother’s spirit had gone by now without her. We had nothing but the sling to cover her, and when in the dawn light we dug her grave, we had nothing to put with her except that little scrap of leather. Nothing else belonged to her.
Inside the hole, her small, naked body was so tender and pale that I didn’t think we could put earth on her skin, but finally Father threw the first handful, then quickly the rest, then the stones, then threw earth on his head. “I mourn for you this way, my child,” he said to the baby’s tiny spirit as it hung, bewildered, in the air. “We’re sorry you’re alone—we didn’t mean harm. Speak well for us if you find the Camps of the Dead.” After the sun rose, we made up our packs and went on our way.