NEVER HAD THE LODGE seemed so dark, so quiet. I tried to sleep, thinking that by daylight I would feel more cheerful, more hopeful, but sleep wouldn’t come. When I thought of staying alone with Meri in the lodge all winter, the fear of starving and freezing crept into my mind. When I thought of trying to find the Char River, my mind’s eye saw lions, saw us drowning, saw us lost. The thought of being lost and hunted by animals was worse than the thought of starving or freezing, but I knew we had to leave—we couldn’t stay. I saw that our need for clothing is what makes us different from the animals, who don’t need clothing to keep warm. We had both outgrown our clothes during the year since Mother died—our sleeves and trouser legs were much too short. Also our clothes were badly tattered and our moccasins almost useless. Meri, of course, didn’t even have a parka. If we didn’t have more clothes by winter we would die of cold and I had no way to get more clothes. I had no large piece of leather.
Except for our need of clothes, I saw we would be like small animals while we were traveling—like foxes, maybe. A big group of people can kill a big thing and live a long time eating it, like lions or wolves. But a very small group like me and Meri would have to live like foxes, eating the frogs and lemmings overlooked by the cranes. Big groups of men with spears and clubs can walk where they like in strange country and don’t need to fear the dark, but we would have to travel very carefully during the day and at night hide in small places. I remembered a story Mother used to tell about the man who stole fire from the hare and how since then the snow leopard has always come to a campfire, because the hare sends him to get it back. It is true—if you see a campfire, you know that a person is nearby, perhaps sleeping. We would not build a fire.
I wondered how we would find the way. After I became a spirit and traveled as an animal, I always seemed to find my way easily, and even if I couldn’t find a place I might want to visit, I could always get home. Sometimes I used the sun, sometimes the stars, sometimes the direction of the wind as it blew my fur, and sometimes a trail of scent left by others ahead of me. I found it easy to remember the scat and urine boundaries made by other animals, the silence made by beds of pine needles, the special squeaking bubbles made by a stream on parts of its course, the clouds of scent made by certain plants—all were useful, even in the dark. But when I was a girl on the Marten River, I understood none of these helpful things.
Instead I sat down to think. “Water flows north,” I remembered Father saying. But all he meant was that sooner or later the rivers turn north, or flow into other rivers which go north. Even that wasn’t true of the Fire River. Taking a stick, I scratched a line on the ground which I called the Marten River. Meri came to ask what I was doing, and I told her to leave me alone. I put a mark for myself on the south bank, and another mark for Meri.
If I listened carefully, I could hear where the water went around the rocks, and I put a small rock on my drawing. The Marten had to run downhill, from the rising land southwest of us. I put stones for the rising land. I looked at the sun. The Marten ran east, I realized.
I searched my memory for an image of the Char River. It ran west, but just to be sure, I imagined myself on the south bank of the Little Char River on the day I had noticed that Mother was pregnant. I remembered Mother wading downstream toward me, her face dark in her own shadow. If the sun was behind her in the morning, she was facing west. If the water broke over the backs of her legs, it was going west. For sure, the Char River ran west.
In the middle of my stones which showed the rising land I put bigger stones for the hills where we had been when Mother died. On the far side, from east to west, I drew the Char River. The longer I stared at my drawing, the more sure I felt that it was right, and when I climbed one of the little hemlocks and looked through the treetops at the hills, I knew that my drawing was a good one. “We can go,” I said to Meri when I climbed down again.
“Now?” she asked.
“Why not?” I answered. So we made our packs and followed the south bank of the Marten while the daylight lasted.
Many times in my life, I found that things I was sure would happen failed to happen, while things I never dreamed of happened without warning. The trip to the Char River stays in my memory as good and bad surprises like beads on a string.
The first night I was surprised that darkness came so soon, before we were ready. In the dusk I lost all courage and wanted to turn back, but of course we were too far away. We were pushing through the brush by the water in hope of catching a frog, but either a crane had found all the frogs or they knew how late in the year it was and were hiding in their little mud lodges. Instead I found a dead fish floating on its back by the bank, its white belly shining in the evening sun. I took it. Then Meri and I looked at each other. We didn’t dare build a fire, so we took bites out of the fish’s raw flesh, swallowed with difficulty, and threw the head and guts back into the river. Later we found sedge growing in bare spots between the thickets; we stopped to dig its roots by the last of the daylight. “Tomorrow we’ll find food along the way and we’ll eat in the sunshine,” I promised Meri. “We’ll camp before dark, too.”
“Where will we go tonight?” she asked. But I didn’t answer. I didn’t know. All afternoon I had seen no hiding place—the thickets were too open; there were no piles of rocks or blown-down trees with hiding places between them, no trees tall enough to climb. When it was almost dark I noticed how quiet it was, how all grazing animals had left the river, how nothing stirred. I saw that we were in danger. They who eat the deer had started their evening hunting. Then I saw how careless I had been to get into thickets by the river, where hunting animals lie in wait for those who come to drink. As the first stars came out, I stopped walking to think and to look carefully, to push my fear down.
Not far ahead I noticed long follows-fire grass growing on a bank, showing that the ground had once been cleared there. When I went nearer I thought I saw, even in the gathering dark, a darker space behind some of the grass, and when I went up to this darkness I found a hole. Around it in the earth were beds like the ones the she-wolf made around the lodge—it was a wolf den, perhaps the den of our she-wolf’s people. I saw many old scats, thick with white hair, a few white, gnawed antlers and white, gnawed bones. There were no footprints except those of mice. The wolves had used the den in the spring and early summer while they raised their pups, and now that the pups were too big for the den, the pack had gone. There were no footprints or drag marks in the mouth of the tunnel. Nothing seemed to be inside it now.
With Meri behind me, I crawled into the tunnel carefully, pushing Father’s spear ahead of myself, pausing to sniff and listen, to learn if something else might be inside after all. When I smelled only dust and heard nothing, I went on.
We crawled slowly down a long passage, feeling with our hands the hard floor of the tunnel. The earth got close and warm. We squeezed ourselves through the passage. I wanted to whisper to Meri, but I couldn’t turn. My shoulders, my spine, and the top of my head scraped the roof of the passage. Then suddenly I felt space. My breath echoed. I groped with one arm, and finding no wall to my right, moved carefully as far as I could. When I felt the far wall, I realized we were in a little cavern dug out by the wolves, a place where we could sit together, where a wolf could stand up or lie down. Here we could turn, to see the faint gray light up the tunnel and to smell a stream of fresh air. I felt the ceiling and found that it was strong, domed like the roof of a lodge. The tunnel was too small for any animal large enough to eat us. Only a hyena or a bear would bother us anyway—only a hyena or a bear might dig its prey out of the ground. But if something dug for us while we slept, its scraping and snuffling and the dirt rolling on us would wake us, so that we could spear its feet. We saw that we were safe, that nothing could harm us except the many fleas that began to bite us. Relieved and very happy, we hugged each other.
When we went outside to get our packs, we heard a deer stamp and give a loud snorting whistle, its call of alarm. Then many deer slipped past us, quietly hurrying away from the river, and we knew that something large and stealthy was hunting nearby. We crawled down the tunnel again and rolled in the deerskin, warm, safe, comfortable except for the fleas, not even bothering to listen for whatever it was.
We must have slept very well. During the night, unknown to us, the wolf pup found us. When I woke up in the morning, I saw him curled beside Meri. She was delighted, and hugged and kissed him. Outside in daylight we saw that his ears were badly bitten. The other wolves, or perhaps only some of them, must have driven him away after all.
He followed us closely, hunting frogs when we hunted frogs, snatching at locusts which flew up in front of us. Meri dug up a sedge root and divided it in three pieces, one for her, one for me, and one for the pup. Although it is wrong to waste or play with food, I didn’t try to stop her, as she had found it.
For many more days we followed the river, until it became a stream running through beaver meadows on high, flat ground. We spent one night in a beaver’s lodge that we found in the evening when the beavers were out. Like the wolf’s den, it was domed and strong, but it smelled of wet mud and dung and was so small that when we were both inside it, as if we were both together in a parka made of sticks, we couldn’t move. During the night a beaver tried to come in with us; when we heard the gush of water in the coldtrap, we shouted to drive it away.
We spent one night in a narrow, hollow log alive with ants and grubs, which crawled slowly over our skin with their tiny soft feet. Another night, on the high ground, we found a perfect cave with a very small opening, a cave used by hares and smelling of hares, grassy and sweet. One night we found nothing better than a cleft between rocks, where we hid ourselves and hoped that no animal would find us.
Each day we stopped to dig roots, and when we were in the high country, to pick berries. On a ledge at the very source of the Marten we found carrion—a scrap of a musk deer’s carcass abandoned for some reason by a snow leopard. We carried the stinking scrap far away in case the leopard came back for it, and built a fire to cook it until it smelled better. People later said that we had lived like animals, and I suppose we did, but after all, we had no choice.
One day I felt fullness in my belly, and pain. When I pulled down my trousers to relieve myself, I saw blood in the crotch. At first I couldn’t think what was the matter and, very frightened, I called Meri. All I could think of was Mother on the last day of her life, bleeding but not knowing why.
“You’re bleeding!” cried Meri, also frightened. “Are you cut? Are you having a baby?”
I didn’t know, and my heart was beating so fast that I couldn’t reason. I didn’t think I was cut or hurt, and knew there had to be a father before a woman got a baby. But was this always true of everybody? Did the geese whose flocks reached between the horizons and the reindeer whose herds covered the hills as far as the eye could see all have fathers? Some did, of course. But all of them? Impossible! Was I gotten with child by a spirit?
The only thing was, my belly was so flat and thin that my ribs and hipbones showed. If a baby were there, we would see the bulge of it. “It’s not a baby,” I told Meri.
“I smell a baby,” she whispered.
She was right. Something smelled like a birth. I smelled like a birth, I realized with horror. Would the smell attract bears or tigers?
The smell drew the pup. He came right up to me to sniff, making a brief back-and-forth motion with his hips. And then, of course, I realized what was happening to me—I was only menstruating, like the estrus of deer in the fall, which makes the stags bellow, and like the rutting of tigers in winter, which makes us call the moon the Moon of Roaring. People have it too, only not at any special season, and men are afraid of it. “I must be menstruating,” I said.
“Yes,” I answered.
Meri began to cry. “I don’t want to go to Graylag’s lodge,” she said. “If you get married, I’ll be all alone.”
The idea chilled me. “Married?” I said. “I am married. Didn’t you know that?”
“No,” she said, weeping.
“Well, I am. Mother told me. But I won’t leave you because of that. Not because of that, not for any reason.”
Meri seemed relieved. She didn’t then ask who my husband was, and it didn’t occur to me to tell her.
Only the problem of the stain remained. I found and stripped a birch tree, and with the edge of Father’s spear I scraped a mound of fiber to use as a pad. I had more fiber than I needed, it turned out, for the next day my bleeding stopped and didn’t start again.
If starting to menstruate was a bad surprise, a good surprise came soon after, when we reached the peak of one of the mountains and saw before us the vast reach of steppe and taiga drained by the Black River, of which the Char and the Antler are west-flowing branches. I saw a gleam of water shining—it must have been the Antler River—and I saw which way to travel to reach the water. I even thought I saw a plume of smoke. It struck me that if we waited until dark, we could see whether or not people had made a campfire in the distance, but the top of the windy mountain seemed very wild and lonely. We decided to hurry on.
We could have spent longer than we did finding the lodge, but given enough time we probably would have found it even if we had never found and followed the Antler River, because if we had kept walking west, we would have come to the Black River anyway. We almost ran during the last few days of our journey, so anxious were we to see the other people. On one of the last nights we hid under a sandy bank in a hole that must have been dug by hyenas. It smelled of hyenas, and like the wolf den was filled with fleas.
“Never mind,” I said to Meri. “We’ll soon be in the lodge.”
“I know,” she said. “Mother and Father may be waiting for us.”
“What?” I said. “They’re not waiting for us. They died. Don’t you remember?”
Meri looked unsure. “But I dream they’re waiting for us,” she said.
I suddenly found myself crying, frightening Meri and the pup with my sobs. So Meri surprised me and I surprised myself. After all, Meri was a child, too young to have sense. Why was I so upset?
But the biggest surprise of the journey, and the reason I remember the journey by the surprises it held for us, came at the end. We followed the Antler River to the Char River, and followed its south bank to the bend. From there we saw the lodge with Graylag’s huge antlers standing on top of it, and smoke rising from one of the smokeholes. Where we crossed the rapids the boulders were too far apart for Meri, but the water was slow—we took off our moccasins and trousers, pulled up our shirts, and waded chest deep through the icy water. The pup, after much crying and running up and down the bank, finally plunged after us. Then we dressed and ran to the lodge.
The familiar coldtrap door waited for us, open and dark with the smell of food floating out of it. We dove inside.
When our eyes got used to the dim light, we saw that no one was with us but two strange women, sitting together by Graylag’s fire. The cooking smell was theirs, from strips of meat. Although they were older than I, both were young, with sleek bodies, smooth, pretty faces, clean, braided hair, and new clothes. At the sight of us their eyes grew round. “Who are you?” they asked. “Where are your people?”