THE NEXT MORNING Teal took me and Meri to a place on the river where the bank was crumbled and a deer trail led gradually under water. There she made us strip and scrub with sand. She took out our braids and scrubbed our heads, then ducked us in the current, although the water was now ready for winter, cold enough to freeze. Our mouths were blue and our jaws were trembling, but we managed not to cry, even after Teal looked us up and down as we stood wet and shivering, then made us scrub again.
When I reached for my clothes, Teal said, “Your breasts have grown.”
I knew this, but I looked down at myself anyway. Then, trying to move casually, I shook out my trousers and held them ready to step into. But before I could, Teal took them from me and carefully examined the crotch. “Has your menstruation started?” she asked.
Could the stain still show, after so many days? It didn’t seem possible. “No, Aunt,” I said.
“But it has,” said Teal. Pinching the stained place, Teal folded the trousers against herself as if they had become her trousers. Over the top of them she stared at me. My eyes dropped.
“Sometimes a girl doesn’t understand the signs,” said Teal. “Or she is afraid of her initiation or of lying with her husband. It’s good we found out. When this Yellowleaf Moon is full, we must dance so The Woman Ohun will protect you. Then Timu can lie with you if he likes.” She paused, then continued: “You come from a strong lineage, a Fire River lineage. If you’re afraid of initiation or coitus, you mustn’t show it.”
“No, Aunt,” I said.
“Also, we must sew new clothes for you. Meri can have your old trousers.” Teal gave back my trousers. “She can also have your outer clothes. We must make her some new moccasins and a shirt. Yours is too ragged. But for now, wear your own.” I put the trousers on. “Graylag has promised a skin,” she went on. “You can share it with Meri. Today we will start Meri’s shirt and your trousers. Owl will give some prepared leather because you are married to her brother. Timu will also give you leather. Ethis has lots of leather from her wedding portions, and she could give some to you.”
I didn’t think Ethis would want to share her wedding clothes with me, but again I said, “Yes, Aunt.”
Suddenly Teal placed one palm on the trail and held up the other hand for silence. After a moment she whispered, “What now?”
We all felt the trail. Something very large walking on our side of the river was making the ground shake. It couldn’t be the deer who owned the trail, as deer step lightly.
“There’s nothing here to climb,” said Teal quietly. “Unless we want to swim, we’d better leave this place.”
We walked up the bank to look around the floodplain. At first we saw nothing, but then, as if we saw a hill where before there had been flat ground, we saw a large mound with birds roosting on it. Soon the mound moved, and we saw that it was not a hill but a very large rhino in winter pelt. As it turned a curve of the trail, we saw at its flank a little rhino, a calf of that spring, with straight hair standing out all over it, like a thistle in the morning sun. The birds rode, their heads still on their loose necks, their bodies slowly jolting.
“A rhino,” said Teal. “Now where does she come from and what is she doing here? Have you ever seen one in this valley?”
“No,” I said. “Only on the steppe.”
“I’m afraid of it,” said Meri.
“You should be,” said Teal.
“I want to go back to the lodge,” said Meri.
“It can shatter the lodge,” said Teal.
But we went back anyway, keeping out of sight by following a higher terrace. We didn’t want the rhino to see us, lest it think we were its enemies and charge us. When we had gone a long way, we climbed the third terrace, looked down again, and saw, far off, the hairy curve of the rhino’s back above the bushes. It wouldn’t bother us now, I knew, and by the time we reached the lodge I had almost forgotten about it.
At the lodge Teal and Ina built a dayfire outside the coldtrap door, where they could work on the skins in plenty of light. Meri was sent with Ankhi to gather bearberries, while the rest of us spent the day cutting and sewing a shirt for Meri and a parka for me, using my old shirt as a pattern. We used Owl’s flint knife and Ina’s greenstone knife, scratching the sharp edge again and again across the deerskin, opening the leather a little every time. Owl and Ina couldn’t help regretting the loss of the perfect flint knife given Mother in Meri’s first betrothal exchange. “If we had that knife, this work would go quickly,” said Owl. But the knife was with Mother in her grave.
“Since Meri is now to marry Swift, the knife would have been given back to White Fox’s parents,” said Teal reasonably. “We wouldn’t have it here. But if our work is going too slowly, why can’t the mammoth hunter women help us? Ethis!” she called. “Rin!”
“Hi!” called these women from inside the lodge.
“Bring us your scrapers and knives. Bring us your needles. We need tools and helpers if we want to finish this!”
So Ethis and Rin came outside and began to work on my new pair of trousers, cutting them in the style favored by the mammoth hunters, loose and wide, especially in the seat, with extra space over the belly, where mammoth hunter women sew a panel with a decoration. I thought they would also make the decoration for me, and I liked the idea of having one, but the seat worried me—how would I look dressed in such wide clothes? I could say nothing, though; I could only obey Teal, who gave me the chore of making the shirt ready for its stitches by piercing every hole for the needle. I got myself a flat rock to push against, and struggled all day making evenly spaced holes in the very tough leather by twisting a borrowed stone awl.
Ankhi and Meri came back at the end of the day with Meri’s shirt, which she had taken off and tied at the neck and sleeves to make a bag, filled with bearberries. I saw how much she had grown up; last fall she wouldn’t have picked a handful of berries without eating them, and now she was helping to feed us all. So much food must be shared, of course, and so we saved some for the men. But Meri had thought of this—she had picked extra so she and I could eat a good meal. We were licking the last sweet taste from our fingers when Graylag and the other men came home with pieces of a yearling fawn they had found swimming in the river while a herd of hinds and other yearlings looked down at it from the far bank. It must have been trying to ford with the herd but had somehow been carried downstream by the current.
The men put the liver on our dayfire. While it cooked, we told of the rhino and her calf. The men already knew, having seen their tracks and dung, and were puzzling over why this steppe animal was in the stony, wooded country by the river.
“It’s dangerous,” said Swift. “Not natural. On the plains we see plenty of them, but not in this country—they don’t like rocks under their feet.”
“It could be passing through here,” said Timu, “or want to go south across the river. Do you think so?” Timu turned to Swift.
“I think so,” Swift agreed, sounding as if he said “thing zo.” “It wants to go across but doesn’t do it.”
“How can we get rid of it?” Teal asked him.
“That’s easy,” said Swift. “They don’t like fire.”
“Don’t hurt them near the lodge,” said Graylag. “Leave them alone. Don’t make noise. Don’t show them fire. Remember how big they are.”
“But they don’t like fire!” Swift insisted.
In three days’ time, working on the new clothes for part of every day, we made new shirts and moccasins for me and Meri and new if baggy trousers for me, finished except for the decoration. “Put something on the front,” Teal said to me. “The front looks strange without a design.”
“But I don’t know how. And I don’t know any patterns.”
Teal shrugged. “Do what you can,” she said. “After all, those are your wedding clothes.” And so, although I had never watched anyone decorate clothing, I sharpened a stick, blackened it in the fire, and drew a small design on the panel. After working out the design in charcoal, I burned it into the leather. It wasn’t very good but it was better than I was afraid it might be. In fact I felt a little proud of it.
“What is it?” asked Ethis doubtfully. Her own clothing was beautifully decorated with many fine stripes, both in scratches rubbed with ashes and in black burns.
“A frog,” I said. “Those are its ribs.”
Ethis and Ankhi exchanged faint smiles. “Why a frog?” asked Ethis.
I felt embarrassed. I had just happened to think of a frog when I began drawing—that was why—but I didn’t want to admit as much to Ethis. Instead I said, “My mother told me that snow and ice can’t kill the frog. I chose it for its strength.”
Again Ethis and Ankhi smiled. “You know,” said Ethis, amused and superior, “the panel of the trousers covers your womb. The decoration tells of your womb. Mine”—and she pointed to the front of her trousers stretched over her pregnant belly—“shows all these feathers for the birds that bring children. When I drew this, I meant to show many children. That’s how the people of the Hair River draw decorations.” She was mocking me. “But a frog? A frog is poor and thin.”
“Never mind the decoration,” said Teal, cross because talking takes people’s minds from their work. “Yanan, give your old trousers to Meri.” Teal was already cutting Meri’s old trousers to make a pair of winter moccasins. “Meri is cold. Give her your old trousers and wear your new ones. See how you look in the mammoth hunter’s style.”
Meri stared at me expectantly, hugging her naked knees. So I had no choice but to step out of my old trousers and put the new ones on.
Right away I knew that they were terrible. The decoration was ugly, but worse than that, I felt the grip of the legs too far down my thighs. I realized that below my waist, the pants were so broad that they stood stiffly by themselves, not touching my body. In dread I peered around. Sure enough, where the seat should be, a great bag hung.
Everyone looked at me. Stupid, horrid Rin even smiled, as if she liked what she saw. Ethis and Ankhi looked mischievous, and Meri looked surprised. Teal merely ran her eyes over me in her matter-of-fact way, then looked at the sun. “Firewood must be gathered,” she said, packing her scraps of leather, her scraper, the needle, the sinew, and the awl into her skin bag. Then she stood up stiffly and walked toward the trail, as usual sure that the rest of us were following.
Our way passed some low rocks sheltered by a few spruce trees at a distance from the lodge—the place where, these days, the men sat in the daytime. Most of them, now back from their hunt, were there cooking the marrow bones of the swimming fawn. I heard them laugh, probably at the sight of my trousers. I wanted to hide. Instead I kept walking, hoping that none of them would speak.
But, “Come here, New Trousers!” shouted Timu.
“Come here, Woman of the Mammoth Hunters! I want to marry you!” called White Fox.
“A woman avder all!” cried horrid Swift playfully in his loathsome accent. “I wan du marry you!”
When the moon rose, instead of sitting inside the lodge with the others, I sat alone by the embers of the dayfire, wondering about my trousers. If I had thought I could get rid of them, perhaps explaining that a hyena had taken them while I was bathing, I would have thrown them away. But Teal would never believe that the loss of my trousers was an accident, nor would anyone give me more leather if I ever treated clothing with such disrespect.
Far away in the west the fiery glow of the sun grew dark red, and the wind lifted, showing how cold the night was going to be. Across the river a distant forest fire put a streak of red and a plume of pale gray smoke into the sky. In time, on the plain above the lodge two lions began calling to each other, one far away bellowing loudly to one nearby, who waited a long time before answering, as if unwilling to answer at all. The far lion had to roar over and over, until its voice grew hoarse and even got a high pitch to it, to get a grunt from the near lion. How like people, I thought as I listened. One begs, another begrudges.
Inside the lodge Swift and Graylag also heard the lions, and crawled out to hear them better. Only recently, Graylag agreed, had lions come near the Char River. They usually chose deeper valleys with caves, or the valleys of rivers that cut through open plains. Swift and Graylag looked thoughtfully in the direction of the roaring. “I hear two,” said Graylag. “Perhaps there are more.”
“Not more,” said Swift, “just two.” Graylag looked at Swift doubtfully, which Swift noticed. “The far lion is a male.”
“A male?” asked Graylag. “You can tell from the voice?”
Swift laughed. In his mammoth hunter accent he said, “Not from the voice! From the time it takes the near lion to answer!” Now Graylag shook his head, not believing. “It’s true,” cried Swift. “A lioness gets an answer quickly.” He struck his fist into his palm twice, quickly.
Showing me their moonlit backs, Swift and Graylag sat on their heels to listen to the lions. Soon Owl and Ethis on their hands and knees followed Timu through the coldtrap to listen also. While they cupped their ears to catch the fading roar of the far lion, I compared the cut of Ethis’s trousers to the cut of Owl’s. Owl, of course, wore our kind of trousers. While the people spoke in whispers about the terrible winter that might come, bringing plains animals far to the south, I decided I could make my trousers look like Owl’s if someone would give me sinew to make thread and lend me an awl. And while the people sat in worried silence after the lions stopped roaring but as the night wind moaned in the spruce trees—the voice of The Bear reminding us of winter—I crawled through the coldtrap to beg thread and borrow an awl from Teal.
As begrudging as the near lion, Teal took a long time to answer. “You’ll waste sinew and leather by changing the style of your trousers,” she said at last. “And what will you wear if your cutting ruins them?”
“Please, Aunt,” I begged. “I’ll treat them carefully.” Reluctantly she took her bag from one of the antler tines under the roof, and reluctantly she reached into it for her awl and a small length of sinew.
“Use the sinew you pick from the old seams,” she said.
Because I didn’t want anyone to tease me, I waited while all the people outside crawled slowly back through the coldtrap, but when the way was clear I ducked out to the dayfire, kicked off my trousers, and turned them inside out. There I picked open the seams and with the awl pierced a new row of holes for the needle.
After a while I felt someone near, and raising my head saw Meri sitting quietly beside me, holding a small strip of meat. I thought she had brought the meat for me but out of the night the wolf pup, stealthy because most people stoned him, crept to her, gulped the meat, and vanished in the dark again.
Just as I decided to punish Meri with silence for feeding the pup rather than me, we heard the pup bark sharply. Then we heard a terrible loud snort and a stamping that made the earth shake—something was rushing at us! Suddenly, out of the dark the pup dashed up to us, chased by the young rhino. The pup tried to hide behind Meri but we both leaped out of the way, Meri to the right, I to the left, while the rhino’s charge carried it straight between us, past the dayfire and into the dark again.
There the youngster gave a sorry bellow as he found himself alone. From the bushes tramped the mother to the rescue, her huge face, as long and plain as the slope of a hill, swinging anxiously from side to side as she came. She seemed to blame me when she saw me—she gave a terrible snort, and the next thing I knew, I was running headlong through the dark with the huge thing pounding after me, her warm breath like wind on my legs. I dodged. She tried to follow, but she was so big and going so fast that she couldn’t turn quickly enough. I scrambled up the little cliff behind the lodge, and before I knew it, I was peering over the edge listening to the rhino’s thumping feet and to the people all shouting at once. If I had been wearing my baggy new trousers, my legs would have caught in the extra leather and I might have been killed.
The mother rhino must have charged the lodge—the shouting people scattered. I heard Swift’s voice above the rest, then saw a bright torch waving, heard a thump and a bellow, and saw the young rhino running headlong into the night, a spear waving in his side and his long hair burning like a thistle on fire. The mother pounded after him. Sliding down the cliff, I crept back to the lodge.
The mother rhino had shattered our coldtrap as easily as a man breaks kindling. By the light of the moon we saw that the bones and branches of the walls and the antlers of the roof lay crushed into the meat of our fawn stored at the side of the passageway. Also the rhino had stepped on what was left of the shirtful of berries. A dark pool of berry juice oozed into her footprint, like blood. Owl and Ina were weeping. Teal cried, “How will we mend this before the snow?”
“Be glad the lodge is standing!” said Graylag.
“The rhino will be back to trample and kill us,” said Ina. “She knows where we are, and now that you hurt her young one, she hates us.”
Graylag turned on Swift, who still held the torch he had used on the rhino. “Didn’t I say not to show them fire?” Graylag asked angrily.
The anger didn’t bother Swift. “They won’t be back,” he said, and scornfully tossed his torch onto the embers of the dayfire. “They don’t like fire.”
Swift was right. The rhinos didn’t come back. Although all of us except the mammoth hunters decided to sit outside during the night—I sewing my trousers, the others listening to the distant crying of the young rhino, and all of us sure that the mother would come back at any moment to trample the lodge and whoever was inside—the mother did no more than call out a few times. She seemed to be up on the plain above the valley. “You see?” said Swift before going through the broken coldtrap to sleep. “The fire burned the baby. Now the small one is hurt and the big one won’t leave it.”
Late at night the other people dozed, but I kept sewing. Toward morning, when the seam was finished and I only needed to trim off the extra leather, I heard hyenas calling m-m-m-mmwoa?—their call that sounds like a person asking a question. Then I heard more crying, followed by snorting and pounding. Timu and Elho woke up and looked at each other. The hyenas and the rhinos were having a fight.
Right before sunrise I trimmed the last of the leather and put the trousers on. As I did, ravens called in the sky, then dropped out of the clouds to the plain where the rhinos were. When Timu and Elho saw this, they made the hunter’s handsign for carrion.
“Wives!” they called. Ethis and Ankhi came out of the broken opening of the lodge, where they, trusting in Swift’s experience, had been sleeping unafraid.
“What now?” asked Ankhi.
“Bring your ax and your knife,” said Elho. “Hyenas have killed the young rhino.”
The two men with their mammoth hunter women set out for the plain, led by the sight of the ravens. Presently Timu turned back, annoyed. “Yanan!” he called. “Are you going to sit there? Come!” So although I was about to fall asleep, I took my ax and followed. It seemed that Timu meant me as well as Ethis when he called his wives.
Letting the others go ahead of me, I stole a look at my trousers. The seat which once had bagged now fit. Also I could feel the reassuring touch of leather all the way up my legs. The insert with its embarrassing decoration was still there, but I pulled the fringe on my belt to cover it. I felt better, not so ashamed, but I must have been walking too slowly, because Timu looked back impatiently. I touched my nose and mouth in a gesture of apology. He nodded—it was all right—then gave me the hunter’s handsign to come carefully.
We climbed the terraces to the plain. Over a rise of ground, on a treeless part of the terrace, we saw the rounded side of the young rhino lying still on the heather. Over him stood his mother, her wide hips toward us, her tail raised. Beyond her, just showing above the heather, four hyenas stretched their necks to look at us. The mother rhino shifted her hips restlessly—she wanted to turn around to see what the hyenas saw but didn’t dare take her eyes off them. We sat too, hidden in the heather, and moving very slowly began to pull grass tussocks for their clumps of sod.
The wind blew on my cheek, then veered to blow on the backs of my ears. A moment later, the mother rhino spun around to face us. But though she had our scent, she didn’t seem to see us, and though she stamped and snorted threats, she didn’t dare to charge. The sight of her rear was a signal to the hyenas who, afraid to lose even scraps to the ravens, anxiously moved closer. The mother turned and rushed them. They scattered, then again drew near.
Time passed. By noon the mother’s head and tail were drooping, as if she were tired or were giving up. A raven flew down to roost on her spine. By early afternoon she was moving short distances to feed. Each time she did, the hyenas stole up to her youngster, making her charge back again.
By midafternoon the hyenas were goading her to chase them. When she ran after one, the others would close in on the dead calf. When she ran back, the one she chased would lope at her side. This was heavy work for the hyenas, as the heather was thick and springy underfoot and the day was warm. From time to time they would stretch their necks, looking anxiously at us to see whether we were stealing their food. We laughed to ourselves as we sat comfortably hidden in the heather; taking all the risks, the hyenas were going to tire the rhino for us, even though they seemed to guess what we were planning. Then suddenly one of the hyenas led the charging rhino right toward us—we had to jump to our feet and scatter.
“Hyenas are filth!” cursed Timu as he dodged.
At last the rhino no longer chased the hyenas but stood apart from her calf, on whose corpse ravens were feeding. Perhaps when she saw the ravens she lost hope. The hyenas gathered at the corpse, snarling at each other. We let them eat for a little while, waiting for the rhino to move farther away. When she was at a safe distance, we stood up and walked boldly toward them.
The hyenas looked at us, then threatened us with snarls and showed us all their teeth, hoping to scare us. But people can throw things and hyenas cannot. Timu threw a rock at the nearest hyena. We heard a shriek and a sharp crack—Timu had broken its eyetooth! “You tried to get us killed,” he jeered while the hyenas, even the one with the bleeding mouth, watched us cut into the meat. “Now see us! Next time we’ll kill you.”
Back at the lodge, the people fixing the coldtrap had been able to scrape up some of the trampled venison. This, with some of the meat of the young rhino, we broiled on the coals of the dayfire. Teal was still worried that the mother would attack the lodge again during the night. But Owl and Crane, when they went to the river to fill a waterskin, caught sight of the rhino on the south bank. “She swam,” said Swift. “She won’t be back.” Or as he put it, “wand be bag.”
“So you say.” Teal poked doubtfully at a broiling strip of rhino meat. “Yet she shouldn’t have been here in the first place. Since we knew of no rhinos here before, why are you so sure of this one?”
As if Teal’s ignorance were hurting him, Swift widened his strange, sky-colored eyes. “This wasn’t good country for her,” he explained earnestly. “There are rocks here. She’s big. She’s heavy. Rocks hurt her feet. She didn’t want to be here, but she was, because of the river.”
“Because of the river?”
“Of course because of the river!” Swift pointed to the meat of the baby rhino. “His mother came from plains in the north. She was afraid the cold winter coming would kill her little one, and she tried to find good plains in the south. But she found your Char River too deep for her baby. She was afraid he might drown like that one.” Swift poked a stick into the broiling meat of the drowned fawn. “Now her little one is killed, she can go across and not come back. The deep river doesn’t matter to her.” Swift’s pale eyes took in all of us around the fire. Then he lifted his chin and proudly said, “I tell you one lion is a male; you don’t believe me. I tell you the rhino is afraid of fire; you don’t believe me. I tell you she won’t be back; you don’t believe me. But you should believe me—we of the plains are familiar with plains animals.” Since he said “Jar” for “Char” and “blains” for “plains,” some of us couldn’t help but smile, liking to think we couldn’t understand him.
“Timu calls you Wife,” said Teal to me early one morning as the Yellowleaf Moon, almost full, was setting. She and I were following a deer trail into the hills, on our way to dig lilies. “He watches you when he thinks you don’t see him.” I knew this, but I said nothing. Teal went on. “He wants coitus.”
This surprised me. “He has coitus with Ethis!”
“Ignorant girl. Coitus would frighten the child Ethis is carrying.”
I knew that we say “a stranger in the coldtrap” to show the fear a tiny unborn child must feel when he sees his father’s penis before he knows his father’s face, but if Teal thought that was stopping Timu, I thought I knew better. Anyway, Ethis’s pregnancy barely showed. If a baby was there, it was a small one. “I hear them making the noise in the night,” I said.
“I have ears!” snapped Teal. “But there are more ways than having coitus to make that noise. As you’ll find out. Look at the west.” I looked where Teal was looking, at the rim of the setting moon. “Tonight it is full. Tomorrow we will initiate you. If he lies with you after, it won’t harm you.”
“I don’t want to lie with him,” I said.
“Some girls are afraid at first, but the fear leaves with experience. Isn’t Timu handsome? Don’t you like him?”
Not if it meant being initiated first. “I don’t want to be cut,” I said.
“You mustn’t show your fear,” said Teal. “The pride of your lineage will be in your care when we cut you. Remember that. If you show pain and fear, people will think that your lineage is weakening and that you aren’t ready to bear children. Do you remember how Owl screamed when she gave birth?” I remembered. One night in the lodge, the year before we went to the Fire River, Owl gave birth to her baby with so much fuss that Mother, Teal, Ina, Junco’s mother Bisti, and even Yoi scolded her until she wept from the scolding as much as from the pain. “Owl didn’t do well,” said Teal. “She wasn’t ready. Also, Ankhi and Rin will be watching you, and your co-wife Ethis. Also Meri. Do you want to shame yourself? Or do you want to set a good example for Meri and show the mammoth hunter women how it’s done?”
But I was afraid to bear children. Mother understood childbirth and was ready for it, yet she died of it. So did her baby. After all Owl’s painful labor, her little boy had died too. What good was it all doing? “I’m too young,” I pleaded.
“Not any more,” said Teal.
After we crossed the ridge and found the dry leaves of lilies, which showed us where to dig, we sat on our heels and took our antler picks to the partly frozen ground. I wasn’t cold but still I shivered, even in the sunlight on the southern hillside where the lilies grew, even in my new parka.
Teal seemed to understand. Resting her pick, she arranged bulbs in her carrying bag. “Listen to me, Yanan,” she said. “I went through initiation and childbirth, even though I was afraid at first and both were painful. Your mother did also. Even my mother, no one less than Sali Shaman, went through these things. I didn’t show fear, and neither did they. Neither will you. Don’t worry about any of it. These women’s things—menstruation, initiation, childbirth—they aren’t very difficult and don’t need skill or knowledge. They’re not like finding food or hunting or building or sewing. They just happen. You need only to keep quiet; all can be done without practicing.” Teal smiled.
“But why must I?”
Teal grew serious. “We must. It’s The Woman Ohun’s plan.”
That night the full Yellowleaf Moon rose huge and pink at sunset. All night it lit the sky, and set when the sun was rising. At dawn and dusk on this day we call the sun and moon The Woman Ohun and Her Daughter. When the sun was high again, all the women of the lodge, even Meri, carried two deerskins across the river to a southward trail. It led to a meadow among hills where, under some birches, grew short, thick grass and berry bushes. Red deer used this place for grazing. Because we got there when the sun was high, the deer were lying down, chewing. Reluctantly they rose to their feet—hindquarters first, then forequarters—and moved in two groups over the crest of the hill to rest where we couldn’t see them. First trooped the hinds, all together in an orderly herd shaped like a spearblade, with lookouts before and behind. Beside them wandered the stags, each one alone but all moving in more or less the same direction. These stags would soon be roaring and fighting each other, gathering hinds.
We built a fire and stripped off all our clothes, even our ornaments (those of us who had ornaments), even the ties of our braids. Then we shook out our hair and began the Deer Dance. Singing the music, clapping the rhythm, we circled the fire, taking two steps forward, then one step toward the fire, letting our hair fly out over the smoke. Meri and I didn’t know the dance at first, or the song either, but before we had gone halfway around, following Owl’s scarified haunches, we had learned. We circled for a time, Teal screaming in a high bird’s voice, and as I seemed to be just one of the dancers, I began to wonder what this had to do with me.
But in time Teal took my arm and drew me toward the fire. Meri tried to follow me, but Teal pushed her back among the dancers. Then Teal spread one of the deerskins on the ground and told me to lie face down. The women clapped their hands to stop the singing and the dancing; suddenly there was no sound but the wind and the fire, and I felt everyone’s eyes on me. Then I knew why Teal had said I would be able to chase away my fear—I could either cry or show the pride of our lineage, like the women before me. Almost gladly I took a deep breath, and with a nice slap of my palms hitting the leather, I threw myself on the deerskin. If I had tossed a necklace or a tool in front of the other women as carelessly as I threw myself, I would have been scolded.
But everyone except Teal and Meri wandered off to pick berries. I saw them squatting naked among the bushes, tossing berries into their mouths. Teal took out a sharp knife and crouched beside me. Worried, Meri sat on her heels by the fire. With only Meri and Teal, by now testing her knife on her thumb, I saw that no one was there to admire my courage.
Presently I felt Teal lift a small pinch of flesh on my hip. I looked over my shoulder. Quickly she drew her knife across the pinch, let go, and gathered up a new bit of flesh beside the first cut. By the time she was making the third cut, the first stung badly. Just as I felt tears coming, Teal whispered, “Relax now. These are the marks of The Woman Ohun to protect you. Soon they will heal and then grow small.” I breathed deeply and tried to think of something besides the pain. When the other women came back from their berrying and began to dance again, I made sure to seem as if I didn’t care; resting my chin on my two fists, I watched the struggles of a nest of ants whose home, a stick, had been tossed on the fire.
As the day wore on I grew very cold, lying naked on the ground in the autumn air. The pain was bad, and to feel my blood trickling down the skin of my thighs was frightening. Up my right thigh and hip and down my left moved Teal’s knife, slitting bits of skin. Although I could keep my face still, I couldn’t lie still, and I began to shiver. After what seemed half of my lifetime, Teal made the last of the cuts, then took warm ashes from the fire and rubbed them into the wounds. This last pain surprised me so much that a cry almost escaped me. I bit my lips and squeezed my eyelids shut to stop the tears.
But that was all. Again I looked over my shoulder and saw the marks of Ohun, the two rows of cuts from the tops of my thighs to the base of my spine, like the rows of scars on all other women, like the rump patch of a deer.
I thought I should get up, but Teal pushed me down firmly. “Stay there,” she said, so I did, while she threw the other deerskin over me to cover me completely, even my head. Then I lay under it in the dark, hurting and freezing while the dancing women, Teal among them, stamped the ground nearby.
When next they rested, the women talked lewdly. “An erection like a horse’s,” said Ethis of our husband, and in my mind’s eye I saw Timu standing with his penis extended almost to the ground, like a stallion’s.
“It could burst a woman,” said Rin.
“A trail is marked for it to follow,” said Ankhi, speaking of the scars. “Yanan’s vagina can be found in the dark.”
Owl, Teal, and Ina laughed at these words but added none of their own. Being Timu’s sister, Owl couldn’t speak lewdly of him, of course, nor could Teal and Ina, being his stepmothers. And not until the next summer, when I watched the initiation of a girl of the mammoth hunters out on the steppe, did I realize that women always speak lewdly when the rows of scars are made. On the steppe I laughed at the jokes and tried to speak lewdly too. But at my own initiation, because only the mammoth women joked, I thought that they were trying to upset me. Under the cape I made up my mind not to move until Teal called me, and then to stand up smoothly, as if nothing had happened, and to show no feeling but pride. I lay so quietly that Meri asked Teal if I was still alive.
“She’s alive,” said Teal. “When the moon rises and the last red part of the sun is gone, she’ll get up.” I heard the women’s voices fade, probably as they went to eat more berries.
The wind blew cold near the end of the day. I was hungry, stiff, and shivering. I heard the voices of the women coming back, and then I heard, far away, quail calling as they do on a clear evening when the last red bit of the sun goes down. When Teal lifted the deerskin, I leaped to my feet and brushed off my thighs as if I had, perhaps, just stumbled. Taking no special notice of me, the women danced again, and although I began to bleed, although blood ran down my legs into my footprints so that as I circled the fire I could see where I had been, I danced with them. We sang:
You who give birth to everything,
You whose children are all the animals and all the people,
You whose children are the stars,
You whose hair burns in the northern lights,
You who walk naked in the snow,
Don’t take our lives when we give birth.
Let us give birth easily, as the deer gives birth.
Let us walk away from that place without injury.
Don’t kill us.
Let our children be strong
Like the deer’s children.
Let them soon walk behind us in health.
Don’t kill them.
Give us life, Ohun.
Give us children.
“Well,” said Teal when the song was over, “I’m cold.” The dance circle broke; in the fading light we went to get our clothes. Trying to dress as easily as I would after a bath, I pulled my trousers over the scars of Ohun, and then, still with no expression on my face, I put on my shirt and braided my hair.
“Good,” said Teal as we took up the trail. “No crying. Well done. Now you’re different.”