11

PEOPLE OFTEN TOLD the story of the earliest men, Weevil and Wolverine, and The First Woman, Mekka. When Weevil met The First Woman at his summer hunting grounds, he didn’t know how to make love to her. Just then Wolverine came along and told Weevil that the woman was meat. Weevil built a fire to cook her, then killed her with his spear. Fie cooked and ate her, offering some to Wolverine. “That’s your wife you’re eating,” said Wolverine. “None for me. I’m not a cannibal.” Weevil got so angry he threw the hipbone at Wolverine. The hipbone struck a rock, shattered, and in its place stood The First Woman with her back turned. She bent over and looked at Weevil between her legs, singing:

 

Husband fight your wife!

Wife fight your husband!

 

Suddenly Weevil’s left hand reached out and struck his right hand. His right hand picked up a stick and beat his left hand. His left hand reached for the ax, but the right hand snatched it and threw it far away. The left hand grabbed a brand from the fire and burned the right hand, but the right hand grabbed the left hand around its neck and choked it until it turned blue. When it seemed that the two hands were going to kill each other, The First Woman sang again:

 

Husband, stop fighting!

Wife, stop fighting!

 

Now Weevil’s hands let go of each other and collapsed on their backs, exhausted. “How unhappy I am,” said Weevil. “If my hands keep on fighting, I will starve.”

“Clasp them together,” said The First Woman. So Weevil clasped his hands. “When they are clasped, they can’t fight,” said The First Woman.

And Weevil saw that this was true, not only of his hands but of a husband and wife also. So Weevil and The First Woman clasped each other, and after that Weevil knew that The First Woman was there not like an animal to be killed for food but to make his heart glad and to make children.

 

One night soon after my initiation someone shook me very gently, and I woke up. But for the sound of people breathing and the murmuring voices of Owl and Teal talking from their beds near the embers of Graylag’s fire, the lodge was quiet and so dark that I could barely make out the shape of someone crouched beside me. As I tried to see who it was, my skin suddenly prickled. A man! He was large, a faint man-smell came from him, and although I couldn’t see him, I heard him breathing and knew he was facing me. Then his warm hand, dry and rough as antler, circled my upper arm, slipped down, and clasped my wrist. I shook Meri, who stirred in her sleep, while the man’s hand moved down my arm to my hand, which he lifted and stroked. He spoke. “Come.”

It was Timu. Although his voice was very soft, almost a whisper, at the sound of it Owl and Teal fell silent and tossed a few sticks on the fire. In the very faint light I saw that Timu was naked and that his eyes were looking into mine.

Beside me, Meri sat up suddenly and threw her arms around my neck. Carefully Timu lifted them away, folded her hands together, and placed them on her chest. Then, pulling the deerskin over her, he closed her eyes with his thumbs. “Be peaceful, Sister-in-Law,” he whispered, soft as breathing. Her eyes flew wide, but she didn’t try to stop him as he took my upper arm and pulled me to my feet.

I still remember the clasp of Timu’s hand—strong and warm, with pulses in it. I remember realizing that he must have waited for the right moment to come for me, when nobody was sitting by the fire to eat or talk or get warm, when the lodge was dark and everyone was lying down.

Walking very slowly, silently, Timu led me around Swift and Rin in their deerskins by the door, around Elho and Ankhi lying together in the middle of the lodge, around Crane and his wife, Owl, who had tactfully covered her face with her deerskin, around Ethis, alone, quietly curled on her side, around Graylag, asleep between his wives. At his own bed Timu sat on his heels and drew me down beside him, then wound an arm around me, rolled on his side, and pulled his deerskin over us completely, covering even our heads.

Because Timu had praised me for bravery when my scarification was made, I had since tried to walk proudly, without flinching, saying nothing about the soreness and itching caused by the cuts. Then I saw that Timu might have taken my silence to mean that the cuts had healed. What good had my bravery done me if it had led me to this? Would there be a baby? I didn’t quite understand what was going to happen next, but I knew I wasn’t ready for it. I knew if he hurt me, I might not be able to keep still. What would Teal think of my crying? Or any of the people? Swift and Rin, no better than strangers, would laugh at me.

Just as I opened my mouth to speak, Timu ran his palm over my hip. It hurt! I gasped. He stopped; then, wrapping his arm loosely around my arms, his leg around my legs, he put his lips right on my ear so that only I could hear him and said, “Don’t be afraid. Don’t fight. This is good, not bad, you’ll see.”

Suddenly my throat tightened painfully as he began to rub my body from my belly to my throat. “My scars,” I whispered.

His face hidden in my neck, Timu stroked my belly with his rough, dry hand. What is happening to me? I wondered; then I heard him whisper, “Will I stop?” I felt the tickle of his breath as he waited for my answer, and as I might feel the earth tremble faintly with the footfalls of a large, advancing animal, I felt his heart. And I tried to answer, but by now my thoughts were darting and hiding like siskins in a forest, and although I could tell that my scars might still bother me a little, by now I didn’t care.

 

Once after I became a spirit, when the Moon of Walking was a crescent but the cold was still so strong that the northern lights hissed like burning spruce needles, Teal tranced to beg for meat. The deer, instead of gathering to start their northward journey to the plains, were scattered through the open woods on the south side of the river. Time and again hunters had gone after them but couldn’t find them. Other animals were coming from their wintering places; just that evening a white owl hen floated softly overhead, followed later by another hen, as if the white owls had their own trail in the sky.

Because the shaman promised us a fine reward of fat if we found deer, Marmot soberly agreed to try. But then, instead of taking the form of an animal who hunts widely, like a raven or wolf, or even an animal who hunts by day, since the night was almost over, he took the form of a white owl cock. Rising into the air, Marmot mantled for a moment on the highest tine of the antlers on the roof, then flew silently into the dark in the direction taken by the hens.

A white owl cock! I thought. What selfishness! Yet in the lodge below, the people sang a song in praise of Marmot. It made me sad. I tried to brush away this feeling, thinking, How easily fooled the people are; if they’re hungry, they deserve to be. But after listening a little longer to the sincere, uplifted voices, I slid off the roof in the form of a wolf, nosed for a moment at the people’s sparse refuse lying on the snow, then made for the south side of the river.

As I was scrambling up the last sloping terrace of the far bank, dawn came, and in the light I saw ahead of me the silhouette of a large wolf against the sky. He saw me before I saw him, and poised in midstep with his forefoot lifted, he looked straight at me, his gray face in shadow, with the fur around his head lit from behind. Carefully we approached each other, and realizing that we didn’t know each other, we tried to circle each other slowly so we wouldn’t too quickly get too near.

Soon he cautiously stretched his nose toward my hindquarters, making me tuck my tail, while his own tail, which at first he carried straight out behind him, he lifted into the air. I found a strong, crisp, male smell about him, but it was not completely unfamiliar—he was a young wolf from the large pack who lived in the hills where the Char rose. I had noticed his sign and heard his voice many times before.

In a moment we were frisking. We dropped to our elbows, bounced, danced, nipped each other’s ears and faces, and worried each other’s necks until I knocked him with my hips and dashed away. He chased me! I lost him! Then I spied him crouched behind a bush, his ears pricked, his yellow eyes bright, and as I turned to run he sprang at me.

All day we played. Late in the afternoon we ate some snow, then stretched out full length in an open glade, back to back, our fur touching. We lay in the last patch of sunshine, and when it faded and the light in the glade turned blue, we stood up, stretched, and shook out our fur. I kissed his lips. Tenderly he caught my muzzle in his jaws. I had thought we would go hunting, but before I knew it I had turned around to show him my haunches, and looking back at him over my shoulder, I drew aside my tail. He threw his gray foreleg over my back. I braced myself to receive him. We joined. Pulling his hind leg over me he turned around, and in a great steaming cloud of our own panting breath we stood still, our rumps pressed together, our faces lifted, our ears low, our eyes shut.

Ah, how fast my heart beat and how gladness rushed through me! When at last we came apart, we danced and kissed and chased each other, although the woods by now were quiet and dark. And then, our hearts filled with love and happiness, we began our hunt.

We stayed together for a long time, my partner and I, mating, hunting, and playing. Whenever the cold air held a cloud of odor, or when, like smoke, a scent of dung or footprints crept up from the earth, we would look at each other to learn what the other thought. Together we followed promising odors and covered bad odors with snow.

One day we hunted up and down the south side of the river until we found a hind who was thin from winter and weak from the swarm of ticks we noticed under her falling winter hair. Sick as she was, it took us most of the afternoon to get her down. Even after we backed her into a thicket, she kept us dodging her terrible kicks by making us keep our eyes on the tip of her nose—where we were ready to grab her—and on her clubbing feet.

Afterwards I realized that a tigress was watching us from the cover of some trees. When the hind broke and ran, with us right behind her, trying to bite her haunches to make her bleed, the tigress must have followed, but we were still too busy to notice. Not until I bit the hind through her nose and my partner bit her rear ankle, not until we stretched her out and wrenched her over so that she crashed down on her side, did I see, out of the corner of my eye, a big striped form slipping among the trees. The tigress! Then a gust of air blew toward me and I smelled her. My hair rose as my heart sank. I tried to get a better look, but my teeth were so deep in the hind’s neck that my cheeks were wrinkled up around my eyes—I seemed to see everything over the top of a hill. The hind may have seen the tigress, though; suddenly she bellowed and began to kick harder than ever, snapping my head from side to side. I had no chance to look around for anything.

By the time the deer lay still and our stomachs were hoping for the meat, I remembered the tigress and turned to see her calmly walking toward us. She stared hard at us with her frightening yellow eyes until a big rush of fear made my legs jump, taking me straight over the carcass and off at a run with my tail tucked. My partner followed. At a safe distance we watched the tigress calmly lie down and, as if it was her habit, lick the carcass before eating. We who had done all the hunting and taken all the bruises got no food from our hard work except for a few bites we snatched and the drops of blood on our fur. When we licked the blood off ourselves, our meal was over and we had to hunt again.

Two of us were too few—we knew that. Many of us might have been able to stand off a tiger; many of us could easily pull down another deer. The forest was alive with red deer and roe deer, or so it seemed to us, but we weren’t able to start them bleeding. They ran too fast or stood at bay, their backs in thickets. We ate hares and voles.

We followed the river upstream to find a place for a den, a hole that someone had already started and that we could make bigger, because the ground was frozen. We needed to live by water so we could drink and so we would have a way to keep our pups from following us. In my mind’s eye I saw myself leaving the den with pups stumbling after me until I crossed the water, so they couldn’t follow but had to wait on the bank until I came back. On a sandy hillside we found a hole started by hyenas, too wide for us and too shallow, but since the frozen earth at the bottom of it crumbled easily, we began to dig it out. When it was deep we lay at the mouth with our bellies against the cold, loose earth, rolling out our tongues to cool ourselves. In my mind’s eye I saw ourselves next winter, with the pups almost grown and our pack larger.

At dusk the full moon rose. We nosed each other’s faces, our tails waving. Again we were ready to hunt! Before we left the den we sang together, softly at first, then with all our hearts, finishing with yells that warmed our blood and filled our heads with triumph.

During the many days that I stayed on the south side of the river with my partner wolf, I never thought of the lodge or the people. As if I had never known them or they had never been, I had no plans to go back. Then one day in early spring we came upon a very strange object: the leg of a hare alone by itself, with no hare attached to it, dangling in a cloud of human scent in an empty space just at head-height above the trail. My partner wolf touched the hare’s leg with his nose, then took it in his teeth, and suddenly he flew up to hang in the middle of the air, his feet wildly thrashing. I was so frightened I dashed away to hide in the woods, only to creep back much later, my hair on end. Horrified, I saw him still struggling weakly, hanging in a cloud of his own musk mixed with the smell of his semen and feces. I waited anxiously, but he didn’t come down again, and after dark, when the moon rose, I smelled hyenas, so I crept away while a gang of hyenas, chuckling and pushing each other, tugged down his body and cracked his bones.

One last time I crept back to where he had been. Now the earth was all soaked with the stench of hyenas, and no trace remained of my partner wolf but tufts of fur. There was no reason to stay longer, but I didn’t want to leave. I stayed nearby for most of the night, and when the sky in the east began to turn pale, I thought I saw his gray face looking at me from a cluster of low spruce trees. Filled with joy, I ran toward him, but after all he wasn’t there, nor had he left footprints or a trace of scent. I called, letting my voice go high and loud with a tremble in it, but no one answered.

If I had stayed in the forest, what would have happened to me? Would I have given birth to a litter of pups? One lonely day I fell asleep on a south-facing rock all gray with lichen and silver with mica, a rock that even after dusk still held the warmth of the sun. While I was asleep I dreamed of hunting horses with Timu, and I awoke in human form. The ragged, waning Icebreaking Moon shone between the branches of a spruce tree, and by its light I began my hike back to the lodge on the Char River. I walked all night, as frog song leaped in bursts from the edge of the water, and all the next day, as flocks of calling ducks beat the air around me on their flights in and out of the reeds. When I reached the lodge, Marmot asked me where I had been for so long and why I had walked back in the form of a woman rather than running in the form of a wolf or flying in the form of a raven, and I looked at him scornfully because I didn’t want to answer. “What for?” I said.

 

After I began to sleep with Timu, I became impatient for night to come while at the same time I was anxious all day to be near him. I tried to sit beside him at the dayfire when he scraped a hide, or at least to be within sound of his voice. Hearing him laugh made me laugh. The cloud-ribbed sky made me think of his ribs or the roof of his mouth. I wanted to do everything to please him, and at last saw why some women try to do as their men say.

I was jealous of Ethis and her pregnancy, even though it meant that Timu slept with me. But he would sleep with me anyway, I thought scornfully. I remembered how when we were children I used to try to get him scolded or to shame him or make the other children laugh at him. What ignorance! What had I known about love?

When Timu went hunting with his half-brother, Elho, or his sister’s husband, Crane, I took Father’s spear and followed them. Why not? I was strong, a fast runner, and good at stalking. One day I wounded a roe deer, which Timu finished killing with his spear. Timu then said that he and I were enough for a hunting team.

So we hunted far and wide together, sometimes stopping at midday to make love, if the frost was not too heavy and we found a good place. I would kick off my trousers and drop to my hands and knees on the smooth, golden leaves of a birch grove or on the rough, sun-warmed needles of a spruce grove, and smile at him over my shoulder. Afterwards we would carefully pick the birch leaves or spruce needles from each other’s hair. We thought that if people could guess what we did, they would laugh at us.

But we didn’t kill anything and in fact seldom even saw game. Perhaps my mind was not on food but only on Timu, and if his mind seemed on anything but me, I would tease him until he chased me. On one such day, although he quickly caught me and threw our trousers onto a wormwood bush, he seemed thoughtful. No matter how we tossed about, he seemed to be searching the plain with his eyes. And as soon as we were done he took his firesticks and started a brush fire. Annoyed, I asked why. He answered that here follows-fire grass would most likely grow next spring to lure grazing animals. Giving me a tuft of heather as a torch, he told me to drag the flames a long way so that the field of follows-fire would be very large. Then I went one way, setting fire, while he went the other, and when we were far apart the wind suddenly flamed the wormwood bush with our trousers. Too late we ran back. Timu’s trousers were burned.

“Why must you always make love? Now see what’s happened!” he cried angrily, pulling on the trousers even though one leg was black and shorter than the other.

I was angry too. “Did I put your trousers there? It’s you who started the fire!” I shouted.

In angry silence we strode back to the lodge. The people, who had seen the fire in the distance and were waiting for us, noticed the burned trousers at once. “What happened to your clothes?” they cried.

My co-wife Ethis looked startled, then sullen. “I made his trousers,” she reminded everyone.

Swift laughed, showing all his teeth. “Ha-ha!” he cried. “Where was your leg when your pants burned?”

Then everyone laughed, or so it seemed while I stared at my feet, my braid between my breasts. When I remembered to show pride as Teal had taught me, I raised my chin and threw my braid between my shoulders. Then I saw that Meri and Ethis weren’t laughing but were staring at me, Meri anxious, Ethis jealous, and that Graylag wasn’t laughing but was staring at Timu, furious. “Are you a child to take a woman hunting?” he roared at Timu. “Don’t we need hides? Don’t we need meat? Do you expect us to hunt for you while you play with your wife?”

Timu looked coldly at his father. “I’m trying to teach her to hunt. Is that playing? Are we so many that we don’t need her help this winter?”

“Then next time go with a third person,” said Graylag. “Go with Swift or me, to keep your mind on your work.”

Timu’s face darkened, but his expression stayed the same. “Gladly,” he said at last. “I thought you and Swift hunted together because of your age. I’m glad you feel I won’t walk too fast for you.”

Graylag’s face turned red and his eyes grew round. “Am I slow like a woman?” he asked, leaning as if to take a step toward Timu. “Am I to be insulted by my own son?”

“Will we fight, Father?” asked Timu. “If you will, I’m ready.”

But by now everyone was shouting at once. “Don’t fight!”

“Respect your father!”

“Graylag shamed his son.”

“Timu can’t help his anger!”

“Timu talked back!”

“Graylag is right to be angry.”

“Please, good friend, sit here with me a while.”

“Please, Brother, come sit with me.”

“Please, Husband, don’t lose your temper.”

“Are we animals, to fight?”

Slowly Graylag and Timu were persuaded to sit at opposite sides of the men’s dayfire, Graylag with Swift, Timu with Elho, so the two could relieve their feelings by talking about each other but not to each other. I sat with the other women at our dayfire, where we cracked pine nuts as gently as possible while secretly listening to the men. I was astonished to hear them settle the quarrel by finding fault with me. “Yanan is always begging,” Owl’s husband, Crane, explained to Swift. “My wife was the same. It happens when girls are new to coitus.”

Swift agreed. “Women keep after you. Graylag knows it.” Groping in his hunting bag, Swift found a squirrel and laid it on the fire. “Small, but a bite for each man here,” he said seriously. “A little food helps anger go away.”

It was all too much for Teal. Dropping her pretense of cracking pine nuts, she stood up. “Do you say that Yanan is to blame for Timu covering her and covering her? He was having her before her Woman Ohun scars had scabs on them. You insult me and my lineage when you insult my kinswoman.”

The men all turned to look at us indignantly. We stared back. As so often happens, what started as a quarrel between two people was spreading to become a quarrel between the women and the men. “It’s lucky for Timu that coitus isn’t food,” I said to the circle of women, trying to sound spirited, not stiff. “He would die if he got no more food.” The women laughed and cheered, looking over at the men’s fire to be sure the men didn’t miss it. Angrily the men stared back.

And so passed the afternoon and evening, the men not sharing the squirrel with us and we not sharing the pine nuts. Of course the squirrel was very small and we had a great many pine nuts, but our feelings were hurt all the same.

By morning there was no question of Timu hunting with me. While I was still inside by the fire, before I could crack a handful of pine nuts for myself to give me strength for the day, Timu went away with Crane. I found their tracks in the frost. Elho and White Fox seemed to be thinking of hunting—Elho was knocking tiny flakes from the edge of his spear while White Fox looked on—but I had no thought of going with Elho and White Fox, even if they wanted me. Nor did I want to stay at the lodge today, as Swift and Graylag were working a hide by their dayfire and showed every sign of staying. So I decided to go hunting by myself, and went into the lodge for Father’s spear. I lifted it. It was, as always, very heavy. I would, as always, have trouble throwing it.

But then an idea struck me. Today I would use a lighter spear to see if my aim improved. In fact I would use a boy’s spear, White Fox’s, with burned and sharpened ivory for its point. White Fox could use Father’s. When I brought Father’s spear to White Fox, he gladly agreed to exchange, and I soon found myself crossing the river on the ice, the little spear balancing lightly and perfectly between just two of my fingers. In the heavy frost, reindeer tracks led everywhere. I began to look about for sets made during the night.

It wasn’t to be easy, I saw. Although I found tracks, the frost was melting around them, making it hard to tell which tracks were fresh and which were stale. Father could have done it, Graylag or Timu could have done it, and I could have done it if the tracks had been in mud. But tracking an animal in frost was something I didn’t do often. I wondered how to begin.

In time I noticed Meri’s wolf following me. This was no surprise; he often followed me or Meri whenever we went somewhere. I don’t know where he hid himself the rest of the time—we seldom saw him around the lodge anymore—but as soon as either of us set foot on a trail, he seemed to come from nowhere. Right away he chose one set of tracks and followed his nose after them. Off we went, the north wind in our faces, into the lichen-hung woods. The animal, a reindeer doe walking by herself, turned south as if to go into the range of low hills, but where the tracks turned, the wolf stood still and looked north, back toward the river. This can’t be, I thought; but the wolf’s ears were pricked, and he trembled a little as he stared into the woods. He knows something, I said to myself, changing my grasp on the spear so I could throw it.

Carefully, quietly, I eased myself through the little trees, and sure enough, a doe was hiding among them, her ears alert. The wolf, I saw, was very interested, his head forward, his eyes wide, and his nose pointing. He surely saw her, and knowing he was about to rush her, I balanced the spear and threw.

The wolf sprang almost as the spear left my hand. As the doe leaped with the spear in her neck, the wolf grabbed her by the hock. I ran to them, groping for the knife in my belt. My spear had missed her windpipe and the big veins—it shook in her neck, then dropped before I reached her, but when she tried to run the wolf jerked her backwards so she suddenly sat down.

That was all the time I needed. Forgetting the knife, I snatched up the spear and jabbed it through her ribs. With a bleating roar she tried to struggle up again, but the wolf held fast, and I threw myself full length on top of her. Her brown eye was not a hand’s breadth from my eyes. I looked down into it, saw it swimming with terror, then saw her eyelid flutter and her pupil glaze. But just in case, I took my knife out anyway and cut her throat.

Well! I should do something with this reindeer, I told myself, but all I could think was that I, in no time at all, had found and killed meat all by myself while the unlucky men had been trying for days but had caught nothing. So much for Timu teaching me to hunt! I’d get him to help bring the reindeer home, and then I’d teach him to hunt! I could hardly wait to see him.

The whole hunt went through my mind again—the tracks, the browsing doe, the spear, the strike, the awful bellow! I looked the doe up and down, and saw that the wolf had torn a flap of skin from her haunch and was gulping meat. Perhaps I hadn’t exactly killed her all alone; the wolf had helped. I knew the people would be angry when they saw the bites he had taken, but planning to think of some explanation, I let him eat for a while.

Suddenly I thought I heard something behind me. I looked, and saw a large brown animal half hidden in the trees. A hyena! Of course. Perhaps he was also hunting the doe. Surely he would have heard her bellow. Was there only one hyena? Usually they hunt in groups. I wondered what would happen if I now skinned the deer and cut up the carcass. Would the hyena fight me for her? One hyena I could manage. If there were many, I wasn’t sure. I would hate to come home having killed a reindeer which I then lost to some hyenas! If the people would mind the wolf having a few bites, how furious my losing the carcass would make them.

I looked at the wolf. Would he help? I didn’t think so. He was standing by the doe as if thinking of showing his teeth to the hyena, but his ears were low and his tail was tucked—he was also thinking of running. Suddenly the hyena whooped. Was he calling others? The wolf must have thought so, because he turned and ran. I looked at the hyena. He faded behind a spruce thicket, but since he didn’t come out again, I knew he was still there. Perhaps this meant that he was alone.

In case it did, I took off my belt, tied it around the doe’s antlers, and began to pull. She moved, but very slowly. Pulling her home would take the rest of the day. I saw I had no choice but to cut her in pieces and put the pieces as high as I could into trees, the way I used to keep food from the wolf at the Marten River. But first I would have to skin her. With White Fox’s spear I stabbed a hole in the tough hide over her pubic bone, then I crouched, and with an eye on the hiding place of the hyena, I took my knife to her belly.

I had hardly slit the skin when the hyena cantered from behind his cover and off among the trees. Something had scared him. I turned. Elho was coming up behind me very quietly.

Without a word he took out his knife and bent his long body to skin one of the legs. “Graylag should let Timu hunt with you,” he said when the leg was finished. “How can one person carry so much meat?”

These words pleased me very much, but still embarrassed by the burned trousers, I didn’t want to talk about hunting with Timu. “Did you see the hyena?” I asked him.

“Yes,” said Elho, “and the wolf too.”

The wolf? The wolf had left long ago. “Were you following me?” I asked.

Elho hesitated. “No one likes to hunt alone,” he said at last. “I decided to come to help you.”

Did he? “Before you went to the mammoth hunters you never worried about me,” I said. “You used to help my aunt in the woods, though, didn’t you?”

Elho showed his white teeth. I smiled too. “We were children then,” he said.

“And now we’re not children. Not since Teal took us out in the woods and told us the story of our kinswoman Sali.”

“Now we’re married and getting children,” he agreed.

Getting children? “You and Ankhi, perhaps,” I said.

Very serious, he waited, looking down at me. “Or you and Timu,” he said softly.

I looked at Elho’s chest, then at his shoulders, then up at his sunlit face. He certainly was handsome. No wonder my Aunt Yoi had once let him call her “wife.”

What was I doing, talking about getting children? Why was I letting Elho stand so near? I took a step backwards. “Me and Timu? When I get a child, I’ll tell Timu, not you. I’m not my Aunt Yoi, to spoil my lineage. I remember the story of Sali Shaman, if you don’t. If you’ve forgotten, go ask your mother to remind you.”

Elho wasn’t listening. Although I hoped I spoke a little sharply, his serious expression didn’t change. “Yanan,” he said gently. I didn’t answer, but I waited, not breathing. “Every night Timu has you. I hear you together and I envy him. And he has you while he hunts with you, the most beautiful of all the women. I want you too.”

Far off in the woods I heard a jay. A pulse beat in my throat, and for the shortest moment I stared hard into Elho’s eyes. Then, “For shame!” I said, as if I couldn’t imagine such a thing. “What will people think when they find us in the woods here? If you came to help me hunt, help me with this carcass. I remember everything our mothers told us, that night in the woods when the tigress came. I care what people say, if you don’t!” Seizing the doe by an antler, I jerked the corpse between us to rub out my tracks.

Elho gave me a long look. Another time, his eyes said. Then he turned to the carcass in its new position and started to skin another leg. “Go back to the lodge and get someone to help carry this,” he told me.

I ran. When I heard the river, I stopped. With amazement I saw I was obeying like a child. And the deer was mine! Elho, not I, should have gone to find the others. I wanted to go back and insist that he go and I stay, but it was too late now. He would laugh to see me angry, and might even take my going back as a signal that I had changed my mind. So, hating myself when I should have been proud, I trudged to the foot of the terrace.

There I looked up at the lodge. It was good I came when I did. Graylag, Swift, and Timu were looking down at me from their places at the dayfire. While they watched me climb the terrace, I felt as guilty as if Elho and I really had made love instead of simply thinking about it. When I reached the top, Timu asked me, rather scornfully, “Have you finished your hunt so soon?”

“Yes,” I said.

He looked surprised. “Did you find a carcass?”

“I have meat,” I said carelessly. “You’d better help me get it if you don’t want hyenas to eat it.”

“Eat what? A reindeer?”

“A reindeer doe. A yearling.”

“Did you kill it?” asked Timu.

“With this,” I said, holding up White Fox’s spear. And I turned around and walked off, not looking to see who was following.

When I heard their feet behind me on the trail, I knew the three of them were following. Too late, I saw I should have mentioned that they would find Elho there. As we came near the carcass, they noticed his tracks. “Elho?” said Timu curiously. “Is Elho here?”

“Yes,” I answered, as carelessly as I could. “Did you think I left a carcass for the hyenas? You wouldn’t wait for me this morning. If no one came along, I would have been all day putting the meat in a tree.” The men said nothing. What were they thinking? That Elho and I had arranged to meet in the woods? Well, they could find out for themselves. I knew better than to keep talking about it.

And they did find out for themselves. When we reached the carcass and Elho, I noticed the three men looking around at the tracks on the ground. Their manners didn’t let them crouch down to look at the tracks closely; rather, they tried to scan the ground casually, looking Elho over as well. He worked away with his knife, innocent as a ground squirrel, stopping only to glance at the others as if to ask why they didn’t help, as I was now doing. Timu and Graylag took out their knives.

Swift seemed about to do the same, when suddenly his casual manner changed. Giving a grunt of surprise, he looked at the ground with a puzzled, intent expression. Then he began to quarter the space around the deer, then circled us twice, then backtracked me and disappeared among the trees. Timu and Graylag got to their feet. What had he seen? Just in time Elho remembered to get up too. The men were about to follow Swift when he suddenly hurried up to us, rather excited. “Yanan!” he said. “That wolf of yours, he helped you! Did you know it?”

Of course I knew it! Swift treated us as if we were stupid. But, “Yes, Uncle,” I said.

“Come here and see this,” said Swift to the other men. They did, letting Swift show them how the wolf had followed the deer’s trail, where he must have seen the deer, although the trail led the other way, where he stood when he looked at the deer, and how he rushed it. At the footprints where the carcass lay, Swift showed the splash of blood from the wound and the hip mark where the wolf sat the deer down. He saw the hunt exactly.

Graylag and Timu were interested, and Elho pretended to be. But he knew better than to seem surprised—Swift of course found his tracks too. “You saw this!” said Swift.

“Not all of it,” Elho admitted. “I came too late to see all of it.”

Swift had forgotten any question of wrongdoing. “I want to see it. Yanan! Next time we hunt, I want to go with you.” Of course this sounded different in his ugly accent: “I wa ndu go wi dyu.”

While we butchered the carcass, Swift asked me many questions about the wolf. Had I known what the wolf would do? Had the wolf known what I would do? While we carried the meat home in single file, I tried to answer the questions Swift called over his shoulder. This wolf had never helped me, I said to Swift’s back, but several times his mother had tried to make me help her. Swift must have been listening very carefully. When we were at the lodge, stuffing the meat into the coldtrap, he repeated some of my answers to be sure he remembered what I had said.

The rest of the people fed the fire and got ready to cook the meat. No one cared about the wolf now—everyone waited for me to divide the carcass. Timu helped me, since making a division was something new to me. I had to be sure that my in-laws got the best parts—the hind parts—while making sure that my kin got even shares of the front parts. And Timu didn’t act as if the carcass was his, either. In fact he seemed rather proud of me. He made tactful suggestions rather than insisting, and he nicely covered the only real mistake I made—treating White Fox as Meri’s betrothed and Swift merely as my co-wife’s kinsman—by apologizing as if he had made the mistake himself.

As soon as each piece of meat in the coldtrap had an owner, we cut the liver into strips and laid them on the coals. As we did, a thought came to me. We had just divided the meat as if there were only one hunter. But if there are several hunters, the meat must of course be divided differently. The hide, for instance: the hide belongs to a sister of a single hunter, but if there are many hunters, it belongs to the oldest hunter’s wife. If it hadn’t been for the wolf, I wouldn’t have been able to bring down the doe, and I might not even have found her. I wasn’t a single hunter after all—I was one of a pair, and the hide, which now belonged to my sister, should really belong to Ethis, since I was a woman and didn’t have a wife, only a co-wife.

No one else seemed to think of this, so I forgot about it. I wanted Meri to have the hide anyway, and I was more interested in Timu, glad that he was pleased with me. No one else wanted to think about the wolf at all, except to be sure that he kept out of the coldtrap. When I told about the hunt, the men were much more interested in the fact that there were a number of reindeer tracks so close to the river. That seemed odd to them; they had been looking for reindeer in the hills. Only Swift was still very interested. Several times he told the other men what he had learned from the pattern of the wolf’s tracks and mine as we followed the deer, and from what I had told him afterwards. When no one showed much curiosity, he sat back to think. “Where is your wolf?” he at last asked Meri. She looked around for the wolf, didn’t see him, and shrugged. She wouldn’t have told Swift even if she had known. “Yanan! Where did the wolf go?” called Swift over the heads of all the people around the dayfire, waiting for the liver.

“He may be looking for scraps where we cut up this meat.”

“That’s right,” said Swift. “I’m going to find him.” And standing up, he took his spear.

“Don’t touch him!” shouted Meri. “He’s mine!”

Swift laughed. “I’m not going to hurt him, little one. I want to see him, that’s all.” So Swift went off to look for the wolf, which puzzled the rest of us a bit. But as soon as the liver was cooking and ready, we were too busy filling our stomachs to give the wolf another thought.

Swift came back that night after the rest of us were rolled in our deerskins, I in Timu’s again. Trying to control his breath, Timu was stroking the inside of my thighs while waiting for everyone else to fall asleep. When Swift called my name, Timu put his other hand over my mouth so I wouldn’t answer. But Swift didn’t wait for an answer. “Your wolf has gone away alone,” said Swift. “But I want to see him hunting. Next time I will hunt with you.”

“What men of meat, these mammoth hunters,” whispered Timu.

 

Before the reindeer was eaten a blizzard came, and with it more reindeer to take shelter in the trees. Snow on the ground was good for us—tracking was easy, and we could walk very quietly. Graylag now had no objection to Timu and me hunting together, so with our spears we started over the fresh snow, wondering if in spite of the cold we could make love by being quick about it and not taking off all our clothes. But when Swift saw us leaving, he came too. He wanted to hunt with the wolf, we knew, and we tried to hide our disappointment. “If it pleases you, Uncle,” I dared to say, very respectfully, “let the wolf go alone with you. Then you can watch him better.”

“He doesn’t want to go with me,” said Swift simply. “He wants you.” I looked at Timu, who shrugged. To say more would make other people suspicious. Swift and I followed Timu across the river, where in time we noticed the wolf trotting ahead of us, looking now and then over his shoulder to see if he was right that we were on a hunt. Soon he took an interest in a thicket at the bottom of a hill, and Swift made the hunter’s handsign for reindeer. Very quietly we crept forward. Suddenly the wolf rushed into the front of the thicket as a reindeer stag leaped from the back, up the hillside, and away, with the wolf right behind him.

Our stalk was spoiled, and I can’t say I was sorry. Now Swift could see that a hunt could be ruined as well as helped by a wolf, and wouldn’t insist on coming with us. I was about to start back when Swift barred my way with the shaft of his spear. “Keep still,” he whispered. Far up the hill the stag was turning, trying to keep the wolf from circling behind him, slashing hard at the wolf with his forefeet.

Swift poised his spear. No one can throw that far, I thought, but the moment the stag showed us his side I heard the spear hum, then heard a thump and a bellow, and saw the stag totter with the spear in his ribs. The wolf grabbed his nose and pulled him over. Swift rushed up the hill with his knife out, kicked the wolf out of the way, and cut the stag’s throat.

Swift and Timu were very happy. Up the hill the wolf watched hopefully while Swift and Timu admired the size of the stag and the amount of fat on him, then sat on their heels and started skinning. “Yanan! Go to the lodge and get someone to help carry the meat,” said Timu. What else could I do? I went.

The people hurried back eagerly. When the skin was off and rolled into a bundle and the meat was in packs, the people, singing, carried it home. We even brought the antlers to make needles and awls, so nothing was left to reward the wolf but bloody snow and the rumen. The wolf could eat the snow, I thought, but I doubted he would eat the rumen, since there isn’t any meat in a rumen, just the cud of chewed lichen, and I didn’t think wolves ate that.

While we were cooking the liver, and Rin, Swift’s half-sister, was stroking the long white winter hair of the reindeer hide she now owned, Swift had the attention of all the other men by telling them how much the wolf could help them. A wolf could smell trails better than a person, he pointed out, and hear better too. A wolf always knew where the animals were, since he was out in the woods with them all the time and didn’t spend the night in a lodge. And if the animals moved away, a wolf saw where they went. On the plains, said Swift, people could catch the animals themselves, but not in the woods. So how is it, he asked pleasantly, that a man from the plains has to show the men from the woods how to hunt in their own country?

Swift was a man of meat, without a doubt. No wonder all the men respected him. They didn’t even mind his teasing—in fact they laughed cheerfully. And now they all wanted to go hunting with the wolf.

So they tried. Each time two or three of them went hunting, they looked around to see if the wolf was near. He never was, of course—they had thrown too many stones at him. Swift thought that hunting with me would bring the wolf. But it didn’t; the wolf knew better than to go near Swift after he had kicked him off the stag. The other men gave up quickly, but Swift kept trying, which annoyed Timu, who didn’t like to see me spending so much time with someone else. I didn’t like to go with Swift either, and wouldn’t have if I didn’t know that Graylag really wanted me to. Swift ranged very widely, never stopped to rest or talk, but strode all day so fast I had to run to keep up. And if he saw game, he would leave me behind while he stalked it, sometimes forgetting I was waiting, so I would have to make my way home by myself.

In fact, unless I was alone, the wolf usually stayed away from me too. The men became very disappointed in him. Perhaps he became disappointed in us, after all he got to eat was a rumen full of half-eaten lichen. He preferred the feces from our latrine and the food he stole from the coldtrap. The only person sure to see him was Meri, who told us that he sometimes came to find her when she went after firewood. But Meri on a hunt? Meri still sucked her thumb! It wouldn’t have occurred to any one of us, not even me, to take Meri hunting.