23

MARMOT THE SPIRIT knew little of childbearing. He was following the reindeer migration when Ina bore The Stick, and was digging out a bear when she bore The Frog. Not that he would have watched his wife laboring—in his time as in mine, men sat as far away as possible from a woman giving birth inside a lodge. And I would never mention, not to a man who was my senior, anything that leads the mind to private parts. So neither Marmot nor I ever spoke about what happened to me.

Instead I found out for myself. Lying face down on the roof, hanging my head over the smokehole, I watched what went on below. In Ethis’s shirt, next to her full, warm breasts, curled a little baby, a boy—the one I bore under the hemlock. Ethis and Timu, their heads together, would smile down at him and put their fingers in his fists to feel the power of his grasp.

I couldn’t help being somewhat jealous. For a while I had thought that Timu and I would raise Elho’s child, with only me knowing the father. Now I saw that Timu and Ethis would raise Timu’s child, with everyone knowing the father.

And Timu’s child he was. Soon after my death Teal lashed the people in the lodge with words, showing them what fools they had been to think that any other man could be the father. What better proof of it, she asked, than the second child, the child born dead, the twin?

So! Teal had pulled a double-child out of me under the hemlock! I didn’t have time just then to think about what I had heard, because Teal’s angry voice went on. “If Yanan lay with a stranger after lying with Timu, maybe the stranger was the twin’s father,” she said. “But Timu’s child was the first out because he was the first in!”

The people tried to calm Teal because they understood her anger at the loss of a kinswoman. They knew Timu was the father, they said. They had never thought he wasn’t! They were glad about the baby—Timu’s baby—and sorry things had turned out badly for Yanan. They also were sorry that Timu had to feel the painful shame of doubt, now that they saw no doubt was necessary. And they were even sorry about the other baby, not that he mattered.

But he mattered to me. Where was he? One day I went back to the hemlock to look, but I didn’t find his body or his spirit. Somewhere, someone had buried all the birth matter and him too. And who could say about his spirit? It wasn’t around me, I knew. Nor did I see how a bird could have found his spirit in my belly to bring it to my lineage. But the spirit had to be somewhere.

At last I remembered the otter whose eyes met mine on the bank of the river, and the tussles and splashes of otters mating in early summer. That meant otter kits were ready for spirits, there inside her long, strong body. Was my child now on a wild ride, speeding and twisting through the water? I didn’t see what else could have happened to him. Of course I wouldn’t meet him later, because he wouldn’t be a person. Even so, otters surely have their own lineages, since in every other way they seem to do well. Who wouldn’t, with plenty of food even in winter? Nothing seems to hunt them, not even people, since getting their pelts is too troublesome. I didn’t remember ever seeing a dead otter. So I was content.

Sometimes I thought to go as an otter to visit him, but the otter with kits might not want to meet another female in the river. So I left them alone, except to hunt for sign. And of course I left Ethis and Timu alone to raise the baby, which they did very well. Through the smokehole Marmot and I would look fondly down at our children, he at his boys, as he called The Stick and The Frog (although these great, hulking men were older now than Marmot), and I at my son, who in time learned to talk and said many little things that made the people smile at him.

After three years the people named him Spotted Deer. I liked that. I liked to think of him growing tall and strong to fill the name brought to mind by this great creature. And after three years, if I judged otter sign rightly, my otter child was fully grown and owned a nice long stretch of the river.

Swift acted differently toward me when he knew me as a spirit. No longer did he call me Hide-in-the-Grass and no mention was ever made of the fact that we had spoken of marriage. I was also more respectful to him, since only after I became a spirit did I fully realize his power. Once at the Hair River, when he saw me asleep in some dry birch leaves after I had stayed very long with the mammoths, I suddenly found myself bolt upright, rigid, unable to move or speak or see. I could still hear, though. “What stands behind the lodge, naked in winter and clothed in summer?” a faraway voice was saying. “If I ever come back, I’ll know where to find you.”

However long he left me as a birch tree, it seemed longer, rooted to the earth with insects crawling up and down my skin. I had nothing to do but think, as I’m sure he planned, but if his plan was to make me think about the lesson he was teaching me, the plan went wrong—all I could think of was fire. Then suddenly I was sitting collapsed at Swift’s feet, again in human form but limp from the experience. I looked up at him, my mouth agape, and in those lion-colored eyes of his I saw a truth: that we who are spirits have owners.

Or those of us who used to be people have owners. Who knew about the rest? Into Swift’s birch grove at the Hair River, the spirits of animals used to come at night in human form. Twice I saw this—two pairs of animal spirits who, each pair for its own reasons, wanted to see the mammoth skull. The first pair were lion spirits in the form of a man and a woman. Looking more like Swift than Swift himself, the two walked boldly from the plain straight up to the skull and peered into the eye sockets. What they thought to find in there, I couldn’t tell. They didn’t spend much time—in a moment the lion spirit turned his back and faced a bush. Did he mark it? Both left right afterwards, one behind the other, shoulders straight, heads up, bodies swaying.

The second pair were mammoth spirits in the form of women. Both were tall and strong, and their dry, brown skins were covered with fine wrinkles. Both had long, coarse hair in hopeless braids, made with no skill at all, like the clumsy braids that little children make when no one helps them. But the minds of these women were far from their braids. Moving slowly to the skull, they ran their hands up and down its forehead. In time they wandered to the hunters’ boulder piles and brush screens. The screens they examined carefully, looking long at how the branches stood in the ground, then pulling up a few to taste their cut ends. At last their slow but constant movements brought them to the plain again, and I watched them growing smaller in the distance. They walked quite far apart and side by side, not one behind the other as we would do. For a while one carried a branch, then dropped it.

These spirits weren’t owned by our shamans. In fact, Swift shivered when I told of them, and wondered what gifts he could offer. The lions might like fat, the same as us, but not the mammoths. Grass? There was too much grass already, and it was easier to get right where it grew than wherever we might put it. “We already know they don’t want us to kill them,” said Swift. “But how can we not do that?”

One day, followed by all the people, Swift and Teal visited the mammoth skull, sang into its nostrils, and decorated its forehead with ocher. I never knew whether this show of respect impressed the animal spirits, since if they ever came back to see the skull, they didn’t come as men and women, or not in the years I was there.

 

In my third year as a helper to the lodge and the living, I was sent away for good. No more did I see Spotted Deer or my otter son, or the shamans or the people, or the animals in the woods or on the plain. I was sent away because of trouble brought on, as usual, by a bad winter and much hunger. Part of the trouble was my fault, but part was not. After the trouble was over, a man was dead and the shamans didn’t want to keep me.

The bad year began in summer, which was very dry and so cold that the berries never ripened. Since there was so little to eat, many of the migrating reindeer didn’t stay in our woods but kept going. No snow fell to help the people, to cover the lodge from the wind, to show tracks, or to make the red deer flounder. Instead the noisy, frozen earth made stalking very difficult for the people and escape very easy for both red deer and reindeer. And the tigress kept them scattering.

Goldeneye was with us in the early fall, but as if he foresaw the winter to come, he kept an eye on the long lines of geese as they passed overhead. How he recognized his old flock I couldn’t say, unless he knew their voices. But suddenly one day, with much calling and a clatter of wings, he rose into the air. Up he flew, reaching a high place just as a flock was passing. Those were the geese who had made him break trail for them through the wind when he had last traveled with them, so now he timed his meeting to join the flock at its tail. He might have unbalanced a few geese before and behind him when he burst into their line, but if so, they were too busy flying to do anything about him. In moments all were gone.

As autumn turned to winter the cold deepened. Trees split, startling people at night. And when the ice boomed far away in Char Lake, the people in the lodge felt the vibration. The cold came through the people’s heavy clothes, freezing their toes and fingers. And ice on the river was so thick that people couldn’t keep an open waterhole.

By the time of the Icebreaking Moon, the weather got warmer, but too late. People were almost starving. In the scattered refuse around the lodge they looked for broken, frozen bones to crush into powder or to pick for scraps of marrow. At the first creaking of the ice on the river, the sound that told us the water would soon be free, the shamans pleaded with us to start the Char running. Knowing how much the people must need food to beg for fish instead of meat, it hurt us that we couldn’t. But The Woman Ohun starts the Char, out in water as deep as the sky and almost as far as the Camps of the Dead from the river. Helpless in the face of so much hunger, Marmot escaped in the form of a wolverine.

Then the people sang and the shamans tranced and asked me for a bear. But they didn’t ask nicely or call me Honored Spirit. Rather, Swift promised that if I didn’t bring news in three days’ time, he would root me to the earth forever. The next thing I knew, I was a great sow bear making for the hills where the Char rises.

I might have seen how the plan would fail. It was too early in the year; I was confused, sleepy, cold, and hungry because there was nothing to eat. Nothing. Other bears were safe in their dens, but I was wandering in the barren, frozen woods with my strength leaving me and no place to go. I walked without stopping for a night and two days, found my own tracks, and saw that I had made a circle.

Meanwhile, the hunters didn’t wait for me to come back. Perhaps I had too often failed them. The next thing I knew I heard people close on my trail, and tired as I was, I began to run. But not fast enough—the hunters on their long legs overtook me. I looked over my shoulder into their staring eyes, their eager, fearsome faces, and before I knew what I was doing, I spun around and charged them. With a swipe of my paw I laid a man down on the snow. The next swipe raked the clothes off the side of another man. A spear bounced off my shoulderblade, but I hardly felt the blow as I bolted from the people, amazed that they fell back to let me through.

As suddenly as I became a bear, I found myself as a person again, now alone in the woods and lost. Heartsick, I walked south until I found the river, then followed it to the lodge, where I heard people singing. By now it was dark. Sitting on the roof of the lodge wrapped in his sleeping-skin was Marmot, home at last. I was very glad to see him.

But the news he had for me was bad. A sow bear had hurt The Frog so badly that he now lay dying in the lodge. The Frog! Marmot’s son killed by my hand! Marmot would not forgive this. Might he do to my son what I had done to his?

I listened at the smokehole, praying to The Woman to spare The Frog, or if not, at least to let people think another bear had killed him. But I heard people talking of his burial. Since the earth was still frozen, people were trying to decide in which tree to store him. Suddenly his wife and many other people began to cry, and I realized that he was gone.

Just as I turned to Marmot, planning the speech I would make to admit my guilt and beg his forgiveness, the spirit of The Frog suddenly appeared beside us. Since he couldn’t yet know what had happened to him, he seemed amazed to see me and didn’t recognize Marmot. But Marmot was delighted, and soon, in his most fatherly way, was explaining matters to his large, confused son. I thought to let the shamans decide whether or not to point out who killed him. So instead of speaking, I waited quietly, dreading what was to come.

I didn’t wait long before I saw the trancing spirits of Swift and Teal slowly take form like rising heat in the air above the smokehole. In their most respectful voices, they greeted Marmot and The Frog. It seemed that Teal had captured him. While she began to tell him of the people’s need and ask him to go as a reindeer to lead another reindeer to the hunters, Swift took me aside.

“Honored Spirit,” he began, “what can I say? The people are angry that we promised them a bear, only to have it kill this man and destroy my parka. The Frog will never hunt again, and I can’t hunt in this weather until a skin can be found to make a new parka. The people blame us. Yet they are hungry and need our help, as we need theirs. How can we trance without their singing? And why would they sing if their songs bring them death but not food? You are harming us. So your cousin will replace you. Now you must go to find your lineage where they eat the sun. Speak well for us if you find the place. I’ve finished talking.”

I didn’t want to leave the lodge I had known all my life, and I didn’t want to leave my two children, but what could I do? The shamans owned the air.

I gathered all my things, my grave goods, and said good-by to Marmot very humbly. I even said good-by to The Frog. When the sky turned gray, I slid off the roof and started west. It would have been easier to fly as a bird, but my power to change form seemed to lie with the shamans. Now it was gone, so I walked. In the form of a falcon, Marmot slowly circled me a little while. I was glad about that—it seemed to show that he didn’t want to see the last of me. Perhaps he even knew what had happened and forgave me. Then something far off must have caught his attention—with a flash of white under his wings he rose high, became a tiny thing, and vanished.

I didn’t know where to go, so I followed the Char. In the afternoon I reached the plain on the far side of the Black River, with no idea where to go next. But suddenly a ptarmigan must have noticed me standing there—it burst noisily from under a bush, then dragged itself fluttering over the ground, asking me to follow. So I did. It led me.

I came at last to a vast, treeless plain, free of snow, where berry bushes and high grass were growing. Far away I saw the camps of many people, with shelters meant to look like bushes, made of grass laid over branches, and shelters meant to look like hemlocks, made of hides laid over poles. As I got near, many people stood up to see who came.

I asked a stranger for the camp of our lineage, and with his lips and chin he pointed. As I passed among the people, they realized they didn’t know me and sat on their heels again. But when I saw Mother, all the people near her remained on their feet. “Yanan. You’ve come,” she said.

“I’m here,” I answered, glad to see her. Of all the people at the camp of our lineage, she was the only one I knew. But I noticed which shelter was hers from her antler necklace with pendants, which hung inside. I also noticed an awkward silence growing.

One by one my relatives began to sit down again. I stood uncomfortably, trying not to stare. Even so, I couldn’t help but notice that not all my relatives were dressed as I was. A few wore clumsy one-piece garments made of sewn skins, as if the wearers were trying to look like animals. Others wore only loincloths, while still others, although they were outdoors in the daytime, were completely naked, with loose, matted hair. Those small people were strangest of all as they clustered nervously at the far edge of camp, openly staring. At last, as if he found his courage, a little bare-naked man stepped forward. “You spoiled a hunt,” he said.

I didn’t know who he was or what to call him, so I answered as simply as I could, “Yes, Uncle.” When no one spoke, I added, “I’m sorry.”

“Let me talk to my daughter,” said Mother to the people. And she led me to her shelter where others wouldn’t overhear. “The elders had great hopes for you, and want you to know they’re disappointed,” she began.

I felt sure they were, whoever they might be, but thinking that explanations would be useless, I said, “I’m sorry about The Frog.”

“Never mind him,” said Mother. “Let his own kin worry about him. The elders are worried by things that hurt us.”

“What things?” I asked, remembering many and feeling uneasy.

But Mother didn’t answer right away. Instead she said, “It’s their own fault, to my way of thinking. They expected too much of you. They expected you to die on the Pine River, but you surprised them. When the elders saw how well you took care of yourself and Meri, they became greedy. That’s why they sent the spirits of two people instead of one. That’s why you had a double-child. I say the mistake was theirs, because you didn’t understand childbearing, but they say it was yours, because you chose an unsafe place to bear those children.”

I nodded to show I understood. Mother went on. “And we noticed the smell of our burned blood on the wind and realized that you lay with a kinsman. You were taught not to do that. What if your misdeed had divided the lodge?”

“If I lay with anyone, it was after I was pregnant.”

“But you didn’t know! What if someone had killed the child or made the people of our lineage leave the lodge? Were there so many of us in Graylag’s lodge that we could lose one to an angry husband? Could some of us live without the others?”

I knew she was right. “I hid my misdeed,” I said.

“Teal hid it,” said Mother. “Teal took care of everything. The elders are pleased with Teal. Of course, for years they’ve been pleased with Teal. And except for those things I told you, they should be pleased with you. After all,” she said, “perhaps you didn’t add to our number, but you didn’t lessen it. That’s what’s important. If the elders used their fingers to work it out, they’d find you did well. What really bothers them is that you lost one of us to the otters. Sometime you might apologize for that.” She smiled. “Well then, Yanan. Welcome. Tomorrow I’ll help you pull grass for a shelter. Or you can sleep with me in mine. I’ll take you to the elders later, and they can greet you.”

I looked around her shelter and saw her familiar deerskin on a pile of grass. “Thank you, Mother,” I said, very content. Then, since the account of my misdeeds seemed to be over, I couldn’t help but ask, “Who are the little naked people?”

Mother touched her finger to her lips. “Speak softly when you speak of them!” she whispered. “They’re the elders!”

“Ours?”

“Ours,” said Mother. “They hate to see waste, like a spoiled hunt, and because they’re poor, they think we disrespect them. But otherwise they’re simple to please.” Mother moved close to my ear and whispered, “When you get a chance, look at their grave goods, if you can find them. Only easily pleased people would keep grubs and sticks and old eggshells for grave goods. Just like ravens.” She moved back far enough to let me see that she was smiling. “The elders led strange lives, though, so they tell good, strange stories.”

In the evening a large group of men with spears and axes gathered in one place as if they were expecting something. People who were sleeping then sat up, sharpened their knives, and talked excitedly, as people do with a meal in sight. Hungrily I asked Mother where our food was, and she pointed above us at the sky, where the sun was setting.

The sun was huge, as big as a mammoth, all hot and flaming and coming down fast. Fearlessly, the people speared it. When it collapsed struggling on the ground they clubbed it with axes, then cut it up and gave a piece to everyone. Hot and crisp, mine burned my mouth but tasted good because, just as I thought, it was mostly fat. What else can make such a fire?