MY STORY ISN’T BIG like the stories some of the mammoth hunter men could tell. Mine doesn’t end with a huge pile of meat. My story has no captured women, only the gifts of a marriage exchange, and no battles, only arguments about the gifts. My story isn’t very long, and perhaps lacks wisdom, since the beginning was told me by other people and the end came sooner than I wanted. I was still a young woman when I left the world of the living and became a spirit of the dead.
So there was much about life I never learned. Still, I knew where all the berries grew, and how to find the seeds hamsters store in their burrows. Better than most of the men, I knew the animals who eat grass and the animals who go hunting. I remember the children who lived and the children who didn’t, the women who bore those children bravely or in fear, and men I liked and men who scared me. I was scared by some of the mammoth hunters the first time I saw them—by those with pale eyes and grass-colored hair. To me, they looked in every way like lions. I was shocked the first time I met such people. My aunt agreed to marry one of them before she saw him, and then was very rude because his looks gave her such a surprise.
Thinking of his pale eyes watching me, I remember a big pile of meat in my story after all. And a big swarm of flies. But when we got the meat we already had plenty of other food, so I don’t think about the pile as often, say, as I think about a scrap of marrow from a tiger’s kill we found when we were starving.