A Hero's Tale (3 page)

After a while, Maara asked for Aamah, and the forest people escorted us to the shed. Its roof was made of skins stretched over a pole framework and was so low that I could barely stand upright under it. Maara had to stoop to enter. The children laughed at her, and she laughed with them.

In a cozy corner, behind a wattle screen, a small fire was burning. Aamah sat beside it. Next to her sat the man who had been with her the day before. Aamah made us welcome at her fire, and the rest of the forest people settled themselves nearby. Again words of greeting were exchanged and food was offered. Aamah handed each of us a spit with strips of roasted meat skewered on it.

We were both full of porridge, but we ate enough to be polite. Then Maara offered our gift to Aamah, who accepted our woolen shirts with unconcealed delight, unfolding and admiring them before passing them along for the others to admire. The children touched them cautiously, as if they found the shirts mysterious and a little frightening. Their elders must have seen woven cloth before, although they seemed to have no means of making it themselves.

Maara spoke with Aamah for a little while, repeating enough of their conversation to me so that I could follow it. They spoke at length about the coming of winter. Over the last few days the weather had warmed a bit, but Aamah seemed to think that more snow was on the way. She also gave Maara some advice on where to set out our snares and fish traps.

When others joined in the conversation, Maara grew quiet, content to listen. I lost interest in listening to talk I couldn't understand, and my eyes began to wander. There was a lot to look at. This was where the work of the community was done, where meat was smoked and hides were cured, where acorns were husked and soaked and ground into meal. Here reeds were woven into baskets and stone was worked for tools and weapons, but it was clear that no one slept here, nor would they find the open shed comfortable in bad weather. I saw no other shelter within the enclosure. Perhaps their sleeping quarters were as hidden as the village itself.

The man sitting beside Aamah began to speak. From the way he first settled himself and from his tone of voice, I knew he was about to tell a story. The children, who had been playing nearby, sat down to listen. Maara smiled in anticipation. Then, to my surprise, she moved behind me and pulled me back against her. The storyteller paused often to make noises and gestures to illustrate his tale, and Maara took each opportunity to whisper the story in my ear.

Honey Paw is very thin. Sleepy and bad-tempered, he blinks at the sun. The bees are hard at work among the flowers. Honey Paw follows them home. He satisfies his hunger, and the bees begin again.

Four Legs walks a great distance. Berries grow where only he can find them. Long Claw digs out the rotten hearts of trees and eats the grubs he finds there. Yellow Tooth gnaws on bones of elk and deer.

Fur Man is fat. His winter coat is thick. His great head grows heavy. He shelters in his cave and sleeps.

While I was trying to understand the meaning of the story, the children all began to shout at once, "Urti. Urti."

"Bear," Maara whispered in my ear.

"Oh," I said. "It's a riddle."

But the storyteller hadn't finished.

She-bear has lost her cub.

"He left the den too soon," she says. "He wandered too far."

Beside her hearth fire, she waits through the night for his return.

In the morning, she-bear goes out to find him. She looks in the forests, in the meadows, in the streams. She looks everywhere. She searches drifts of fallen leaves. She searches every cave and hollow tree. She searches everywhere.

She asks the squirrel, the beaver, the hunting cat, "Have you seen him?"

She asks the fish, the bird, the grasshopper, "Have you seen him?"

She asks everyone she meets. No one has seen him.

Night falls. In the branches of a tree, old mother Owl unfolds her wings.

"Old mother owl," says she-bear, "where is my son?"

Old mother Owl takes wing. Silently she ascends into the sky, high over she-bear's head. She-bear follows her with her eyes.

There in the sky, she-bear sees her son, on his back, lying in a field of stars. Then she knows that her son has met his death, and in her sorrow, she seeks her den and falls into the long sleep of grief.

Old mother Owl is sorry for she-bear's sorrow. Old mother Owl flies to the body of she-bear's son and plucks his spirit from his mouth. Old mother Owl flies to she-bear's den and sends his spirit into his mother's heart.

In the spring, she-bear wakes with her cub beside her.

The story filled me with sadness. A tear trickled down my cheek and drew Aamah's eye. Aamah spoke to Maara, and Maara said, "She wants to know what made you cry."

I had no ready answer. I shook my head. Maara answered for me.

"What did you say?" I asked her.

"I told her that your mother too has lost her cub," she said.

Aamah smiled at me and spoke to me directly.

"She will send old mother Owl to your mother's heart," said Maara.

We left the village of the forest people so late in the afternoon that we didn't arrive home until after dark. Neither of us was hungry. The forest people had fed us until we couldn't take another bite. We huddled under our cloaks while we waited for our fire to warm the hollow tree.

Although my body was tired, my mind was wide awake, full of all the things I had seen and heard that day. I had spent the homeward journey thinking about the story of she-bear and her cub. I understood its meaning. It was a tale for teaching children about the bear stars.

As everyone knows, the bear travels in a circle in the northern sky, completing one circle in the course of the year. At summer's end, the bear lies on his back, a sign that winter is coming. The story also taught something of the ways of bears.

When I was small, my mother told me animal stories to teach me about the world. Each story was the answer to a question. How did the bobcat lose her tail? How did the hare get his white winter coat?

I was a little disappointed.

"Is the story of she-bear only a tale for teaching children?" I asked Maara.

"If it were," she said, "would it have made you cry?"

Then I remembered her reply to Aamah. The story of she-bear was also a story about motherhood.

"Are our mothers searching for us, do you think?"

"I hope not," said Maara. "I hope they're both safe at home, but I think their hearts must be searching for some news of us."

As I drifted into sleep that night, I dreamed of old mother Owl. She flew into the heavens and touched the stars. She flew all night on silent wings. She heard the prayers of she-bear and answered them. She heard Aamah's prayers and answered them. She heard the love in every mother's heart and brought their children home to them.

The next day was cold and dark, and we had work to do before bad weather kept us at home. In the morning we followed the brook downstream, looking for a place to put our fish trap. On the way back, we set our snares. We spent all afternoon collecting firewood. It was fortunate we did, because that night, as Aamah had predicted, snow fell.

For the next few days we stayed snug and safe in our hollow tree. To pass the time, Maara repeated the story of she-bear, a few words at a time, first in the language of the forest people, then in my own tongue. I learned the strange words more easily than I thought I would. At least I learned to recognize the sound of them. Making many of those sounds myself was more than I could do. Maara tried not to laugh at me.

After our visit to their village, I had no more anxiety about the forest people. My experience there convinced me that they had kind hearts. None of them seemed to doubt our good intentions. I felt that they accepted us, not just as neighbors, but as friends. Even the children lost their fear of us. One little girl laid her head in my lap and fell asleep and neither knew nor cared that a few hours before I had been a stranger. Now I was ashamed that I'd had doubts about them, because most often it is the trusting who are trustworthy.

After the snowfall, the forest people came to visit us again. Nearly a dozen of them crowded into our hollow tree. I was disappointed to see that Aamah wasn't with them. This time the man who usually stayed by Aamah's side, the storyteller, whose name was Sett, appeared to be their leader. They had brought us a shoulder of venison, which we cooked and shared with them. While we waited for the meat, we offered our guests some tea and acorn bread.

Once we had eaten everyone relaxed and a general conversation began. I didn't understand a word of it, but I found it soothing. It reminded me of when I was a child, listening to the grown-ups talk. Although I couldn't always follow what they were saying, the threads of their conversation wove themselves together into a tight fabric around me, and if the sharp words of some tore it a little here and there, the mending threads of others drew us all together again. So the forest people's talk surrounded me, until at last I drifted off to sleep leaning against Maara's shoulder.

For several weeks, weather permitting, we exchanged visits with the forest people, and when we could, Maara and I returned their generosity. Even the gift of a few fish pleased them, although they could easily have caught all the fish they needed for themselves. While fish seemed to me a more practical gift, they greatly prized our woolen shirts, not for their usefulness, but for their novelty. Aamah had shared them out by tearing them to pieces, so that everyone could have a few strips of cloth. Some wore the strips tied around their wrists or ankles or as headbands, while others braided them into their hair.

I soon discovered why the forest people had no use for woolen clothing. Whenever we traveled to their village, brambles would tug my cloak from around my shoulders and tear holes in my heavy woolen trousers, scratching the skin underneath, while the forest people, in their fur tunics and deerskin trousers, glided through the thickets unhindered and unscathed.

I envied the forest people their sturdy clothing for its warmth as well. In stormy weather and at night, they retreated into a cave in the rocky hillside behind their camp, but they preferred living in the open. As long as daylight lasted, they sat around the central fire in the enclosure or, if snow was falling, around Aamah's fire in the covered shed. While Maara and I were seldom warm enough, even wrapped up in our cloaks, they didn't seem to mind the cold at all.

The forest people always had work of some kind to do, but they were never too busy to spend an afternoon with us sitting around the fire. They were fond of conversation and could spend hour after hour talking and telling stories. Although they never seemed to tire of hearing tales they must have heard a hundred times before, they took even more delight in hearing something new. They asked Maara endless questions about who we were and where we'd come from. Maara did her best to answer them. Her once halting speech became more fluent every day. Her tongue had not forgotten how to make the sounds of its first language, and what she didn't know, the forest people were glad to teach her.

While they always treated me with courtesy and kindness, the forest people seldom spoke to me directly. If I failed to understand their gestures, they might speak to me through Maara, but for the most part they ignored me. In general conversation Maara tried to make me feel included by repeating some of what was said so that I could understand it, and she continued teaching me in private, as she had taught me the story of she-bear.

I began to listen closely to the forest people's talk. As the days went by, I caught more and more words I understood. Sometimes I could put together for myself a little of their meaning. My ear was learning to attune itself to the strange sounds the forest people made, but my ear proved more clever than my tongue. Their simplest words felt awkward in my mouth, and I was too shy to try speaking to them.

Then one day Maara taught me to say a simple greeting. She made me repeat it endlessly, until my tongue had grown accustomed to it. When they heard me try to speak as they did, the forest people were delighted. They responded by telling me the names of everything they could find to point to and waiting for me to repeat the words after them. They were relentless. Maara finally had to rescue me. Later that afternoon, as we sat around their fire, I heard one of the women whisper something to Maara while tapping the side of her head in a gesture I understood. I didn't need Maara to tell me that the forest people had thought me feeble-minded.

Because their lives were so different from my own, I listened fascinated to everything the forest people talked about. Most of all I loved their stories. Almost all of them started with a riddle. It was a clever way to capture the attention of the children, who were delighted with themselves when they shouted out the answer, although they must have heard each riddle many times. The stories themselves were simple. Each one taught a lesson about the world, about the ways of animals, about which plants were good to eat, which bore fruit, when and where to find them, and what could be learned about the weather and the seasons from the lives of plants and animals, and from the night sky.

As simple as they were, I found the stories strangely moving. Beneath the surface lay a meaning that touched my heart, although it took my head a while to find it. Almost without exception, the heroes of the stories were animals, yet all the strengths and foibles of humankind were there, in the fierceness of the badger and the wild pig's stubborn pride, in the suspicious nature of the hunting cat and the mother-love of bears. All their favorite story characters wore a human face, like the squirrel whose scolding chatter brought back the memory of an ill-tempered woman who used to frighten me when I was small. It gave me a sense of satisfaction to laugh at the memory of that old woman's silly squirrelish face, and I enjoyed even my own rueful laughter when a story showed me an unflattering image of myself.

One day when we were visiting the forest people, we overstayed our time. It had been a gloomy day, and before we knew it, dusk had fallen. Aamah insisted that we stay the night.