The Animal Wife (15 page)

I could see that Andriki was right. There were no trails, just bird-songs. Anything that walked was close to the ground. But the sunny, silent landscape looked so different from what my mind's eye had seen that I felt confused. "Where are the hills?" I asked.

Now Andriki looked puzzled, and pointed with his lips at the range. "Those are the hills," he said.

"Then which are the breasts?" I asked him, laughing.

He also laughed. "All of them. Aren't all hills like breasts? How can I know which hills are breasts? No one told me."

Ready to have a joke with Andriki, I looked around to see which hills were most like breasts. I saw only four bare summits, all much the same except that two were larger than the others. A pair of hawks flew high above them, one far behind the other, going south. Suddenly my skin prickled. Perhaps the hills were breasts, but if they were Ohun's breasts, Ohun wasn't a person. She was a very large animal asleep on Her back—a tigress, a lioness, a hyena!

I knew I should think a long time about the name of these hills and its meaning. Surely there was a story, with much to be learned from it. Hadn't Sali, the great woman-shaman from the Fire River, become a tigress after her husband killed her? Did Sali have something to do with Ohun? With these hills?

The thought was disturbing. I opened my mouth to ask Andriki, but when I looked around I saw him far away, squatting with the others, tossing crowberries into his mouth. I stood alone on the trail, strangely upset, feeling very much an outsider in this quiet, sunny land of Father's. I didn't even know the way to the lodge, and I didn't want to go without the others. So I too pushed through the scrub to a sprawled bush that still held some black crowberries, and I too sat on my heels to eat.

All afternoon, alone in the sunshine, I picked and ate crowberries while the light wind whispered through the hard little leaves, bringing the smell of juniper from the sun-warmed heath. Late in the day, as I was looking around for more crowberries, I happened to notice all the people far down the trail, already wearing their packs. Some had started! Would they have left me behind? I hurried to catch up, and once again I was the last person in line.

Horses, I saw, had used the trail before us, although our footprints had covered their footprints and flattened their balls of dung. The trail and the horse tracks took the quickest, shortest way out of the brushy growth into a valley and across a quiet, west-flowing stream where now, in the dry season, the water lay still. Dust and yellow birch leaves floated on it. In the low water grew little islands of grass. When I stepped on them to cross, water soaked into my moccasins.

On the far side the woods were open and sunny, welcoming to a hunter—man's country once again. Beyond the trees I saw a narrow meadow. The tracks of the horses led there. I soon began to look around. A fire had been through years before; now young larch and stone-pines grew, winterberries and bilberries, lichen, grass, and many good mushrooms. The shallow river would flood in spring, making the ground a bit soft for horses, but spotted deer and red deer wouldn't mind it, roe deer and moose would prefer it, and reindeer would visit it in winter for the reindeer moss that grew everywhere. In fact, the browsing of many kinds of deer had kept the birch trees low and dense, making good cover for deaf-grouse and ptarmigan. We would probably find a bear or two asleep in the hillsides, and since no bear could hope to wake up alive after a winter's sleep near Father, the bear we would find would probably be a young newcomer drawn by the berries on Ohun's Breasts. I saw how Father had chosen his place well.

Or chosen the hunting well. As for the rest, I also saw that the slowly moving water would freeze solid with the first heavy cold, so people and animals would have to work hard to drink; I saw that all the dry wood and low branches had been used, so we would have to work hard with our axes or else travel far for fuel; and although the woods seemed too thick for lions, I saw how a tiger might like them, so we would have to watch where we went. It was a hunter's place. But what had I expected? It was Father's.

Walking east, I found where the stream drained a narrow lake, and thinking that the lodge would be in sight of the lake, I followed the bank. In no time I noticed a dark mound half hidden in a haze of yellow grass and the thin green needles of sapling pines, the summer's growth which no feet had trampled. Like Uncle Bala's lodge, Father's was domed, but Father's was bigger—half again as long and also higher. The tallest men of Father's family would almost be able to stand inside. Grass grew on the arching roof among the stones that weighed down the sod. Some of the grass stood tall, waving gently in the wind, but in places the grass on the roof lay flat. Trails ran through it. Wolves had climbed there, using it for a resting place or a lookout.

I had not been inside a lodge since the winter before, when I had lived with my mother and stepfather in the lodge belonging to Bala. For as long as I could remember, my place had been with Mother at the fire by the door, in the cold end of the lodge, the bad end, the end used by in-laws or kinswomen of the owners. As I crawled down Father's coldtrap I realized I didn't know just where I was going, where in this lodge I should take my pack, or where I would sleep. I kept moving, though, because everyone but Maral was already inside.

At the end of the passageway I stood up. If the lodge had seemed big from the outside, it seemed small from the inside, small and dark and already filled with the smell of smoke, of the bodies and hair of all the people who, still bulky in their outer clothes, turned to look at me, some of them shading their eyes from a sudden blaze of birchbark they were using to start the fires. With its thick walls, the lodge was much colder than the outdoors, as if it still held the cold of last winter. And from the heavy smell, it seemed that wolves had used the inside as well as the roof.

Behind me, Maral squeezed against me as he stood up and, taking my pack from me, carried it past his stepsister, Rin, and her daughter, Waxwing, who, heads low, were blowing on their fire by the door. Moving carefully to avoid his brother and their wives, who were crowded together in the middle of the lodge, waiting for more light before they found their sleeping places, Maral led me to the rear of the lodge and put my pack by his.

I looked around. Piles of large stones had been used to brace the poles that made the walls of this lodge, heavy walls bent with the weight of crosspoles and with covering sod. In the middle of the lodge a line of four forked lodgepoles braced a rafter running the length of the domed roof, a heavy load, and although these poles were dug into the earth, they were also braced deeply with boulders.

In Uncle Bala's lodge, in a wide spruce wood that was the winterground of mammoths, the stacked bones of many young winter-killed mammoths had made the walls of the lodge—lower jawbones resting on their condyles with their chins up. Compared to rocks and poles, these arched bones were very strong but not very heavy. No bracing was needed, as the jaws interlocked. But no mammoths, dead or living, would be found in an open wood like Father's winterground; the men who had built the lodge would have found no huge bones and would have had no choice but to cut poles and carry rocks. Also, a lodge made with rocks and poles could be strong only if it was narrow. The people who would have to fit themselves into the rear of the lodge would be squeezed very close together.

I had never much liked crowding. I had never liked to inhale the breath of others. I had never much liked babies, with their sharp knees and their cold, smooth bodies, crawling over me, as Frogga might do here, to get from one place to another. I did not want to test myself by lying for a long time beside Pinesinger. But even so, even though the lodge was cold and dark and crowded, even though I was already coughing from the smoke and my eyes were already stinging, I felt a strange happiness to belong, for the first time I could remember, at the owners' fire.

L
ONG AFTER DARK
in Father's lodge, when people had settled into their places, Andriki tightened his drum. Then he with his drum and Maral with his deep voice led us in singing "Honor to the Spirit of the Lodge," to the one who would keep us safe in winter. Maral sang:

 

Honored Spirit!
We are burning fat.
Fat is in the smoke!
Come for it! Eat it!
Remember who gave it!
We who are singing,
We gave it!
Hona!

 

"We who are singing, we gave it!" sang the rest of us. When our voices and clapping joined with Andriki's drum the song grew huge, filled the lodge, and carried our prayer up the smokeholes into the wide, dark sky. "We who are singing! We who are singing! We who are singing! We gave it!"

So we prayed, but in truth we had no fat. All we could give the spirit was the name of fat, the word. That the spirit got over and over, although never from me—when the time came to sing "Fat is in the smoke" and "We gave it," I kept quiet. At Uncle Bala's lodge we didn't treat spirits so freely. I hoped the spirit here was of an easy nature. Since we had nothing but words to offer the spirit and only a little food and a little wood for ourselves, we didn't sing for long, but only until the fires burned low, and then we rolled ourselves into our sleeping-skins.

On my right, almost touching me, Uncle Maral and one of his wives began to move rhythmically in their deerskins, softly grunting and huffing as they worked toward a climax. But which wife? Whoever she was, she was quieter than Maral; perhaps she was holding her breath. My mind sorted over the women of the lodge. Maral couldn't be prodding his short, round, dark-haired wife—Aunt Truht was too far pregnant. So surely he was working on his long, tall, pale-haired wife, Frogga's mother, Aunt Lilan. Yes! Toward the end, a woman's muffled voice said "Waugh!" The voice was Lilan's.

On my left lay Pinesinger in the deepest shadow. She was so close that I felt her breath on the skin of my face, a faint, soft tingle, like an insect's footsteps, which tells us when something alive is very near. And I could smell her breath, her hair. She too was listening to Maral and Lilan. My mind's eye saw Pinesinger's smooth skin, her pale brown eyes with yellow lines in them, her white teeth, her dry lips, and the tip of her tongue, moist, pink, wetting her lips. Then I saw her as if from above, as if I were standing behind her and she were crouching; I saw the back of her head, her shiny hair, her glossy braid. My mind's eye followed her braid down the midline of her shirt to the hem, then down the row of knuckles of her bare spine to where her body split in two, to where her wide, bare haunches rested on her heels. Two rows of raised scars, her Scars of Ohun, curved away from the damp cleft of her buttocks. As if I were an eagle I saw her from high above; her haunches were two bare hills, and the lines of scars were lines of geese flying close to the hills far below me. I thought of an eagle dropping out of the sky, and I thought how large, how strong, how alive a goose would seem to the plunging eagle when at last his body struck hers, as his claws dug through her feathers. Then I tried to think of something else. In those days every memory of my time with Pinesinger hurt me.

Before long I heard feet scrabbling on the roof. The wolves! I heard snuffling at the smokeholes, then the scratch of nails as a wolf slid from the roof to the ground. What boldness! I waited, ready to find my spear, to rush outside and punish the wolves, but no one else moved to chase them off. Wolves seemed to mean nothing to Father's people. At least there was no food they could steal from us. At last I dozed.

Suddenly I was wakened by the short, sharp bark of a wolf nearby. I opened my eyes. The quarter-moon shone dimly through the clouds, faintly lighting the smokeholes. I could just make out the shapes of some of the people in the dark lodge. All were tense, and some were sitting up. I made out Andriki, not in his bed but sitting on his heels, leaning forward. I made out the long, straight line of his spear against his shoulder. Sure from the way in which people were acting that something was very wrong, I threw back my deerskin and would have reached for my spear, but I felt Andriki's hand on my arm. Through the shadows I peered at him. Putting his hand between the smokehole and my eyes so I wouldn't miss his meaning, he made the handsign for tiger.

So! A tiger was outside! I listened hard, but heard nothing. I sniffed the air. At first I smelled nothing, but suddenly my head filled with a burning stench of tiger musk and urine, a stench that stung my eyes and closed my throat. The tiger must have sprayed our doorway!

What tigers spray is fear. In the cold lodge I began sweating, and to my shame, even though it was dark, my chin began to shake. I held my jaws apart so my teeth couldn't chatter, and I held my breath, waiting for the roar that would leave me deaf and melt the marrow in my bones. Everyone waited.

But no roar came. Instead the lodge creaked suddenly, and a shower of dirt from the ceiling rained down on our heads. In silence, the tiger had leaped to the roof. For a terrible moment, during which I saw the roof caving to drop the tiger among us, the lodge seemed to tremble, then the poles groaned in their braces and the dirt showered down again as the tiger leaped off the roof. He mustn't have liked the wobbling. Then he roared.

How much breath can a tiger hold? While the roar went on, fear took us like strong hands, shaking us. Near the end, as we heard the tiger half gasping to force the last of his voice through his terrible mouth, we also heard Frogga crying, her little voice drowned out by the great voice. Lilan tried to stuff her breast into Frogga's mouth to hush her, but Frogga wasn't hungry, she was terrified, and she wouldn't take the breast. Worst of all, when the tiger ran out of breath, Frogga was still crying and suddenly could be heard plainly! As suddenly, the tiger became very quiet. He was listening to Frogga.

In time Lilan managed to hush her daughter, and then everyone listened. At last the tiger gave a short roar, nothing like his earlier awesome bellow, then another short roar a bit farther away. He was moving.