The Animal Wife (35 page)

"Speak," said Father.

"You asked to hear this," warned Pinesinger, as if she were about to enjoy herself with Muskrat's insults.

"Just say it," said Father. Pinesinger was boring him.

"Well then, she says if one of her people had died near a cave, that person would have been taken far away, since her people treat their dead with respect. That's what she says. She says her people wouldn't keep the corpse of someone they loved near where other people live. Such a thing would be out of the question for them. And she says she knows less about the skull than you do, Husband, since she didn't stay to look at it. She says her people dislike long-dead corpses, or buried bodies, or human bones."

"By the Bear!" said Father. "She thinks we keep corpses with us? She thinks we handle human bones?" He looked at me.

"I didn't understand her, Father," I said, not wanting to be blamed for Muskrat's words or to have to deal with her because of them.

Graylag and Maral came out of the cave, carrying the skull between them with sticks through the eye sockets. At that, they had only the upper part of the head—the lower jaw was missing. Where was it? Where, for that matter, were the rest of the bones? Calling to their wives to dig a hole, Graylag and Maral set the skull down near us. Muskrat got up and moved farther away. The wolf pup came to sniff at the skull, but people leaped to their feet, shouting and throwing stones. The pup ran.

While in the distance the women took their digging sticks to the thick sod of the plain, Graylag reminded us of a boy who had died here years before. This boy had come with Graylag's stepson the first time the stepson had brought his family from the Fire River to spend a summer at the Hair. Could the skull have belonged to the boy?

A boy who had come from the Fire River? Shocked, I realized that I knew him. He was an orphan named Kakim who, having no family, had slept at our fire for several years. I remembered the day he had left the Fire River, following his new foster father, who in turn was following some women visitors returning to the Hair. "Father," I asked. "Was he Kakim?"

After looking at me curiously, perhaps surprised that I should be the one to know whose skull we had found, Father thought for a time, then admitted that he hardly remembered Kakim. He turned to Graylag. But Graylag had known the boy only a few days and didn't remember his name. At last some of Graylag's people remembered a little about the boy and felt sure that the skull must have been his. Already sick when he arrived, the people remembered, Kakim had died of diarrhea in the Moon of Dust and had been buried in a shallow grave, where, the people admitted, animals might have found him. He had been an orphan without close relatives, so no one had bothered to dig deep. Was that how people had seen Kakim—worth no trouble? If so, he must have known it. How lonely he must have been!

Lost in thought about Kakim, I was watching the skull and its burial and didn't notice that on the plain above the cave Muskrat had cleared some grass and was making a small thornbush barrier of the kind that helps to keep animals from walking up to people who are sleeping on the ground. What now? As best I could with my few words of her language and her few words of mine, I asked her why, when a good cave waited for her, she was getting ready to sleep in the open.

Poor Kakim's skull had frightened her, it seemed. Muskrat made it clear that she would not even go into a cave where a human skull had been found, let alone sleep there. So I tried to explain how the skull came to be in the cave, but she didn't want to know about it, and once again I had to call Pinesinger. Pinesinger found that Muskrat also refused to sleep near people who handled the dead. By this she seemed to mean Father's people. They might reach out and touch her with their corpse-fouled hands. Or the cave might be a burial ground, she seemed to think. The rest of the body, or other bodies, might still be there.

I said the cave was Father's, not a burial ground. I said I thought I even knew whose skull it was, which should make it less frightening. Muskrat wasn't interested. Perhaps I was trying to trick her into going back inside. I could say what I liked, she said; it wouldn't matter. I could beat her or kill her, but I couldn't make her go in. If I dragged her in, she'd come back out again. And she would have—I saw that.

I also saw how I would have to stay outside with her. I couldn't leave her alone with a baby; something might happen to them. After all, the cave still smelled of lions, who hadn't been away long enough to starve the fleas. Who could say that the lions were gone for good, or even gone for long? Much as I might have liked to let Muskrat do as she pleased without me, I couldn't. I left her nursing the baby and went to get dry bison dung.

***

So began the Grass Moon. I enjoyed sleeping under the sky, and I saw how it was that a man sometimes takes his wife and moves away from the rest of his group for a while in summer. It was almost as if we were alone. Father's and Graylag's people sometimes used our fire as a dayfire, but at night they went to sleep in the cave. Then the stars began their journeys and the moon rose out of the grass on the horizon. We would sit quietly, watching the fireflies. We would listen carefully to distant noises, straining our ears to hear the roaring that would tell us if lions were near. We didn't hear lions. They must have been far away, at the meltwater pools on the plain. But often we would hear other animals in the great distance—bison, mammoths, nightjars, owls, and wolves. The wolves' song, sung by many weaving voices, although very far off, always brought the pup to his feet, his ears stiff, his body trembling, straining to hear more. As the distant song faded the pup would give many little cries, and when the song stopped he would raise his chin and call. Several times he would do this, then wait, listening. Each time a wolf would answer. The pup would run back and forth in excitement or stand perfectly still, listening, trembling, waiting. But at night we tied him up, in case he thought of leaving. After all, he was Father's.

Although we lived apart, the people in the cave, especially Father, were much in our thoughts. But I'm not sure we were in theirs. This became clear on one of the first nights we spent apart from the others, the three of us. On that night I was already sleeping while Muskrat sat quietly by the fire, when suddenly I was wakened by loud singing, clapping, and screams. The people below were dancing, probably to clean the cave. I listened carefully. Father was trancing. I heard him calling in the voice of a deaf-grouse, then an eagle, then a woodcock, then a bee. Then I heard the other people calling to Father, calling his trancing spirit home from wherever he had flown in the night sky.

They made me think, those voices, coming up out of the ground below us. They made us both think. Muskrat fell silent, listening and thinking. And the baby listened! I reached out to Muskrat, who handed him to me, and I watched his face as he listened to the voices below us. His mother seemed puzzled and almost frightened by the singing, so I thought the sound might upset the boy too. At least, I thought, his face would show wonder. But in fact he showed no sign at all that he heard anything unusual. What a child he was, that even a sound as strong as that would not frighten him! Instead, like an old person, he seemed to understand.

A
S WE HAD HAD
too much snow that winter, so we had too much rain that summer. The meltwater pools, which should have dried, were filled again, over and over, and the animals went on drinking from them. To lure the animals to the river we burned the grass, but still they stayed away. The rain that filled the pools kept the grass on the plain as fresh and green as any new grass that might grow after our burning.

So we were forced to travel far for hunting. Almost every day we who owned the hunting lands of the Hair River went out with Graylag's men. That summer we seemed to be lucky with horses. It was almost as if every time we tried, we killed one. I think this was because horses run best on hard, dry ground, and the ground was soft that rainy summer. Running far on soft ground seems to tire horses. Often when we hunted them we found them already tired, because every animal that hunts was also running after them that summer. Anyway, we had plenty of horsemeat.

By the time the Grass Moon was full we had killed three horses. Each time I had been one of the hunters and had earned a hunter's share. Of course the best of the meat I killed, the good parts of the rear and flanks, were for in-laws and always went to Frogga's family, but I kept for myself some parts of the liver and neck, my rightful portion as hunter. I also got in-law shares from Maral. Perhaps these were small, as I was young and not yet living with Frogga, but they were meat. I got meat from Pinesinger too, who shared with me because I was her stepchild. Her shares came from Father but also from the people of her lineage, and so were almost always from the forequarters. This was no bad thing; the forequarters of a horse are thick with good meat. Whenever I got meat from Pinesinger I gave some to Muskrat, whose milk fed my son.

I especially remember all this sharing because that summer was the first I spent as one of the grown hunters, not as one of the children. It was the first time that my place in a large group in summer was as one of the men, with women to feed and in-laws to favor. Before that I had had just a boy's place, and my elders had been responsible for favoring and feeding me. When I was a child, each piece of meat that came into my hands was given to me to eat. Each piece of meat was simple food. But that summer, more than ever before, each piece of meat was far from simple food. It was heavy with meaning, to me or to someone else. When I gave meat, I had to think carefully not to make a mistake and anger someone. When someone gave meat to me, I couldn't help judging the size and cut of the piece and wondering what the giver meant by it. Sometimes I think that if I had to name that time, I might call it the time of pieces of meat.

Or the time of rain. Every few days it rained. Sometimes we would see little rainstorms in the distance as Ohun filled the pools on the plain. In the evenings we would see clouds rising over the western horizon, clouds with thunder and lightning in them, which by dawn would be over us with falling rain—sometimes the gentle rain of Ohun, more like a mist than like a downpour; sometimes the harsh, fierce rain of the Bear.

The people in the cave were dry, of course. But nothing would make Muskrat go inside, where, as she had told Pinesinger, a corpse could be hiding, and I wouldn't go in without her. So to keep us dry, Muskrat built a shelter. At the Fire River in summer, my mother and the other women built shelters for shade as well as for protection from the little showers that sometimes came. These shelters looked like bushes—little bristling domes made with branches thatched with grass. They shaded us from the sun and wind but weren't much protection from the rain. It rained so little, though, that we didn't need much protection. During rainstorms we would wait all crowded together, crouching inside these dripping domes. If we got wet, which we did, we waited for better weather.

But Muskrat made a different kind of shelter. Hers was like a fir tree, with piles of branches woven in rings that grew smaller and smaller, ending with a thicket of branches at the top. Over the rings she laid grass in lengthwise bundles. Unlike our shelters, hers was truly dry. I remember thinking two things the first time I slept with Muskrat and our little boy in her dry shelter during a rainstorm: that my woman must have lived in a place of much rain and snow if she could make such a shelter and snow-walkers too, and that I wished my mother could see me, to learn how this shelter-making should be done.

I must laugh when I remember wondering where I had seen such a shelter before. As Pinesinger and I stood staring at it after Muskrat had built it, I told Pinesinger that it looked like the shelter a real muskrat might build in a swamp. How well I had named my woman!

***

One day when the air was warm and hazy, when the new crescent of the Dust Moon hung in the afternoon sky, Muskrat noticed something coming. She stood up, watching. I stood too. Far away we saw a line of people swaying. We stared. They were too far to recognize. I called to Father, and up came the people from the cave. We all stared. After a very long time we saw that they were Graylag's people, and we sat down to wait. I couldn't help but notice Father and how young he suddenly seemed. Like a boy, he was joking, laughing, his face no longer still and set but moving and alive. When at last the people were among us, when we were greeting them, loudly exchanging the first bits of news, helping them to take off their packs, I saw Yoi and Father looking very happily and boldly at each other, as if they couldn't wait to lay hands on each other but were too proud, too old and dignified, to show it.

Pinesinger noticed it too, and her face grew stiff. As soon as she could, she crept into the cave, and that was the last I saw of her until night. Meanwhile we built a large fire near Muskrat's shelter and found strips of horsemeat to cook for the newcomers. For the rest of the day we cooked and ate, Father and Yoi sitting side by side, offering each other shares. Now and then Father, his face mock-serious, would say something very softly to Yoi, and she would laugh too much. As all of us could see, they were glad to be together.

I'm still not sure just what happened in the cave that night, because I was dozing in Muskrat's little shelter, but when I heard some loud voices and terrible screaming I looked out—Muskrat had built the bottom of the shelter so that we could see outside, to keep watch on what moved at night on the plain—and in a short time I saw Pinesinger, weeping, carrying her weeping baby and her deerskins and coming to our fire. Of course I got up and went to sit with her, feeling a flare of anger at Yoi and Father. Why should they treat her badly just because they wanted each other? Pinesinger had never asked to come here.

"You would have been better off to stay at the Fire River, Stepmother," I said, trying to be kind. "You might have married Kestrel," I added, naming one of my cousins. Then I saw that she was moving stiffly and that a blue bruise was starting to show on her face. "Oh?" I said. "What's this?"