Tsuga's Children (16 page)

Arn’s face was warm, from the running but also from pride in what Bren had said—that he could run.

“Now we’ll go to the bowyer and see if we can find you a bow. Here, can you pull mine?” Bren put the end of his bow in his instep and bent it as he pushed the loop of the string into the nock, then handed it to Arn.

The bow was carved of hickory, thin but wide in its limbs, thick enough at the grip to feel secure in the hand. Arn placed three fingers on the string, as his father had taught him, and drew to his cheek. The pull was heavier than the one his father had made him, but he could hold the string against his cheekbone for a few seconds without his arms shaking. Then he let the string slowly back.

Bren nodded as he took his bow. “I draw to the ear,” he said, “but some say it’s better to draw to the cheek.” He turned as abruptly as before, and Arn followed him.

* * *

Jen and Arel went to Arel’s family’s hogan, which was much like Bren’s. Amu and Arel’s mother, whose name was Runa, were working with the others, so the hogan was empty. The dirt floor had been swept smooth and there was no fire in the large hearth. Two small windows were bright but not transparent because they were made out of animal skins scraped so thin the light came through. Arel had noticed where the stitching had been removed from the red fox fur border on Jen’s parka, so she went to a wooden chest with leather hinges and found needles and thread. The needles were much thicker than the ones the Traveler brought at home. Then they went outside where it was brighter and worked on the sewing. It was hard because the stitching holes were smaller than the needles, so they had to press each stitch through with a bone palm thimble.

“The animals,” Arel said as they took turns pushing the needle through. “I know an animal, like you said you know Oka. I’ve never told anyone because we’re not supposed to know them.”

“Not supposed to know an animal?” Jen said.

“I knew it was wrong but I couldn’t help it. His name is Mask, and he’s a raccoon. His legs were broken and he didn’t want to die.” Arel was shaking as she spoke, in fear at having done what was not supposed to be done. “Can I show him to you, Jen, and you won’t tell? I’ve always wanted to tell somebody about Mask.”

They put away the needles and thread, and Arel led Jen across the meadow toward the southern forest. They ran and then walked. A brown rabbit ran ahead of them in panic before it veered off and hid in the taller grass of a gully.

At the edge of the forest Arel stopped and looked guiltily back. No one was in sight. She led Jen into the green shade of the pines. “Mask!” she called. “Mask, I’m here!” She sat down on the moss. “He’ll come if he heard me.

Sometimes he’s so far into the woods he can’t hear me, but if he hears he’ll come.”

They waited quietly. Jen felt there was no hurry to ask or tell anything, that they would in their understanding of each other get around to all the things she wanted to tell or to find out. Then Jen said, “He’s nearby.”

Arel said, “I know that. How did you know?”

“I can feel him thinking. He’s worried about me being with you. I’ll bet he’s so close we could see him if we looked carefully.”

“I know that too, Jen! I didn’t think anyone else could do that!”

They looked very carefully into the shadows, into the low bushes that grew between the trees, then higher into the trees. Arel said, “I see him, Jen. Look.”

And there he was, a young raccoon with his masked face still, his bright black eyes observing them. He sat on the limb of a pine, ten feet from the ground, peering quietly at them through the needles.

“It’s all right, Mask,” Arel said.

The young raccoon watched them, thinking of old dangers that spoke to him in his bones, then of Arel, who had touched him without hurting him. Finally he moved and came down the other side of the tree where they couldn’t see him. Halfway down his masked face peered around the tree trunk to see if they had moved. When he saw they hadn’t, he came all the way down, then came toward them, looking from one to the other. Finally he came up to Arel and let her touch him. After a while he let Jen touch him too.

“I don’t know how he broke his legs. They seemed bitten,” Arel said. “His front legs—maybe a wildcat or a lynx. But I tied on wooden splints, like we do for people, and brought him food. He hid over there beneath that rock. What he liked best was corn, fish and bread. Then in a week he could get around by himself, and now he’s as good as new.”

“But you said it was wrong,” Jen said.

“Tsuga says it is wrong to change the animals. He says the animals belong to themselves and we should never interfere, but I don’t know why it was wrong to help Mask.”

The raccoonrolled over on his back soArel could scratch its belly. “He’s grateful, I think,” Arel said.

Jen remembered a windy voice she had heard in a dream:
They held the creatures prisoners in pens, fed them and gained their trust, only to betray them in the end … They became worse than what they most feared.
She shivered at the belief she had felt in that strange, gentle voice.

“Goodby, Mask,” Arel said, getting up. “We’ve got to go home now.”

The young raccoon watched them from its wild black eyes, its thoughts, too, masked from Jen and Arel as they left the forest for the afternoon light of the meadow.

“Arel,” Jen said as they walked back toward the houses, “if we ever get back home I wish you could come and visit us.

But then she remembered the blackness of the cold cave beneath the mountain, a cold, unearthly black so absolute it had seemed to dissolve her eyes, and she heard old Snaggletooth’s gleeful voice:
A cave of many passages, in and back, and only Ahneeah knows the way!

On the way to the bowyer’s Arn and Bren stopped to watch the fishermen, who waited with their nets in loose curves pulled by the current. Downstream a watcher suddenly shouted, “Shandeh! Shandeh!” and in a moment they saw a dark shadow approaching along the river bed, a long, sinuous shadow that appeared below the smooth swirls of water, then disappeared beneath the rapids’ froth, only to appear again, always moving swiftly upstream. When the moving shadow reached the nets, they were drawn tight, then as suddenly loosened by the men on the far bank. On the near bank men with lines ran away from the river, pulling the nets around in a circle to capture the shadow and pull up on the shoreline hundreds of small fish that now, in air, billowed all silver in their desperate tries to swim in air and among the teeming bodies of their fellows. But the nets were drawn away from the water and the fish were soon gathered in wooden sieves to be prepared for drying.

“We will have fresh shandeh for the evening meal,” Bren said. “This is called the month of the shandeh. All the rest of the year they stay deep in the warm lake.”

The bowyer, who, by his glowing forge and bellows, many hammers and tongs, was also the smith, greeted Bren. “Bren who will not remain a child!” he said. He was a tall, muscular man, his hair turning gray in a fringe around his face, as if the heat from his forge had faded it. When he left his forge for the woodworking part of his hogan he put a buckskin shirt on over his sweat-gleaming arms and chest. He spoke to Arn. “He’s the best bowman of his age, and better than many twice his age.”

Bren found it difficult to conceal his pride.

They looked through the rough bows stacked at the rear of the hogan, trying to find one to fit Arn, and finally they did find one that seemed right in pull and length. The grip was unfinished, however. “But you can finish it; I’ve heard you have a good knife,” the bowyer said.

“A knife!” Bren said. “Show him your knife!”

The bowyer gently took Arn’s knife in his big hand, as if it were something precious he might accidentally drop. He looked at it carefully—pommel, hilt, choil, guard, and finally the blade, which he sighted down, turned in the light, and rubbed with his thumb.

“I heard that your father forged this blade,” he said. “He is one of us, a master of his craft. Also, I sense by color and brightness that this blade is harder than ours—a bit brittle, perhaps, but very strong. When you see him, tell him that Rindu, the artisan, greets him as a brother.”

Arn’s thoughts went again across the miles of forest and darkness to the world of ice where his father lay silent in the small cabin. The bow his father had made for him had seemed more like a toy than the one he now held, yet his father hadn’t treated it that way. “This weapon fed a thousand generations of the Old People,” he’d said, looking seriously into Arn’s eyes. “Treat it with care and respect.” And then came the shameful memory of the impaled toad; he had used his bow as a toy, and the result had been a cruel and needless death.

Gradually, as he carved the bow’s grip to fit his left hand, these thoughts faded. Bren and Rindu twisted and waxed a bowstring for him and found an old, repaired leather quiver for him. Then he was given ten arrows, five with bladed hunting points, five with blunt points for practice and small game. This was, Arn learned, a ceremony in which he must take each cedar arrow in his hands and memorize its grain and other small differences of detail so that he would always know each arrow as his own.

“Arn’s arrows,” Rindu said. “May they give death without pain.”

Then, until the sun was low in the southwest, Bren and Arn practiced with their bows. They went to a clay bank, where spring freshets had cut a gully in the meadow. Bren took a stick and drew the rough outline of a deer in the clay, and they shot their arrows from twenty, thirty and forty paces. Bren’s arrows, released the moment his string touched his ear, flew with such straight tension and authority, Arn didn’t think he could ever come close to matching their flight with his own. He did improve, though, after many tries. Bren finally lost his initial impatience with him, and when Arn learned, as if in his fingers themselves, to release his arrows smoothly, with little wobble, Bren said he might someday make an archer.

Before the first haze of dusk they walked back toward the winter camp, where cooking fires had been lit. Blue-gray woodsmoke rose from the central openings of the hogans to form a soft mist that drifted slowly, in smooth layers, across the river toward the east. Arn was thinking of his hunger, after this day, and of the warm hogans where the people would be hungry after their long day of work. He felt himself part of them now.

Bren stopped and looked toward the east, where the light from the western sky still made the trees glow a dim orange. “See!” he said, excitement in his lowered voice. “See, by the trunk of that tallest pine! Do you see?”

Three deer—a doe and two yearlings, their backs fading into black, their chest and belly markings white, fading into the dusky orange of the evening light, browsed silently at the edge of the forest.

“See?” Bren said. “We were not playing. When you learn, that is not play.” He gazed, as motionless and watchful as the deer, who had seen them stop and knew across all that distance the quick intensity of hunters. “They know,” Bren said with reverence in his voice for those lives and minds far across the river, those free animals who were of the wilderness that gave sustenance to his people.

That evening Jen and Arn met Fannu and Dona, grandson and granddaughter of Aguma, the stocky gray-haired woman who was Chief Councillor, whose palms had glittered with the silver scales. They met other children, some younger and some older than they, each different from them and from all the others. At the evening meal they saw two nursing babies held across their mothers’ laps, heard their small noises as they fed at their mothers’ breasts.

Because of the constant work of the month of the shandeh, the people ate in communal hogans, some having been assigned to prepare the food for others. Jen and Arn sat at a long table in Aguma’s hogan, the largest in the winter camp. Huge pottery tureens of shandeh stew steamed upon the table. Plates piled high with hot yellow cornbread were passed from end to end, with plenty for everyone. Each took his bowl and with a wooden ladle dipped out as much of the rich stew as he wanted. Among the vegetables—Arn recognized cattail tubers, arrowroot, corn, beans and small wild carrots—thick flakes of the white meat of the shandeh swirled in the rich yellow broth.

The people, young and old, were tired but friendly with each other. The shandeh had run well this year, and they foresaw less hunger in the hard months of the false spring when the sun would be high but the earth still cold and fallow.

After the meal were the evening fires, most of the people returning to their own hogans.

Amu and Runa, Arel’s parents, stayed for a while with them by Aguma’s fire after the dishes and bowls had been collected and taken to the river for washing. As they sat in the warm firelight Bren kept looking toward the door of the hogan, obviously worried about something, and finally Runa came to kneel behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. “Bren is worried,” she said in a voice in which they heard a smile of affection. Her round face was bronze, her black hair glowing with fine threads of reddish gold in the firelight. Arel had told Jen and Arn that Bren’s mother was dead, and that after her death Bren’s father had changed. He would go away sometimes for weeks at a time, no one knew where. And now he had been away again for several days.

Bren seemed to gain some comfort from Runa’s concern, but still he was silent, seeming very small among the adults, his brows down over his eyes like dark awnings.

When the bearskin curtain over the door began to move, Bren looked up eagerly. The bearskin was pushed aside and what looked like half a man—all legs—came through the doorway. It was old Ganonoot, all bent over, his head tilted up in order to see. He cackled when he saw Arn and Jen, Bren and Arel, Fannu and Dona and the other children by the fire. “Here are my little ones who like stories!” he said as he came swiftly over to them, moving smoothly like some kind of insect that had more legs than it ought to have.

Bren’s face went dark and still again; he had been expecting someone else. But Ganonoot, smiling so wide his dark gums shone in the firelight, sat down among them, took his yellow fang in his fingers and moved his head up and down as if that tooth were a handle.