Ursula K Le Guin

by Buffalo Gals

  “I like stories a lot.”

  “It takes three nights to tell it. What do you want to know about them?”

  “I was thinking that maybe I ought to go there. Where they are.”

  “It’s dangerous. Really dangerous. You can’t go through—they’d catch you.”

  “I’d just like to know the way.”

  “I know the way,” Horse said, sounding for the first time entirely adult and reliable; she knew he did know the way. “It’s a long run for a colt.” He looked at her again. “I’ve got a cousin with different-color eyes,” he said, looking from her right to her left eye. “One brown and one blue. But she’s an Appaloosa.”

  “Bluejay made the yellow one,” the child explained. “I lost my own one. In the…when…You don’t think I could get to those places?”

  “Why do you want to?”

  “I sort of feel like I have to.”

  Horse nodded. He got up. She stood still.

  “I could take you, I guess,” he said.

  “Would you? When?”

  “Oh, now, I guess. Once I’m King I won’t be able to leave, you know. Have to protect the women. And I sure wouldn’t let my people get anywhere near those places!” A shudder ran right down his magnificent body, yet he said, with a toss of his head, “They couldn’t catch me, of course, but the others can’t run like I do…”

  “How long would it take us?”

  Horse thought a while. “Well, the nearest place like that is over by the red rocks. If we left now we’d be back here around tomorrow noon. It’s just a little hole.”

  She did not know what he meant by “a hole,” but did not ask.

  “You want to go?” Horse said, flipping back his ponytail.

  “OK,” the girl said, feeling the ground go out from under her.

  “Can you run?”

  She shook her head. “I walked here, though.”

  Horse laughed, a large, cheerful laugh. “Come on,” he said, and knelt and held his hands backturned like stirrups for her to mount to his shoulders. “What do they call you?” he teased, rising easily, setting right off at a jogtrot. “Gnat? Fly? Flea?”

  “Tick, because I stick!” the child cried, gripping the willowbark tie of the black mane, laughing with delight at being suddenly eight feet tall and traveling across the desert without even trying, like the tumbleweed, as fast as the wind.

  Moon, a night past full, rose to light the plains for them. Horse jogged easily on and on. Somewhere deep in the night they stopped at a Pygmy Owl camp, ate a little, and rested. Most of the owls were out hunting, but an old lady entertained them at her campfire, telling them tales about the ghost of a cricket, about the great invisible people, tales that the child heard interwoven with her own dreams as she dozed and half-woke and dozed again. Then Horse put her up on his shoulders and on they went at a tireless slow lope. Moon went down behind them, and before them the sky paled into rose and gold. The soft nightwind was gone; the air was sharp, cold, still. On it, in it, there was a faint, sour smell of burning. The child felt Horse’s gait change, grow tighter, uneasy.

  “Hey, Prince!”

  A small, slightly scolding voice: the child knew it, and placed it as soon as she saw the person sitting by a juniper tree, neatly dressed, wearing an old black cap.

  “Hey, Chickadee!” Horse said, coming round and stopping. The child had observed, back in Coyote’s town, that everybody treated Chickadee with respect. She didn’t see why. Chickadee seemed an ordinary person, busy and talkative like most of the small birds, nothing like so endearing as Quail or so impressive as Hawk or Great Owl.

  “You’re going on that way?” Chickadee asked Horse.

  “The little one wants to see if her people are living there,” Horse said, surprising the child. Was that what she wanted?

  Chickadee looked disapproving, as she often did. She whistled a few notes thoughtfully, another of her habits, and then got up. “I’ll come along.”

  “That’s great,” Horse said, thankfully.

  “I’ll scout,” Chickadee said, and off she went, surprisingly fast, ahead of them, while Horse took up his steady long lope.

  The sour smell was stronger in the air.

  Chickadee halted, way ahead of them on a slight rise, and stood still. Horse dropped to a walk, and then stopped. “There,” he said in a low voice.

  The child stared. In the strange light and slight mist before sunrise she could not see clearly, and when she strained and peered she felt as if her left eye were not seeing at all. “What is it?” she whispered.

  “One of the holes. Across the wall—see?”

  It did seem there was a line, a straight, jerky line drawn across the sagebrush plain, and on the far side of it—nothing? Was it mist? Something moved there—“It’s cattle!” she said. Horse stood silent, uneasy. Chickadee was coming back towards them.

  “It’s a ranch,” the child said. “That’s a fence. There’s a lot of Herefords.” The words tasted like iron, like salt in her mouth. The things she named wavered in her sight and faded, leaving nothing—a hole in the world, a burned place like a cigarette burn. “Go closer!” she urged Horse. “I want to see.”

  And as if he owed her obedience, he went forward, tense but unquestioning.

  Chickadee came up to them. “Nobody around,” she said in her small, dry voice, “but there’s one of those fast turtle things coming.”

  Horse nodded, but kept going forward.

  Gripping his broad shoulders, the child stared into the blank, and as if Chickadee’s words had focused her eyes, she saw again: the scattered whitefaces, a few of them looking up with bluish, rolling eyes—the fences—over the rise a chimneyed house-roof and a high barn—and then in the distance something moving fast, too fast, burning across the ground straight at them at terrible speed. “Run!” she yelled to Horse, “run away! Run!” As if released from bonds he wheeled and ran, flat out, in great reaching strides, away from sunrise, the fiery burning chariot, the smell of acid, iron, death. And Chickadee flew before them like a cinder on the air of dawn.

  iv

  “Horse?” Coyote said. “That prick? Catfood!”

  Coyote had been there when the child got home to Bide-A-Wee, but she clearly hadn’t been worrying about where Gal was, and maybe hadn’t even noticed she was gone. She was in a vile mood, and took it all wrong when the child tried to tell her where she had been.

  “If you’re going to do damn fool things, next time do ’em with me, at least I’m an expert,” she said, morose, and slouched out the door. The child saw her squatting down, poking an old, white turd with a stick, trying to get it to answer some question she kept asking it. The turd lay obstinately silent. Later in the day the child saw two coyote men, a young one and a mangy-looking older one, loitering around near the spring, looking over at Bide-A-Wee. She decided it would be a good night to spend somewhere else.

  The thought of the crowded rooms of Chipmunk’s house was not attractive. It was going to be a warm night again tonight, and moonlit. Maybe she would sleep outside. If she could feel sure some people wouldn’t come around, like the Rattler…She was standing indecisive halfway through town when a dry voice said, “Hey, Gal.”

  “Hey, Chickadee.”

  The trim, black-capped woman was standing on her doorstep shaking out a rug. She kept her house neat, trim like herself. Having come back across the desert with her the child now knew, though she still could not have said, why Chickadee was a respected person.

  “I thought maybe I’d sleep out tonight,” the child said, tentative.

  “Unhealthy,” said Chickadee. “What are nests for?”

  “Mom’s kind of busy,” the child said.

  “Tsk!” went Chickadee, and snapped the rug with disapproving vigor. “What about your little friend? At least they’re decent people.”

  “Horny-toad? His parents are so shy…”

  “Well. Come in and have something to eat, anyhow,” said Chickadee.

/>   The child helped her cook dinner. She knew now why there were rocks in the mush-pot.

  “Chickadee,” she said, “I still don’t understand, can I ask you? Mom said it depends who’s seeing it, but still, I mean if I see you wearing clothes and everything like humans, then how come you cook this way, in baskets, you know, and there aren’t any—any of the things like they have—there where we were with Horse this morning?”

  “I don’t know,” Chickadee said. Her voice indoors was quite soft and pleasant. “I guess we do things the way they always were done. When your people and my people lived together, you know. And together with everything else here. The rocks, you know. The plants and everything.” She looked at the basket of willowbark, fernroot and pitch, at the blackened rocks that were heating in the fire. “You see how it all goes together…?

  “But you have fire—That’s different—”

  “Ah!” said Chickadee, impatient, “you people! Do you think you invented the sun?”

  She took up the wooden tongs, plopped the heated rocks into the water-filled basket with a terrific hiss and steam and loud bubblings. The child sprinkled in the pounded seeds, and stirred.

  Chickadee brought out a basket of fine blackberries. They sat on the newly-shaken-out rug, and ate. The child’s two-finger scoop technique with mush was now highly refined.

  “Maybe I didn’t cause the world,” Chickadee said, “but I’m a better cook than Coyote.”

  The child nodded, stuffing.

  “I don’t know why I made Horse go there,” she said, after she had stuffed. “I got just as scared as him when I saw it. But now I feel again like I have to go back there. But I want to stay here. With my, with Coyote. I don’t understand.”

  “When we lived together it was all one place,” Chickadee said in her slow, soft home-voice. “But now the others, the new people, they live apart. And their places are so heavy. They weigh down on our place, they press on it, draw it, suck it, eat it, eat holes in it, crowd it out…Maybe after a while longer there’ll only be one place again, their place. And none of us here. I knew Bison, out over the mountains. I knew Antelope right here. I knew Grizzly and Greywolf, up west there. Gone. All gone. And the salmon you eat at Coyote’s house, those are the dream salmon, those are the true food; but in the rivers, how many salmon now? The rivers that were red with them in spring? Who dances, now, when the First Salmon offers himself? Who dances by the river? Oh, you should ask Coyote about all this. She knows more than I do! But she forgets…She’s hopeless, worse than Raven, she has to piss on every post, she’s a terrible housekeeper…” Chickadee’s voice had sharpened. She whistled a note or two, and said no more.

  After a while the child asked very softly, “Who is Grandmother?”

  “Grandmother,” Chickadee said. She looked at the child, and ate several blackberries thoughtfully. She stroked the rug they sat on.

  “If I built the fire on the rug, it would burn a hole in it,” she said. “Right? So we build the fire on sand, on dirt…Things are woven together. So we call the weaver the Grandmother.” She whistled four notes, looking up the smokehole. “After all,” she added, “maybe all this place, the other places too, maybe they’re all only one side of the weaving, I don’t know. I can only look with one eye at a time, how can I tell how deep it goes?”

  Lying that night rolled up in a blanket in Chickadee’s back yard, the child heard the wind soughing and storming in the cottonwoods down in the draw, and then slept deeply, weary from the long night before. Just at sunrise she woke. The eastern mountains were a cloudy dark red as if the level light shone through them as through a hand held before the fire. In the tobacco patch—the only farming anybody in this town did was to raise a little wild tobacco—Lizard and Beetle were singing some kind of growing song or blessing song, soft and desultory, huh-huh-huh-huh, huh-huh-huh-huh, and as she lay warm-curled on the ground the song made her feel rooted in the ground, cradled on it and in it, so where her fingers ended and the dirt began she did not know, as if she were dead, but she was wholly alive, she was the earth’s life. She got up dancing, left the blanket folded neatly on Chickadee’s neat and already empty bed, and danced up the hill to Bide-A-Wee. At the half-open door she sang,

  “

  Danced with a gal with a hole in her stocking

  And her knees kept a knocking and her toes kept a rocking,

  Danced with a gal with a hole in her stocking,

  Danced by the light of the moon!”

  Coyote emerged, tousled and lurching, and eyed her narrowly. “Sheeeoot,” she said. She sucked her teeth and then went to splash water all over her head from the gourd by the door. She shook her head and the water-drops flew. “Let’s get out of here,” she said. “I have had it. I don’t know what got into me. If I’m pregnant again, at my age, oh, shit. Let’s get out of town. I need a change of air.”

  In the foggy dark of the house, the child could see at least two coyote men sprawled snoring away on the bed and floor. Coyote walked over to the old white turd and kicked it. “Why didn’t you stop me?” she shouted.

  “I told you,” the turd muttered sulkily.

  “Dumb shit,” Coyote said. “Come on, Gal. Let’s go. Where to?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I know. Come on!”

  And she set off through town at that lazy-looking rangy walk that was so hard to keep up with. But the child was full of pep, and came dancing, so that Coyote began dancing too, skipping and pirouetting and fooling around all the way down the long slope to the level plains. There she slanted their way off north-eastward. Horse Butte was at their backs, getting smaller in the distance.

  Along near noon the child said, “I didn’t bring anything to eat.”

  “Something will turn up,” Coyote said, “sure to.” And pretty soon she turned aside, going straight to a tiny grey shack hidden by a couple of half-dead junipers and a stand of rabbit-brush. The place smelled terrible. A sign on the door said: FOX. PRIVATE, NO TRESPASSING!—but Coyote pushed it open, and trotted right back out with half a small smoked salmon. “Nobody home but us chickens,” she said, grinning sweetly.

  “Isn’t that stealing?” the child asked, worried.

  “Yes,” Coyote answered, trotting on.

  They ate the fox-scented salmon by a dried-up creek, slept a while, and went on.

  Before long the child smelled the sour burning smell, and stopped. It was as if a huge, heavy hand had begun pushing her chest, pushing her away, and yet at the same time as if she had stepped into a strong current that drew her forward, helpless.

  “Hey, getting close!” Coyote said, and stopped to piss by a juniper stump.

  “Close to what?”

  “Their town. See?” She pointed to a pair of sage-spotted hills. Between them was an area of greyish blank.

  “I don’t want to go there.”

  “We won’t go all the way in. No way! We’ll just get a little closer and look. It’s fun,” Coyote said, putting her head on one side, coaxing. “They do all these weird things in the air.”

  The child hung back.

  Coyote became business-like, responsible. “We’re going to be very careful,” she announced. “And look out for big dogs, OK? Little dogs I can handle. Make a good lunch. Big dogs, it goes the other way. Right? Let’s go, then.”

  Seemingly as casual and lounging as ever, but with a tense alertness in the carriage of her head and the yellow glance of her eyes, Coyote led off again, not looking back; and the child followed.

  All around them the pressures increased. It was if the air itself was pressing on them, as if time was going too fast, too hard, not flowing but pounding, pounding, pounding, faster and harder till it buzzed like Rattler’s rattle. Hurry, you have to hurry! everything said, there isn’t time! everything said. Things rushed past screaming and shuddering. Things turned, flashed, roared, stank, vanished. There was a boy—he came into focus all at once, but not on the ground: he was going along a couple of inches above the ground, moving very
fast, bending his legs from side to side in a kind of frenzied swaying dance, and was gone. Twenty children sat in rows in the air all singing shrilly and then the walls closed over them. A basket no a pot no a can, a garbage can, full of salmon smelling wonderful no full of stinking deerhides and rotten cabbage stalks, keep out of it, Coyote! Where was she?

  “Mom!” the child called. “Mother!”—standing a moment at the end of an ordinary small-town street near the gas station, and the next moment in a terror of blanknesses, invisible walls, terrible smells and pressures and the overwhelming rush of Time straight forward rolling her helpless as a twig in the race above a waterfall. She clung, held on trying not to fall—“Mother!”

  Coyote was over by the big basket of salmon, approaching it, wary, but out in the open, in the full sunlight, in the full current. And a boy and a man borne by the same current were coming down the long, sage-spotted hill behind the gas station, each with a gun, red hats, hunters, it was killing season. “Hell, will you look at that damn coyote in broad daylight big as my wife’s ass,” the man said, and cocked aimed shot all as Myra screamed and ran against the enormous drowning torrent. Coyote fled past her yelling, “Get out of here!” She turned and was borne away.

  Far out of sight of that place, in a little draw among low hills, they sat and breathed air in searing gasps until after a long time it came easy again.

  “Mom, that was stupid,” the child said furiously.

  “Sure was,” Coyote said. “But did you see all that food!”

  “I’m not hungry,” the child said sullenly. “Not till we get all the way away from here.”

  “But they’re your folks,” Coyote said. “All yours. Your kith and kin and cousins and kind. Bang! Pow! There’s Coyote! Bang! There’s my wife’s ass! Pow! There’s anything—BOOOOM! Blow it away, man! BOOOOOOM!”