Ursula K Le Guin

by Buffalo Gals

“I want to go home,” the child said.

  “Not yet,” said Coyote. “I got to take a shit.” She did so, then turned to the fresh turd, leaning over it. “It says I have to stay,” she reported, smiling.

  “It didn’t say anything! I was listening!”

  “You know how to understand? You hear everything, Miss Big Ears? Hears all—Sees all with her crummy gummy eye—”

  “You have pine-pitch eyes too! You told me so!”

  “That’s a story,” Coyote snarled. “You don’t even know a story when you hear one! Look, do what you like, it’s a free country. I’m hanging around here tonight. I like the action.” She sat down and began patting her hands on the dirt in a soft four-four rhythm and singing under her breath, one of the endless tuneless songs that kept time from running too fast, that wove the roots of trees and hushes and ferns and grass in the web that held the stream in the streambed and the rock in the rock’s place and the earth together. And the child lay listening.

  “I love you,” she said.

  Coyote went on singing.

  Sun went down the last slope of the west and left a pale green clarity over the desert hills.

  Coyote had stopped singing. She sniffed. “Hey,” she said. “Dinner.” She got up and moseyed along the little draw. “Yeah,” she called back softly. “Come on!”

  Stiffly, for the fear-crystals had not yet melted out of her joints, the child got up and went to Coyote. Off to one side along the hill was one of the lines, a fence. She didn’t look at it. It was OK. They were outside it.

  “Look at that!”

  A smoked salmon, a whole chinook, lay on a little cedarbark mat. “An offering! Well, I’ll be darned!” Coyote was so impressed she didn’t even swear. “I haven’t seen one of these for years! I thought they’d forgotten!”

  “Offering to who?”

  “Me! Who else? Boy, look at that!”

  The child looked dubiously at the salmon.

  “It smells funny.”

  “How funny?”

  “Like burned.”

  “It’s smoked, stupid! Come on.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “OK. It’s not your salmon anyhow. It’s mine. My offering, for me. Hey, you people! You people over there! Coyote thanks you! Keep it up like this and maybe I’ll do some good things for you too!”

  “Don’t, don’t yell, Mom! They’re not that far away—”

  “They’re all my people,” said Coyote with a great gesture, and then sat down cross-legged, broke off a big piece of salmon, and ate.

  Evening Star burned like a deep, bright pool of water in the clear sky. Down over the twin hills was a dim suffusion of light, like a fog. The child looked away from it, back at the star.

  “Oh,” Coyote said. “Oh, shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “That wasn’t so smart, eating that,” Coyote said, and then held herself and began to shiver, to scream, to choke—her eyes rolled up, her long arms and legs flew out jerking and dancing, foam spurted out between her clenched teeth. Her body arched tremendously backwards, and the child, trying to hold her, was thrown violently off by the spasms of her limbs. The child scrambled back and held the body as it spasmed again, twitched, quivered, went still.

  By moonrise Coyote was cold. Till then there had been so much warmth under the tawny coat that the child kept thinking maybe she was alive, maybe if she just kept holding her, keeping her warm, she would recover, she would be all right. She held her close, not looking at the black lips drawn back from the teeth, the white balls of the eyes. But when the cold came through the fur as the presence of death, the child let the slight, stiff corpse lie down on the dirt.

  She went nearby and dug a hole in the stony sand of the draw, a shallow pit. Coyote’s people did not bury their dead, she knew that. But her people did. She carried the small corpse to the pit, laid it down, and covered it with her blue and white bandanna. It was not large enough; the four stiff paws stuck out. The child heaped the body over with sand and rocks and a scurf of sagebrush and tumbleweed held down with more rocks. She also went to where the salmon had lain on the cedar mat, and finding the carcass of a lamb heaped dirt and rocks over the poisoned thing. Then she stood up and walked away without looking back.

  At the top of the hill she stood and looked across the draw toward the misty glow of the lights of the town lying in the pass between the twin hills.

  “I hope you all die in pain,” she said aloud. She turned away and walked down into the desert.

  v

  It was Chickadee who met her, on the second evening, north of Horse Butte.

  “I didn’t cry,” the child said.

  “None of us do,” said Chickadee. “Come with me this way now. Come into Grandmother’s house.”

  It was underground, but very large, dark and large, and the Grandmother was there at the center, at her loom. She was making a rug or blanket of the hills and the black rain and the white rain, weaving in the lightning. As they spoke she wove.

  “Hello, Chickadee. Hello, New Person.”

  “Grandmother,” Chickadee greeted her.

  The child said, “I’m not one of them.”

  Grandmother’s eyes were small and dim. She smiled and wove. The shuttle thrummed through the warp.

  “Old Person, then,” said Grandmother. “You’d better go back there now, Granddaughter. That’s where you live.”

  “I lived with Coyote. She’s dead. They killed her.”

  “Oh, don’t worry about Coyote!” Grandmother said, with a little huff of laughter. “She gets killed all the time.”

  The child stood still. She saw the endless weaving.

  “Then I—Could I go back home—to her house—?”

  “I don’t think it would work,” Grandmother said. “Do you, Chickadee?”

  Chickadee shook her head once, silent.

  “It would be dark there now, and empty, and fleas…You got outside your people’s time, into our place; but I think that Coyote was taking you back, see. Her way. If you go back now, you can still live with them. Isn’t your father there?” The child nodded.

  “They’ve been looking for you.”

  “They have?”

  “Oh, yes, ever since you fell out of the sky. The man was dead, but you weren’t there—they kept looking.”

  “Serves him right. Serves them all right,” the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to cry terribly, without tears.

  “Go on, little one, Granddaughter,” Spider said. “Don’t be afraid. You can live well there. I’ll be there too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark corners in the basement. Don’t kill me, or I’ll make it rain…”

  “I’ll come around,” Chickadee said. “Make gardens for me.”

  The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak. “Will I ever see Coyote?”

  “I don’t know,” the Grandmother replied.

  The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, “Can I keep my eye?”

  “Yes. You can keep your eye.”

  “Thank you, Grandmother,” the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope towards the next day. Ahead of her in the air of dawn for a long way a little bird flew, black-capped, light-winged.

  Three Rock Poems

  The first thing about rocks is, they’re old. What a geologist calls a “young” rock may be older than the species of the individual who picks it up to look at or throw at something or build with; even a genuinely new bit of pumice, fresh from the mouth of Mt. St. Helens, which spat it out into the Columbia River in 1981 to drift down and be picked up on a beach south of the rivermouth, is potentially (if one may say so) old—able to exist in its shapeless, chaotic thingness for time to come beyond human count of years. In the wonderful passage in T.H. White’s Sword in the Stone where young Arthur the Wart learns to understand what the rocks are saying, what he hears them whisper is, “Cohere. Cohere
.” Rocks are in time in a different way than living things are, even the ancient trees. So I was thinking when I came to the last line of the poem “Flints.” But then, the other thing about rocks is that they are place (hence the next-to-last line). Rocks are what a place is made of to start with and after all. They are under everything else in the world, dirt, water, street, house, air, launching pad. The stone is at the center.

  The man and woman who survived the Greek Flood were told, “Cast your mother’s bones behind you and don’t look back.” When they had figured out what their mother’s bones were, they did so; and the rocks softened, and took form, and became flesh: our flesh. And this is indeed what happened, between the Pre-Cambrian Era and this week: the matter of Earth, rock, softened, took form, opened eyes, stood up, stooped down to pick up a rock in soft, warm, momentary fingers…

  The Basalt

  This rock land poured like milk.

  Molten it flowed like honey.

  Volcanoes told it,

  their mouths told all the words of the story,

  continuous, tremendous, coherent,

  brimming over and flowing as easy

  as milk and as certain as darkness.

  You can pick up a word and hold it,

  opaque,

  untranslated.

  (1982)

  Flints

  Color of sun on stone,

  what color, grey or gold?

  In winter Oregon

  on Wiltshire flints in the window

  the same sun. The same stones:

  the standing woman,

  the blind head,

  the leaner, the turner, the stranger.

  Bones of England, single stones

  that mean the world,

  that mean the world is old.

  (1986)

  Mount St. Helens/Omphalos

  O mountain there is no other

  where you stand the center

  is

  Seven stones in a circle

  Robert Spott the shaman

  set them

  the child watched him

  There stands the Henge

  a child plays with toy cars

  on the Altar Stone

  There stands the mountain

  alone and there is no other

  center nor circle’s edge

  O stone among the stars

  the children on the moon

  saw you

  and came home

  Earth, hearth, hill, altar,

  heart’s home, the stone

  is at the center

  (1972)

  “The Wife’s Story” and “Mazes”

  “Mazes” is a quite old story, and “The Wife’s Story” a more recent one; what they have in common, it seems to me, is that they are both betrayals. They are simple but drastic reversals of the conventional, the expected. So strong is the sway of the expected that I have learned to explain before I read them to an audience that “The Wife’s Story” is not about werewolves, and that “Mazes” is not about rats. Perhaps what confuses people in “Mazes” is that the character called ‘the alien’ is from what we call ‘the earth,’ and the other one isn’t. The source of the resistance to the reversal in “The Wife’s Story” may lie somewhat deeper.

  Mazes

  I have tried hard to use my wits and keep up my courage, but I know now that I will not be able to withstand the torture any longer. My perceptions of time are confused, but I think it has been several days since I realized I could no longer keep my emotions under aesthetic control, and now the physical breakdown is also nearly complete. I cannot accomplish any of the greater motions. I cannot speak. Breathing, in this heavy foreign air, grows more difficult. When the paralysis reaches my chest I shall die: probably tonight.

  The alien’s cruelty is refined, yet irrational. If it intended all along to starve me, why not simply withhold food? But instead of that it gave me plenty of food, mountains of food, all the greenbud leaves I could possibly want. Only they were not fresh. They had been picked; they were dead; the element that makes them digestible to us was gone, and one might as well eat gravel. Yet there they were, with all the scent and shape of greenbud, irresistible to my craving appetite. Not at first, of course. I told myself, I am not a child, to eat picked leaves! But the belly gets the better of the mind. After a while it seemed better to be chewing something, anything, that might still the pain and craving in the gut. So I ate, and ate, and starved. It is a relief, now, to be so weak I cannot eat.

  The same elaborately perverse cruelty marks all its behavior. And the worst thing of all is just the one I welcomed with such relief and delight at first: the maze. I was badly disoriented at first, after the trapping, being handled by a giant, being dropped into a prison; and this place around the prison is disorienting, spatially disquieting, the strange, smooth, curved wall-ceiling is of an alien substance and its lines are meaningless to me. So when I was taken up and put down, amidst all this strangeness, in a maze, a recognizable, even familiar maze, it was a moment of strength and hope after great distress. It seemed pretty clear that I had been put in the maze as a kind of test or investigation, that a first approach toward communication was being attempted. I tried to cooperate in every way. But it was not possible to believe for very long that the creature’s purpose was to achieve communication.

  It is intelligent, highly intelligent, that is clear from a thousand evidences. We are both intelligent creatures, we are both maze-builders: surely it would be quite easy to learn to talk together! If that were what the alien wanted. But it is not. I do not know what kind of mazes it builds for itself. The ones it made for me were instruments of torture.

  The mazes were, as I said, of basically familiar types, though the walls were of that foreign material much colder and smoother than packed clay. The alien left a pile of picked leaves in one extremity of each maze, I do not know why; it may be a ritual or superstition. The first maze it put me in was babyishly short and simple. Nothing expressive or even interesting could be worked out from it. The second, however, was a kind of simple version of the Ungated Affirmation, quite adequate for the reassuring, outreaching statement I wanted to make. And the last, the long maze, with seven corridors and nineteen connections, lent itself surprisingly well to the Maluvian mode, and indeed to almost all the New Expressionist techniques. Adaptations had to be made to the alien spatial understanding, but a certain quality of creativity arose precisely from the adaptations. I worked hard at the problem of that maze, planning all night long, re-imagining the lines and spaces, the feints and pauses, the erratic, unfamiliar, and yet beautiful course of the True Run. Next day when I was placed in the long maze and the alien began to observe, I performed the Eighth Maluvian in its entirety.

  It was not a polished performance. I was nervous, and the spatio-temporal parameters were only approximate. But the Eighth Maluvian survives the crudest performance in the poorest maze. The evolutions in the ninth encatenation, where the “cloud” theme recurs so strangely transposed into the ancient spiraling motif, are indestructibly beautiful. I have seen them performed by a very old person, so old and stiff-jointed that he could only suggest the movements, hint at them, a shadow-gesture, a dim reflection of the themes: and all who watched were inexpressibly moved. There is no nobler statement of our being. Performing, I myself was carried away by the power of the motions and forgot that I was a prisoner, forgot the alien eyes watching me; I transcended the errors of the maze and my own weakness, and danced the Eighth Maluvian as I have never danced it before.

  When it was done, the alien picked me up and set me down in the first maze—the short one, the maze for little children who have not yet learned how to talk.

  Was the humiliation deliberate? Now that it is all past, I see that there is no way to know. But it remains very hard to ascribe its behavior to ignorance.

  After all, it is not blind. It has eyes, recognizable eyes. They are enough like our eyes that it must see somewhat as we do. It has a mou
th, four legs, can move bipedally, has grasping hands, etc.; for all its gigantism and strange looks, it seems less fundamentally different from us, physically, than a fish. And yet, fish school and dance and, in their own stupid way, communicate! The alien has never once attempted to talk with me. It has been with me, watched me, touched me, handled me, for days: but all its motions have been purposeful, not communicative. It is evidently a solitary creature, totally self-absorbed.

  This would go far to explain its cruelty.

  I noticed early that from time to time it would move its curious horizontal mouth in a series of fairly delicate, repetitive gestures, a little like someone eating. At first I thought it was jeering at me; then I wondered if it was trying to urge me to eat the indigestible fodder; then I wondered if it could be communicating labially. It seemed a limited and unhandy language for one so well provided with hands, feet, limbs, flexible spine, and all; but that would be like the creature’s perversity, I thought. I studied its lip-motions and tried hard to imitate them. It did not respond. It stared at me briefly and then went away.

  In fact, the only indubitable response I ever got from it was on a pitifully low level of interpersonal aesthetics. It was tormenting me with knob-pushing, as it did once a day. I had endured this grotesque routine pretty patiently for the first several days. If I pushed one knob I got a nasty sensation in my feet, if I pushed a second I got a nasty pellet of dried-up food, if I pushed a third I got nothing whatever. Obviously, to demonstrate my intelligence I was to push the third knob. But it appeared that my intelligence irritated my captor, because it removed the neutral knob after the second day. I could not imagine what it was trying to establish or accomplish, except the fact that I was its prisoner and a great deal smaller than it. When I tried to leave the knobs, it forced me physically to return. I must sit there pushing knobs for it, receiving punishment from one and mockery from the other. The deliberate outrageousness of the situation, the insufferable heaviness and thickness of this air, the feeling of being forever watched yet never understood, all combined to drive me into a condition for which we have no description at all. The nearest thing I can suggest is the last interlude of the Ten Gate Dream, when all the feintways are closed and the dance narrows in and in until it bursts terribly into the vertical. I cannot say what I felt, but it was a little like that. If I got my feet stung once more, or got pelted once more with a lump of rotten food, I would go vertical forever…I took the knobs off the wall (they came off with a sharp tug, like flowerbuds), laid them in the middle of the floor, and defecated on them.