Scarlet Feather

by Joan Grant

  “What happens to a squaw after she knows she is going to swell up and have a baby?” I asked anxiously.

  “She goes to the Squaws’ Tepees, and not until it is more than a year old may its father, or any other man, notice her again. If they meet on a narrow path, she must stand aside for him to pass, and he will pretend even to have forgotten her name.”

  “Don’t squaws hate the fathers of their children?” said Raki.

  “I don’t know…perhaps if they have never known love they are not disturbed by hatred either.”

  “It is a pity that my father is the Chief,” I said, “otherwise I could kill him for making you so unhappy. Do you hate him very much?”

  “No,” she said, “I love him…and he loves me, though only a little and not enough to make him break the law of the tribe. You were born because we were happy together, while he had forgotten everything except that we were young, and alone together in the summer weather. And I was happy, because I believed that he would never wish to send me away after I had told him of the Before People…but you see, Raki and Piyanah, he never believed that they were real.”

  “Why didn’t you make him look into a pool too?”

  “I did. I could see the Before People so very clearly…two of them, a man and a woman, held out their hands to us. But your father said there was only moonlight on dark water.”

  “He loved you and he wouldn’t believe you?” said Raki, incredulous.

  “Perhaps he couldn’t believe me…because he wanted to go on believing that the only duty of a Chief is to carry on the pattern set on the loom by his father and his father’s father. He said that if he took a squaw to live with him all through the year, the Braves would never trust him to lead them to battle. He said that even the squaws would despise him. But at least he did not make me go back to the squaws, for I said that if he did not allow me to live away from the tribe I would drown myself, and take his child with me to the ‘other side of the water.’ My sister chose to come with me; but she died when Raki was born, so I suckled you both. It is because Raki has taken milk from me that Piyanah’s father can declare him to be the next Chief.”

  “Has he no other son?” said Raki.

  “No. Perhaps I made him distrustful of all squaws, or sometimes, when I am happy, I think it is because he still loves me. We are under his protection, and that is why food is left for us on the rock where I was waiting for you…that is why Ninee stays with us, and why no one dares to molest either of you.”

  “But why are they afraid of us?”

  “Because you are my children, and they know that I have seen the Before People. And because you have already broken one of their laws, and not been punished for it.”

  “Which law?”

  “Raki is a boy who still lives with his mother after his seventh year, and he is straight, and swift, and full of health. The men are afraid of the squaws seeing him, for it might make the squaws rebel against the law which says that if a boy stays with his mother after his seventh year he will be crippled before the next moon, and mad before the second, and dead before the wane of the third. It was clever of the men to think of that ‘punishment,’ for without it they could not make the women obey them. I have often heard a squaw weeping, night after night when she thought the others were asleep, because her son had been taken away; and I have seen a woman stand by the path while a boy walked past without any sign of recognition that she was his mother.”

  “Then the women ought not to hate us!”

  “Women must either believe that this tribal law is false, or else that you are under the protection of some powerful spirit, and to the foolish all spirits seem evil; or they must know that they have been betrayed for generations…and it is easier for them to cling to their false loyalties.”

  “Do all tribes think the same?” I asked.

  “Each tribe has its own totem, and the hope by which I live is that among them there is at least one tribe that remembers the Before People. Every seven years the tribes meet for the Feathered Council. When your children are old enough to find their mates, go to the Gathering of the Tribes, and I think the Great Hunters will allow them there to find the ones who will be to them as you are to each other.”

  The fear that this story had brought disappeared like mist before the sun. Mother knew that Raki and I would never allow ourselves to be parted…he would never be a Brave, nor I shut away from him in the Squaws’ Tepees.

  “If Piyanah’s father chose me for the next Chief, would the tribe acknowledge me?” said Raki.

  “No, that is why he will not choose you.”

  “I am glad,” said Raki. “We should have to try to lead them away from their unhappiness, and Piyanah wouldn’t like to live among people who hate us, and neither should I.”

  “Shall I be able to see the Before People?” I said.

  “I hope so, Piyanah. Not a day has passed since you were born that I have not asked the Great Hunters that I might share with you my perilous sight.”

  “Perilous?”

  “There is always danger in being ‘different’.”

  “Can I try to see them…now?”

  “When the pool holds the circle of the moon.”

  Side by side Raki and I lay on the smooth, cold rock, staring down to the troubled water. It was dark, for a cloud had hidden the moon: when it shone clear I knew that the moment had come.

  I watched a stick carried round and round by the current. I tried to send my spirit diving down, down, so that it could tear aside the dark water which was hiding from me the country beyond the water. “Great Hunters, please let me see them,” I whispered, over and over again.

  But the water was only water, driving on and on under the force of the fall.

  “You see…nothing?” It was my mother’s voice.

  “Nothing…” The desolation of the word made it difficult not to cry.

  “Nothing,” echoed Raki; and I knew he shared my bitter disappointment.

  “Perhaps when you are older you will see them,” and I knew Mother was desperately trying to believe this might be true.

  Raki put his hand on her arm. “It doesn’t really matter, Mother; it doesn’t really matter if we can’t see them, because you have shown us how to believe in them. Piyanah and I would never be able to forget them, even if we wanted to, for every time we thank the Great Hunters for letting us be together we shall be remembering the Before People and thanking them too for showing us how to be happy.”

  “Yes,” she said slowly, “I had forgotten that. You have each other. I had only…them.”

  Later, when we asked Mother why the Before People had been forgotten, she said:

  “I have told you, many times, the legend of how the Father of the Great Hunters made the Earth in the morning of the years. First he made the rocks, then the plants and the trees, and then he made the animals. When Earth was ready for man, each pair of animals brought forth a strange cub, the first men and the first women; and the tribes who are decended from them still honour their first ancestor in their totem animal.

  “But the Father of the Great Hunters had an enemy who is old as the sky. At the dark of the moon he came down to Earth; he made treacherous rocks which betray the climber; poisonous fungus and the death-berry; the rattle-snake and the viper. The hornet and the tek fly are his children also, and he made the bat and the carrion crow. These also brought forth men and women, and of all these the descendants of the carrion crow, the Black Feathers, are the most fearsome.

  “Many times did the Black Feathers fight against the children of the Great Hunters, but always were they vanquished, for the happy people were led by an oriole whose wings were bright as the sunrise, and it sang to them of the morning of the Earth.

  “Then the Lord of the Carrion Crow fought with the Oriole, and stole her feathers, and hid his evil in her bright plumage. And the people believed the Sorrow Bird, the first of their enemies, because he came disguised as their protector.

  “The
Sorrow Bird told them that pleasure is only the conquering of pain, and joy the overcoming of sorrow; that freedom comes only through endurance, and courage is born only of fear. So because they listened to the Sorrow Bird they left the quiet valley which had been prepared for them, where the trees were heavy with fruit and the meadows parted by singing waters; for they thought it was wicked for them to live in a place which demanded neither pain, nor endurance, nor tears. Some of the women suspected that the Sorrow Bird was evil, but because they loved their men they followed them into exile. Yet even in the cold lands of the North they still vanquished the Black Feathers, for the love between them was stronger than arrows.

  “Then the Lord of the Carrion Crow brought another great evil to Earth. He told the Sorrow Bird to lead the people to a wide plain where they must build two fires, a hundred paces apart; round the first fire gathered all the men, and round the second all the women…and the people who had once been happy obeyed.

  “Then did the Lord of the Carrion Crow gather up the power of all black clouds, and with it he drove a great cleft into the Earth between the fires, a cleft which stretched from horizon to horizon without end, and was deep as the black night.

  “Yet still the Black Feathers could not defeat the people, for across the cleft they spoke of the love between them, and the love built a bridge over it. Then did the Lord of the Carrion Crow go down into the canyon he had made, down into the depths below the Earth. And when men and women spoke to each other he caught the words and twisted them between his fingers, so that the word of love was heard as hatred, and unity became the sound of separation.

  “He is still there, the Lord of the Carrion Crow, and only people who love each other, as do you and Raki, need not fear him. The bridge over that canyon is firm under your feet, and though he roars in fury, to you the sound is less than the shrill squeak of a bat; even if he takes your bridge in his hands and tries to snap it like a dry bone, it is less disturbed than is a rock by the shadow of a dragon-fly.”

  Then my mother said, “Remember always, Raki and Piyanah, that the two great enemies of mankind are the Sorrow Bird and the Canyon of the Separation; but both are powerless when a man and a woman keep the strength of the love between them, for love is stronger even than the Lord of the Carrion Crow.”

  It was nearly two years before we again saw the Pool of the Before People, for Mother had asked us not to go there until she thought we were ready to see to the “other side of the water.” She came with us, as she had promised. My father carried her in his arms; for she was dead.

  He had wanted to bury her under the great pine tree which grew solitary above the encampment. But he listened to Raki and me, this tall, remote stranger, and said that as it had been her wish, he would give her body to the pool.

  Sharp and clear in the vivid moonlight he stood on the high rock that shone with the spray of the fall. My mother’s body looked as though it was carved wood, stiff and unyielding; yet it remembered her, and could still smile at the things they used to do together, she and her body.

  Raki’s hand was warm and reassuring, yet I knew he trembled as I did. “We can’t see them, but they are waiting for her,” he whispered. “All the beautiful people of the Before Country…and it isn’t cold and dark down there. The fruit trees are shining under a kindly sun, and the people have put on their most brilliant tunics to welcome her. She was lonely here, with only us to talk to; and they have been waiting for her since before we were born.”

  I saw the Chief’s lips moving, but could not hear what he said because of the sound of the fall. He raised up her body on his outstretched hands, as though he were offering it to the night sky.

  Then he knelt, and let her rest on the water, still supported by his arms. Gently the current drew her away from him. Three times she passed us, quiet and serene, as though she were asleep on the breast of the pool.

  Perhaps the Before People were waiting to take her feet in their hands, to set them on the steps which led down into their country, for at the centre of the pool she raised her body upright…and then we couldn’t see her any longer.

  “Did you see them?” I whispered to Raki.

  “No,” he said, “I didn’t see them. But there was a light round her before she disappeared; it may have been their sun shining up to her…or perhaps it was only the moon reflected on the water. I shall never be quite sure.”

  The Choosing

  Only a circle of earth scorched black by the cooking-fire was left to show where we had lived with our mother; even the holes which had held the centre-posts of the tepees had been filled in and the ground trampled hard and smooth. I saw a gleam of scarlet among the scattered ashes and picked up a small bead…one of those which Mother had used to decorate our moccasins. “This is all we have left, Raki…all that is left of the place where we used to belong.”

  “Na-ka-chek has given us our own tepee,” said Raki, “and he lets us do whatever we like.”

  “As though we were bear cubs he was trying to tame! He is afraid we shall run away if he is not very careful.”

  “Are you being quite fair, Piyanah? He gives us everything we ask for.”

  “Didn’t we give Pekoo honeycomb every day when we first found him?”

  “We always did…when we could find any.”

  “Yes, but we did it because Pekoo liked it, not because we hoped it would keep him with us. When the Chief is sure of us, he will try to make us obey the laws.”

  “Well, we can wait until that happens,” said Raki cheerfully. “I am sorry for him in a way…living all alone as he does. Even the Braves are so much in awe of him that they never speak in his presence except to answer a question.”

  “I’m glad he’s lonely,” I said passionately, “terribly glad. He is so proud of being the Leader of Braves, and we are the only people who know he is a coward.”

  “He’s not a coward,” said Raki indignantly.

  “Yes, he is! A brave man can be frightened of his enemies, but only a coward is frightened of his friends. It was because he was frightened of his own tribe that he wouldn’t let Mother be happy with him. If he had had even a little of her courage, the others might have followed him…instead of being so disgustingly miserable that they don’t even realize that they are miserable.”

  “You can’t be miserable without knowing it,” said Raki, in the voice he kept for the times when he thought I was being deliberately unreasonable.

  “Oh yes, you can! And it’s the worst kind of misery there is…when it’s so deep that you have to make yourself believe that there’s nothing better to compare it with. They won’t admit that anyone can be happy…that’s why they still hate us, even though they daren’t show it now that Na-ka-chek has declared that you will be the next Chief. We keep on reminding them of the things they have missed…we are the hind that escaped from the hunter, the fish that was too agile for the starving fisherman, the canoe that shot the rapids in which theirs always foundered. That’s why they hate us…and why they always will!”

  “They won’t believe us yet,” said Raki, “But that’s only because they don’t take any notice of anyone who hasn’t won a feather for his forehead-thong. When I am the Chief they will have to recognize the truth of my laws…and they will recognize you too, for you will always sit with me in council. When they see we go on being happy together, they will have to believe us.”

  “It will be a long time before they let you win a feather, Raki, and what shall I do while you are training to be a Brave?”

  “I expect they will go on letting us share a tepee…if they don’t, I shall refuse to attempt the ordeals, and that would make your father so ashamed that he would soon change his mind. I am afraid it will be horrid for you having to watch me undergo the ordeals, but you will have to think of how useful the feather will be to us in making people listen.”

  “You and I have only known days with both of us in them, Raki. A day would seem longer than a moon if we were apart.”

  �
�But we shan’t be apart.”

  “You will have to be trained by the Brown Feathers, like all the other boys who want to be Braves. They will make everything as difficult for you as they can, to try to prove that a boy who is brought up with a girl is always weak and a fool.”

  “They’ll soon get tired of trying that!”

  “You are stronger and quicker, and much more wise than any of them…but there are tens of them and only one of you.”

  “Well, they can laugh at me…and I can fight. They will find it more difficult to laugh with a split lip and some of their teeth missing! If your father had meant to part us, he would have said so by now.”

  But I didn’t trust Na-ka-chek to understand about Raki and me; he was too cold, too spare, to know the hearts even of his own children. So Raki’s confidence in the future brought me little comfort.

  Although Ninee had refused to eat for three days after Mother died, we knew she was glad to be back with the tribe. Nona, her mother, was the eldest squaw; a woman so old that only her eyes seemed really alive, yet her word was never disobeyed in the Squaw’s Tepees. Her voice was thin as the echo of a cracked cooking-pot, but when she told stories even the shadows crept closer to listen.

  She never spoke when Raki was there, but sometimes, when he was with the other boys learning to build a canoe, I used to let Ninee take me to her. I pretended that I only went there to hear stories which would make Raki laugh, but sometimes it was difficult to remember that they were not really frightening.

  Nona seemed to believe that everything was hostile to women: the tree spirits were jealous if a woman brought forth a child, and scornful if she was barren. The animls hated her because she sewed their skins which the hunters had stolen from them, and cooked the flesh that, but for women, the hunters would have been too lazy to kill. The spirits who lived in quiet pools were especially dangerous, for they would catch a girl’s reflection and carry it away, so that she lost her memory and died. For a woman to kindle a flame was so deeply to anger the spirit of fire that she would die before the next noonday, and only after humble supplication might she take a brand from the watch-fire to the place of the cooking-pots.