Scarlet Feather

by Joan Grant

  “Do they want to be taken into the woods?”

  “Yes: they think of little else. They don’t know what is going to happen to them there, but they know that not to be chosen is considered an almost unendurable shame. Sometimes it is quite unendurable, for last year a girl killed herself because no man chose her…she ate death-berries.”

  “Can’t you tell them, Raki…what really happens, I mean?”

  If it hadn’t been Raki and me I should have thought he was embarrassed. “Well, we don’t know much about it, do we, Piyanah? I mean, you don’t any more than I do…and you really are a girl.”

  “Don’t the girls talk about it…afterwards?”

  “No,” said Raki, “they don’t. Some of them seem sorry to be back with the squaws, and some of them are terribly glad. But they never say anything about what happens.”

  “Aren’t the girls told anything before the Choosing?”

  “I’m sure they’re not…they whisper and giggle and tease each other; some seem to think that the tree spirits make babies, but I’m sure that’s nonsense. Do the other boys know all about it, Piyanah? I suppose they don’t say anything about it to me because I wear squaw’s clothes.”

  “The boys boast how they will win the wrestling and earn the best squaw, but I think it’s only important because it will show that they have become full members of the tribe. Perhaps they are told when they become Brown Feathers. …I’m sure Gorgi and Tekeeni don’t know anything, for they admitted it when they promised not to take a squaw until they joined our tribe.”

  Raki sighed. “It is very difficult for us, Piyanah, to have to teach men and women how to have children who can be free and happy, when we don’t know how to have children ourselves.”

  “I am glad we came back to the tribe,” I said suddenly. “I would like us to have children, and if we’d stayed in our little valley there would have been no one to tell us how to start.”

  I was spearing fish in one of the hill streams, when the deep, ominous note of the Horn of Gathering rolled up from the valley. My heart leaped like a stranded trout, for the sound held the horror of a rattle-snake…the tribe was being summoned to hear that danger was closing in on them, to hear of the Black Feathers.

  I caught up my six fish, threaded a reed through their gills, and ran down the steep hillside. When I reached the encampment the rest of the tribe had assembled, and Na-ka-chek was telling them that three hundred Black Feathers had been seen coming out of the East, from the country which had been called “uninhabited.” They were men in war paint, and with them came neither children nor squaws. When they heard this, the women huddled together and caught up their children as if to be ready for instant flight.

  “It is not certain,” said Na-ka-chek, in the same calm voice which might have been declaring something of minor importance, “that the Black Feathers will cross the pass into our hunting-grounds. If they go to the north-west I shall send runners to warn the neighbouring tribe that they may be the intended victims. If the Great Hunters consider us worthy, they will choose the Tribe of the Two Trees to cleanse the earth of the vermin of the Carrion Crow.”

  At this there was a murmur of assent from the Braves, and some of the squaws began to look less anxious as they realized there was a chance the danger would pass them by.

  “Only the fool lets danger take him unawares,” went on Na-ka-chek, “so our plans were made soon after the last salt reached the encampment. Those to whom I have given my authority will tell each of you what he is to do for the safety of all. Continue with your preparations, but do not let anticipation change the pattern of your lives until the Horn of the Gathering tells you that the enemy has crossed the pass.”

  The crowd dispersed, and I was able to speak to Raki alone before he went to give orders to the squaws.

  “It has never before been so difficult to obey,” he said, “and I have never been so close to understanding the courage, and the sorrow, of women. You can stay here, to fight; but I must hide with the women…hide, when I might be able to save you if we were together. Hide, because I am more useful keeping squaws from interfering in the battle than I should be if I fought beside you!”

  “If we lose the battle, Raki, yours will be the greater danger. Even if you all manage to escape, how will you be able to look after a herd of women? The Old Women will be like a heavy stone round the neck of a swimmer, and the young squaws and the children will lame you as though you tried to wade through ant-hills. You will have to leave them, or starve with them…and I know you will never leave them.”

  “Don’t you know I should welcome starvation if you had died? Do you think I want to keep you waiting in our little valley?”

  “It will be difficult to hide the tracks of so many women, for only ours have been trained to walk in each other’s footprints. The Black Feathers will not give you an easy death when they find you are not a squaw. They will torture you, Raki, and I shall not be able to help you from the other side of the water.”

  I heard Dorrok shouting for me, and knew we should not have another chance to talk alone. We both carried a weight of fear for each other, so much heavier than the fear for ourselves.

  Dorrok let me take Gorgi and ten other boys to help Raki and our women to carry the things they would need to the chosen hiding-place. This was a large cave, its mouth hidden by a tangle of brambles, and near enough to the encampment for two journeys there and back to be made between sunrise and noon. There was no need to carry water up there, as a stream ran close beside it, but a lot of bread and pemmican was necessary, for it would be too dangerous to light a fire.

  Na-ka-chek had warned Raki that the squaws must remain hidden until they heard the sound of the Horn. If it had not been sounded by the fourteenth day, they must try to make their way westwards to ask shelter from the neighbouring Chief…a journey that would take twenty days even if there was no sickness among them. He also warned us that though the enemy might be beaten off in the first attack they might withdraw only until they saw a favourable opportunity to fall on us again. Squaws who ventured back too soon were often carried off, and with Black Feathers even children would not be safe from massacre.

  The approach to Raki’s cave was up a steep slope of loose shale, without even a thorn bush to afford cover to anyone trying to attack uphill. The cave mouth was narrow, and partially filled by a boulder which would conceal three bowmen who lay flat behind it. Several of the girls were skilled with arrows, but I was doubtful whether they would find a human target so easy as the ones against which they had practised. I was confident of their loyalty to Raki, but would they be able to keep free of the cloud of fear that wrapped the Old Women and the squaws who still clung to their superstitions?

  Among the rest of us there was one question of supreme importance: would the Black Feathers use their traditional method of attack? On this depended the success or failure of our plans. Would they silently encircle our encampment, creeping forward through the darkness to pile dry grass against the tepees, then set them alight so that those who slept there would stumble out into the firelight, blinded by smoke, a prey easier than the animals stampeded by a prairie fire? Would they do this, or respect the honourable laws of battle? If they held to the laws of the Feathered Council they would give us a day’s warning, so that our women and children could be sent to a place of safety: then the Chiefs would meet, to decide the number of Braves each might send into battle and to choose the landmarks from which, at dawn the next day, the line of warriors would approach each other, advancing under cover or charging across the last hundred paces according to their choice.

  “The Black Feathers have been outlawed by the Council of Thirty Tribes for more than two hundred years,” said Na-ka-chek. “We must remember that they are the children of the Carrion Crow, and have not even the honest cruelty of mountain lion. They will try to attack when we are asleep, setting fire to our tepees, massacring our women and children. We will let them think we are a fat and easy prey: they wi
ll find an encampment where everyone appears to sleep except the man by the watch-fire. This man will wear the blanket of an Elder, and the truth of a Scarlet Feather; he will know that the darkness is eager with death, yet he will sit, and smoke, and wait, until he gives the war cry by which we light our fires.”

  “Our fires,” he repeated, “Beyond the circle of tepees shall be set tinder-wood and straw sprinkled with fish-oil. Beside each of these a man shall wait with a smouldering torch, its light carefully hidden. It shall be the enemy, not ourselves, who is blinded by the light of a ring of fires, and we, ready in vantage-points on the cliff, shall let him slake his thirst for blood in the hot rain of arrows.”

  Black Feathers

  “The Black Feathers! Wake up, Piyanah. The Black Feathers have crossed the pass!”

  Still dazed with sleep, I found myself running with Gorgi down the steep path. Instead of a solitary figure by the watch-fire, the leaping flames showed my father wearing the feathered headdress, and round him gathered the Braves, to make before the Totem the dedication of arrows. On the fringe of the crowd I saw Raki, with the squaws who had not yet joined the others in the cave.

  My father raised his right hand and the clamour of tongues was stilled. To the Totem he spoke, and the hearts of his people were open to listen:

  “Messenger of the Great Hunters, in whose memory we live; at thy feet we set these our arrows, that they may fly in truth against thy enemies. Though we are but as a drop in a great river, we, the Men of the Two Trees, are of the morning against the darkness, and in the name of the people on the other side of the water we fight against the children of the Carrion Crow.

  “If we die in thy name, may we deserve the right to enter the Happy Hunting-Grounds; and if we triumph in thy name, may the trees rejoice that we live among them, and the river rejoice that our canoes belong to their waters, and may the animals rejoice that in our country we have not betrayed them.

  “May our courage and our endurance prove worthy of the Totem thou hast set amongst us. May our arrows have the vision of thy eagles, and the strength of our sinews be as the Great White Deer which only the chosen of thy sun has ever seen.

  “Into thy care I commit my people, and I, Na-ka-chek, speak not only in the name of my Braves, for under your protection I place also the women, and the children, and the Naked Foreheads, declaring them to be my equals; so in the name of the Mother of my Sons, I ask that they, too, shall gain entry in honour to thy Country.”

  Then did the Wearers of the Scarlet, and the Brown Feathers, and all of us who would fight in the protection of our people, come forward to kneel before the Totem, holding in our outstretched hands the arrows, feathered in scarlet and yellow, which can be used only against humans who have been declared the enemy of the tribe.

  Then did we kneel before Na-ka-chek, who made with his fingers upon our foreheads the tribal mark, the two interlaced blue triangles in the yellow circle, men and women under the sun, though except by Raki and me this meaning had been forgotten. And on the forehead of Raki and our thirty women he made this sign also.

  Then I watched Raki take the path to the hills: and with him there were women who were young and proud; and women who were frightened; and women, with blankets drawn over their heads to protect them from demons, who shuffled along, dark as the shadows of sleeping bats. I watched them go into the woods beyond the firelight.

  With Gorgi and Tekeeni, I climbed to our vantage-point on the cliff overlooking the encampment. We had been forbidden to talk, and thoughts began to race through my mind. “I must forget that I also am a squaw. Gorgi and Tekeeni are excited…to them the Black Feathers are a new quarry. They are right; Piyanah has sometimes wept in her heart at the death of a stag, but Black Feathers have not the nobility of animals, so she can watch her arrows drink their blood, and laugh and shout in exultation. Black Feathers are not real people, they are a legend, born of fear and shadows, who keep alive the curse of the Separation. Their squaws hate them and their children fear them: think of their squaws, Piyanah, whom your arrows will set free.

  “I never thought I should have to fight without Raki beside me…we never really believed in the Black Feathers. Will Raki find the way to our little valley? Are the corncobs still there, waiting for us to pick them up? We were not afraid of crossing the water when we were eleven…we must not be afraid now. I can’t be afraid, or I shouldn’t have been able to eat of the ‘feast of the preparation’ without feeling sick. There is salt before battle, as much as you can eat…blood will taste salt too. My skin glistens with bear’s grease…difficult for an enemy to grip in a wrestling hold, and if I am wounded, the grease will enter my blood so I shall gain the strength of a bear instead of weakening. I am glad that Pekoo remembered me, for the Lord of the Grizzlies will take me under his protection. An arrow will be hot as fire. …Raki and I used to think it would feel like a hornet. I would rather feel an arrow than a tomahawk. If they take my scalp, I hope that I’m dead first. But I’m not going to be dead, because Raki and I are going to lead a new tribe, and this battle will be only a story we tell by the watch-fire when we are old.”

  I could feel Gorgi and Tekeeni tense beside me as we lay on the narrow ledge: the Scarlet Feather had put two fresh logs on the fire, the signal that the Black Feathers were sliding towards us through the woods with the stealth of vipers.

  The circle of cliffs was taut with bows. A shadow moved down by the river, and I felt Gorgi notch his arrow to the string, though we were not to loose our bows until the enemy began to retreat towards the opening in the rocks on the east of the encampment. The man by the watch-fire seemed absorbed in his smoke.

  The shadows moved closer. They were surrounding the the Squaws’ Tepees. The pool of darkness below the Great Tepee altered its shape…now there were men as well as rocks in the intensity of darkness. Now we should know if Na-kachek had been right when he said that the Black Feathers were obedient to their tradition and always surrounded the tepees before they attacked.

  The man by the watch-fire threw on another log…the Black Feathers had surrounded the encampment. The Scarlet Feather knew that the three hundred pairs of eyes were watching him; he might well be the first victim, alone and defenceless; yet he had not moved, the smoke from his pipe was calm and unhurried, as though he were indeed an Elder, pausing in a story often told.

  Suddenly he leapt to his feet and gave our war cry. The encampment was no longer in darkness, for the ring of fires we had prepared sprang into life…our fires, not the pyres of tepees for which the Black Feathers had waited.

  In the sudden glare I saw the enemies: their bodies glistening with oil, their ribs outlined with charcoal so that they looked like skeletons from the Underworld. I saw the Scarlet Feather die, but before his body fell across the fire four of the enemy had died by his tomahawk. I saw Dorrok strip off a man’s scalp like the pelt from a beaver: he held it above his head, then laughed and threw it into an empty cooking-pot before plunging after another enemy.

  I learned that death can be grotesque, and a man run though his head lolls down his back. I heard that even a Scarlet Feather can scream when a arrow quivers from the socket of his eye. I heard Gorgi sobbing with excitement, and my hands were so slippery with sweat that I was afraid I might not be able to restrain my arrow from its leap.

  The fires blazed higher. I could see my father in a press of fighting men. Quarters were too close for arrows, and I could hear the thud of tomahawks and clubs. I saw the skull of a Brown Feather split open and the white mess of brains slide down his shoulder before he fell. I could smell the hot, sweet stench of blood even through the smoke. Our fires were spreading and tongues of flame licked up one of the smaller tepees.

  A wounded man was crawling up the slope towards me, trying to find the sanctuary of darkness. I was going to help him, but Gorgi pulled me back and I saw the black feather in his forehead-thong. He was coughing, a hard, dry cough like a sick animal; his body curved forward as though he were trying to ret
ch. Fire suddenly ran up a pine tree and I saw the haft of a broken arrow sticking out below his shoulder blade: the light was so bright that I could even see the colour of the blood bubbling from his mouth. The coughing went on and on: I could hear it even above the noise of battle.

  There were many of our dead before the few Black Feathers who still survived started to try to withdraw into the woods.

  “Now!” shouted Gorgi. “Now! The first to pass that rock is mine.”

  I heard the sting of his bow, and a Black Feather threw up his hands and fell forward.

  “Got him!” said Gorgi.“The second is yours, Piyanah. …There! He is trying to hide in that shadow.”

  I held that man’s life between my finger and thumb as though he were an ant. I could see the muscles of his back moving as he fumbled for an arrow. Killing a Black Feather is less than killing an ant. I felt the life go out of my bow, and saw the ant stagger and spin round…then try to crawl away. With my third arrow I killed him…the hunter does not let a wounded animal escape. It is beautiful to kill a Black Feather! At last I knew the meaning of a hunter, there was no pity such as had spoiled the killing of a deer. The blood of an enemy is hot and red and beautiful, and by it the brave grow strong!

  “I am going to take his scalp,” I said, and stood upright on the ledge.

  “No, Piyanah, we are to stay here,” said Tekeeni.