Scarlet Feather

by Joan Grant

  “Then I began to think of you…you grow very like her, Piyanah, even in your body. I began to wonder what I should say to you if you were going away…as so soon you are going away, and I wanted to be sure you would remember me. Would you want to hear of the pride I feel in you, or the way I honour your courage, and your wisdom, and your endurance? Then I thought, ‘How can I know what Piyanah would want unless I know my own heart? What would I want Piyanah to say to me before she went away?’ It was easy then, for I knew above all things I should want to hear, ‘I love you, Na-ka-chek.’

  “You nearly said that once, on the morning after you won your Scarlet. Do you remember how you smiled and said, ‘Dear Father’ …and then said, ‘I never called you that before…we have built a bridge over our canyon’? I wanted to say then, ‘I love you, Piyanah,’ but I thought a Chief and a Scarlet Feather could not open their hearts even to each other, without betraying them. Then I knew what your mother would want to hear, if my voice still held any meaning for her.

  “I said, ‘I love you’; over and over again, in an ordinary voice as though she were sitting beside me and could hear everything. The words seemed to find an echo in the pool, and I thought the water was throwing them back to me. But it was not an echo, Piyanah; it was her voice! I saw her; it was natural to take her in my arms, and for both of us to smile at the man sitting by the pool, the man who had tried to barter for love by the power of the feathers which had forgotten their singing.

  “Once I thought that love was a word used only by a man and woman who in the summer weather had forgotten their duty to the tribe; now I have learned that it is stronger than war cries, and in it is the wisdom of the generations. It is the way of knowledge of the Elders, and the Scarlet of warriors; it is the feathers of the bird of the morning, and the canoe by which the living and the dead cross the great river. It is the full moon and the high sun, the living rain and the heat of the growing. Love!—the single voice by which the wearers of the Singing Feathers can know their kindred, and themselves.”

  Chief of the Heron

  During the winter our people had made for us the tepee of a Chief. It was of double hides, painted with scenes through which Raki and I had lived; two figures standing on a pass, watching a column of black smoke, the scalping of the Black Feathers, a canoe entering the Caverns of Darkness, Raki diving from the Eagle Rock; but much of it remained undecorated, for as yet our people had no tribal history to record. Instead of a centre-post it was supported by eight poles, of birch-wood, which is light to carry, carved with birds and animals between bands of the white and scarlet we had chosen for our tribal colours. On the day before we became Chief it would be taken up to the place where my mother’s tepee had been set when Na-ka-chek came to this new place of the corn-growing. There we should begin the Moon of the Uniting, which henceforward would be the name given by our tribe to the first spring moon to commemorate that men and women rejoiced together before setting forth on their journey to the South.

  The preparations for this journey were almost complete. Each man had made a piece of tanned leather, his height by twice his height, to be hung over a cross-bar or a low branch to form a shelter in which he and his woman would sleep. Nearly everything we were to take with us must be new. The men had been making tomahawks, bows both for hunting and war, fish-spears, coils of raw-hide rope. The women were busy with leather sacks to carry pemmican or corn, water-skins, tunics, fur robes; in plaiting fishing lines, or collecting feathers to fletch arrows.

  Ten of the squaws, led by Rokeena, were making marriage robes for Raki and me, and as they wished them to be kept secret until we wore them I had to whistle before entering the largest of the women’s tepees so that they had time to hide them. I knew that they were of white doe-skin because I had seen a few shreds of this lying beside the blanket in which they were wrapped, and suspected they would be decorated with feathers, as Tekeeni had brought back a number of blue jays which he said were for Rokeena.

  I made the ceremonial moccasins for Raki—though I often regretted the pride which would not let me give them to someone else to finish; setting beads, as I admitted to Gorgi, needs far more patience than stalking a mountain goat. He appreciated what I meant, for early in the winter we had gone into the mountains, and stayed there seven days before we killed the first of the eight rams that provided the fine, white fleeces which are used for a Chief’s blankets.

  All Chiefs, before they take their oath to the tribe, fast for two days and two nights; drinking only water at sunrise and sunset. They must not lie down or sleep, but sit cross-legged in a tepee set apart, so that if the Great Hunters speak to them, even in a whisper soft as a falling leaf, their voice will be clearly heard. For this fasting the tepees in which Raki and I had lived alone since we became Scarlet Feathers were taken up to opposite ends of the semicircle of cliffs. During this period of separation, which was a symbol of all that we had undergone to gain a yet closer unity, he wore the squaw’s tunic that he had put on at our first parting, and I the breech-clout, breast-bandage, and roughly patched tunic which belonged to that same bitter loneliness.

  I knew that below me in the encampment preparations for the marriage feast were being made, yet all was silence, for no one spoke above a whisper lest we who listened be disturbed. In thought I returned to that night when as children we had watched my mother and father looking towards each other, divided by so much more than the curve of the cliffs. Between Raki and me love sang like a bowstring, and the love of our tribe would be the arrow which should leap from that bow towards the sun.

  A marriage between equals had not taken pace in any tribe during the memory of the ancestors, yet when I had asked Na-ka-chek what words Raki and I should use to pledge our oath of eternity, he had said, “Your mother has told me it is her wish that I shall speak the words which will make you one at the dawn hour. Then, as the new Chief, you and Raki shall unite those men and women who wish to follow the path on which you are their forerunners.”

  “What words shall we use to unite our people?”

  “It is your hearts which must tell you that: but the words must be like living water fresh from the spring, for words and water grow stagnant if they are stored away. Your mother told me that the bright river which joins her country to our own must be ever flowing, that though the stream may echo the same wisdom, ripple after ripple, it must always be fresh and alive to keep its keen vitality.”

  “Then, Father, is no wisdom of any value unless it is seen today?”

  “Wisdom is always better than no wisdom; for is not stale water precious in a desert? But if we walk in company with the Before People we shall never know drought, for when we are thirsty we can cup our hands at the ever-living spring.”

  At moonrise on the second day I heard singing, many voices joined together, rising up from the circle of tepees. With difficulty I got to my feet, for my legs were cramped from sitting so long in one position. I unlaced the tepee-flap so that I could see out. Two lines of torch-bearers were winding up by the cliff paths, one towards me, the other towards Raki, coming to prepare us for the marriage.

  The leading women carried logs of wood, soaked in resin to make them leap into flame at the first touch of a torch, and built a fire on the platform of bare rock outside the tepee. I had to keep silence until I spoke the oath with Raki, but it was good to give myself to their ministrations for I was tired after the ordeal. Four women, among them Rokeena, entered carrying jars of steaming water scented with balsam. On the ground they spread coloured blankets; then they washed my hair and my body and rubbed my aching muscles with pine-oil.

  I lay naked by the fire, drowsy with the kindly heat until I was warm and dry: then I slept in the tepee until they brought the marriage robe. It was more beautiful than any I had seen—even at the Gathering—embroidered with white and scarlet beads, with the feathers of orioles and jays; stitched with the hair of the women who had made it. I was to wear my mother’s necklaces, scarlet and blue and white, and a
forehead-band of scarlet breast-feathers; even my hair was plaited with strands of white and scarlet wool.

  Across the lake of shadows which lapped against the cliffs I could see the fire which the men had built for Raki. The moon was already low in the sky. Could Raki hear his heart thudding as I heard mine, thudding as though we had been climbing a high mountain and were nearing the peak? Suddenly, as though lit by a single torch, thirty other great fires sprang into life round the curve of the cliffs. This was the signal for which I had been waiting; for moons, for years, perhaps for generations.

  As I walked down the path towards the Totem, the women followed, carrying their torches in single file behind me. I saw the moving plumes of Raki’s torch-bearers: each procession so faithful an echo that they might have been reflected in still water.

  The white stone, which had once been the boundary beyond which we must not pass, had been carried down and set before the Totem. On it were three bowls of red clay painted with white designs, and in front of these three wooden platters, all carrying emblematic objects to be used in the ceremony. I remember being surprised that I noticed even such small details as a single grain of corn which had spilled from the central bowl; for I had expected to be aware only of Raki.

  Side by side we stood before the Chief: behind us the men and women to whom we in turn would hand on the unity which the words we were to hear would bring to us. In the torch-light Na-ka-chek’s face had the same quality of timelessness as had the Totem, both wood and flesh might have been carved by the same hand. The brown and white and scarlet feathers of his headdress seemed to have a winged life of their own. No one could have looked at him without awe, nor—and this I realized for the first time—without feeling a new strength, a new courage, and a new love, from some hidden source of life to which he belonged.

  I had thought he would use words rich and sonorous, as though the Lord of the Trees spoke of the sky, but his voice was curiously gentle and intimate. He might have been alone with Raki and me instead of in the hearing of the whole tribe.

  “Raki and Piyanah, the Great Hunters have allowed me to welcome you at my place of the corn-growing, so that we might learn of each other and remember that which was lost, and so search until it be found. The laws of my tribe divided you, but you have built a bridge over the canyon. That you are man and woman divided you, but by the bridge you have come to unity. You are the man and the ‘not-man’; the woman and the ‘not-woman’: being both you are one, and being one you are both. Now has the time come when you are to teach others that in duality there is unity, and that in unity there is duality.

  “When you first came to me I thought you were young and helpless, children who had only to obey and to learn. Then I did not recognize that you already possessed the quality from which all others are born, the quality without which no others are pleasing to the Great Hunters. I saw the reflection of that quality in your courage, in your endurance, in your integrity, and it was reflected even in the skill you learned from others, woodcraft and the fletching of arrows. Then I began to ask myself, what was this quality which you possessed even as children? I knew it was the string without which bow and arrow are valueless. I knew it was the whetstone without which the tomahawk becomes blunt. I knew it was the feather without which an arrow cannot fly to the quarry. I knew it was the river without which people perish of thirst. Still, though I could recognize its existence, I could not give it a name. It is a small word, and in my time considered unworthy for a man to use, even when young and foolish. Love is the name of the quality.

  “Because you loved each other, you were able to love yourselves. Because you loved yourselves you knew yourselves, and in that knowing came an echo of the wisdom of the Before People, who long ago drove the Sorrow Bird from the land where they lived in peace. To this love shall you pledge your oath, and each day at dawn, and at noon and at sunset, you will say, ‘I love us both, the male and the female: I love myself, the male and the female: and with eyes that are open to that love will I see others, the male and the female.’”

  Then Na-ka-chek stepped forward to unite my forehead-band and Raki’s forehead-thong: and he took my right hand and Raki’s left hand and with the thong and the feathered band he bound them together, pulse to pulse: but first he took a knife from the white stone and made on each of our wrists a shallow cut so that our blood was mingled. Then he pronounced in a loud voice, so that all could hear:

  “Raki and Piyanah are of one blood on Earth.”

  Then he cut off a strand of Raki’s hair and a strand of mine, and these he put into one of the clay bowls, and taking a brand from the fire he set light to the hair so that it shrivelled into ashes. And from the second bowl he sprinkled water on to the ashes. From the third bowl he sprinkled salt into the water, saying:

  “This oath shall endure after your bodies return to dust: for this water is the water of the river of life and this salt is the riches of wisdom which you have won through the years and which has become part of you.”

  Then he held out the bowl for us to drink, and when we had done so, he said, “Raki and Piyanah are of one spirit on the other side of the water.”

  Then four Elders, who had been standing to the north and to the south and to the east and to the west of the Totem, came forward: and each carried one of the carved ceremonial shields which were kept in the Tepee of the Elders and are old as the tribe. On the first and the second shields were the clothes of the separation we had worn during the fasting, and these my father took and held in his upraised hands towards the sky, saying:

  “Of separation was born unity, and of earth shall be born fire.”

  Then he walked forward to cast them into the watch-fire. The third and fourth shields bore two feathered headdresses, alike as are the wings of a great bird. We went down on one knee before him, and he placed them on our heads, the sign of his authority and of our own, saying:

  “In the name of these feathers, remember that you are pledged, now and for the generations, to look to the Bird of the Morning who alone can drive forth the Sorrow Bird.”

  And as he was speaking the sun flooded up over the hills to fill the pool of the cliffs with light, and the torches were pale against the morning.

  Then did he say, “Because you have heard the song of the feathers your totem animal shall be winged.”

  Then we all waited hushed and expectant, knowing that the first bird we saw would be our totem animal during the generations of the future.

  No bird-call broke the silence. I saw two Elders glance at each other, and knew that if no bird appeared they would take it as an omen of disaster. Raki and I were the first to see the heron—two herons, flying very low over the encampment towards the river. The relief of the crowd was tangible as a wind.

  “Raki and Piyanah, I, Na-ka-chek, declare in the name of my Totem, that now and until both of you have crossed the River, you are, and shall be, Chief of the Tribe of the Heron. What I have given to you, you shall give to your people. And to you they shall give that which they have given to me. Your honour shall be their honour, and your courage their courage, even as their feathers shall be in your headdress and their love in your heart.”

  Raki and I knew that the unity to which we had attained was a degree for which all the others, save perhaps Gorgi and Cheka, were not ready. We had spoken in our names on both sides of the water, but they who came with us were building a bridge across the divisions of Earth, not yet the bridge between Earth and the stars. So it was in the name of their Redskin selves, not in the name of the generations, that we asked our tribe to pledge their oath.

  First came Rokeena and Tekeeni, she upright and serene, so different from the crippled girl who had been scorned in the Squaws’ Tepees; he a handbreadth taller than she, his mouth solemn—which hid the gap made by the “friendship tooth” which Raki still had on a neck-thong. The objects on the wooden platters had been placed there at our request, for we knew that they would help to symbolize the ritual we were going to use.
It was a ritual born of our hearts, yet well familiar, for our thoughts had polished the words many times during the past two years. On the first platter were two moccasins, a man’s and a woman’s, bearing in white and scarlet beads our new tribal mark of two interlaced triangles. With these were a thong and a forehead-band in the same colours, twisted together.

  Then, speaking as one, Raki and I said:

  “If we give you our moccasins, on what journey should they take you?”

  Rokeena and Tekeeni answered, “Towards each other, towards our friends, towards the Sun.”

  And we asked them, “From whom should they take you away?”

  They answered, “From the Sorrow Bird, from the Lord of the Carrion Crow, and from loneliness.”

  We gave them the moccasins and they put them on; then knelt and gave them back to us to be returned to the white stone.

  Then we took the forehead-thongs and said, “What should they mean to you?”

  “A sign that we should never forget that the name of each other is written on our foreheads; deeper than a brand, stronger than a tribal mark.”

  We asked them, “Why are these thongs twisted together?”

  And they answered, “Because together they have the strength which cannot be broken, but divided they are no greater than their own substance.”

  Then from the second platter we took a cob of corn and a strip of pemmican and asked, “What is the riddle in these things that you can answer in yourselves?”

  Rokeena said, “Corn is the wisdom of the future which should grow in the field that love has furrowed.”

  And Tekeeni said, “Pemmican is the memory of the past in which we are strong today and which can sustain us in a time of forgetting; as we were sustained until the Before People were clearly remembered.”