Scarlet Feather

by Joan Grant

  From the third platter I took firesticks and salt, and we said:

  “What is the word of the fire, and the voice of the salt?”

  Together, Rokeena and Tekeeni answered, “The fire is the memory and the looking forward, that we shall take with us even to the places that are cold with today. The salt is the voice of the Great Hunters in which are remembered all the bright realities in the name of love, and in the eating of which we recognize that we may call both the pine-cone and the Lord of the Trees, both the rocks and the Great Hunters, our Ancestors.”

  Then, as Na-ka-chek had done to us, we took her right wrist and his left and drew a knife over them until the blood flowed, and bound their wrists together to make them of one blood.

  And this did we do also to Gorgi and Cheka; to all the seventy who were to come with us.

  If a stranger had been looking down into the encampment from the top of the cliff he might have thought that the feasting he saw was familiar to any Redskin who had been to the Gathering of the Thirty Tribes. Young deer were roasting over glowing ashes and savoury steam rose from twenty cooking-pots; platters of salted fish were passed from hand to hand, and cakes fried in goats’ butter and honey were piled on dishes of red and yellow pottery.

  But let the stranger come down the steep path, and he would think himself bemused by tree spirits or drunk with mead. For he would have seen men and women eating together, talking together, singing together, in equality. And he would have seen two Chiefs, a man and a woman, sitting side by side on a white blanket woven from a fleece that she had brought back from the high mountains in winter. Yet even if the stranger had looked at the woman’s moccasins he might not have known that it was a man who had embroidered them—a man in whose fingers dwelt the skill of both hunter and squaw, warrior and woman.

  If the stranger had concealed himself in the shadow of the pine tree at the foot of the cliff to watch unseen he would have known that the feasting continued until sunset. He would have seen an old man, who by his headdress was a Chief also, go into the Great Tepee. And he would have seen the Elders go to the Tepee of the Elders, and the Old Women and the children, and many of the Braves, and the squaws, return to their own places as is the custom.

  But he would have seen the man and the woman who wore the Feathered Headdress, and with them seventy and three, stay to put fresh logs on the tribal watch-fire that flared into a great blaze against the sunset. And as the shadows came down to guard the Earth against the Sun’s returning, he would have seen these men and women go hand in hand to be alone together in the woods of their sunrise.

  Moon of the Uniting

  I thought I had been dreaming of our childhood, when we used to sleep secure and naked in the robe of beaver pelts: but I was awake and it was not a dream.

  Raki stirred and held me closer, murmuring, “Don’t let me wake up.”

  “Wake, Raki, for this dream is not going to break with the morning.”

  I think he could not believe it, until we stood together before the tepee to watch the sun of our tomorrows flowing down to fill the valley with light. His body was brave as fire against the red sky, while the great trees rose up from the mist as though the Hunters sent them to join with us in company.

  “For a moon, Piyanah, we can forget yesterday and tomorrow. Where shall we go to share our being alone?”

  “To the places where we still have a promise to fulfill; the places we expected to find again only on the other side of the water.”

  “Where first, Piyanah? To the birch grove, or our little valley?”

  “To the birch grove, for that had separation on both sides of it. It was like an island of a river in flood: every day we watched it getting smaller and smaller and knew that soon the current would sweep us away from each other.”

  “Need we remember that sorrow?”

  “Would you forget the joy, Raki? If you lose a few beads from your moccasins would you throw them away when they could so easily be mended? The moccasins of that memory will always take us back to youth and joy, and looking forward. It is for us to make them ready for our feet, and then, even when we are old and proud with feathers, we have only to wear them to speak in the voice of young love to those who have also turned aside from an arid path, to see a new star in a sky which had become too wide, too cold, for understanding.

  “Now we can see that star as a kindled torch, but how shall we forget the time when it was cold as the drifts in which a lost hunter feels his humanity flicker?

  “Because we have learned that the wisdom of the Great Hunters belongs to all ages, for the feathers of the bird of time can carry a man to all the days of his youth and of his age that he had known since before the first redwood. Do you remember, Raki, how, when we were children, we used to bury an uncomfortable thought and mark the place with a white stone to remind us never to dig it up again? Another white stone shall be the bead to complete these happy moccasins, so that we can wear them without fear of memory.”

  “What shall we bury?”

  “The grief of separation. Together we will dig a grave under the birch trees, and we, who are living, shall walk hand in hand away from that grave, and laugh—as we must have so often laughed together when the bodies of our generations returned to the kindly earth.”

  As we went down the path to the river an oriole was singing in a high spruce and we paused to listen.

  “It must be Great Oriole,” said Raki, “for no ordinary bird could say so clearly, ‘Raki and Piyanah are happy.’”

  “And that must be Great Chipmunk, hurrying off to tell all the people of the forests to rejoice with us who share their secrets.”

  “Even the Lords of the Trees are with us, Piyanah.” He took my hand and spread the fingers against the bark of a chestnut. “The trees are warm with life; yesterday they were equally alive, and it was only ourselves who could not share in it, but today they are part of us.”

  “And so is the grass…even the rocks are alive.”

  He smiled, “Do you think we could have died in our sleep and crossed to the other side of the water?”

  “Perhaps being dead and being really alive are the same thing. Yesterday we were two people, but now together we are a child of the Great Hunters. Because we are that child our eyes can see the life in the trees, our ears can hear the laughter of the west wind, and our heart know that the words the rivers sing are, ‘Love life: and live by love.’ Yes, Raki, that is what has happened to us, we do love life…we never realized until now that life had to be loved before we could understand it. We have thought of it as something always there and never bothered to notice it; or else it was something to be endured, like an ordeal; or something which kept on changing its quality and was called by many names…birth, and childhood, and old age. It was always a background, never part of ourselves; a distant mountain that we seldom noticed because it was too far away to be climbed. I have never before seen life as something you can hold in your heart, warm and strong as sunlight: never realized it was something you could love, which, because you loved it, could never forsake you.”

  “That is why everything is so different today, Piyanah. I always thought that if we could see beyond the little earth we knew, we should become grave and old with so much wisdom, but there is a simplicity about loving that I never understood until now. Both of us have thought and wondered about the laws we must make for our tribe, but now we can teach them to love life, and to do so they must love themselves and each other; then they will also have learned the great simplicity; to seek love, to act by love, to live love.”

  “Then we shall have brought them home from separation. They will never have to be men pretending to be women, or women disguised as men. They will realize, as we have done, that each in himself is man and woman, and that from two of these are born the torch-bearers to whom the Great Hunters are no longer hidden by the mist of birth and death.”

  It was sunset when we came to the place of the white birches, and the gentle green of eveni
ng was flooding up from the horizon to quench the yellow flames which still flared from the torch of the day. The air was very still and the young buds quiet, as though they listened for our returning. The moss grew close, here in the shade, and we moved silently as shadows.

  It seemed that in a moment I should see Raki and Piyanah lying together by the stream. We had come to tell them that they might sleep secure from dreams of separation. A night bird called; its note sharp and clear as spring water.

  “I thought I could see them there,” said Raki, and I answered, “Yes, so did I.”

  He took me in his arms. “They will come back to us Piyanah. Our life is a fire that will call them from the shadows. We have not been complete without them; they were waiting here, waiting until we came back.”

  “While we were alone it was that Raki and Piyanah who kept our fire alive; they were much more real than the warrior and the squaw, much more real even than the two people who yesterday took the oath of eternity.”

  It seemed the sleepers stirred and got slowly to their feet; then came silently towards us, who waited for them. For a moment I could see the girl clearly, and pitied her for the fear in her eyes. I knew Raki could see the boy, who stood there trying to smile while the claws of separation, more cruel than a mountain lion, tore at his side.

  “We have come back,” I said, and heard Raki echo, “We have come back.”

  We held out our arms to the shadowy figures. Then Raki and I were together—alone among the birch trees.

  As before, we stayed three days in the birch grove; but this time we left in peace on our way to the little valley. We had been travelling north-east through the forest since dawn, and were crossing a narrow game trail when Raki stopped and said:

  “Piyanah, do you remember that tree—the one struck by lightning beside the big rock?” Then he ran forward and pulled off a strip of lichen which uncovered an old blaze cut deeply into the bark. At the sight of it I could almost feel the sharp stone on which I had grazed my hand when I helped Raki dig up the bundles that he had hidden on the night we ran away together, so long ago.

  “Seed maize and pemmican, do you remember, Piyanah?”

  “Yes, Raki! And the tomahawk we brought to cut branches for our shelter, and the fish-hooks. …Oh, Raki!—it’s all coming back again, and now there is no fear to spoil it.”

  “Do you remember how you hoped we should be able to cross on the ice? Now we can cross at the ford.”

  “No, Raki—can’t we go by the rapids as we did before? The cliff won’t seem difficult to climb now.”

  “Shall we laugh at ourselves for thinking we were such brave children?”

  “We will laugh with ourselves, the real laughter we are finding together.”

  Soon we stood at the top of the cliff looking down at the galloping water. Because my hands were not cold with fear it was easy to swing down to the ledges. Then we were leaping from rock to rock across the river; soaked in noise and spray and sunlight; shouting to each other—though we knew the sound of our voices was snatched away like twigs by the thunder of the rapids. But it was good to echo the song of the water; we were part of its strength and urgency, for we shared the surge of freedom when the ice has melted.

  We were not quite sure whether we found the same place under the bank where we had spent the first night of our adventure, but again we pulled down sandy earth with our hands to make a shelter against the north wind which came with evening. So as to echo our first journey we decided not to build a fire—but this time we had a beaver robe in which to sleep, a beaver robe in which to lie in Raki’s arms and watch the stars.

  “We have spent so long training our bodies to be obedient, Raki,” I said sleepily, “yet now that we let them do exactly what they like best they are such indulgent masters!”

  Raki chuckled, “I don’t feel as though I had been submissive. I feel more exalted than if I had climbed a mountain which touched the sky.”

  “I feel better than that! I feel as though I had flown to the top of the mountain and so would never have to climb any more!”

  By noon next day we reached the top of the pass. Here there were still patches of snow, and where it was melting in the spring sun we walked ankle-deep in slush, before we stood looking down the steep slopes into the “unknown country.” In the distance we could see our Lake of the Wildfowl, glinting blue under the clear sky, but our valley was still hidden by a fold of the hills.

  Raki smiled down at me, “No black smoke, Piyanah.”

  “I’m glad we saw it, Raki. Until now I was never sure whether, if we had the choice again, I would try to keep you away from the tribe. Our valley belongs to us more than it ever did before because we have made ourselves free to come back. It is not only that we are a Chief; it is because we tested our need of each other against everything else and found it stronger even than we knew. If the Great Hunters had answered my prayers, that I might be able to hide with you from the Black Smoke, there would always have been a barrier between us. You were never really happy when we had to hide; you would never have been happy if I had managed to keep you with me by saying that I would die if you went away—I always thought I should die if we were parted, Raki; did you know?”

  “Yes; I thought so, too, and hoped that it would happen quickly to us both.”

  “It would have spoilt things for us if I had made you stay; or if you had sent me to the squaws while you became a warrior. It’s better than being reborn, the thing that’s happened to us in the last five days. It’s the knowledge that if we met one of the Before People he would recognize us as belonging to their kind, for both of us know the two halves of ourselves and of each other. We have learnt everything we know as man and as woman; whatever we have of courage, or swiftness, or endurance, is male and female, instead of belonging only to either.”

  He smiled, “We both know how to strip the pelt from a gopher or the scalp from an enemy’s head. And unless you had told me that you had made these moccasins I should never have believed that you were as good as I am at making patterns with beads!”

  “I will race you to the rock where we used to watch the sunset, and then we will decide who has the swifter moccasins.”

  Across the slope we leapt like young deer; past rocky outcrops, through shallow snow-drifts, across narrow ledges which crumbled underfoot and sent showers of pebbles clattering down the hillside. He was gaining on me when I reached the stretch of mountain grass where the sentinel rock waited for us. I reached it in time to swing round, arms outstretched against the smooth stone, breathless, laughing—and more breathless still after Raki reached me.

  I had so often thought of the valley as we had left it: the fish-trap above the second fall, the pine-boughs guarding the food we had stored for the winter, the firewood stacked beyond the shelter; the stripped corn-cobs, thrown down by the stone I had used as a grinding bowl when I had said, “I want everything just as it is now on the other side of the water, Raki; everything just as it is now until I am used to being dead.”

  Only the twin pine was the same, and at its feet a low mound covered with brambles must have been our wood stack, and shelter, and winter food store. The fish-trap had long since been swept away, and the dam we had built to make the pool where I filled the water-jar had fallen to the strength of melting snows.

  “Look, Piyanah!” Raki was pointing to the place where we had planted our first corn, where now there was a litter of dried stalks. “It was a real place of the corn growing,” he said softly; “the cobs we hung to dry on our roof-pole must have scattered, and the ground we made was kind to them. Year after year they must have seeded themselves, for those stalks are not older than last autumn.”

  “But the shelter is gone, and everything else,” I said, feeling for a moment forlorn.

  “The shelter was dead wood, cut from the tree; and why should the stream be tamed by the stones we set if we were not here to thank it for its courtesy? But corn is strong as a tribe: we brought it here and it has
multiplied and flourished. Our tribe will be like that, Piyanah. It will start like a handful of corn, perhaps fifty or a hundred grains. And we shall take them to a new valley where the ground has never been furrowed, and when we leave them, because it is time for us to go to the other side of the water, they will no longer need us to look after them, for they are the seed of the generations who will be happier because we were born.”

  “Raki, I think you have just found the question which all men and women have to answer before the Great Hunters let them enter the Land beyond the Sunset—‘How many people are happier because you were born?’”

  The Bitter Mountains

  At dawn we made our last offering, of grain and meat and arrows, to the Totem of the Two Trees. Henceforward we could no longer claim territory that was familiar, for the morning and the evening were the boundaries between which we travelled.

  We were to make the first stage of the journey by river, before striking South to assay the pass over the mountains of which Hajan had told us. The tribe gathered to watch us go. The Old Women remote and vindictive, longing to mouth the maledictions they dared not utter in the presence of my father; the young men regretful that they could not come with us; the squaws scornful yet envious, the Half-brothers and the Naked Foreheads sorrowful because we who had befriended them were going away.

  It was difficult to say farewell to Na-ka-chek and to display the impassivity that he expected from me. I knew he could have wept because he might never see us again, yet I knew he rejoiced because in our going we fulfilled his oath. I had begged Narrok to come with us for I knew he would be lonely for me, but he had said, “Through your eyes, Piyanah, I have seen beauty which once I thought had forsaken me. When I was blind and in despair your father brought me hope; now I stay to comfort him.”

  Raki and I knelt in the prow of the leading canoe, and at the bend of the river we let the paddles trail in the water, to look back for the last time to the place which for so long had been our home. Above the naked trees the look-out rock was carved against the sky; on it stood the Chief, watching us go away from him into the future. My vision of him was blurred by tears. I was afraid because I was leaving him, lonely because I was leaving him; yet how could I be lonely with Raki? And how could a dual Chief fear to go beyond familiar boundaries?