Scarlet Feather

by Joan Grant

  I remember very little of the next few days, only the interminable sway of the litter and the soft thud of many feet in single file through the silent forest. Game must have been killed, for at night, and at noon also, Raki fed me with strong broth. They must have made camp early each evening, for I know I slept with Raki in the Chief’s Tepee instead of the ordinary shelter we used on the march. It was set close to the fire and the light flickered on the pictures of Raki and me, and made them seem alive.

  Sometimes I thought Hajan was with me, trying to make me jump over the precipice because he said I had shared in his betrayal by not telling the others that the mountains were too treacherous to dare. I tried to make him believe that we had found a way down and were safe on the southern side, but he always said, “You will have to grow wings before you can reach that forest, Piyanah.” And then he would run towards the edge of the precipice, and I was trying to hold him back. I would wake crying and shivering, and Raki would wrap another blanket round me and hold me in his arms, comforting me, saying that I was safe and only dreamed of danger.

  On the sixth day I began to get stronger, but Raki said I must let myself be carried part of the day. I wondered why he did not decide to let us camp in one place for several days so that we all had a chance to rest. At first when I asked him this he pretended not to hear, but later he said:

  “I dared not stay within sight of the Bitter Mountains, for every time our people looked back it would remind them of Hajan and Dorrok—and more important still, Piyanah, I dared not let them know you were ill.”

  “But they must have guessed why I had to be carried?”

  “No, they believed you had been injured by the avalanche. They are not afraid of an injury, but to them illness is a sign that the spirits are angry.”

  “Raki, shall we never cure them of superstition?”

  “We shall: but it may take years. They trusted Hajan to guide them, and he failed. All the men had been trained by Dorrok: he was the standard by which they tested their strength. He had taught them to rely on their trained skill to overcome danger, and they saw him destroyed by a danger against which he was powerless. You and I, their Chief, are the only solid rock they have left. If they had realized that one of us was also afflicted by demons—for to them fever can come from no other source—they might have lost faith. If we had stayed in camp, even for one day, they would have known it was not lameness that prevented you from walking. Gorgi and I kept in the lead with you; and when at night you did not join the others round the watch-fire aroused no curiosity, for it has always been the custom of the Chief to keep apart from the tribe.”

  “Doesn’t even Rokeena know I have been ill?”

  “No, but she suspects, and so does Cheka. But they had the courage to keep their suspicions to themselves. I wish I could say as much for the other women!”

  “They are being difficult?”

  Raki’s voice was suddenly bitter. “Sometimes they have almost made me feel that we were fools to rescue them from the Old Women. If they had complained that the distances we made were too great I could have sympathized, for even Gorgi and Tekeeni were tired at the end of the day, as I was. If they had grumbled when the cooking-pots were half empty, or failed to collect their share of wood for the watch-fire, I could have sympathized; but their questions have been more irritating than a cloud of biting flies. The same questions over and over again. ‘Where are the warm rivers?’ Where is the valley which is never cold, even in winter? Why did you tell us we should find it beyond the mountains, when these woods are no better than our own?’ And every morning they ask, ‘Shall we find the valley today?’ And when their husbands tell them to be patient or else to be quiet, they whisper together and sympathize with each other, and behave as though they lived in the Squaws’ Tepees of any of the Thirty Tribes!”

  “How do the men behave, Raki?”

  “If they grumble it is not in my hearing: habit is stronger than new laws and they have always been trained to obey their Chief. If I say that we start at dawn they are ready—at dawn. They follow me in silence, until I thrust an arrow in the ground to show them we have reached the site of a new watch-fire.”

  “When we reach country that is kindly I think we ought to stay there for a while to let them regain their confidence.”

  “To me we shall stay for something far more important. You need to rest in the sun, Piyanah, to sleep without measuring your dreams by the day’s necessities. I think we shall soon come to such a place. I sent Tekeeni ahead as forerunner, and he has just come back to say that from the next hill he can see open grass-land stretching to the horizon. There is a lake, and he saw a herd of bison in the distance, so we shall not lack food; nor moccasins—and all of us need moccasins.”

  I could walk all day by the time we reached the lake. It was fringed by reeds, and wildfowl were so numerous that we could have eaten three times a day with no more trouble than it takes to spread snares. There were no tall trees, but many bushes which afforded pleasant shade. They had grey-green leaves, and fluffy yellow flowers with a scent like warm honey.

  Day by day the weather was warmer. We discarded our tunics and our skins soaked up new life from the sun. Raki and I built a shelter of dry reeds on the west of the lake while the others encamped on the far side. We felt the need to claim the Chief’s privilege of being apart, and thought it might be well for the tribe to be independent of authority.

  By the twelfth day I again had a body that was strong and obedient, instead of one which demanded irksome consideration; but I still found it curiously pleasant to be lazy, and so spent the afternoon basking by the edge of the lake. When I woke, a cool breeze was rippling the tall grass of the plain. I waded out through the shallows, intending to cross the lake in search of Raki. A swimmer was approaching, but the sun was directly behind him so until he drew closer I did not realize it was Raki. I went back to wait for him. His skin shone with water-drops as he came up the shelving bank. He flung himself down beside me, silent and frowning.

  “You are troubled, my Raki?”

  “Not troubled—impatient!”

  “Who is the mother of your impatience?”

  “Myself…and the women! For years, Piyanah, we have tried to train them to value freedom, and now they wail as though in taking away their abject dependence we had stolen their favourite necklaces! They seem to have forgotten that I used to live as a woman: now I am only a man, a man who must be obeyed even if his commands are foolish…and who has not even the sense to demand obedience! Squaw and husband are equal and I have told them they must share a tepee; but what do I find when I go to their encampment? The women all together, grumbling; and not one of them catching fish or hunting with the men!”

  “The men are finding it difficult to share their work with the women, for their training has made them solitary.”

  “They didn’t find it difficult to help me train the women after we had built an encampment away from the Old Squaws.”

  “Then it was an adventure to win a woman by more subtle means than wrestling at the Choosing…it was like finding a flint and turning it into an arrow-head, or teaching a coyote to act as a hunting-dog. At first they were content with a marriage of loins, but now they want something more. So do the women, but because they find this higher marriage more difficult they have begun to think regretfully of the old ways.”

  Raki sighed. “I wish all of them were like Rokeena and Tekeeni, or Gorgi and Cheka!”

  “Three moons is a short time in which to kill the black bear of custom. The women, even the most clear-sighted of them, saw men as mighty warriors who were rescuing them from the hatred of the Old Squaws. It is easy for a man to be kind to a woman who makes him feel a hero, much easier than accepting her as an equal.”

  “And are men no longer heroes?”

  “Why should they be? Every hardship, every achievement, has been shared by us all. Did the ice wind hold back its arrows from the women when we crossed the pass? Would the avalanche
have turned aside if Dorrok had been a squaw?”

  “Men and women have demanded equality, and we know that without equality they will never be able to sustain the bridge over the canyon…yet now they grumble because they lack the false totem-poles we cut down to make that bridge. Men are no longer heroes; and women are finding that hunting is not so pleasant when a careless arrow leaves the cooking-pot empty.”

  “And men are finding women’s work difficult,” I said feelingly; “I should never have understood how easy it seemed unless I had lived as a man. It is easier to tend a watch-fire than to keep an even heat under a cooking-pot…one forgets to add water and the stew burns, or ashes get into the dough to spoil the bread.”

  Raki laughed, “I know! Had you forgotten that I used to cook for the tribe?”

  “Why was it so different when we were in our little valley?”

  “Because it was natural for us to do everything together; you were better at some things and I at others, but not because we were male and female.”

  “There has never been a canyon between us, so I suppose this is why we have never understood how it feels to look down from the bridge and feel giddy. If we had been leading a tribe in the old tradition, Raki, we should have consulted our Elders, whom we knew would agree with us, and no one would have questioned our decisions. The squaws would have known that if they complained that we travelled too far or too fast no notice would have been taken of them…they could have kept up with the rest, or stayed behind to die of hunger or grizzlies! The men would never have thought of questioning the word of the Chief…but now we give reasons for everything. Sometimes I wish we had never made it our first law that they must learn to think for themselves!”

  “If they don’t learn to think they will never be like the Before People. They will go on blindly following tradition, even if it cripples them. Do you remember the Brown Feather whose body was not found for two days after the battle? Dorrok had to break its arms and legs before it looked as though it was lying quietly waiting for its funeral pyre. That’s what tradition can do to free people…break them to make them conform to a set pattern.”

  “We have kept some of the old laws, Raki…like the hunter’s law of never leaving a wounded animal to die.”

  “That isn’t a tradition, it’s a real law of the Great Hunters. There are always some of the real laws in every tribe, but taboos have been added until very few people can distinguish between them. Even if one of the Great Hunters came down to talk to us, in a loud voice so that we could understand every word, and even if our children and our children’s children remembered exactly what he said; if we hadn’t also handed on to them the quality of thinking for themselves, taboos would creep into the laws and gnaw at them like termites secretly destroying the centre-post of a tepee.”

  I saw he was discouraged and tried to comfort him. “Anyone can lead a blind man…if he is really blind and not like Narrok. We must always have the courage to point to the furthest horizon we can see, so that those near us can learn to be far-sighted too, and follow the same path not because they tread in our footsteps, but because they are trying to reach the same landmark.”

  “Perhaps we have never quite understood how difficult it must be to fight against taboos unless you can see them as barriers between you and a place you long for which is clearly in sight. You and I have always had each other to fight for; ‘This will bring me back to Piyanah’ was the light which carried me through the dark despair of living with the squaws; it was the rope which helped me to climb a precipice, the green water which led me down a rapid, the balance which held me in the dive from the Eagle Rock. We both saw the ordeals as obstacles which kept us from each other, never as an end in themselves. But if we had had no real horizon we should have believed that each stage of our training was terribly important in itself. That is why the Scarlet Feathers are solitary, more solitary than any of the others; they have climbed their highest mountain, and found the peak only a narrow platform where they are even more lonely.”

  “Na-ka-chek said that love was all the war cries of the true Scarlet…I suppose he meant that love was the first law of the Great Hunters.”

  “Love is the far horizon…the horizon we must teach our people to see for themselves.”

  “Yes, and it sounds so easy…love and have vision; love and be free of taboos. Why is it so hard for people to understand?”

  “Because, Piyanah, they know also that to love is to accept responsibility; and people are more frightened of responsibility than of Black Feathers. We, the Redskins, honour courage, seek courage, almost we lust for courage, to conceal from ourselves our terror of responsibility. Men and women fear love more than they fear demons: they cannot hunt it with arrows, nor barter for it with salt, nor win it by an ordeal.”

  “We did not fear responsibility…we wanted to lead a tribe, we wanted to be free to use our own authority.”

  “Only because we had known love since we were born and have never feared it, even when it brought grinding anxiety. Piyanah, at last I understand why the squaws cling to their superstitions and why men cherish tribal laws, however onerous. Obedience is a way of evading responsibility. The word of the Chief took the conscience of the tribe into his keeping. They need not question any decision he made: they were told that the man of endurance chooses the more difficult of two ways, so to them the steep way was easier because no choice had to be made. If they failed in an ordeal, again they were free of responsibility, for they said, ‘My body has betrayed me.’ They never said, ‘I have betrayed my body.’ Even if they lost a battle they said, ‘The enemy was too strong,’ or ‘The demons were fighting against us.’ It was the Gods’ fault if the winter was too hard or storms spoiled the growing crops…so long as they could evade responsibility they never had to blame themselves!”

  “Of course, Raki! And that’s why the women cling so jealously to their customs and taboos. It is easy to say, ‘Do not look at your reflection by the light of the full moon, or else a water demon will snatch your spirit,’ or ‘Do not let your shadow fall upon a woman who is heavy with child’ …or any other of a thousand taboos. If taboos are broken and disaster follows, as it sometimes must, that makes it still easier for them to accept instead of to question.”

  “We must tell them tonight, Piyanah, that every law which is blindly accepted instead of being tested against the feathers of truth is one more thread in the web of Black Spider, the wife of the Lord of the Carrion Crow. She is cunning, that spider; she offers freedom from responsibility…but whispers ‘from responsibility,’ so that the foolish hear only ‘freedom.’ She offers placidity; and whispers ‘so that you will only see the hawk when it is plunging, too late to fight or run.’ She offers the safe cave of habit; and whispers, ‘safe until an avalanche closes the mouth and leaves you to starve, alone in the dark.’ She offers expediency; and whispers ‘my expediency, in exchange for your integrity, of which I eat and grow fat.’ She says, ‘Be obedient, be secure, be content.’ But unless Love has made your ears responsible for hearing all that she says, you will never hears her chuckling, ‘Be obedient…to me: be secure…in my web: be content…to wait until I am hungry.’”

  “Yes, Raki. Tonight you must warn them of Black Spider, before you tell them that tomorrow we again go South.”

  The Blue Smokes

  For half a moon we travelled through gentle country. Flat grass-lands gave way to rolling hills; water and game were plentiful, and the suffering of the Bitter Mountains was forgotten in the easy marches. Raki and I were happy; for when we made camp the men and women shared in all that needed to be done, and the dusk was warm with laughter.

  Raki smiled at me, “Redskins who laugh, my Piyanah, and once we should have been surprised as though owls had spoken with the voices of Elders!”

  Several times we saw traces of old camp-fires, but no human being until the fifteenth day. He was a hunter, and before he spoke we knew he could not be one of the Smiling Valleys, for his skin was too
dark and his nostrils too broad. He told us we were entering the territory of the Blue Smokes and that the Smiling Valleys lived much further to the west. At this news we were disappointed, though the warmth of his greeting was enough to show us we had been wise to travel away from the hard North.

  When we first sighted the encampment of the Blue Smokes we thought their tribe must number over a thousand, for the cluster of tepees, which were thatched with straw, was surrounded by between fifty and sixty wide strips of cultivation. It was only later that we learned they were less than three hundred and not sufficiently important to claim a place at the Feathered Council. To them, the cultivation of fields was more important than hunting, and they seldom killed for meat unless hides were needed for moccasins. Even their clothes were woven from plant fibres, though the method of preparation they did not tell us; it was a jealously guarded tribal secret, the cloth being their most valuable form of barter.

  We were taken to the Chief, and found him to be a man past middle age. He expressed almost excessive pleasure at our arrival, and immediately gave orders for a feast to be prepared in our honour. We noticed that men and women shared the same encampment and the Chief displayed no surprise when Raki and I both wore a feathered headdress when we attended the feast. None of them had been to a Gathering of the Thirty Tribes, and they were eager for news of what had taken place there that year. It was late on the first night that the Chief admitted he had heard of us from the Chief of the Smiling Valleys. My ordeal had greatly increased in the telling! The caverns had been the home of particularly horrifying demons, which I, being possessed of curious magical powers, had been able to slay in hundreds. The Chief of the Demons had at last been driven to beg for clemency, which I had granted in return for an oath of allegiance from his people. I was now credited with being able to produce cloudbursts or droughts with equal ease, so that the crops of my friends flourished, while my enemies dwindled through famine.