Split Feather

by Deborah A. Wolf

  Time’s up, old man, I thought. Spill the beans. Spill all the beans. But at the look of naked grief in his eyes I bit my tongue, and even felt a bit ashamed of myself. This was hard on him, too.

  He held out both hands. Laying the walking stick aside, I took them. I couldn’t remember ever holding an old person’s hands before, which was strange. His skin was dry, but soft, like a well-loved leather coat, his grip strong as tree roots. He closed his eyes, and took a deep breath, and when he opened them again he was someplace else.

  “Catherine,” he breathed, and the word held a world of longing.

  Grandma, I thought.

  “She was so beautiful. Prettiest girl in Tsone. Prettiest girl anywhere, and she loved me. Her father was a rich man, the son of a shaman, and she could have had any boy she wanted. Any boy in the world… but she chose me.

  “I was born in Nenana and moved to Tsone when I was a kid,” he continued. “But in her father’s eyes I was an Outsider, a gussuk, because my great grandfather was a Russian fur trader with blond hair and green eyes. He forbade her to have anything to do with me… so of course we ran off and got married.” He opened his eyes and smiled at me. I smiled back, but it hurt a little, too.

  I knew I’d never have a love like that.

  “When we came back, her father wouldn’t speak to her, but Catherine figured once we had a baby, he’d change his mind. She wanted a house full of kids… she loved kids, and she was good with them. If there was ever a woman who was meant to be a mother, it was my Catherine. Smart, and funny… always laughing, always… and fierce as a mother bear when it came to children. So we started trying for a family right away.”

  Okay, Grandpa, I thought. Too much information.

  “But it just wasn’t meant to be, I guess. Catherine thought her dad had something to do with it. They got in a big fight, and she said he put a spell on her. I never believed that, and figured it was probably my fault… I’d had mumps when I was a kid, and the doctor said I might never have children. That didn’t bother me as a young man, of course, but later on… it hurt pretty bad. Watching my Catherine go from all excited and hoping to just a sad shell of herself. It ate her up.

  “As the years went by she stopped talking about babies, and put away all the things she’d made—all the little mukluks and blankets and whatnot—and I thought to myself maybe she’d given up. I know I had.

  “But then one day she said she was gonna go pick berries with some friends, and she packed up her stuff and took her boat…” He stopped for a moment, then continued. “I didn’t know till later she’d gone out alone. I went looking for her at a friend’s house, and they all said they hadn’t seen her. I can’t tell you how worried I was. Me and some of the fellas, we took our boats out and went looking for her…”

  His voice broke. I gave his hands a squeeze.

  “But she came back, right?” I said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.” I knew this story would have a happy ending… what was I afraid of? But I was afraid. My heart was pounding as if I’d been running for miles, and maybe I didn’t want to hear the rest of this story, after all.

  “People get lost out here all the time, Sigurd. As I said, this isn’t like your city, where if someone’s car breaks down they just walk up to a gas station and use a pay phone to call for help.”

  Cell phones, Grandpa, I thought. Nobody uses pay phones anymore. But he didn’t seem to notice my smile.

  “Out here, you get in trouble, usually nobody ever knows what happened to you.”

  “But she came back,” I repeated. “Didn’t she?”

  He hesitated. That seemed strange, but when he spoke again, I put it to the back of my mind.

  “She came back, and when she did, she had a baby.”

  “So… she’d been pregnant?”

  “No, Sigurd, she wasn’t. My Catherine was a tiny little wisp of a girl… she couldn’t have hidden that.”

  “Okay, now I’m confused.”

  “My Catherine went across the river to Oldtown, and she came back with a baby.” He stared intently into my face, waiting for me to catch up.

  “So some girl in that other town couldn’t keep her baby, and Grandma took it?” I blew out my breath in relief, though I hadn’t realized I’d been holding it. I could live with this story, after all. “You’re telling me that my mom was adopted? That’s not so…”

  Grandpa John squeezed my hands, squeezed them so hard it hurt, kept me trapped there so I couldn’t get away from his words.

  “Nobody lives in Oldtown, Siggy,” he said, his voice low. “Nobody but ghosts, not since before I was born. I’m not telling you that your mother was adopted.”

  No, I thought. No, no, no.

  Somewhere far away my demon was laughing.

  “I’m telling you she wasn’t human.”

  14

  A breeze kicked up, singing in the willows, ruffling the silt-laden waters of the Kuskokwim, teasing Grandpa John’s thick silver hair. A flying raven skrawked its indignation, black feathers all awry, and settled itself on a nearby spruce to preen its feathers and listen to the old man’s story.

  Though we sat together, and though he still held my hands in his, the old man’s eyes were closed, and as I watched the wrinkles of his face smooth away, saw his eyes roll and twitch behind the lids, it seemed to me as if he was very far away, in a place that existed only in his memory.

  “A long time ago,” he began, “before roads and airplanes and cell phones, before Denali was ever called by some white man’s name, before the French fur trappers or the Russian fur trappers or the oil men, in the days when the world was as Raven had created it, there was a little village just like ours. In this village lived a young girl, like you, with long hair black and shiny as Raven’s wing, brown eyes, brown skin, cheeks soft and round as salmonberries.

  “One day she was picking berries not far from her village, when she stepped into a pile of bear dung. ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Nasty bear!’

  “‘Hush!’ her friends said. ‘The bears will hear you and be angry!’

  “‘I don’t care,’ she replied. ‘I don’t worry about what some smelly old bear thinks.’

  “Well. On the way back to the village, the girl lagged behind her friends. Before she knew it, the sun was setting and she was all alone. She started to hurry, but her basket tipped, spilling all the fat berries. As she bent to scoop them up, a handsome stranger appeared, wearing a bearskin cloak.

  “‘Here, let me help you,’ he said. By the time they had picked up all the berries, it was dark.

  “‘I need to get back to my village,’ the girl said.

  “‘It is late, and the woods are full of bears,’ the stranger said. ‘Come with me to my village instead.’ And she did.

  “When they reached the stranger’s village, she saw that all the people were wearing bearskin cloaks. The girl was taken to the center of the village and welcomed by the chief, an old man with a crown made of bear’s claws. After they had eaten, the old man stood and spoke to her.

  “‘You have insulted my people,’ he said, ‘and for this you should die. But my son is in love with you, so you will marry him instead, and stay here forever.’

  “‘I will not!’ the girl cried. ‘Take me home!’ But the old man was the chief of all the bears, and her words had made him very angry. So he would not let her go, and she had to marry the handsome stranger, who was also a bear…”

  Grandpa John’s words, the lilt of them, the song of them, carried me back to a time when people had reason to fear the dark, and the cold, to a time when the line between humans and animals was more finely drawn.

  He explained that the girl came to love her husband, and bore him sons, and mourned when her brothers came looking for her and slew her bear husband. How she and her little boys—not fully human, not fully bear—went to live in a little house at the far end of the village, and then one day put on their fur cloaks, and took bear form, and walked away into the mountains, never to be se
en again.

  “When I started this story, the winter had just begun,” he finished, “and now I have chewed off a part of it.” He let go my hands, and sat back, looking at me expectantly.

  I blinked.

  “So you’re telling me,” I said, and coughed to cover a laugh. “You’re telling me that my mom was one of these… bear people? Don’t you think it a bit more likely that some girl had a baby she couldn’t keep, and that’s the baby my grandma found?”

  Grandpa John smiled. “What girl? The closest village is eighty miles away by river. Do you think some pregnant girl is gonna walk all that way to give birth, and then leave again? Do you think a girl in Tsone could be pregnant, and nobody would know it?” He shook his head. “If that’s what you think, you haven’t been paying attention. Besides, it was seventy below zero when my Catherine found that baby, your mother, all wrapped up in a bearskin… No human baby would have survived out there. I know this is all hard to believe, Sigurd. You weren’t raised here, you don’t know. But I’m telling you it’s true.

  “The sons of that girl in the story settled down over there.” He pointed with his chin toward Oldtown. “They married human girls, and for a long, long, long time our two villages shared this land. They were our kin, and our friends. Sometimes they would walk around like people, and sometimes they were bears, but they taught us how to treat bears with respect, and we taught them how to build a fish wheel. Everybody got along okay.”

  “So what happened?” I asked. “Why is that old town deserted?” I didn’t believe a word of it, but it was a pretty good story. Come to think of it, being half bear would explain my temper.

  “The missionaries came,” he said softly. “They brought their Bible and they built their church, and they told us that our old ways were sin. Then soldiers came…” His voice trailed off, and Grandpa John looked across the river for the first time. “And everyone in Oldtown died. A long time ago.” The grief in his voice touched me, though I still didn’t believe a word of it. More likely everyone in that village had died of smallpox or some other disease, and it turned into some kind of bear-people myth.

  Yet Grandpa John seemed so certain. And he had lived through those times.

  “So where’s the church, now?” I asked. “I haven’t seen any church in Tsone. Was it in Oldtown?” The old man smiled then, a hard little smile full of secrets.

  “It burned.”

  All by itself, hm? His eyes dared me to ask my next question, and I never back down from a dare. “And the priests? The soldiers?”

  “They burned, too,” he said, and made an odd little gesture with his hands. Poof.

  Yeah, these were my people all right, adopted or no. Crazy and dangerous. I grabbed the walking stick, and stood, and held out my hand to the old man.

  “Let’s go have dinner,” I said. “I’m starved.”

  15

  “C’mon, Aunt Siggy! C’mon!”

  “I’m not your aunt,” I grumbled under my breath. “Hey, not too close to the river!”

  “I know what I’m doing,” Emily scoffed. “I’m not a baby. I even know how to drive Garvin’s boat. Come on!”

  I followed behind her, still grumbling, berry pails banging against my knees. I had little interest in berry-picking, less interest in babysitting, and absolutely zero interest in heading back upriver, which of course was the way she chose to go.

  “Hey, Emily!” I hollered after her. “How about downriver?”

  “I already looked downriver,” she called back, in a voice that let me know I was sooo stupid.

  Looked?

  Oh. Of course. She’d be looking for her parents, whether she was allowed to or not. Maybe I was pretty stupid. I picked up my pace till I was walking by her side.

  “Grandpa John warned me about getting lost…”

  “Grandpa John warns everyone about getting lost,” she said, rolling her eyes, “but we’re not gonna get lost. We’re just going upriver a ways. You can stay here if you’re scared.”

  Stomping along at her side, I scowled so fiercely we probably didn’t have to worry about bears. I mean, she’d lost her parents and all and I felt bad for her, but what a brat.

  I followed Emily from the road to the river, and from there all the way to the mud flats, biting back a protest at every other step. We weren’t supposed to be this far from the village, but what could I do? I’d never babysat before—for good reason—and thought it probably didn’t involve actually sitting on the kid, even if I kinda wanted to. But wasn’t she supposed to listen to me? I was the adult, right? Carrying the berry pails and adulting and shit?Dammit.

  She stopped as soon as we stepped out onto the flats, her skinny little self silhouetted against the bright sun, the hot bits of midday dancing on the waves and sparkling in the mica-heavy silt. She went up on her tiptoes, as if by doing so she might see all the way across the river and through the forests to wherever her parents had gone. She was small for ten, all knees and elbows and big eyes, and her hair stuck out at odd angles from her head.

  Because her mama hadn’t been there to do her hair that morning.

  Okay, maybe she wasn’t a brat. Maybe I was just a shitty person.

  I set down the berry pails. Now that we were away from the village, I supposed we didn’t have to pretend to be berry picking anymore. Walking over to stand beside her, I shaded my eyes against the glare.

  “See anything?”

  “No.” She sighed. “You?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I’ll take Garvin’s boat and go across the river,” she said, but there wasn’t much hope in her words. “I know they’re out there somewhere. I know it.” She kicked at a rock and then bent to pick it up and with a flip of her wrist sent it spinning across the water.

  Skip, skip, skip, plop.

  I goggled at her. “How’d you do that?”

  She goggled back. “You’ve never skipped rocks?”

  “Never,” I confessed.

  “Garvin taught me when I was, like, two. How come you never learned?”

  I shrugged. “Guess ’cause I never had a big brother.” I couldn’t really count foster brothers, with their short shelf lives and wandering hands.

  She considered that for a while. “Yeah, Garvin said you lost your mom, too, and then some white woman came and took you away and they sold you.”

  Ouch. “Yeah, pretty much.” I looked down at my feet and saw a likely-looking rock. I picked it up, but she just gave me a look.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. Then, “That’s not a very good skipping rock. You want one that’s flatter, like this.” She picked up a palm-sized gray stone and handed it to me. It was wet and cold and sparkling like the mud flats. “You put it in the crook of your finger, like this…” She moved my fingers around, frowning in concentration. “…and then you flip it with your wrist. Go on, try.”

  I tried.

  Skip-PLONK.

  “No, not like that.” She shook her head. “You’re not trying to kill the river, just skim across it. Look, you throw from the waist, like this. Watch me.” She stooped, grabbed up a rock, and threw it all in one movement, graceful as a willow switch.

  Skip-skip-skip-skip-skip-plop.

  “I got five!” she hollered.

  “Like this?” I tried again, biting my tongue between my teeth and trying to mimic her smooth move.

  Skip-skip-skip-PLONK.

  “I got three!”

  “Two and a half,” she giggled.

  For the next however long, we scuttled up and down the beach like crabs, forgetting lost mothers and missed lunches, never minding that our feet were cold and wet or that the mud sucked at them alarmingly whenever we stood still for too long.

  “You don’t wanna get stuck in the mud,” Emily warned me. “The water squooshes out and then it’s like cement. Not even a moose is strong enough to pull loose once it sinks. So don’t sink!”

  I found a perfect hand-sized rock with a pale glittering line running throug
h it.

  “Here,” I told her. “I’ll bet you could skip this one clear across the river.”

  “Oooh, this one’s too pretty to skip,” she said. “I’m keeping it. Here, you can have this one. It looks like a raven’s head.”

  The stone she handed me did look like a raven’s head, with a pointed beak at one end and jaggedy feathers at the back, and a round little eye in the middle drilled right through. “Oh, cool,” I told her. “It looks like someone shaped it this way on purpose.”

  “Maybe they did,” she grinned. “Maybe it was the ancestors. It’s yours, now.”

  A photograph, a birthday card, and a stone that looked like a raven’s head. I had three treasures now, where before I’d had none.

  “Thank you,” I told her, gravely. “I’m going to keep this forever.”

  Emily’s smile was wide and wonderful and bright as the midnight sun.

  “You’re welcome, Aunt Siggy.” And then she added, “I love you, Aunt Siggy.” She skipped away, laughing in the sunlight, never seeing how her words pierced me to the bone.

  * * *

  I’m not sure how long we played out on the mud flats, giggling and shouting and trying to skip stones across the Kuskokwim, when a white plane with red stripes and an orange underbelly roared overhead.

  “It’s a search plane!” Emily hopped up and down. “They came! They came!” Then she began a mad sprint downriver.

  “Whoa, whoa!” I called after her. “We can’t run all the way back, and if you leave me here I’ll never find my way to Grandpa’s cabin. Hold on, would you?” I grabbed up the bucket, then looked where it had been sitting. “Oh, hey, check this one out.” It was a perfect skipping stone. Wide as my palm, perfectly round with smooth tapered edges, it begged to be thrown. “Last one for luck?” I asked Emily, holding it aloft.

  “Yeah! Throw it!”

  “You’re better than I am. You throw it.”

  She trotted back to me and took the stone. “I’ve never seen one so perfect. Maybe we should keep this one, too?” But she’d already fitted it to the crook of her finger.