by neetha Napew
“Take it!” agreed Torka’s woman, looking not at Naiapi but at Torka with confusion and apology as she gratefully yielded the unwanted gift to the headman’s talkative woman.
But Supnah had risen. He stalked to the women’s circle and jerked the beads from Naiapi’s hands so abruptly that she cried out in protest. “What Navahk has given to the woman of Torka, Lonit, not Naiapi, will wear!” He ignored the petulant glare of his woman as he put the necklace roughly around Lonit’s neck.
Torka saw his woman tremble as the weight of the stones fell heavily upon her shoulders and over her long, plaited hair. He was so angry that he rose, holding the spearhead in his hand as though it were a dagger.
Supnah was coming toward him. The dogs that lay near his fire circle tensed noticeably. Slowly Aar got to his feet and walked forward to stand, tail tucked, ears back, beside Karana. The headman distrusted the wild dogs that were always close to Torka’s fire; and in particular, he disliked the big male, Aar. He paused and indicated the dog with a sideward nod of his head. “Tell the spirit of the dog to hold.”
Karana hesitated.
“Tell him!” commanded Torka, for the boy’s sake, not his own. Were it up to him, now that Supnah had twice chosen to encourage Navahk’s advances toward Lonit, he would have allowed the dog to leap for the headman’s throat. But Supnah was Karana’s father, and he had risked his life and the lives of his hunters to help Torka to rescue his woman from the Ghost Band. He owed him something for that; but the headman was stressing that debt nearly beyond its limit. Karana obeyed, frowning up at Supnah as the headman extended a hand to him.
“Torka is not the only man who knows how to rework a damaged spearhead. Come! Karana spends too much time at Torka’s fire.”
Things went badly after that.
They continued southward toward the River of Caribou Spring Crossing, traversing a barren land of broken gullies and long, windy hills. There was little sign of game, and when at last they reached their destination and made camp, it was under leaden skies that promised rain, and all signs told them that the caribou had crossed the river many days before. In the ever-shortening night, the people murmured with frustration, and Supnah assured them that it was the way of the caribou to pass in a segmented line: first cows and calves, then bulls. Days of intermittent rain made the herd signs difficult to read. Perhaps the bulls had not yet passed this way?
“This man will make the songs that will call the caribou to the river and to the spears of the hungry people .. . if the spirits of the caribou are close enough to hear.” Navahk looked meaningfully at Torka, reproaching him before the entire band. “Did I not say that it was a bad thing when Torka’s dogs and women slowed the trek? Because of Torka the caribou have crossed the river. Because of Torka this band may go many days without fresh meat.”
Men hunkered by smoky fires of dried sod and bones that they had brought with them from their last camp. They ate traveling rations of dried meat and fish and berries that their women had pounded into cakes of fat. Tomorrow, when the women had rested, they would seine for fresh fish in the river and set snares for ptarmigan. By tomorrow night Navahk’s magic might call the caribou; then they would feast upon real meat and drink hot, nourishing blood beneath the cold and threatening sky.
But although he chanted and danced and made magic, smokes that rose from within his lean-to like clouds boiling on a mountaintop when a storm is due the caribou did not come to cross the river. The only thing that came to the River of Caribou Spring Crossing was rain—steady, cold rain.
“Torka’s rain,” Navahk called it. “Just as Father Above has driven away the game, he has made rain for Supnah’s people because Torka and his women walk with dogs. This is not a good thing!”
All day the rain fell. Navahk said that Father Above remained angry. He told his people that he had heard spirit voices in his magic smokes, telling him that it was not a good day to hunt. Supnah’s women murmured with worry, but Supnah’s men said nothing. They were not in a mood for hunting. Torka chafed against the watchful, wary way that they looked at him. Navahk smiled at his discomfort.
Angry and frustrated, Torka fought down the desire to challenge the man physically. He put on his waterproof rain cloak of oiled bison intestines instead, took up his spears and his spear hurler, and without so much as a word to his women stalked out from the encampment alone. No one except Lonit tried to stop him. Aliga knew better than to try to change his mind once it was made up. From where he sat like a captive within Supnah’s lean-to, Karana made to jog after Torka when he saw the hunter stride purposefully past the last of the lean-tos, but Supnah pulled the boy back by the fringes of his tunic.
In the end only the dog Aar left the encampment with Torka. They returned by nightfall, the dog with the limp body of a fat ground squirrel held proudly in its jaws, the man with the carcass of a steppe antelope slung across his shoulders and several hares and a ptarmigan hanging from his bone carrying stick. With the dog at his side, he stalked to the headman’s lean-to, glad to find that the magic man was there talking with him. It was a spacious shelter, well braced against the weather and wind, with Naiapi and Pet sewing at the back and Karana playing a moody game of bone toss in a corner.
Torka interrupted them all without ceremony, dropping the game that he had taken at the entrance to the shelter. It splashed water inside. He was not concerned. They stared up at him, amazed by his rudeness; somehow this did not concern him either. If anything, it pleased him.
“Torka brings fresh meat for Supnah’s hungry people. As he has said, he is not a magic man. He cannot call the game to die upon the spears of men. But Torka is a hunter who can go out and kill it.” He hefted his spear and shook it meaningfully at the magic man, as Nayahk had once too often hefted and shaken his staff at him. “This is a good thing!” he said, and taking none of the meat for himself, turned and walked to his own lean-to.
The people were glad for the gift of Torka’s kill. The headman divided it among the families, and all savored a share. All except Navahk, who would partake of not so much as a bite.
The rain fell for two days and nights, and for more than half of that time, Hetchem screamed against the pitiless agony of childbirth. Navahk, glad to be distracted from the food that Torka had so generously provided, danced naked for Hetchem in the rain. Within her damp and frigid lean-to, while the women gathered outside, watching as best as they could, he made magic smokes for her and brought forth from between her legs the bloodied heart and entrails of the bad spirits of her pain. He held these things up for the watching women to see. They marveled as they beheld his powerful magic and stared wide eyed as he threw the small heart and finger-thin, ribbonlike guts of Hetchem’s pain into the flames of his magic fire. Sizzling like any other meat, they made good smoke. Comforted, Hetchem slept and did not cry out again.
The next morning, while the sun rose into clear skies beneath which Karana searched and called in vain for a missing pup, Hetchem died while giving birth to a hideously deformed baby. The women wailed. The men were silent.
“We will go from this camp,” announced the headman. “The River of Caribou Spring Crossing is a bad camp for Supnah’s people.”
No one spoke against moving on. They broke camp eagerly. Hetchem was put to look at the sky forever. The women dressed her in her best furs and favorite adornments. They placed her fire-making bag at her side, with her sewing and working tools, and each woman brought a little
something from her own fire circle as a gift for Hetchem’s spirit. When finally they turned and walked away from their friend for the last time, she was resplendent in nose and lip and ear
rings of pebbles and bone and precious wood .. . and a necklace of polished, perfectly matched white stone beads glistened like a collar of hailstones around her shoulders.
Torka smiled when he saw it, and hugged Lonit as Navahk glared hatefully at them both.
A wind had risen out of the east as they gathered to perform one last rit
ual before taking up their belongings and putting the camp of the Caribou Spring Crossing behind them. Rhik, Hetchem’s man, would not go with them. He would stay behind to keep the mandatory five-day death watch for his woman, lest predators come to devour her body before her spirit had a chance to decide whether it really wished to leave her. When the necessary number of days had passed and he was certain that her spirit was free to be born again within the next child of the band who would be given her name, he would follow and rejoin his people.
But first he must expose his deformed infant according to custom. It lay quietly sucking its fingers on the floor of the bloodied birth hut where the women had been forced by tradition to leave it after its father had refused to look at its face. He did not look at it now. He brought it into the light of day, holding it outward toward the magic man with an expression of abhorrence upon his face. The people of Supnah formed a circle around Rhik and the baby and the magic man as Navahk shook his staff over the infant, proclaiming its life invalid.
“This life has never been born! This life has no spirit! This life is not life! The People put this dead thing out from among us!”
In absolute silence and solemnity, the members of the band symbolically turned their backs upon the child. Now the father knelt. He lay the baby upon the sodden, spongy surface of the permafrost. Naiapi brought a small basket of woven grass and placed it into his hands. It was full of freshly gathered tundral mosses. As Naiapi turned away, the father stared at the contents of the little basket; then, with grim determination, he proceeded to pack the infant’s mouth, nostrils, ears, and anal as well as vaginal openings with moss so that whatever twisted life spirit it might possess would be trapped within its body and incapable of being born again.
Torka stood with the other hunters, his back to the ritual killing of the child, an unwelcome litany of words moving like fever-chill within him. This is the way of the People. From time beyond beginning. This is the way it has always been. This is the way it will always be.
In silence the circle broke. The people of Supnah left Rhik alone with his dead woman and his dying child. Packs were hefted. People shuffled off after Supnah without a word. Even the dogs were unnaturally quiet, although Sister Dog walked whining, nervous circles, searching for her lost pup, until at last Karana came and, with only a touch, caused her to follow the others.
As the band walked on, Torka looked back, troubled as his eyes fell upon the solitary figure of Rhik, hunched forward, rocking himself in grief. All semblance of dignity and composure had left him as he was wracked by lamentation for the death of one who had walked beside him for a lifetime, his back turned upon the naked infant that tradition had forced him to suffocate with his own hands.
The people of Supnah walked in silence, bent beneath the weight of their traveling packs. All except Navahk, whose belongings were hefted by Grek and Stam, so that he might walk ahead of his people unencumbered, free to sing a death song for the woman and to shake his staff at the world while eagles and teratorns and other carrion-eating birds began to circle in the sky above and behind him.
Torka watched him. Torka knew that he enjoyed his song, and that, somehow, he was kindred to the carrion eaters of the world, This is a bad band, thought Torka, and knew at last and without doubt that he must leave it.
For many days Torka kept his decision in his heart. For as many nights he lay awake with it, measuring its worth as though it were a new woman whose merits must be carefully considered before at last allowing her to share his bed skins. He wished that he had taken as much care before he had first taken upon himself the double burden of lana and Aliga; but what was done was done. He would not dishonor them, or himself, by turning his back upon them now—as he must turn his back upon Karana. The thought of leaving the boy was like contemplating the amputation of his spear arm. Karana was as a son to him, but Supnah was his true father. And the more Torka watched them together, the more convinced he became that it would be wrong to take the boy from his people. Karana was as stubborn as a musk ox and as unforgiving as the storms of the winter dark, but Supnah’s doting display of protective concern and paternal affection would eventually make their mark upon the boy. Karana might become headman of his band one day, and in time he might even become a man who would put his dagger-eyed uncle in his place; but in the meantime Supnah would see to it that no harm came to the boy, and most assuredly the headman would never allow his son to walk out of his life twice.
The initial awe the band felt for Man Who Walks With Dogs had lost its luster. After he had allowed them to see that his spear hurler was not a magic stick but only a tool that all the hunters might learn to make and use, he became only another man in their eyes, an outsider who had walked into their band to bring shame to their headman, magic man, and themselves as well.
When they looked at him, they saw a man who had survived the terrible long winter of the starving moon without abandoning his woman, his ancient grandfather, or another man’s child. When they looked at him, they remembered the old people and the children whom they had turned out of their encampment to walk the wind forever.
And at last he understood why Supnah and Navahk had put aside their enmity and focused it upon him. Yes, he had brought Karana back to them alive from the spirit world, but as long as he stayed among them, he would be a constant reminder of the fallibility of Navahk’s powers, and Supnah would always see him as the stranger who had saved the life of the beloved son whom he had sent to die.
Inside his shelter Torka lay quietly in the dark, with Lonit asleep in the curl of his arm. His thoughts no longer distressed him. He had made his peace with them. Like a hunter who has come to a fork in a game trail, he had carefully analyzed the signs and had made up his mind as to which trail would most benefit him.
To continue on with Supnah would lead him to the loss of his woman and, inevitably, to the loss of his own life. He would never give her up. Never. Torka and Lonit were like the great dark swans that flew together, male and female, hearts and lives bonded until death. He would fight for her against any man, as he had fought for her in the past, barehanded against wolves and with spears and bludgeon against men. Unless she asked to go. And then his life would be over.
He closed his eyes. Beside him Lonit murmured against dreams. They had come far since leaving Rhik to sit death watch for his woman. Only this afternoon he had rejoined the band as Supnah had led them on a more easterly course, out of the tundral barrens toward familiar hunting grounds that lay at the confluence of two rivers, in a country that his people called the Land of Little Sticks.
They would be there tomorrow. The hunters said that it was good hunting country, with many streams and groves of dwarf willow from which the women could gather generous supplies of sticks for burning and twigs for the making of baskets. They had killed moose there in the past, and sloth and horse. There were fish for the taking, and good birding. Men could hunt in the Land of Little Sticks for many days before being forced to move on in search of fresh food supplies.
Then they would turn back. Beyond the Land of Little Sticks the tundra stretched away to the southernmost extension of the Mountains That Walk. There, in a wall of ice two miles high and no man knew how many miles wide, the world ended.
Or did it? Torka closed his eyes. Memories filled him, of a land that Supnah, at Navahk’s insistence, had refused to enter. It lay behind them now—or perhaps, as an eagle flies, it lay somewhere ahead, hidden within the mountain vastness. It was a river of grassland ten to twenty miles wide, running due east between the towering, transversely aligned glacier-ridden mountains. Supnah had called it the Corridor of Storms. Navahk had said that it was forbidden country, the realm of the wanawut, the end of the world. Yet, as Torka allowed the memory of that land to grow within him, it was as though he stood again on the bare, black-boned ridge looking down at an undulating sun-washed land so thick with the first new grass of spring that it rippled in the wind like the fur of a green animal. And everywhere upon that
land he saw herds of grazing animals. So many animals that he was overwhelmed by the hunting potential of the land that was forbidden to Supnah’s people. Navahk had said that it was the end of the world. To Torka it seemed to hold the promise of a new beginning.
He opened his eyes. A mammoth trumpeted in the night. Torka stared into the darkness as the high, shrieking cry reverberated through a thousand distant, unseen canyons. Lonit stirred against him. He drew her closer, listening as the last echoings of the mammoth’s cry faded into the night. She sighed, awake now. “Listen. Did you hear it? Was it Thunder Speaker? Was it Life Giver?” Life Giver. She called the great mammoth that. No longer the Destroyer. It had killed their people and set them to wander alone. It had killed the men of the Ghost Band, but it had turned away and allowed Torka to keep his life when he had dared to place himself before its charge to save the life of Karana. No one could convince her that something magic had not happened in that moment, that a covenant had not been made between man and mammoth. And although he claimed otherwise to all who had witnessed that encounter, within the deepest recesses of his spirit he knew that she was right. He and the beast had been one in that moment when life and death had hung in the balance. He had not thrown his spear, and the mammoth had not charged. The Destroyer had not destroyed him; it had given him the gift of life instead, and in his heart he had named it totem. He would never hunt it, or its kind, again. “Life Giver is far away,” he said to the woman in his arms. “In lands from which Supnah has led his people.”
“There was game there. Beyond the country where the Ghost Band died. In the long land of grass between the Mountains That Walk. There was much game.” Her hand strayed upward across his chest, stroked him softly. “The women say that if hunting is good, we will winter in the Land of Little Sticks. The women say that if the hunting is not good, we will walk northward again, crossing the Plain of Many Waters, following Big Milk River to winter at the place of the Great Gathering. It is far, beyond the country of the Ghost Band. Wallah, Grek’s woman, says it is a big camp. Many bands come there in the last days of summer, to settle in for the duration of the time of the long dark, to trade and share news and to barter women and children and goods. Naiapi says that Supnah gave her father a robe of bearskin, two of his best spears, and a marmot-skin bag filled with his favorite fishing hooks in trade for her. Naiapi is proud to speak of that and says that the Great Gathering is a good camp. Wallah says that there are games, much storytelling, and competitions between the women to test their cooking and sewing skills.
