by Sue Harrison
She went to the chief hunter’s ulax, slipped inside. During the years since the grandfather’s death, K’os had joined her husband twice on trading trips. Both times, Daughter had stayed in the village. During the first trip, she had lived with Eye-Taker and her children, but during the second Daughter had stayed with the chief hunter and his large family. That summer, the chief hunter had lost a wife in childbirth and the remaining two wives said they needed Daughter’s help in sewing clothing for their children, to make up for the lost needle of that dead wife.
Daughter had been happy there, so much did the chief hunter’s wives treat her like one of their own, scolding and teaching and laughing.
In the chief hunter’s ulax all things seemed easier. If something was not finished by night, well, then, it could be done the next day. If Daughter sewed a crooked seam, then she could fix it. If someone spilled oil, well, the smell of it would sweeten the crowberry heather that padded the floor. There was little anger, little regret, and no day was marred by Seal’s heavy-lidded eyes watching her from the shadows.
Where else could Daughter go, now that White Salmon’s family did not want her?
Only one lamp burned in the ulax. The chief and his wives and their children were already in their sleeping places, but the grandmother was still awake. In her old age, she found sleep difficult to capture. She smiled a welcome to Daughter, patted the floor beside her, and when Daughter sat down, she handed her a needle and a cormorant skin sax that needed mending.
So then, for that night, Daughter stayed awake, sewing, and when morning finally gave the old woman heavy eyes, Daughter tucked her into a sleeping place, and sat alone in the ulax until she heard one of the wives wake. Then Daughter crept up the climbing log, and out into the day. Her sorrow was blunted, both by lack of sleep and also because of the pretense she had lived as she sat up with the grandmother—that she belonged to the chief hunter, a daughter loved, one whose marriage would be celebrated rather than cursed.
For the next few days, Daughter stayed in Seal’s ulax, kept her fingers busy with sewing. Once she returned to the chief hunter’s ulax, but by then even the grandmother knew what had happened to her, and Daughter could not bear their pity. Better to be with K’os, who treated her brusquely as though all that had happened was Daughter’s fault. She tried not to hope that White Salmon would come for her, but every footstep on the ulax roof set her heart racing.
The morning of the fifth day, Seal came inside, windblown and smelling of fish. “We are ready,” he told K’os, lifting his chin toward Daughter and raising his eyebrows in question.
K’os shook her head, and Daughter’s belly tightened in dread. Something was happening. Had they agreed to give her to some other man? Someone old who could offer a better brideprice?
She dropped her sewing and got to her feet, clutched her fingers around the amulet that hung from her neck. The ulax was warm, but suddenly she wished she was wearing more than just the woven grass panels that hung from the belt at her waist.
“What have you done?” she asked Seal.
“Nothing,” he said and smiled at her, his mouth wide. “Your mother and I think it is a good time for you to be away from this village. We will make a trading trip. You are coming with us.”
“No,” she said. “You go, but I will not. Eye-Taker needs my help with her children.”
“You think that if we leave you, White Salmon will claim you as wife while we are gone?” K’os said.
Daughter did not answer.
“He will not. Ask Green Twig’s father how much White Salmon offered for her.”
The words were as vicious as a slap, and it was all Daughter could do to stay on her feet. But K’os had lied to her before, in small things, in foolish ways. Daughter said nothing, merely took her sax from a peg on the wall and slipped it on.
“When do you leave?” she asked Seal.
“Tomorrow, if the weather is good. Perhaps the next day.”
She climbed from the ulax, went to the beach, hoping to find White Salmon there, or at least one of his brothers. He was at the iqyax racks, laughing and talking with other young men. Once she would have joined them, stood behind White Salmon as a wife does, in respect, but this time, she interrupted what he was saying, boldly lay a hand on his sleeve, pulled him to face her.
“What I hear about Green Twig, is that true?” she asked.
He looked down the beach, then over his shoulder at the sea, up toward the sky as though she were not there. One of the other young men covered his laughter with a hand and turned away.
“I have pledged a brideprice,” White Salmon finally said.
Anger controlled Daughter’s tongue, and when she would rather have given gentle words, she could think of nothing but curses, so she turned away, let the wind take the men’s laughter from her ears.
Chapter Twenty-one
A ROCK HAD ROLLED down from the top of the grandfather’s grave, and Daughter set it back in place. Who would take care of the grave once she was gone? Soon earth tremors and wind would move all the stones, and grass would grow over her grandfather’s bones. Then, even if she did return, how would she know where he was? It seemed a cruel thing to leave him here with people who were not truly his own, but what else could she do?
“I will try to return, Grandfather,” Daughter said to the grave. “But K’os wants to visit her own people, the River men, and I am not sure that she will come back to this island.”
Daughter hunched her shoulders so that the stiff collar of her sax covered her ears. She should have worn the hooded otter fur parka K’os had made her for the trading trip, but Daughter needed the comfort of familiar clothes.
She lifted her head and spoke a few words in the River language, as though the wind could understand. Perhaps it did, she told herself. Perhaps the wind that blew over the First Men’s islands also carried the clouds and rain to the River People.
K’os said that Daughter spoke the language well. Seal pretended to speak it, but he knew only a few broken phrases, words that traders might use. He pronounced those in strange ways so that when he said them, boasting of his knowledge, Daughter had to think hard to know what he meant. More than once he had cuffed her when she did not understand.
“So, Grandfather, I have come to say good-bye, and to tell you that I will not forget you or your stories and your wisdom. I will teach my children about the Boat People and about you and how you saved me from the Bear-god warriors.”
Tears tightened her throat, and she could say no more, so she ripped the grass away from the grave, making an edge of bare earth, then rearranged the rocks, pressing them against one another into a tight mound that would stand for a while against wind and ice and tremors. The island’s two mountains stood high to the south and west of their village, and Daughter spoke to those mountains, asked protection for the grave. After all, the mountains had so much island they could shake, why disturb this small mound of rock and the man whose bones slept under it?
She turned away, her good-byes said, but then remembered something she had meant to do. She had made a necklace of wooden beads carved from the remains of the log boat she and the grandfather had ridden from their island. She lifted the necklace from under her sax and, moving several of the rocks at the top of the mound, let it fall down into the grave. She was replacing the rocks when she noticed a bit of hide, dark and nearly rotted, sticking out between two stones. It came easily into her hand, and she realized that it was an amulet, one that the grandfather had always carried.
The hide fell apart in her fingers, and she clutched at what was inside—sand, lighter in color than the sand of the First Men’s island. She clenched her fist so the wind could not steal what she held. Without doubt, it was a gift from the grandfather.
As she walked back to the village, she clasped her hands in front of her, holding the treasure. She climbed up Seal’s ulax, and looked toward the beach. To her relief, he was near the iqyax rack, oiling his trader’s boat. When she
went inside, prepared for K’os’s questions—a story on her tongue about taking sand from the island for luck—she found the ulax empty, a disarray of food containers and trade goods cluttering the center of the floor.
Daughter slipped into her sleeping place and used her teeth to tug a bedding fur, skin side up, into her lap, then dumped the sand on the skin.
Among the grains were tiny fragments of green stone, nearly translucent. She picked out a thin, curved shard, and finally realized it was a bit of water gourd. How could she forget those gourds that had kept them alive during their journey?
Daughter picked up the shard of gourd and caught her breath when she saw the tiny carved bead under it. It was small, only the size of a crowberry, and nearly as hard as rock, but not rock. When she looked at it closely, she could see that there was a tiny face on one side. The bead was pierced with a hole, and so, although Daughter poured the sand, stones, and the shard of water gourd into her own amulet, she threaded the face bead on a sinew string and tied it around her neck.
They left two days later, K’os at the front with a paddle, and Daughter behind her, tucked among the packs of food and trade goods. Daughter looked long at the island, the grass so green, the flowers bright in the low meadows—yellow cinquefoil, lupine, primola, and bluebells—and the mountains that still kept their caps of snow.
Some of the people had come out to the beach, and she looked for White Salmon, wondered if he would say good-bye. But he was not there. The chief hunter’s wives and their children crowded the shore, the boys calling for her to bring them back gifts. They celebrated her leaving because they thought she would return. K’os’s eyes said otherwise, and Daughter knew that K’os planned to keep her close. What mother wanted to face old age alone?
But surely K’os wanted Daughter to have a husband, and a husband always protected his wife, even against her own mother. Most likely he would be a River man, and Daughter would have to learn new ways, but she already understood the River language, and K’os had told her many River People stories, had insisted that Daughter learn to tell the stories herself. She had sewn parkas and boots like the River People wore, but she made them out of fur seal or otter skins rather than caribou hide. She had learned plant medicines, and K’os had made her an otter fur medicine bag like K’os’s own.
So in some ways she understood the River People, but she had never skinned a caribou, never helped on a hunt. She had never eaten fresh caribou meat, and she often wondered how people lived without the good taste of seal blubber, the warmth it put into a belly during the cold days and nights of winter.
When she wore the beautiful parka K’os had made her, she found the hood restricting. How did a woman turn her head? How did she see anything but what was right before her eyes?
“You think our winters here on this island are cold?” K’os once asked her. “You will find out how cold winter can be when we live with the River People.”
Daughter had not answered. Since she was a little girl, she had understood that K’os liked to frighten her, and she had learned that she had the strength to meet all the problems that K’os predicted. Those few times when Daughter did doubt her abilities, she reminded herself that K’os had once been young, had faced the same worries, the same dangers, and she had survived. If K’os could, then she could.
Though at first all things seemed new, their traveling, like everything in life, settled into sameness. Their days started with the first rays of sun. Seal told them that traders did not eat in the mornings, only at night, but K’os did not listen to him, and always had dried fish and a water bladder ready. She would not repack the boat until she had eaten, and Daughter ate also, fearful at first of taboos broken, but after several days of Seal’s sharp words and K’os’s defiance, Seal, too, ate a share of the fish. It seemed to Daughter that the eating was a wise thing, that Seal was able to paddle harder and longer.
Each morning, she and K’os packed the boat while Seal studied the skies and decided if the tide was high enough or low enough to start out again. Their landings were usually easier in high tide, and Seal tried to avoid beaches where rips spun out from the shore. They left when the sea was right, sometimes well into the morning, at other times as soon as they had packed.
Seal paddled all day at the back of the boat while K’os and Daughter took turns at the front, and the one who did not paddle bailed.
The bailing tube was a hollow piece of bamboo driftwood, cut the length of a forearm with the bow of a joint in the center. A hunter placed one end of the bailing tube into the water at the bottom of the boat and sucked on the other end until the tube was full. Then he emptied the water over the side of the boat. A man with both hands on a paddle could use his mouth to bail, and the tube fit easily into small spaces between packs, even down into a cramped iqyax hatch.
Daughter had seen boys practicing with bailing tubes in shallow water at low tide. Then she had joined the other girls in laughing at them. Why practice something that was so simple? But now she found that she did not have enough breath to suck up much water. Seal mocked her, commented on the weakness of women, but she ignored him and tried until she was so dizzy the sky spun. As the days passed, her lungs grew stronger, and though she could never suck up as much water as Seal, she was soon better at it than K’os.
Gradually, as they traveled, the boat’s sea lion covering allowed water to seep in through the seams, and sometimes waves splashed over the sides. Then Seal would curse his trader’s boat, tell K’os that if it weren’t for her and Daughter, he would travel like a man in an iqyax.
K’os would pack the gaping seams with strips of fish fat, and remind Seal in harsh words that almost all traders used open boats. If he did a better job of securing sea lion skin covers to protect bow and stern, they would not have so many problems. Then Seal would set his mouth in anger and say no more, for when it came to arguing, who was better than K’os?
When they found a good beach, they stopped. Sometimes that happened early in the day, other times not until sunset. Twice they found no beach at all, no inlets, and so paddled on through the night.
Each time they stopped, they carried the boat and their packs high above the tide line. The boat was longer and wider than an iqyax and thus more stable in the water, but it was still light enough for K’os and Daughter to carry.
To make a shelter they tipped it to the side, faced its belly toward the wind, and arranged packs like walls on either end, then stretched sealskins over them to make a roof. If the beach had driftwood, they built a fire on the open side of their shelter.
Daughter searched for driftwood while Seal oiled the boat cover and K’os repaired its seams. That was Daughter’s favorite time of day. Though her belly twisted in emptiness, she knew she would soon eat, and it was good to again feel the earth firm beneath her feet.
On some beaches the waves were generous, bringing more wood than they could use in many nights, but other beaches were bare, with nothing but a few shells. On those beaches Seal used his hunter’s lamp for warmth. It was made of stone like all First Men lamps, and seal or whale oil fed its moss wick, but it was small, only the size of a man’s hand, fingers spread, and did not give much heat. On especially cold nights, Seal hunkered near the lamp, sometimes even squatted over it, his sax funneling the heat up to his legs and groin, smoke coming from the neck hole. Daughter and K’os would be left to shiver in the cold, no warmth for them except from each other.
“We should have brought our own lamps and oil,” Daughter told K’os the first night they could not make a fire.
K’os had only shrugged and said, “We must be careful, riding this sea as we do. What the sea allows from a man, it counts as disrespect from a woman.”
“Hunters’ lamps are taboo for women?” Daughter asked.
“Perhaps,” K’os had told her. “Why take the chance? We will be colder in the River People’s land than we are here. Do you want the sea to hear your complaints? Wear your parka.”
During
that night, the parka warmed her, so Daughter wore it in the boat the next day. But that was a day of wind and waves, and soon in the sea spray she was drenched, the parka sodden. By the time they made a camp for the night, Daughter was so wet and cold that she could not keep her teeth still. She looked with longing at the hooded waterproof parka Seal wore, but was careful not to complain or even express a wish for one. Though K’os did not say so, they must also be taboo for women. Otherwise, K’os would have one. But how strange that only hunters were allowed to wear a chigdax when it was a woman’s hand that fashioned it from dried sea lion gut, and a woman’s needle that sewed the watertight seams.
Seal and K’os wore seal flipper boots, but Daughter went barefoot as she had all her life. She had made herself boots in the manner of the River People, but she did not want to watch them rot a little more each day, her feet in the water that always lay in the bottom of the boat.
The first few days on the sea had frightened her, and at night her mind was tormented by dreams of otters that attacked with sharp and vicious teeth. In one dream, she had looked down at her feet, was amazed to see them whole, even with her smallest toes. Then the grandfather had picked up a knife, a large blade, dark with dried blood, and she had awakened screaming, had reached down to where her small toes had been, felt the ridged scars, and reminded herself that she had received a fair trade for that first toe, life, not only for herself but the grandfather.
During the second moon of traveling, a squall came on them, and though Daughter had little respect for Seal, he handled the waves and the wind with strength, speaking in a soothing voice to his wife and daughter. His calmness seemed to draw away their fear, and bailing became a rhythm bounded by his words.
He managed to get the boat to a beach. It was little more than a shelf of rock, without sand or driftwood, set against cliffs so high that in the rain and fog Daughter could not see their tops.
