Jade kept on the Five Fires Mountain path as long as it was clear and without forks, over the pass. At the first fork he took the north fork…[There follows a detailed passage of the paths Jade took and the regions he searched, which would lend credibility to the story for a Valley reader, but is tedious to the ignorant foreigner.] Late on the second morning of his search, on the far side of Echcheha Ridge, he saw where she had left pits of dried apricots and plums by the path. Soon after that, he heard a noise far down in the canyon, a big animal moving, and he called her name. The noise stopped, but there was no reply.
At sunset he came out into Huringa Valley. He did not know anything about the Huringa people, and so he tried to keep away from their paths and houses. Where the ground was clear there in the valley he saw a person running up a big hillside towards the trees, but he could not see clearly in the twilight, and did not dare call out. On the far side of that valley he got into thick underbrush and had to lie down and sleep away the dark. In the morning he wanted to go home, for he had brought no food with him and had eaten nothing for two days; but he saw some good mushrooms, and while he was eating them he heard noises like a person forcing through brush across the top of that ridge, and he began to follow again, going over the ridge on deer trails.
Now they were in the wild country between Huringa and the Inland Sea. Now they were both lost.
She thought she was going back towards the Valley of the Na, but she was going north, then northeast, then east, then north again. He kept following her, because now he could hear her talking sometimes, far ahead; but when he called she did not answer. She had gone wild. She would hide in the underbrush for a while, and then go on quietly.
On the evening of the fourth day he was passing two big blue-stone boulders in the open place at the top of a ridge, and thought, “That would be a good place to sleep.” He went to the rocks and saw that Withy was lying asleep between them.
He sat down nearby and kept talking softly, saying Obsidian heya, so that she would not be afraid when she woke up.
She woke and sat up between the boulders. He was sitting against one of them. They were under the evening star. She said, “You’ve come for me!”
He said, “Yes. I’ve been following you.”
She kept looking at him from the side of her eyes; she tried to get away from him, running away, but she stumbled, and he caught her. She kept saying, “Oh please, don’t kill me, oh please, don’t hurt me!”
He said, “Don’t you know me? I’m your brother Jade, from Carved Branch House.” She did not listen. She thought he was a bear. When he spoke, she thought he was the Bear Man, and began to cry and beg him for food.
He said, “I haven’t got any food,” but as he spoke he saw that a tree growing up from between the boulders was a cherry, and its fruit was ripe. They gathered cherries and they both ate. They ate till they were drunk with eating after fasting. They lay down together between the boulders. It seemed to them that the boulders pressed them together. They lay there together until she woke under the morning star. She looked at him and saw that it was not the Bear Man but her brother. She got up and ran away, leaving him asleep between the rocks.
It was a rocky ridge, with deer trails going through the open chaparral and wild lilac. She went without going anywhere, walking and running. She came around a big stack of brown rocks and came face to face with a bear. She said to the bear, “You’ve come for me!” She put her arms around the bear and pressed herself to it. The bear was frightened and tore at her face with his claws to get free, and ran away.
When Jade woke up and found Withy not there, he was frightened at what they had done. He did not call to her or wait for her or try to follow her, but set off down the ridge westward. He did not know where he was, but he got to a place where he could see Ama Kulkun, and guided himself by that, and after two more days he came down Chumo Creek to Chumo, and across the Valley to Chukulmas.
He said to the people there, “I did not find Withy. She must be lost.” He said he had gone east of Huringa and north of Totsam and had found no trace of her. The Obsidian people who had gone looking tor her had come back two days earlier. They had not been able to catch up with the people going to Green Sands. For a month, then, her people waited for them to come back from Green Sands. When they came back without her, knowing nothing of her, her mother said the Going Westward to the Sunrise songs should be sung for her; but her father said, “1 do not think she is dead. Wait awhile.” So they waited. The Finders went to Huringa and Totsam and through that wild country, asking the Pig People and other people who hunted there if they would watch for the lost girl, but there was no word of her.
In late autumn near the time of the Grass, when the Lodge Rejoining had been built, in the rain in the evening a person came into Chukulmas, walking between the houses. It was like a dried corpse, naked and dark, with hair behind but skull in front, and half a face. It walked to the Obsidian heyimas and climbed the roof and called down the entrance, “Bear! Come out!”
They all came out of the heyimas. Jade was with them. When he saw the half-faced girl he began to scream, and fell down screaming. Someone said, “That is Withy!” People ran to bring her family from the lodge Rejoining, where they had been singing for her, and they took her home to Red Balconies.
At first she was crazy, but after a month at home Withy could speak and behave responsibly. She said she did not remember what had happened, but once she said, “When Jade found me.” They asked what she meant and she did not answer. But Jade heard of this, and he went to the heyimas and talked to people there, telling them a true account. Then he left Chukulmas and went up on the Mountain to the Springs, and then went to live in the Lower Valley. He lived outside of Tachas Touchas as a forest-living person. He did not dance, and did not enter his heyimas. At the time of the Moon dancing he always went up into the southwest ranges. One time he did not come back. Withy lived in Chukulmas until she was old. She wore a mask outside the house to hide her face from children.
NOTE: Although the story is a typical cautionary tale, there is some evidence for its having actually happened; the circumstantial details are unusually precise, and people in the Obsidian of Chukulmas identified themselves as descendants of the families of Withy and Jade.
The Brave Man
There was a man who was exceptionally brave, a man who went to meet danger. When he was a young boy living in Kastoha-na he went with another child to pick blackberries, and the child with him, going ahead, met a rattlesnake under his hand and was paralysed with fear. This boy, without tool or weapon, darted out his hand and picked up the snake behind its head so that it could not turn to bite him, and whirled it and flung it far across the thickets.
When he was still wearing undyed clothing, the wild pigs came down from the northeast countries in vast herds and were eating all the gathering acorns and making the woods and hills very dangerous for human people to go in. The young man would go out alone to hunt the wild pigs, without dogs, and with a bow not a gun. He killed a great many, so many that people had to help him bring back the hides for pigskin leather. When he was in the Bay Laurel Lodge he climbed the Palisades, climbing even the Overhang without a rope; he spent a season with the Falares people, sailing small boats on the deep sea.
He became a member of the Finders Lodge and roamed far and wide among many places and peoples, across the Inland Sea and across the Range of Light. He spent three years on the shores of the Omorn Sea, having sailed across the Rift or Straits to the desert countries and the great canyons and mountains of the Range of Heaven. In desolate places where those with him were troubled and ill at ease he had no worry and no fear. He laid his head down on the stone under which lay the scorpion, and both slept. He went willingly and alone into the poisoned regions, and because he was not confused by anxiety nor forced to hurry by fear, he did no harm to himself or others, but by following maps and guides given by the Exchange and by his own accurate and intrepid exploration he reached depos
its of tin, copper, and other valuable substances. His name became Bell, because the expeditions he went on brought back so much metal that the Smith Art was able to make bronze in quantity and cast bells of it for sheep, cattle, and musicians. Bells cast of bronze are the sweetest and most complex in tone, and so they called him by that name, a giftname.
After several great journeys he was ready to settle down for a while, and presently he married a Fifth-House woman, he himself being of the Fourth House. They lived together in her household in contentment, he studying with the Finders and at the Exchange in Wakwaha and she a master vintner of the Wine Art, until she became pregnant and the pregnancy went badly. She miscarried in the sixth month, and after the miscarriage did not recover. She bled and wasted, and ate and slept very little. Doctors found no cause for surgery and no remedies gave relief. A bringing-in was held but she could not sing. One day Bell came into the house and found her lying alone weak and weeping. She said, “Bell, I am going to die.”
He said, “No, that isn’t so. You won’t die.”
She said, “I am afraid.”
He said, “Fear is no use. There’s nothing to fear.”
“Is death nothing to fear?” she asked him.
“Death is nothing to fear,” he said.
She turned away from him and wept in silence.
Another day, soon after, he came and she was very weak; she could not lift her hand.
He said, “Listen, my wife: if you’re afraid to die, I’ll do it for you.”
That made her smile. She said, “Brave fool!”
He said, “I will die for you, my wife.”
“No one can do that,” she said.
“With your consent I can do it,” he said.
She thought that he still did not understand that she was dying. He seemed like a child to her. She said, “You have my consent.”
He stood up from the bedside. He stretched himself so that he stood with his legs and arms extended and his face turned upward. Then he called upward aloud: “Come, Mother! Come, Father! Come from that House, come here to me from that falling House!”
He looked down at his wife then and said, “Please don’t call me any longer by the name I was called; with your consent I have given it away. All the name I have now is Bear.”
Then he spread out the bedding in the corner and lay down in that room.
That night it began raining. A great storm came out of the northwest with lightning striking in forest and town and thunder crashing from range to range and rain coming down with no air between the raindrops. Birds were beaten from their nests and ground squirrels drowned in their burrows, that night.
Each time the thunder sounded the man who said his name was Bear would cry out. Each time the lightning flashed he would hide his face, moaning. His wife was so worried about his behavior that she asked her sister to help her move her bedding beside his, and she took his hand, but she could not make him be calm. She sent her sister to bring his mother from her household. She came and she too asked him, “What is it, Bell? What is wrong with you?”
He did not answer any of them, but lay trembling and hiding. At last his wife remembered that he had said to call him Bear. She said, “Bear! Why do you act like this?”
Then he said, “I am afraid.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I have to die.”
His mother said to the wife, “Why does he say that?”
She said, “He said he would die for me. I consented.”
The mother and the sister said, “No one can do that.”
The wife said to him, “Listen. I do not consent! If I gave consent I take it back!”
But he did not hear her. The thunder crashed and the rain roared on the roof and windows.
It rained all the night, and the next day, the next night and the day after that. The floor of the Valley was flooded, and there was standing water from Ounmalin to Kastoha-na.
The man who said his name was Bear lay while it rained, shivering and hiding, not eating and not sleeping. His wife stayed with him, trying to care for him, trying to make him be calm. People came from the Doctors Lodge, but he would not speak to them nor hear them sing; he covered his ears, moaning.
People began saying in town, “That brave man is dying for his wife, taking her place dying.” So it seemed to be happening; but no one knew if it could be done, or if it was something that ought to be done.
People came from the Madrone Lodge and sat with the wife at the man’s side. They talked to him, saying, “Listen. You are going too far. You should have been afraid to do this.”
He wept aloud. He said, “It’s too late now. Now I am afraid!”
They said, “You can come back.”
Again he wept and said, “I never knew the bear. Now I am the bear.”
It stopped raining at last, and the waters returned into the River and the weather went on in the usual way. But the man never got up, but lay trembling, and did not eat. His bowels gave way, and he began to bleed from the anus and to be in pain. He cried out and screamed. He was so strong and sound a man that it took him a long time to die. After fourteen days he could not speak any more, and four days after that they began singing the Going Westward to the Sunrise songs in his room, but still he lived nine days, blind and moaning, before he died entirely.
After his death the wife tried to change her name, calling herself Coward, but most people would not call her that. She regained fair health and lived to be an old woman. Each year at the Ceremony of Mourning at the World Dance she threw his names on the fire, his first names and the name Bell and last the name Bear; and though names are burnt only once, no one prevented her from this, because of the name, and because of what he had done to her. So it went on a long time, and so the story got remembered for a long time, even now, long after she too died.
At The Springs Of Orlu
She had been wearing the undyed clothing for five years. Her name was Adsevin. She left her house in Chukulmas to bring water from the springs of Orlu for the Water Dance.
She had been up to those springs with people of her heyimas, but not alone before. When she came across the ridge at the head of the canyon she listened for the sound of water running. The scrub oak and thornbush had grown thick and there was no human path. She crouched down and followed deer paths, and came out on a big boulder of red rock that stuck out from the wall of the canyon like a porch. From there she looked down to the spring. She saw a deer drinking, and saw a man drinking. He was crouched down drinking from the surface of the water where it welled over the lip of the spring. He wore no clothing and his hair and skin were the color of a deer. He had not seen or heard her come out onto the rock. After he had drunk his fill he raised his head and spoke to the spring. She saw his lips make the heya wakwana though she did not hear his voice. He looked up then and saw the girl on the rock in the canyon wall. They looked at each other across the spring, across the air. The man’s eyes were the eyes of deer. He did not speak, nor did Adsevin. He looked down, moved back from the spring, turned, and went into the thick underbrush along the bank of Orlu Creek. The big alders growing there hid him from sight at once. She could hear no sound of his going.
She sat a long time on the boulder ledge watching the spring run. In the heat of late summer no bird spoke. She went down to the spring and sang to it, took up water in the blue clay jar, slung the jar in the carrier, and went back as she had come, scrambling up the steep canyon wall. When she was on the big rock above the spring she turned back and spoke: “We are dancing the Water in Chukulmas tomorrow.” Then she went on up the deer trails and across the ridge.
When she had brought the water of Orlu to the heyimas for the wakwa the next day, she went home to her hearth in Cat’s Whiskers House. There she asked her grandmother’s brother, a woman-living man, a teacher of the Blue Clay, “Did I see a person from the Second House or from the Eighth House, at Orlu Springs?”
He asked, “How did this person look?”
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“Like a deer, like a man.”
Her uncle said, “Well, maybe you saw a Sky person. This is a sacred time and you were doing a sacred thing. How did this person speak?”
“He spoke to the water after he drank.”
“Did he speak to you?”
“No. I spoke to him. I said that we are dancing the Water.”
“Maybe this person will come to the dancing,” her uncle said.
Adsevin looked towards the hunting side, towards the paths from the north, all the time of the dancing in the dancing place, the next day; but she did not see the man from Orlu Springs.
He had come, but he was afraid to come into the town, into the dancing place. It was too long since he had been with human people. He did not know how to come among them. Afraid, he hid under the creek bank and watched the dancing. Dogs came barking and snarling at him, and he fled away, running up the streambed into the hills.
After the dance the heat became still greater and nothing moved all afternoon at Chukulmas except the buzzards over Buzzard Hill. On such a day Adsevin went back up the canyons and ridges to the springs of Orlu. She found the deer trails that led down to the big rock, and came there. The spring had ceased to run. No one was there. On the rock were four green acorns of the live oak. A squirrel or another person might have put them there. Adsevin took them, and put in their place what she had brought with her: a stick of olive wood carved in a spiral and polished smooth as a hehole-no. Not speaking loudly or looking down into the canyon, she said, “I will be going on the Salt Journey. After that I will come back.” She went on home then to Chukulmas.
After the Salt Journey, before the Wine, she came to the rock in Orlu Canyon. The hehole-no was gone; nothing was there. Whatever was there, the squirrels, the jays, or the wood rats might have moved it or taken it. She found an obsidian chip in the dirt of the canyon wall and with it made the Blue Clay mark, scratching it into the skin of the red boulder. When she was done she stood up and said, “They will be dancing the Wine in our town soon.”
Always Coming Home Page 12
