Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  At daybreak, as soon as you could see clearly, Dream Eagle shouted, “I am coming now!” He was the war chief so he would tell us what to do and not do. He told us not to follow him until he called to us, and then he went down alone into the valley. There was some mist along Rotten Rock Creek and the scrub willows hid him, so he climbed up on the big split red rock called Gaou to be in full view. He stood there without his gun and yelled at the Pig men to come down and fight.

  A Pig man came running down the side of the ridge through the chamise in flower. He was wearing leather clothes that protected his whole body and arms and legs, and his face was painted red-brown like the pigs. He carried no weapon. Dream Eagle jumped off the rock onto him, knocking him flat. They began to wrestle. It was hard to see from where we were. Dream Eagle banged the man’s head on a rock. The Pig men began shooting at us from their ridge, staying hidden in the underbrush and trees. We weren’t sure whether Dream Eagle had called to us yet because the shots and echoes made so much noise, so we decided to split up the way we had planned to do, some of us going around the ridge in the brush and some of us running down into that valley to fight in view.

  Most of the Pig men stayed high up in the brush and shot from there. I think all of them had guns, but they were not all good guns. We had three very good guns made by Himpi the Gunsmith, and eight good ones. The rest of us had chosen to fight with knives or without weapons.

  A Pig man shot from halfway down their ridge in the chamise and shot Dream Eagle when he stood up from wrestling with the Pig man. The bullet went in his left eye and killed him. The other Pig men shouted at the one who had shot Dream Eagle, and some of them came running down to where he was and they were yelling there, and then some of them came all the way down into that valley and left their guns on the rocks and came to fight with us with knives.

  The one that came at me had on the heavy leather armor, but I cut him across the face with the first stroke of my knife. He ran away with blood flying behind him and I chased him up to the Ritra Trail. He kept running, so I went back down into Rotten Rock Valley, and ran at a Pig man there. The leather clothes they had were hard to cut through. He cut me twice on the left forearm before I threw the knife at very short range straight into his mouth. He fell down strangling on his blood and dying. I cut off his head from his body with the knife he had been holding, and threw the head at another Pig man who was running towards me. I do not remember doing that, but the others saw me do it and told me about it. The Pig man ran away. I had to go back up our side of the ridge because I was bleeding hard from the cuts on my arm, and Cedar helped me tie up the cuts. I saw some of the other things that I will tell about, and heard about some later.

  Sun’s Son fought with knives in the valley with a very tall man who kept grunting like a pig. Sun’s Son cut the tall man many times, but the tall man at last caught his hair, pulled his head back, and cut his throat. Then Silence shot the tall man from behind, to make up for Dream Eagle.

  Giver Puma Dance’s son fought in view with two Pig men one after the other, and wounded both, and was wounded so that he had to go back over our ridge, as he was bleeding hard, like me.

  In the willows crossing Rotten Rock Creek, Black was shot in the head. She died there. At nearly the same place, Lucky was shot in the belly.

  Blood Star, Giver Rose’s son, Watching Stars, and Toyon, who were some of the people who tried to go through the brush around to the other ridge, all were shot and wounded. They shot at the Pig men but were not sure if they hurt any of them.

  Silence hid in a place clear around behind where the Pig People had made their fires, and from there he shot and killed three men besides the tall man who killed Sun’s Son.

  Rattler and Dream Mountains were brothers. They stayed together, going around through the brush, and they shot two Pig men, wounding them so they went off to the Pig People’s camp. Rattler and Dream Mountains followed them most of the way shouting insults and calling them cowards. They were fourteen and fifteen years old.

  Choosewell’s gun jammed at the first shot, and he hid in a scrub-oak thicket. After a while he saw that a Pig man was hiding there too, almost in arm’s reach. The Pig man had not seen Choosewell. Choosewell tried to hit him from behind with the gun-stock, but the Pig man heard him move, and ran, and then Choosewell ran our way.

  After Silence had killed the tall man and the three other men, he wounded a man who started screaming like a pig being killed. While he was doing that, another Pig man came down into the valley and stood beside Gaou Rock holding his arms out and his fingers stretched like the condor.

  Silence shot at him, but missed. He was very angry about Dream Eagle. That was why he shot. Our people began shouting to him not to shoot. The Pig man climbed up onto Gaou and kept holding out his arms for peace, and people called out, “It is over, it is over,” to the people up in the woods who could not see him. It was about halfway between noon and sunset then.

  We stayed around our fire place on the ridge until the Pig People had got their dead and wounded. Then we came down into the valley. Olive had not come or been brought back to the fire place, and we looked for him for a long time. He had been shot and crawled into a hiding place near the rocks in some poison oak and died there, but when he was being carried up the ridge he came back to life.

  We made litters for our dead and the wounded who could not walk, and carried them back past Tachas Touchas to the war lodge in Kehek Clearing. People from the Doctors Lodge came up from town. They made a shelter near the war lodge and looked after the wounded people there. The one most badly hurt was Lucky. He died after five days. All that time we were singing the Going Westward to the Sunrise songs for him and for the four others who had been killed, Dream Eagle, Sun’s Son, Black, and Olive, who had died again. All of us who had stayed alive went through purification ceremonies. Blood Star was purified as a man. Silence only stayed the nine days of the wakwa in the war lodge, and then went back to Dark Mountain. The rest of us stayed in the war lodge and kept out of sight of people and did not go into town for twenty-seven days. After that we went home. Around the time of the Summer Dance, the Pig People left Buzzard Mountain and went over northwestwards towards the coast. They were brave and true warriors in that war.

  A COMMENTARY ON THE WAR WITH THE PIG PEOPLE

  Written by Clear of the Yellow Adobe of Tachas Touchas and given to the library of that heyimas.

  I am ashamed that six of the people of my town who fought this war were grown people. Some of the others were old enough to behave like adults, too.

  All up the Valley now they are saying that the women and men in Tachas Touchas make war. They are saying that people in Tachas Touchas kill people for acorns. They are saying they can see smoke rising from Tachas Touchas all the way from Ama Kulkun. They are laughing at us. I am ashamed.

  It is appropriate for children to fight, not having learned yet how to be mindful, and not yet being strong. It is part of their playing.

  It is appropriate that adolescents, standing between childhood and adulthood, may choose mindfully to risk their strength in a game, and they may choose to throw away their life, if they wish not to go on and undertake to live a whole life into old age. That is their choice. In undertaking to live a whole life, a person has made the other choice. They no longer have the privilege of adolescence. To claim it in grown life is mindless, weak, and shameful.

  I am angry at Dream Eagle, Olive, and Black, who are dead, at Blood Star, Stone Dancing, and Silence, who are alive. I have said why. If they are angry at me for saying so, let them talk or write about it, and those that are dead, let their people speak if they will.

  The Town Of Chumo

  An oral history, related by Patience of Forty-Five Deer House in Telina-na.

  Chumo didn’t use to be there. There was a town called Varred or Berred, on the inside of the northeastern hills, farther to the east than Chumo is. It was somewhere up in the slopes of the dry hills there, and around the dancing place o
f that town there were hot springs, four of them steady and one intermittent. They had that sacred water for the heyimas and for heating, but they had to pipe their water for the houses and barns and fields from Big Rattlesnake Creek. They had storage pools and reservoirs, aqueducts, and pumps. People say you can find stonework all along Little Rattlesnake Creek and back up Tongue Draw that’s left from their aqueducts. The town was destroyed in a fire that swept over the northeast range out of Shai Valley, burning both forest and grass. There are histories and laments in the libraries about the burning of that town and the wild and domestic people that were caught in the fire and burned. Most of the human people got warning in time, before the fire came over the range. It went forward so fast, on a great wind out of the northeast, that even birds could not escape it. They fell burning from the air.

  After the plants began to grow again there and the mice and other small peoples came back, the human people began to build the town back in the same place. Some of them said it was a bad idea, since the forest was gone, and going backwards is a bad beginning, but others said, “Our springs are there, so the town should begin there again.” They were digging out the Serpentine heyimas, hauling out the roofbeams and the roof that had burned and fallen in, when there was an earthquake at the place and time where they were. The ground split wide open along the line of the hot springs and then closed together again, swallowing the springs. That water never came up into the light again. Two people who had been working to clear out the heyimas were killed by the roofbeams and earth falling back in and down upon them.

  After that the human people left the town to the wild people, and stayed in summerhouses or built small houses at different places or went to other towns, and it seemed as if there would be no more town in those hard hills. But a woman was herding sheep in a meadow called Chumo and she saw a lot of the old people who had lived and died in Berred dancing in that meadow. They came and danced there in the early morning, before sunrise. She told others about it, and they agreed together to make their town there. It was a convenient place, since they had begun keeping their sheep up on Sheep Mountain. So they made the dancing place and danced on it, and dug and built the heyimas, and crossed the hinge at Chumo Creek, and made their town there. They had a very famous Sun Dance there, the first winter of that town. All the people that had lived in the old town Berred, they said, that were Sky people, came to dance with the Earth people in Chumo, and they could hear the singing between their songs.

  A lot of Chumo people don’t live inside the town. It’s a long-armed town, as they say. They have their houses out a long way from the common place, some of them, down along Chumo Creek and clear over to Rattlesnake Creek, near where the old town was before the fire.

  The Trouble With The Cotton People

  Written by Grey Bull of the Obsidian of Telina-na, as part of an offering to his heyimas.

  When I was a young man there was trouble with the people who send us cotton from the South in trade for our wines. We were putting good wines on the train to Sed every spring and autumn, clear Ganais and dark Berrena, Mes from Ounmalin, and the Sweet Betebbes they like down there, all good wines, selected because they travel well, and shipped in the best oak casks. But they had begun sending us short-staple, seedy cotton, full of tares, in short-weight bales. Then one year they sent half in bales and the rest stuff already woven—some of it fair sheeting weight, but some of it sleazy, or worse.

  That year was the first I went to Sed, with my teacher in the Cloth Art, Soaring of the Obsidian of Kastoha-na. We went down with the wine and stayed at the inn at Sed, a wonderful place for seafood and general comfort. She and the Wine Art people had an argument with the foreigners, but it got nowhere, because the people who had brought the cotton to Sed said they were just middlemen—they hadn’t sent the lousy cotton, they just loaded and unloaded it and sailed the ships that carried it and took the wine back South. The only person there, they said, who was actually from the cotton people, wasn’t able to speak any language anybody else spoke. Soaring dragged him over to the Sed Exchange, but he acted as if he’d never heard of TOK; and when she tried to get a message through the Exchange to the place the cotton came from, nobody answered.

  The Wine Art people were glad she was there, since they would have taken the sleazy without question and sent all the good wine they had brought in return. She advised them to send two-thirds the usual shipment, and no Sweet Betebbes in it at all, and to take the rest back home and wait to hear from the cotton people. She refused to load the sleazy stuff onto the train, so they put it back into the ships. The ship people said they didn’t care, so long as they got their usual share of the wine from us for doing the shipping. Soaring wanted to cut that amount, too, to induce the ship people to pay attention to the quality of their cargo; but the other Valley traders said that was unfair, or unwise; so we gave the sailors a half-carload, as usual—all Sweet Betebbes.

  When we came home there was discussion among the Cloth and Wine Arts and the Finders Lodge and the councils and interested people of several towns, and some of us said: “Nobody from the Valley has been to that place where the cotton comes from for forty or fifty years. Maybe some people from here should go there, and talk with those people.” The others agreed with that.

  So after waiting awhile to see if the cotton people would send a message on the Exchange when they got their sleazy back and less wine than usual, we set out, four of us: myself, because I wanted to go, and knew something about cotton and fabrics; and three Finders Lodge people, two who had done a lot of trading and had been across the Inland Sea more than once, and one who wanted to keep up the Finders’ maps of the places we were going. They were named Patience, Peregrine,* and Gold. We were all men and all young. I was the youngest. I had come inland the year before with a Blue Clay girl, but when I said I was going to the end of the Inland Sea she said I was crazy and irresponsible, and put my books and bedding out on the landing. So I left from my mothers’ house.

  I had been busy learning with the Cloth Art and had not given much thought to joining the Finders Lodge, but the trip to Sed had made me want to travel more, and I knew I had a gift for trading. I saw no reason to be ashamed of it. I have never cared much what people say. So I went as a novice of that Lodge, both a traveller and a trader.

  In the books I read and the stories I heard as a kid, the Finders were always travellers, not traders, and they were generally on snowy peaks in the Range of Light singing to the bears or getting toes frozen off or rescuing each other from chasms. The Finders I was with appeared not to favor that style of travel. We rode me Amaranth Train sleeping-car all the way down the line to Sed, and stayed at the inn there again, eating like ducks in a slug patch, while we asked around about ships and boats.

  Nobody was sailing south. We could get a ship going across to the East Coast, to Rekwit, some time in the month; or as soon as we liked, a boat would take us across the Gate to the Falares Islands. From either Rekwit or the Falares we could try to find a coaster going South, or else go on foot down the inner side of the mountains. The Finders decided the chances were better on the west side, and that we should cross the Gate.

  I was sorry when I saw the boat.

  It was about fifteen feet long with a little farting engine and one sail. The tidal currents run in and out the Gate faster than a horse at a gallop, they say, and the winds the same.

  The boat’s people were skinny and white with fishy eyes: Falares Islanders. They talked enough TOK that we could understand one another. They had been in Sed to trade fish for grain and brandy. They sailed those little boats way out west of the Gate, out on the open ocean, fishing. They were always saying, “Ho, ha, go out to big waves, ha, yes?” and slapping my back while I was throwing up over the edge of the boat.

  A north wind was coming up, and by the time we were out in the middle of the water of the Gate the waves were getting very steep and hard, like bright little cliffs. The boat climbed up and dropped down and jerked and sla
pped. Then the low fog that had been lying over the Inland Sea, which I had taken for distant land, blew and faded away in a few moments, and there a hundred miles to the east of us was the Range of Light, the far glitter of the peaks of snow.

  Underneath the boat there, Patience told me, the bottom of the sea was all buildings. In the old times outside the world the Gate was farther west and narrower, and all its shores and the countries inland were covered with houses. I have heard the same thing told in the Madrone Lodge since then, and there’s the song about the old souls. It is no doubt true, but I had no wish at the time to go down and verify it, though the harder the wind blew the likelier it seemed that we were about to do that. I was too bewildered, however, to be really frightened. With no earth to be seen but those tiny white sawteeth half over the world’s curve, and the hard bright sun and wind and water, it was a good deal like being dead already, I thought.

  When the next day we finally got ashore onto one of the Falares Islands, the first thing I felt was lust. I got a big, long hard-on, and couldn’t turn my mind from it. The Falares women all looked beautiful, and I had such mindless desires that I was really worried. I got alone, with some difficulty, and masturbated, but it didn’t help. Finally I told Peregrine about it, and he was decent enough not to laugh. He said it had to do with the sea. We talk about living on the coast—being chaste—and coming inland—when you stop being chaste—and all that may be reversal-language. Sex is always turning things around and upside down. He said he didn’t know why being on the sea and then coming ashore had that particular effect, but he had noticed it himself. I said I felt as if I’d come back to life with a vengeance. At any rate, a couple of days eating what the Falares people eat cured me. All the women began to look like seaweed, and all I wanted was to go on somewhere else, even in a boat.