Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  A person began dancing with him, facing him. Although there was no light in the caves, Sungazer could see the person, who did not look like anyone he knew, nor like a man, nor like a woman. The person said dancing, “Do you know enough to know?”

  Sungazer answered, “I have learned the teachings, I have learned the songs, I have lived on the Coast since I was a child, I have fasted, I have danced, I have given, I have given everything!”

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” the person said, dancing. The voice grew higher, speaking. The person kept shrinking, dancing. Sungazer could not see very clearly. The person kept looking smaller and smaller, dancing, until finally something like a mouse or a big spider was there, and ran away into the dark of the small caves.

  People from the Wine Art of Kastoha came into the caves then, and they came around Sungazer and carried him out. He could not walk. They gave him water to drink, and then some milk, and the pulp of an apricot to eat. He drank and ate. They carried him on a hay-cart to Chukulmas, to his mothers’ house, and left him there to get well.

  But in the evening he got up and left Tile House and went out of town on the hunting side. He went as far as he could to a lonely place, a side canyon of Blue Creek Canyon, and there he tore and knotted his shirt into a rope and tied himself with it to a digger pine so that he could stand up with his back against the tree. He said, “Now I will die of hunger and thirst unless I am given one glimpse of the eternal truth.”

  He made this promise again and again all night.

  As the day began he saw somebody coming up the canyon through the chaparral and digger pines. His eyes were still burnt and dim, and the light was not clear yet. He thought it was somebody from town coming to find him and make him stop fasting, and so he called out, “Don’t come here! Go back!”

  The person stopped there down by the creek and then turned around and began to go away. Then the young man thought it might be a person from the Four Houses bringing him what he had asked for, and he called out, “Come back! Please come back!” But the person was gone.

  Standing tied to the tree, Sungazer said, “I am going to die now.”

  All at once a bright person stood before him, clear as glass, shining. The shining person spoke to him: “Take the gift!” That voice seemed to ring and shine, but the person was not there. The young man stood waiting in silence. The air was still. Clouds were across the sun and there was an even light. There was no sound. Nothing moved. Nothing happened. A junco flew alone across between two pines, alighting on a branch. The young man waited for the gift, for the truth. Bluejays began to quarrel and yell in the top of the tree he was tied to. The young man waited. It began to rain.

  When the rain fell on his hair and face and arms, the young man knew that nothing would happen, that that was what was to happen, but he was angry. He thought, “Then I will go on and die.” He bowed his head to keep the rain from wetting his lips, and stood there tied to the tree.

  It rained a few big drops and ceased, and after a while the sun came out. That afternoon the young man went blind. Some time after that people from his house and heyimas, looking for him, found him. He was partly alive then, and did not know anything for a long time while the Doctors Lodge kept and healed him; and after he began to regain his mind and strength the healing went on until the winter. The doctors brought him back to life except for the sharpness of his eyesight, which was gone, so that I can see things only by looking sidelong at them. Straight before me I see nothing.

  Sungazer later married Plum Flower of the Obsidian and lived in Built Too Quick House, where they had a daughter and a son. Sungazer worked with the Wine Art of his town, and sang with the Doctors Lodge. Last winter his wife died. Since that time I am Junco.

  The Bright Void Of The Wind

  By Kulkunna of the Red Adobe of Telina-na.

  Thirty years ago, I am told, an illness that had been in me for a long time grew stronger, taking consciousness from me, causing convulsions, and finally making my heartbeat and my breathing stop. Of this I remember nothing, but I remember what happened:

  I was inside a dark house, strangely shaped, without rooms. The walls of the house were thin, and wind and rain beat against them. I stood in the middle of this house. High up in the walls were some narrow, small, dim windows. I could not see through them. I wanted to see out, to know what part of town this house was in, and said angrily, “Where is the doorway? Where is the door?” Groping along the walls then I found the door and opened it.

  At once the wind blew it wide open with a rush and bang, and the house shrivelled up behind me like an empty bladder. I stood in a tremendous place of light and wind. Under my feet was only light and wind, the force of the wind bearing me up.

  As soon as I saw that, I thought I must fall unless I found something to stand on: and I began falling. I sought for any place to set my foot or hold with my hand in the wind. There was nothing. I fell, and was terrified. I closed my eyes in fear, but it made no difference: there was no darkness there. I fell, and there was nothing I could do. I fell, like a feather falling from a bird in flight. The wind bore me, and I fell drifting. I was like a feather. There was no need to fear.

  As I began to feel this and understand it, I began to know the greatness of the wind, the brightness of the light, and joy.

  But along with that knowledge I felt a pulling, which grew stronger. The brightness shook, dimmed, and darkened; the wind grew smaller and weaker, becoming sounds, breaths, and voices.

  Then I was back breathing through my nose and mouth, hearing in my ears, feeling in my skin, living in my heartbeat. For a while I could not yet see with my earthly eyes, and so was able to see with my mind’s eyes that all my senses could perceive was themselves, that they were making the world by casting shadows on the bright void of the wind. I saw that living was catching at shadows with hands of light. I did not want to come back to that. But the doctors’ art made me come back, pulling at me, and their singing drew me back, calling me home. I opened my eyes and saw an old man, Blackfern of the Black Adobe Lodge, sitting beside me singing. His voice was thin and husky. He looked into my eyes with his eyes, singing:

  “Walk here now, walk here.

  It is time to walk here now!”

  I understood that it was time that I go on walking on the earth, and not time that I return to the shining. So with regret and pain, with difficulty and labor, even as the fire-covering song of Going Westward to the Sunrise says,

  It is hard, it is hard.

  It is not easy.

  You must go out—

  even so, I became my ashes. I became my dark body and its illness once again.

  For many nights and days I was helpless, but when at last I recovered health I was stronger than I had ever been, and by careful diet and learning I have remained well.

  I had lain many days in the doctors’ care before I asked why I did not see Blackfern, and, saying his name aloud, remembered that he had died, an old man, when I was still a child.

  When I ceased to be a patient I began to learn to be a doctor. To those who taught me skills and songs I gave the song Blackfern gave me across the wind, thirty years ago. It has been useful in healing people in shock and in the crises of fever.

  White Tree

  By Ewe Dance of the Obsidian of Sinshan.

  He was born in the House of Yellow Adobe early in the rainy season. His mothers’ household was in Up the Hill House in Sinshan. That was a new house then; his mother and her mother and sister and their husbands had built it during the year before this man was born. His first name was Twenty-One Days.

  His disposition was mild and unsociable, his mind active and thoughtful. He was not much inclined to words.

  He was well educated in his household and heyimas, took part in the ceremonies of his House in due time, and became a member of the Planting Lodge at thirteen years old, a member of the Bay Laurel Lodge a year later, when he put on the undyed clothing. During his adolescence he learned arboriculture with hi
s mother’s brother, a scholar of the Planting Lodge and of the Yellow Adobe, and with orchard trees of all kinds.*

  When he had lived nineteen years he went up to Wakwaha to the Sun. He lived there at the Yellow Adobe heyimas learning and singing until the World was danced. After that he went alone on the Mountain.

  When he came down from the Mountain he came to Kastoha-na, where he lived in a household of people of his House, studying the way the trees grew there, as the orchards of Kastoha were the richest and most beautiful anywhere in those times. Presently he took his middle name, Fairweather, and put on dyed shirts, and went to live in the household of a Serpentine woman, Hill of Hill House in Kastoha. She was a forester, working mostly with the oaks that are cut for fine carpentry. For some years he worked with her in locating, selecting, cutting, and replanting forest oaks. He joined the Wood Art.

  Whenever he was back in Kastoha he worked at crossbreeding varieties of pear. In those times none of the Valley pears was very good, all were subject to cankers, and most needed irrigation to bear well. To obtain varieties of trees, he travelled with the Finders to Clear Lake and the Long Sound, and through the Exchange he asked people in the north for help. Some seedling pear trees were sent to him from orchards in a place called Forty Forks River far in the north, and were brought to him by some of the traders from those people trading smoked salmon for wine. By crossbreeding the northern trees with a pear tree he had found growing wild above the oak forests between Kastoha and Chukulmas, he came upon a strong, small, and drought-hardy tree with excellent fruit, and he came to Sinshan to plant some of the seedlings. Now this is the brown pear grown in most orchards and gardens, and people call it the Fairweather pear.

  During these years when he was travelling and Hill was often in the forest they did not live together for long at a time. They had no children together. After a while Hill decided to leave her marriage and her household and be a forest-living woman. Fairweather went to live in the household of an Obsidian woman, Black Ewe of Magpie House in Kastoha. She had one daughter. She and Fairweather had one son.

  Fairweather began to study with the apple trees of the Upper Valley orchards, working at crossbreeding to help the mountain apples resist the edge-curl disease. He was also doing a great work of many years with the soils and earths of the foothills of the Mountain and the trees that grew in the various soils, learning where and how they grew. But as he was in the midst of this work, Black Ewe began to be ill with the vedet, which affected her hearing and then her sight.

  They moved from her mothers’ household and came with their daughter and son to Sinshan, where they lived for some years in Old Red House. They worked with the Doctors Lodge, Black Ewe learning how to be ill and Fairweather how to care for her when she needed help. He worked as an orcharder and took part in all ceremonies of his House and the Arts and Lodges of which he was a member. He could not continue learning the earths of the Mountain foothills. Black Ewe lived nine years in pain, deaf and blind.

  After she died her daughter returned to the grandmother’s household in Kastoha-na. Fairweather and his son lived in a room in the Yellow Adobe household of Chimbam House, where he had cousins. At that time his last name came to him from the Planting Lodge at the Wine Dance: White Tree. He continued to work in the orchards of Sinshan, planting, tending, pruning, cleaning, fertilising, weeding, and picking. He became a member of the Green Clown Society, and danced the Wine and the World and the Moon till he was eighty-one. He died of pneumonia after working in the plum orchards of Sinshan in the rain.

  White Tree was my father’s father. He was a kind and silent old man. I am writing this for the library of his heyimas in Sinshan and copying it for the library of his heyimas in Kastoha, so that he may be remembered for a while when pear trees are planted or orchards praised.

  TRANSLATOR’S NOTE:

  …he learned arboriculture with his mother’s brother…and with orchard trees of all kinds.

  We would be more likely to say that he learned from his uncle about orchard trees; but this would not be a fair translation of the repeated suffix oud, with, together with. To learn with an uncle and trees implies that learning is not a transfer of something by someone to someone, but is a relationship. Moreover, the relationship is considered to be reciprocal. Such a point of view seems at hopeless odds with the distinction of subject and object considered essential to science. Yet it appears that White Tree’s genetic experiments or manipulations were technically skilful, and that he was not ignorant of the theories involved, and it is certain that he achieved precisely what he set out to achieve. And the resulting strain of tree was given his name: a type case, in our vocabulary, of Man’s control over Nature. This phrase, however, could not be translated into Kesh, which had no word meaning Nature except she, being; and anyhow the Kesh saw the Fairweather pear as the result of a collaboration between a man and some pear trees. The difference of attitude is interesting and the absence of capital letters perhaps not entirely trivial.

  The Third Child’s Story

  By Spotted Goat of the Obsidian of Madidinou.

  My mother didn’t intend to conceive me,

  she was too lazy to abort me,

  my first name was Careless.

  Her House was Obsidian,

  her town was Madidinou,

  her household was in Spotted Stone House.

  The people of Madidinou are like gravel,

  like sand,

  like poor dirt.

  My father’s House was Blue Clay,

  he lived in Sinshan,

  in his mothers’ household.

  The people of Sinshan are like thistles,

  like nettles,

  like poison oak.

  My mother’s husband’s House was Blue Clay too,

  he lived in Madidinou,

  in her household.

  I am a superfluous person,

  a low-quality person,

  my soul is small.

  I did not learn to dance well,

  or to sing well,

  or to write well.

  I don’t like farming,

  I have no skills,

  animals run away from me.

  My older sister and brother were stronger than me

  and never waited for me

  and never taught me anything.

  My mother’s husband was their father,

  he cared only for them,

  he never taught me anything.

  My mother’s mother was impatient,

  she thought I should not have been born,

  she said I wasn’t worth teaching.

  I didn’t dance any wakwa till I was thirteen,

  nobody in the heyimas would teach me the songs,

  nobody would teach me the dances.

  I put on undyed clothing when I was fourteen,

  when some Blue Clay people from Sinshan took me on the Salt Voyage,

  but I didn’t see any visions.

  When I was fifteen a Blue Clay girl kept pestering me,

  she kept hanging around,

  she made me come inland with her.

  She got pregnant,

  we got married,

  she miscarried the child.

  She put my clothes outside her door,

  I had to go back to my mothers’ household,

  they didn’t want me in that house.

  I had to work all the time for my mother’s husband farming,

  for my mother at the power plant,

  for my grandmother doctoring animals.

  There was a Serpentine girl wearing undyed clothing,

  that I kept following around

  until she came inland with me.

  Her parents said we couldn’t be married in their household,

  that she was too young to get married,

  that they didn’t want me living there.

  So she and I went to Telina-na,

  we lived with some Serpentine people,

  we worked at different things ther
e.

  The people of Telina-na are like flies,

  like mosquitoes,

  like gnats.

  They think they’re great-souled because their town is big,

  they think they’re important because their town has big dances,

  they think they know everything because their town has big heyimas.

  They think what they do is right,

  and other people are ignorant,

  and everybody should do what they say.

  I kept getting into fights there,

  those people picked fights with me,

  the young men picked on me.

  I was always being hurt,

  I got knocked down,

  my front teeth got loosened.

  They didn’t fight fair,

  so I used a knife,

  I split the belly of one of those young men.

  They made a big fuss,

  they sent me back to Madidinou,