GOATS.
Goats were kept as commensals and for milk, in the Upper Valley towns; in Madídínou, Sinshan, Ounmalin, and Tachas Touchas they were raised for meat, leather, and wool. The Upper Valley towns, though liking goats for their mischievous intelligence, preferred not to keep them around in great numbers, saying, “One goat outnumbers three people, three goats outnumber thirty” As they were bred with various aesthetic and practical ends in view, there was a great variety of fancy strains and types, including several very small, fat, black or black-and-tan “short goats,” the lop-eared, long-haired, cream-colored Ounmalin Milch Goat, and the pugnacious and handsome “mountain goat” that ran with the sheep on Sheep Mountain.
CATTLE.
The Valley cattle were mostly dun, cream, brindle, brown, and fawn color; they were small, with a moderate shoulder-hump, slender legs, incurved horns of medium length, dished brow, and large, oval eyes. In Telína-na a somewhat larger animal, often pure white, was much prized for work. The herds were primarily dairy herds, but a good deal of plowing and heavy hauling was done with oxen. They were not raised for beef, and if slaughtered were generally killed in the first year for veal. As a rule, each household had its cow or cows in the town herd, in charge of the Tanning Art; herding, feeding, and milking might be done by the family or by arrangement with the Art. Households going up into the hills to a summerhouse for the hot weather often took a cow along. Most cows and oxen were commensals, named, and counted and regarded as members of the household. A good deal of poetry was addressed to cows, some of it pointing out how much easier to get along with they are than human beings. The breed was mild, canny, and goodnatured, deserving the praise they got; only the bulls were of uncertain temper, and so were usually common property of the town or the Art, kept fenced in Penis Meadow.
HORSES, DONKEYS, AND MULES.
Since most human people of the Valley were not travellers and when they did travel usually went afoot, there being no long roads, horses were not kept for journeys. They were commensals, and rather extravagant ones. Riding was a sport, not a means of getting somewhere, and horses were seldom used to haul or work. There were not many of them in the Valley, and none of heavy stock; they were selected less for strength and patience than for “wit and beauty.” The Summer games always included horse races and riding exhibitions, which might go on here and there up and down the Valley for a couple of months. There was a mystique of the horse, the stallion especially being considered sacred, uncanny, or venerable. The stallion was the cult symbol of men of the Obsidian, though Serpentine people, of the House of the Summer, were most often the breeders and trainers. In the Summer games men rode mares, women rode stallions; in the races the jockeys were adolescents of both sexes. White, black, or piebald stallions were sacred to the Obsidian, but the most prized colors were buckskin and red roan. The Valley horse was seldom as much as fifteen hands tall, fine-boned and short-barrelled, fast on a short track, and inclined to get fat. Unwanted colts were not killed but taken down the river and turned loose to join the wild herds on the grasslands and salt-grass flats west of the Mouths of the Na. These herds roamed the coasts of the Ocean and the Inland Sea. The horses in them were mostly scrubby, but sometimes a group of Bay Laurel boys or Obsidian men made an adventurous and enjoyable sacred journey to the wild horse country to catch an animal or two to recruit the Valley stock. The only large herds of horses in the Valley were kept by the Serpentine of Chúkúlmas. Lower Valley towns generally did not keep any horses at all.
All the towns kept donkeys. Like cows, donkeys were members of the household. They worked with people at hauling, carrying, pulling, plowing, and all donkeywork. Crippled people got about in little donkey-carts. Donkey colts trotted about loose with the cats, dogs, and children. The Valley donkey was the typical small burro, fine-legged, with a black cross on mouse-grey shoulders, and a dreadful voice. Donkey stallions, being notoriously irascible, were pastured in Penis Meadow with the bulls.
A Portrait of Míbí
Mules, like horses, were mostly bred in Chúkúlmas. The small mule or hinny with a horse sire and donkey dam was sometimes used for riding, and for playing the game vetúlou, a kind of polo; mules with donkey sire and mare dam worked in harness, hauling, and in the fields. The Train was pulled mostly by mules. They were respected for their intelligence and reliability, and were handsome creatures, but since a mule needs nearly as much room and feed as a horse, the donkey remained the chief work-companion in most towns.
PIGS.
Pigs were not raised in the Valley, possibly as a result of cultural differentiation from the Teudem or Pig People, six or seven small nomadic tribes whose territory included the Ranges of the Valley and the Odoun and Yanyan valleys. The Kesh would barter with these tribes for pigskin, but felt all the prejudice of the householder against the nomad, and also considered that the Pig People went rather too far in identifying themselves as Farrows of the Great Sow.
DOGS.
Valley dogs were a motley lot. There was not much work for dogs in the towns, and strong feeling against letting dogs breed freely, since the pups must be either tamed or killed to prevent their joining the wild dog packs. Most male pups were gelded, and the principal job of the domesticated dog was as a guard against wild dogs: an ironic and unhappy role, but fortunately dogs do not have much sense of irony. The wild dogs were a real danger to people and livestock in the woods and fields; they ran in family packs of two to six and also in all-male “rogue” packs of fifteen to twenty, and could pull down any creature they hunted. Children who went out herding or gathering were taught to climb the nearest tree at once if they heard or saw wild dogs, and if possible they went out guarded by the household dog—often, in fact, with a whole cortege of hangers-on and trailers-along and wayside-sniffers.
The wild dogs ran rangy and large; the domesticated dogs were smaller, as a rule, but strong and stocky. There were no pure breeds, but the commonest types were the hechí, a sturdy, furry, chowlike watchdog, highly intelligent and serious, sharp-eared and bushy-tailed and usually tawny or reddish in color; the dúí, a long-legged dog with curly grey or black hair, very useful as a sheepdog, with a high forehead and a grave, sensitive disposition; and the ou or hound, short-haired, lop-eared, sociable, lazy, clownish, and keen. Hounds were allowed to run in packs on the hunting side of town, but the hunters kept a sharp eye on them lest they begin to fraternise with the wild dogs. The hounds were hunted with deer and small game only; when a wild dog, boar, or bear hunt was necessary, the hechí was the dog taken. Dogs were beloved commensals, but were seldom allowed indoors; and dogs hanging around among the houses of the town would be driven out by children, who were expected to keep them out of trouble in town as they kept the children out of trouble in the woods. A kind of subvillage of doghouses usually lined the approach to the Left-Hand Side of town, and there the puppies and children played freely.
CATS.
Since they don’t foul the ways, cats had the freedom of the towns. The household cat was usually allowed to live indoors as mouser and commensal. Most Valley cats were shorthairs, of every conceivable color and marking, though black and tabby were favorites. As they were the main ally against mouse and rat depredations in the house, the granary, and the field, they were allowed to breed freely; if an excess-kitten problem arose it was solved by taking weaned kittens up onto the hunting side to fend for themselves. The forests were therefore well stocked with feral cats as well as the native bobcats (two or three times larger), all competing with the foxes and coyotes for the wood rats and innumerable voles and white-footed mice. Tales about giant crossbred wildcats—jet-black lynxes, monster tabbies—were earnestly vouched for, but never substantiated by actual eye witness. It was always somebody in another town who had seen one lurking near the chicken runs.
SMALL FRY AND BIRDS.
Chickens were always kept for eggs, meat, and company; the smaller towns had coops and runs here and there among the houses, while the big towns kept
the smell and bustle of the poultry-yards off near the barns, but there was generally a hen in sight, anywhere in any town. Each town had its peculiar breed of poultry and defended its merits against all others. In Sinshan and Madídínou, people raised himpí, the little guinea-piglike animal with piebald fur, for meat; elsewhere himpí were kept only as pets, which put Sinshan and Madídínou at some moral disadvantage. Brush rabbits were sometimes kept and bred and fed with herbs for a finer meat than that of the wild rabbit, but the rabbit was a game animal, and rabbit-breeding was looked on as a kind of cheating, a bit contemptible. It appears that at some periods pigeons, geese, and ducks were kept in large flocks, and times when this practice was rare; sometimes, therefore, these birds lived in the First House as domestic animals, and sometimes in the Second House as wild game. But also, since most pigeons, ducks, and geese were neither hunted nor domesticated, but shared the woods and waters of the Valley in their immense flocks with the human inhabitants, and since they are not ground-dwelling birds, they were not considered to belong to any of the Five Houses, but rather to the Sky and the Wilderness. Because of these crossings and anomalies, the wild goose and the grey pigeon were the favorite pictorial image of the soul going from House to House, between Earth and Sky, between waking and dream or vision, between life and death. The vast migrations of the geese, when the River became “a river of wings and the shadows of wings,” and the skeins of the geese crossing the sky daylong, were the beloved image of the passage and renewal of life. The wild goose, duck, and swan were drawn in the shape of the heyiya-if, and so was the flight-skein; the sounds of the geese calling as they flew, creaking and honking across the wind, were used in music.
PETS.
The word commensal has been used to avoid the condescending, patronising overtones of the word pet, and because it better translates the Valley term, which means people living together.
By the standards of the animal breeding and slaughtering industries of our society, all domesticated animals of the Valley were “pets,” but those standards are questionable in every sense. At any rate, children and many adults “lived together” with various beasts beside the useful domestic companions: mice, wood rats, feral hamsters (a pest in the grainfields), crickets, toads, frogs, stag-beetles, and so on. Kingsnakes were not kept in the house, but were a much honored dweller beneath the house or barn, since they keep rattlesnakes away. The rare ringtail or “miners’ cat” tamed easily and was sometimes kept as a treasured and sacred inhabitant of the Blue Clay heyimas. The young of the larger wild animals, game animals, most wild birds, and fish were never domesticated or made pets of. If a hunter in error shot a doe with nursing fawns, he killed the fawns, and then went through a ceremony in the Hunters Lodge to clear himself of guilt. A deer might consent to be killed and to be eaten, but not to be tamed. Deer shared the Second House of Life with human beings—not the First House, where the domestic animals lived. To coax or force them to live in a House not their own would be inappropriate or perverse.
THE HOUSE OF OBSIDIAN.
As the Kesh saw it, the domestic animals consented to live and to die with human beings in the First House of Life. The mysteries of animal-human interdependence and cooperation and the mystery of sacrifice were the central preoccupation of the animal rituals of the House of Obsidian. Such rites and teachings were also connected with those of the Blood Lodge. This lodge, into which all girls were initiated at puberty and to which all women belonged, was under Obsidian auspices: “All women live in the First House.” The identification of woman and animal went deep throughout the sexual and intellectual teaching of the Blood Lodge (and where in our man-dominant culture that identification is used to devalue, this must not be assumed to hold for the Kesh: rather the opposite). Blood Lodge ritual and learning was passed on by the breath, not written down; but many of the women’s songs of the Moon and Grass Dances grew out of it, and a whole body of mystical, satirical, erotic poetry—unfortunately, like most metaphysical poetry, very hard to translate—used its symbols and themes: the ewe, milk, blood sacrifice, orgasm as death spasm, impregnation as rebirth, and the mystery of consent.
II. Animals of the Blue Clay
In the world-view of the Valley people, all wild animals were Sky People, living in the Four Houses of Death, Dream, Wilderness, and Eternity; but those who allowed themselves to be hunted, who responded to the hunter’s singing and came to meet the arrow or enter the snare, had consented to come across into the Second of the Earth Houses, the Blue Clay, in order to die. They had taken on mortality sacrificially and sacramentally.
By its mortality, the individual deer was related physically, materially, with human beings, and all other beings on earth; while “deerness” or The Deer was related metaphysically with the human soul and the eternal universe of being. This distinction of the individual and the type was fundamental in Valley thought, and even in the syntax of the language.
Most wild animals, most of the time, stayed over in the Wilderness: ground squirrel, wood rat, badger, jackrabbit, wildcat, songbird, buzzard, toad, beetle, fly, and all the rest, however familiar, beloved, or pestiferous, did not share a House of Life with human beings. The relationship is based essentially on who eats whom. Those whom we do not eat, or who eat us, are not related to us in the same way as those whom we eat.
On the northwest wall of a Blue Clay heyimas the figure of the deer was painted, on the southwest wall the brush rabbit, on the ceiling near the ladderway the quail. These were the Keepers of that House.
Only the deer, the brush rabbit, and the wild pig were regularly hunted by adults for food or for fur and hides and to control high population. All three species were numerous in the area, and in peak years were very troublesome to farmers, gardeners, and vintners. Pigs were a particularly fierce and persistent competitor for acorns, a valued gathering-crop. They were also dangerous, and so were always considered fair game.
The only other true game animal was wild cattle. Herds sometimes travelled down the grassy slopes west of the Inland Sea, and hunters went out after them, mostly for adventure and sport, since the Valley people had little taste for beef. The meat was treated like venison, and mostly dried for jerky.
Wild-dog packs were extremely dangerous to people and to domestic animals, and when a pack moved into the Ranges of the Valley it was systematically hunted down, usually by a group sent out from the Hunters Lodge; but the feral dogs were not usually spoken of as game. Nor were bears. The bear, the Rain Dancer, the Brother of Death, was the Keeper of its own House, the Sixth House. But when an individual bear began acting “crazy” or “lost,” hanging around the pastures and fields near a town, or intimidating and stealing food from people in summerhouses up in the hills, then it was said to have “come into the House of Blue Clay,” and might be hunted and killed, and its flesh eaten.
As for birds, quail was always called a game bird, and was a favorite figure in Blue Clay imagery and poetry, but in fact only young children ever seemed to hunt quail, though some people kept quail penned and fattened them to eat, or ate the eggs. Chukar and pheasant were especially prized for their feathers. Wild duck, wild goose, and several kinds of pigeon lived in and migrated through the Valley of the Na, especially the marshes of the lower river, in vast numbers. They were hunted and snared for food, and were also domesticated (see “Animals of the Obsidian”).
The freshwater fish of the Na and the creeks were small and coarse, but since they were prized as food, along with crayfish and frogs, they were considered to live in the Second House. Ocean fish were more often traded for than caught, since few people of the Valley wanted much to do with boats or deep water. The Fishers Lodges of the Lower Valley sometimes gathered shellfish on the sea beaches, but the Pacific “red tides” plus residual pollution of the oceans made mussel-eating a risky business.
Fish were supposed to be prejudiced against men: “For her I rise, from him I hide.” A good deal of the fishing in the Na and its tributaries was done, with hook and
line and handnet, by old women.
Rules concerning hunting weapons in the Hunters Lodge were strict: guns might be used hunting bear, wild dog, and pig; otherwise the tools of the trade were bow and arrow, snare, and slingshot. Hunting was called “the art of silence.”
Hunting for food and skins was primarily an occupation for children. All young children, and adolescent boys in the Bay Laurel Lodge, were allowed to hunt rabbit, possum, squirrel, wild himpí and other small game, and deer, and were praised for their successes. They were forbidden to hunt ground squirrel (still a carrier of bubonic plague), and only the older boys were given guns and allowed to join an exterminatory hunt of feral dogs or pigs. When girls became adolescent and joined the Blood Lodge, they stopped hunting. Women living in isolated summerhouses or the recluses called “forest-living” women might shoot or snare rabbit and deer for food, but they were exceptions to a norm. A man who spent much time hunting after he had outgrown the Bay Laurel Lodge and was of marrying age was looked upon as either childish or shiftless. Hunting, in general, was not seen as appropriate behavior for an adult.
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