Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  I glared at him, encouraging silence.

  “It’s nothing to do with making more money or taking better care of the old body, nothing like that. The old folk say their biggest regret is not having taken more risks. Can you beat that?”

  “Will you let her tell her story?”

  “That girl wasn’t the least bit afraid.” He smiled and shook his head. “You’ve got to admire her chutzpah.”

  Every step of the way, he hummed or sang to her, keeping two paces ahead through the dense woods and walking shoulder to shoulder as they crossed open land. The sun blazed in front of them as they began their journey, hung above their heads at their midday repast, and followed their backs as they climbed into higher country, the cedars tall and so thick that S’ee no longer smelled the salt water. She had never known the air without the sea, and its sweetness among the pines frightened her, but she marched on, enchanted by the man’s songs. They made camp when the sun dipped below the timberline, and while S’ee gathered dry sticks for the fire, the man disappeared into the brush. As she warmed her hands over the new blaze, she was startled by his return. He held up a rabbit by the hind legs and grinned at his own prowess. While the dinner cooked, he told her stories, starting with the traditional tales of how the Tlingit came into the world, but stranger stories, too: “The Man Who Killed His Sleep” and “The Salmon People” and, strangest of all, “The Woman Who Married an Octopus.”

  “And it was the eight arms that convinced her to live under the sea and marry the octopus. Two arms to hold her feet, two to hold her hands.”

  He circled her wrists with his fingers and then let her go.

  “One arm to stroke her hair.”

  She felt his hands comb her hair but averted her eyes from his.

  “Two arms to hold her breasts.”

  With the lightest touch, he cupped her breasts and smiled when she did not flinch. The crust of the rabbit skin blistered over the crackling fire. S’ee looked at his eyes. “And where went the eighth arm?”

  He put his left hand between her legs and drew spirals along her skin, pressing lightly when he reached her lap, but despite the gentleness of his touch, he frightened her with the heat radiating from his palm. He withdrew his hand and began another story, and after they had eaten, he bade her lie near the fire while he retreated to the opposite side for the sake of modesty. As they rested beside it, the fire gave up its spirit and breathed its last as embers. But S’ee could not sleep.

  Darkness weighed more heavily amid the tall trees. No starlight, the moon missing from the sky, and the firs pressed all around, their branches palpable against her skin when a breeze chanced by. The typical sounds of home were absent. No gulls crying out in their dreams. No ocean sighing upon the shore. No sisters tossing in their beds. She heard the man rise, creep across the needled ground, the heat of him preceding his body’s arrival. Clamping shut her eyes, she could tell he was directly above her, waiting. She willed him closer. Shivered when his hand touched her hair, then her face, but she waited, wanting and dreading the moment, and only when he said her name did S’ee open her eyes and rise to his embrace.

  Her first cognition of the act had come from watching the village dogs casually mounting one another out in the plaza, but still she did not understand its purpose and only thought they were at play. Once walking home with her mother, she spied a bull moose fresh from his rutting, and when she asked her about the huge erection between his legs, S’ee’s mother could only laugh. “Reminds me of your father,” she said and steered her away. Her older sisters talked about sex in general terms, as some abstraction to keep men happy. In reality, she had no idea of what was about to occur.

  S’ee pulled her shift over her head and was naked, and the man felt the softness of her skin, his hands in arcs and circles, kneading flesh, and turning from him, she slid and knelt, squaring her shoulders, her hands firmly on the ground. He whispered her name again and drew close behind her, stroking her legs and back, his nails tracing the contours of her body. He kissed the small of her back, ran his mouth along her spine, and licked the sharp blades of her shoulders. One hand snaked between her legs, stroking, and with two fingers he parted her labia, and then he began to kill her. Or so she thought, he was stabbing at her, forcing a blunt club into her vagina. With each thrust, she cried out and clenched her muscles, slowly realizing that this weapon was a part of him. He called to her from far above, singing her name, then began grunting in rhythm. S’ee craned her neck but she could only make out his shadowy bulk in the pitch. He pressed against her head, and she thought she felt his mouth draw wide and full of sharp teeth. No longer able to hold up her own weight under his, S’ee folded her arms and crumpled facedown to the ground, and he covered her with his body, warm as a thick blanket against her back. With a shudder and a growling roar, he came inside her, a liquid heat that filled the void, as viscous as menses. In her shock, she felt nothing more than the pressure to pee and lifted herself at once so that he would move his dead weight off her. He kissed her again between the shoulders and withdrew.

  Scrambling away to a respectable distance, she squatted on the bare earth for a long time. When her muscles finally relaxed, she felt a burning sensation and caught the foulsweet smell of him streaming in her own water. The darkness pushed against her skin, chilling her. She felt her way back, desperate to find the man.

  “Where are you?” she whispered.

  A huff of air escaped his mouth as if he was snorting in his sleep. She followed the strange sound, her hands searching the darkness till she brushed against his hair. Thinking she had accidentally bumped his head, she mumbled an apology and when she touched what she thought was his chest or shoulder, he seemed extremely hairy, as if he had donned a fur coat.

  He drew her into his arms, and she curled her back against bare skin. The puzzle over the difference between the hirsute and smooth man kept her awake well into the night. Toward dawn, he woke, aroused. Knowing what was to happen, S’ee could relax the second time and was almost enjoying herself when he climaxed and quickly rolled off her back. They spooned together in the gathering light, and she began to think of the beautiful man as hers.

  Over the next two days, they traveled deeper into the forest as it rose toward far-off mountains. Each hour, the climb became more difficult, the spruce and cedar taller and thick with crepey moss, the air dense with moisture. She had never seen the inside of the rain forest or heard the riot of so many songbirds when the sun drilled a hole through the canopy. Rustling in the underbrush or the fleeting shift of shadows worried her to his side, and when a creek crossed their trail or a fallen cedar blocked the passage, he took her hand in his and led her safely. They passed the time by telling each other stories, and when she recounted the legend of her father, Yeikoo.shk’, and the death by salmon, he hung his head.

  “Sister salmon,” he said, “was upset. Take the eggs and leave the fish is not only wasteful but shows a lack of respect. What kind of man was this?”

  “A proud man. A foolish man.”

  “And who do you favor, little doll, your mother or your father?”

  She giggled as if he were merely teasing her. His ways seemed less alien the more time she spent in his company, and they were only apart before the evening meal when he left her alone to make a fire while he scared up some dinner. Once each day, he made his toilet in the privacy of the deep woods, and each time that feral smell returned with him, as powerful an odor as that she had tried to wash away at the stream with her sister. How long ago it seemed to her. S’ee could not abide the man’s scent when he first came back to her, could not imagine how so sweet a man could smell so awful.

  But at night she forgot about those momentary distractions. After their first sexual encounters, it was she who initiated their intimacies, crawling to his place when the embers ashed over, kissing his face and chest until he could no longer resist, and they would roll over and he would cover her back, huffing and panting, and she, her pleasure growin
g, would wait for that final exclamation, a roar of release that filled her with the sense that they were to be together this way for the rest of their lives. And as he lay beside her, S’ee pictured taking him home to meet her mother and sisters, her cousins, the whole clan and moiety. She could envision their faces, filled with wonder and jealousy over how she could have landed such a king salmon, for he was nothing short of a marvel, strong, handsome, a powerful spirit.

  He led her through a gap between two mountains and stopped at the apex of a descending trail, shielding his eyes against the sun as he scanned the horizon. She leaned her head against his shoulder and could feel the excitement pulse through his skin. “There,” he said, pointing to a distant meadow carved in two by a winding river. “There is my clan.” Perhaps the sun blinded her or perhaps she knew not what to expect, but S’ee could make out nothing more than brown specks shuffling along the shores. But for his sake, she feigned excitement. It took all day to traverse the valley, and when they arrived under darkness, she could see no more than a few feet in front of her hands in the rising river mist. As they crept among what seemed like logs, she could hear their heaving snores and was careful not to disturb their sleep.

  When they had found a place to be alone, he held her in his arms and said, “Don’t look up in the morning. At dawn, if you rise first, don’t look up among the people.”

  I wonder why he says this to me, she thought, but after he made love with her, S’ee forgot, and lost in her dreams, she fell asleep and did not remember his warning. When she woke with the sun, she reached behind her for the man and her fingers touched fur. She rolled over to face him, but he looked just like a human being. Propping herself by the elbows, she rose to a sitting position and sought out the other people sleeping on the ground, but all around them were brown bears, dozing in the sunrise. She stood and pivoted on her toes, finding bears in every direction she looked. The man, when he put his hand on her shoulder, frightened her, but he was still a human being in her eyes.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “These are my brothers and sisters. They won’t hurt you. And even though you insulted me—and all bears—back in the woods with your sister, no harm will come to you. Despite your curses, I have fallen in love with you. I want you as my wife.”

  “Gunalche’esh hó hó,” she said. Thank you very much. “Ax téix’katix’áayi i jeewu.” You have the key to my heart.

  Next to me, the old man cleared his throat to commence another observation, but I hushed him with a curt gesture and a doleful glare.

  They were in every other respect honeymooners. He did not wish for her to see him as a bear and only appeared that way under cover of darkness—when he climbed upon her back, he was as he was. At all other times, he seemed a beautiful man to her. She loved the basso trill in his voice, the black depths of his eyes, the way he stretched his spine when he stood to smell the wind. He brought her squirrel and ptarmigans and wild berries, salmon fat with eggs, and fixed a home away from the other bears in a den dug into the southern face of a hill. Her back and shoulders were hatched by his nails. His loins ached with the frequency of their wild couplings. That first winter, as he hibernated, she lived on teas sweetened with sap and the moles and mice that blundered into their cave, and she did her best to fend off boredom by imagining his dreams. Her compensation was that he held the warmth of the world in his chest, and from the time of the first frost to the thaw, she hunkered through the winter beneath a coat of fur. S’ee was happy with him, the one she called simply X’oots, or Brown Bear.

  As that first winter blustered outside, she felt the alien kicks and stirrings in her womb, and until summer arrived again, she worried whether their child would be grizzly or Tlingit. X’oots roared when the baby emerged, pink as sockeye, a human boy. She named him Yeikoo.shk’ after the father she never knew. With one child at the breast, but growing like a cub, she became pregnant again that fall, and in her second summer, a girl child arrived among the bears. The two small children kept her mind busy so that she forgot her people, and it can be said that love’s first blush fools each of us into believing we are changed from the person we once were. Only when she was not thinking about it could her past creep in like a fox to the den. When the sun became a stranger again, X’oots prepared to find a new home, and the thought of him snoring for months while she tended to their babies filled her with dread. One morning while the children crawled and batted around a piece of dry fish, S’ee asked her husband, “Who will help me while you sleep all winter?”

  “We will all sleep,” he grunted. “You, me, the babies.”

  “No, the babies never sleep, or when they sleep I am wide awake, and when I am tired, they want to nurse or play. Your boy is all teeth and thinks my nipple is a piece of bark. And there you are in the corner on the best branches. You never open an eye, the baby could be screaming, foot caught in a hole, and now there are two.”

  “I am a bear, Dolly, and they are half bear. We will sleep, and you need to stop gnawing the bone. It is the most natural thing—”

  “For you. But I am Tlingit, not a bear.”

  “I should have known when you cursed me for your own mistake—”

  “And I should have listened to my sister and never followed you.”

  The image of her sister persisted the rest of the day, as well as the spirits of her other sisters, her mother, all of her people. Homesickness infected her heart as surely as a fever, and a delirium of memories beat like a drum through the night. She could not hold her babies without thinking of the other children in the village, running, as she had, half naked in the muddy square, chasing a three-legged dog, kicking an old seal bladder, torturing one another with spruce switches. As she stirred a stew of moose meat and roots over the fire, she saw in the steam a vision of fog rolling off the sea, enveloping the houses in the village, the people moving through a cloud, calling out to unseen cousins, and hearing the happy sound of their replies. When X’oots lumbered to a corner for his night’s sleep, he left her alone with her sorrow, and while everyone slept, she cried for the first time since coming to live among the bears. Resentment broke the seedskin of her heart and shot its vines through her veins. Her husband’s snoring disgusted her, and he smelled of wet fur and stomach gases. She began to plan her escape.

  As the threat of snow deepened, X’oots decided that they needed a bigger home for the two cubs now wintering in with them. For three days, he searched the mountains for a suitable space, and upon his return, he ordered them to pack at once. They traveled higher into the hardscrabble country, and when the family reached the half-excavated den, he told S’ee to gather spruce branches for the floor while he finished digging. Instead of picking up fallen ones, she climbed a nearby tree and broke off high branches, enough for three beds. When X’oots saw what she had done, he confronted her.

  “Foolish woman, why don’t you do as I say? Now any hunter can see by the treetops that there is a den nearby. I asked you to gather only those branches already on the ground.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and brought their daughter to her breast. Grumbling at every step, he moved them higher up the mountain face and dug so furiously that she thought the whole hillside would come tumbling down. After their first night in the den, she snuck out early in the morning to rub her scent against the trees, and while the others slept, she made a bolus of clay and moss and spit, and rubbed it all over her skin, then rolled it down to the bottom of the mountain, knowing that, if they were looking for her, the dogs would find her scent among these pebbles and the men would figure out what she had done.

  As it happens, as they must, the men of the village had been looking for her for three years. Every spring, her mother’s sons and nephews would prepare for the hunt. In the first year, the brothers reached only as far as the place where the bear and S’ee had camped on their first night, but they had not figured the spell of the herbs and leaves properly, so they had to turn back. In the second year, the brothers reached as far as the pl
ace where all the bears had slept by the river, but they had made weak medicine, and the spirit abandoned them again. But come April of the third year, the boys knew how to fast for eight days with no water, how to work the leaves and not go crazy, and how to carry the dogs to search not just for brown bear, but for their sister as well. For one month, they had allowed the dog named Chewing Ribs to sleep in S’ee’s old bed, among her clothes and treasures, so that he would carry her smell in his nose no matter how long the search might take.

  Snows turned to the rains of spring, and the bear and his family watched from the dryness of the den. The babes crawled across the floor, harassing a field mouse, and in a corner S’ee chewed on a moose sinew to soften the leather, for she was planning on surprising her husband with new moccasins. All morning he sat at the opening trying to see how the seasons changed, and he startled her by breaking off his vigil and ambling over to her side. He sat next to her on a blanket sewn of rabbit skins, his arm looped over her shoulders.

  “Restless?” she asked. “Winter’s almost over, so cheer up.”

  “It will be the youngest one, I think. The youngest brother will kill me.”

  She dropped the leather to her lap, cast a quick glance at their children, and asked, “What are you talking about?”

  “I dreamt last night they are coming for me. Not a dream, but a vision. Your brothers are coming to kill me. The youngest one will shoot his arrow true. They are coming soon.”

  “You must have eaten some bad roots to upset your stomach and give you such nightmares.”

  “I love you, Dolly, even if you don’t still love me, but you must be brave and pay attention. Your brothers are coming, and I want you to do something for our children.”

  Regret seized her suddenly. She moved to his side, but he did not look at her, so she circled behind him and wrapped her arms around his chest.