Centuries of June

by Keith Donohue

  “Don’t be afraid,” he told her. “I will not kill my brothers-in-law. After they have filled me with their arrows, have them put a fire at my head and feet. Ask them for my skin and stretch it on four poles so that I can watch the sun come out from hiding each morning and send my spirit out each new day to protect my family.”

  “You mustn’t speak such foolishness.” She kissed the back of his neck.

  The afternoon’s wind blew strong and carried the smell of dog, and X’oots paced on the ledge in front of the den. He stood tall, then shuffled back to her. “Where are my knives?” he asked. “I need to put my knives in my mouth.” She understood this to mean he was to change into a bear, something he never did in her company during daylight. He would show them his teeth and claws. Thoughts of her brothers’ safety escaped from her mind, and he read them in the air.

  “Don’t worry. I could kill them one by one. A slap to the face and they would tumble down dead, but I would not hurt the boys, Dolly, because that would hurt you, too. But where are my teeth? Perhaps I can scare them away?” He changed into a bear.

  Below, the dogs snuffled through the spruce litter and the balls of earth and moss with her scent that she had rolled down the hill, and the man who followed the dogs shielded his eyes from the sun and searched for the opening to the den. Two brothers circled round to approach the bear from above the entrance, scrambling over the scree, and kicking stones like tiny avalanches. X’oots and S’ee could hear them coming through the ceiling.

  “Remember …”

  The other hunters clambered along the steep face, the dogs ahead on the scent, pausing with ears cocked for a sound. Chewing Ribs wagged his tail and roared toward the cave, oblivious of the grizzly, bounding between the great bear’s legs into S’ee’s arms. Concentrating on the approaching men, X’oots missed seeing the little dog entirely. S’ee hushed him, pushed his tongue and head away, and pinned him behind her back against the cave wall, wriggling, tail thumping a tattoo on her spine, but Chewing Ribs stilled when the bear peered into the darkness at the commotion. “Did one of their dogs come in?” X’oots asked.

  “No, it was a mitten. One of the brothers threw it in to see if you were home.”

  When he could no longer stand the suspense, the bear poked his nose out of the cave and gave himself away. The brothers below gave a shout, and the brothers above drew their arrows. X’oots rolled back into the den, searched for his wife and children in the half-light, and spun just as the first arrow glanced off his shoulder. Soon the air whined with arrows. The bear roared and staggered, hit a dozen times, fought into open air and skidded headfirst down the rocky incline till he lay supine. He lifted his head but knew he could no longer move, then lay still and breathed his last, the edges of his fur fluttering in a passing breeze. The dogs danced around the corpse, yelping triumph and crying over their fear of death. One of the brothers braved a kick in the dead animal’s ribs, and seeing no spirit left behind in the bear, he lifted his chin to the skies and began to sing.

  Hearing the human voice, S’ee uncovered her children, demanded they keep quiet and gather the arrows that had missed the mark. With a strip torn from the remnants of her dress, she tied the arrows to the dog’s sides and pushed him out of the den. When the arrows came back to them this way, the brothers stopped their chanting and knew that something human remained in the hole above them. They found her naked and cowering with two young children in the darkest corner of the den.

  “Woman, how did you get here?”

  “I am S’ee, don’t you recognize me? And that was my husband you have filled with your arrows.” She pushed the men aside, scrabbling down the rock face on all fours till she embraced the bear, dusty and bloodied, his spirit gone. The insects swarmed on the wounds, crawled into his mouth and lifeless eyes. She buried her hands in his fur, grabbed the broad muscles along his arm, and keened her lamentations. Young Yeikoo.shk’ raced to her side, desperate to comfort, and when she saw the boy, S’ee thought of the babe left in the den and knew at once what she must do.

  “Go to my mother and have her send clothes for me and my two babies, and we will need moccasins for the journey home. You are to leave the head and skin whole and drape it across four poles, facing the east, so that X’oots may see the break of each day and watch over his children.”

  The brothers did as she instructed, and the dogs cried inconsolably at the bearskin stretched out above them, as if alive. The brothers took the meat but would not eat it, building a pyre as soon as they left the valley, burning his body atop a mountain. For six days, S’ee woke to the sight of the bear watching the sunrise, and she cursed him for his pride. The babies grew hungry and dirty from her neglect, and by the time the brothers returned, the children ran and hid from them. The youngest brother, the one whose arrow first pierced X’oots’s heart, gave S’ee the dress and moccasins sewn by her mother, and the customary shape and style of those clothes assuaged her grief. The thought of leaving her husband behind she could not endure, so she ordered her youngest brother to roll up the skin and carry it on his back for the journey. She dressed and combed her hair with her fingers, fed the children, then followed her brothers out of the valley of the bears.

  Whispers reached her ears before the family arrived in the village. Those children were not Tlingit but half bear, and S’ee herself had nearly become one from her long familiarity with the grizzly in the rain forest. Even her mother and sisters looked upon them with wonder and suspicion. S’ee overheard the eldest tell Shax’saani how their sister smelled like an old brown bear no matter how many times she bathed. At potlatch, the tribal leaders huddled together and murmured to one another as they watched S’ee’s children roll and tumble in their rough play. Rumors fell like rain: that they were wild at heart and when of age would run amok; that their teeth were sharper than a marten’s; that in one minute flat, they could dig a hole deep enough to hide in; that they preferred to shit on the pathways, their stools gleaming with jewels of undigested berries. By early summer, a few mothers advised their children to stay away from S’ee’s “cubs.” The snub spread from house to house, family to family, infecting the clan.

  “I am sorry, sister,” said the one who had ended up marrying D’is, the moon-faced boy, “but your boy and girl are wild things, ruining my sons.”

  Those children who did play with Yeikoo.shk’ often goaded him to pretend to be the bear. He had grown over the summer, big enough to crawl under his father’s skin and shuffle a few steps under its weight. Older boys, no longer children but not quite men, forced him to put on the bear so that they might wait in the brush and pepper him with headless arrows. The ones that hit the hide fell harmless to the ground, but many missed the mark and struck him on his bare arms and feet.

  “What happened to you?” S’ee asked her son after one such hunting game. He refused to answer and did not cry when she rubbed balm into the welts and scrapes. Petulant, he slept by himself in a corner of their house, refusing his mother’s comfort and his sister’s entreaties, but after that night, he did not play with the village boys any longer and often wandered off to laze away the day on a tree limb or, when the salmon ran, to thrash about the water and the rocks. Three young boys spied him there waist-deep among the rapids, a salmon flapping in his jaws. His behavior and rapid growth did not go unnoticed among the adults. Shax’saani shared the gossip with her sister: “They say he is slow, your boy. A man’s body but a child’s mind.”

  Yaan.uwaháa, the daughter, fared no better. She rapidly outgrew all of the other infants in the clan, spurted past the toddlers and young girls, and by summer’s end resembled a ten-year-old version of her mother. She had a keen sense of smell and was forever hungry, and more than once, her aunties had to chase her from their kitchen door with a broom when she came looking for a second breakfast. While they shot no fake arrows at her, the girls in the village showed less mercy than the boys. Group by group shunned her. Most nights she curled beneath the bearskin, missing her fath
er, crying herself to sleep as the rain beat on the roof.

  The two children ran away in early fall and were missing for one week. S’ee’s youngest brother, the one whose arrow found X’oots first, tracked them to a nearby hill where they had dug a fresh den. He found them asleep, curled beside each other, the bearskin their pillow, and he bound their hands to a long rope and led them back to camp like recalcitrant dogs. The tribal council’s fires burned late that night, and in the morning before anyone else had risen, Shax’saani visited S’ee’s bed and shook her gently awake. “My sweet little Dolly,” she said. “Come walk with me, and we’ll see the sun sneak over the trees.”

  They strolled to the bayshore and watched a pod of orca swim past, leisurely hunting their breakfast. “When you followed the man, I was afraid for your life, and when you didn’t come back that day or the next or many months, I was heartbroken. There was no one to talk with anymore, and even after D’is—”

  “Man in the moon,” S’ee giggled.

  “After he married another, there was just no one left in the world. I still longed for you, and not a day went by that I did not think of you.”

  “I missed you, too, sister.”

  “When the brothers arrived with the news they had found you and then fetched our mother to send your clothes, my torment was over, and when you first walked through the door—after the smell off you cleared my head—well, my heart leapt like a babe in the womb.”

  The last of the whales passed by. Behind them, the sun had cleared the firs on the far shore and now light sparkled across the waters. Shax’saani took S’ee’s hand in hers. “But you brought those two wild things into our family, and the men have made medicine to judge what must be done. They say the eating of the flesh of brown bear is now taboo. Only black bear may be taken for food. You may stay with us, Dolly, but your son and daughter must be exiled to the rain forest, for our own safety. They will become grizzlies one day and will surely kill a Tlingit, maybe your brother, maybe your sister.”

  S’ee considered her sister’s words, picked up stones from the gravelly beach, and held them while she thought. “I am glad that no Tlingit will eat the brown bear from this day on, and X’oots would be happy, too. But they are my boy and girl, Shax’saani. Banish them and you banish me. Forever.”

  “It’s not me, little sister, but the wisdom of the village.”

  Taking her sister’s hand, S’ee forced open her palm and transferred the pebbles to her. The sun shone full on the bay. From over the ocean, a thin band of clouds gathered on the western horizon. She walked away without looking back, walked on through the village stirring with life, down the pathways that rained with salmon in the months before her birth. She walked past her mother’s home without stopping at the door, past her sisters’ homes, past her brothers’ homes with rack after rack of herring drying in the sun. Her children stirred when she entered, and she sang as the breakfast cooked on the fire, and when they had finished their meal, S’ee told them they must go.

  Because the heavy skin baked in the sun, they took turns wearing the burden and bore to the shady side of trails where the mosses made the trees look like green ghosts. The trip took much longer than S’ee had hoped. Journeying with her children over the same path traveled years ago with her young husband, S’ee felt the circle closing. His spirit lingered, fell with the rain, rose with the mist. She recollected the tender way he cradled the babies in his arms, the grin on his face when he brought back to the den some treat like cloudberries or the warm haunch of a moose. The wildness of his eyes and how it freed her to be wild. The way he’d dip his head into a river and come up gleaming, the water racing off his skin, glistening at the tips of his hair. How fat he was in December and rail-thin come April. How he roared with delight when she bucked her hips beneath him. How he chose to be a man for her.

  In the valley of the brown bear, she could find no one willing to speak Lingit with her, and every word had to be filtered through the ears and mouths of her children. Her sense, after their brokered conversation, was that the bears blamed her for the death of X’oots and for bringing the humans to the rain forest, and that while her children were welcome, she could not stay among them.

  “I remember,” little Yeikoo.shk’ said, and led them back to the den where it had happened. S’ee could barely stand to be on the hill where her husband had lain, but they had no choice but to winter in their old home. Her son was the first to leave, stealing away one night in the middle of a snowstorm, mad with hunger and confinement. Word came later that he had headed north and inland to be away from man, and some say Yeikoo.shk’, the grizzly, terrorized the Yukon, fierce and smart as any Tlingit, had many cubs with many bears, and could not be tracked. Her daughter Yaan.uwaháa lasted that first winter and into spring when the cubs born that February emerged with their mothers, and the maternal pull forced her slow independence from her own mother. She was gone for good three years later, the victim of another party of hunters who, mistaking her for a true bear, shot her dead just above the headwaters of the river. One of her two orphan cubs survived, and three years later found one of the hunters sleeping in a grove and dispatched him into the next world with a swipe to the neck.

  S’ee lived a long time above the valley of the brown bears. In warm months, she moved among them freely in an uneasy truce, teaching herself their ways, but they gave her wide berth. No custom or commerce would be shared. She could only watch their new families from a distance. The fragrance of foamflower and coralroot every June reminded her of the husband she had loved and lost, and in the long, cold months of winter, she dreamt of him, clinging to his skin, straining for his disappearing scent in the shabby fur. She felt as if she was becoming a bear herself as she aged. At twenty-five years, she could no longer stomach the sight of her own reflection in the water, and at thirty, she felt as if she had lived forever in the purest silence, bereft of all language she had once known. When the spirit came upon her to sing out her sorrows, the sound of her voice frightened her. On cold clear nights with the blanket draped across her shoulders and hooded over her head, she huddled on the rocks to count the stars, constellations strung like roe against the northern sky, though their names were long forgotten, praying that their lights would go away, waiting for the world to end.

  Lost in her story, and feeling strangely responsible for its outcome, I averted my gaze from her shining face and studied her toes, which heretofore I had failed to fully appreciate. Her feet were beautiful and soft, as if newly sculpted, and I scrutinized their graceful lines, imagining all kinds of sensual activities, with a devout attention.

  “Bup-bup-bup-bup.” The old man sang out a warning, and I looked up at the war club poised in her two hands lifted over her head and the mad glee in Dolly’s eyes as she prepared to smash my bean. With startling alacrity, he jumped next to her and shot out his right arm like a piston and clamped his fingers around her wrist. For all his ostensible frailty, the old bugger displayed an iron grip, and the club did not budge an inch.

  “Vengeance is mine,” she hissed between her teeth.

  “Sayeth the Lord,” he corrected her, nose to nose. “You are excluding one-half of the quotation, which utterly destroys its intent. Partial quoters are the scourge of debate, and selective citation is the refuge of manipulators and charlatans. ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, sayeth the Lord.’ Leviticus, I believe. Not your place, surely, to seek revenge, and I encourage you to surrender this shillelagh of yours before it accidentally goes off. Honestly, Dolly.”

  Locked in immortal struggle, the two figures bristled with tightly wound energy, like two locomotives butting on the same track. Whispers of steam escaped from the corners of their clamped lips and the curlicues of their ears. Had I the slightest reflexes, I would have joined him in the fray, but some flaw of courage or instinct kept me stationary, a stoic witness to both my threat and my salvation. She panted and sneered at him, the anger pulsing at her temples. A small but distinctly metal squeak followed the
tightening vise of his five digits, and she cried out sharply and let go the club, which landed with a clunk in the sink. Cradling her wrist, Dolly slumped back against the counter. She would not look at me and turned her head, though the bitterness in her eyes reflected in the medicine cabinet mirror.

  My head ached again, either from my ancient wound or the complex implications of her story. The pain was not only in my mind but also two or three spots on my chest and shoulders, phantom aches of an empathetic nature. Given the tenor of her story, I found myself oddly drawn to X’oots, the bear man, and his self-sacrifice, and totally appalled by the dog Chewing Ribs. Somewhere in the house, my gentle cat practiced his diffidence. Behind the cabinet doors, pharmaceuticals promised hope and relief—an aspirin, perhaps an ibuprofen. As I was debating over which to take, it occurred to me that an hour or so must have passed since Dolly entered the room and began her story. A sleeping pill might be in order, but I did not want to take one too close to the hour I was supposed to be awake.

  “Excuse me,” I said to them both and left to find the correct time. Without a word, they waved me off into the darkness just outside the bathroom door. The overhead light, which I had certainly turned on when fetching the bottle of whiskey, had been flicked off. Playing with the switch illuminated nothing, and the hall dripped dark as a tomb. From the bathroom, snatches of conversation rode the air. “… the sixteenth century,” she said. He asked, “So what have you been doing with yourself these five hundred years?” Surprised by the old man’s question, I looked back and saw him standing close in front of her, nearly pinning her to the counter, his left arm extended and his palm against the mirror, and Dolly leaning back, her shoulders squared, a coy smile parting her lips. Distracted by their flirtations, I tried to fathom how and why I was alone in the darkness. The light switch failed again, but the household stairs could be negotiated even if I were blind. Closing my eyes, I grabbed the railing and lifted my toes over the abyss.