Dance of the Tiger

by Bjorn Kurten

  The remarkable stranger had not been Tiger’s foremost interest at the Meet. He was a man now, and it was time to find a woman. He knew that his parents had been discussing it, and he had guessed whom they had in mind. The Big Lake Chief, Wolf, had a daughter named Hind. He had seen her once before, two summers ago, when he was in a gathering party with his mother and some other women and children from Trout Lake. They had met up with gatherers from Big Lake. Though Hind was shy and timid, their eyes had often met.

  Now he was older. When they stopped in at the Big Lake settlement on their way to the Meet, there was music-making and dancing, and many girls had their eyes on him. But Tiger saw only Hind. She, too, was grown up, and strikingly beautiful, with large brown eyes and a slim, high-breasted figure. She was very provocative, dancing past Tiger, turning her back to him, smiling with mischievous eyes over her shoulder, and with a quick bend forward baring for a moment her trim brown buttocks. They had stolen away briefly and kissed, pressing their eager bodies to each other.

  Yes, it would be Hind, Tiger thought, when he saw his father in grave discussion with Wolf. He watched them laugh and clasp each other’s hands, and knew there would be a wedding later in the summer. He would go to Big Lake with his parents and Marten and little Godwit. There would be a great celebration, with flutes, tomtoms, dancing, eating, and drinking. Hind would be his woman, to take back to Trout Lake, where he would build a house for her.

  At the thought of it, he had taken off into the woods to run a race by himself, to feel the air rushing by and the power of his own body. He swam in a small stream to cool off, then lay on the bank to dry, until the stings of the myrmicids drove him away.

  Now the campfire was dying, and Tiger’s thoughts were called back to the mammoth hunt by a dispute between two of the men. One had insisted that he, too, could be in two places at the same time. When he was asleep, he could go to places that might be days and days away from where he was.

  “So that’s what you do,” said the neighbor. “That’s just what I thought. You’ll sleep through the mammoth hunt too, unless we do something about it—dreaming about mammoth tongue with cranberry sauce.”

  The man blushed—it was he who had talked about that particular delicacy—but persisted. “I believe there’s a part of me that travels about when I sleep, though nobody else can see it.”

  The Chief realized that the conversation had been inconclusive and that his men were anxious. He chose his words carefully.

  “One Shelk is quite enough,” he said. “If he comes in two parts, I want neither. But he’s far away now. As for you, I want you all in one place tomorrow; no wandering in dreamland. Tomorrow’s the day to strike, Trolls or no Trolls. But they have done us no harm all these years, and if we leave them alone they are not likely to start now. To be safe, though, everyone keep on the lookout for Whites in the forest. And if you’re going to sleep on sentinel duty”—he smiled at the dreamer—“be sure to wake someone else first.”

  The man grinned and went to tend the fire. “You won’t catch me asleep, Chief,” he said confidently. “And I hope you’re right about tomorrow. The fare has not been too good these days.”

  The Chief also rose, and raised his arms high, uttering the ancient prayer to the game:

  “O great Guardian of the mammoth! If it is your wish to deliver your cattle into our hands, give us the sign, keep the tryst. For what we must do, we ask your forgiveness, with all our heart.

  “And now some sleep,” he added, looking around.

  All the men except the sentry, who walked the perimeters of the camp, were soon dozing. The moon was down and the forest very dark. The sentry took the little moon-stick carried by the party, and made a mark for the night. The stick would tell them the phases of the moon, by which they lived as much as by the changing seasons.

  Among those sleeping soundly was Tiger, who would return to the trackers at dawn with plans for the assault. He was no longer afraid of Trolls. No, the only danger was losing the mammoths; and the Chief would take care of that.

  Indeed, everything was working out according to plan. The mammoths were just where the Chief’s craft and experience had told him they would be. His men had reached their stations in time, the trackers being summoned by Tiger at the last moment. The fires had blazed up simultaneously all along the line, and now the mammoths were swerving toward the bog. The spears had found their targets, and though none of the mammoths had been mortally wounded, they were all in a panic to escape. Already one or two animals were knee-deep in the bog, sinking helplessly. A couple of young clung to them, still able to move but afraid of leaving their mothers, and shrieking incessantly. Others retreated more slowly, squelching at the edge of the bog.

  Only the big bull in the rear refused to budge. Hooting and blowing blasts of air through its trunk, stirring up a cloud of dust and dry leaves, it was working itself into a fury.

  Some of the hunters were already in the bog, closing in for the slaughter. Everybody was intent on the prey, utterly unaware of the long line of men now emerging from the edge of the forest. Crouching, silent, they took up their positions and chose their targets.

  Suddenly the bull seemed transformed into a gigantic incarnation of rage and destruction. Its black hair rose all over its body, making it look twice its size. Ears flapping out, tail swinging high, trunk above its head, tusks forward, it charged through the flames and towered in front of Tiger.

  The boy flung himself to the side, seeking the shelter of a young pine tree. But nothing stopped the momentum of the mammoth; its seven tons of bone, muscle, and ivory snapped off the brittle pine like a reed, and it thundered into the forest, plowing a trail of broken bushes and small trees. Tiger was pinned beneath the fallen tree.

  Sensing disaster, the Chief turned around and raced back. “Tiger, Tiger! Are you hurt?” His eyes were seeking the spot where the tree had fallen. At the edge of the forest, the men in line had already risen to launch their missiles. They were in full view, but the Chief never saw them.

  Tiger tried to answer his father, and found that he had no voice. He could not move, but felt nothing, for the shock had numbed all sensation. He watched the long, agonized run of the Chief, the white tiger tooth on his breast dangling with each bound. Suddenly something like a stick was standing straight through the running body, which lost its life in mid-air. The body swung with the impact and its own speed, and vanished from his sight with a thud reverberating through the noise of the slaughter. The boy closed his eyes, and at last the physical pain overwhelmed him.

  THE LAND

  Now I see for a second time

  Earth in fresh green rise from the sea;

  The cataracts fall, the eagle flies.

  —Völuspá

  The land had only emerged in the last few thousand years. Obeying the commands of sun, wind, and water, the great ice that had once covered it had retreated to the fells of the far north. There it was collecting its strength to reconquer its empire. For now, every summer was warm enough to divest the ice of its power. It was holding its own, but it could not advance; and its strength was spent in great rivers coursing south, bountiful and awesome, cascading through narrow gaps, broadening into lakes and estuaries.

  Relieved from the weight of the ice, the land was rising from the sea, and plants, animals, and men invaded it. It was now a land of forests, bogs, and lakes, richly stocked with game. To the north it was bordered first by a belt of dwarf birch and bogs, then by the tundra, and finally by the ice. To the southeast lay the sea, which had once been a gigantic freshwater lake and was now a brackish water body, linked to the oceans by narrow straits. Its contours shaped by the ice, the land gradually dipped into the sea, in a fleet of thousands of islands large and small, down to single ice-polished rocks among the seaward skerries. And far away to the west lay the real salt sea.

  To the sparse groups of men entering this land, it was a world of wealth and beauty beyond measure. The pine forest, gay with the soft browns
of its rough-scaled trunks and the persisting green of its crowns, stretched endlessly. It was a forest of infinite variety, from the windswept, stunted firs of the outer islands and the sharp dry woods of esker and granite hills to the mighty pillars of the lowland grand forest, secure in their massed strength. There were also the wetlands, where the pine became scrawny and dwarfed once more, fighting for its life amid willow, alder, and birch, and the bogs, where the pine died. But the somber spruce had not yet invaded the land, and perhaps would not do so at all, in this age; its domain was half a world away to the east.

  In early summer, the pines blossomed into the light green of their new shoots, as if dressing for a festival. Mammoth and caribou had left the country much earlier and the great bird migration was at its peak. But it had started long before, perhaps when the silent woods awoke with the chirping of innumerable chaffinches, whirring in myriad flocks close above the treetops, which still carried a melting mantle of snow; or with the august spectacle of hundreds of cranes in sleek formations flying in from the south at a dizzying height. Serenely they flew in search of the wetlands and lakes where the excitement of courtship and nesting awaited them. Then came the explosive awakening of spring: now the hepaticas in timid stands amidst patches of melting snow; soon the white carpet of wood anemones covering the floor of the forest.

  Bison, elk, and the tremendous shelk, its palmed antlers up to a fathom in length, could be hunted when the mammoth was gone; and the sturdy little horse, and the stag with its many-tined antlers too. But the sweetness and variety of the berries of forest and glade, beach and bog, made them the most coveted food. And to those versed in their lore, the mushrooms of late summer offered excellent fare.

  In the autumn, bird-song died, and the skies were darkened by the southward flights. With the first snow, herds of mammoth and caribou reappeared. After the darkness, rain, and sleet of autumn came the silvery luminescence of winter nights and the crisp, clear cold of winter days. And so, following the rhythm of the seasons, the men who lived off the land measured their past in winters and their future in summers.

  Into this land came a people raven-haired and dark of complexion, carrying the inheritance of a long line of ancestors from sun-scorched steppes far away. They called themselves Men; others called them Black. Their marks of dominance were a proud stature, jutting chins, high foreheads, manes of swept-back hair, long exquisite necks, a breadth of shoulder and a narrowness of hip. The flowing beard of the adult male was a wondrous sign of his rank. The women were smaller, and graceful in youth; in maturity they, too, developed the tokens of their station, in splendid volumes of breast and haunch, belly and buttock. The man’s role was to hunt, fight, beget sons, and seek the mystery of communion with the powers of the unknown; the woman’s, to bear and rear children, gather the harvest of forest and meadow, and obey the man who chose her to be the mother of his sons.

  These men brought with them their new, full-toned speech, elastic and expressive beyond compare. They also brought their inventive technology, symbolized by the atlatl, or throwing-stick, which could catapult a javelin with superior speed and penetration. They brought their dreams and hopes and their passionate affinity with the beasts of game, which they sought to record with all their skill and love.

  They strove to catch and render in undying images those transient animal shapes that burn into the retina and are seen again in exquisite detail and precision when the eyes are closed: animals in repose, in action; the sights before the hunter in that fleeting moment at the point of the kill, when endurance, skill, and cunning are to be rewarded. In that moment, javelin poised, muscles and sinews already exploding into the throw, the strength and beauty of the beast are forever impressed upon the hunter. By recording this image, he pays off his debt and receives absolution, for the taking of a life is a crime, which must be atoned for.

  So the hunters flocked around the master draftsman, who swiftly conjured up the sought image with unerring lines. They traced the pattern laboriously, again and again, sharing in the mystery and atonement. Just as the atlatl and the spear were the tools of the hunter, so the charcoal stick, the engraving point, and the dye became those of the artist. The tribesmen sought fulfillment in animal portraiture as a complement to the hunt and took the names of four-footed or winged beasts, exulting in the splendor of their totems.

  The mystery of fertility was equally significant. A man must be not only a hunter and an artist but a father of sons. Here the women participated in like degree. Man’s pride in his phallus and his sperm was equaled by his pride in his fertile woman, who received his sperm and gave him sons in return. A man without sons was no man. So his art, too, encompassed that revered symbol, the Mother of Sons, and the tokens of fertility, the phallus and the cleft fruit.

  A thousand years earlier, the men of the past had made this place their home. Twenty thousand generations in the snowbound lands of long winters and brief summers had bleached their skin and hair to a light fairness. The equality of men and women was reflected in similarity of stature and body build. The mark of dominance in the full-grown man or woman was a wonderful pair of eyes, shaded by the perpetually frowning superstructure of their jutting brows. In their myriad tales and stories, remembered from generation to generation, the boldness and power of their eyes were likened to those of the eagle. Birds were deities in their myths. They revered the birds’ song with its glissando of vowels and tones, hopelessly beyond their own tongues. They themselves, humble earthlings, took the names of flowers and trees. But each flower and each tree had its own bird in the Land of Dead Men, and the belief that transformation awaited them when they died was central to their lives.

  So awesome were the eyes of the Whites that it had become a token of deference for them to pass their hands over their faces, hiding for a moment the brilliance of the eyes and the somber menace of the brow. Partly in compensation for that trait, the White society had become ritualized through and through, with tact and politeness as the prime code of behavior. They called each other “Miss” and “Mister”; they used polite circumlocutions when giving orders, and were ready with profuse apologies at the slightest suggestion of wrongdoing. So their great strength was balanced by their habits of deference and politeness.

  Among the Whites, women chose their mates and descent was reckoned along the maternal line. They gloried in their ancestors, whose exploits and adventures they were ready to tell and retell. Story and myth were their art. Women and men found affinity not only with the living members of their clan but with those of earlier generations who walked unseen by their side, throughout their lives. To these women and men of the past, they could turn for advice, encouragement, and precedent.

  The Whites were the oldest settlers of the land. Millenniums ago the entire continent to the south had been in their hands. Now only a small remnant of their race lived here, on the northern outskirts. The Blacks had settled the great interior, where the forest abounded in game and the lakes and streams in fish. They had spread along the coast of the Salt Sea in the west, where they found the inexhaustible riches of the ocean. The Whites still lived in the frontier lands of the north and along the brackish-water seaboard.

  The Blacks had known of the Whites for a long time, and called them Trolls. Concerned with their own lives and passions, they took little heed of the older race. In broad daylight the Trolls seemed to be inferior beings, comical sometimes, or faintly sinister, making odd gestures with their hands about their faces and jabbering in a weird tongue utterly unlike human speech. Yet at night, the sight of these stumpy figures with their large pale faces and hooded eyes seemed to touch something buried deep in the Black man’s being, as if recalling an age-old experience of unreasoning terror. Somehow the Trolls were like the ghosts that might haunt a man in a nightmare. They seemed to bear a menace of secret witchcraft, of deep cunning, perhaps even wisdom, of a kind denied to Men. They evoked unspeakable mysteries older than time.

  To the Whites, the Blacks were godlike,
tall and eloquent, with a speech as varied and flexible as that of the birds. And there was something else. No White could look at the clear brow of a Black without feeling a mysterious tenderness, such as a child might evoke in the heart of his parents.

  While there was much to differentiate them, there was more that the two races had in common. They lived off the same land. They lived by the same laws, which governed rigidly the patterns of their thoughts and emotions, their actions, and their reverence for the numinous things in their world. Everything was alive to them, not only trees and bushes, birds and four-footed beasts, but the flying clouds, the moving streams, the caressing or whipping winds, the lakes and the seas in their placidity or foaming anger. Forever mutable, these must have life and sentience. Even stones and rocks possessed a mysterious life, which sometimes seemed to gather and become transfigured into strange formations where their spirits took shape—an august profile, a pair of shadowed eyes, a hand, a paw, a sexual organ, a resting body, the whorled gut of a ripped-up animal. The stillness and permanence of these forms, the assurance that they would always be there, enduring beyond the transmutations of things that grow and fade, invested them with a sublimity of their own. Men and women found security in them. An ageing man could return to the sanctuary of his youth and say: Here I am, changed, old, marked by my years; there you stand, indestructible, eternal; it is good to be near you again.

  Man had to live in concert with all things. Every animal, bird, and plant had its own Guardian, big or small, against whose will there could be no appeal. Guardians spoke to men in the whisper of the rain, the voice of the thunderclap, the rush of the rapids, the nightly call of the owl. The eyes of the Guardians watched men with intense concentration in a glittering star, with sudden wrath in a flash of lightning, with veiled, inscrutable watchfulness out of the depths of a hollow on the face of a cliff.