Dance of the Tiger

by Bjorn Kurten

  The atlatl was a sacred hunting weapon, used sparingly, and with the greatest compassion for the suffering of the animal pursured. Who had heard of manhunts except perhaps in stories of the distant past and far-off lands?

  With swift certainty, Tiger decided that this was Shelk’s doing. That proud stranger and his followers were new to these parts. Who could tell from what land of terror they had come?

  Tiger sank back, oblivious to the rising excitement in the camp.

  “I knew it!” said Miss Angelica. “You can speak the birdtalk, Mister Baywillow! My son, you are a child of the Gods!”

  “What is Shelk?” asked Baywillow. “Do you think he meant me?”

  “Shalk,” repeated Silverbirch, unable to pronounce the correct vowel. “It is the name of an animal in bird-talk, but I do not understand why he should call you that.”

  “Please do ask him, Mister Silverbirch,” begged Miss Woad. “He understands you.”

  “Yes,” said Silverbirch, with pride. “He understands me, though I do not speak the real bird-talk.” He turned to Tiger, who lay with half-closed eyes. “Shalk?” he asked, pointing to Baywillow.

  Tiger shook his head. “No, he isn’t Shelk. I thought he was, but Shelk is older.”

  “A Black man?” asked Silverbirch.

  “Yes, a bad Black man. He killed my father.”

  Silverbirch nodded. He understood.

  “Yar nahm?” he asked.

  Tiger smiled at the old Troll’s strange rendering of his language, and told him his name. Suddenly it was repeated almost perfectly by the dark young Troll: “Tiger!”

  The two young men’s glances met, and something passed between them.

  “He is not Shelk,” repeated Tiger. “Shelk is the man who killed my father.”

  Again Silverbirch nodded, then turned away to search for something among the supplies stacked on the runners. When he returned, he closed Tiger’s hand around the great tooth of the black tiger.

  “Fatha?” he asked.

  Tears came to Tiger’s eyes, and the Trolls gathered closer to comfort him, stroking his cheeks, his forehead, his body, with their strong hands, until Tiger fell into exhausted sleep. That was the last he remembered for a long time. He was unconscious that night, all through the remainder of the journey, and for days afterward.

  VEYDE’S ISLAND

  So enamored is the traveling wind of the tree that stands with its root in the earth and grows.

  —Johannes V. Jensen, Myter

  Where the land dipped into the sea, the eskers and ice-worn knolls, all striking to the southeast, jutted out as points and islands—a once-drowned landscape now emerging from the deep. The inner skerries, sheltered from the onslaught of the sea, were densely wooded, much like the mainland. Farther out the trees were wind-beaten and stunted. And beyond these islands were hundreds of islets fringing great water bodies where rocks now awash were slowly emerging.

  Miss Angelica’s party walked a well-beaten path to the far shore of one of these points of land, from which they rafted themselves to the nearest island, their home. They had chosen the island because it had a good spring; fresh water was often hard to get on the islands. The nearest point of the island was not far from the mainland promontory, as if the long ridge of hills had made a small dive into the water, then emerged again in another headland. Though short, the crossing could be dangerous enough in a strong southwestern wind. In that direction lay an open bay, on which heavy seas built up easily. Then the waves would crash through the narrow channel, towering and breaking as they met the drag of the shoaling bottom. But on this day the weather held, and the water glimmered in drowsy stillness, broken only by long lines of ripples where indolent cat’s-paws ruffled the surface. Great flocks of scoters with their young dotted the bay, and white-fowl still patrolled the sky, though it would soon be time for their departure.

  The Troll’s island, irregularly shaped and at most a couple of miles long, was wonderfully varied. Forests covered much of the land, but they were interrupted by rocky hills sheltering wetlands which supported patches of crowberry, labrador tea, and cotton grass. Coves dissected the coastline, in some places almost cutting the island in two. Water shallow enough to be waded separated it from neighboring islands, so that one could easily tread for miles from one island to the next, never having to swim. To the south, the island drew out into a long, narrow moraine. West of this, commanding a view of the sea, was the bluff where Miss Angelica’s people had pitched their tents.

  Much later, Tiger himself would navigate the raft, made of pine logs of varying length, tied together with leather thongs and supported by crossbars. Of that first voyage he had no memory. His first hazy impression was of waking up inside a small conical tent, made from skins stretched over poles that leaned together, leaving a smoke-hole on top. A small seal-fat lamp burned in the middle of the tent, and the open door-flap admitted the murky light of an overcast late-summer day. A Troll girl sat beside him, her pale features and white-blond hair shimmering in the dusk. When she saw that he was awake, she smiled, scooped up something in her hand, and held it before him. Berries—bilberries and cloudberries. He managed to swallow the handful, then dropped back into a doze.

  For days, he was alternately chilled and feverish, faintly aware of the Troll girl waiting upon him and feeding him, first only berries, then pieces of fish and meat. When he shivered with cold, she lay down beside him, sharing her own warmth; when he was hot and thirsty, she offered him water out of a skin.

  When he tried to ask her name, she did not understand, but went at once to fetch the old Troll who spoke such a peculiar version of Tiger’s own language. Silverbirch did not know how to render the girl’s name, but she suddenly pointed to the roof, where he saw a dried woad plant, its trusses of seed-pods hanging like pendants. Tiger understood, and spoke her name in his own language: “Veyde!”

  That plant was man’s friend. Soaked in water, it gave off the deep blue of a summer’s lake. In many pictures had Tiger contrasted the ochre-red of life with the blueness of the woad. When you scattered the seeds over fertile ground, new plants would sprout. If the Trolls had the woad, perhaps they were human.

  For a long time Tiger was too ill and weak to move, but he became used to seeing Veyde at his side, and took comfort in her presence. Gradually he began to recognize the other Trolls. There was the old interpreter, whose name, he learned, was Silverbirch. There were curious, blue-eyed children who could only peep in through the flap-door and grin at him because Veyde would not allow them in. And there was the tall, dark young Troll called Baywillow.

  Tiger soon came to be especially glad of Baywillow’s visits. Only a few years older than Tiger, he listened intently as Tiger spoke to him in the Black tongue and skillfully imitated his words, which none of the other Trolls could do. Veyde learned to pronounce Tiger’s name and her own after a fashion, but Baywillow took to the new language as if it were a dormant skill, needing only the catalyst of Tiger’s presence to return it to memory. Smiling his shy smile and often passing his palm over his face, the young man sat on the floor at Tiger’s side, cross-legged and hunched as if to hide his height. He repeated Tiger’s words carefully, making sure he got them right and understood their meaning. Sometimes he stood up and raised his arms, as if giving thanks.

  But there were times when Baywillow was away, sometimes for several days. To ease the tedium, Tiger tried to understand and repeat the words of Veyde and Silverbirch, but the language was difficult, full of queer and uncouth sounds that were hard on Tiger’s tongue. He soon found that it was not a language you could whisper in. The pitch of the voice was an integral part of the language, and the varied modulation compensated for the monotony of the vowels—just ah and oh. Indeed, the Whites seemed to have a perfect ear for music, and were able to discern very subtle variations in pitch. The language was necessarily spoken with great deliberation, quite unlike the sophisticated patter of the Blacks. It seemed full of the mammoth’s bones. Tig
er came to learn it well, but the road was full of pitfalls, and he seemed to stumble into all of them, much to Veyde’s amusement. Old Silverbirch, shocked by her rudeness, admonished her with a stern brow, gesturing to Tiger to apologize for the insult. Tiger loved these exchanges, which made him laugh and forget the pain in his leg.

  Occasionally the other Troll oxen and bitches (Tiger still thought of them more as animals than as humans) would look in. At first he found it hard to tell them apart. The only exception was the authoritative Miss Angelica, who always looked long and hard at Tiger, then held a low-toned consultation with Veyde, and left as abruptly as she came in. One day, feeling more sure of himself, Tiger forestalled her.

  “See you tomorrow, Miss Angelica,” he ventured, carefully patterning his words after Veyde’s. Miss Angelica smiled.

  “It will be a pleasure, Mister Tiger,” she answered graciously.

  Then came the day when Tiger first crawled to the entrance and looked out. The sight overwhelmed him. The tent was pitched high on a bluff overlooking the sea to the south. (In winter, they would move to houses in the shelter of the woods.) Never before had Tiger seen the sea, and its immensity came as a revelation to him. The perfect straightness of its far edge was a mystery beyond all others. For the first time in his life, Tiger saw a straight line. He had climbed hills as a boy and looked out over the endless panorama of forest, but always there was the undulating line of hill and vale, the tussocky contours of distant trees. Here was the sea, barely ruffled by a gentle breeze that built a lane of glittering sunshine to the end of the world. Here he looked into eternity.

  Later he came to know the sea in its varied moods and seasons, but he never forgot the exhilaration of this first view. There were rocks and islands in the sea; there were distant flocks of ducks and mergansers, and white-winged seagulls. Early autumn had already turned the occasional rowan trees a rusty red, but the alders still formed a belt of light green against the background of dark pine woods on the larger islands hemming in his view to the right. Here and there a birch gleamed yellow. Tiger lay motionless in the opening of his little tent, remembering the story of his father’s first view of the sea. So this was it!

  When his legs healed, Tiger would even walk on the sea, a frozen waste. He would trek for days from island to island, or just walk straight out into the whiteness, with nothing but sky and ice for company. Then he would look back to his landmarks, watching them shift with the increasing distance until at last, afraid of getting lost, he turned homeward again.

  During the spring thaw the sea was treacherous. The ice broke into great sheets that churned against each other and built strange jagged structures that froze again overnight. Then black cracks widened between the floes and the spring storms broke up the remaining ice, grinding it into round patches that formed an intricate pattern on the endless surface. And finally the blue summer sea returned, warm enough for swimming and for navigating the raft and the little coracle that Silverbirch had built.

  That coracle, made from sealskin stretched over a frame of pliant branches, became Tiger’s favorite plaything. It was very small, and folded flat; distended, it was not even big enough for two grown people. It was almost as wide as it was long, and Tiger’s first attempts to navigate it began with him and the coracle spinning round and round. But he learned to propel it in one direction, using a leafy bough for a paddle. When the wind was in his favor, he would stick the bough in the prow of his skiff and drift along, shouting excitedly to the onlookers.

  Running along the shore, the children begged to be taken aboard, and Tiger carefully hoisted the smallest girl into the skiff, paddling around with hardly any freeboard. These excursions usually ended with a swamped coracle, and Tiger returning to shore with a very wet but delighted child.

  The coracle gave Tiger one unforgettable memory. It was early in the spring, and the ice had melted enough for him to paddle around. Looking to the northeast, he saw a mirage such as he would never see again. It was as if the surface of the earth had buckled up into a towering, distant mountain, on which were dark outlines of faraway islands against the white of the surrounding ice. It was like a bird’s-eye view, and the map was inscribed into his visual memory for the rest of his life.

  Tiger continued to gaze at the image, but it became hazy and finally vanished. He tried to explain it to Veyde and Baywillow, but they had never seen such a thing. They told him about the ordinary mirages, which lift rocks and islands over the horizon. Soon they would be familiar to Tiger too.

  Tiger became an established member of the little clan on Veyde’s Island. He spoke the White language tolerably well (he had long since ceased to think of them as Trolls), and his friend Baywillow spoke his own language far better now than old Silverbirch. Tiger walked with a limp, for his leg had not set quite straight, but he ran as fast as before. He had regained his old skill with the throwing-stick, and Silverbirch had taught him the sling. This came naturally to him, and he bagged many a hare and bird. He had taken part in many sealing expeditions, had taught his new friends what he knew about fishing, and was now one of the best providers on the island. He was also going to be a father.

  It was when he learned this that he ceased to look upon Veyde’s people as Trolls and saw them instead as human beings. He was well on his way to recovery the day Veyde straddled him for the first time, seeking that fulfillment for which she had yearned since the moment she saw him pinned by the tree at Miss Sundew’s Cloudberries. Using artful fellatio to rouse him, she rode him, body erect, head back, her eyes fixed on the soot-black roof of the winter house, as if she could see right through it into that sky of birds where she would ultimately go.

  Tiger needed coaxing, for Veyde was so utterly unlike anything he had experienced that he had found it hard to think of her as a woman. He closed his eyes until the pleasure grew unbearable. Then he opened them, taking in forever the sight of this woman who was straddling him, her fair hair, her great smiling mouth, the swollen tits over her barrel chest.

  Then the sensation was gone, and new emotions swooped down on him like a flock of ravens. Veyde took him in her arms, and his went around her too in an automatic response. But the only thing in his mind was a terrifying question: What animal is this I am holding in my arms? And for a second he felt that he had made love to a bison cow or a wolf bitch. This image struck so deep that Tiger lay still, in a struggle with this feeling, while Veyde, oblivious, fondled him with immeasurable gratitude and uttered endearments in her outlandish tongue.

  Tiger never told anyone of his terror and soon forgot it himself. The two of them had moved into Veyde’s winter house, clustered with the others in the shelter of the woods. The houses were built on a small eminence, with good drainage so that they stayed dry. They were dug down into the earth, and the walls were made of rocks, lined with earth and moss. The wood-beamed roof was covered with pine and juniper branches and animal skins. The entrance was a short underground tunnel. But when they moved into their summer tents in the spring, a few blocks of stone were removed from the wall and a thorough spring cleaning was done.

  When he had mastered the White language, Tiger got to know the other members of Miss Angelica’s tribe. The new couple’s closest friends were Baywillow and Silverweed, who lived in the house next to theirs. Miss Silverweed was a genial but singularly absent-minded young woman who often lost herself in meditation, becoming oblivious to the events around her. Despite her fits of abstraction, she was an excellent hunter. But she was not much good at housework, and Tiger was amazed to see Baywillow busy with such chores as tanning hides and sewing clothes. At Trout Lake, and among the Blacks generally, this was women’s work. Nonetheless, Tiger was an adaptable and impressionable youth, and he grew accustomed to seeing the women join the men on fishing and hunting expeditions. He even tried his hand at domestic work, and came to enjoy the sessions of hide-scraping, when stories were exchanged all around.

  Storytelling was the favorite pastime of Miss Angelica’s peopl
e, and some of the stories were terribly lurid and frightening. But Tiger soon noticed that these tales, which sent the audience into tittering hysterics, seemed always to be about distant relations or other clans. They were usually followed by a more decorous narrative about the tribe’s own ancestors, as if the clan needed to return to safety after a brief trip into a wonderland of terror.

  Tiger found the tanning business far less pleasant, because the Whites used rancid urine instead of wood-ashes and water to cure the leather. As a tailor, he was no success at all. The clothes he wore—sealskin boots and breeches, a blouse made from caribou skin, and a lynx-fur beret—were the handiwork of Baywillow and Veyde.

  Old Mister Silverbirch was the local sage and doctor, and lived with Miss Angelica and Mister Marestail. He could have moved in with one of the women, for there were more women than men on the island, but he did not wish to. He still mourned his own woman, who had been lost almost ten years ago. Silverbirch’s polite and circumstantial manner set the tone for the community, but he never succeeded in quieting Veyde’s gaiety and her unorthodox behavior. Once she told Tiger, “Do you know, I was almost killed by a falling tree one day because Mister Silverbirch was too polite to shout at me! He just said courteously, ‘Would you be so kind as to step out of the way, Miss Veyde, because Mister Marestail is felling a tree and it is about to fall on top of you.’ I said ‘What?’ and he started saying the whole thing all over again, when Miss Rosebay rushed up and pushed me to the side. Whoosh, bang! and there was the tree. Mister Silverbirch clicked his tongue at us and said something about ‘young people nowadays.’”

  Poor Mister Silverbirch had been having great trouble with his teeth of late. He had pulled out the worst one, but he could not eat tough food unless he was mouth-fed, so he preferred fish, which he could chew himself.

  He doctored everyone else in the tribe too. When Tiger’s condition improved and he was able to walk again, Mister Silverbirch often looked at him with a proprietary air: here was living evidence of his skill as a healer.