by Sue Harrison
When the Near River men returned to where they had left K’os, they came with shouts, as though she should rejoice with them in their victory. Instead, she lifted her chin and looked away, answered them in anger.
When the Cousin River women who had come from the village asked why K’os did not return to join the attack, she pointed at the bodies of the two boys and Sun Girl’s mother, the three who had volunteered to slit the Near River guards’ throats. So the Cousin River People came to the Near River Village in mourning, soot still black on their faces, their arms and clothing cut to show their grief.
K’os’s greatest sorrow was over the number of Cousin River women who had chosen to go to the Near River Village. She had thought more would be killed in the battle, especially after she convinced the men to let the women use weapons.
Who could believe the Near River hunters would use fire against the Cousin River Village? Who could believe Fox Barking would think of an idea like that?
Now with so many women from the Cousin River Village, there was less chance she would become wife, more chance she would stay slave. But she walked into the Near River Village with her head held high and did not let herself remember the last time she had been there, with Ground Beater, Tikaani and Snow Breaker, now all dead.
It did not matter what had happened to them, she told herself. She was alive. There were Near River men, wounded in battle, who could use her help. She had brought her medicines, and soon it would be summer, a time to gather new plants. If there were not enough wounded men for her to heal, she was sure there were those who would become sick. She patted her medicine bags. She was also sure she could heal them.
Chapter Fifty
OF THOSE WHO REMAINED in the Cousin River Village, five were hunters, including Chakliux and Night Man. There were six boys seven summers and older, one handful of younger women, three handfuls of old women. Five handfuls of children and babies. Twisted Stalk had hidden two tiny female pups under her parka, and a young mother who had recently lost her baby said she would nurse them. So with Biter, they had three dogs.
Aqamdax sighed and continued to sort through the contents of K’os’s burned lodge. Knife blades, scrapers, cooking stones, an assortment of beads had all survived the flames. She also found a bundle of fox furs, charred only at two edges, a few tattered pieces of woven sleeping mats and a water bladder.
Three old women were fighting over the contents of the lodge next to K’os’s. Aqamdax, her despair spilling into words, raised her voice and interrupted their squabbling.
“Aunts,” she said, “everything must belong to all of us. If we fight among ourselves, what hope do we have?”
The three women were suddenly silent, then all of them turned on her, shouting insults and taunts. Aqamdax closed her eyes against tears, then opened them to see Chakliux beside her.
He led her out of the smoking ruins, down the path and into the cool quietness of the forest. “These are not your people, Aqamdax,” he said. “Why do you stay? Come with me; bring Yaa and Ghaden. We will find Sok, spend the summer fishing and hunting together. Our lodges will be warm next winter, and we will have enough food. During those long moons when we wait for spring, I will build an iqyax frame. Then next summer, when we have enough fish put away to keep us through a long journey, you and I can return to your people.”
“Chakliux, I cannot leave Ghaden,” she told him. “Yaa may want to return to her mother, but….”
“Yaa’s mother was killed in the fighting,” Chakliux said softly. He caught Aqamdax’s mittened hands in his own. “I will build two iqyan. We will wait until Ghaden is old enough to paddle one, then we will go, but until then, bring your brother and Yaa, and come with me.”
Aqamdax pulled her hands away. “I cannot leave my husband.”
“There are many women in this village who need husbands. Let him be husband to one of them.”
“Chakliux,” Aqamdax said and began to cry. She laid one hand across her belly. “I cannot leave Night Man. I carry his child.”
They made one lodge, using lodge poles and caribou hides that had survived the fires. The women with babies, the children, were crowded inside. The others, mothers with older children, the hunters, and the old women made lean-tos. They set them in a ragged circle, their open sides toward the lodge, as though to draw warmth from those within.
They lifted their voices in mourning songs, and the words rose into the night sky, riding the smoke that spiraled up from the hearth fires.
Chakliux approached the lean-to where Night Man lay. His sister Star sat on one side of his bedding mats, Aqamdax on the other. Yaa and Ghaden were huddled together at the back of the shelter, and Star’s mother sat twisting her hands, staring off into the distance as though she waited for those dead ones who would never return.
Night Man purposely averted his face, but Chakliux went to him, lay two large hares on the ground beside the fire.
“We do not need your meat,” said Night Man.
Star looked anxiously at her brother, began to gnaw her bottom lip. “We need the meat,” she said. “We need the pelts.”
Night Man raised his voice. “This lodge has a hunter.”
“I have come to ask for a wife,” Chakliux said. “There is no shame in taking meat from a man who will be husband to your sister.”
Though Aqamdax understood that Chakliux was doing this for her, the words were knives to her chest. Chakliux had grown up with Star. Surely he knew she would not be a good wife.
It would not be an easy thing to have him live in the same lodge, to see him share Star’s bed during the night, but he was a hunter. He would bring meat. She lifted her head to look at Night Man and could see that he was torn by Chakliux’s offer. Chakliux had been enemy. How could Night Man welcome him as brother? But if he did not, was he throwing away the lives of his wife and their child, his sister and his mother?
“You would take this man as husband?” he asked Star.
Star stood and walked slowly to Chakliux’s side. “You think you can live again as Cousin?” she asked.
“I can live as Cousin,” he said.
“Then I will be your wife,” she told him. “Do you have bride price gifts?”
“Only the promise of my hunting.”
Star pursed her mouth into a pout, but Night Man said, “That is bride price enough.” He lifted his good hand as though to encompass the ruins of the village beyond the circle of lean-tos. “What more can we ask?”
“There is one thing I must do first,” Chakliux said. “My brother Sok, his wives and children, our mother and an aunt have made a camp three days from here. They wait for me. I must tell them I will stay in this village.”
“I have heard of the hunter Sok,” Night Man said. “Tell him he is welcome here.”
“I will tell him.”
“When will you leave?”
“If you allow me a place beside your fire tonight,” Chakliux said, “I will leave in the morning, and return as soon as I can.”
“You have a place beside my fire,” said Night Man.
Chakliux picked up the two hares, handed them to Star. “Not a bride price,” he said. “Someday I will give something better.”
She took the hares, sat down, laid them across her lap and stroked their fur. Biter pulled away from Ghaden, his eyes on the hares, but Yaa caught him around the neck and held him back.
“Wife,” Night Man said to Aqamdax, “skin them. We need meat tonight.”
Aqamdax took the hares from Star, and Star wailed like a child. Her mother looked at her, startled, then raised her voice to sing a mourning song. Star glanced at Chakliux, then changed her cries from petulance to mourning.
A handful of days passed, then two handfuls, and still Chakliux did not return. Star shouted out her anger at the old women in the camp, at the children, and twice Aqamdax had to stop her as she stood, knife in hand, ready to shred the sides of their lean-to.
He would not be back, Aqamdax told herself. Sure
ly, when he had time to think, time to realize how difficult it would be to have Star as wife, he would stay with Sok, and Aqamdax would not see him again.
The people had made another lodge, this one smaller, the covering pieced from caribou hides charred and weakened by the fires, but now the old women and some of the older children had a place. Ghaden and Yaa spent the nights in that lodge, though Ghaden was not allowed to take Biter with him.
The first few days after Chakliux left, Star had joined Yaa and Aqamdax to set out traplines. Now she did nothing except lash out in anger or crouch inside the lean-to, refusing to eat, refusing to speak.
Each morning Night Man worked to sit longer, and finally he was able to push himself up, first to his knees, and then to his feet, though he stood only a short time. His right arm still hung useless, and Aqamdax made a sling to bind it against his body.
Several of the old women salvaged bits and pieces from half-burned baskets and wove fish traps. The three men strong enough to hunt prepared spears and weapons for caribou. The boys made bolas to bring down birds that would soon come from the south.
The twelfth day after Chakliux had left them, Aqamdax took Biter with her to check traps. She hoped the dog might catch a hare or ptarmigan. She stopped by a tangle of highbush cranberry and picked a few wizened berries, offered several to Biter. “Next year will be better,” she told him. Biter, his fur ragged, his body gaunt, whined as though he understood her words. Suddenly, he jumped away from her, began to run. She followed him for a few steps, then saw that he chased a hare. She returned to her trapline. Each loop was empty.
Such things always happened at this time of year, she reminded herself. Winter traps had already caught most of the small animals that lived near the village. She would have to move the trapline farther away.
When Biter returned, he carried the front half of a hare in his mouth. She praised him, surprised that he would bring anything at all when they shared so little with him.
It was a sign, that hare, Aqamdax thought, a reminder of all good things. She was alive and deep inside her belly she carried a child—a son who would be a strong hunter, or a daughter who would sew and weave and someday give Aqamdax grandchildren.
She smiled, raised her eyes to the blue sky. The wind was a spring wind, and it swept through the forest with a warmth that lifted the last of the winter’s cold from the brown and gray earth. Aqamdax began a soft song of praise, a thanksgiving for her life, for the life of Night Man’s child, for Ghaden and for Yaa. For her husband and his family.
Suddenly, Biter’s ears pricked forward. He whined, laid the hare carcass on the ground, set one of his front feet on it, then barked.
Aqamdax slipped her knife from its scabbard and crouched beside the dog, clasped a hand over his muzzle to quiet him. She waited, then heard someone call her name. “You will let me have this?” she asked Biter and reached for the hare.
He lifted his foot, and she took it slowly, slipped it into the carrying bag slung from her shoulder. Biter gave her one backward glance and began to run. She followed him, then saw them, all of them—Chakliux and Sok, Red Leaf and Snow-in-her-hair, Cries-loud and Day Woman, last, her voice rising above all the others, old Ligige’.
“We have come with my brother,” Sok called out. “We hear there is a village near that needs hunters.”
Aqamdax allowed her eyes to meet Chakliux’s, a long look of joy and welcome. She called Biter to her, then waited as the others passed, greeted them as they greeted her, though Red Leaf said nothing, only walked by, her hands cradled over her belly.
Aqamdax joined Ligige’, last in line. “I am glad you chose to come, Aunt,” she told her, “but even with Sok and Chakliux, we have only five strong men to hunt for us.”
“Ah, child,” Ligige’ told her, “Perhaps we have only five hunters, but how many villages have two storytellers? You and Chakliux will help us forget our bellies. Your stories will give us strength for what we must endure, and remind us that life is sacred and the earth is good.”
Author’s Notes
PERHAPS THE GREATEST GIFT that any novel can bestow is when, under the guise of entertainment, it allows the reader to defy the boundaries of time and space and live the lives of its characters. This transliteration of the reader’s inner vision offers an incredible possibility: a mind open to new understanding.
When we step away from ourselves and see through the eyes of another, we are blessed not only with a vision different than our own but also with a more accurate portrait of ourselves, of our political and social environs, and the preconceptions that color our thinking.
While I make no claim that Song of the River will be able to do that for its readers, during the research and writing of this novel I found that I developed a better understanding of the human weaknesses which precipitate war, the prejudices we use for justification and the devastation that can be brought about by hatred.
Even when war is reduced to the fundamental level of intervillage conflict, traditions of prejudice and mythologies of superiority are used to justify elitist and even vastly deviant behavior. In both primitive and complex societies, material comfort has a tendency to camouflage the most destructive of social ills, not those that deny us wealth and leisure but those which strike at the most basic and vital level of our existence: our souls, our consciences—the very things which make us human.
Although there is general consensus that the ancestors of the present-day Aleut people lived on the Aleutian Archipelago thousands of years ago, archaeologists, anthropologists and ethnologists disagree as to the identity of the descendants of the Denali Complex people, those users of microblades who also lived in Alaska thousands of years ago.
Though novelists are allowed freedoms not given to scientific researchers, please be assured that my speculation has been tempered by research into many North American and Asian aboriginal cultures, both prehistoric and historic, including Aleut, Diuktai, Nenana, Denali, Denbigh, Yup’ik, Athabascan, Cree, Eyak, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Haida, Kwakiutl, Nootka, Koryak, Even, Chukchi, Itelmen, and Yakut.
I have long believed that one of the best ways to learn about a people is through their language. In Song of the River, I include a number of Native words, most from the Aleut and Ahtna Athabaskan languages, with spellings as standardized in the Aleut Dictionary, Unangam Tunudgusii, compiled by Knut Bergsland, and the Ahtna Athabaskan Dictionary, compiled and edited by James Kari. Both dictionaries are published by the Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
Those readers familiar with my first three novels—Mother Earth Father Sky, My Sister the Moon and Brother Wind—and the Aleut words used in those texts will notice minor changes in spelling. When I wrote Mother Earth Father Sky and its sequels, Bergsland’s fine dictionary (published in 1994) was not available to me, and so I used a variety of sources for Aleut words. Because I believe Bergsland’s dictionary is and will continue to be lauded as the definitive lexicon of the Aleut language, I use his spellings in Song of the River.
My decision to use an Athabascan language for the River People was not merely by whim, but because Athabascan peoples of Alaska evolved a riparian culture and also hunt caribou, bear and various smaller animals and birds.
The Athabascan language family is comprised of some thirty-five languages spoken in Alaska, Canada and the southwestern and western United States. At the time of the publication of this novel, fewer than one hundred people, most over the age of fifty, speak Ahtna Athabascan, though there are more than one thousand people living who are of Ahtna descent.
Through Song of the River and my other novels, I hope to engender an awareness of the treasure inherent in North American Native languages, and to that end, I ask that the reader accept the Native words in this novel, not with irritation or in resignation, but with contemplative wonder and joy.
The riddles in this novel are based on the riddles of one of the northernmost Athabascan peoples, the Koyukon. Each riddle, however, is an origina
l, none copied from any known Koyukon riddle, in recognition and respect of ownership rights.
(For those readers who are admirers of the oddities and possibilities of language: in Chakliux’s riddle as presented in chapter eight [“Look! What do I see? It runs far, singing, and Sok’s is the first to fill its mouth with meat.” Answer: Sok’s spear], the Ahtna word for a bone-tipped, birch-shafted caribou or bear spear is c’izaeggi, from the root zaek, much similar to zaek’, which means “voice” or “spit,” and also to the word zaa, which means “mouth.” In addition to posing a riddle, Chakliux is also making a pun, thus giving an added dimension to the unraveling.)
Two last comments: many Athabascan hunters will not use dogs to take bears. They consider such hunting an insult to the bear. Second, please do not confuse the disdain some of my characters carry for fishskin baskets to be a reflection of my own preferences. These references are meant only to illustrate the small prejudices that color our lives. Fishskin baskets, examples of which may be seen in many of Alaska’s fine museums, are incredible examples of the beauty, variety and ingenuity of items produced by Native peoples.
Glossary of Native American Words
AQAMDAX (Aleut) Cloudberry, Rubus chamaemorus. (See Pharmacognosia.)
AYAGAX (Aleut) Wife.
BABICHE (English—probably anglicized from the Cree word assababish, a diminutive of assabab, “thread”) Lacing made from rawhide.
BITAALA' (Ahtna Athabascan) A foot-long organ located between the stomach and liver in the black bear. Among the Ahtna, it is considered taboo for anyone except the elders to eat the bitaala’.
CEN (Ahtna Athabascan) Tundra.
CET’AENI (Ahtna Athabascan) Creatures of ancient Ahtna legend. They are tailed and live in trees and caves.
CHAGAK (Aleut) Obsidian, red cedar.
CHAKLIUX (Ahtna Athabascan, as recorded by Pinart in 1872) Sea otter.
