Hunters and Gatherers

by Francine Prose

  Martha couldn’t imagine joining the other women. Instead, she picked the bites on her ankles till they erupted in bright dots of blood, and wallowed in a deep trough of isolation and sorrow, which she deepened, experimentally, with painful thoughts of Dennis: the muscles rippling in his back as he got out of bed in the morning. Once more Martha was alone, a shivering spectator at a rink crowded with happy skaters: normal people falling in love, getting married, having children, gathering to drum in the dawn and worship a kindly beneficent Goddess.

  The other bedsprings squealed, and Martha stiffened with anxiety until she heard Titania say, “Mother of God. What’s the racket?”

  “They’re drumming the dawn in,” Martha said.

  “Horseshit,” said Titania.

  So Martha wasn’t the only one not taking part in the drumming! The fact of Titania’s presence—or really, that Martha wasn’t alone—filled Martha with an irrational glow of optimism and well-being.

  By the time Martha and Titania went outside, the drumming session had ended. They found the women in the ramada, settling in for another of Rita’s lectures.

  “Today on our medicine walk,” Rita said, “we will learn desert ways.”

  “Excuse me? Did we miss breakfast?” Titania asked.

  Joy said, “No. Get this. We’re fasting. In preparation for the vision quest tomorrow. I could personally go for two eggs over and hash browns and take a miss on the visit from Little Sister Bunny Rabbit.”

  “Maybe it’s better this way,” said Bernie. “I don’t know how many more roadkill meals I could handle.”

  “Two more, I think,” said Diana. “We get lunch today and then nothing, fasting till tomorrow evening. Then a feast so we can stuff ourselves before we go into the desert, to make sure we have enough protein and don’t faint and sue them, even though for the Native people the solo vision quest was about fasting—”

  “Would you quit it, Diana?” said Joy. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you? You’d love to turn every one of us into a world-class anorexic.”

  “Not eating should be a choice,” Bernie said. “We should honor Diana’s decision but be free to make our own—”

  “Are you ladies finished?” asked Rita.

  “Sorry,” Diana mumbled.

  Joy said, “Can you believe this?”

  Rita said, “Going into the desert is like going to see our family. Because we are related to everything—the prairie dogs, the rattlesnakes, the little creepy crawlers.”

  “My,” said Titania, “she’s pathologically obsessed with little creepy crawlers.”

  Isis sat near Rita, gazing at her adoringly. Well, there was no telling how hallucinating a giant friendly jaguar might alter one’s point of view. Wasn’t Isis’s life a testament to the transformative power of vision?

  Starling, Bernie, Freya, and Hegwitha still hoped to meet their jaguars and so were willing to give Rita the benefit of the doubt. They sat up front with Isis and mirrored her worshipful look. Joy, Diana, Titania, Sonoma, and Martha sat slightly farther back. But when Rita said, “Don’t be strangers, sisters,” the holdouts moved forward and the acolytes made room.

  “This morning,” Rita continued, “we go for a two-hour walk in our church. Ours is not the white man’s church: a building with a roof and a cross. The Earth our Mother is our church, and every time you walk the earth you enter our temple. Our Asian brothers and sisters remove their shoes to go into their temples, but when we enter our desert church, Native people put on heavy boots—if they know what’s good for them.” Rita lifted one columnar blue-jeaned leg to display a cracked, dusty work boot. “Everybody got strong shoes?”

  “Yes,” said Bernie, and the women raised their booted feet.

  Rita put her hands on her thighs and pressed herself out of her chair. The others picked up knapsacks, canteens, and walking sticks. Weren’t they somewhat overprepared for a two-hour hike? Maybe this was just their way of dealing with the unknown. Martha had brought a small water jug that had come with the bike she’d had in the city; she’d kept it as a memento after the bike was stolen. The canteen fit in her purse, which she’d taken when she left her cabin. She knew it was an uptight, distrustful New York thing to do, but something about Scotty made her want her cash and credit cards with her.

  Bowing her head, Rita asked our Mother the Earth to share her medicine with her New York sisters. Then she set off toward the same trail that Martha had taken yesterday afternoon.

  The desert was less lovely with other people blocking the view, but the compensation was that Rita strode confidently past the point at which Martha had panicked and quit. Rita paused for impromptu botany lessons about various cacti and other plants.

  Holding up a branch, Rita asked, “What is this, ladies?”

  “What ih-iz a branch?” Sonoma said.

  “Wrong,” Rita said. “When Native people look at this, they see a part of a tree. You know the difference between a branch and part of a tree? We see everything as connected to everything else in creation, and it all teaches us secrets about medicine and health. Native people were the first to extract aspirin from a branch like this one.”

  “That one?” asked Hegwitha.

  “Like this one,” Rita said.

  Martha kept catching up and then falling behind and growing more sullen, just as she had on nature walks with her grade school classes. Anyone might think that children would be glad to get out in the air, but Martha recalled feeling put-upon and insulted when teachers bullied them into inspecting the dirt and trees. The only thing the children had cared about was who was walking with whom; the boys and girls were like baby bats, operating on sonar, not looking but acutely aware of where the other sex was. Those nature walks had simmered with repressed sexual tension. If the teacher had known to study that, she might have learned about nature, too.

  Rita kept pointing out especially large or oddly shaped giant saguaro cacti. She said, “Native people believe saguaros are magic creatures. Some say they are our ancestors—or visitors from outer space. If you stand between the arms of a saguaro cactus—not the kind that grow straight up, but the ones that put their arms out and circle them around you—you will hear strange noises. And we say that the cactus arms are talking to each other.”

  Giggling uneasily, the women took turns standing between the arms of a huge two-pronged cactus and closing their eyes and listening. Some gave it longer than others, their faces contorted with effort, but even the most suggestible women wore silly smiles of bewildered relief as they scurried away and gave the next woman a turn. No one was saying whether or not she’d heard the cactus speak, or what she’d overheard.

  Sonoma spent a surprisingly long time between the cactus arms, with her eyes scrunched shut and her cheeks puffed out, as if blowing up a balloon. Finally, she shook her head and sneered in disbelief.

  By the time it was Martha’s turn, the others had all moved on, thus saving her the embarrassment of public ritual eavesdropping on cactus conversation.

  Now Rita was talking about harvesting plants in accordance with time-honored ritual, and how living green things would save you if you got lost—provided you respected their spirits. She showed them water-bearing stems, plants with edible buds, poisonous plants identical to ones that were nourishing and delicious.

  It was dawning on Martha that she might really be expected to spend two days alone in the desert. Yesterday she’d got frightened hiking up not even this far. She would have to find a way to avoid the vision quest without losing face completely.

  Rita was talking about how many of her neighbors’ lives were saved by their knowledge of roots and herbs. How strange that so many people should have got lost and had to subsist on prickly pears! If Martha was pressured into going alone, she would stay in sight of the cabins and hide and pretend that she’d gone farther.

  The desert shimmered so prettily in the silvery light that it was hard to imagine Brother Rattlesnake sleeping fitfully under a rock. But Rita could
hardly get out a sentence without mentioning Brother Scorpion, Sister Black Widow Spider, and other members of their extended creepy-crawler family. Was Rita just a worrier, or was she trying to make her world seem like a minefield that they needed her to guide them through? Rita said that many tribes believed in the spiritual benefits of fear; your journey would go faster if you started it in terror.

  The morning was cool, the air fragrant and pleasant. Martha began enjoying the hike. The women goggled admiringly as Rita named the desert plants, some of which cured diseases like dropping sickness and centipede fever, so now they knew what tea to brew if that was their diagnosis. Rita showed them a hive of honeybees living in a rock, guarding the entrance to their cave like a battalion of fuzzy helicopters, and listed twenty different kinds of honey that her people knew how to make.

  “Gosh,” said Bernie. But what impressed Martha was that Rita had found this hive in the vast expanse of desert, which did seem to indicate that she knew where she was going.

  The hike proceeded without incident, except for one bad moment when Rita unwrapped a stick of gum and tossed the wrapper onto the ground. Appalled, the women watched the wadded-up silver foil and green paper tumble like sagebrush over the sand.

  Otherwise, the walk went so pleasurably and quickly that they were shocked to discover that Rita had brought them full circle back to the camp. They laughed when they came over the hill and saw the trailer and the cabins.

  Hurrying ahead, Rita disappeared into the trailer, from which she emerged with a pail of ice and individual bottles of Gatorade. Rita held up a jar of purple liquid and said, “Native healers have understood for centuries what white doctors know only now about replacing fluid electrolytes.”

  The women’s brief resistance was less about the drink’s toxic color than about their disappointment at not being offered some organic bark infusion. But they overcame their reluctance and fell on the Gatorade, which Martha had never tasted, and which hardly had a taste: cold liquefied grape candy.

  As the women sat at the picnic table, swigging their fluid electrolytes, Rita asked how they’d enjoyed the walk.

  “It was so beautiful,” Isis said, and the others nodded.

  Diana said, “I feel I got centered just from that practice hike. I can’t wait till it’s time to go out on our solos.”

  Rita rolled her eyes. “Later we will talk about vision quest. Now we are talking about desert walk.” She asked if any of the women had questions from the walk. “But don’t expect me to answer. Folks are always disappointed when they think I have answers. But it’s good to say our questions out loud and counsel together about them.”

  Hegwitha timidly raised her hand. “I’m interested in healing? And in what you said about herbs? Do indigenous people know ways of curing…the life-threatening illnesses that more and more people seem to be getting these days?”

  “For every disease,” said Rita, “there is an herb that will cure it.”

  “Cancer?” Hegwitha asked.

  “Naturally,” Rita said.

  “Then if the Native people know it,” said Hegwitha, “why aren’t they sharing that knowledge with—”

  Rita cut her off. “Because no cure is as simple as the right herb and the right dosage. There are reasons we get ill, things we think and say and do, ways we get out of alignment with the Earth, our Mother.”

  Everyone watched anxiously to see how Isis would deal with the fact that Rita was contradicting what she always said: Hegwitha hadn’t caused her illness. Isis stared at Rita, oblivious to the others’ stares.

  Finally Joy said, “I have a question about something that happened on our walk. I’m sorry to bring this up, but as a group we’re pretty conscious…No matter where we go, we try not to impact on our surroundings. But we saw you throw out that gum wrapper, and I can’t help wondering how that fits in with respecting the Earth, our Mother.”

  Rita looked at Joy as if at a creepy crawler—put off but grimly determined to honor its repulsive tiny spirit. She said, “The Earth Mother will heal herself. She is woman, giver of life. She isn’t finished with us yet. She will make her changes, do her shifting. Oh, yes. She will heal herself.”

  “In a rat’s ass,” mumbled Joy.

  “Rita’s insane,” whispered Titania.

  “And now,” Rita said, “we will talk about the sweat lodge. Tonight we will counsel with the Great Spirit and the powers of the four directions. We will gather rocks for our altar and willow for our fire, and strip naked to rid ourselves of the white man’s negativity. We will enter our sweat lodge and ask the Great Spirit for healing visions and guidance.”

  Rita smiled regretfully and after a moment cleared her throat. “This is a difficult subject that has caused many problems for my white sisters. But there are rules from the time of the ancients that Native people respect. One is that we ask our sisters who are having their time of month not to come and sweat with us because it is not the Great Spirit way.”

  “And why not, may I ask?” said Joy.

  “Because,” Rita explained, “we believe that at a woman’s moon time, the Great Spirit is helping her eliminate poisons and negativity, and she should be off by herself for a personal ceremony alone with Mother Earth.”

  “Hear, hear!” cried Diana.

  Sonoma gave her a withering look.

  From the beginning, Martha had hated the prospect of being shut in with the others, naked. Her hesitance was partly from modesty and partly from fear that her body would cave in at a heat that hardly bothered anyone else. While they were merrily chanting and seeing lions and jaguars, she would be off, unnoticed, suffocating and dying.

  Rita said, “I’d like the sisters who are having their moon time to please raise their hands.”

  Rita was providing the perfect excuse, the ready-made escape. Martha could pretend to be having her period and not have to strip and subject herself to the heart-stopping heat. And yet she couldn’t raise her hand. She was sure she would be found out, and besides, it seemed unlucky, like getting out of something by pretending you were sick. It was irritating after all these years to still have to fake your period, just as you did in high school to be excused from gym or swimming, on those rare days when your hair looked good and you didn’t want to ruin it.

  None of the women lifted a hand. Martha was surprised. Even if Titania and Bernie were past menopause, the rest of the women were still menstruating, and the odds were that one was now.

  Rita said, “Are we sure? There are no secrets in the sweat. Nothing can be hidden. Not even a tampon string!”

  “Ugh, gross,” said Sonoma.

  “Rita,” said Diana. “I’m glad you brought this up. Because our little sister Sonoma has recently come into her moon time, and I know that there are traditional rites that Native women do to mark this passage.”

  “Yes, there are,” said Rita, warming to the subject and to the fact that Diana seemed to be on her side. She must have encountered plenty of menstruating women who resented missing ceremonies they’d paid good money to take part in.

  “In some tribes a girl goes off to a special house called the moon lodge. She puts a deerskin over her head and asks the spirit of the sun to help her be reborn. After ten days the other women join her and sing ancient songs. The girl prays to be purified and promises that all her life, until her moon time stops, she will spend ten days a month renewing herself in the moon lodge.”

  “Ten days a month!” said Bernie. “Most Anglo women are still fighting for maternity leave.”

  “It’s like maternity leave,” Rita said. “Necessary for health. Many cases of female sickness, tumors, and infertility result from women skipping their moon-time ceremony.”

  “Hear that?” Diana asked Sonoma.

  “Stop it, please,” said Freya. “Diana, I’m tired of you telling my daughter to go out in the desert! You do it if you want to—but leave Sonoma alone! It’s sick, your pressuring a child into getting lost or killed.”

  “Well!
” Titania said. “The maternal instinct asserting itself! Who would have suspected, Freya?”

  “What do you mean?” Freya turned on her. “Just because you drove your daughter into the arms of the Moonies…”

  “Oh, dear,” said Isis, laughing. “What is this? The feminist Goddess-worshipping Lord of the Flies?”

  “All right,” said Rita, “if there are no more questions, we’ll break for lunch.”

  Lunch was baked beans from an institutional-sized can, heated lukewarm over the fire, and a stew of slimy okra and gummy cornbread pillows. Rita called it pozole: an ancient recipe from her Aztec brothers and sisters.

  Martha chewed the yellowish squares that wadded up in her mouth. Tucking a soggy mass into the pocket of her cheek, she brooded on the gnocchi dinner that marked the end of her romance with Dennis. She’d felt that everyone in the restaurant knew what Dennis was saying, that the insinuating young waiters were enjoying every minute and left the accusing plate of gnocchi before her long after it was obvious that she wouldn’t be able to eat it.

  “After lunch,” Rita said, “you may take time to meditate or walk and get in touch with the Earth Spirit. But, please, ladies, no more food till tomorrow night. We are fasting for our sweat.”

  More food? Where would they find it? Did Rita mean prickly pears?

  “At five,” said Rita, “we will regroup to find stones for our sacred fire.”

  INSIDE THE COOL DIM cabin, Titania was in bed, propped against the thin pillow, reading Middlemarch.

  “My idea of heaven,” she said. “Forget the happy hunting ground. This is like a cruise or mountain vacation or being sick as a kid. There’s nowhere I can go, nowhere I have to be, no way anyone can reach me, nothing to do besides stay in this room and read this terrific novel.”

  Martha was shocked to realize that she hadn’t brought a book. There were times when she’d traveled with a library for fear of having nothing to read. Had Mode destroyed her pleasure in the written word, turned each sentence into a slippery eel that had to be chased down and dissected? A stab of covetousness for Titania’s copy of Middlemarch made her long to grab it and escape to that verdant English village.