We paddled down the creek and out into the river, floating downstream along with the current. I was surprised at how fast we moved. It made me a little nervous. The river was deep and wide downstream of the village, and we paddled long enough that I thought we must be nearly to Ohanoak before Memeo finally gave the word to turn back upstream. As we slowly turned the canoe around and passed close by the riverbank, I noticed how the trees along the bank seemed to reach out toward us, almost straining to reach the water with their branches. I hoped we wouldn’t become tangled up in one of them. Small birds darted among the branches and mosses trailed down into the water. Once we were facing into current, it slowed us down a little so that it took longer to paddle back upstream, but I must admit I liked the slower pace because the canoe seemed steadier and less apt to overturn.
The best thing about moving more slowly, however, was the longer time to watch the fish in the deep, clear water. Sturgeon, which our tribe called coppáuseo, were easily my favorites. They were the biggest fish in the river, some of them half the length of the big canoe and twice as long as a man. On their backs were thick, bony scutes. In our village, we used the scutes as decorations or as hide scrapers. They swam slowly along, sweeping their massive bodies back and forth, always facing into the slight current, and sometimes poked the tips of their strange snouts up above the water’s dark surface. Their slow, gentle movements gave the impression of a dance as they weaved back and forth, up or down, always to a rhythm that seemed to emerge from within the river itself. The river whispered a gentle song, calling softly to me. I never saw the giants crash into each other, as one might expect from such gargantuan beasts; instead they seemed to flow as the river flowed, elegant in their immensity. The biggest had to be ancient animals, the elders of their tribe.
I swayed sympathetically as I watched them, holding my breath the way they seemed to, and was startled back into awareness when I heard Tetepano, just behind me in the canoe, softly whisper, “Wake up, Skyco.”
When we finally reached our village, Ascopo and Kaiauk chattered about the new canoe, how it handled well, and how many fish they would be able to catch from it. They kept trying to get me to join in, but I was thinking about the coppáuseo and the dance of the river.
At the landing place on the riverbank, where the dark river water slowly shoaled onto white sand, many of the other villagers gathered to see the return of the new canoe. Chaham, who loved to fish, was the first to call out with his youthful exuberance, “Where is Roncommock? Can we bless this canoe now and go fishing in it tomorrow?”
“Don’t be so impatient, Chaham,” Roncommock replied as he appeared from among the throng of villagers on the riverbank. “Why are you in such a hurry to go fishing?”
Manchauemec, another great angler who was never far from Chaham, spoke up before Chaham could reply.
“Roncommock, you know that it is time for us to take a group out to the sandy banks and fish in the saltier waters. Striped bass—mesickek—will enter the inlets there and start their runs inshore and we will follow them. It is time.”
“Yes, Manchauemec, it is time. Tonight we will celebrate the new canoe and tomorrow you can prepare for a trip to the sandy banks. Come to my wigwam after you have finished here. I need to speak with you about the expedition.”
The crowd parted and let Roncommock through, but quickly coalesced again around the paddlers, everyone babbling now about the celebration tonight and the upcoming trip. A trip to the sandy banks! Kaiauk was hopping around with excitement and talking animatedly with Chaham, who was just a little older than he. The men went every spring and occasionally at other seasons. Children and women stayed in the home village, but sometimes they took boys my age, who had begun their training but not yet completed it or been husquenaughed. Ascopo would likely be part of the trip since he helped carve the canoe. Would I? I padded quickly along to Roncommock’s wigwam and found him sitting by the fire inside.
As I entered the wigwam, Roncommock looked up with a slight smile on his face. “Did you enjoy the paddle on the river in the new canoe, Skyco?”
“It was wonderful, Roncommock,” I replied, beaming. “We saw more coppáuseo than I have fingers on both hands, and all of them were longer than a man is tall. They are impressive beasts, and they swim as if they were dancing.”
“What else did you see?”
“Tiny, pale, green leaves of both the giant rakiock trees and cypress were just emerging, barely beginning to cloak the dark limbs in greenery. Long, grey mosses hung down to touch the black water, enhancing the impression that the huge trees were elders with grey hair. The magnificent trees and enormous fish must be ancient, the elders of their tribes. They deserve our respect. A small, energetic, yellow bird with a big voice was calling again and again from a limb that branched and bent slightly toward the water like the fingers on a skeletal hand.”
“Is that all you heard, Skyco?” he asked, as if he already knew.
“I heard the song of the river. It called to me. Was it the spirits, Roncommock?”
“Yes, Skyco. Do you think you are ready for them?”
“I think so, but I feel anxious, too. Even while the river sang to me I could imagine the great blue ocean and the tall sandy banks. I have heard the men describe these things, but this felt different. I need to see them myself.”
“Then it is time for you to go, Skyco. But first you should learn a little bit about being a fish. Come sit down beside me.” With those words, Roncommock opened his medicine pouch and added a pinch of his special mixture of sacred uppówoc and other herbs to the fire.
I Am a Fish
Although a moment ago I sat close beside Roncommock, inside the warm wigwam and next to the fire, I suddenly realized that I was no longer warm. Neither did I feel cold. The temperature felt just right. I saw many rounded rocks below me and, as I somehow hovered over them, their patterns grabbed my attention. Some rocks were black with white stripes, some brown with darker swirls in them, many were grey with wavy streaks of white curls. Then I saw a dark grey rock that contained small, red jewels of pebbles, and I tilted over to take a closer look.
How did I do that? I was looking at the rock, but yet was somehow above it. I looked around for Roncommock. Where was he? I saw a shadowy cave over beyond the rocks with something moving in it. What was that? Could it be a bear or cougar stalking me? But then the dark shape moved out from the shadows and into the sunlight where I could clearly see it. It was a largemouth bass. I must be a fish!
Now I understood. Up above me glowed the shimmering, silvery surface and the rocks I examined formed the river bottom. I floated in between. I looked back at the big bass as it moved toward me. Suddenly I panicked. How could I breathe underwater? I shot up toward the surface and took a gulp of air, but it hurt. Something was wrong. Then I heard Roncommock in my mind, telling me to relax.
“You are a fish, a bass like me,” he said. “Calm down. Feel your gills working for you. There is no need to breathe. Your gills will extract the oxygen from the water for you. Feel it. I am here with you now in the bass beside you. I required a moment for my own mind to locate a fish and join you, but you nearly leaped out of the water before I arrived.”
I stopped struggling and drifted down next to him. I felt the water flow over my gills. I squeezed the muscles in my throat and felt my gill flaps open. Almost immediately, a sense of well-being poured over me.
“The oxygen,” Roncommock began, “is flowing through your blood now. Feeling better?”
“Yes,” I answered him as our minds touched.
“Now keep calm and connect with your body. Feel how it responds to this new element. It will feel different from the ant, closer to your own form, and that familiarity caused your panic. Like the ant, however, this fish body will perform all the necessary life functions if you allow it to do so.”
I noticed a slight pressure along my head as I faced int
o the current. My tail automatically gave a little push to move me forward. Arms and legs still seemed to be in the right places, but they were fins instead, and I moved them slightly to better orient myself in the water.
“Roncommock,” I queried him, “why don’t I feel cool in the water? I feel neither warm nor cool, just right. But when I was still me, I mean, still human, sitting beside the fire, I was too warm. Now the temperature feels just right. Why is that?”
“Now that you are a fish, your body temperature is determined by your surroundings. As a human, you made your own heat instead. When the temperature of the air dropped, you felt cold, and then you might shiver or move to generate more heat from within. Or, when you sat by a fire that was warmer than your body, you felt warm, so you sweated to cool yourself or moved away from the fire to a cooler spot. As a fish, your body temperature is always the same as that of the water, so you don’t notice any difference. You can’t tell whether you are cold or hot.”
I thought about that for a minute, and Roncommock entered my mind again.
“Let’s swim!” he said. “We are fish, and fish swim!” He darted upstream and I followed. Without thinking too much about it, I just flexed my tail and shot forward. My arms, which were now my forward fins, automatically helped me balance. I came to rest to the right of him in a deep pool of water. Just before he dashed off to another pool, I felt a strange itching sensation along my left side. The whole length of my body, from just behind my gill flap, which used to be my neck, all the way down my body onto my tail, felt like an itchy feather had been drawn along my skin. I swam after him and caught him in the next pool.
“What was that weird itch? When you took off, the side of me that was next to you felt strange. I didn’t feel anything like this at all when I was an ant. What was it?”
“It is the lateral line of a fish, a sensory organ unlike anything a human has. Fish use it to detect pressure waves in the water the same way that ears detect pressure waves in air.”
“You mean I could hear you start to swim?”
“No, I’d say you felt it, wouldn’t you?” Roncommock seemed to smile at me even though his fish face was more of a pucker than a smile. “You felt the water pressure wave I generated as I thrust my tail and darted forward. This ability to sense the movement of others helps fish stay together in a school and warns them of a hungry predator’s approach.”
“Hey, this is interesting. What else can we do?”
“Try this. Swim with me and tell me when you notice a different odor to the water.” We took off, swimming faster than before, but still moving upstream. As we passed the roots of a big tree, which created dark overhangs and swirling eddies in the current, I noticed that water was flowing from two directions, one still straight ahead, but another one pushing me from the right side. My lateral line was tingling again.
“I want to go this way. There is less force of water on me from that direction. And my nose tells me that it smells better somehow than the main stream does.”
“That’s it!” Roncommock said to me. “You feel and smell the water from your home stream. Its headwaters are where these bass hosts hatched and first swam as tiny fry. The waters flowing downstream should smell better to you than any other stream. You can smell your home.”
Roncommock paused and we both looked toward the smaller stream. I had to turn my body to see the stream, and realized I was looking at it with one eye while my other eye was looking across at the other side of the stream. I moved back and forth a few times, finally understanding that I could never see the same image with both eyes simultaneously, just one or the other.
“Your eyes are on the sides of your head, not in front anymore. You can see both sides of the stream, a large area, but not directly in front of you,” Roncommock said, sensing my struggle.
“Then how am I able to see where I am going? That seems like a problem, Roncommock!”
“Just swim, as you were doing before. You’ll see.”
And I did. As I swam, the slight side-to-side wobble of my undulating body allowed me to see the world in front. I even had a pretty good view behind me. From nearly all directions, I had a great view of the waterscape and other animals, including food and approaching predators, but less acuity directly in front or behind.
“Time for lunch,” said Roncommock. “Watch me hunt and then you try it.” I did as he told me, watching as he slowly swam upstream, pausing beside a jumble of sticks and tree roots that stuck out from the bank. Suddenly, he shot forward and grabbed a tiny stick, then backed up, pulling out a stonefly nymph by its long antenna. It wiggled like a tiny wood roach. He flipped it forward, then snapped it up and swallowed it. “Mmmm. Now you try.”
I looked, but couldn’t see anything hiding amongst the debris. After a few moments, I impatiently asked Roncommock if he could see anything.
“You are moving too fast and not paying attention!” he said. “Slow down. If you create too much water movement, the prey can feel you coming. Move slowly and watch for the tiniest protrusion of an antenna.”
Slowing down and moving more gently so that I barely advanced upstream, I began to notice little extensions of legs and antennae sticking out from behind the wooden debris. There was a lot of prey here, which I hadn’t seen before. I selected an antenna that looked particularly thick and juicy, grabbed it with my mouth, and backed up. Out came a very angry crawfish, or anshaham, waving its big claws around while I hung onto one of its antennae. It kept flipping its abdomen as it tried to escape, but just as I let go so that I could turn it around to eat it, it grabbed my lower lip with a pincer and squeezed hard. My mouth shot open and I yelped, or tried to. No sound came out, but the anshaham knew what it was doing, let go with its claw, and dropped back down to the streambed. Before I knew what was happening, it shot backward with a flip of its tail and disappeared from sight into one of the many crevices along the bank.
“You’ll be hungry if that is the best you can do!”
I tried glaring at Roncommock, but without eyebrows, it just didn’t work, so I decided that the best response to his criticism was to catch prey like a natural-born fish. This time, I chose a smaller antenna and pulled out a mayfly nymph, an insect flattened from top to bottom so that it fits into narrow crevices. I had no problem flipping that flat morsel into my mouth and crunching it up. It was as crispy as grilled fish skin and as sweet as a roasted chestnut. Delicious!
“So, this time, Roncommock, we are both largemouth bass,” I stated with certainty.
“Yes, we are freshwater relatives of the big striped bass, or mesickek, that you will fish for when you go with the men to the big eastern sound.”
“We are here in the Chowan River, then?”
“Yes. I do not have the power to take you far from your human body. There are largemouth bass in the river here by our village, along with many other fish, but the largemouth are most similar to the mesickek. Learn from the largemouth bass and you will understand the mesickek and the spot-tailed bass that you will catch as a human.”
Spot-tailed bass, which our tribe calls chigwusso, are as big as mesickek, both reaching a size near that of a grown man. Chigwusso are reddish in color and have dark spots near their tail fins. Mesickek are silvery with dark stripes from their heads to their tails. Both prefer the brackish water of the eastern sound, but the Chowan near our village was freshwater.
We swam out into the river together, down near the bottom where the current was stronger. I felt a big fish approaching us and moved in closer to Roncommock.
“You feel that?” he asked me. “You sense the approach of another?”
“A big one,” I said. “Will it try to eat us?”
“You are a predator here, Skyco. The largemouth bass eats smaller fish in addition to other prey such as the mayfly you just consumed, and the small fish are afraid of you. However, you should keep in mind that there is always another
fish that is bigger than you and that fish might be your nemesis. Be at ease, though, for what approaches is a sturgeon—a coppáuseo—and despite its large size, it is not a predator of large fish.”
“What do they eat, then?”
“Watch and learn, Skyco.”
I held my questions and just watched while an enormous, greyish body emerged from the gloom of the river bottom. It was indeed one of the coppáuseo I had seen earlier in the day, when I was canoeing as a human boy. It moved slowly upstream, and it frequently dug down into the bottom sediment with its strange, elongated nose with ropey feelers, sucking up small insects and worms into its mouth from underneath the pebbles it dislodged. Once it moved over a mussel, and I saw its tube-like mouth extend downward in order to engulf the mussel. The big fish cracked the mussel’s shell and worked it around in its mouth, spitting out a few large shell fragments but swallowing the rest.
“This huge fish eats the smallest animals?” I asked Roncommock incredulously.
“Yes. That is why we have nothing to fear from this creature. But smaller fish fear us. Now let us see if you can catch one.” Roncommock moved off ahead of me and I followed. “Slowly, now, Skyco. Use your new senses to find minnows and other small fish. Remember that they can sense you, too, especially any quick movements you might make.”
We cruised slowly along, near the edge of the riverbank now. I could feel the tingling along my side whenever a small fish darted away. I began to understand what they felt like and sensed where they were located when they moved.
Spirit Quest Page 7
