Hunting the Ghost Dancer

by A. A. Attanasio

  "The plants there are less familiar."

  "Exactly. Here, we know these pink blossoms, the mushrooms that grow nearby, and the animals that favor this shrub. There, we know nothing. It is the same with our wandering. With the Mothers—of any tribe—we will recognize the ways. Out here in the taiga, less and less is familiar, more and more we are in jeopardy of eating a deadly plant, disturbing a hungry beast. We need the protection of the Mother. As women we need Her, so that what children we bear will have protection and provision."

  Duru laid a small hand on Cyndell's knee, wanting the older women to feel her understanding. "Everything you say is true, Mother Cyndell. For now, I'm too young to bear children. This is a good time for me to follow my husband, wherever he may lead me."

  "Why, Duru?" Cyndell felt a burst of anger and restrained herself. "Hamr is not your choice. Why let the dead choose for you?"

  The child's face flinched with pain at the memory of Aradia. She had seen her die through the heat of her fever, and the image of her sister in the delirium of the flames always shimmered in her blood, an inch behind her eyes. "Hamr is all I have left of Aradia. He is the best of the men. That's why she chose him. She always had the best."

  "Still, he is only a man. Only a man, Duru. You must think of the Mother. He won't."

  The rain had faded to soft mist. Duru dropped the rope she had been twisting nervously and stepped out into chill fragrant air. Nimbus clouds streaked scarlet with dawnlight promised more rain. She headed down toward the thicket, to gather mushrooms.

  Mother, Aradia, Biklo, all dead—the Mothers she knew, gone. Why should she live as a slave? Why should she live at all? The fever should have killed her, as it had killed the others. Why was she alive and the others gone?

  Even now, a moon after those cruel days, the wildness of fever and grief still spun inside her like Hamr's wheel. Far inside her, the chills had departed, tears no longer burned her eyes when she remembered those dear ones she had lost—yet, grief still churned.

  With Hamr, everything had become different, new, unlike all that had gone before. Duru did not want to be with the Mothers of any tribe—ever again. She did not want to be reminded of the good way life had once been, and could nevermore be. She loved Hamr, not just for Aradia but because he had led her here to the taiga, to where summer had an unfamiliar shape and where new memories waited to be made.

  Even Timov, idle and coddled, had become stronger, more alert and useful than he had ever been in the clan. Duru glimpsed in him the creative power of their suffering.

  Mist dewed in her long hair, and her locks garlanded her neck as she bent to pluck white mushrooms from the turf around skinny birch. She put the mushrooms in a woven-grass sack she carried at her hip. When she had enough, she looked up and marveled at this strange land that so disturbed Mother Cyndell.

  Indeed, it looked as though it had fallen from the sky: giant boulders scrabbled with vines teetered above ravines, and everywhere on bluffs and hillocks fir trees glowed with inner darkness. Blind Side would be having a hard time picking his way through this jumbled land.

  Jays swirled around a blue spruce, then burst through the birch thicket with rowdy screams. Something had frightened them from the berry shrubs, where they had been loitering.

  Duru pulled the draw-cord on her foraging sack and backed away, peering among slender trees for what had startled the jays. She hoped to see a civet cat, though she feared to find a panther slinking through the grove. Her skin tightened. Just visible in the shrubs, hyenas appeared. Their blackened visages had already spotted her, and they approached with grinning fangs.

  Shouting to frighten them, Duru looked about for a stick, a rock. Her noise made their grins wider.Thick shoulders, powerful striped legs, and leering muzzles pushed into the light.

  She counted six of them—and noticed their ribbed gutsacks and the pangs of hunger in their tiny eyes.

  With a howl, she swooped and snatched a fallen branch, used both hands to bring it up before her.

  The beasts growled shrilly, advancing. They fixed on her, a creature their size, prey that would not thwart their hunger. Carefully they closed in, each waiting for the other to initiate the attack, eager to follow through and get down to the urgent necessity of feeding.

  Cyndell, busy filling gourds with rain-water, heard Duru's cries, dropped the gourds, and rushed down the slope toward the thicket. The girl backed into view as Cyndell reached the hawthorn arbor, and the older woman observed her fending off something. On the run, she snatched as big a rock as she could lift in one hand.

  The hyenas, assured of their prey's vulnerability, converged swiftly. Duru thrust the branch at them, turned, and ran. The branch slowed the beasts, kept them from a lunging run, and sharpened the rage of their attack. With tails streaming, in full voice, they pursued.

  Cyndell paused in her rush when she confronted hyenas shooting out of the thicket. Their enraged barks iced through her. Here came the doom the Mother had foretold. The pack, gaping fangs, gained on the child and would momentarily pounce on her.

  Crazed with terror, Cyndell screamed and threw herself forward. The slant of the land flung her faster than her feet could move, and she fell, rolled in a flail of arms and hair, cursing herself for failing the child, then leaped to her feet.

  The hyenas fanned out and narrowed in from the sides, to keep Duru from fleeing left or right. As the land rose, her dash slowed, and they followed closer, ready to lunge, two paces behind their prey, black faces frenzied with chase-ferocity. At that moment Cyndell flew screaming down the slope of the bluff.

  The rock she threw thudded off one hyena's back and elicited a hurt yelp that briefly slowed the charge of the others. Cyndell seized Duru's arm and hauled her past, then pushed her up the bluff.

  "Run! Run! Don't look back! Run!"

  The next instant the beasts fell upon Cyndell. One carnivorous jaw clamped her arm and, in a stab of twisting pain, she toppled off balance. Another jaw fastened on her leg.

  She went down in a tangle of sharp, gasping hurts. Immediately the others jumped her, sinking their fangs into her face and throat, tearing at the skin of her torso with hind claws.

  Her blood sprayed; the steamy feel of it, the sweet smell of it, heightened their voracity. Looped in salty entrails, they burrowed their putrid muzzles under ribs for the glisteny liver and quivering heart.

  Screaming her terror, Duru flew up the bluff, past the indifferent boulders where the jays had perched already anticipating what carrion they might pluck. The snarling and snapping from below drove Duru harder than she ever thought she could run. Her breath had left her with her screaming, and she staggered uphill, toward the silver firs, taking in air with wrenching sobs.

  Hamr and Timov had heard Duru's first cries from the high ledge, where they had gone in the hope of spearing one of the goats they had seen the day before. Hamr paused only long enough to loosen the rope that tethered his horse, so Blind Side could pull free if a big cat came. Then he and Timov, spears held low for balance, scurried down the broken landscape.

  Before they found Duru, they spied from their high vantage Cyndell’s body torn among the frenzied beasts. Timov howled his rage. The hyenas did not bother to look up, though they recognized his voice from the day they had lost their elk to him. He cried from too far away. They would eat well before he came close enough to despoil them again.

  Duru had collapsed among pinestraw on the steep grade at the skirt of the Forest. Panting and blind with tears, she clutched at her brother when he lifted her.

  Hamr stood over them, a spear in each fist. The silence of awe in his heart that he had experienced when they had taken the elk had turned to horror.

  Timov rose, left Duru sitting in the pinestraw and started down the slope.

  "Where are you going?" Hamr asked.

  Timov looked back, perplexed that Hamr would have to ask. "To drive them off. Kill one if I can."

  "Leave them be."

  Timov's pe
rplexity narrowed to anger. "That's Mother Cyndell down there. We can't leave her to them."

  "Let them have her meat. She's with the Great Mother now, not with them."

  "Her meat?" Anger flexed in his voice. "You talk of the body that nursed me and Duru. She should be buried."

  "Let the beasts have her," Hamr insisted. "Someday it will be you and me."

  "No," Timov spat back. "That's Mama Cyndell." He turned and hastened down the hillside.

  Hamr shook his head, and let him go. He felt a weak grip on his calf and looked down at Duru.

  "Help him," she said. When he did not move, she added, "I am your wife. A woman of my clan is dead. Bury her."

  Hamr sighed and helped Duru to her feet. "You must wait by the fire, where I can see you."

  After leaving the girl in the hawthorn covert, Hamr continued down the slope, shouting for Timov to wait. The youth already descended the bluff, throwing rocks at the pack. The beasts moved off reluctantly and circled back, heads low, tails tucked.

  "We will bury her where she fell," Hamr said, coming alongside Timov. "You will dig. I will drive off the beasts."

  Timov thanked Hamr with a nod, not daring to meet his gaze, knowing the somber indifference he would face there. Shouting, the men advanced on the feeding hyenas. From among weed-stalks and long grass, crows waiting their turn flapped up into the misty rain like black, answering cries.

  )|(

  When Hamr returned, he gave Cyndell's calendar bracelet to Duru. The girl wept over it while they cleaned up. Then she revived the small fire under the hawthorn trellis.

  If she did not make herself do something, she would turn into a rock. She crumbled dried leaves to powder and struck sparks from her fire-pebble, and the enormity of her aloneness crouched over her.

  Hamr and Timov sat before the fire, soaked with sweat and rain, while Duru told them about the signs Mother Cyndell said she had identified in the Forest.

  "Mother signs. There's a tribe living not far from here."

  "Panther?" Timov asked, hopefully.

  Duru pouted indifferently. "Someone is in the Forest. I'm sure if we look, we will find them."

  Hamr broke a pine bough over his thigh and fed the fire with the resinous wood. "So long as it's not raining, we're safer in the ravines."

  "Not safe enough for Mama Cyndell," Timov said harshly, and stoked the kindling.

  A sob broke through Duru. When her brother put his arm around her, she said, "She gave herself to save me."

  "She's happier now, with the Mother," Timov soothed. "She didn't want to wander like this."

  Duru wept quietly, eyes squeezed shut, face glistening in the orange blaze. "It should have been me."

  Hamr poked at the fire. What do you tell a child? The truth would be: "It was you—that's why you're suffering. Cyndell feels no more pain." Those words would not quite fit his breath, neither would platitudes about Cyndell returning to the Great Mother, nor the peace of lying with the Mudman. Silence alone offered itself, and that made him angry.

  There had to be something with which he could face her tearful anguish. He looked at her. Her child-features squeezed with hurt, and tears flowed freely. Timov, too, wept, leaning against his sister, shoulders jerking.

  Hamr's anger softened. He wished he could cry. Long ago, shortly after his father had died, that power had weakened in him. He had put all his will and energy into making himself strong on the outside, to replenish the loss of his father's power—and to fend off the mockery of others, who thought him a fool for wanting greatness. His body had become strong—his will had become strong—and he had lost that deepest strength that comes only from grief.

  When he thought of Aradia, the softness in his life, who might have made him strong again in his deepest self, he felt rage at those who had killed her—and he felt emptiness. No tears rose in him.

  Yet, certainly, she deserved his tears if anyone did. Spretnak, too, who had taught him to dare for greatness. The relief of tears had never flared in him for those he loved the most. Something darker moved inside when he experienced grief. Somehow he knew: The dead did not need his tears. They soared free. What he felt in himself when he thought of them, what he allowed himself, opened to the hurt of living on.

  Once Duru and Timov had calmed, Hamr said in his softest voice, "Cyndell came with us this far. To turn aside now would waste her death. We must go on. We must find the Panther people."

  "They may be here," Timov said, "in the Forest."

  "Perhaps," Hamr said to the fire, then looked up at the two across from him, "and perhaps not. We dare not gamble with our lives."

  "How far will we go?" Duru asked in a thin voice.

  "As far north as the herds have gone," Hamr answered. "Surely there we will find the great hunters—and among them, the Panther people."

  That afternoon, even though the sky lowered veils of rain, the travelers set out again. Blind Side of Life, happy to follow the herd trail, accepted Duru's weight. She sat easily on the beast, clutching Cyndell's satchel to her chest.

  Ahead, where a stream ran beside the trail, softer trees than fir and spruce arched over the ravine and made a green tunnel. When evening fell, they camped in the gully. Timov started the fire, Hamr led Blind Side to the stream bank, where he could graze, and Duru set about foraging nearby as she had with her nurse every evening.

  She followed the contour of the land upstream, to where a pond had silted in. Choked with mint grass, poplars, and willows, it had become a meadow. There, she knew she would find the tenderest shoots, purple-tipped tubers that made the best broths, soft-cored reeds whose hearts held sweetness, and chive grass and garlic bulbs that fortified with pungency the meal she gathered.

  Her hands expertly parted the turf to find the bulbs she sought, lifted rocks, always toward her so they opened away and would not expose her to snake or scorpion. She plucked delicate blades from among poisonous creepers. She reached into her forage sack for twine and brought out a thin braid of silvery strands, hair Cyndell had plaited from her own head. The girl's wise hands, that long ago stopped needing supervision, forgot what to do.

  The meal that night held silence. No songs or stories could fill Cyndell's absence. Each ate without speaking, staring into the fire, and when done, they lay with their backs to each other and slept. The next seven nights continued the same. Then, the land began to change more drastically yet, and evening meals became more animated with strange news of what they had seen.

  The ravine country thinned out as the migratory trails opened northward into enormous sweet-smelling grasslands. Ponds and kettle lakes shone in the distance like pearls. To the south and east, the Forest loomed larger than ever with giant green vaults.

  Among the brindled shadows, a white elk with immense antlers appeared and watched them. The wind carried new, peculiar smells. Silk tufts of unknown plants flurried by. Stupendous herds shifted in the north like dark clouds, too distant and too dangerous to approach.

  At the edge of creeks, the travelers knelt and did not recognize the swift stabs of fish in the kelp or the black toads squatting among rocks smooth and speckled as eggs.

  None of them could any longer explain the weather. Rain fell far away, leaning like lavender shadows over the blue firs, and crawled away into the wind, full of animal canniness. Torrents flashed out of a clear sky. Or clouds boiled overhead, releasing showers in steamy sheets that disappeared before reaching the ground.

  At night, wolf voices cried from the Forest with supernatural sorrow. And blue and green fire reeled across the stars, a sweep of aquatic ripples. The three travelers fell asleep every night with that radiant smoke in their eyes, trying to figure the unfelt wind blowing through it.

  Glaciers appeared in the north. They burned with sunlight under the tremendous sky. Arrows of birds came and went from the ice-fields each day. The sun blazed, but the wind, when it turned from those blue glares, blew cool and delivered, with the witchy fragrance of the grass, the sadder, lonelier
smell of winter.

  No longer did the wanderers simply encounter food. Hunting had become nearly impossible in the open land, and only one rabbit fell under Timov's slingshot, none under Hamr's spears.

  Duru puzzled over wisps of mysterious grasses and nibbled at narrow, bitter roots, afraid to try them in her broths. She watched what Blind Side ate and cooked that. Nowhere could she find the sweet marrow of the canebrakes, the fat tubers from silted meadows, friendly mushrooms, well-known berries. Each day, all three had to forage to gather enough edible plants to make one meal.

  At last Hamr admitted the migratory trail served only Blind Side, who enjoyed grazing on the abundant grasses. For them to survive, they would have to leave the trail to forage in the Forest. They led the horse up from the path grooved by his ancestors, and made their way through woeful terrain of scattered boulders and twisted lone-pines.

  )|(

  Flowers burst wherever sunlight lanced the Forest. Purple mallows glowed in the shadows among clouds of mushrooms, and red and orange gills of fungus ledged tree trunks. Here began the forbidden realm of the travelers' past—the Eyes of the Bear. Here, everything appeared strange to the people who had lived among sea cliffs and grasslands.

  Yet, after long wandering in gullies and ravines, the plenitude of the Forest comforted the Blue Shell. The rank, sweet smell of burdock mingled with resinous breezes slipping down dark corridors from the mysterious interior. And every turn of the wind smudged the air with odors of blossoms, water plants, and a tumult of animals.

  Duru stared up at the high peaks of trees burning with morning light and felt glad Hamr had led them here. Above the branches, the day opened like a sliced melon.

  Another beautiful day, like the other eight glorious days they had enjoyed since entering the Forest. Plenitude smothered the grief of all they had lost The skins of the squirrels Hamr and Timov had killed stood taut on a drying rack fashioned from branches. A dozen skins of tawny fur, ready in another day or so for stitching to garments.