Call Down the Stars

by Sue Harrison

  “Has your father returned?” Gheli asked.

  “People say that he is at Chakliux’s village. Or he was a few days ago. By now he may already be home.”

  “Was he traveling alone?”

  Daes opened her eyes and flung back her head, clenched her hands at the stupidity of her mother’s question. “How should I know?”

  “I thought, well, I thought they might have …”

  Daes sighed. Her mother’s gentle response made her suddenly ashamed of herself. She took one of Gheli’s hands in her own, smoothed her fingers over the roughened skin. She felt her throat close a little. Her mother’s hands were dry and lined like an old woman’s.

  “We will leave tomorrow morning,” Daes told her. “Help me pack everything.”

  They worked together that afternoon. Daes took the last of the fish from the drying racks, put them into caribou hide packs, and made heaps of all the goods, one for each of the three dogs, another for herself, and one for her mother. Last of all, in the morning, she would take down the lean-to, add its caribou hides to her pack. Then there would be only the drying racks to show where they had spent the summer.

  But when morning came, a bright day, full of the sun, Gheli was again sitting outside the lean-to, Duckling in her lap. “I think I need to stay one more day,” she told Daes, and because Daes was ashamed of the curses she had shouted at her mother the day before, she agreed to wait.

  She followed animal trails into the forest, killed three hares with her throwing stick, then took them back to the fish camp, where she spitted them to roast over hearth coals. During the afternoon she went out to search for mouse caches—the little tunnels in the tundra sod where mice store seeds and bulbs for winter. She dug up several small caches and one that was large, filled a waistpack with what she found. She parched the seeds on a flat stone heated in the fire, ate more than her share that night, and said little to her mother.

  She did not sleep well, as though she knew through her dreams that her mother would do the same thing the next morning. So when Daes found Gheli again sitting outside, she only pursed her lips and spent another morning hunting. She came back with nothing, and that afternoon lay on the bedding in the lean-to. She fell asleep, slept hard, and woke to a meal of fresh fish that her mother had cooked.

  Daes ate, but that night when Gheli was asleep Daes sneaked from the tent, took the dogs to the edge of the woods, and strapped on their packs. Then she returned to the lean-to where Duckling was asleep in her cradleboard. Daes strapped the board to her belly, hefted her pack to her back, then quietly slipped away.

  She kept a lead line on each dog, but they carried so much weight that she had little trouble with them. Mostly they seemed glad to leave the fish camp, and when one sat on his haunches and turned back, as though to wait for Gheli, Daes, said, “She will come. You think she’d let me take this daughter of hers, knowing I have no milk to feed her?”

  But though Daes walked slowly all that day, sure that her mother would catch up with them, by night they were still alone, the baby wailing for want of food, the dogs whining under the loads they carried.

  Daes considered returning to the fish camp. How long could a child live without its mother’s milk? But Duckling sucked water from Daes’s fingers, and later the baby managed to choke down broth from a bowl, snorting it out her nose, coughing it from her throat, but swallowing at least half of what Daes gave her.

  Then Daes decided to continue the journey, decided to set a faster pace. Better to get back to the village before bad weather set in, before the men left on the fall caribou hunts, before the baby grew weak from lack of milk.

  After two and a half more days, Daes came to the Four Rivers village. She unloaded her packs and those of the dogs, then left everything at the entrance of the lodge to take her sister to a woman who had a baby of her own. By the time Duckling was sucking at the woman’s breast, several women—including Wing, Bird Hand’s mother—had gathered at the lodge.

  Daes, in the hardship of walking, had not thought ahead to what she would say. Should she tell them Gheli had foolishly refused to leave the fish camp? Would that justify Daes taking Duckling? Surely any woman could see that the baby’s eyes were sunken, her little belly swollen with hunger.

  “Has someone died?” one of the older women asked, and Daes knew she was afraid to say Gheli’s name, afraid of bringing her ghost to them.

  Daes squeezed her eyes shut so tightly that tears beaded in the corners. Then she looked at the old woman, addressed her politely, saying, “Grandmother, no one knows what has happened, but I waited as long as I could, went out looking for her, called for her, found only my sister and our dogs and packs there, and finally decided to bring back as much as I could carry. I hope that my father has returned, and that he and I might go out and look for her.”

  Then all eyes were downcast, and Daes felt a sudden catch of fear. She pulled in a long breath and said, “Something has happened.”

  “Get him,” said several of the women. Two left, and Bird Hand’s mother bent over Daes. With tears close under her words, she whispered, “We had to stop our celebration …”

  “She probably doesn’t know about the celebration,” one of the others said.

  “Aaa,” agreed Bird Hand’s mother. She brushed at a tangle of hair that had come loose from her braids and said, “My son’s marriage to Crane. You knew about that, nae’?”

  For a moment Daes sat without speaking, then she realized that her mouth was hanging open like the mouth of some old woman who has spoken all her words before using up her life. “I knew,” she said, and closed her mouth with a snap.

  “See,” said Bird Hand’s mother. She drew her brows into a frown and told Daes, “A man came from Chakliux’s village. He told us he was looking for your mother. He said that her husband had drowned in a storm somewhere.”

  “Aaaaeeee,” Daes murmured, a soft mourning cry, but also a denial. “Aaaaeeee.” How could her father be dead? He was a strong man. He had traveled the North Sea nearly to the ice edge of the world. Once he had even walked over the mountains to the South Sea. She looked into Wing’s eyes, suddenly remembered that Bird Hand had taken Crane as wife. Anger wove itself through her sorrow, and she spat out words as sharp as bird darts.

  “You are wrong,” she said. “My father is alive.”

  Wing did not try to convince her.

  “If he is dead,” Daes said softly, “what will I tell my mother?”

  The oldest woman in the group leaned close. “You said you couldn’t find her.” She stared into Daes’s face, blinking rheumy eyes.

  “I did not say she wouldn’t come back,” said Daes.

  “Perhaps you did not look hard enough,” the old woman told her.

  Daes held her breath, waiting for questions from the others, but though they glanced at her from the corners of their eyes, they said nothing, and when the women returned with the man from Chakliux’s village, all but Wing and the eldest of them left. That old one closed her eyes, began a soft chant, something to protect the village.

  Daes played the part of politeness, her eyes downcast as the young man spoke.

  “I am named Cries-loud,” he told her.

  His voice was low, as though he spoke from sorrow.

  “You’ve come to tell me that my father drowned in a storm,” Daes said, and met his eyes as though her boldness would be strong enough to make him deny the death.

  He lifted a hand, brushed it nervously against his cheek, and Daes found herself staring at him, saw that Wing also stared. What was there about this man that seemed so familiar?

  “Yes,” he said. “I need to find your mother and tell her.”

  Wing poked her head between Daes and Cries-loud. “She is also dead,” Wing said.

  The grandmother stopped her chant and hissed at her. “We do not know that!” she said. She clasped an amulet, dark with age, as protection against Wing’s words.

  “You said …” Wing began.
/>   “I said I couldn’t find her,” Daes shouted. “Only that. Not that she’s dead!”

  Cries-loud lifted a hand as though to calm the women, and it seemed as though Daes were looking into still water at her own face. She shook her head, noticed that Wing was doing the same.

  She looked at Cries-loud. “I have wood for a fire and food in my lodge,” she said. “Come and tell me about my father and the storm that took him.”

  They left the grandmother and Wing behind, left the mourning chant that the old woman had wound around them, and somehow Daes knew without seeing that Cries-loud followed her, so it was not until she reached the lodge that she looked back, and then only to hold the doorflap open for him to go inside.

  CRIES-LOUD’S STORY

  Cries-loud followed his sister to a fine, large lodge. At least it seemed that Cen had treated his mother well, that in taking her as wife, he had given her a good life. And this sister of his, she was strong and healthy, a large woman, with wide hips, good for babies. He had been careful with his questions since he came to the village, had asked cautiously—only as messenger—about his mother, and always called her by the name Gheli. He had said nothing about his sisters, and it was nearly a day before someone mentioned Daes by name. Even then he sensed some hesitation, as though there might be something wrong with her, so he was relieved to see that she looked normal and seemed to do all things as a woman should, quickly starting a fire, offering him water, and dragging in the packs that were set in the entrance tunnel.

  “They say you just returned from fish camp,” Cries-loud said. “It’s late in the year for that.”

  Daes shrugged. “My mother wanted to stay. She doesn’t like to come back to the village too soon. She says we miss too many fish doing that.”

  He nodded, then asked, “Where is your sister?”

  “They told you about my sister?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you and your mother three days. A man can learn much in three days.”

  Daes hung a boiling bag from the lodge poles, poured in several bladders of water, and added dried fish.

  “Did you see the baby in that lodge where we were?” she asked. “That’s my sister. I brought her back from fish camp. I couldn’t find my mother. She was gone a long time. She went to pick berries or gather plants.” Daes stopped, passed a hand over her face.

  There was something wrong about what she was telling him. Berries? Plants?

  “You looked for her?” he asked.

  “I spent a whole day looking for her, my sister crying in hunger,” Daes said. She began stirring the fish in the boiling bag, then with no explanation hurried into the entrance tunnel.

  Cries-loud sat there thinking she had left the lodge, and wondered whether he should leave as well or wait for her return.

  She came back with a handful of lovage, thrust it toward him as though it were something important. “She was looking for lovage. We dry it for winter to add flavor to our boiling bag.”

  She shredded the leaves and dropped them into the boiling bag, stirred again.

  “So she went for lovage, not berries.”

  “Probably,” Daes said. “But if she found berries she would bring them as well. Highbush cranberries are good this time of year, after the first frost.”

  Her words made sense, Cries-loud told himself, so why did he feel as though she were lying? And why hadn’t she asked about Cen?

  During the days walking to the village, he had tried to decide how to tell his mother and sister about Cen’s death. He had not even considered that they wouldn’t be in the village. Who stayed in fish camps when caribou hunts were about to begin?

  Your mother, some small voice told him, when she’s worried her husband will bring Ghaden to the village. Ghaden, who might recognize her as Red Leaf.

  Cries-loud watched his sister and wondered what it had been like for her, named after the dead Daes. Had the ghost followed her name to this new Daes? Had his mother—Red Leaf, Gheli—feared the power of that name? Surely she lived in dread lest someone come to the village who would recognize her. There were always men—hunters, traders—going back and forth between villages. How better to hide herself than to spend the summers in some remote fish camp?

  She also must have learned to sew differently, for, according to Yaa, a woman can recognize other women’s work, especially sewing as gifted as Red Leaf’s. And Cen would surely want to trade his wife’s fine parkas. Had she somehow changed her stitches so they no longer spoke her name?

  Suddenly he realized that Daes was holding a bowl of food before him. He wrapped his hands around the bowl, inhaled the steam, smelled the smoky fires that had dried the fish. The smell pulled him away from the lodge, from his sister whom he had known only as a baby. He stayed for a moment in that safe place, then opened his eyes and came back.

  “Thank you,” he told Daes.

  He lifted the bowl to his lips, used his fingers to push a little of the meat into his mouth. He chewed and swallowed, then lowered the bowl to his lap, and motioned for her to sit down beside him. “Do you want me to tell you what I know?”

  She squatted on her haunches, as though to be ready to refill his bowl.

  “Sit,” he said, “unless you want to get yourself something to eat.”

  “No.”

  “Your father was a good man,” he began, and thought how strange it was to be telling this sister about Cen, to be telling her that her father was dead, when all along she belonged to Sok, a father who was alive and strong.

  During the whole telling, she did not cry, and when he had finished, she stood, brushed her hands together, and pulled off the soft ground squirrel parka she had been wearing inside the lodge. Cries-loud expected her to begin a mourning cry, but she only stirred the boiling bag. Finally she calmly picked up a woman’s knife that lay on a hearthstone and drew the blade across her left arm, once, twice. She lifted her hand and leaned over the fire so the blood ran down her arm into the coals.

  She showed no sign of pain, as though she had only cut a fish for drying, but she said to him, “Thank you for coming to tell us.”

  He hoped she would add something about her mother, at least how to get to their fish camp. If Red Leaf were still alive, she needed to know about Cen, and she also needed to know that K’os was coming, she and her daughter Uutuk and Ghaden.

  But when Daes spoke she said, “The man Ghaden, do you know him?”

  “I know him. He lives in my village.” Almost he told her that he was married to Ghaden’s sister Yaa, but then for some reason did not.

  “No one else from your village is coming, nae’?” she asked.

  “There’s a woman from our village who knew your mother. Perhaps you recognize her name. K’os.”

  “No,” Daes said.

  “She’s coming to share your mother’s mourning, and she plans to travel with her husband Seal, a First Men trader, as well as a daughter and that daughter’s husband, Ghaden.”

  For a moment—so quickly that Cries-loud almost missed it—Daes’s eyes widened, but she went to one of her packs and rummaged through it until she came up with a strip of caribou hide. “Let me help,” he said, and she held her arm out toward him.

  He wrapped the strip tightly, then bent to look into her eyes, clasped her chin when she tried to turn away. “You know Ghaden,” he said.

  “My mother speaks about him sometimes.”

  “And me?” he asked. “Does she speak about me?”

  Daes looked at him, puzzled. “No,” she said slowly. “Why should she?”

  She glanced down when Cries-loud tucked the end of the hide strip into place near her elbow. For a moment, he thought she was studying the wrap, but then she raised her hand to his, held it there. His hand was larger, but otherwise they looked the same, even to the pattern of their veins.

  She lifted her eyes to his face and asked, “Who are you?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Herendeen Bay, Alaska Peninsula

&nb
sp; 602 B.C.

  THERE WERE MURMURS OF protest when Kuy’aa stopped her story. One of the bolder women said, “We want to know what he tells her. We want to know if he decides he can trust her.”

  “Do you think he can?” Kuy’aa asked.

  “No!” most of the men called out.

  “Of course,” said one of the chief hunter’s wives. “Once she knows she is his sister, she will not do anything to harm him.”

  Another woman said, “You cannot trust her. Look how often she lies, and she just took her baby sister and left her mother.”

  “Her mother deserved to be left. Who could live in a fish camp all winter? The baby would have died!”

  The arguing continued, the voices rising. Yikaas glanced at Kuy’aa and saw that she was smiling. Qumalix moved to sit beside her, and Sky Catcher did the same.

  “It must be a difficult story to tell,” said Qumalix, “because it is a difficult story to hear. You don’t know whether Daes is good or bad. You don’t know how to feel about her.”

  “There are many ways to tell this story,” Kuy’aa said. The old woman licked her lips, and Yikaas saw that they were dry and cracked. He asked if anyone had a water bladder, and soon one was thrust into his hands. He gave it to her, waited as she drank, and then said, “So then, Aunt, why did you tell it this way?”

  “It needed to be short,” she said. “There are too many people in this ulax, and they distract one another from the telling. If I were to tell it only to you, I would also have let you know what Gheli was thinking and perhaps even how the baby felt. That way you would have other people to think about, and you wouldn’t be so frustrated with Daes.”

  “You want her to be good,” Qumalix broke in to say. “And gradually you realize that she’s not as good as she should be.”

  “But she’s not as bad as K’os,” Yikaas said. “She does think about others. She was worried about her sister.” He saw that Sky Catcher was trying to listen, and so asked with a gesture of his eyes for Qumalix to translate what he had said into First Men words.