Tsuga's Children

by Thomas Williams

  Around the ledges from which the tree grew, tall thin stones were set at intervals, making a circle on the meadow with the tree as its center. The gray stones were all about the same size, each about as tall as his father. Carved designs, worn by time, circled the waists of the squared stones. He climbed down from the ledge and went to one of the stones.

  “Arn!” Jen called.

  “Come here,” he said, “but be careful getting down from the ledge.”

  The stone was mute, an unmoving sentry. It was headless, but around its middle was a carved band, like a wide belt, with what was obviously a sheath hanging from it, all in deep relief in the gray granite.

  The sheath was exactly like his own; the knife handle that protruded from it, though worn smooth, resembled the final curve of his own knife’s stag handle. He undid the bone buttons of his parka and drew his knife from his sheath to look at it. Jen had gone to the next stone in the circle. “Look, Arn,” she called. He went to her. This stone sentry’s sheath was empty, but his arm, carved in relief across his chest, held a stone knife whose curved blade, choil, hilt and pommel were exactly the same design as Arn’s. He held the smaller knife against the stone one and they were just alike, one in ancient worn stone, the other bright and sharp. His living hand grasped his own knife’s handle just as the rugged stone hand grasped its stone one.

  They could only wonder. The sentry stones, mute in their grainy age, ringed the great tree.

  “Look!” Jen said. She had turned back toward the tree, and now pointed to the ledges.

  At first Arn saw only tumbled rocks and granite with the tree’s brown roots arching down across them. But then he saw that here, too, was a design that could not have been accidental. At one place the roots formed an arch above a platform of smoothed stones, and behind the living arch was another, made of stone, surrounding darkness.

  “Come on,” Jen said, but Arn held back.

  “Let’s be careful,” he said, knowing they would go there, to the center. Jen, not listening to him, ran back toward the tree. From the corners of Arn’s eyes the stone sentries seemed to stand straighter as he followed Jen.

  They climbed up to the level place, where each stone was smoothed and fitted to the next. It was like an altar, or a place to be watched by people standing like the sentries, within the sentries’ circle. Thin echoes of their own footsteps sang in their ears, as if the small sounds rebounded from the walls of the whole valley.

  “This place is very old,” Jen whispered. “There’s no end to it. I can feel it going back and back, like there’s no bottom or end to it.”

  They both thought of the old stories but neither wanted to say so out loud. The valley had been neither kind nor unkind to them so far.

  The roots, thicker than the trunks of most trees, came down like the fingers of a giant hand on either side of the dark entrance, which was much larger than they’d first thought. It was an arch of fitted stones, higher and wider than their home cabin back in the frozen world.

  It had turned cold. Light snow sifted past the high column of the tree, coming from a graying sky where the pale sun was only a lighter gray place beyond the mountains to the southwest. As they looked, shivering, the mountains faded into the gray-white of swirling snow.

  They held hands as they moved slowly toward the entrance, each of them in dread but as if in a dream unaware of any other thing to do. At the living arch Jen stopped to put her hand to the thick root. She started, then took Arn’s hand and placed it where hers had been.

  “Do you feel it?” she asked.

  “I feel the bark,” Arn said.

  “It moved,” Jen said. “It moved, Arn.”

  “It was the wind moving the tree,” he said.

  “No, it wasn’t like that.”

  The dense flesh of the tree had moved under her hand, in response to her touch. She knew it had moved, but she didn’t know what that strange convulsion of the wood had meant, whether it was a welcome or a warning.

  9. The Sacrifice

  They turned to the dark entrance beneath the tree where the gray stones arched against the black. Something moved in the half-light—a small brown figure glided toward them and stopped at the edge of daylight. It was the old lady, one arm held up, the fringes of her tattered buckskin blouse hanging down. The wrinkled brown hand was palm-forward, telling them to stop, to not enter. Her ancient face was stern, her small eyes glittering. For a moment no one moved or spoke.

  Jen gave a little cry, and said to Arn, “Ask her where Oka is!”

  Arn’s hands moved in the language. For “cow” he made the gestures of milking; the question part was his open hands, palms up, empty and asking.

  The old lady’s arm came down and pointed behind them, so they turned away from her, toward the east.

  At the eastern edge of the meadow several large animals grazed, moving together slowly, one or two raising their stocky heads to look around. They were dark, heavy beasts.

  “What are they, Arn?” Jen asked, but he didn’t know.

  Suddenly the animals were in alarm. They jumped and came down with all four hooves together, then ran on a curving course toward the center of the meadow. Jen and Arn felt the heavy thudding of hooves before they heard it. Behind the large animals smaller gray ones bounded through the winter grass, gray backs appearing and disappearing like the backs of salmon going upstream.

  “Wolves!” Arn said, with an excitement in his voice not all caused by fear. Jen was frightened; Arn’s excitement seemed wrong, strange to her.

  The large animals were driven closer to the ledge, running side by side, touching each other as if for comfort in their fear, their eyes showing white and their mouths slobbering. They had short horns and looked like cows except for their long shaggy hair. One of them had dropped behind, an older, slower one. It turned desperately, fighting its own great weight, and tried to hook the following wolf with its horn. A white spot flashed on its sweating neck.

  “Oka!” Jen cried. “Oka!”

  But it couldn’t be Oka, with that long shaggy coat now suddenly flecked with blood as a wolfs fangs raked it. Silently running, the other wolves caught up. One bounded in from the rear and cut a hamstring with one audible clack of its white teeth. The cow thudded down on its side and the wolves went in to its belly, slashing and ripping until they had pulled its insides out in long ropes while it was still dying, groaning out its last sounds in the deep grass.

  The other cattle had formed a ring, back to back, with their heads down and horns menacing the wolves that circled them. After a few feints toward the closed circle of horns the wolves went back to feed upon the dead cow.

  Jen and Arn stood absolutely still, Jen crying silently, while the wolves snarled and tore at their meat. After a long while the wolves, gorged, lay down in the last light of the winter sun, their bellies plump. The other cattle had gone quietly back to grazing, tails swinging, their muzzles methodically wrenching the brown grass loose from the roots before they slowly chewed. Red and white ribs arched over the carcase of the dead cow, its torn coat folded back over the grass like a shaggy robe with a red and yellow lining.

  Arn stared at the carcase of the cow and the sated wolves, full after their hunting. He turned to Jen and she saw their triumph in his face. She thought only of the cow that had been taken from life and brutally changed into meat, but Arn had been running with the hunters all the while.

  She moved away from him, feeling alone. At her movement the cattle raised their heads and stamped nervously, their large eyes upon her. Some of the wolves raised their heads, their ears straight up, staring directly at her with an alert curiosity that was neither fear nor aggression.

  Arn watched the wolves, his eager curiosity matching theirs.

  “Arn,” she called to him as if he were far away. For a long time he didn’t answer, and when he did speak, he said, “Did you see that? Did you see the wolves hunting?”

  “She said Oka was out there!” Jen cried.

&
nbsp; Arn turned, the excitement of the hunting fading from his face. “She pointed that way, that’s all we know, Jen.”

  They turned back to the archway, but the old lady was no longer there. The sun had gone down, the earlier snow flurries had ceased, and the moon was a bent sliver among thin clouds that moved silently across the sky. Darkness had begun to settle in. The black archway now seemed as palpable as a wall. They peered into that blackness, but it was like a curtain of fur, something they might reach out and touch, and they were both struck again by the old lady’s admonition not to enter. Never, when she had stayed at their cabin, had she seemed so stern, powerful and unfriendly.

  They had to find a place to spend the cold night, and it was Jen who found a protected place beneath a whorl of the great tree’s roots. Arn went to gather fallen twigs and branches so they could have a fire, while Jen gathered together the fallen needles of the tree and heaped them beneath the sheltering roots.

  When Arn returned with an armload of wood he put it down and said, “Listen!”

  They held their breaths, hearing a distant sighing, at first the wind in the high branches of the tree, but changing, coming now from the meadow. They crept over to the edge of the stones. The sighing, or chanting, came from across the meadow, where many flickering lights, small moving fires, came toward them.

  “Those are people,” Arn whispered.

  The stone of the ledge and archway, and the gray trunk of the tree, became visible in the flickering orange light. Several of the dark approaching figures carried bundles of branches. Crouching down, Jen and Arn watched while several bonfires grew at once in a half-ring around the central ledge. As the fires ate brightly through their kindling and branches, figures stood or crouched around them, strange shapes half men, half animal. A chant, dry and toneless as the wind, came from the figures behind the fires. “Hey-yeh, hey-yeh, hey-yeh, hey-yeh,” the chant went on, neither rising nor falling.

  “Those are people!” Arn whispered.

  As the fires grew higher they saw that the figures were human, but the heads and upper bodies, all shaking up and down in a dance to the rhythm of the chant, were animal. The men wore animal skins with the masks of animals. There were the shoulders and head of a black bear, the fangs gleaming white in the gaping mouth, and there was the huge head of a boar with its ivory tusks. Other figures wore deer heads, antlered and without antlers, others the heavy heads of shaggy cattle, or the sharp muzzles and stiff ears of wolves. One figure was half the tawny head and cape of a lynx that grinned in the flickering light as all cats grin. Firelight glinted on fangs and hair as the creatures danced in place.

  Just below the stone platform on which Jen and Arn crouched, a long stone, high and flat as a table, was set in the ground, the higher flames of the fires reflecting across it. It was toward this stone that all the animal heads gaped and nodded as the chant went on. The fires made a great room out of the darkness, so that the thin moon glimmered faintly high above. Behind the dancers were the dark silent shapes of others who didn’t move. Their human faces shone as dimly as the moon.

  The chant ended all at once, so quickly and simultaneously Jen and Arn were startled, as if the steady noise had hidden them and now they were about to be discovered.

  From the darkness at the side came a figure whose arms were long black wings, whose head was that of a giant crow. It approached the table rock. Following the crow came a stooped figure wearing a cape of long needles and quills, with a stubby, furred face—a giant porcupine. These stood silently beside a stone, waiting. From the people in the darkness of the meadow rose a high, faint humming that changed into the sad keening of women. It was not so much a moan of immediate sorrow as a formal imitation of that long, hopeless wail. It rose and fell in slow waves. Jen felt the sound within her as if she had been born to hear that song of infinite loss. She thought of her mother, who might be uttering just those mourning sounds over her lost children. She felt that she, too, was born to someday feel that same intensity of grief. As the keening rose and fell she became Eugenia, bereft of her children. Her own throat sang with the strange women on the meadow.

  Two men dressed in cattle skins, with cattle heads, appeared at the edge of the dark. Each held a child by the hand, the children dressed in buckskin with bright designs made of dyed porcupine quill beads sewn all over their clothes. Their dark hair was braided and oiled. Jen and Arn could see that one was a girl, the other a boy, the two children about their own ages. The mourning song rose higher as the cattle men led them toward the stone.

  The little girl’s face was rigid with fear, though she walked steadily, the cattle man’s hand on her arm. Jen trembled with her and couldn’t breathe. She had never known a girl her age but she knew this girl in the deepest possible way, fearing for her as if she herself were approaching the unknown ceremony.

  Arn saw the fear and bravery of the boy, who walked erect, his dark face set against any weakness. He would never cry or try to run away from what he had to do, though whatever it was caused hidden terror. Arn felt it in his bones like a chill.

  Without a sound a deer—a man wearing the head and coat of a great antlered buck—appeared at the head of the stone. The cattle men, still holding the children’s arms, took their places next to the crow and the porcupine. To the foot of the stone came a figure all in long white fur, with a white animal face, bearded in white, with narrow curved horns. This one wore the skin of a mountain goat.

  The fires grew tall, their orange flames, higher than the men, wavering as their highest wands burned out in the upper air. The keening grew as a man came forward, naked to the waist except for a long necklace of polished teeth, holding in his right hand a knife that shone copper or bronze. The knife was short, like the sticking knife at home, with a sturdy broad blade. The man’s dark hair was pulled back and tied with rawhide behind his stretched, grim face.

  The cattle man who held the girl lifted her to the stone, where she lay on her back. Her chest and arms trembled but she made no sound. The cattle man holding the boy lifted him up and placed him beside the girl, where he, too, trembled but his stern young face didn’t change. The man with the knife stepped forward and raised it over the children, point down.

  Jen started up, ready to cry out and run to the stone, but Arn held her arm, whispering, “Quiet, quiet!”

  Just then a tree, moving on human legs, came out of the darkness and stood between the man and the children. It was really a man holding a young evergreen, the soft needles and branches hiding his upper body. The small cones and short needles of the tree were like those of the great evergreen of the ledges, though this tree was so young and soft it was hard to compare them. The tree stood quietly, not moving, hiding the children from the knife. The mourning song faded, but underneath was still a low hum of sadness, muted but not gone.

  The goat and the deer raised their heads to the night sky, their front hooves out over the children on the stone. All was quiet except for the low humming of the women and the windy crackling of the fires. Black clouds moved past the thin moon without changing shape, silent in a wind that was far above this place.

  With a harsh cry like a cough the knife man hacked a branch from the tree, then another, the soft boughs falling lightly to the ground. The keening song rose again with each falling branch until the tree was naked and the women’s song was a cry that filled the night. The knife rose high above the children. As it began its swift plunge Jen cried out but could not be heard above the rising chant of grief that came from the men and women on the meadow. The men in animal masks had surrounded the stone so that the two children could not be seen. The waning fires flickered orange and red, staining the moving edges of the animal heads as if their light were blood.

  Then several of the animal men lifted the two bodies to their shoulders. The people, now silent, followed the bearers of the children back across the meadow into the darkness. The embering fires glowed in a wide half-circle around the stone.

  Arn and Jen crouc
hed side by side behind the jagged rim of the stone platform. A cool mist moved over them, coating the stones and their faces with moisture. In the soft dimness of the mist and ember light, they were still, staring at each other, feeling small and abandoned. “The children,” Jen whispered. “The children.”

  Arn could not make his feelings clear to himself. Those had been people. He didn’t know, yet he must know, what had happened to the children. The children were still with him though ages seemed to have passed since he watched their fear and trembling. It was their acquiescence that filled him with doubts about his own judgement and made his feelings hurtful and deep. What had happened did not seem all wrong, but how could it not be wrong? He himself had killed, stopped life and revealed, with the sharp blade of his own knife, those inner parts of animals that made them live. Killed them and eaten them. He, too, was an animal, alive and seeing, as was Jen. They, too, could die as easily as he had killed. And it was not easy for those people. To the animals they pretended to be on that dark night, whose skins and meat they had taken, they would prove their kinship by sacrificing two of their own kind. But it was wrong. The brave boy and the brave and fearful girl, willing to die. He felt deep hurt, a round, swelling hurt inside because of feelings he could not understand.

  Jen thought of that boy who would not show any fear in his face. She admired his bravery but she wanted to shout that it was wrong, all of it was wrong. And the girl—if only she could have known her and had her as a friend. But even in her loss she felt responsible, as if she had something to do with the ceremonies she had only observed. The girl had not cried out that it was wrong. Though the women mourned, no one tried to stop it. It seemed Jen’s own failure too. Then there was Oka, whose presence in this world, or in this valley, now seemed to fade, as if the wolves’ kill she had seen was Oka, and that death natural and inevitable, unlike the deaths she had just witnessed, done by her own kind to her own kind.