Tsuga's Children

by Thomas Williams

  And there he was, a young raccoon with his masked face still, his bright black eyes observing them. He sat on the limb of a pine, ten feet from the ground, peering quietly at them through the needles.

  “It’s all right, Mask,” Arel said.

  The young raccoon watched them, thinking of old dangers that spoke to him in his bones, then of Arel, who had touched him without hurting him. Finally he moved and came down the other side of the tree where they couldn’t see him. Halfway down his masked face peered around the tree trunk to see if they had moved. When he saw they hadn’t, he came all the way down, then came toward them, looking from one to the other. Finally he came up to Arel and let her touch him. After a while he let Jen touch him too.

  “I don’t know how he broke his legs. They seemed bitten,” Arel said. “His front legs—maybe a wildcat or a lynx. But I tied on wooden splints, like we do for people, and brought him food. He hid over there beneath that rock. What he liked best was corn, fish and bread. Then in a week he could get around by himself, and now he’s as good as new.”

  “But you said it was wrong,” Jen said.

  “Tsuga says it is wrong to change the animals. He says the animals belong to themselves and we should never interfere, but I don’t know why it was wrong to help Mask.”

  The raccoonrolled over on his back soArel could scratch its belly. “He’s grateful, I think,” Arel said.

  Jen remembered a windy voice she had heard in a dream: They held the creatures prisoners in pens, fed them and gained their trust, only to betray them in the end … They became worse than what they most feared. She shivered at the belief she had felt in that strange, gentle voice.

  “Goodby, Mask,” Arel said, getting up. “We’ve got to go home now.”

  The young raccoon watched them from its wild black eyes, its thoughts, too, masked from Jen and Arel as they left the forest for the afternoon light of the meadow.

  “Arel,” Jen said as they walked back toward the houses, “if we ever get back home I wish you could come and visit us.

  But then she remembered the blackness of the cold cave beneath the mountain, a cold, unearthly black so absolute it had seemed to dissolve her eyes, and she heard old Snaggletooth’s gleeful voice: A cave of many passages, in and back, and only Ahneeah knows the way!

  On the way to the bowyer’s Arn and Bren stopped to watch the fishermen, who waited with their nets in loose curves pulled by the current. Downstream a watcher suddenly shouted, “Shandeh! Shandeh!” and in a moment they saw a dark shadow approaching along the river bed, a long, sinuous shadow that appeared below the smooth swirls of water, then disappeared beneath the rapids’ froth, only to appear again, always moving swiftly upstream. When the moving shadow reached the nets, they were drawn tight, then as suddenly loosened by the men on the far bank. On the near bank men with lines ran away from the river, pulling the nets around in a circle to capture the shadow and pull up on the shoreline hundreds of small fish that now, in air, billowed all silver in their desperate tries to swim in air and among the teeming bodies of their fellows. But the nets were drawn away from the water and the fish were soon gathered in wooden sieves to be prepared for drying.

  “We will have fresh shandeh for the evening meal,” Bren said. “This is called the month of the shandeh. All the rest of the year they stay deep in the warm lake.”

  The bowyer, who, by his glowing forge and bellows, many hammers and tongs, was also the smith, greeted Bren. “Bren who will not remain a child!” he said. He was a tall, muscular man, his hair turning gray in a fringe around his face, as if the heat from his forge had faded it. When he left his forge for the woodworking part of his hogan he put a buckskin shirt on over his sweat-gleaming arms and chest. He spoke to Arn. “He’s the best bowman of his age, and better than many twice his age.”

  Bren found it difficult to conceal his pride.

  They looked through the rough bows stacked at the rear of the hogan, trying to find one to fit Arn, and finally they did find one that seemed right in pull and length. The grip was unfinished, however. “But you can finish it; I’ve heard you have a good knife,” the bowyer said.

  “A knife!” Bren said. “Show him your knife!”

  The bowyer gently took Arn’s knife in his big hand, as if it were something precious he might accidentally drop. He looked at it carefully—pommel, hilt, choil, guard, and finally the blade, which he sighted down, turned in the light, and rubbed with his thumb.

  “I heard that your father forged this blade,” he said. “He is one of us, a master of his craft. Also, I sense by color and brightness that this blade is harder than ours—a bit brittle, perhaps, but very strong. When you see him, tell him that Rindu, the artisan, greets him as a brother.”

  Arn’s thoughts went again across the miles of forest and darkness to the world of ice where his father lay silent in the small cabin. The bow his father had made for him had seemed more like a toy than the one he now held, yet his father hadn’t treated it that way. “This weapon fed a thousand generations of the Old People,” he’d said, looking seriously into Arn’s eyes. “Treat it with care and respect.” And then came the shameful memory of the impaled toad; he had used his bow as a toy, and the result had been a cruel and needless death.

  Gradually, as he carved the bow’s grip to fit his left hand, these thoughts faded. Bren and Rindu twisted and waxed a bowstring for him and found an old, repaired leather quiver for him. Then he was given ten arrows, five with bladed hunting points, five with blunt points for practice and small game. This was, Arn learned, a ceremony in which he must take each cedar arrow in his hands and memorize its grain and other small differences of detail so that he would always know each arrow as his own.

  “Arn’s arrows,” Rindu said. “May they give death without pain.”

  Then, until the sun was low in the southwest, Bren and Arn practiced with their bows. They went to a clay bank, where spring freshets had cut a gully in the meadow. Bren took a stick and drew the rough outline of a deer in the clay, and they shot their arrows from twenty, thirty and forty paces. Bren’s arrows, released the moment his string touched his ear, flew with such straight tension and authority, Arn didn’t think he could ever come close to matching their flight with his own. He did improve, though, after many tries. Bren finally lost his initial impatience with him, and when Arn learned, as if in his fingers themselves, to release his arrows smoothly, with little wobble, Bren said he might someday make an archer.

  Before the first haze of dusk they walked back toward the winter camp, where cooking fires had been lit. Blue-gray woodsmoke rose from the central openings of the hogans to form a soft mist that drifted slowly, in smooth layers, across the river toward the east. Arn was thinking of his hunger, after this day, and of the warm hogans where the people would be hungry after their long day of work. He felt himself part of them now.

  Bren stopped and looked toward the east, where the light from the western sky still made the trees glow a dim orange. “See!” he said, excitement in his lowered voice. “See, by the trunk of that tallest pine! Do you see?”

  Three deer—a doe and two yearlings, their backs fading into black, their chest and belly markings white, fading into the dusky orange of the evening light, browsed silently at the edge of the forest.

  “See?” Bren said. “We were not playing. When you learn, that is not play.” He gazed, as motionless and watchful as the deer, who had seen them stop and knew across all that distance the quick intensity of hunters. “They know,” Bren said with reverence in his voice for those lives and minds far across the river, those free animals who were of the wilderness that gave sustenance to his people.

  12. An Interrupted Tale

  That evening Jen and Arn met Fannu and Dona, grandson and granddaughter of Aguma, the stocky gray-haired woman who was Chief Councillor, whose palms had glittered with the silver scales. They met other children, some younger and some older than they, each different from them and from all the others. At the
evening meal they saw two nursing babies held across their mothers’ laps, heard their small noises as they fed at their mothers’ breasts.

  Because of the constant work of the month of the shandeh, the people ate in communal hogans, some having been assigned to prepare the food for others. Jen and Arn sat at a long table in Aguma’s hogan, the largest in the winter camp. Huge pottery tureens of shandeh stew steamed upon the table. Plates piled high with hot yellow cornbread were passed from end to end, with plenty for everyone. Each took his bowl and with a wooden ladle dipped out as much of the rich stew as he wanted. Among the vegetables—Arn recognized cattail tubers, arrowroot, corn, beans and small wild carrots—thick flakes of the white meat of the shandeh swirled in the rich yellow broth.

  The people, young and old, were tired but friendly with each other. The shandeh had run well this year, and they foresaw less hunger in the hard months of the false spring when the sun would be high but the earth still cold and fallow.

  After the meal were the evening fires, most of the people returning to their own hogans.

  Amu and Runa, Arel’s parents, stayed for a while with them by Aguma’s fire after the dishes and bowls had been collected and taken to the river for washing. As they sat in the warm firelight Bren kept looking toward the door of the hogan, obviously worried about something, and finally Runa came to kneel behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. “Bren is worried,” she said in a voice in which they heard a smile of affection. Her round face was bronze, her black hair glowing with fine threads of reddish gold in the firelight. Arel had told Jen and Arn that Bren’s mother was dead, and that after her death Bren’s father had changed. He would go away sometimes for weeks at a time, no one knew where. And now he had been away again for several days.

  Bren seemed to gain some comfort from Runa’s concern, but still he was silent, seeming very small among the adults, his brows down over his eyes like dark awnings.

  When the bearskin curtain over the door began to move, Bren looked up eagerly. The bearskin was pushed aside and what looked like half a man—all legs—came through the doorway. It was old Ganonoot, all bent over, his head tilted up in order to see. He cackled when he saw Arn and Jen, Bren and Arel, Fannu and Dona and the other children by the fire. “Here are my little ones who like stories!” he said as he came swiftly over to them, moving smoothly like some kind of insect that had more legs than it ought to have.

  Bren’s face went dark and still again; he had been expecting someone else. But Ganonoot, smiling so wide his dark gums shone in the firelight, sat down among them, took his yellow fang in his fingers and moved his head up and down as if that tooth were a handle.

  “Don’t you think I know you, my little ones?” Ganonoot said, looking quickly with his bright little berry eyes at each child in turn. “I know what you want to hear and do! And some will get their wishes and some won’t; that is the way it is in the world. Bren wants to grow up too fast and be a great hunter, Arel wants to hear all the small thoughts of meadow and forest, Fannu is vain of his running and jumping, Dona wants to dress in ermine and wolverine, Jen and Arn are sad for their home, and search for the answer to a question they don’t know how to ask. Now, can I give each of you what you desire? What story would you like to hear?”

  Fannu, who was tall for his age, and thin, just the opposite of his grandmother, said, “Tell about the boy who rode the deer.”

  Ganonoot said, “Ah, that was a smooth ride with a big bump at the end, for he’s still flying toward the morning star.”

  “Tell about the Queen of the West,” Dona said.

  “When she grew too beautiful she turned into wind,” Ganonoot said, “and the snow is her ermine cloak.”

  “Tell about the white-footed mouse who spoke to Ah-neeah,” Arel said.

  “He was the only mouse who dared complain of the weasels,” Ganonoot said, “and the only thing Ahneeah granted was that the weasel kill swiftly, with one clean bite.”

  They looked to Bren, who was silent, staring at the embers. Ganonoot said, “Come, Bren. What story would you choose?”

  “That my father return,” Bren said. He looked up, his face closed and stern against showing his feelings. “But that’s not a story.” He looked down again.

  “There is a story that is old and sad, but noble in places. I will tell you the tale of Ahneeah and the People Who Left the World.” Ganonoot’s voice changed as he began the story; it grew deeper and clearer.

  “Long ago, so long ago the Great Tree was a sprout no higher than a rabbit’s eyes, the People lived among orchards and meadows and gardens, groves of sugar maples, hills and valleys of the trees who give of their meat—hickory, beech, butternut, chestnut and oak. Each plant had a purpose—to live and grow. Each animal had a purpose—to live and grow, and the People knew this, deep beyond all questions, for they knew their own purpose and saw that it was the same. They ate only plants, and the plants they ate could not feel pain because plants have no need of pain, and the People knew this without asking. But we ask, ‘Why do the plants have no need of pain?’ It is because they cannot run away, and pain is to tell you to run away, and after you have run away, to rest and heal.

  “Ahneeah is of the sun and moon, fire and ice; her voice is the wind and thunder, her glance is the lightning, her tears are the rain. But the earth is older even than Ahneeah, and we are all made of the earth we till and walk upon and sweep from the floors of our hogans.

  “Now, of the animals who were not men, certain of them chased and killed and ate each other. Certain of them ate only the plants, who felt no pain, but others killed the creatures who could run, and be hurt, and cry out in agony as they died. The men saw this, and being hungry for flesh they invented the sling, the spear, the snare, the trap and the bow. Ahneeah said to them in her voices, ‘All right, you have chosen to give death to those who swim and fly and run from it. But when you kill you must be present in order to see death, and hear its cry; therefore you may not use the snare, the poison, the toothed trap or the trap which holds a prisoner. It is the right of all prey to be free to escape if they can, and if a kill is made, the red blood of your prey must flow over your hands, as your own red blood flows through your hands, and every man and woman who would eat meat must kill and clean the body of the kill. No one who has not killed, or helped to kill, may eat flesh, for knowledge of the agony of death is the price of flesh.’

  “But there were men who could not hear Ahneeah’s voices, or would not hear them, or who were mistaken and confused. They thought that what they could do justified the doing of it. And now I will tell you how this confusion led to the murder of prisoners and finally to the killing of men by men. It is a story of heroes lost, of brave children and men and women, and of the sad people who, with Ahneeah’s guidance, left the world for alien lands, only to yearn through generations for Ahneeah’s justice, though they had long forgotten from whence it came, or from whence they came.”

  As Ganonoot spoke the formal words of the story he seemed to them less and less the childish old man he had been. He was just a voice saying words that rang in the air solemn and clear.

  “Ahneeah planted the Great Tree when the People first came into the world, but that tree was destroyed during the time of greed and war. The second tree grew in the shade of the first. The second tree is the Great Tree we know, but it was a sprout no higher than a rabbit’s eye when Ahneeah …”

  At this moment the bearskin across the hogan door was pulled violently aside, so that its skin side slapped against the doorpost like a whip. Everyone looked and saw a tall, thickset man who stood with his legs apart, his hands on his hips. His dark hair was ruffled as if he had been running, and his eyes gleamed with red flashes in the firelight. “It’s Bren’s father,” Arel whispered.

  “Bren!” the man said. “So you are wasting your time listening to the old idiot tell children’s tales!”

  Bren got up, apprehensive about his father’s anger, yet there was relief and joy in his fac
e.

  “Andaru, my brother,” Amu said. “Bren has been here with us.”

  “Yes, listening to the whimsy of this dodderer!”

  “While you’ve been who knows where?” Runa said, matching Andaru’s anger.

  Andaru turned to Amu. “Brother, tell your woman to speak more softly!” His face was strained with his anger; like Bren’s, his brows came low over his eyes.

  Then the old woman, Aguma, stepped out of the shadows to face Andaru. “Andaru, where have you learned such manners? And why do you bring your sourceless anger to my hogan?”

  Andaru looked at her steadily for a moment, then shrugged as if she and her hogan were not important. “I’ll take my anger with me, then,” he said in a calmer voice. “Come, Bren.” He turned and went past the bearskin into the darkness. Bren seemed embarrassed, and kept his eyes away from them all as he followed his father from the hogan.

  Ganonoot said, “The story was for Bren, the hunter, and now it will have to wait.” He said the words solemnly, but then, with his silly cackling laughter, he rose to his feet and scuttled like an insect to the doorway. “Goodnight, goodnight, goodnight, children! We will have to wait and see! Goodnight!” And with that he turned and glided swiftly past the bearskin into the night.

  The people murmured among themselves, giving their opinions of Andaru’s behavior. Arel said to Jen and Am, “Some people say that my uncle Andaru has been with the Chigai.” She whispered the last word.

  Jen and Arn looked at each other, feeling the uneasiness all around them. Because of all the things they didn’t know, they seemed to be among strangers, though earlier they had begun to feel almost at home with the people of the winter camp. Arel took Jen’s hand, and put her other hand on Arn’s arm. “You’ll stay with us tonight, in our hogan,” she said. “My mother has made up beds for you.”

  That night they slept on shelf beds in Amu and Runa’s hogan, on mattresses of aromatic balsam covered with supple skins. They went to sleep hearing the muted voices of the adults around the fire.