The Night the White Deer Died

by Gary Paulsen

  And Janet moved to the pony and threw herself onto its back and sat up and picked up the braided hand loop in the pony’s mane, which she took firmly in her hand. And Billy moved through the gate instead of jumping the wall, and the pony followed out into the dark of the road, the still wash of the night and moonlight. Billy headed off” in the direction of the mountains and the pony followed, with Janet on its back, and never once did she hesitate.

  11

  They moved through the night like a soft knife through water, so that the night opened in front of them and closed behind and left them just in their small pocket of moonlight and silence. Later, when Janet tried to remember the ride, all she could honestly remember was that her mind was blank and that images of great beauty would cycle through, come and go, but not really stay so that she could lock them in her thoughts.

  They were out of town very soon, away from all buildings, and past the gate to the pueblo, on out into the country, up into the foothills that led to the mountains.

  Riding was easy. She was amazed that it was so simple. She’d ridden some in the past, when she was a small girl, but then only in circles on led small ponies.

  This was, if anything, easier; the pony moved to keep its weight directly under her, kept her comfortable and balanced, and soon she relaxed her grip on the braid and began to move with the motion of the horse, which made it easier still, and once she relaxed, she began to see things in the night.

  Once a small nighthawk swooped past, not four inches from her face, out of the night and back into it in silence, and she actually felt the kiss of wind from his wing, a brush so light on her cheek that it might have been imagined, a kiss by a ghost.

  Billy moved ahead of her as they got out of the buildings and left the road and moved across the flats of scrub and piñon, and she watched him and felt … felt close and strange and safe and wonderful in a way she couldn’t understand and didn’t pick at because she sensed that to pick at it would ruin it.

  It wasn’t love, not really, but something very much like it, and there was awe in it and richness and quietness and softness and power, and the feelings all cycled through the way the images did, so that she couldn’t remember later any single one, couldn’t say to herself I felt this way at any given time. It was very much like the touch of wind from the wing of the nighthawk, the way the feelings moved through her mind as they rode—soft touches of thoughts that didn’t always tie together but were always good and left her mind with a good taste.

  She wasn’t cold, and that, too, surprised her. It was a chilly night, though very still, yet she wasn’t cold even with the movement of the horse, and she supposed it was because she was so caught up in everything else.

  The trip across the high desert, out of town, and up through the scrub and sand washes might have taken two hours or two days, she didn’t know, had no way of knowing or caring; but before dawn they were in the pine forests of the foothills and moving through the rich smells of the pine needles around them.

  The moon went down while they were in the pines, but enough light came from where it went over the horizon to light their way, and Billy moved ahead of her over a series of ridges, rolling high mountain meadows, through the dark, and finally down a last, sloping incline to some more trees and through the trees and down a shallow bank to the edge of a pool of water.

  It was not the same pool as the small pond in her dream. This one was much larger, but she gasped when she saw it because it was so peaceful; around the edges, out about ten feet, there was a thin layer of ice, and the water beyond was so still it was practically impossible to see where the ice ended and the water began.

  Billy stopped his horse on the grass near the pond and dismounted and signaled for Janet to do the same, and he took both horses off into the trees and tied them.

  Then he came back, and he was holding the striped blanket from the pony, which he unfolded and spread on the ground, and still in silence and all with hand motions he told her to sit on the blanket and make herself comfortable. When she’d done so, he moved off to the edge of the pond and spread his arms and sang a song, or recited some poetry, in Indian, standing tall with the white buckskins and the night around him, and although Janet couldn’t understand any of the words in the song, she recognized it as a form of praying from the tone in his voice and the way he stood.

  When he’d finished singing, the first sound he’d made all night, he squatted with his back to Janet, still facing the pond, and sat in silence for what seemed like hours.

  Now Janet became cold, and she wrapped the blanket around her shoulders—he didn’t turn when she moved—and hunched warmth into her shoulders and began to feel strange. It was the strange feeling that comes of not having slept, the messy-dream feeling and burned-out sensation that takes over the mind when sleep is needed, and she wondered if she should tell Billy and was going to say something—perhaps that she would like a little sleep—when he stood up and turned and faced her.

  For a time he stared down on her, sitting huddled in the blanket, and while he stood this way, the sun came up in back of him—or at least lightened the sky and silhouetted him with a faint red glow—and she could make out the features of his face better than in the dark, and she could see that they were soft and gentle.

  “Why do you do this?” he asked, and his voice had a hoarse quality that was somehow close. “I am an old man, and yet you followed me up into the hills—why do you do this?”

  But he didn’t want an answer, not really, and she sat quietly watching him, waiting, and she wanted to touch him but knew that it would be wrong, so she just sat, but of all the things she didn’t question, she didn’t ask herself what she was doing on the mountain with Billy.

  That had come up, once, during the ride. A brief question, a touch of inquisitiveness, a smell of wonder; but it had vanished immediately, because even not knowing what was going to happen, she knew she couldn’t miss it.

  That it had all been strange, almost weird, she knew and understood—but that it could have been stopped or changed, that she could have not come with him or not be involved with him was utterly impossible. It was all natural, like rain, like wind.…

  “And it is this way and so,” Billy interrupted her thinking. “When there was no time, back even before there was no time and no coyote to think of things, the Great Mother sent two crows, and they flew and flew until their wings were tired, looking for a place to land, a place to be.”

  He paused, still standing over her, and she looked up and nodded, though she wasn’t sure why she was nodding. She was following the story, but had no idea where it was going or what it truly meant, or why he was telling it to her.

  “When at last their wings could no longer support them, when they had flown through darkness and it seemed they would have to fly thus forever, they fell to earth.

  “Down and down they fell, end over end, two black birds tumbling through the blackness of before time, and when finally they hit the earth, it was at the same place at which they had started to fly, the same place they’d been put by the Great Mother.

  “And it is this way and so. Where they landed was this place we now stand, as it always will be the place where The People stand. Because where we start is where we end and where we end is where we start, and that is the end of the story.”

  He nodded and sat, or dropped into a squat, facing her.

  “I …” She didn’t know what to say, what was expected of her. “It is a good story.…” She let it fall off, waiting.

  “It is the ritual story always told in courtship between a young brave and the maiden who rode his pony.”

  “Oh.”

  The light was brighter now, a yellow-red glow over everything, and she looked around at the trees and down at the pond without trying to look around at the trees or down at the pond.

  “Now they ride in trucks, and there is no ritual.” His voice was tight with scorn. “They ride in trucks and do not mind the beauty of things, the way th
ey used to do.

  “Now we would sit for a day and another night, and I would go and kill a deer, and you would eat of it, and when we went down the mountain, we would be married.”

  She said nothing, but she thought of the deer that he mentioned and that brought back the dream, and she wondered if she could have read somewhere about the deer and marriage business. It seemed to fit so well.

  “Now they ride in pickups and go to the church with the walls and the man in black with the backward collar says they are married, and so they are married, and then they drive around with much sound on the horns of the trucks and get drunk on beer so their heads are loose and go to bed and that is that … tscha!” He turned and spat. “That is less than nothing. Where is the beauty in that?”

  He stood, an upward movement that seemed to lift him, and spread his arms to show his buckskins. “Look. Oh, look, I stand in good relation to the gods. Is not this suit worthy?”

  She looked up, smiled. In the full light the bead-work was incredibly fine—almost beyond human doing.

  “My mother made this suit. I was married to Easter in it.” He smiled, and his ugly teeth did not show but only beauty. “Isn’t this better than a pickup and horns making sounds?”

  She nodded. And meant it.

  “Ahh, and it was this way and so. Back before time men were men, and there were no horns and no trucks. And no wine.” A sadness crept in. “No wine—only beauty.”

  “Tell me.” She sat up, wrapped the blanket tighter. “Tell me what it was like … all of it.”

  He looked at her, let his eyes close and open. “You would not believe it.”

  “Tell me anyway. Please.”

  And he stood, and began moving and talking, and in less than a second Janet was whisked back before time.

  12

  It was more than the way he talked, the words rolling like half-music from his tongue, rolling down and surrounding her with what they said and were; and it was more than what they said and were; and it was more than the way he moved, sometimes with immense grace, half-dancing, and sometimes with jerky movements, but still dancing, only not just dancing but telling.

  It was everything, all of it came together—the movement and the words—and Janet thought this must be the way it was back when people lived in caves and the hunters returned from the hunt and told the story of how it went around the fire.

  Something moved inside her, watching him talk-move, and it was a strange and new and yet somehow very, very old thing, and it scared her but left her feeling more alive than she’d ever felt.

  “We had wars,” he started. “And it was thus and so that after the Great Mother gave us this place and this mountain as our own, there were others who came from the south, way down where they had nothing but sand and dryness because they had displeased the Great Mother and that is all she would give them.”

  And here even his body showed the scorn, the utter degradation of the others who came from the south and who had displeased the Great Mother, and Janet felt almost ill at the thought of them.

  “And they came up north to take what was ours, because we had water and good soil and stood in good relation to the gods. Tscha! They were fools and thought they were warriors of such stature that they brought their women and children and even their dogs with little skids to carry their meager supplies and clothing.”

  His movements dipped and whirled so that Janet could see the dogs and children and the little skids, poles going back alongside the dogs and the dust of their walking, and she squinted, looking out with her mind at the picture of them walking and coming.

  “We met them in the big flats of desert out away from our corn so they could not ruin crops, because we did not know if they understood the saving of crops even in battle. And we heard later that they had told their women to be ready to live in the small rooms of the pueblo by nightfall.”

  He minced to show the women laughing and dancing, and Janet caught herself smiling as she saw them—women from an age dead and gone centuries before she was born—getting ready to move into the pueblo.

  “Ahh, there was fighting that day that the people from the south could not expect, could not believe. They came to kill, to conquer, and instead they died, and their women sang the death songs for many, many days.

  “We took our women with us to the battlefield to show them the scorn we held for them, to show them how little they were. And we stood in ranks with lines straight, and the women in back, and we used the big clubs with the sharp points on the end, and we killed them as they came at us, killed them and threw them over our shoulders like meat for dogs, and the women in back stuck little knives in the backs of their heads to make sure they were dead and cut them to show what we thought of them as men, and when that day was done, the people from the south were no more, no more, and the crows were fat for a whole summer with what they had to eat.

  “We threw their bodies down in the gully south of the pueblo and took their women and children into our tribe, and those people were no more, nothing but a stink in the afternoon.”

  He stopped suddenly, and Janet could smell the blood and dust in the heat of that day, could hear the women screaming and wailing, could see the wild savagery of the battle, and a part of her was sickened by it and made sad by the women’s crying and the children without fathers because they’d been killed in the battle.

  But another part was thrilled, was excited by the story of the battle, and she related to the winning side because she sat now with one of the warriors. And as she looked up, his age vanished and the time vanished so that what stood before her was not Billy Honcho, old man in buckskins, but a young brave.

  Tall, he stood, shining with his leather clothes in the new morning light, fresh from a battle three hundred years old, fresh with ancient blood and victory and with strength and sureness showing in and around him like something alive, a glow of life, and she reached out from where she sat, let the blanket fall and reached out.

  And Billy reached down and took her hand and held it for a second and released it, and there was much that went between them, whole worlds that went between them when they touched there in that cold, still morning on the edge of the partially frozen pond.

  She loved him. Not so much him, and it was not so much gushy love, but she loved what he was when he told the story, loved not just what he was but what he should have been, loved what he could have been if the time had been right for him.

  She loved him. Because he was the Indian in the dream, but he was more than that too; more than simply a dream person, because when he’d told the story of the battle, she had actually seen him change and become a warrior in the fight. And even now, after the story and battle were done and he stood silent, he was still all that he should and could have been, and she loved him for that; and all the wine and all that other part of his life were gone—shed like old skin or waste. Gone.

  And what was left she loved and more, it was more than just love—she was awed by the strength of him, the power that had taken him and made his nostrils flare and his eyes blow fire and youth, and it scared her a little. But only a little, and it was a good fear—almost a fear of herself and the kind of fear that kept her out of trouble.

  They were silent the rest of the morning, silent as the sun came up and made them warm, and they sat, Billy down by the pond, Janet on the blanket, through the whole day, off and on dozing and getting warm, and in the middle of the afternoon Billy uncoiled and stood and turned, and his face was soft, but still young.

  “It is time.”

  She had been dreamily looking at his back and the pond, staring into her mind, and she stood with him. “Time for what?”

  “You must take the pony and go back down the mountain. I will stay.”

  No, she thought, but it didn’t come out, didn’t make it to her mouth. No cut through her thoughts and seared across the middle of her brain; no this is wrong no don’t do this no you don’t have to stay on the mountain, no I love you no don�
��t stay because there is no need; no, no, no.…

  “You do not move.” His tone admonished. “You have something to say?”

  “I would rather you didn’t do this—didn’t stay.” Some part of her wanted to run to him, run screaming and hold him and cry, but some new part wouldn’t let her do it, made her reserved. She hated the new part, but understood it.

  “It is time.” He repeated, his voice flat. “I have done most things once. It is no good to do things twice. Down there,” he pointed with his face back in the direction of the pueblo, “there is only the wine. Only that.”

  “But …”

  “It is time.”

  “I …”

  “I know. I feel the same.” And a kind of torment slid into his words, a tremor, a smell of something unsure. “Do you think this thing is easy? Do not make it harder for me. It is time. Go. Now.”

  She turned and walked back into the trees where he had tied the horses and untied the pony and climbed onto its back and rode out into the meadow and down in the direction of the pueblo and town because she knew it was something she had to do, had to leave him now, though it tore at her to do it.

  She rode out across the meadow and started down the trail that led back to town and home, a fifteen-year-old girl with a mother who was divorced and with Julio who followed her and made the sounds in his throat so she would turn and see him ignoring her. But at the last moment, just as the pony started on the down trail, she turned to look at Billy once more because she knew she would never see him again, and she loved him.

  She loved him. For what he could have been, and she knew that he loved her the same way, for what they could have been. But when she turned to look, he had his back to her and was facing the pond and his shoulders were straight, and she knew he was waiting, waiting for his last battle, and that he wouldn’t be thinking about her. And she turned and rode down the mountain, and she did not look back again, did not once look back, though she cried and cried and was still crying so badly in grief for a love that was gone before it came, still crying so deeply and tearingly that when she rode into the courtyard of her home, she could not stop, could not get off the pony, and had to get help from her mother, who came out and half-carried, half-led her into the house and only patted her on the forehead and did not ask the reason for the crying.