Rabbit Boss

by Thomas Sanchez

  With the morning he awoke. From the side of the mother of his children he moved out beneath the Sky. Smoke was blowing white from a fire glowing in front of his brother’s gadu, already some of the men were there, being part of the morning. He came to the fire like the other men, not because he sought warmth, for the coolness of the morning was natural on his naked skin, but for the reason that the fire was the beginning of the day, and he sat in front of it between the other men and ate the scoop of pinenut mush still hot from the basket until he felt it heavy in his stomach. Basa stood, his brother stood, and laughed into the air, the Birds jumped in the trees, back in the forest a Bear rolled in the water; coming quickly through the camp, his Rabbit robe hung high from his shoulders signaling the hunt that would fill the day, was the Rabbit Boss. He stopped at the point of the fire in the middle of Basa’s laughter, across his face was frozen the smile from the years of squinting into the Sun. “Basa, my son,” he spoke into the laughter. “Why is it on the morning of the Rabbit hunt you laugh? You take the pleasure of what is to come like the child takes a new toy to its breast. The one who should laugh like the brook is your brother. It is on this day he will take for his first son a Rabbit robe that will protect and warm him through the young seasons of his life. Gayabuc, my son,” he looked down at the man who had only eyes for the fire. “What say you, this morning of the hunt?” The old man who stood with the strength of a rock waited, but in the space where his oldest son’s answer should be there was nothing. To the old man this was answer enough. “Gayabuc has time only for the Fox.” He let his breath out heavy in the air. “His body is with us but his heart is with the Ghost on yonder lake.” Now he knew his son would speak. “I say on this morning of the hunt,” Gayabuc pulled to his feet, “it is not the time of Gumsaba, of the Big Time. It is still the time of the first season. The Rabbits was the only creatures in the forest with less flesh on their bones than us. The white days have been many and hard beyond what most of us have memory of. The Rabbits will be weak, the meat tough and sharp in the mouth. I say why do we go into the forest and hunt Rabbit before his time. Fish is in the lake and he waits for us to eat him.” “Yes, Fish is in the lake,” the old man turned his eyes away from his son. Out across the morning flatness of the lake a silver arch split the surface and hung one still moment like a Bird before slapping once more into obscurity. “Fish is in the lake,” he repeated, for it was so, it could not be denied, his son was right, the Rabbits would be weak and without much flesh. It would not be their time, and this son, this Gayabuc, knew what he himself had forbidden to be spoken of, that when the time of the Gumsaba was come, when the berries weighted the green bushes to the ground and the Rabbit was heavy with flesh, it would not be the time of his people, for he had the dream hung in his head like a string of trout Fish in the sun. Those that his son had seen during the white days would return, the bodies that owned the bones would return to claim them, for he too had the dream and could look nowhere without seeing their Ghosts. The Rabbit must be taken in this first season. “Our bellies are small like the Bird,” he looked to all men around the fire. “And you Gayabuc, can make the baby robe for your first son. Rabbit’s fur is thick and warm from the white days, it will be good. The time of Rabbit is here. It is the time of Pelleu.”

  They went away from the Big Lake in the Sky, from Tahoe. The winter home was left behind. The Rabbit Boss led the way into the forest. Behind him came the two sons and the other men in silence while the women, burdened with baskets and children, followed far back in the path of the men, their voices distant like startled Birds in the rain. Painted Stick walked slowly, her small steps matching those of the other women. Her son was light in the willow cradle strapped to her back. She took pleasure in the weight her son’s body offered her. She hoped for him to grow heavier with each step and bend her to the Earth. She wanted him to bend her back like the strong bow. He was her man now. The father of this child-man, Gayabuc, had escaped her. His Spirit was no longer with her through the night. There was the touch of flesh beneath the Rabbit blanket, but his hands no longer locked on the warm stone of her breast as he moved like a dark cloud into the heart of her body. He had not moved into the heart of her body since he disappeared into the white for the hunt that would return with meat strapped heavy on the back, meat for the babyfeast of his first son. He returned with no meat weighing down his shoulders but only talk of the White Ghosts of the lake yonder. Soon his talk of the White Ghosts was slower and finally it was gone, and with it his Spirit went, to the yonder lake, where he told of the White Ghosts that ate of themselves, his eyes spoke only of that now, emptied his body of all else. His eyes saw away from her, from the first son, from his father, and this was her doing, it was her offense, for the sign read she had wronged him, the baby was brought out of her body in winter, not in soft gold days of the Big Time, not in Gumsaba. The waterfall roared in her memory. This was the terrible offense. Now she paid its heavy cost, the Spirit of her child’s father lost. The waterfall in her memory crashed over her body, the cold water rushing through her hair, slapping it the length of her brown back, flowing over her swinging breasts, washing down her stomach into the soft tangled darkness between her legs where the hardness of his body was thrust cold and sunk in the deepness. The water swirled around her legs, around his legs bent to her, it boiled a cold foam beneath them, supporting the tight slant of her calves. Then he was gone. She stood alone between the rocks where the waters were quiet. Beneath the silent surface her brown legs glowed in the blue. She leaned against the log jammed between the rocks and watched the needle points of the high trees jab a long row across the open Sky as the blood ran out of her body into the perfect blue. It spread in the blue a large pink cloud, moving out from her, swelling. When she looked from the trees to the water she dipped her hand in the pink cloud growing from her, it slipped through her fingers, splintering into the calm pool. She leaned her face to the disturbed waters that stirred the color of fire from the movement of her hand, her lips almost touching the cold surface as the moan rose. It came slowly from her throat at the sight of the cloud reforming, spreading thicker in the water. He had broken the life from her beneath the waterfall. Her face sank into the pool filling with blood. She scooped at the cloud grown large and red, her hands thrashing through the crimson slivers of her life, trying to gather it to her. She moaned as her hands clamped between her legs, pressing hard into the mound of hair erupting blood, holding back her life. It stopped. The cloud grew no larger, it hung suspended in the blue, dying around her. She was still, waiting its return. But it came no more. She was alone in the blue of the pool, the brown roots of her legs melting into the blue itself where she saw the silver flash of fish, felt it move against her skin, felt its sharp dart brush against her knee, cutting her body from the water and sending her blind flesh into the forest, heaving between silent brittle bark of tall trees, her naked feet slapping against the golden crust of dried pine needles that cracked beneath each running footprint. The Sun caught high in the still branches overhead and spilled down in brilliant shafts slicing the long green shadowed path with bright doors of light that her body raced through, breaking in and out of the gold and green and into the full day filling the great place in the forest where trees did not grow and the people lived on the gentle grass where she stopped, damp hair flung around her shoulders and the cry from her lips burning across the grass to the huddled women splitting the white bellies of silver Trout with long graysharp stones, “Mother!” The stones stopped in the white bellies as twelve eyes the color of damp earth flung wide with the single terror of a Fawn that has just had an arrow pass through the narrow of its neck. The eyes held the girl at the edge of the trees where the only movement was the heaving flesh of breasts. “Mother!” The cry came again, carrying up the slight slope of grass. “The life was broken within me and flowed into the quiet pool by the fall!” The women did not move. The girl could not feel their eyes on her face puffed with pain, and she felt them not on her heav
ing flesh, but lower, down the roll of stomach to the dark tangle between her legs dripping a steady crimson fall to the grass, and behind her, in the forest, was the trail splattered with the blood that had spilt thick down her trembling thighs. At first there was one laugh from the women with the sharp stones, it was short and caught the girl staring at the wet space centered between her dust covered feet, then it was joined by another and the grass was covered with the happy sound bubbling from the lips of the women with the stones, filling the clearing in the forest up to the tree points stuck in the Sky, bubbling like a hot soup overflowing the edges of a bowl. The flow of laughter raised the girl’s head, the eyes in the dark puffed face showed the tears that raged for the blind moment that held her in the ignorance of her own body. “Girl,” one of the women spoke, laying her knife into the grass and coming with her whole body full off the ground and her feet solid beneath her up to the girl at the edge of the forest whose dark face flashed with the shame and hatred of her youth. “Girl, you fear for nothing. It is your first Season. It is the Season of the Woman.” These words came to the girl through the sound of laughter from the women on the grass, and further within her to her mind, deeper still, to her heart, was the sound of the waterfall.

  She did not eat for four days. It was a hard time. The berries thick with juice dropped from the bushes and she stooped to gather them but could not suck at their sweetness. She gathered the berries into her basket and walked with its weight, her fingertips stained with the fragrance that flared in her nostrils and was forbidden her. During the day others would come and scoop the sweetness from her basket and laugh as the juice ran from their mouths. Once he came, but he took only one berry and crushed its fatness with his thumb and streaked the sweet print of fruit across the thick lips and bent to her breast and sucked at her swollen nipple until she pushed him back in the leaves and he too laughed, the white of his teeth sharp in the Sun as she rubbed the red circle from her breast. All that she had, she gave away. The berries, the nuts picked one by one, the Fish cleaned and split, the sap balls she plucked from the bark of the high pines, all was given up, for in this first Season of the Woman she need be generous, a generosity that would stay with her and keep alive the others the long time of the Woman and into her death. She slept little, for the four days without food for the stomach were fed with examples that would shape her from a girl to a Woman and she did not want to be weak and lazy in spirit. On the morning of the second day without food the sister of her father gave her to drink of the warm water that was scented with the sugar of pine, she raised the basket cup to her lips and the sister said, “Young girl, I will guide you into the time of Woman, from this moment you will not leave me. I will assist you to stand like the tree. Do not be afraid. I will keep you from all the wrong ways. It was said Gayabuc came into you before the beginning of your time. You must hide your face from him. He must not come to you. He must not touch of your skin before your Dance of the Woman or all the Antelope and Deer will run from him, he will be a poor hunter, he will not be a full man.” She took the cup from the girl and met her dark eyes almost lost in the falling black hair, “Have you acted with a good heart in all things during the days before the start of your first Season?” The girl did not answer, outside the bark of a Dog cut the early morning, and within her roared the waterfall and the heat. “If you have not,” the sister put her hand in the girl’s tangled hair, “the signs will speak, the ground beneath your feet will turn to water and Coyote will eat the heart from the children that crawl from you. AHHH,” she let her old shoulders sag with the weight of her breasts. “Such talk is not good. You have acted wisely, you have eaten of nothing since the beginning and for that you will live to the age of the Bear herself and never will you ache for food, for you will have all the food you have eaten as you pass from the girl to the Woman. You will not,” she leaned her whole body forward, the smell of nuts coming from her brown teeth, “ever go hungry. You are young, your flesh is hard, you are pretty like the laugh,” she tugged the girl’s hair. “You say nothing, but it is good you do not comb this hair, it is forbidden to you, it will turn to the color of ashes if you comb it, it is forbidden to you even wash the dirt from the skin of your body in the cold streams, not even your face may be washed gently, to do so would wrinkle it like the dead leaf, and you must not drink of the pure water, to do so means the sickness to death. AHHH, but you have been instructed in all these ways of the first season and all the seasons since you were the small girl, and the year last you were with my daughter’s girl in her first season, you carried the barren stick and you learned much. You have prepared yourself for this time, of that I am sure, you know it is forbidden to make your body for the men during this first Season, during all Seasons until you die, you must not make the men approach.” She tugged at the girl’s hair. “I will cut this hair, that is the way, and if we cut it now it will grow quickly and thick for all your life and glow like the Moon.” She laughed and clapped her hands and cut the girl’s hair in swift, sharp strokes and wrapped it firmly in green leaves. Together they went to the stream and the sister tossed half of the loose thick hair into the air, it fell scattered on the clear water and floated, slowly, blindly, over the gleaming rocks beneath and out of sight “Goodbye hair,” the sister called, and she laughed with the gurgling of the water rushing over the rocks in front of her feet. “You will be safe hair, and grow as long as the stream and return to this girl when she is old and without much hair, like me, hah, and you will keep her warm during cold white nights.” She fell to her knees and scooped the soft Earth next to the stream with her hands and buried the remaining hair deep, packing it hard with mud. “It will come back to you in life,” the sister stood, the heavy flesh of her body trembling with anticipation. “It will grow rich and dark like the Earth it is planted in and cover your days, but that, of course, is only if you be good and stay back from the men during your Season, you must not look above the ground at your feet for fear your eyes will fall upon hunters going out for food into the forest with their weapons, and look not you into the face of those who gather the Rabbit, for you are unclean in your Season, and if you gaze only the once onto the man the animals will run from him in the forest and the fish will sink from him in the waters and the babies in you will rot like the Worm in the cocoon and the people will grow with Dog sickness and die in their beds. Hah!” She laughed, clapped her hands and looked suddenly to the stream. “But you are the good girl, you are the one who has been instructed in all these ways of the first Season and all the Seasons since you were the small girl, you know you must keep your head bowed to the Earth and your body straight and strong so the dead blood flows quickly away to the ground. Come, come come come!” She took the girl’s hand and pulled her from the stream. They moved back up the slope, the people now were out in the day and the children saw the old woman and the young girl being pulled behind and came running between the huts, following the shouts and laughter that broke unexpectedly from their young throats like icicles from a tree, their small hands linking together as they whipped out in a winding chain behind the young girl, who saw them not, never lifting her bowed head once. He saw her. Saw the hair that once grew a fine thick mane down her back was chopped off. He was sad at this and he followed the girl far back, behind the children, watching the proud, strong slope of her bent neck as her eyes saw nothing but the path before her. It was in her walk something that pulled him to her, he had seen her that first time, come into the camp with her father and his family, her father had the Deer vest with solid blue feathers from the winter Bird, his name was Blue Breast, he was brother to the woman that was mother to him and had come from the hot valley over the mountain where he had lived with others beside the shallow lake, but there had been another woman come to him in the same hut and she was followed after some days by her man and there had been words and a fishingknife cut to the heart of the man, so Blue Breast came with his two women and family to the camp of Gayabuc’s father by the Lake in the Sky, it wa
s the girl come into the camp for the first time walking through the late afternoon with the full basket braced on her jutted hip that he watched and felt his blood move with each of her small steps, he wanted her there, in front of everyone, in front of the Sun, on the hard straw grass, but she looked to him not, she walked effortlessly behind her father, the Owl glides through the trees of the Moonless forest, he watched this same walk now over the heads of the small children, and when the old woman pulled the girl into her hut and slapped the blanket down in the openness behind her scattering the laughing children he stood silent, his blood still moving in the trace of her tiny steps, watching. The old sister sat in the center of her hut on the Rabbit blanket worn of dense fur and showing splotches of its cracked yellow skin like angry scars, the air came quickly through her lips and the girl standing with her head bowed sensed the strong smell of nuts swelling around her. “Run girl,” the old sister mixed her words with the loud sound of her breath. “Run hard during your Season and when you feel your body getting slow run some more and you will not grow soft like me and have a spinning head every time you walk around yourself. Work and run so you will not be lazy and short of life air, gather firewood for your mother so your arms will be strong to carry the children, HaH, and hold the men down when they try to sneak away. Run hard, work hard, walk straight, keep your fast for the four days, do these things and you will not die young and the strength of the flesh shall not desert you.” The old sister came to her feet in the hut and tipped the young girl’s chin until the clear earthen eyes gazed into her own. “But you are the good girl, you are the one who has been instructed in all these ways of the first Season and of all the Seasons since you were the small girl, and in the coming days you will grow weak without the food in your belly and from the hard work you will keep doing for your mother and all of the people. You will need the strong stick to support the weight of your body, you will need the strong stick to keep you straight and the dead blood flowing to the ground. Will not you need this stick to guide you into the Season of the Woman?” the old sister asked. “Will you not need this support?” “This guide I need,” the young girl spoke full into the hut. “This support I need.” “Ahhhh,” the old sister let the mass of her flesh rest on the bones, “it is good you are in need of this support, of this guide, for I have been at work this night past on just such a stick, a strong, straight, hard stick that is light to the touch but will bear all your burden, a fine stick cut from the elderberry tree by my own hands, a stick that has been stripped of all brittle bark, peeled of its thick skin to its white meat, a painted stick.” She slipped away from the young girl into the early morning shadows that filled the hut and emerged with a long thinly rolled blanket cradled in her arms, she unwrapped the blanket slowly, rolling each curve out smooth, the loose skin around her mouth pulled tight with the solemnity of her movements. The girl watched as the blanket unfurled and gathered on the floor, leaving exposed in the old sisters hands a painted stick longer and straighter than the length of her young body. “Stick,” the old sister spoke completely to the object in her grasp. “Oh my stick, stand you straight. Help this young girl through her first Season of the Woman, through all Seasons of the Woman, for all her time. Don’t fall down my stick. Stand you straight,” her fist hardened at the top of the wood and she pushed the shaft upright, planting it firmly in the Earth beneath her. “Support the burden! Don’t fail. Stick, don’t fail!” She thrust the object further from her until it pushed against the girl’s body, snapping her erect. “Take it,” she commanded. The girl took it to her. “Lean your face against it.” The girl pressed her face to the shaft, the green smell of wood filled her nostrils; beneath her clenched hands flared the painted red ocher band coiling around the stick to its bottom securely anchored between her dusty feet. “Now you are ready to meet the Season,” the old sister spoke without taking her eyes from the stick. “Keep the painted stick with you as you would your own arm, as you would your own leg, move with it. If it falls to the Earth you will not grow straight. If it falls your days will grow crooked into life. You will die young.” When the girl emerged from the hut the waiting children sent up a shout that tore the tranquil rhythm from the morning Sky, but when they saw the painted stick they fell silent. On the fourth day of her first Season the girl was so weak from the food she had not eaten that she could not stand without the stick.