A Hero's Tale (6 page)

I didn't speak the forest people's language well enough to talk to the men about it. Even if I could have made them understand my questions, I doubt they would have satisfied my curiosity, but they seemed to know what I was feeling, and they would smile at me as if to say, "Be patient."

One thing Maara did try to explain to me. I thought at first it was my own ignorance of their language, but it seemed that sometimes the forest people spoke of me as he and at other times as she.

"Hunters are men," said Maara.

"If I'm a hunter, am I no longer a woman?"

"A woman is always a woman."

"How can I be both?"

Maara sighed. "Tamara, he is a hunter. Tamras, she is a woman."

I didn't find this explanation very helpful.

"Men and women are different," said Aamah, when I asked her the same question. She spoke to me as patiently as she would have spoken to a child, and with so much kindness that I could not take offense.

All the same, I didn't want her to think that I was ignorant of something so obvious.

"I know there are differences," I told her. "My people tell lots of stories about the differences between men and women." I smiled, remembering a few of them. "Some of them are quite funny."

Aamah smiled back at me. "We tell those stories too."

Someone called me out of a sound sleep. It was almost morning, but still too dark to go outside and much too cold to get out of bed until someone else had made a fire. The hunter who came for me saw that I was awake and waiting.

"Good," he said. "You hear."

When I left Maara's arms, she didn't wake, or perhaps she was pretending. She turned over and pulled the elk robe over her head. Four men, wolf-clad, waited by the cave entrance. The man who had come to wake me joined them. They talked quietly together while I hurried into my clothing. When I picked up my wolfskin, one of them gestured to me to come to him, and he helped me put it on. It fit as snug as a cap over my head, with straps concealed by the wolf's forelegs that went over my shoulders and a belt that tied around my waist. I fastened my quiver to the belt and strung my bow.

The men took up their weapons. Two of them had bows, but I was surprised to see that the other three carried spears. I had seen hunting spears in the armory in Merin's house, although few there hunted anymore. They were lighter than the spears used in war, light enough for throwing. The spears the forest people carried were short, but their thick shafts and long stone blades made them look heavy, too clumsy to throw. None of the men who had hunted the stag had carried spears. I wondered if this hunt would be different.

The men seemed to know where they were going. We followed no trail that I could see, and no wolves traveled with us.

All morning no one said a word. The hunters spoke to each other only with their hands. Many of their gestures I understood. Someone would point to us to go this way or that, or hold up a hand to make us stop, or cup his ear to tell us to listen. Other signs were not so obvious. Their hands seemed to speak a language of their own. At first I tried to pay attention, but while my mind was distracted, puzzling out their meaning, my feet would trip over a root or step on the heel of the man in front of me. At last I gave up trying to understand. I did what seemed reasonable to me and relied on the others to let me know if they wanted me to do something else.

About midday we entered a thicket. Here the hunters walked more cautiously, and our leader knelt often to examine the ground. We'd had a thaw, and much of the snow had melted, but the ground had frozen again. I could see neither hoofprint nor pawprint on the frozen ground. Nevertheless it was clear that the men had found the trail of something, and their hands had a great deal to say about it.

Not long afterward we came upon a sign that even I understood. A pile of fresh dung lay in the trail. Its strong odor, both sour and bitter, was the odor of the pigpen. At once the hunters grew still, while their excitement hummed in the air around me. Two of the men with spears slipped silently into the thicket. The third led the rest of us farther along the trail.

We traveled slowly, stopping many times to listen. We walked for perhaps as long as half an hour, but I hardly noticed the time passing. I needed no one to explain to me that the men who had gone ahead through the thicket were our wolves, and they would drive the game back toward us. The deer had surprised me. This time I would not be unprepared. I forgot to be afraid that I might fail. Something was about to happen. It might come at any moment, and every moment I was ready for it.

At last we heard shouts in the distance. We stopped when we heard them coming toward us. As wolves lie in wait, the two archers knelt beside the trail, while the man with the spear blocked the trail itself. All three crouched down and lowered their heads, peering out from under their wolf's-head caps, showing more of the wolf's face than their own.

Although no one had told me what to do, I saw what was going to happen as clearly as if I could glimpse the future through the veil of time. Whatever came toward us down that trail would see three wolves waiting there and stop. It would pause only for a moment while it decided what to do. I would have that moment to send an arrow through its heart.

I hid myself beside the trail where I thought the pig would stop. One thing I did not foresee. He was immense and very fast, and he had little to fear from wolves. He paused only for the briefest moment and my arrow was too late. It struck him in the belly, not a killing wound, but a painful one. He whirled to face me.

I nocked another arrow and drew the bow, knowing that even if my arrow struck his bony head, it wouldn't stop him. Without taking time to aim, I loosed the arrow. Then I fled. I would have climbed a tree if there had been one handy, but in the thicket I found only shrubs and saplings. Too late I remembered my disguise, although I doubt I would have had the courage to stand my ground and hope to convince the boar that I was a hungry wolf, not the frail child of humankind.

Behind me I heard a shout of triumph. I turned to see our spearman standing not three paces from the boar, who tottered, then sank to the ground. The shaft of a spear protruded from his body. The blade had pierced his heart.

When I approached, I saw that the boar also had several more arrows in him. My second arrow had missed his head and lodged in the fat of his shoulder. Four more arrows had pierced his side. Another had gone through his neck, so that he would soon have choked on his own blood. Even so, I admired the courage of the spearman who had struck the killing blow.

Before I could praise his courage, he spoke to me.

"A good shot," he said.

He must have meant my first shot, not the second, which had done more to anger the boar than do him harm.

I gestured at the spear. "A brave blow," I replied.

The hunter smiled.

The two archers joined us. Each admired the shots the other had made, and mine as well. When the men who had gone ahead to intercept the boar appeared, they too joined in the general exchange of praise, of which I received an equal share. I hardly felt as if I had done enough to merit their compliments. Nonetheless they pleased me very much.

Then the hunters turned their attention to the boar. One of the archers praised his courage, and the other men agreed with him. The archer used his bow to measure the boar's length, while the others had a lively argument, most of which I couldn't follow, that seemed to have something to do with whether or not this boar was bigger than another that had been killed by someone else. I began to think that when we returned home, the size of this boar would have grown by at least half a bow-length.

As they had done with the stag, the hunters butchered the boar on the spot, all the while exchanging stories of the hunt. The men who had been so silent all morning now spoke as if the killing of the boar had released their tongues from an enchantment. The hunters who had gone ahead told how difficult it was to discover where the boar was feeding and how clever they had been to slip past without alarming him. Then, when they showed themselves, as a boar will often do, he chose to fight before he chose to run. Both men had bloodied their spears in their attempt to change his mind.

Next it was the archers' turn to tell the story of the kill. They didn't seem to mind that I had missed my shot. Of course they knew that I had meant to send my arrow into the boar's heart, but they spoke as if I had inflicted the belly wound on purpose, to turn the boar so that they would have a better shot. The way they spoke let me know that they approved of what I had done.

Just as I was about to think very well of myself, one of the archers said, "And Tamara, how fast he is!"

The other archer chuckled. The two spearmen who hadn't witnessed for themselves my headlong flight from the tusks of the angry boar understood perfectly what had happened.

"Did he climb a tree?" said one.

The other made a show of looking around him, as if assessing which slender sapling might have served as a place of refuge.

Now all the men were laughing. I blushed to the tips of my ears. Then I too began to laugh. I didn't know that the feelings of the hunt still remained so strong within me until my laughter started to release them. The anxiety, the excitement and the fear, dissolved into our laughter. Perhaps this was how the warriors of Merin's house had felt when they returned from their pursuit of the northerners after the battle on Taia's day. They were full of an energy that the fighting failed to dissipate. Maara once called it "the wildness." Now I felt the wildness in myself.

We returned to butchering the boar, still full of talk about the hunt. We calmed ourselves with talk and laughter, until the butchering was done and it was time to start for home. Each man took his share. My burden was as heavy as the others, and it pleased me that they expected no less of me than they expected of one another.

The hunt had taken us far from home. Darkness fell before we reached the village. Although we had eaten nothing all day, I wasn't hungry. I was so tired that I would have liked to go straight to bed. The others were just as tired, but when we entered the enclosure, we were immediately surrounded. The women took the meat from us, while the men questioned us about the hunt, and the hunters began again to tell the tale. I looked for Maara, but didn't find her.

The night air was bitter cold. As soon as I stopped moving, I began to shiver. We all went inside the cave, where the fire had been burning for some time. Maara sat beside it. When her eyes met mine, something in them stopped me for a moment. Pride was there, a pride I had seen many times before, and as it always did, it filled my heart with pride in myself. But there was more than pride in Maara's eyes. In them I saw both admiration and respect. This was not the look that a mother gives her child nor the look a warrior gives her apprentice. This was the look that passes between equals.

The hunters asserted their right to the best places by the fire. I would have sat next to Maara, but she moved away to give the hunters room, and they insisted that I stay with them. Twice more the men told the story of the hunt, first for the ears of the other men alone, as the women kept themselves busy somewhere else, and then a second time after the women joined us.

The story the hunters told the men was mostly an imparting of information. They told of where we had found the boar and of other signs they had seen along the way. There was some boasting too, and the squabble I'd foreseen over the boar's size. The story they told for the women's benefit was completely different. It was intended to impress, to show off the hunters' skill and courage. They boasted of me too, and no one said a word about how fast I was.

By the time the meat was done, the smell had made me ravenous. The hunters ate first, while the children watched us with envy in their eyes. At any other time I would have felt too guilty to eat while a child went hungry, but this was the custom among the forest people, and I knew why. As the warriors of Merin's house took as theirs by right the spoils of war, the hunters of the forest people took what was their due, and the children's envy was not just for the meat, but for the glory.

After everyone had eaten, there was a little of the usual talk and storytelling, but it was late, and the women soon left the fire and went to bed. Maara went with them. When I would have followed her, the hunter sitting next to me took hold of my arm and held me there.

"Let the women go," he said. "Tonight, Tamara he is a man among men."

Warmed by the fire, with a belly full of meat, I had dozed through much of the storytelling. Now I was wide awake, and I didn't mind sitting up a while. The hunters too seemed to want to talk some more, as if they felt they had to say it all, to quiet their minds enough to sleep.

The boasting and the praise were over now. The hunters spoke of the day's hunt in a simple and straightforward way. When they had said all there was to say about it, they told tales of other hunts, and the men who had stayed home that day told stories of their own. The hunters spoke of going to the hunt as Merin's warriors spoke of going to war, with excitement and anticipation, and enough bravado to conceal their knowledge that they would soon be in harm's way. To them each hunt was a contest, which might be won or lost, in which the prize was life itself.

They told more than one tale that night of hunters killed or maimed by wounded boars. They told them for my benefit, so that I would understand, while the wildness still sounded through my blood and bones, what I had accomplished, what I had overcome. Their stories taught me how the world felt to them, and how they understood it and their own place in it.

They told tales of times of plenty, when the gods had all but laid the game at their feet, and they told tales of hungry times, when they had fought with their wolf brethren for what little game there was. They told tales of great hunters and legendary hunts, remembered from a distant time. Beneath the surface of their stories ran a thread of meaning that eluded me until I noticed that they never spoke the words for killing or for death. Instead of saying that an animal had died, they said, "he gave himself" or "he gave up," as if his death were a surrender, or an offering. And if a hunter lost his life, they spoke of his death in the same terms. In their eyes, the hunter and the hunted shared a common fate, the hunt itself a ritual in which one or the other would become the sacrifice.