A Wild Yearning (44 page)

Assacumbuit chuckled. "The
lusifee
would truly have you singing your death song."

A soft giggle came from Silver Birch. But when Ty looked at her, all he could see was the top of her bent head. The middle part in her shiny black hair was stained vermilion and she wore a finely quilled dress with a string of red and blue glass beads. She had dressed in this elaborate way every day for the past five months. She dressed for the return of her husband, the Dreamer, who was never coming home.

Shamed and scorned by the tribe for losing the fight to a mere Yengi—even if the Yengi was Assacumbuit's stepson— the Dreamer had walked out of the village that night. He had not returned, nor had he been seen by anyone since. The Norridgewocks, all except Silver Birch, suspected he had gone to the sacred mountain, Katahdin, where he had sang and danced and fasted until he entered the spirit world of his dreams.

The wind came up, rattling the bark shingles on the lodge. Ty stirred restlessly. He wanted his wife.

"Keep your stick in your breechclout a while longer," Assacumbuit said, reading Ty's mind and causing him to blush. "A man should not allow himself to become a slave to his appetites. Especially his appetite for a particular woman."

Too late,
Ty thought with an inward laugh.

He started to stand up. "I think I'll just—"

Assacumbuit's hand fell on his arm. "Rest easy, my son. They've been gone only an hour and I sent the brother of Silver Birch to watch over them."

Reluctantly Ty settled back down.

Stuffing her hands deeper into her bearskin muff, Elizabeth Hooker peered through clouds of her own breathing into the hole they had cut in the marsh ice. "I don't see anything," she said.

"You can't see them. They're buried deep in the mud," Delia informed her, proudly showing off her newfound knowledge.

She poked around the unfrozen mud in the bottom of the hole with a flint-tipped spear. The young warrior, Pulwaugh, watched critically, chewing vigorously on a wad of spruce gum but doing nothing to help, for it was woman's work.

"Ty showed me how to do this," Delia said, mostly for the benefit of the young Abenaki, who, she suspected, spoke more

English than he let on. "The great Yengi warrior Bedagi isn't too proud to teach his woman how to hunt for eels."

Suddenly she gave a sharp jab. Exclaiming with delight, she straightened, bringing up a pair of eels with yellow bellies that squirmed on the barbed tines. "Two of them!"

"Ugh!" Elizabeth shuddered, backing away. "They're horrible!"

"But delicious. Haven't you eaten smothered eels before?"

Elizabeth shuddered again. "Yes, but I didn't know they looked so... so disgusting when they were alive."

Laughing at Elizabeth's foolishness, Delia strung the eels onto a pointed stick that was already heavy with the smelt they had fished from a hole in the lake with a sinew line and corn for bait. Suddenly the sound of demonical laughter disturbed the winter silence, a long, ghostly
hoo-oo-oo.

Shading her eyes from the winter glare, Delia looked up to see a white loon circling overhead. "Glooscap's messenger," she said, with a dreamy smile. "He's predicting a storm."

She never saw a loon now without thinking of a certain afternoon on the lake. In November, after the first dusting of snow, the weather had suddenly turned warm again, like summer. The Norridgewocks had taken advantage of the good weather to prepare for the coming winter—preserving food, making and repairing weapons, utensils and clothing, hunting for game. Ty decided to take Delia into the forest to show her how to set rabbit snares.

He
had
taught her some things about setting the snares. He showed her how to make the nooses of twisted bark fiber. He told her she must do them in fours, as four was a sacred number because of the four winds and the four compass points. He had taught her a song to sing when she found the traps empty, to drive away the bad-luck spirits.

But it was too beautiful a day for such serious concerns and before long they found themselves floating on the lake in a canoe, Delia slouching lazily with her back against Ty's warm chest, secure within the circle of his arms.

At first their talk was only interrupted by occasional kisses, but soon the talking grew less and less and their kisses got longer and harder, until the canoe began to rock dangerously.

Delia struggled halfheartedly in Ty's embrace. "Ty, stop," she protested. Her heart was palpitating rapidly, although it wasn't because of the near capsizing. "Remember what happened the last time you tried to kiss me in a canoe."

Ty's lips made a flank attack on her mouth by sneaking up her neck. "The way I remember it," he murmured against her throat, "you kissed me."

Delia's laugh was a deep, contented purr. "Was I really such a brazen hussy?"

"Be a brazen hussy now," Ty offered, and followed the invitation by slipping his hand inside the loose neckline of her buckskin dress to fondle her breasts.

Suddenly, crazed laughter rent the air above their heads as an enormous, muscular bird crashed onto the lake beside them, dousing them with an icy spray, rocking the canoe, and almost giving them an unwanted bath in the snow-fed lake.

Startled, Delia sat up abruptly, clutching her opened dress tightly to her chest. She looked into the lake where the bird had dived, but all she saw were the ripples. "What the bloody hell was that?" she demanded so indignantly that Ty burst into crazy laughter of his own.

Just then a sharp beak poked out of the water, followed by an iridescent, greenish-purple head. Then the whole bird popped up, still wearing his gaudy summer plumage of black and white checkered coat and striped collar. His tiny beady eyes fixed on Delia and he yodeled.

Delia heard an answering yodel and her head whipped around, for the sound had come from Ty.

The bird raced in a circle around their canoe, so fast he was almost paddling upright on the water on his big webbed feet. He let out a long, drawn out
hoo-oo-oo.
Ty
hooed
back. He laughed,
aha-aha-ha-ha.
Ty
ha-haed
back. He yodeled,
ha-ha-loooo.
Ty
ha-looed
back.

As Delia stared at her husband's smiling, beautiful face, her heart filled up with so much love she thought it would burst. For of all the many facets to this man—Dr. Ty, the healer; Tyler

Savitch, the refined gentleman; Bedagi, the Abenaki warrior-Delia decided she loved this Ty the best.

Ty, the little boy, who could play with a loon.

A touch on her arm brought Delia back to the present. She looked into Elizabeth's rosy-cheeked face. "It's starting to snow again," the girl said. "Don't you think we should be getting back?"

Delia was about to agree—for big flakes were now falling from the sky—when the roses were blanched from Elizabeth's face and she let out a squeal of alarm, pointing back in the direction of the woods.

Pulwaugh turned first and he, too, let out a sharp-pitched cry. The hand that fell to the tomahawk at his waist trembled badly. "It's a ghost!" he exclaimed.

"Nonsense," Delia scoffed. She had never known a people worse than the Abenaki for believing in spirits and ghosts. "'Tis only a man."

The man, although tall and broad-shouldered, was wraith-thin. His clothes were mere rags that flapped in the wind and his long black hair whipped around his face like a torn flag. As they watched, he raised his hand in the manner of the French priest bestowing a blessing.

"Why, it's the Dreamer," Delia said. She thought sadly of Silver Birch, waiting every day in the longhouse for her man's return. "Perhaps we should go talk to him. He looks cold and hungry."

Pulwaugh shook his head angrily and snapped a series of orders at them, all the while gathering their gear and herding them toward the village. Delia obeyed without an argument. The truth was she was afraid of the Dreamer. She certainly wasn't going to approach the man alone.

As they followed their own snowshoe tracks toward home, Delia looked back toward the lake. The Dreamer still stood there, watching them. He looked like a giant black crow, silhouetted against all that white brilliance, and Delia suppressed a superstitious shudder...

The wind knifed through his tattered buckskins and icy flakes swirled around his head. But the Dreamer was impervious to the cold. His eyes followed the three figures as they shuffled away on their snowshoes and disappeared into the curtain of falling snow. Wrapped up in furs as they were, he couldn't see their faces, but then he didn't really care. Dizzy and light-headed with hunger and a fever, he was lost in his own world of dreams.

He thought he might be a spirit now, although he wasn't sure. He lived among the spirits on Katahdin, the greatest mountain. No Abenaki had dared such a thing before, or at least dared such a thing and lived to boast of it.

The Abenaki dwelled and traveled within the woods and on the waters beneath, but the Katahdin was sacred. It was the home of Pamola, the Storm Spirit, a beast with the wings and claws of an eagle, the arms and torso of a man, and the head and antlers of a moose. Pamola, in his rages, unleashed his winds and lightnings and snowstorms on the hapless humans below. To venture up where Pamola had his lodge was to invite a sure and terrible death.

Yet the Dreamer had climbed to the very top of Katahdin and there he had been visited with visions unlike any he had ever beheld before. They were strange visions, fragmented and ephemeral, and he didn't understand them yet. Understanding of the dreams would come later and then he would act upon them. For every Abenaki knew that disaster followed if a dream was not fulfilled. A man must take the path shown to him in his dreams or risk the vengeance of the gods. They were gifts from the gods, to show a man the way, and such gifts should never be ignored.

The Dreamer thought of the power of the visions and threw back his head and laughed. His laughter sounded crazed, like the loon's, and it echoed over the frozen lake. He laughed again and, taking a glass bottle from between the ragged folds of his mooseskin coat, he pulled the cork out with his teeth and poured the fiery brown liquid down his throat.

It burned, causing him to gasp and his eyes to tear. But the effect was almost immediate. The visions came, wavering before his eyes, and he squinted hard as if he could bring them into focus.

Assacumbuit had once warned him the visions that came from the Yengi's spirit water were not true visions. And the black robe said the Yengi god, who was the one true god, frowned upon the drink. But the Dreamer had forsaken the black robe's god. He had ripped the god's totem beads off his neck in disgust and ground them to dust on a rock beneath his heel. There had been no
keskamzit,
no magic, in those beads.

But there was
keskamzit
in the spirit water and he drank more of it, welcoming the dreams. This time the vision that appeared before him was sharper than the others. He could see Yengi, hundreds of the pale-skinned men, flowing over the earth in great rushing rivers. And at their head was
lusifee,
the panther. Suddenly, a great wolf emerged from the forest, slaying the panther with one mighty slash of his sharp fangs. The panther died and the rivers of Yengi flowed back into the ocean where they were carried away by the tide.

The wind gusted and Delia ducked her head, trying to protect her face from the stinging, icy pellets. Her legs burned and trembled with exhaustion. The awkward toe-in way of walking on the snowshoes used muscles she hadn't known existed. She followed Pulwaugh blindly, trusting he knew the way, for she had long since become disoriented in the universal whiteness.

Elizabeth stumbled and the young man stopped, lifting the girl into his arms. Delia heaved a sigh of relief as the shadowy outline of the village palisade loomed before them. The sigh turned to a cry of joy as a man appeared out of the swirling snow.

"Ty!" Delia exclaimed. She covered the last few feet at a shuffling run, throwing herself into his arms. She felt so safe within his hard embrace. The sad, yet frightening image of the Dreamer had followed her home.

Ty hugged her against his chest. "I was afraid you'd gotten lost in this storm," he said, shouting to be heard above the wind.

Pulwaugh carried Elizabeth toward the grand sachem's long-house and Delia started to follow, but Ty led her firmly toward their own wigwam.

"But, Ty, I was going to take the eels to your father," Delia protested once they were inside and he was taking off her fur hood, rubbing her wind-chapped cheeks with his hands.

"Do it later. Besides, he's been spoiled enough today with
people
bringing him delicacies." His hands stilled. He tilted her face up to his and his breath trailed across her lips. "Spoil me for a change. Give me a delicacy."

She loved spoiling him. She moved her mouth the fraction of an inch it took to put her lips into contact with his. His lips were warm, tender; their kiss was hard, draining. Her head fell back and her eyes squeezed shut as his lips moved down her pulsing throat... and then the Dreamer's black, ragged image appeared before her eyes. She shivered.