The Animal Wife (12 page)

I led her up to it. He had been a bull mammoth, he whose skull owned the glade. Without tusks, from the side, his profile was flat, like a man's profile. From the front, the nostrils high on the forehead stared like a third eye, and the bone inside the eye sockets had been rubbed black with charcoal, so the eyes seemed to be watching. It stopped your tongue and made you think, this thing of Father's. I hoped that the sight of it would remind Pinesinger how far she was from home and how she now belonged to the men of Father's people. Here she might want to speak truthfully and seriously with me.

Feeling more confident, I sat on my heels and looked up at her. "Sit, Stepmother," I said.

Wide-eyed, she stared at the skull. As I had thought, she hadn't seen it before.

"The White Thing," I said, not liking to call the skull by name. "Do you know about it?"

Pinesinger shook her head. She didn't know. After all, people came here only for dancing, and this summer there had been no dancing.

"A strong place," I said. "Sit."

Folding her legs slowly, Pinesinger obeyed.

"We can't stay long," I said in my most manly voice. "People will wonder where we are. So let's be quick. People say you're pregnant. People say my father isn't the father of your baby. Have you told someone this thing?"

Pinesinger widened her eyes but didn't speak. I stared hard at her, hoping to draw the truth from her with my expression.

"Am I the father?"

She blinked, as if surprised. Then wordlessly she shook her head: no.

"Another man at the Fire River?" I asked.

Again she shook her head.

"Then who?"

"Your father, of course," she whispered.

Strangely enough, I hadn't expected this answer. "Are you sure?" I asked.

"Why, yes," said Pinesinger, pretending surprise.

Now I knew she was lying, and I felt my anger coming because of the many troubles I saw her lies could bring. "Good," I said. "I'm glad you feel sure. Because I am going to my father and tell him what once happened between us. Then, if he doubts you, if he thinks your child is too large to be his, and if he brings you here later to get the truth out of you, you'll have no trouble answering his questions."

Pinesinger looked shocked. "Would you tell him what we did?"

"Yes," I said.

"But why would he bring me here?" she asked.

"Won't he want to question you alone, where no one will overhear what passes between you? Perhaps the voice of that," I said, pointing to the skull with my lips and chin, "will ask the questions."

"Does it speak?" whispered Pinesinger, looking at the skull. "Have you heard it?"

Although I had been told of the skull's voice, I had heard only what Pinesinger must also have heard, the voice that the wind pulled out of it. But, "Yes—he speaks," I said.

Pinesinger looked at me for a long time, then down at her belly, then up again at me. Our faces were close. Our eyes met. I saw her brown irises fringed with tiny yellow lines which pulsed around the pupils. Her eyes held mine. In a voice grown strangely calm she said, "Now that I think of it, you might be the father."

"Might?" I asked. "Don't you know?"

Pinesinger touched my face with the tip of her forefinger. The touch was as light as a touch in a dream, yet it sent a shock all through me. The spot on my cheek seemed to burn. With her face too close to mine she watched my eyes, looking from one to the other quickly and carefully. I saw the faint lines of her irises pulsing, so that her pupils went from small and black to huge and shiny, with a tiny face in each of them that looked back at me. Her breath, when she answered, carried a sharp, warm smell. "Yes, I know," she whispered. "You want to know too. So you brought me here to frighten me. But I'm not frightened. Instead you have reminded me of the willow thicket by the rapids last spring, when the salmon were running."

Slowly she showed me her teeth, smiling. I must have been staring. Perhaps my mouth was open. Dumbly, I noticed that Pinesinger had bent her head to fumble with something around her shins. She was unlacing her moccasins! One after the other she pulled them off, then stood up on her bare feet and began to untie her belt.

"What are you doing?" I asked. But of course I knew what she was doing—she was taking off her clothes. Again our eyes met, but now mine dropped to the crotch of her legs, which showed as she pushed down her trousers, then rose to her pink nipples, which showed as she pulled up her shirt. Before I could think better of it, I too was undressing, and once again she was bracing herself on her hands and knees, ready for me. I had almost forgotten the faint roughness of her cold skin under my belly, the softness of her breast against my wrist as I pulled her tight against me, the great, slippery strength in her vagina, and the sour-sweet smell of her hair. I have heard of people weeping after climax. I almost wept when we finished, to think of this solid, naked woman whose rump and thighs so perfectly fit the curve of my body, fitting instead against my father's body. And he, with a beautiful grown wife already, had given me stumbling little Frogga! Pinesinger should have been mine!

I could have stayed in the grove forever holding Pinesinger. But no sooner did we finish than she twisted away from me, got to her feet, wiped out her crotch with leaves, and put on her clothes. "Ah, Kori," she said. "What have you done? At the Fire River you lay with an unmarried girl. Today you lay with your stepmother. Now you have a story to tell that will truly interest your father."

A
FTER THE GRASS MOON
came the Moon of Dust. Almost every afternoon a steady, cold wind blew out of the west, drying the grass, lifting the dust to the sky. Dust got between our teeth and filled the corners of our eyes; it fell to the surface of the slow-moving river and rose to make a thin cloud all around the horizon, so that the sun and moon when they rose and set were wobbly and red.

Father became quietly angry after learning that Pinesinger might have come to him pregnant. Sometimes at night I would hear him whispering with her in their sleeping place in the back of the cave. His voice was always low, but hers was not—often I heard her tearfully swear that the child was his. His silence seemed to show that he did not believe her.

His mood, of course, affected the rest of us. His brothers became quiet too. When the headman of the cave and all his brothers grow sullen, the other men cannot very well keep up their usual joking, and so began a time of long silences, of keeping our thoughts to ourselves.

In those days Father was especially kind to me. I thought this was because of the closeness that seemed to have grown between us. But Andriki, who also noticed, thought differently. At last he told me that although my mother had her faults—her temper, her rudeness, her bad-mannered way of doing surprising, sudden things—no man had ever made love to her easily. Even Father had had trouble persuading her to lie with him. One night when he had tried to take her with mild force she had made such an outcry that she woke everybody, which had badly shamed Father. That night had helped to cause their divorce. "Maybe he's sorry now," said Andriki. "Maybe your mother wasn't such a bad wife after all. At least your father knew you were his son and not some other man's—not from Aal! Being sure makes him content, so he's nice to you."

Andriki's words gave me a strange feeling. Was that all I meant to Father? That I was born to a woman who held much against men?

One afternoon we stayed long after sunset in the men's lookout, perhaps so that we didn't have to go into the cave with the women. In the dim evening light a fox came trotting down our trail, not even thinking of danger. I threw a stone, hit the fox on the head, and killed him.

"What aim!" cried Father. "How did you learn to do that?"

I had learned to aim as everyone learned—in my childhood, throwing stones at birds. Father knew; he just wanted to praise me. But his question reminded me of Mother, and of the time before my guilt began, and although the praise in his question would once have made me proud, now it almost made me angry. I didn't answer.

So Father grew sour even with me. Every day we sat in silence in the lookout under the gray sky while the women went gathering or worked hides in the cave. Feeling the trouble, they too were quiet. If they spoke to each other of Pinesinger's child, they didn't tell the men what was said, and we didn't ask.

One day Andriki stood up in the lookout and faced the rest of us. "Why are we sitting here helplessly?" he asked. "Are we women, to be satisfied with carrion when out on the plain is fresh meat?"

So at last we went hunting, or some of us did—we who owned the hunting lands around the Hair. Father and Andriki got the group together, asking only their brothers, Kida and Maral, Maral's half-grown son, Ako, and me. The four other men who lived with Father at that time—White Fox (who was Kida's wife's brother), Raven (who was White Fox's father), Timu (who was Raven's cousin and the husband of Ethis of Father's lineage), and Marten (who was Maral's brother-in-law, Frogga's uncle, a man I didn't much like but was forced to respect)—might have liked to come with us, but they weren't wanted.

Each of us took several spears. Father by then had helped me shape the flint he had given me, so I had two spears. Besides our spears, we took only knives and firesticks. Maral's wives brought berries for him to carry with us, but he refused them. I could see from the mood of the hunters that our next meal would be meat or nothing at all.

So we left, following Father in single file as he strode west over the rolling grassland by the Hair. We crossed a wide plain of tough yellow grass and another of soft red grass, and then a huge burned stretch where soot blackened our moccasins. The fire had passed recently—the stumps of the juniper bushes were still smoldering. On the far side of that place, follows-fire grass was growing. Here a fire had burned long ago. With the old tough grass gone, tender green grass had sprung up, and the grazing animals knew it. We found the fresh dung of bison and horses, and to the southwest, on grass too short for us to cross without being noticed, we saw a herd of bison lying down.

I could see from the way Father looked around for the wind that he was thinking of stalking these bison. Andriki made the hunter's handsign for cow bison, and Maral made the handsign for circle. Then the four men spread out and walked west in an easy, strolling way that would take them at an angle near the bison but not straight to them. I didn't know this kind of hunting, but that didn't matter—it was enough that the four men knew one another's minds. Ako and I followed them.

The bison noticed us, of course. Some stood up. But we walked so calmly, so casually, our spears held very low, that we soothed the watching bison, who bent their heads to graze. The yellow wagtails, who hunt the insects stirred up by the sharp hooves, went on hunting insects. Except for our regular strides and our steady, plodding travel, everything stayed the same until, very slowly, Father and Maral moved up beside Andriki and Kida. To the watching bison, each pair of men must have looked like one person. For a little while the two pairs walked in step. Then quickly and carefully Father and Maral dropped down on their bellies on the short grass. Without breaking stride, the rest of us kept walking.

On we went, leaving Father and Maral behind. Andriki led us around the bison in a wide half-circle that never brought us near them but never took us far away. To keep us in view, the standing bison turned as we went by. This watchfulness of theirs is what makes stalking them so difficult.

After we had walked a while, we heard a great burst of noise from the bison—snorts, grunts, and bellows and the thundering feet of a full stampede. Off went the herd, almost hidden in its own dust, right out from under the wagtails, who screamed in flight. For a moment I was afraid that the bison meant to run toward us. If they did, they would trample us into paste. But they ran away to the north, and left behind themselves in the slowly clearing dust the figures of Father and Maral standing over the huge brown corpse of a young cow bison who lay, stuck with spears, on her side.

By the time we reached Father and Maral, they had gathered grass and bison dung to make a fire and had cut open the skin on the cow bison's thighs. The rest of us took our knives to the front legs and belly. By sunset we had loosened the skin and rocked the great, stiff corpse free of it. By dusk the shine had dried from the meat and we were scraping dried blood from our hands and sleeves.

A stiff east wind rose, but there was no shelter out on the plain. We gathered more bison dung and heather for our fire, then sat around it in the open near the carcass, letting the wind slap at us and whirl the stink of raw meat and rumen in every direction. At dark we heard lions, but they didn't worry us—we were six men with fourteen spears. We would worry the lions, if they came.

Then Father and his brothers did something I hadn't seen before—they chopped the upper front leg and ribs from the body, and as the opened chest filled with black, clotting blood, they dipped it out and drank it from their cupped hands. "Hona!" said each man after drinking. When my turn came, a rush of strength and heat from the fresh blood filled my body. No one needed to tell me that this was a man's thing, taught by the Bear. "Hona!" I said, hoarse from the rough, hot feeling. After each of us had drunk, we cut out the liver and set it to cook. As we did, the moon rose into the smoke on the horizon—a full moon, the Dust Moon, blood red.

Then we sat on our heels around the fire, my father, my uncles, my brother-in-law Ako, and me. The four men watched the meat. I watched the four men. They looked like each other, our fathers and uncles. As the wind blew smoke and their own loosening hair into their eyes, they squinted, and I saw that their eyelids, their foreheads, and the lines creasing their foreheads were the same. In their flapping shirts, the men kept their arms quietly folded, their elbows on their knees. And I noticed that a good feeling seemed to have grown among them. I saw ease in the way their shoulders touched; I felt comfort in the slow way they moved. At last the four brothers began to talk about Pinesinger. Then I saw that to have that talk was the reason we were there.