The Animal Wife (22 page)

Sitting close around the owners' fire, all the other people were waiting for us. Seeing from our faces that we had killed nothing, no one asked about our hunting.

The fire by the door had burned to ashes, but on the rear fire people had laid strips of frozen meat. I was glad to see it. At Uncle Bala's lodge the women became uneasy at the start of heavy storms, especially if the food supply was low. They would want everyone to eat little in order to save food. At Bala's lodge during snowstorms the men and women had arguments over eating, since the men needed strength to hunt after the storm. I saw that at Father's lodge the women were ready to cook and eat with the men. Only firewood would be a problem. We had very little, hardly enough for the night—not enough for two fires, not enough to last through a storm. I saw that someone, probably me, would be sent out for more in the morning.

But not until then. As the meat cooked, filling the lodge with its delicious smell, my eyes searched for Muskrat, for whom I now had the softest feeling. She had not after all lain with my uncles. My anger had been wrong. Now I wanted her to be happy, and when I saw her in the shadows behind the circle of people, looking past Pinesinger's shoulder at the roasting meat, I smiled a coaxing half-smile and watched her, ready for her to look up at me.

But she didn't take her eyes off the meat. When the meat began to burn and Lilan knocked it from the fire, beat out the flames, and passed pieces of it to each of us, Muskrat's eyes followed each piece. Only the people around the fire got a share—Lilan must have forgotten Muskrat. As food grew scarce, forgetting Muskrat had grown easy. Only when I was given my piece—I was the last except the children to get any of the meat—did Muskrat's anxious eyes meet mine. What could I do? Keeping only a small part for myself, I handed the rest to her. She ate it as if she were starving. Had she been fed nothing?

That night I went to Muskrat's sleeping place beside the door, crawled under her sleeping-skins behind her, and slept with the warmth of her naked back against my chest and the smell of her hair in my nostrils. Muskrat seemed not to know I was there and gave no sign that she was either sorry or glad to have me in her bed. She was acting as if nothing had happened between us. Her body felt so good and I dreamed about her so much that I slept lightly, waking to think about each dream and listen to Muskrat breathing, then falling asleep to dream again.

I dreamed at last of a night thick with blowing snow and moonlight. I was on a plain I hadn't seen before, yet it didn't seem strange. Far away I saw a mare and got my spear ready. But the mare turned and saw me, then walked straight toward me. Her eyes were brown, and the windswept hair on her neck and tail was black and straight. I knew at once who she was: the mare I had killed at Uske's Spring, whose spirit had once before come to me in a dream. Since at that time she had come as a woman, I wasn't surprised when she spoke to me. I wasn't surprised that she called me by name or told me her name, which was Dabe Nore. By the name I knew she was really Muskrat, and had always been Muskrat, all that time. She turned her rump and stood waiting, looking back at me over her shoulder. I knew she wanted me to make her pregnant. So I tried, because I knew she was a person and not a mare. I woke from that dream wanting Muskrat. But dawn was coming. People would soon get up.

I crawled outside to relieve myself and found the cold air whirling with snow. No matter what the weather, the men of Father's family didn't get dressed just to relieve themselves. If they were naked when they felt the need, they went outside, as if weather meant nothing. It was almost a matter of pride with them to stand naked passing urine in a storm. So of course I did the same. After all, I wasn't a woman. Yet that morning I thought I would freeze before I finished. I thought my urine would freeze inside my body. Never had I felt such cold.

As best as I could I forced my urine, making the veins stand out on my forehead. Then I scrambled back to my place in Muskrat's deerskins, to be warmed by Muskrat's body. In the dim half-light that came through the snow cover on the smokeholes I saw through the cloud of my breath the long, motionless bedrolls of all the other people, and knew that no one else had any thought of getting up. No animals would move in this weather—we would not hunt. I knew I would have to go for firewood, but I also knew that time would have to pass before I could leave the bed to face the storm again. So I made up my mind to go for firewood later, when the wind died. When I was warm enough, I dozed.

But the wind blew harder as the day wore on. Snow made a drift along one wall of the coldtrap. The fire by the door was out, and its dead ashes were wet with snow from the smokehole. The owners' fire was cold. If a few banked coals still lived to make the smoke that hung below the ceiling, they gave no heat. Nearly naked, Frogga and Pirit crawled out of their parents' beds and, as if they didn't feel the cold, made a tiny lodge with nutshells, bone splinters, cinders from the fire, and bits of bark and twigs from the walls. The adults slept.

In the middle of the day I opened my eyes to see Lilan standing over our bed. She poked Muskrat with her foot and handed her a waterskin. Muskrat had to get up, get dressed, borrow Lilan's ax and digging stick, and go to the lake in the blinding snow to chop open the hole in the ice and fill the waterskin. She was gone a long time. Images of Rin's drowning wolf filled my mind. At last Muskrat came back, her hair and clothing plastered with snow. In silence she gave Lilan the full waterskin and crept into our bed, so cold that the touch of her icy body hurt me.

It shames me to remember that my first thought was to push her away. Instead I folded my arms around her and pulled her close, my legs around hers, my belly against her back. For a long time I held her so, while slowly she grew warmer. She fitted her shoulders against my chest so that as much of herself as possible touched me. My warmth relaxed her. In time I knew from her breathing that she had fallen asleep.

And so we lay there, she sleeping, I soothed by Rin's low voice talking to Frogga and Pirit, telling them how a man called Salmon stole food and fire from the First Man, Weevil. As Rin talked, the cold lodge groaned in the wind. No wonder Rin was thinking of food and fire.

In the coldtrap, still in hairy skin, lay all that was left of our meat—the head and feet of a reindeer, her staring eyes dusty, her upturned hooves showing the cracks and wear of much walking. But with the head and feet were pine nuts, four bags full, almost the weight of a person. The head and the pine nuts would feed us for several days. The pine nuts could be eaten without cooking, so for a while there was no need for us to worry about hunger, and there was really no need for fire.

So I told myself, unwilling to go into the storm for firewood. But by late afternoon people were bored and easily annoyed, and the lodge was so cold that not even the children would get up. The frost of our breath was coating the walls. I saw that I would have to try to get at least enough fuel to last through the night.

There was no reason that Muskrat should come with me, so I tried to slide out of bed quietly, not to wake her. But she woke and turned over, and when she saw me putting on my clothes she sat up, looked at me, and put the palm of her hand against my face. Her palm was as hard and rough as the sole of a foot, but her touch was gentle and her hand was warm. She looked at me very sweetly. Then she dressed herself and followed me into the storm.

Outside, the light was fading and the biting wind was dangerous—in this weather, hands, feet, and faces freeze. The windblown snow had drifted deep; the trails were buried. Wishing I had gone earlier, I looked around for Muskrat. She was right behind me, her eyes half shut against the wind, waiting for me to go on.

So I forced myself through the drifts, choosing the thickest parts of the woods, where some of the snow had been caught by the trees and the snow on the ground was not as deep as it was in the open. Of course most dead wood had long since been gathered, but we found some dry branches on the tree trunks. We also found cones, and at last, after we had walked almost in a circle, we found a small dead tree bare of needles, a tree we had overlooked. Try as we would, we couldn't push it over, and we were too cold to take the time to chop it. So we broke its branches, tied them together, and dragged the bundle home, breaking a new, short trail back to the lodge.

On the way, like ptarmigans bursting out of the snow, three wolves jumped up in front of us. They had dug dens for themselves in the snow to escape the storm, as wolves will. We had almost stepped on them. Very big they were, with yellow eyes in their gray, snowy faces. I had no spear, as they saw when they looked at us carefully before turning to leave. Of course they couldn't leave quickly but had to leap, breasting the deep snow like animals trying to run through deep water. What could we do but watch them escape us? When they were gone we pushed on through the storm to the large white mound that was the lodge, with a plume of snow blowing off the top but no smoke blowing from the smokeholes.

All this happened without a word between us. Before we took off our clothes and got back under Muskrat's sleeping-skins, I divided my small share of pine nuts and meat with her. She ate some of each gratefully and gave the rest back to me. We had no need of words.

***

The storm blew for three days. One night we heard the voice of a wolf, not far away, howling above the voice of the storm. Later we heard the feet of three wolves scrabbling on our roof. Surely they knew of the food in our coldtrap. The next day when I visited the latrine I found that three wolves had left there just before I came and had been eating our frozen feces. I warned the other people so they wouldn't let Pirit or Frogga go to the latrine alone. These wolves might run from adults, but they could hunt children.

Three times Muskrat went for water, and three times she and I together went for wood. On the third night the wind died and the dawn sent clear, bright light down the smokeholes. By then all animals would need to eat and would at last be moving, slowly leaving deep trails behind themselves in the snow. There could be no better time for hunting. We got dressed quickly, planning to follow any trails we crossed. Although walking in deep snow would be cold and tiring, we knew the deer would be colder and more tired. Our hunting could not fail.

To my surprise, while I was putting on my outer clothes Muskrat turned to me and pressed her palm flat, upright, against the midline of my chest. "Tashe," she said. The warmth of her hand crept slowly through my shirt. "Tashe," she said again, gently placing her palm on her own chest. What did she mean by it?

Half out of her sleeping-skins in the owners' end of the lodge, Pinesinger was cracking pine nuts with a stone. "Stepmother!" I called.

"Hi!" she answered, chewing.

"My woman told me something. Did you hear?"

"No," said Pinesinger.

"Will you ask what it was?"

Cracking another pine nut, Pinesinger called out a question in Muskrat's language. Muskrat answered, "Tashe."

"I don't know that word," said Pinesinger, eating.

Although it hurt me to humble myself before Pinesinger, I took Muskrat by the arm, led her through the icy lodge to Pinesinger, and pulled her down beside me so that we sat on our heels at Pinesinger's side. Perhaps afraid that we had come for a share, Pinesinger ate for a while longer, ignoring us.

"Stepmother," I began again, "will you please help me talk with this woman?"

Over her shoulder Pinesinger jabbered away for a while in Muskrat's language, getting a word from Muskrat every now and then.

"The word means 'chest,'" said Pinesinger at last. "That word 'tashe,' that's your chest."

"What about it?"

More jabbering. "Now she says it's 'fire,'" said Pinesinger. " 'Heat,' maybe." But by then Muskrat was speaking and the other people of the lodge had stopped their own talk to listen.

"She's cold," said Rin. "She wants you to bring more firewood."

"She loves you," said Andriki. "She touches you, then herself. The word means 'fire.' She wants to say she loves you."

Pinesinger repeated Andriki's words to Muskrat, who looked down at her hands, displeased and ashamed. She didn't seem to love me. I felt sure she meant something else.

"Talk with her privately," I asked Pinesinger. "Try to find out what she really meant. Do this for me, this one thing, Stepmother. Please!"

Pinesinger gave me a look of impatience. "You captured her. Why don't you learn her speech? Then you could ask her yourself."

"Please?"

"I'll try," said Pinesinger, "but don't sit there staring. I'll ask later. Go away."

So I did. I left them together, hoping that Pinesinger would share food with Muskrat. I had already eaten mine and had none to give.

M
UCH SNOW
had fallen. The cold had been so great that it wouldn't pack. Nothing larger than a hare could walk on it. Instead the snow stayed fine and soft, making animals and people force their way through it. Not even the strongest of us could walk far in the thigh-deep drifts without getting very tired, since we had to lift each foot high with every step. Even then we couldn't lift our feet above the snow, but had to drag them through it.

This kind of snow was both bad and good for hunting—bad because travel was hard for us, good because travel was also hard for the deer. Our plan was to make a big half-circle north of the river, looking for the fresh trails of animals. Because the Lodge Moon had come, with long dawns and long evenings and the sun over the horizon for just a short time each day, we planned to hunt until we killed something, no matter how long that would take.

We headed for a swamp north of the lodge, on a stream like our stream that fed the Hair River. Reindeer and moose stayed near the swamp, taking shelter in the growth of low spruce that ringed its edges and eating the tips of swamp willows that stood above the snow. Maral kept a hunting camp there, a high hollow cone of overlapping hemlock branches which made a space big enough for four men to sleep in, if they lay side by side. Covered with snow and with men inside, this shelter could be almost too warm. In it Maral kept firesticks, a hafted ax, some spearpoints, and a store of firewood.