The Animal Wife (25 page)

Should we all have been frightened? I didn't know. The country, the snow, and the ways of the deer were all new to me. I had never seen so much snow before. By Woman Lake, where Uncle Bala spent the winter, snow was seldom more than dust, and not in my memory had the deer left Uncle Bala's winterground. But Narrow Lake was Father's country. The men who knew it didn't seem afraid of anything, not of the deep snow, not even of the Lily. My uncles spoke of our going on a long winter hunt, walking until we found the deer, staying until we killed something. I liked that. The women's fears seemed pointless, childish, making the rest of us think of death when we should be thinking of hunting. The women's reasoning reminded me of my mother.

"I say the owl hunts in the daytime because he can't hunt now," I dared to say at last to Aunt Rin and the other women one night as we sat in the lodge. "Think of his pellets. They have the hair and teeth and bones of voles and weasels—night animals. Yet now these animals are under the snow, where he can't find them. His death, not ours, is worrying him. He has to hunt squirrels. Maybe he doesn't know how to do it."

"Listen to Knows Everything," said Rin scornfully, "here for his first winter. Even the owl isn't used to this much snow. And do you think the rest of us have nothing to do but pick apart owl pellets?"

Of all the women, only Muskrat seemed unworried. Of course, she couldn't tell us if she was worried. But she didn't seem worried. She went on with her usual work in her usual way, as if nothing had changed.

One day when I was gathering wood I saw Muskrat crossing the lake, not by the trail but by a new way, walking spread-legged on top of the snow. In one hand she carried a dead ptarmigan. I then saw two strange things tied to the bottoms of her feet. When she came near, I stopped her and made her show me. The things were frames made of sticks, with strips of reindeer hide like nets inside the frames. To make them she had cut the hide I had given her. The things were for walking on snow. With them on her feet, she had walked on the surface like a lynx or a ptarmigan, and hadn't sunk with each step like deer or a person. I was impressed. Had my woman thought of something so clever?

That night I held up one of the things and boasted about Muskrat to the other people in the lodge. Maral and Andriki laughed at me. "Your woman is good, I don't doubt," said Maral. "Perhaps she will gather more wood for the lodge, now that she can walk on the snow."

His mocking tone annoyed me. "Let me show you what she brought," I said, looking around for the ptarmigan. But all I saw was a pile of feathers and, burning in the fire, a few small bones. In the dark shadows by the door sat Muskrat with greasy lips. She had eaten the ptarmigan!

My uncles saw this too. "Where is the thing she brought, Kori?" asked Maral. "Show us."

"She ate it," said Rin scornfully. To Muskrat she said, "Are you an animal, that you eat alone?" To me she said, "Aren't you going to teach her that food is shared? You brought her here. Yet all of us must live with her. We are people, Kori. We won't live with animals. What kind of children will you get on this Muskrat? Will they also eat as she eats, offering nothing to anyone?"

Dismayed, I looked at Muskrat. She too looked dismayed. Perhaps she had heard her name. Anyway, she knew we were speaking of her and the ptarmigan. As she wiped the traces of eating from her mouth, her eyes searched mine, as if she were asking, "Now what have I done?"

I couldn't blame her. For one thing, we already knew that she didn't understand how people should act. Until she learned speech, we couldn't teach her how to act better. For another thing, although each and every one of our people, even the smallest children, always shared everything, some people didn't always share with Muskrat. Too often she was left out of the sharing. This was natural enough; Muskrat was different. Also she was shy. If she was left out, she wouldn't remind us, as anyone else surely would. But if other people didn't share with her, she might wonder why she should share with them. What was more—as the women should have remembered—Muskrat was pregnant, so perhaps she was unusually hungry, especially since she wasn't always fed.

I almost spoke these thoughts to Maral. But he had turned away, angry with me because of Muskrat. So I saw how she had shamed me, and I said nothing.

***

Before going on a long trip to hunt deer, we thought we should first try asking the Bear to bring the deer back. One night we rubbed ourselves with ocher and sang. If any of us could have tranced, we would have done it, so that the trancer's spirit could have asked help from the Bear. But none of us knew how to trance—Father was the shaman. Without him we could only pray. "The Lily is hunting where we hunt. Do not help him," we begged. "Favor us. Give us the deer. Kill one and let us find the corpse. Hear how we respect You, Great Brown Leader, Owner of Hunting, Voice of the Storm."

The Bear heard us. By the time we were sucking the bones and picking the hooves and skulls of the two reindeer, storm winds had packed the snow so hard that animals with wide feet could walk on the surface. A few small herds of reindeer came into our woods again, on their large round hooves. The deer couldn't paw down through the snow for the lichen, but the snow was so deep that when it was packed they could stand on it, which put them nearer the branches of the trees. These they browsed down to the under-bark. One day we killed three of them, so we suddenly had plenty to eat.

That same day, while we were hunting, Waxwing had her baby. Back from our hunting, we went into the lodge one behind the other as we always did, waiting for the women to notice that we were dragging a great deal of meat. Yet that day it was we who noticed that something had changed. I happened to be first to crawl down the coldtrap, and as I stood up, I felt the difference. Wondering, I looked around the dark lodge at the shadowy faces of all the women and saw their dark eyes watching me. No one spoke, yet as if lightning had struck nearby, the air seemed changed. Behind me came Maral, then Andriki, then Marten, each in turn pausing as he too sensed something new.

But none of the women spoke, so we sat down as if everything were the same and we had sensed nothing. Presently we heard Rin and her son-in-law, Marten, murmuring together, so we guessed what it was that was new. The baby was a girl. As I think back about this child, I can't say that I remember ever having seen her. She died in her first year, killed by Ohun, but before that Waxwing kept her in her shirt. Now and then we heard her tiny voice. We also heard Waxwing talking to her. But she stayed among us so short a time, she returned so quickly to the people of her lineage in the Camps of the Dead, that I for one never knew the shape of her face or the color of her hair. And she was of Father's lineage.

Soon after the birth of this tiny kinswoman of Father's, a baby was born to Truht and Maral. This baby too was a girl and was my wife Frogga's half-sister, yet unlike Waxwing's baby, this one seemed almost a stranger. She and Truht were the only members of their lineage I ever met or knew. But so it always was with women and lineages, and so it will always be. Truht's child was not her first—the Woman Ohun had killed the others—but from bearing the others Truht had learned how birthing was done. Although she gave birth at night, she managed so quietly that I woke only enough to know that something was happening in the lodge, something quiet—women's business, a dreaming child perhaps, but nothing worrisome. Beside me, Muskrat was awake and listening to something, that much I knew. During the night someone went outside—Lilan, it was. Later she came back. Some people put wood on the fire and sat talking in low voices, and that was all.

The next day Truht slept a long time, rolled in her deerskins. When I happened to sit near her, I thought I might have heard faint suckling. Otherwise this little girl, like Waxwing's, was almost perfectly quiet. Days passed before I saw her. Unlike Waxwing's baby, though, this girl lived a long time, and because she was born in the depth of winter she was years later given the animal name of Deaf-Grouse, in honor of the Bear.

Meanwhile, almost every night during the length of the Hunger Moon Pinesinger kept saying that her baby was coming. More times than I can really remember, those of us at the owners' fire were shaken out of our sleep and told to move to the fire by the door. Rin scolded me for rudeness when I once asked no one in particular why Pinesinger couldn't do as other women did and not bother the rest of us so often. But I suppose she couldn't help it. If she thought her baby was coming, she thought it was coming. She lacked experience, and since the baby was her first and could take a long time, there could be no real question of her trying to birth it privately. Anyway, Pinesinger was not one to try birthing outside in winter. Instead, when Pinesinger's real pains started—a fact we all quickly learned, since she seemed to want to be as childish as possible about her discomfort—the men almost by habit got up to leave the owners' fire and crowd together by the door. Pinesinger had asked this of us so often we were used to it.

Learning at last the true meaning of birthing, Pinesinger complained and cried. Rin and Truht sat with her and gave her a stick to bite. Pinesinger threw the stick into the fire. Later I overheard her tearfully asking Rin to make the rest of us leave the lodge! "Be calm," said Rin soothingly. "In time this will end." Soon Lilan and Waxwing joined them, taking Frogga. Hind must have felt left out, because she got up and joined them too, followed by little Pirit, leaving only Muskrat at the men's fire.

I at least was glad to be far away from Pinesinger. Hunched at the crowded fire by the door, with Andriki's big shoulders pressing against one side of me, making me press down on Ako, I used the time to sharpen my spear. With Andriki's antler chisel I slowly took off one tiny piece of flint after another, making the blade very, very sharp, trying not to think of fathering that baby nor to hear Pinesinger's moans.

Instead I tried to think of something very exciting, to take my mind off Pinesinger. Lovemaking was always exciting, but as Pinesinger's cries grew from moans to shrieks, thoughts of lovemaking didn't seem sensible. I tried to think of hunting. Yet when Pinesinger began to scream, "Ohun! Kill me!" I shut my eyes and blocked my ears and could think only of birth.

For I had seen birth. I wished I had not. What I had seen made me fear it just as the women feared the deep snow. I had been with my mother when she gave birth to my sister. That sister didn't stay among the living very long. In fact, as Waxwing's baby would one day die young, this little sister of mine had died before she was named. But when she was born and while she lived, we were on Uncle Bala's summergrounds at the Fire River.

In those days I was still too young to stay with other children, so Mother took me with her wherever she went. One day she left the other women to dig sedge roots out of sight of anyone else, by herself, far away. I didn't understand why. Of course I stayed near her, hunting beetles while she worked.

Suddenly, without a word of warning, she seized me by the arm and dragged me into a fireberry thicket, where she shocked me by taking off her trousers. Mother always seemed to have her mind on her own affairs and never explained anything, so I was used to sudden, unexpected things, but this time I felt bewildered, because she seemed almost frantic. For one thing, she was passing huge amounts of urine, as if she didn't even know. The ground and her feet were soaked with it, and still she passed more. Meanwhile she was gasping, panting, and aimlessly brushing her face as if her hair were in her eyes.

I was frightened and wanted to run, but in a tight, angry voice she told me I would have to sit down and wait. For a while I obeyed. Squatting, she crossed her arms on her knees and leaned her forehead on her arms, her jaw trembling, her eyes shut, her body shuddering as if she were terribly cold. She then began to grunt as if she were together with my stepfather or were trying to move her bowels. I stood up to go. But snatching my arm, she jerked me down hard and held me with a grasp so tight her nails sank in my flesh. My hand went numb. I cried, but she didn't hear. Angrily I tried to pry open her fingers, but she was too strong for me. In the end there was nothing I could do. I tried not to look at her, but I couldn't help myself. At last I stared openly at her parted, naked thighs, at the thatch of wet pubic hair between them, and at the crawling skin of her huge bare belly, which had begun to ripple like a lake.

For a very long time Mother crouched without moving or speaking, one hand over her eyes and the other clutching my arm. When I tried to tell her she was hurting me, she just squeezed harder. Later she began to drool, then moan.

"Mother! Let me go!" I cried.

"Then stay still," she said between her teeth.

"I will," I promised.

"If you don't, I'll whip you," she said. So I obeyed.

Time passed. For a while she lay down. I tried stroking her arm, but she didn't seem to feel my touch. Later I found and picked a few ripe fireberries for her. She didn't see them, so I tried to put them in her mouth. She knocked them to the ground. I ate them. Then I tried singing to her, although I wasn't sure she could hear. At last she sat up again, her elbows on her knees, her hands clasped, her forehead resting on them, and in this way we waited together, she with her eyes shut, moaning and snarling to herself, I singing and looking around.

This happened during the Grass Moon, when the days were long. We went into the thicket in the late morning, but we stayed so long I began to worry that night and lions would find us. I was very thirsty. The sun moved down until its red light shone through the long grass, until the air turned cool. I saw swifts far above us in the yellow sky, and heard a partridge calling in the thicket:
kriik, kriik,
its summer song. Then I felt something wet on my foot, and looking down, I saw blood on the ground. "Mother! There's blood!" I whispered. "I want to go home."

"Keep still," she gasped. "Not long now." Suddenly she changed position, so that she squatted on her hands and feet, leaning her great belly between her knees with her back arched and her head up, like a frog about to leap, and I saw a baby's head bulging out of her, a baby's head with wet, black hair, with its mouth open and its eyes shut. Terribly frightened and excited too, I stared. Mother reached one hand between her legs and cupped the little head, then the whole slimy body slid past her wrist and bumped on the ground.