The Animal Wife (39 page)

"He beat her?" I asked, although I must say I had almost seen it coming and wasn't too surprised.

"So would many of us have done if our wives had spoken to us even once as she spoke to him."

"Hi!" I said.

"Yes. And your father is displeased with you. He said you began this."

I couldn't deny it. "He's right," I said. "He once asked me not to tell her something, but I babbled like a woman. No wonder he's displeased."

"Never mind," said Andriki. "Your father will forget. You should forget too."

That seemed to be good advice. Before long I had taken it. Andriki and I were playing Stones in the Holes with ten pebbles and five pits each, and I was winning, by the time Pinesinger walked up to the fire out of the night. I don't know what I had expected, or why it surprised me that her face was drawn and strangely quiet, without bruises or tears. All I could think was that this walking about at night was not good for a baby, and I had to stop myself from telling her so. Instead I looked up at her, questioning. Where was Father?

Andriki too was looking up at Pinesinger, saying nothing, taking her in. We sat, she stood. "Come then, Kori. We'll see if my brother is here," said Andriki at last, and we did.

Father must have slipped past us in the dark. We found him in the cave by the men's fire, talking in a low, serious voice with two of Graylag's men. They were Pinesinger's kinsmen, I realized, yet they seemed very sympathetic to Father, nodding reasonably at whatever he said as if to assure him that they had no quarrel of any kind with him. He told them how he had followed Pinesinger's tracks and where he had found her, at a little fire she had kindled far out on the plain. She thought she was going to her parents, but she never would have found them, not the way she was heading, said Father. After all, she had made the trip only once and in the opposite direction.

Her kinsmen smiled and shook their heads in wonder. A woman going alone on a way she had never taken before—what folly! They thanked Father for finding her. As they themselves would be traveling to the Fire River very soon, they offered to take her there for Father if he liked.

When Father noticed me in the opening, he called me to his side and made me answer to him for telling Pinesinger of his plan to send her home. In front of all the people I had to explain how angry she had made me. She had made him angry too, said Father, loud enough for everyone to hear. Very angry. There were only so many times a wife of his could call him a liar and a woman before he would take his belt to her, and Pinesinger had gone beyond that number. So he was glad, he said, that I had explained myself, or he would have sent me to the Fire River with her. Hi! When he told me that, I saw how much I had upset him.

Yoi stood and over the heads of many people handed Father six long strips of meat. These he placed on the men's fire for himself, me, and Andriki. We were the only people there who had not eaten. As we listened to the meat sizzling and smelled the good smoke, I felt Father's hand on my shoulder. As both of us knew, all was well.

Or so it seemed until we heard a scream from my camp up on the plain—a scream that brought us to our feet and made Father and Andriki reach for their spears. Mine was in my camp. I caught up a burning stick and rushed up the trail, with Father and Andriki and most of the other men behind me. But the trouble was only that Muskrat had found her magic bundle gone. I took Father aside and explained in a low voice what had happened. After all, the matter of the bundle was more or less between me and Father, not something everyone needed to be told. Father listened seriously. Pinesinger sat with her child in her lap and her face stony, staring at nothing, wishing us gone, but Muskrat gaped at me, astonished. She might have been crying. I could see she had not expected such a thing. The other men watched her, looking puzzled. "Women's business!" explained Father in his easy way. The other men understood and turned back to the cave.

I suppose I should have stayed with Muskrat and Pinesinger, yet that night I didn't want to. I saw them heavy with anger, drawn silently together against me and all our men. I also saw that the men would be in the cave below, not worrying about the two women but enjoying themselves with laughter and meat and good feeling. We who are the men of Father's family are not afraid to show our anger, but when the trouble is over, we know how to forget. Not so our women. Rather than let two of them punish me, I left them to sulk, thinking that Muskrat at least would be happy by morning.

But by morning she was gone. She had run away without a word, taking Pinesinger, both children, and Father's wolf pup with her.

I
F WE HAD KNOWN
right then that they had gone, we would have caught them. But that morning I stayed inside the cave, planning with Father and Graylag to hunt for the horses I had seen. We had forgotten all about the quarreling.

In time I left the cave and climbed the little trail to the plain. There stood Muskrat's shelter, shining with dew. It seemed very quiet, so I went to look inside. No one was there. But that didn't surprise me—the digging sticks were missing, so I supposed that the two women were digging parsnips and onions as Muskrat had done the day before. I didn't think to look for the dark trails the women should have left in the dew if they had crossed the grass that morning. It simply didn't come to me to notice that there were no trails. If the women had taken their digging sticks, it seemed to me, where else but by the river could they be?

Just then Father and his brothers came up the path, followed by Graylag with his sons and stepsons, all with spears. I snatched my spears from Muskrat's shelter and caught up to walk behind Father as we set off to look for the trail of round hoofprints. After a while we found the tracks and followed them to the horses. But the horses were alert and wary. All the tricks that we tried did not put us within spearing distance of them. At last we had to give up and go to look for some other animal.

In the afternoon we surprised a roebuck in a thicket. He burst out, but I raced after him, threw my spear, and very luckily got him in the rump. He then ran on three legs, bucking and so slowed down that the other men overtook him. By late afternoon we were cooking his liver. My part in this hunt very much pleased Father.

When we returned to the cave, I took my share of meat to Muskrat and Pinesinger. Still they weren't there. Then I began to worry. This seemed a long time of gathering for late summer, when much could be gathered quickly. At first the other men refused to share my worry. By dusk they did, but then it was too late—the women were a day's travel ahead of us, and we couldn't track them until morning.

***

The waning moon rose right before the sun. By its light Andriki and I set out after the women. They hadn't tried to hide their trail, which led downstream and crossed the river where the plain was low, at the place we had forded on our way to and from Father's lodge. We guessed that the women were going to our wintergrounds, perhaps to the lodge. Muskrat was leading, carrying our child on her right hip. Father's wolf followed her.

The speed of the women surprised us. The prints were far apart and few; the women were all but flying. "Hi!" said Andriki when he saw how old the tracks were, even after a whole day of following. "Are we women, that we go no faster than they?"

How could I answer? That night we only got as far as their camp of the night before, and the next day we gained very little on them. They were running and resting, running and resting, as if their strength were failing, yet they were traveling at hunters' speed. During the days that followed we merely shortened the distance between us, but we didn't overtake them. And we had food with us—strips of meat from the roebuck. What they were eating we couldn't say.

Their speeding footprints led not to Father's lodge but to the stream from Narrow Lake, where the women had stopped to drink. Then they had doubled back and climbed up into the Hills of Ohun. Thinking we would find them at the little pond where I had found Muskrat, we followed. It seemed strange to be on Father's wintergrounds when the willows and birches in the woods were green and the berries were just ripening. Even the stillness was strange—nothing broke it but cloud shadows slowly moving over the great heath, and now and then the faint, sharp voices of willow-tits singing. We found where the women had been eating berries. I found berries in a scat left by Father's wolf, and I also found some tiny mouse bones, some feathers, and some very fine, short, dark hair in the scat, which I showed to Andriki. Then we thought we knew how the women might be feeding themselves: by catching little things every night with Muskrat's yew-bark snares.

Following the women's trail on the heath took time, since their moccasins left few prints on the dry ground. But taking our direction from the footprints, we climbed the hill, sure that we would find a camp. We came at last to the long grass on the shore of the pond where Muskrat had been swimming when I had first seen her. There we found a camp with no one in it. That did not surprise us. We looked around, and then we saw why the women had come here and what we could expect when we tried to get them back again. In the camp were the tracks of six people—four strangers besides Pinesinger and Muskrat.

"Waugh," said Andriki, looking down. "Are these adults?" He put his foot beside one of the footprints to show that his foot was almost half again as long.

"Perhaps it's a child," I said.

"These are the same people who camped here last fall. I had forgotten how small they are. Who are they?"

Of course they were Muskrat's people, they who were called the Ilasi. They seemed to be back again for another season, as if our wintergrounds were their summergrounds, although why anyone would want to spend a summer eating birds and berries was more than we could understand. But because they were so few—the old man who walked with a stick, the two women, the child—I could see how the heath might seem good to them. Then a new thought came to me. Perhaps they had been waiting for Muskrat.

They feared us, we saw, and they had known we were coming. Perhaps they had seen or heard us. They had left quickly, hurrying out of the hills and into the forests to the east, just where they had gone after we had captured Muskrat. The ashes of their fire still held embers. We might have followed, but evening was near. Instead we decided to hunt and eat, to give ourselves strength before following them. So we spent the rest of the afternoon picking and eating berries in the warm sunshine, and at sunset we went around the lake to Father's lodge.

Wolves had used it. On the floor lay their scats and shed winter hair. As we crawled into the lodge, we caught their heavy smell. But even the wolves were gone from that round, quiet space—only the evening sunlight lay on the bare floor, and only dust motes moved above it. We built a little fire in the owners' end of the lodge and planned our hunt, and then lay down to sleep in the dust. We had not burdened ourselves with sleeping-skins. After dark we heard wolves snuffling and whining at the coldtrap, and later we heard them singing. Later still we heard a tiger roaring far away. We looked at each other—the voice didn't sound like the Lily's.

Yet the Lily was the tiger I saw in my dreams that night—the Lily crouched under the low bough of a hemlock, his pale eyes green with starlight. I saw his huge, long shape, his spine just touching the branch, his head low. He was hiding, waiting for me. Then the dream changed. I saw the dark shapes of men crouching under the hemlock's branches, hiding, and I knew they were the men of Muskrat's family waiting for me. Waugh! I woke up in the perfect darkness of the lodge. Not a coal glowed in the ashes, not a star shone down through the smokeholes. We had used all our firewood. Frightened and unhappy, sure that by then the little men of Muskrat's family must be hunting for me, I sat up in the blackness, holding my spear.

When the light turned gray, Andriki opened his eyes and saw me sitting there. He could tell I had not slept. I tried not to show that my thoughts or dreams had bothered me, but he saw that too. "Hi, Kori," he said, sounding very cheerful, very easy. "What can we do? Can we leave your father's wife here? Even if your woman stays, we must try to reason with Eider's Daughter. What will her mother say to us if we manage to lose her? What will Bala say? He'll never give us another woman, you can be sure of that."

I smiled, trying to seem as carefree as Andriki. Encouraged, he went on. "Those people of your woman's," he said, "they make me think of Weevil in the days gone by. Weevil was small, you know. A little person. And his in-law was Wolverine, a big person. One day when Weevil and Wolverine were hunting, a snowstorm came. The two in-laws decided to wait out the storm in shelters made from pine branches. So they each made a shelter. Wolverine made his in a short time, but Weevil's took a long time. Wolverine went inside, but he was getting cold and snow was blowing into his clothes even before Weevil finished. Weevil didn't get inside until night. Then Wolverine looked over at Weevil and asked, 'Is your shelter warm?' Weevil said yes. Wolverine asked, 'Is it dry?' Weevil said yes. 'Good,' said Wolverine. 'I'm taking it.' And he did." Andriki looked at me sideways, laughing. "He could do it, you see. He was bigger."

We crawled out the coldtrap, urinated down the cold east wind that had begun blowing during the night, and then, since we had no food and didn't want to drink water, we very slowly and quietly walked off toward the east end of the lake, hunting. In our minds was the she-moose we had seen killed by the tiger. But the woods were empty. With wolves and a tiger hunting there, what chance had we? We turned north toward the grassland with willows. There we saw a group of hinds, far away. We stalked them. The wind changed and they smelled us. The leader's tail went up and she whistled a warning. Away the herd ran, all together in perfect order, the old leader first, the young hinds in the middle, the lookout last. While they went through a little valley, the lookout kept us in sight until the leader reached the high ground on the far side and could watch us. What could we do? They knew too much to let us scatter them. We watched them go.