The Animal Wife (4 page)

Childishly, I began to cry. I couldn't help it. "Please, Mother," I said, "Father wants you. You could still come. Please change your mind. Nothing is settled. It's not too late."

"I won't live with your father," said Mother. "Let him remarry. I feel sorry for his wives. I feel sorry for you. You won't like it at his home on the Hair River."

"Why not?" I asked. But Mother shook her head. She wouldn't tell me.

I finished the marrow and laid the bone on the fire. We watched it without speaking until it flamed. Inside the grass shelter, on Mother's deerskin bed, the baby began to cry. For the first time that I could remember, Mother didn't go to him. As if she didn't hear him, she turned to look at the sky in the west, where the low red sun was filling the clouds with fire. She said, "You will go and I will stay. But we will meet again, Kori. Not on the summergrounds or wintergrounds of any man, but there in the west, where we will eat the sun by the fire of our lineage—yours and mine, but not your father's—with our elders in the Camps of the Dead."

***

After dark, at Uncle Bala's fire, I had to unfasten my pack to get my sleeping-skin, and I saw how I had been too eager to leave, too hasty. But even after all that Mother had said, I had no thought of not following Father. My pack might sit untied for a while, but it was ready.

Yet as I lay waiting for sleep, I saw in my mind's eye a single fire far out on a plain, lit by evening light. Small, but with a long shadow, my mother sat alone beside it. The thought made me so sad that again I couldn't help but cry. Perhaps Father heard me. In the dark I felt his hand on my arm. "I think your mother wants you to stay," he said. "You don't have to come with us this year. You can wait for another year. There's plenty of time."

"I won't wait," I told him.

***

Soon after that, one day at noon, when all of us were resting in the shade of bushes or in our grass shelters, someone noticed that to the east of us people were in sight. We all stood up to see a group of men, women, and children coming toward us in single file. No need for these people to put their spears in the bushes! Even from afar we knew them. They were our kin, part of the group with whom we had spent the spring. Surely in their group was Father's woman. Surely they were bringing her to him!

Somehow my stepfather had crept up behind me. "Ah, you Kori," I heard him say. "Go get wood. Your mother wants to cook fish for these people. Don't pretend you can't hear." So I had no choice but to do as he said, and was out of camp when the newcomers walked in.

When I came back I found them eating fish around Uncle Bala's fire. They had taken off their shirts to enjoy the cooling breeze, and now were sitting on their heels or lying propped up on their scattered packs, loudly laughing and talking with the people of our camp and throwing fishbones in every direction.

In the middle of the group was Father. Facing him, with her back to me, sat Pinesinger, she whose bare rump I still saw in my dreams, she who had given me so much pleasure in the willow thicket in the spring. At first I was puzzled by the sight of her. I couldn't understand why she had come.

Her fine, strong body was naked to the waist, but otherwise she seemed to be wearing wedding clothes. An ivory pin held her braid to her head, her trousers were new, and the beaded tops of her knee-high moccasins were made of urine-bleached leather. All this I saw, but my mind didn't want to know what I was seeing. My tongue seemed to stick to the roof of my mouth. I hoped my eyes weren't popping.

"Kori! Come and greet my wife," called Father.

At the sound of my name, Pinesinger's head snapped around for a look at me. I thought she seemed startled, even frightened, at the sight. Then she caught herself and looked at me with the dignity of a grown woman waiting for a child's greeting. She had become my stepmother. In a stepmother's way she spoke to me formally. "Greetings, Aal's Child," she said.

That night, for the first time since Father came, I didn't sleep near him. Pinesinger and her people were guests of Uncle Bala, and to watch Pinesinger together with my father was too much for me. Nor could I bring myself to go back to my mother and stepfather. Instead I chose my mother's sister's fire and carried my sleeping-skin there. My aunt and uncle took little notice of me, so I lay down near them.

I couldn't sleep. My thoughts would not leave Pinesinger. My body ached to have her again, while my heart ached at the thought of her with Father. How had he gotten betrothed to her right in front of me without my knowing? People had called her by her respect name, Child of Eider. But who was Eider? Pinesinger's mother was called Dai Dai.

My aunt and uncle began to whisper in their bed. "What's that noise?" asked my aunt.

My uncle laughed. "It's nothing," he said. "Just Kori panting."

So my aunt laughed too, then sighed with contentment as she settled herself in her deerskins with my uncle. But he now wanted to make fun of me. "Why are you breathing so hard?" he asked. "Are you thinking about a woman? Think about a man!" I heard my aunt trying to stifle her laughter.

But the question of Eider was puzzling me so much that their jokes didn't hurt my feelings. "Aunt?" I asked.

Her laughter still clung in her voice. "Yes, Nephew?" she said.

"Who is Eider?"

"Why, she's the woman who just came. She's Pinesinger's mother. Is that who you mean?"

"But that woman is called Dai Dai."

"Oh! Ha! Dai Dai!" cried my uncle.

"Ah! Kah! Kah, kah, kah!" shrieked my aunt. "Go to sleep, Kori! Let your poor mind rest! Whoever heard of naming someone Dai Dai?"

So I saw the reason for my confusion. I had known Pinesinger's mother by a children's nickname. I was deeply ashamed.

W
E LEFT
Uncle Bala's summerground when the Strawberry Moon was almost full. Taking our direction from the sun, we walked straight north from the Fire River. There were no landmarks in that huge sweep of grass. There were no trees, just bushes, and no hills, just clouds like mountains on the horizon or in the dome of the sky. There was no trail. Our legs made their own trail where the grass stems broke, and the larks and sparrows that perched on the grass flew up as we hurried by. The nights were very short. Each evening lasted so long that dawn almost overtook it. We had all the daylight we needed, and we could walk as long as we liked.

I don't think we traveled fast enough for Andriki, who worried aloud that we would reach the Hair River too late to hunt mammoths. But we traveled too fast for Pinesinger. All day she lagged, and when we stopped in the evening to gather whatever we could find on the plains to burn for fuel, she would drop her pack and say she was too tired to help us. As soon as we had cleared a space and used our firesticks to start a blaze, she would drop herself down to the bare ground like an animal and lie with her braid in the dust. Very soon, from the rise and fall of her rib cage, we would know she was asleep.

She would wake up later to eat, and then to cover herself with her own sleeping-skin. She didn't yet share Father's. And she would complain. I soon began to see her as Andriki saw her, not as the beautiful woman who would never be mine but as a bother.

One night as we sat on our heels around our fire, cooking strips of meat from a bison's carcass that we had won that same day from a group of hyenas, Pinesinger woke from her nap weeping. She turned her dusty face so the firelight showed us the streaks of her tears.

"What now?" asked Andriki.

"I dreamed I was at home," she whispered. "I dreamed I was with my mother. We sang. We ate cloudberries. But it wasn't real. I'm here alone."

"Alone?" cried Andriki, leaping to his feet. "I'll show you you're not alone!" He jumped over the fire, and soon we heard him in the shadows, snapping the branches of the little bush we were planning to use for a shelter. He came back with a long switch, which he lashed back and forth so that it whistled, then thrust into Father's hand. Folding his legs, he bumped himself down on his haunches and said, "Every day this woman complains. She lags. She makes us wait. She won't work, and she won't sleep with her husband. Instead she dreams of food that grows far away. Is this how she repays the gifts we promised her kinsmen? Use that switch to teach her how to act when she lives with us!"

Pinesinger began to sob loudly, as if Father were already beating her. But Father placed the switch on the fire. "Be easy, Brother," he said. "My wife is young. Where she sleeps and what she dreams needn't worry you. When we find our people, the women will comfort her. Until then, we'll let her be. Did we need a woman's help on our way to visit Bala? Do we need a woman's help on our way home?"

Father looked at Pinesinger and said quite gently, "Now see how you annoy us, Wife. Don't make trouble on a long trip." He waited, perhaps to see whether she would apologize for the trouble she had caused, but when she looked down at her hands and said nothing, he nodded as if he understood her silence and handed her some strips of roasted meat.

***

Perhaps Pinesinger didn't like the trip between the Fire River and the Hair River, but I liked it more than any trip I had ever taken before. Although at first I sorrowed for Pinesinger once in a while, the more she sulked and complained, the less it bothered me that she was Father's and not mine. Anyway, my long-ago doings with Pinesinger seemed small compared to traveling with Father and my uncle. I woke every morning looking forward to the day's events and went to sleep sure that I had never been so happy.

For one thing, I had never been so far from home. Well, of course I had made almost the same journey long ago, when Mother brought me across these plains after she divorced Father. But I had been too young to remember. The only traveling I remembered was the traveling of Uncle Bala's people between their wintergrounds at Woman Lake and their summergrounds on the Fire River, a trip we took each year regularly, spring and fall. I knew every step of the trail. My mother, my stepfather, and my Uncle Bala always made sure I carried something heavy. "You're grown now," they would say. "You're not a child, to carry a child's load." Unless I was staggering, unless my knees were bending and shaking, the adults would think my load was too small.

But with Father, besides my hunting bag with my firesticks, my knife, my childish spear, and the good flint Father had given me, I had only to carry my sleeping-skin and my winter clothes. With Father, I wasn't in a group weighed down by heavy things and children. With Father, I was free, like a hunter, a man with other men—followed, to be sure, by one of Father's women, whose goose-pimpled skin my mind's eye saw no more.

I grew especially fond of Andriki. I think he couldn't help but feel how much I admired him—I was in awe of his strength and courage, and of his skill at hunting too, ever since I had watched him stalk a marmot on a bare, short-grass plain. I know I should have called him Uncle, since he was Father's half-brother. But he was so much younger than Father and such a friend to me that I almost forgot he wasn't my own brother, and I caught myself calling him by name. He was too young and far too easygoing to correct me.

No longer did he call me Botfly, but instead he found reasons to praise me. He admired my eyesight, my fast pace, and my willingness, and he liked all my stories. No one from the Fire River would have listened to me tell these stories, since the people there had already heard them from better storytellers many times before. But to Andriki the stories were new.

I couldn't hear enough of his stories. My favorite was about a man, Wolverine, who found a bulb under a juniper bush. This is such a funny story! The bulb is really another man, Weevil, who has taken the form of a bulb so he can sleep without having anyone bother him. "A bulb!" says Wolverine. "I'll eat it!" So he does. Later Weevil wakes up in the dark. He's in Wolverine's stomach, but he doesn't know it. "It's night! Where am I?" says Weevil. Then Wolverine says, "I'm alone, but I hear a man talking. Where can he be?" Here's the best part—Weevil keeps asking where he is and Wolverine keeps looking around, looking around, wondering where the voice is coming from. At last Wolverine takes down his pants, squats, and passes Weevil out as a turd. A turd has no eyes, so he can't see! Now Weevil speaks in a little high voice. He says, "I've gone blind!" Of course he's blind—he's a turd! And when Wolverine hears his turd talking, he grabs up his pants and runs away.

This was Andriki's best story. Even now I have to laugh when I think of Weevil rolling around like a maggot, not realizing what has happened to him! Every night I made Andriki tell the story, until one night Father said he had heard it too often. So Andriki couldn't tell it anymore.

But there were other things to talk about. Father and Andriki told me of their summergrounds by the Hair River, and of the dry, deep cave in the wall of the ravine, a cave so big it could hold all their people and still have room for more. Father told of a wide trail that led from the plain down the wall of the ravine, a trail used by mammoths coming to drink in the river. This the mammoths did in summer, whenever the meltwater pools on the plain dried up. Hunters could hide themselves at the rim of the ravine and roll stones down to frighten the mammoths, so they crowded each other off the trail and fell onto the rocks in the ravine below. Almost always some of the mammoths broke bones, especially leg bones. That was the good thing, said Father. Most mammoths won't walk on a broken leg. People could spear the injured mammoths, or if they were afraid, they could just wait until the mammoths died of thirst, and then the people could eat their fill and get ivory and more ivory, enough for all their marriages.

Father and Andriki also told me of their winter lodge. When the Hair River left the ravine, it went far across a wide plain, then into a low, wide valley full of birch trees. If you crossed the river there, crossed a wide heath, and went north until you came to the hills called the Breasts of Ohun, you would find a stream flowing west on its way to the Hair. On the stream was Narrow Lake, and on the north shore of that lake was Father's lodge.