The Animal Wife (5 page)

Because the lodge was not very old there was still firewood near it, still rather easy to find. Also there was food. To the northwest stretched a low, wide-spreading heath where spikeberries ripened in the fall, just at the time the people came back from their summergrounds. Red deer, reindeer, horses, and bears also came to eat the spikeberries and then to spend the winter, the deer and horses pawing for food on the heath, the bears asleep in holes. So the people ate meat. "A good place," said Father in our camp one night as he sat with his elbows on his knees, shading his eyes from the firelight. "Our place. Mine and all my father's sons'. Our men share it, and now you too will share it, Kori. We'll be there soon."

Thinking of us, the men of Father's hunting lands, sharing the lodge and the winter hunting, I stared into the flames, letting the flickering light carry me to the snow-covered lodge with a fringe of thin white birch behind it and the pair of pointed hills rising behind the birch trees: Ohun's breasts. In my mind's eye it was a clear, cold evening, and Father and Andriki and I were carrying deermeat home.

In a way I wanted to reach the camp, but in a way I did not. For one thing, I was enjoying the travel. But also, perhaps I felt a little shy when I thought of meeting the rest of Father's people. After all, I didn't know them. Wouldn't things change when there were many of us, with everyone wanting to talk to Father, and perhaps his other children there?

I thought of such things late at night. Then I would get up and sit by the fire. If someone else was awake too, we would get to talking, and I would forget whatever thoughts had worried me.

***

Father and Andriki had started our trip carrying full waterbags. They used the Fire River style of waterbag—an uncut skin pulled off a musk deer over the head, as if the skin were its parka. Bulging with water, these skins looked like musk deer again. At first I was glad not to have one to carry, because a bag of water is almost as heavy as a bag of rocks. But after a few days we had drunk most of the water, and we grew thirsty. By then we were far from the river, out on the plain, where there are no springs or streams. Then I would have been glad to carry a waterbag. Instead we dug milkroots, if we could find the vines that grew from them, and squeezed the bitter liquid from their pulp. My palms smelled of it. Once we killed a bison calf and drank her milky rumen and her clotting blood.

By traveling fast, Father hoped to cross the plain leaving a straight track. If we were sure of reaching the Hair River, it wouldn't matter if we went thirsty for the last few days. But because Pinesinger was slowing us down, when the tenth day came we were no longer finding milkroots but we were still far from the river. We were thirsty. So we turned west and made for a large pool which Father said was fed by a spring and never dried, or not until the Moon of Fires.

One evening we came over a rise of ground and found ourselves at the edge of a very wide, round, shallow hollow. In the center, a pool reflected the sky. The many broad paths leading to the pool were soft with trampled dung; they were the paths of mammoths and other grazing animals who lived on the plain. For a great distance around, the grass had been chewed to its roots by all these animals. Small brown snails waited on the muddy banks, and frogs floated in the shallow water, their eyes out, watching us, their arms and legs spread. We decided to camp for a few days.

I will always remember that spring and its pool. I see it in my dreams. The corpse of a mammoth who had died the summer before lay by the water. On the evening we arrived, we saw it from afar, like a huge, gray, moss-covered boulder lying on the grass. The dead mammoth's hairy skin had dried and shrunken tight to its bones, and its corpse was hollow. Beginning at the rump and belly, where the skin was thinnest, animals had eaten their way into the carcass.

We walked up to it, thinking to eat some too. Stooping very low, we put our heads inside the cave of the body and looked around. The undersides of the ribs and hips and spine were scraped bare. Lions and hyenas must have lain inside that mammoth, eating their fill, but long ago. No one could eat now, since the scraps that were left were as hard and dry as wood. A foul smell and a dim red light filled the body, the smell from the old decay and the light from the red, setting sun shining through the dried skin. Fox scats lay by the thighbone, and I saw how the carcass made a very good den, where a fox could hide from those he hunted and from those who hunted him.

"Here's Kori's lodge," said Andriki, teasing. "I'm going in." Bending low, he did.

Father laughed. "Why not?" he said, crowding in behind Andriki. I followed, and we all squeezed inside, laughing and shoving each other—all but Pinesinger. I sat on a rib, with my back against Andriki. For fun, he made the low, rumbling call of a mammoth. The call boomed, quite frightening and very strange, in that close space.

Looking out through the rear of the carcass, between the mammoth's stiff hind legs, I saw the long legs of Pinesinger walking away from us. Father also saw her. "Where are you going, Wife?" he called firmly, his stern voice sounding rather unexpected coming from inside a carcass.

But Pinesinger didn't answer. Perhaps she hadn't heard him. Instead she circled the pool, vanishing for a while from our view of her through the rump of the mammoth and reappearing later on the far side of the pool, where she stripped and waded in. In the golden sunlight of the very late afternoon, she sat on her heels to dip water over her arms and shoulders, her breasts and belly.

In silence we watched her. Wet and shining in the red sunlight, leaning forward between her long, folded legs, with her hair twisted up on the top of her head so that her neck seemed delicate, she was very beautiful. I suddenly felt foolish, squeezing with grown men inside a stinking carcass, doing something silly for no real reason, just because we hadn't done it before.

Perhaps Father and Andriki felt foolish too. Without a word they clambered out of the opening in the belly, straightened up, and began to look around as if they had always been serious, always purposeful, ever since we had come. Father pointed out a good camping place in one of the small thickets of larch that stood on the rim of the hollow. We didn't want to camp beside the pool, of course, because of the animals that would visit it in the dark. In fact, the light was already fading. "Hurry, Wife," called Father. But Pinesinger was slowly washing her legs, ignoring him.

The thicket we chose had been used by people before. Long ago someone had cut brush and laid it, butt ends toward the center, in a ring. Once this would have helped a little against lions. Now the brush was old and broken, and lay almost flat. Even so, it was better than nothing at all. And we could cut more if we liked.

"Whose place is this?" I asked Father.

"Isn't it mine?" he answered.

"Who cut the brush? You?" asked Andriki.

"Yes, but Bala sometimes comes here. He would have cut brush too, since he doesn't like lions." Father laughed.

Andriki looked carefully around for lion sign, since a thicket such as this, overlooking a pool where horses and bison must come to drink, is chosen by lions for the same reasons it is chosen by people. He soon found a lion scat, which he broke open and sniffed, then threw far away. "Very old," he said. So we made our camp while the daylight lasted, pulling grass, breaking more branches to add to the ring, and glancing often at Pinesinger, who by now was washing her hair.

The moment camp was finished, Father strode off to speak to Pinesinger. In the distance he stood beside her. It gave me a strange feeling to see them together in the late, slanting sunlight, he clothed and standing, leaning slightly forward as if talking to her earnestly, she naked and squatting on her heels, seeming to ignore him and wringing out her hair.

Suddenly he seized her arm and pulled her to her feet. In the great distance, she laughed! She laughed and tried to fight him. He lifted her up and danced around with her. She laughed again, her arms around his neck and her wet hair flying. They were playing! As if I had been caught watching what I should not have been watching, I felt my face grow hot.

Andriki too felt shame. Gruffly he pointed out to me a distant dark green bush that could only be a fireberry. "Go there," he said. "Perhaps you can find a few of last year's berries. I'm going to set snares." So, as the evening star, the Hind, began to pick her way across the fading sky, Andriki went one way and I went another, leaving Father alone to play with his woman.

Daydreams of Pinesinger began to creep into my mind as I looked for the berries. Soon I could no longer stop my thoughts of her naked body, or of my father's naked body, for that matter—shaming thoughts not right to think.

W
HEN
I
CAME BACK
to our camp in the larch thicket, I found Father and Pinesinger, now wearing her trousers, sitting very close. During the day we had dug a large tuber, and this Father had split and placed on the coals of the campfire. But the tuber was burning. Father and Pinesinger had been too busy to watch it and only noticed it as I walked up. Father leaped up, kicked it out of the coals, and seizing a stick, beat the fire out of it.

Just then Andriki came into camp. As his glance took in the burned food, he sat down stiffly, trying to hide his disapproval. I was embarrassed, since I saw no way to behave toward the broken black food without drawing attention to what had started the trouble. So no one spoke. The chunks of smoldering root filled the air with the smell of charcoal. None of us would eat much that night.

Soon Father took Pinesinger by the arm and led her to his bed, already unrolled in the furthest thicket. I glanced at Andriki to see how he felt, and saw that his face was stem and angry. His back was to Father and Pinesinger, and although he couldn't help but overhear their low voices, he seemed not to listen but scowled at the pool and the plain.

Suddenly his face came alive. He touched my arm. I looked where he was looking and saw animals moving, about half as far to the east of the pool as we were to the north. We saw only their legs against the pale, short grass, since their dark bodies seemed to melt into the darkening sky. They were coming to the water. Andriki made the handsign for horses, then for spear. He got his spear, I got mine, and we crept toward the horses, bending low so our shapes wouldn't show against the sky.

Near the water, we crouched down for a look around and saw that the shadowy horses had moved farther away. The stallion was being very careful. So were we as we stalked—careful not to surprise a lion or to move into a lion's ambush.

Just then an idea came to me. Catching Andriki's eye, I made the handsign for carcass. He saw at once what I meant—we could hide inside the mammoth's carcass. Sooner or later the horses would have to come near it if they wanted to drink.

We made our way to it and crept inside. Andriki was very pleased with me—he clapped my shoulder and shook his fist with delight. Here we could hide in some kind of safety. We could even move a little without being seen. Andriki made the handsign for wait, eased himself out again, and came back with a ball of mammoth dung. This we rubbed on ourselves, to hide our odor. Then, crouched inside the carcass, reeking of mammoth dung, peering out between the hind legs or through the slit in the skin of the belly, we waited for the horses to come near.

It was very hard to see in the gloomy, murky light between dusk and night. The daylight was gone, but the night was not yet clear. In this gloom we heard a sudden rush of wings and many birds calling—a flight of sandgrouse had come to the pool. What good sense, I thought. They drink now, before the owls come out but when the hawks can no longer see them. Then I heard a squawk and flapping wings. Something had caught a sandgrouse after all. Perhaps they weren't so sensible. If they drank in the heavy dusk every night, a fox could know just where to find them. For that matter, so could I. I planned to set a snare in the morning.

Inside the carcass the air was very close and warm, smelling of death and the dung we had rubbed on ourselves. After the sandgrouse left with their rush of wings, I heard only Andriki's breathing and the soft creaking of his clothes when he changed his position slightly. He peered out the slit in the belly, and I peered out the rear. I saw stars reflecting on the water, but nothing else. To my great disappointment, the horses had gone. Something had frightened them. Nudging Andriki, I made the handsign for horse. Andriki peered through the gloom for a while, then answered with the sign for gone or finished. But he also made the signs for wait and animal, and I saw that his thinking was like my thinking: if we waited long enough, something would come near us.

So we waited. The gloomy dusk cleared and the stars shone brightly. The pale earth reflected their light like snow. Nothing moved. Now and then a frog called from the pool, but otherwise everything was quiet. I had almost forgotten Father and Pinesinger, who seemed very far away.

Andriki nudged me. He was listening. Then I heard something—stones rolling under an animal's feet. Soon we heard a bush breaking. Only a rhino makes such noise. My teeth clenched as if to bite back my fear. Somehow we had missed the fact that a rhino drank here. We hadn't noticed footprints or scrapes. I hoped he didn't blunder into the carcass. When I dared to peek out, I saw that it was not one but two rhinos, a mother and her calf.

They had come to drink, but something was stopping them. Near the pool, they stood facing the plain. In time they turned their rumps to whatever it was and drank noisily, and on the plain a hyena called. So, hyenas too! I saw two silhouetted heads and four large open ears, dark against the dark sky. Eyes on the rhinos, the hyenas slipped toward the water.

This bothered the mother rhino, who suddenly spun around and rushed them. Calmly the hyenas waited, stepping aside at the last moment so that she lumbered between them. They joined each other at the edge of the pool, where they drank, then waded in. Perhaps they wanted to swim or wallow. Perhaps they had hidden a carcass in the water and wanted to pull it out again. Whatever their plans, the rhino stopped them. She bounced herself around the edge of the pool to chase them, sending starlit drops of water flying with every step. The hyenas cantered away and stopped at a distance, then waited quietly for her to forget about them. But now the little rhino wanted to chase them. He was faster than the mother, and more purposeful. She had only wanted to scare them; the little rhino wanted to catch them. They saw this and left.