Troll Blood (18 page)

K
wimu! Go, Kwimu!” Skusji’j yells.

The young men are playing the ball game. Stripped to their loincloths, they shout and jostle, throwing and catching, leaping through shafts of dusty evening sunlight. Dots of white and yellow paint flash on their faces as they follow the shifting patterns of the ball.

It flies across in a shallow arc, and Kwimu snatches it. He twists and darts, evading pursuit, racing for the tall pole at the edge of the glade.

“Go on, Kwimu!” shouts Skusji’j from the sidelines. “Run! Ow!” He winces. Another player has tackled Kwimu. It’s Kiunik, his young uncle. Seizing a handful of Kwimu’s glossy black hair, he jerks him off balance. Kwimu hooks a foot around Kiunik’s ankle. They fall to the ground, wrestling, and
a third young man grabs the ball and reaches the post. His friends cheer, and as Kwimu and Kiunik pick themselves up, the game is over.

“That looks like so much fun,” the Little Weasel says as they come over, disheveled and panting, to collect their things.

“Very rough fun,” Kwimu complains, laughing, slinging his soft moose-hide jacket over his shoulder, and retying his belt. “Did you see Kiunik? He nearly pulled my head off.”

“Good practice for war” Kiunik adjusts his great necklace of curving bear claws and slyly tweaks Kwimu’s long hair. “This stuff is too easy to grab. Wear it like mine.” He passes a hand over his own head—shaven on both sides, with a stiff black crest running down the middle.

“Ha!” Kwimu retorts. “If I wore it like you, I’d always be changing it. When Kiunik sets a fashion, he likes to think everyone will copy him,” he adds to Skusji’j. “But not me. When I’m as tall as he is, I’ll rub his face in the dust.”

“You can try,” says Kiunik amiably, disappearing into the wigwam.

Kwimu sits down outside and offers Skusji’j a lump of balsam gum to chew. The boy accepts it cautiously—he’s still not used to the strong flavor. Fox settles down between them, tail outspread, nose between his paws. Smoke from the cooking fires hangs over the village, keeping away the insects that have started to arrive.

Spring is here. The rivers are melting: Geese and ducks are flying in from the south. Children chase around the wigwams,
laughing and calling. And the woods echo to a shrill piping. Skusji’j cocks his head.

“What’s that noise?” he asks.

Kwimu looks at him. It often worries him how much the Little Weasel does not know. This is Frog-Croaking Moon. In the boggy hollow down the slope thousands of mating frogs keep up a constant, deafeningly loud shrilling. “That noise is frogs,” he explains. “Don’t you have frogs where you come from?”

“Sqoljk?”
The boy looks puzzled. He doesn’t know this word. Kwimu hooks two fingers in his mouth and pulls a wide frog grin. He tries to make his eyes bug out. He croaks and hops. Skusji’j falls over, laughing. “Oh, now I get it. Frogs!”

Kwimu laughs too. Fox grins. The boys chew companionably.

After a while, Skusji’j says, “What are the little ones playing?”

The small children have formed a long line, hands on one another’s shoulders. The leader calls out, “Look out for Swamp Woman!”

Kwimu’s little sister, Jipjawej, is creeping up on them. “I’m so-o-o-o lonely,” she wails. “I’m coming to get you!” She runs at the line, which swings away from her, shrieking, but trying to stay joined.

“There they go!” says Kwimu. The line breaks up as Jipjawej grabs one of them, and the children tumble over one another to get away from her. “Now
you’ve
got to be Swamp Woman!” she cries.

“Who is Swamp Woman?” asks the Little Weasel.

Kwimu wriggles his shoulders. “One of the Old Ones. She walks in the woods, especially in the boggy places. You know the curved fungus that grows on tree trunks? The children think those are her dishes. Some evenings she wanders around the edges of villages singing, trying to lure people away, because she’s lonely. She doesn’t mean to harm you, but she comes from the Ghost World, where the dead people go.”

“It’s like a game we play at home,” says Skusji’j cheerfully. “Only in our game it’s not Swamp Woman who does the chasing, it’s a wolf.”

“It isn’t just a game.”

“I know.” Skusji’j hesitates, stiffens. “Kwimu—when we move from here, where will we go? Has your father decided?”

“I don’t know. Not to the bay, this year. Perhaps to the lake instead.”

Skusji’j spits the gum into his palm. “I’m not a baby, Kwimu. You don’t have to pretend to me. I know what everyone’s saying.”

Kwimu is silent. Everyone used to speak of the bay as
we’kowpaq
—“the bay where we go in summer.” Now people are calling it
skite’kmujue’katik
—“the place of ghosts.”

“I’ve heard people talking.” The boy bites his lip. “Your father and Kiunik went back there, didn’t they? And they say—”

Kwimu sighs. “They say there is a great stir of the Other Ones in that quarter of the woods this spring. They heard strange singing, and the tree cutter, Kewasu’nukwej, striking
at the trees with his invisible ax. Grandmother thinks the Other Ones are angry because of your foreign ghosts.”

The Little Weasel says with a shiver, “And is that why the
jenu
came? You never told me anything more about it.”

“I know,” says Kwimu slowly. After the terror of that midnight visit, no one wanted to speak of it. Speaking of such things may give them power. But now—

“Is that why it came? Will it come back?” Skusji’j fixes anxious eyes on Kwimu’s face.

Kwimu shifts uneasily. He scoops up Fox and strokes his head. In fact, he shouldn’t be telling stories now the thaw is here. Wintertime is the storytelling season. But Skusji’j needs to know these things. He lowers his voice. “Well, the
jenu
comes with the cold. …”

And, of course, his grandmother hears him. “Kwimu! Come inside right now, and bring your younger brother, too. You know what happens if you tell stories outside in springtime? The snakes all come and listen. You want that the camp should be full of snakes?”

The boys jump up—Skusji’j red with pleasure at being called Kwimu’s younger brother—and go in.

It’s warm inside, with a good smell of roasting meat. Grandmother has hung a big piece over the fire, suspended on a doubled cord that twists and untwists, first one way, then the other, so that it will cook evenly. Sinumkw and Kiunik are playing dish-dice at the back of the wigwam—banging the bowl down to make the dice jump, and laughing over the
scores. Kiunik’s young wife, Plawej, sits beside him, tickling the baby on her lap.

“Grandmother,” Kwimu begs, “tell Skusji’j about the
jenu
.”

Grandmother looks at the Little Weasel. Her eyes are shrewd, and her hair, bound back with strings of painted eel-skin sewn with shells, is almost as thick and black and strong as a girl’s. She has just a few ash gray streaks at the temples.

“Why should the Little Weasel need this story?”

Kwimu’s little brother screws up his face. He says in a rush, “Nukumij—Grandmother—why did the
jenu
come? Did it come like the Other Ones in the woods—because of what happened down at the bay?”

“Ah.” Grandmother nods slowly. She reaches out a wrinkled hand and brushes his cheek. “Don’t worry, little one. Don’t worry,
nuji’j
. That was not your fault.”

“Then it was the fault of his people,” Kiunik interrupts sharply, looking up from the game. “I still say we should camp there this year. Pull down their houses and drive out their ghosts.”

Sinumkw shakes his head. “Then they would wander loose in the woods. People should not interfere between Other Ones and ghosts.”

“Ghosts don’t frighten me,” Kiunik declares. He rubs his hands over his scalp, flattening his black crest and letting it spring up again. He steals a sideways glance at Plawej, looking for her approval. She smiles at him and goes on singing softly to the baby:

The baby gurgles, and Kiunik suddenly leans across and picks up his little son, tosses him into the air, catches him, and kisses him. He rolls back onto the fir boughs and lets the baby play with the big bear-claw necklace on his chest.

Grandmother shakes her head at him. “Those ghosts are not angry with us, Kiunik. The Other Persons are not angry with us. But they are disturbed, like bees swarming when a bear breaks into their nest. Keep away, and you will not be stung. But the
jenu
, now. The
jenu
is different, and I will tell you how.”

Instead of beginning, though, she prods the meat to set it spinning again. Her face is troubled. At last she takes out her slender-stemmed pipe and hands it to Kwimu. “Light it. The smoke will help me.”

Kwimu fills the pipe with a pinch of red willow bark mixed with lobelia leaves. He lights it and hands it respectfully to his grandmother. After drawing on it, she fans a little of the sweet smoke over the boys and says quietly, “This winter has been easy. There has been plenty to eat, plenty of game. Last winter, too. But we all remember the winter before that when it was not so good. There were many blinding snowstorms. The moose and the caribou were scarce. Everyone was hungry.
Some of the children died.” She pauses. “Kwimu’s little brother died.”

Kwimu closes his mouth hard, shutting his tongue behind his teeth. He forces his face to remain steady, emotionless. The Little Weasel shoots him a sudden round-eyed glance.

Grandmother nods. “Yes. It’s good for Kwimu to have a little brother again.”

She smokes thoughtfully for a while. “And that’s how life is: good winters and bad ones, times of hunger and times of plenty. But in the very worst winters,
Eula’qmuejit
, Starvation, comes tiptoeing through the villages, lifting the flaps of the wigwams, blowing his icy breath to chill the people’s hearts.

“So long as we care for one another and share what food and warmth we have, he cannot harm us. But sometimes, if the winter is very hard, we may begin to see a terrible change creeping over one of our neighbors. He will not speak, or join in the songs we sing at the fireside to help us forget the hunger. He sits in the cold at the wall of the wigwam, glaring at the others with red-rimmed eyes, gnawing on his own knuckles, dreaming of human flesh. His heart is hardening into ice.”

The thin smoke rises from Grandmother’s pipe, ascending to the ghosts and the ancestors. “They say this happened to my mother’s uncle. Perhaps, at first, he was afraid of himself—afraid of what he might do to his kinfolk. He ran off into the night, crazy as a wolf. At sunrise his brothers went after him, following his trail.”

Everyone is quiet now, listening very seriously to Grandmother’s story.

“First they see his moccasins, kicked off, and the neat marks of bare feet running through the snow. Then they find his coat tossed into the bushes. He has pulled off his clothes to run naked in the biting wind that makes his brothers shudder and pull their faces deep inside their fur hoods. Soon they notice blood in his tracks. The sharp, broken crust of the snow has cut his feet, but instead of limping and stumbling, he’s running faster and faster, till at last his footprints are so far apart he must be leaping like a moose. And it’s then that the brothers see that the bare foot tracks are changing. Growing longer, larger. Broad and shapeless, like a bear’s, with great gouging marks at the toes.”

Kwimu’s neck prickles, even though he’s heard the tale before.

“Deep in the woods the brothers stop, half frozen. Around them the branches rub and squeak in the cold wind. They stare at the tracks, which are no longer the marks of human feet, and the hair rises on their necks.

“From far ahead, the wind carries a bone-chilling scream. It is too late to save their brother. They stand, afraid to go on, afraid to follow those great clawed marks. What if their quarry has already turned, racing back down the trail with terrible speed? What if he has begun hunting them? He will tear them apart and eat them raw.

“And that is what a
jenu
is, little son. Not a ghost, not one
of the Other Ones at all, but a man who has lost his humanity. Inside every
jenu
, they say, is a frozen heart, a little man-shaped core of ice. Nothing else is left.”

“Then what was it doing?” Skusji’j asks in a whisper. “What was it looking for when it came to our village?”

“Food,” says Grandmother simply. “A
jenu
is always hungry. It prowls in the woods all winter, looking for fat. If it finds a village, it rips the bark from the wigwams and drags us out as we would break open a beaver dam. It comes with the snow and retreats with the snow. Only fire can harm it, because its heart is made of ice.”

“And is there more than one?” the Little Weasel asks.

Grandmother shrugs. “Never many. One winter when my father was a boy, he heard two
jenu
calling to each other from two blue mountaintops. ‘Cold heart crying to cold heart,’ he told me. A dreadful, lonely sound. They are drawn to each other, and yet they hate each other. If two
jenu
meet, they will fight till one eats the other up.”