West of the Moon (38 page)

The Nis preened.

Next morning, the land was in plain view, forested hills, and beyond them white mountains like the ghosts of clouds. Everyone stared hungrily as Gunnar altered course to run south, with the mountains on the starboard side. Every hour brought new sights and sounds. The yelling clamour of a seagull colony on one abrupt limestone rock could be heard for miles. A flight of ducks passed over the ship, quacking loudly. Whales were everywhere, heaving grey or black bodies between the waves and snorting like bullocks. The day was full of mild sunshine, with a gentle haze over silver water.

Hilde looked over the side. Down in the shadow of the ship, pale frilly blossoms floated past – jellyfish, like ghostly baby's bonnets, flowing through the cold, clear water upright, tilting, side on, anyhow. Millions of them. It made her sleepy to watch.

At midday came a shout from Magnus at the helm. “The Wonderful Beaches!” Hilde saw an unbroken white line running along the coast. Sand. Wonderful, white sand. She longed to run on it.

“Now we know where we are,” Magnus told her, satisfaction in every crease of his face. “The Wonderful Beaches. Go on for miles, they do; there's no mistaking them. And you know what that means? Only a few more days, and we'll be there.”

Serpent's Bay! How long ago it seemed, the night she'd first heard of it, sitting at home in the snug, warm farmhouse.
And soon we'll be there. Won't Thorolf be glad to see us!
A thrill of happiness ran through her.
Oh Ma, Pa – if only you could see me now!

T
HE 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.

The ball flies over, and Kwimu snatches it. He twists and darts, racing for the tall pole at the edge of the glade.

“Go, Kwimu!” shouts Skusji'j from the sidelines. “Run! Ow!” He winces. Another player has tackled Kwimu. It's his young uncle, Kiunik, who jerks him off balance by a handful of his glossy black hair. 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, panting, to collect their things.

“Very rough fun,” Kwimu complains, laughing, slinging his soft deerskin jacket over his shoulder, and retying his belt. “Kiunik 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 both sides, with a stiff black crest running down the middle.

“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,” Kwimu 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 pine gum to chew. Fox settles down between them, tail outspread, nose between his paws.

Spring is here. 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, squeaky 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 each other'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-oo 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. The line breaks up as Jipjawej grabs one of them, and the children tumble 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. At evening she wanders around the edges of villages, singing, trying to lure people away, because she's lonely. She doesn't mean harm, but she comes from the Ghost World, where the dead people go.”

“I know a game like that,” says Skusji'j. “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. Perhaps to the lake.”

Skusji'j spits the gum into his palm. “I'm not a baby, Kwimu. You don't have to protect 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 axe. 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. Speaking of such things may give them power.

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

Kwimu shifts uneasily. Perhaps Skusji'j needs to know. He scoops up Fox and strokes his head. 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 pride at being called Kwimu's younger brother, and go in. It's warm, 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
waltes
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 begins, “Skusji'j has a question.”

Grandmother looks at the Little Weasel. Her eyes are shrewd, and her hair, bound back with strings of painted eelskin sewn with shells, is almost as thick and black and strong as a girl's. “What is this question,
nuji'j?
”

Kwimu's little brother screws up his face. He says in a rush, “
Nukumij
– Grandmother – did the
jenu
come because of what happened down at the bay?”

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

“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:

“Let's go up on to the beautiful mountain

and watch the little stars playing follow-my-leader,

while Grandmother Lightning lights her pipe,

and Grandfather Thunder beats his drum.”

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

Grandmother shakes her head at him. “Those ghosts are not angry with us, Kiunik. The Other Persons are not angry. 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.”

But her face is troubled. Instead of beginning, 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. 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. 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 see a terrible change creeping over one of our neighbours. He will not 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, 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 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 barefoot tracks are changing. Growing longer, larger, like a bear's, with great gouging marks at the toes.

“Deep in the woods, the brothers stop. Around them the branches rub and squeak in the cold wind. They stare at these 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 are 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 one of the Old Ones or the Others, but a man who has lost his humanity. Inside every
jenu
, they say, is a frozen core, a little man-shaped lump 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. When my father was a boy, he heard two
jenu
calling to each other from two blue mountain tops.
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
met, they will fight till one eats the other up.”

“They eat each other?” asks the Little Weasel.

“A
jenu
eats anything,” Kiunik sits up, frowning. “See what you've brought on us – you and your people.”

“That's not fair,” says Kwimu hotly. “It wasn't his fault that the
jenu
came. It was bad luck. And good luck that Grandmother knew what to do.”

“Did I say it was the Little Weasel's fault?” Kiunik's dark eyes flash. “I only say that the Jipijka'm People came, and the
jenu
followed. Yes: it was bad luck. Bad that his people came to the bay. Bad that they killed each other there. I think bad luck breeds bad luck. And things like the
jenu
are drawn to it – like moths to a flame.”

“You are right,” Sinumkw agrees. “That's why I don't want to stay there this year. We'll go to the lake instead.”

“The lake's a good place, but so is the bay. We shouldn't abandon it,” Kiunik argues.

“Kiunik,” Plawej pleads softly. “Remember, it's the Place of Ghosts now.”

“I'm not afraid!” Kiunik hands the baby back to his wife and swings to his feet. “And I'll not be driven out. Those are our hunting grounds, our traplines. I'll go there whenever I like.”

He pushes out of the wigwam into the twilight.

“What a hot-head,” Sinumkw complains, pretending to be annoyed. But he looks after the tall young man with affectionate approval.

Grandmother lays her pipe aside and looks at the Little Weasel's worried face.

“The
jenu
has gone now,” she says soothingly. Her eyes are very kind and bright. “Gone far away into the north, to live upon mosses and grass. Now is the hungry time for the
jenu
, while we grow fat. It can't endure summer. In the summer we are safe.”