فصل 02 - بخش 01

TWO

Eleven winters later, my father Flying Hawk took me to the bitternut hickory tree on the marshland. It was a longer journey than it had been for him before, because a year later our village had moved on. All the goodness of the land where it stood had been used up, by our years of growing crops on the fields, and the time had come to give the land back to the trees who would replenish it. This is the way of things.

So the crops had been harvested and packed into baskets, corn and squash and beans, and one by one the houses of elm-bark shingles and woven birch-bark matting had been taken apart. Everyone had carried the shingles and mats a long way through the forest to the new land that the men had been burning and clearing since spring, and poles had been set in the ground to make new frames for the houses.

This was home—the only one I could remember. Though hunting or fishing would take us away in their seasons, this was now the place to which we always returned—until, once more, the time would come for us all to move on.

From here the marsh had to be reached on foot, and that took my father and me three days. But when after all our walking we came out of the woods to the open marshland, I could hear the distant breathing of the sea. And across the waving grass—fading now from green to gold—I could see the three islands my father had described to me. They were three dark hummocks of woodland, in this flat bird-haunted elbow of almost-land that the river made on its winding way to the sea.

My father headed for the smallest island, zigzagging on clumps of grass so that our moccasins would stay dry.

“We were out here on a hunt, before you were born,” he said. “I saw the small bitternut then. It was already a tomahawk tree.”

A tomahawk tree is a sapling with that double shoot, the two leading branches that can—with help—become one.

“If I wasn’t born yet,” I said, daring, “you didn’t know I would be a boy. I might have been a girl.”

He said quietly, “I knew.”

And I saw the bitternut hickory, beside its two rocks. It was a tall tree now, twice the height of a man. The stone blade stuck out on both sides of the slender trunk, a little way below the branches; it was as deep in the wood as if it were a natural part of the tree. It had been there as long as I had been alive.

There was an odd feeling in my throat as I looked at it, like pain and happiness mixed together, and I did what my father had instructed me to do. I said to the tree, “Thank you, my brother.”

My father’s hand rested on my shoulder for a moment, and then he took some tobacco from the pouch at his belt and put it on the ground as a gift to the spirit of the tree. And he too thanked the hickory, and gave apologies for what we had to do.

Then he took out his own axe and cut down the tree. Because it was green wood, the trunk was tough, but before long he had trimmed it down to the first unfinished shape of the tomahawk that he and the tree had begun for me the day I was born. At home, by the time it was finished and perfect, winter would be here.

That was when I would be taken deep into the woods, blindfolded, for the three-month test of solitude that would turn me into a man. This tomahawk would be one of the very few things I could take with me, to help me stay alive.