فصل 03 - بخش 01

THREE

When my proving time came, snow lay on the round roofs of all the homes in our village, and the ground and all the forest trees were white. You were truly a man if you could manage to survive alone, out in the forest, in the darkest part of the year, when most living things on the earth die or sleep, and the cold rules all.

This was also the sacred time when you would be given a vision of the spirit who would guide your life: your Manitou.

All through the summer and fall my father had been rehearsing me in the ways of trapping and hunting that I had watched since I was a very small boy. My mother had been teaching me to cook and to sew, skills that my sisters seemed to have by nature, and my grandmother had methodically made me show her all the plants, seeds, and roots in the woods that could be used or eaten. All our lives we had been learning these things from her, but this time one of them could decide whether I lived or died.

Four boys from our village would be taken out, this winter: Leaping Turtle, White Oak, Spring Frog, and me. We had been talking about it, planning for it, as far back as we could remember. Now that it was really going to happen, there was much less talk. I knew that although nobody would admit it, each of the others was feeling, like me, a coldness at the pit of his stomach when he thought about the moment of being left alone.

The sun went into the trees early, this short winter day. Inside our house in the warmth from the fire pit, I looked down at my sleeping mat, where my mother had set out a little row of things to go with me. There was a skein of sinew thread, and a special stone for making fire; a small skin pot for cooking; the bone awl that my grandfather had made, in its little case of bone. My bow, and the quiver with twelve arrows. And my tomahawk. Privately I thought that these last three were the only things I should be allowed to take, but I didn’t argue.

My sister Quickbird came in from outside, carrying a pot packed full of ice and snow. She pulled off the skin draped over her head, and shook it near the entrance. Then she peered at my collection.

“Needles,” she said. “For goodness’ sake—you have thread and no needles. Boys have no sense.”

My mother clicked her tongue reprovingly, bending to put the pot beside the fire. The baby was bound to her chest, fast asleep.

“Hah,” said Quickbird.

“I have three needles for him,” my mother said. “Show respect.”

Quickbird had the sense to hold her tongue, but I heard the very small snorting sound she made. She was my younger sister, only a winter younger than me; we grew up together, and the older we grew, the more she wished to be a boy. Whenever she bragged about her skill at girl things—sewing, planting, cooking—I knew it was to hide her longing to learn instead to hunt and fish and track with our father, like me. She was totally unlike our older sister, Southern, who was as peaceful and gentle as our mother.

Southern wasn’t there; she had gone to the women’s house, because she had her moontime bleeding and that was when women stay separate. She had managed to give me a hug before she went.

“Come back safe,” she said.

I knew she was remembering the time four winters ago, when the boys who had been her playmates had been sent out one by one for their lonely testing time. The boy who was her favorite never came back, and it was a long time before they found what was left of his body.

My mother reached into a bag hanging from the wall and put a small fold of doeskin on my mat. “There,” she said.

Inside the fold, stuck into the skin, were three tiny strong bones from a bird or an animal, each with a hole bored in the blunter end.

“Beautiful,” I said. “Thank you, Mother. But are you sure—”

“Don’t lose them,” Quickbird said. “Keep them all together. Like this.” She picked up the doeskin fold and the loop of sinew thread, wound the thread round the doeskin, and tucked the tiny package into the top of my belt. She gave me her quick brilliant smile. Then it vanished.

“Moccasins!” she said. “You forgot the most important thing: spare moccasins! I know where they are.”

She dived into the shadows behind her sleeping platform at the back of the house. I wondered if she was right. On hunting trips in winter, my father did indeed make sure always that we had extra foot coverings with us. Walking in snow without moccasins, your feet will freeze, and you will die.

A wave of cold air washed over us and my father came in, turning to make sure the entry mat was closed behind him. He straightened up, and shook snow from his head. The tiny flakes dropped in a shower, melting as they fell.

He looked down at the things set out on my sleeping mat, which was right in front of him, and he frowned. He was a tall, fine man, my father, with a brow and nose as strong as a cliff, and a frown on his face was an alarming thing to see.

“What is this?” he said.

Quickbird was back with the extra moccasins; she put them down beside the rest and smiled up at him. I sometimes felt she was the only person in the world who was never afraid of my father.

“For Little Hawk when he goes,” she said.

My father ignored her; he was looking directly at our mother. It was a terrible look, and I felt suddenly cold.

“What can you be thinking?” he said. “Have you lost your senses? You know how it must be.”

My mother was as strong as him, in her way, and she looked right back at him, chin up. Wrapped against her chest, our baby brother gave a little sleepy sigh.

“I have one grown son,” my mother said.

“I too,” said my father. “And he will go out into the winter as all sons do, with a bow, an axe, and a knife. Those things only. And he will come back a man.”

They were staring at each other as if they were enemies. Quickbird had been standing still as a rock beside me, holding the forbidden moccasins, but I felt her shift very gently until her shoulder was touching my arm. I lifted my hand just enough to rest my palm briefly against her back, for comfort—and with the other hand I took out the little pack of needles and thread that she had tucked into my belt, and quietly gave it back to her.

My mother said nothing.

“Come, Little Hawk,” my father said. “It is time to go to the sweat lodge.”

He turned back to the entrance, and after a quick glance at my mother’s rigid face, I followed him. There was nothing else I could do.

Outside, the houses were glimmering white shapes in the winter twilight; snow was drifting slowly down, and there was no moon. The snow had come early that year; our elders said it would be a hard winter. Two dogs lying huddled against the wall of a longhouse stirred hopefully as we passed, but my father hissed at them and they lay still.

Smoke was billowing from the hole in the roof of the sweat lodge. The land sloped upward here, and the lodge had been built into the slope so that half of it was under the earth. Like our house, it was made of heavy bark shingles and reed mats on a sapling frame, but it was much bigger. The lodge was not a house but a center for cleansing and special rituals—like this one, the final sweat for the boys who would go out the next morning on their quest for manhood. We would sit naked in the hot steam. We often did this, whole families together, but this time we would sweat out not only the dirt on our bodies but also the fears in our minds.

And tonight the sweat lodge was only for the men. The women had special places of their own too, like the house where my sister would stay until she stopped menstruating that moon, and where she would be if she were having a baby. It is the way things are.

At the entry to the sweat lodge my father and I dropped our clothes, then we went in. The air was thick with heat and steam and smoke, from the fire pit where water had been poured onto heated rocks; it was like walking into a barrier, except that the barrier was the air you breathed. Through the steam I saw a blur of naked bodies shining with sweat, and I heard deep voices greet my father. Then a damp hand grabbed my arm.

“Hawk—here.”

It was my friend Leaping Turtle; he pulled me down to sit beside him on the wooden bench with the other boys, White Oak and Spring Frog. We had grown up together, he and I—done all our learning together, from the day we strung our first small bows to the stretch of nine moons in which patient, wise old Running Deer led us through the transformation of a live growing birch tree into a small, light birch-bark canoe. That was a magical time, perhaps the best of my life. But neither of us would take our canoe on the solitary journey that waited for us the next day.

“Can’t breathe!” I whispered to Leaping Turtle.

Complaints were strictly forbidden; our fathers would never say such a thing.

He hissed back, “You’ll die out there anyway!”

Jokes about serious things were even more unthinkable; if anybody had heard that, we’d both have been banished from the sweat lodge and maybe the whole solemn ritual.

We grinned nervously at each other for a private moment—and then we heard a great hissing and we were choking in new clouds of steam, as an elder poured more water on the hot stones. Sweat was running down my forehead and dripping off my eyebrows; it stung my eyes; it made little rivers down my back and chest.

One of the deep voices rose, booming through the steam-filled room, and the ritual of chant and prayers for the departing boys began.

By the time it was all done, my brain was spinning from the noise and the heat and the sense of mystery. They sent us out through the entryway, the four of us boys who in a few hours would be gone from the village, and we dived into the thin layer of snow on the ground and rolled our sweaty bodies in its wonderful crunching cold.

Above us the sky was clear of cloud now, and the stars blazed down, countless chips of Manitou fire in the darkness, each star with a human being somewhere in his care. I wondered which one was looking out for me, and hoped he would be paying attention in the morning.

By dawn I was up from my sleeping mat, dressing in my belt and breechclout, tunic and leggings, with my body underneath them already covered in grease like an extra skin, to keep out the winter cold. When I put my moccasins on my feet I could tell that my mother had fitted an extra layer of rabbit fur inside—something she must have done the night before, a secret, defiant gesture, when only Quickbird was there to see.

I took no food or drink that morning, nor would I have any until I could find it for myself. Out there, alone.

This was what we had been taught: that you must go out fasting, and that this first fast couldn’t be broken until you were given the vision of your Manitou, the spirit who would go with you all your life. Only then might you hunt for food, to start the long lone survival ordeal. My father said that too long a fast would bring not just a vision but weakness and death, so my Manitou would wisely decide the time when he revealed himself. So did my grandmother, who was the wisest person I knew. I hoped they were right.

Everyone was awake—except my baby brother, tucked into his cradleboard, fast asleep. My mother set a log on what was left of the fire. Her face was stern and unhappy, as it had been the day before. Quickbird came and gave me a silent hug, and I could feel that her cheek was wet.

My father was dressed for our journey. He set my bow beside the door, and put my quiver of arrows across my shoulder and my tomahawk in my belt. I reached for my sharp stone knife in its deerskin casing, but he gripped my wrist to stop me.

He said, “I have a better knife for you to take. It cost me many skins, so you must take care of it. And take care of your fingers, too. It is very sharp.”

And he gave me something I’d seen only twice before in my life, in the hands of those who had traveled north to trade with the white men from across the sea. It was a knife made of metal, in a holder of thick hide, moose skin perhaps. The handle was covered in skin too, and the blade was shiny, flat, thin: like the leaf of a bulrush but a thousand times more strong. It was a treasure. I couldn’t imagine where he got it.

I was amazed and delighted. And from the look on my mother’s face, I could tell not just that she too had never seen this knife before, but that she felt sure it would help me survive.

I said, “Thank you, Flying Hawk. I will keep it as safe as my tomahawk. And I will bring it back to you.”

I put the knife in my belt. I was ready. I went to the baby’s cradle and touched his smooth round cheek in farewell. He gave a small sigh but he did not wake. Someday, I thought, all this would be happening to him, too.

We went out into the cold grey morning. My father and I strapped on our snowshoes and put our long bows over our shoulders. My mother kissed me on the forehead and handed my father a scarf of soft doeskin and a long deerskin strap. I smiled at her, and at Quickbird’s anxious face, and they were the last things I saw before my father bound the scarf across my eyes, tying it securely behind my head. Then he put one end of the strap into my hand; this was how he would lead me into the forest.

“You will come back a man,” he said.

My mother and Quickbird said together, one voice strong and one small and sad, “You will come back a man.”

The strap tightened round my hand, and in my new darkness I followed my father away from home.

We walked, I suppose, for half the short winter day. It was fairly easy at first, once I made myself stride out in confidence that my father wouldn’t let me run into anything. Because our people had been burning and clearing and farming this land for ten years, there was good space between the trees, free of vines and scrub. Though I was walking in darkness, I could feel the breeze on my face, and hear the chickadees calling and the soft crunch of our feet through the snow.

After a long time branches began to catch in the crisscross sinews of my snowshoes and in the top of my bow, and gradually my father slowed our pace. We must have reached the wild woods, where men had never yet cleared the land and the new trees grew up through a tangle of old ones that had died and fallen down. The only paths here were those of the deer and the raccoon, the possum and the fox—though even here, now and then, you would find one of the long-distance trails made by the feet of runners taking news of our people from one village to the next.

I could see nothing at all, of course. Splatters of snow fell cold on my face sometimes, from the unseen trees above. My father was holding my arm now, no longer using the strap as a leash. We walked more and more slowly, until finally he stopped. I felt his fingers at the back of my head, and he untied the doeskin scarf covering my eyes.

I blinked in the sudden daylight. There was no sunshine; the woodland was grey and white under the snow.

My father grasped my shoulders with his two hands and looked me in the eyes, his face grave and strong. He said formally, once more, “Come back a man, Little Hawk.”

Then he gave me a quick fierce hug and he turned and went away, disappearing into the trees and scrub. I could hear the sound of his snowshoes only for a very short time. Then there was silence, and I was alone.

When I was a little boy, I had always liked being alone in the woods. My father enjoyed telling a story about a spring morning when I was about two winters old; he said I had slipped away from my mother and was not found for the whole of that day. Just before nightfall a search party found me sitting peacefully under a tapped maple tree, with my mouth open to catch the sweet sap dripping from the little hollow sumac stem fitted into a slash in the bark. The birch-bark bucket that had hung under the stem to collect the sap was empty at my side. For some time after that I was called Little Maple, because—they said, making my poor mother cross—I had chosen to be suckled by a tree instead of a woman.

But this time I would be alone for a quarter of the year, and nobody would come looking for me.

Leaping Turtle and I had often discussed the best plan for our first solitary days. We would recite our list to each other. Before dark comes, find a safe place for the first night. Make fire. Travel. Be ready for your Manitou to find you. Then you must eat, and hunt. Make sure you have made yourself a real camp before the hard snow comes. And look for the sun and the stars when you can, so that you can find your way back home at the end.

There was no sun in this grey, cold day. I thought about what I would need soon for making fire, and looked round at the bare trees for a slim, straight branch the thickness of my thumb. That was easy; there was a thicket of small maples right next to me.

I chose a tree, asked its pardon for cutting its lowest branch, and for the first time I took out my father’s knife. The thin metal blade went through the wood so fast that it flicked out at my wrist as well, and the blood welled up in a neat line on my skin. I sucked at my wrist, amazed. A knife so sharp was going to have to be treated with very great respect.

I trimmed the branch into a stick, dropped it into my quiver to join the arrows, and began picking my way slowly through the trees. All our lives we had been taught to run races with each other, to run fast, fast—but to move always in the woodland as quietly as fox or deer. There were no sounds of life anywhere, and no animal tracks on the snow.

After a while the land rose and became rocky, and it was harder to find spaces for my snowshoes. I took a long, awkward step forward—and fell headlong over a steep ledge, down through a mass of vines masked by snow.

For a moment I lay there, dazed. This was the worst thing that could happen—an accident at the very start. There was pain in my leg, bent by a trapped snowshoe. Was it broken? The other snowshoe was gone. Something hard was digging into my ribs. When I moved my head, long vicious spines dug into my cheek, and I could feel the blood trickling down.

So I knew I must have fallen into a great tangle of greenbrier, the toughest, prickliest vine in the woods. Nothing can kill greenbrier; it will climb a tall tree in a single season, and a small animal that runs into a really thick tangle can find itself held so fast by the spines that it never gets out. My sister Quickbird had found a little skeleton once, caught in a greenbrier patch near the village, with shreds of grey fur still attached; it might have been a baby rabbit. Even though Quickbird, like all of us, set traps for the rabbits that came after our crops, she had touched the little bones with one finger, and cried.

But I was not a rabbit, and I made myself roll over out of the briers in spite of the sharp spines and the screaming pain in my leg. I took off the snowshoe. Its ash-wood edge was crushed at one side but not broken. Nor was my ankle, I decided when I felt it up and down. I held a handful of snow against it for the pain, and tried not to think about how I might have banged my head against a rock, or caught a greenbrier spine in my eye. My knife had flown out of my belt but was caught in the vines, still in its leather case, and out on the snow I could see my bow and its quiver, the arrows spilling out of it from the force of the fall. My other snowshoe lay there too, its binding still attached.

The hard thing that had been digging into my ribs was my tomahawk. It lay there as if it were waiting for me, and it felt like an old friend in my hand.

I hacked at the greenbrier stems to rescue my knife. Looking up now at the rocky ledge over which I’d fallen, I could see that the vine grew over it like a great snowy curtain—and that against the rock, behind the cascading vine, there seemed to be a dry space. If it was deep enough, perhaps I could shelter there for the night and rest my hurt leg.

Moving faster, I cut away enough of the vines to make myself a space free of their grabbing prickles, under the overhanging rock. The ground there was soft with dead pine needles, and I could see bits of scat from some small animal—but the scat was old, and there was no sign of a nest. This really could be my first night’s shelter, in spite of the greenbrier.

I strapped a snowshoe on my good leg, and tried to keep my weight off my bruised ankle by clutching at trees. Hobbling, I rescued my bow and arrows and set them under the overhang. Then I went scouting round the cluster of pine trees growing on this slope, until I found a big fallen branch that had clearly been there for a long time. I chopped out a piece of it and brought it back, with an armful of dry twigs. Twice more I hobbled out to collect bigger pieces of dry wood, and after that I cut two live branches from the nearest pine tree, shaking the snow from the needles, thanking the tree.

My ankle was hurting so much after all this that I had to drop the branches and sit on a rock, bent over like an old man. But only for a moment. The air was very cold; the grey light was beginning to fade. It was time to make fire.

For now, there was only one way I could do that. I took out the stick I cut from the maple tree, and with the tip of my knife I cut a shallow hole in the piece of old pine wood and set the stick upright in it. Then I crushed some dry pine needles round the stick, held it between the palms of my hands and began rubbing my palms together, to and fro. They had grown very sore before I saw the first curl of smoke, but a flame jumped in the pine dust when I blew on it, and I fed my crackling little fire with small branches, and started to feel warm for the first time since I came out of our house. I also felt very hungry, but I knew there was no chance of finding food here.

Then I remembered the greenbrier that had half-killed me.

In my mind I was a small boy again, back in the spring fields, perched with Leaping Turtle on the rickety wooden platform where we were posted to scare the birds away from the new-planted seeds. And my grandmother Suncatcher came out into the field with a basket and her digging stick, and called to us.

“Come down, little ones! Time for learning!”

Having been trusted with work by our fathers, we didn’t take kindly to being called little.

“We have duties, Grandmother!” we shouted importantly. “We have to keep the birds off!”

Suncatcher snorted. “And do you see a single bird in this field while I am here? Come down!”

And she led us to the enormous stand of spiny greenbrier that was kept at bay around a big dead elm tree near our planting, and showed us two things: how to pick its new shoots as a sweet green vegetable, and how to dig its roots.

But now, just as the water came into my mouth from thinking about roasting greenbrier roots in my fire, I remembered the rules. I was fasting. I couldn’t eat, not until my Manitou showed himself to me. It was almost as hard a disappointment as falling off the ledge.

All the same, in winter food must be taken when you see it, even if it is kept for later days. The ground was not quite frozen yet here under the trees, so with my tomahawk I dug up some small greenbrier roots, the size of my finger, and dropped them into my quiver with the arrows. There were a lot of pine tree roots too; they were very thin but tough, and I should need them to make snares. I teased them carefully out with the axe head and tucked them inside my tunic in a long bunch, to keep them from drying out.

My fire was a dwindling glimmer in the black night. High up, through a narrow gap in the trees, I could see one bright star. There was no breeze, and the thin line of smoke from my fire rose straight up toward the star. Since I had no water to drink, I sucked some snow. I went a little way off to relieve myself; I came back and banked up my fire with wood and dirt. Then I curled up on my pine branches under the rock overhang and I went to sleep.

I had been so busy thinking about how to stay alive that it hadn’t yet occurred to me to feel lonely, or afraid.