فصل 04 - بخش 01

FOUR

I woke just after dawn, out of a dream about my grandmother Suncatcher. In the dream I must have been very small, because she was singing to me, though the song drifted away before I could trap it. Lying there half awake, I tried to send my thoughts to her. My grandmother is a strong, special person, a member of the tribal council and the center of our family. I wished she had been there on my last day, but she had gone to the women’s house with my sister Southern. Before she left, she gave me her blessing and she kissed me on the forehead, and she said, “You will see me first when you return, Little Hawk.”

Though it had seemed an odd thing to say, since she knew how much I would be longing to see my parents and my sisters, I had said yes, of course I would do that.

But return was a long way off: three moons from now. I stretched, on my bumpy pine-bough bed. I was cold and very stiff, and my fire was dead, but I beat myself with my arms for warmth. The strands of pine root fell out of my tunic, so I braided them into a long string and tied it round my waist, to keep it safe.

It was a grey day again; the sky above the treetops was full of cloud. I kicked away the ashes of my fire and strapped on my snowshoes. My ankle ached, but it was much less painful than the night before.

Blindly I set off through the trees and snow, with nothing to tell me which direction to take. All the world around me was cold and silent and empty, as if it would never change. A few flakes of snow began to drift down through the branches. I found myself longing suddenly for the warmth of our firelit house, with my mother grinding corn, singing a soft rhythmic song to match each thump as the pestle came down on the mortar. I made pictures in my head of my sisters separating deer sinew into threads, my father carving a burl from an oak tree into a bowl. I could smell a stew simmering in a pot on the rocks beside the fire, with deer meat in it and groundnuts and corn and beans. . . .

I tripped over a tree root and fell headfirst into the snow. When I got up, brushing off snow and leaves, my eye caught a movement somewhere ahead through the trees, and I froze. Was it a deer? As my hand tensed to reach for my bow, I remembered regretfully that I couldn’t yet hunt.

But it wasn’t a deer—it was my friend Leaping Turtle, walking purposefully, carrying a large branch. My heart leapt at the sight of him, and I shouted in delight. Happiness washed over me in a great wave—and then in the same moment vanished.

The rules said that we were not allowed to speak.

Leaping Turtle stopped as he saw me. Our eyes met, and on his face I could see the same quick anguished mix of feelings. We could not greet each other or even make any sign, let alone share our ordeal. The road to manhood had to be taken alone. We had to live as our fathers and our ancestors lived; we had to obey the law.

So each of us went past the other, on through the trees, alone, away. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. The drifting snowflakes were cold on my face. I could hear the soft sound of my snowshoes moving through the snow. I stopped for a moment and strained for the sound of Leaping Turtle’s feet moving away too, but I could hear nothing.

Sorrow made a great lump in my throat, but I walked on. On and on, up slopes and down slippery rocks. All that day I walked, until the light began to die. No birds sang. The snow had stopped falling; the air was colder than before. Before night fell, I found a low-hanging tree and made a nest for myself as I had done before.

Day after day I walked on through the trees in the grey light, with no idea where I was going. I was cold all the time. It was so long since I had eaten that I was hardly aware of hunger, but I could feel myself growing weaker. I sucked handfuls of snow often, because water was allowed. Over and over again I thought about Leaping Turtle and wondered what he was doing, and whether we should ever see each other again.

Each night I found myself a place to sleep and made a fire to keep myself from freezing. And I would sit by the fire for a long time, staring at the small flames, trying to empty my mind so that the Great Spirit could send me my Manitou. But nothing came.

Then there was a day when snow began to fall again, slow but persistent. My heart sank. I had hoped to reach a place where I could build myself some kind of real shelter before the big snows came, but I had found nowhere yet. The day was perhaps half done.

The snow kept falling. I reached a place where two big trees leaned together, and began yet again the long process of collecting firewood and green cedar branches. I cut bigger branches as well this time, to fit between the tree trunks like a kind of roof. Far away, very faint, I could hear wolves howling; it was like a warning. By the time I had a fire, darkness was all around my little flame-lit space.

By now the snowflakes were coming very thick and very fast. They hissed as they fell on the flames. Reluctantly I pushed dirt over the fire and pulled more branches around my little space. The air was so still that they stayed where they were, and in no time at all the snow had covered them, fat white flakes falling silently, softly, relentlessly, on and on. There was no sound anywhere.

This would be a big snow, and it would take a long time. I curled up beside my bow and my quiver of arrows, and because I was dog tired, I fell asleep.

When I woke, after what must have been a long time, there was a faint whiteness outside the branches covering me, and they were closer to my face than they had been before. Something told me not to move. Nothing was wrong with my curled-up body, warm with its own heat, and for once the air was not icy as I breathed it into my chest. But fear crept through me. What had happened outside?

Moving just one arm as I lay there, I pulled an arrow from my quiver and pushed it out in front of me. It disappeared into thick, thick snow. I churned it round a little, to make a small hole so that I could see out. I was inside a snowbank, and the snow was still falling out there, in big silent flakes. If I were to break out of this tiny oppressive space, new snow would cover me before I walked even a few steps.

I fought with myself to lie still. I tried to guess what my father or my grandmother Suncatcher would say to me, but thinking of them only made me lonelier. I was afraid.

The thoughts ran around my mind like ants. I was totally alone, trapped in this cold snow-buried winter. I had failed to find my Manitou. Perhaps I was not worthy even to have a Manitou. I couldn’t go home. I should die like Southern’s friend who never came back from the woods, whose body was found many moons later half-eaten by animals. I should never see my family again.

A great snorting sob came out of me, though a man does not cry and a man does not show weakness, ever. For a few moments I pressed my face into the cedar branches and I howled like a coyote. Outside, the snow came silently down and down, burying me deeper, and I drove myself into a kind of trance of despair.

I had never known how my Manitou would come to me, but I never expected it to come as a comfort for shame. They had taught me that you can earn your revelation only by fasting or by bravery, by heroism. They were wrong.

He came as a great osprey—a fish hawk, the bird we see only in summer—and he swooped over me with the spread feathers of his broad wing brushing my face, in my mind. He called to me, and his voice sang like the throb of a drum.

“Stop this,” he said. “Stop this at once. You are Little Hawk, given life on this earth. You will keep yourself alive.”

“I can’t,” I said wretchedly. “I can’t. I’ve failed.”

“I will show you your strength,” said my Manitou. “Come. Come.”

And I was flying with him, up into the grey-white sky, swooping down over the snow-mounded treetops. The snow was no longer falling, the clouds had taken shape—towering, churning clouds full of winter, with a break in the eastern sky where the sun was beginning to glimmer through.

My arms were wings; I lay on the wind. I followed my Manitou as he banked and turned. Far below us I could see the sea.

He said many things to me, that I may not tell to you. Nobody may share the heart of a man’s vision of his Manitou. He spoke to me for a long time, high up over the winter world, and then he showed me that my vision was, for now, at an end.

“Remember,” he said. “You are Little Hawk, and with my help there is nothing you cannot do. Say it.”

“There is nothing I cannot do,” I said. “With your help.”

I knew it was true. I was smiling. I could feel the air all around me as if I were swimming in the sea, held up by the water and the waves.

“Go now,” said my Manitou. “Go as one with earth and water and air. Find your way.”

His broad wings swept by me, with a noise like the wind in the trees.

Then I was wide awake in my hole in the snowbank, in the cold air, and I was no longer the same person that I had been before.

This was how my Manitou the great fish hawk came, and is still coming. Now and forever, I believe.

The white glow inside my burrow was brighter than before. My arrow was still there, just visible in the wall of snow that had closed over it. I grabbed it, pushing up with my other hand at the pine branch above my head; snow came cascading down, and all at once I was blinking in a white blaze of sunlight. Through the gap, I saw that the wall of snow enclosing me was as wide as my forearm was long.

I shook the snow off my face and hair. Above my head I heard a short harsh cry, and as I looked up, a red-tailed hawk flew up from a pine tree branch into the blue sky, crying out twice more as he went. I knew at once that my Manitou had sent him, and that I should follow.

He was wheeling slowly overhead, in the way of hawks. I scrambled up, strapped on my snowshoes, and took my knife and my tomahawk, my bow and my quiver. When I stepped out into the feathery snow I sank into it, in spite of the snowshoes.

The hawk flapped away to the west, and was lost behind the tall pine trees. I flurried after him through the deep snow; it was very slow going, and I stumbled and fell often and was soon very wet. Nothing mattered, though, except that I should follow the hawk. I caught another glimpse of him high in the blue sky and I heard the brief faint call.

Then all at once there was more light and sky ahead, and I was out in the sunshine at the edge of a large pond, its frozen surface glaring white with unmarked snow.

Then I saw one mark on the snow. At the far edge of the pond there was a long gash that could only be the new trail of a deer.