فصل 06 - بخش 01

SIX

The most frightening thing of all was the noise. It grew and grew, as if the Great Spirit were angry with his people, shouting in a rising fury. Overhead, the big trees began to creak and groan. The wind howled into my fire, bringing icy snow with it. Hastily I put the fire out, and I clutched my deerskin round my body and pressed myself into a corner of the cave. Everything I owned in the world was there with me, like a tiny family: axe, knife, bow and arrows, the strips of dried deer meat tied in bundles, the squirrel-skin bag. I could hear thunder rumbling as the wind rose.

The storm raged on. For hours and days I lay there, curled up under the deerskin, sometimes sleeping, sometimes half-dreaming. If I was hungry, I nibbled deer meat. If I was thirsty, I sucked on snow. There was so little light that it was hard to tell night from day. I had become an animal like a winter squirrel: sleeping away the bad weather in its nest, emerging again when the sun shone.

And in the end, on the fourth day, the storm blew itself out. The constant high howl of the wind dropped to muttering gusts. I stretched out my cramped arms and legs and pushed aside the icy branches that had been protecting me, and suddenly I saw sunlight.

I stood up, with the deerskin round me like a cape, and stared out at the snow. The storm had left such beauty behind it; the trees glittered in the sunlight and above their white branches the sky was blue as a robin’s egg. Nothing moved but occasional hunks of snow falling to the ground here and there, as the sun warmed the branches where they lay.

I could hear in the distance a long low rumble, going on and on without a pause. It took me a moment to realize that this was no longer the wind, but the roar of the waves breaking on the shore, way out beyond the pond and the marshland. It was the voice of the sea, whose anger would last much longer than the storm that had stirred it into life.

I spent the rest of my day clearing the snow away from the cave and digging out my fire pit. When night came, the star-scattered sky was clear of cloud, and through the trees I saw a full white moon rise, banishing the stars and casting black shadows over the gleaming snow. So I knew I had been away from my home and my village for a whole month. It was a long time, and in it I had become a different person.

Every day I went scouting through the snow, and I saw no other living thing except the small birds who hopped and foraged through the branches above me. Once, in a rotting hollow tree near the pond, I came across a pile of lily roots, a wonderful discovery; it was probably the winter hoard of a muskrat. I took away only half of it and left the rest for him and his family, and I set no trap to catch him.

I was setting traps in other places, though, and one lucky day I caught a turkey.

Perhaps it was the smell of the roasting bird that brought back the wolf next day. He came close enough to snatch up the turkey’s entrails, which I had buried in the snow among the trees. He was clearly very hungry indeed, to go after such worthless stuff, and he didn’t behave as most wolves do. When I shouted at him, he crouched down and snarled, baring his teeth as if in challenge.

I threw a rock at him, and he moved to one side but still stood there, poised, belligerent. For a long moment he stared at me, and then he turned and loped away, still with a slight limp in his foreleg. I climbed on the rock and watched until he was out of sight.

I was uneasy that night, knowing that he was close again. Though the wolves are our brothers, he was a strange lone wolf, surviving on his own, and I didn’t trust him. I took care that my food was always at the back of the cave, hidden behind a rock, and at night I banked up my fire so that it would burn for a long time. The moon was growing thin again, and a wolf’s eyes could see better in the dark than the eyes of a boy. Fear made me sleep lightly, and whenever the fire died, I brought it back to life, to burn till the dawn came.

The turkey was small, and lasted only for two days. Nothing came to my traps, and there was no sign anywhere of the tracks of deer. I was staying alive now only on a few lily roots and the brittle strips of deer meat that I had dried, and I ate very little at a time so that they would last. And perhaps they would have lasted, if it hadn’t been for the wolf.

It took a lot of wood to keep the fire burning all night, and much of my day now was spent hunting and cutting dry branches and trees. The forest floor was full of dead wood, but I had to go further and further away to find more, digging for it in the snow. One day before the light began to die, I came back out of the trees dragging a big oak branch, and I saw something that made my heart stop for an instant.

The wolf was in my cave, crouching, eating.

I shouted at him angrily, and grabbed up the branch as a weapon. For that moment I was an animal just as he was, defending the food that would keep only one of us alive. But this time, I had no arrow to shoot at him.

He crouched in the cave, facing me, snarling. He looked huge, all gleaming teeth and yellow eyes, and in the same moment that I swung the big branch at him, he leapt at me.

The branch knocked him off balance, so that he missed me, but I lost my own balance too, rolling over, banging against rocks. I scrambled up, pulling my knife out of my belt, still yelling, half out of my mind with rage and fear. With both hands I held out the knife in front of me, wheeling, facing him.

The air was full of flying snow and splintered branches, and the noise of our voices, screaming boy and snarling wolf. And the wolf spun round and leapt at me again.

I don’t know why I didn’t die then. For that one moment, I knew my life was over. The wolf was leaping at my throat, mouth open, teeth bared, because that is the way wolves kill their prey always, aiming to rip out the throat and bleed the animal to death. But in the flurry as he crashed into me, instead his claws carved a gash down the side of my face, and he ran his own throat onto the knife held out at arm’s length in both my hands.

As I fell sideways the sharp knife ripped across his neck and blood came spurting everywhere. We were rolling in a whirl of bodies and blood, dirt and snow, terrible noises coming from both of us. I found myself stumbling backward into the cave, blinking through the blood that coursed down my face, still holding out my knife in front of me with two rigid arms.

But even though he was so big, and far stronger than me, the wolf was no longer attacking. He rolled to and fro, as if he were trying to stop the bleeding. He got to his feet and began to lope away, but he was staggering, and when he was almost hidden by the trees I saw him fall down.

My heart was still beating so fast it was like a drum in my ears. I stood there gasping, and the side of my face was beginning to hurt furiously. My cheek was wet, and hurt too much for me to want to touch it.

I came slowly out of the cave onto the trampled snow. Our battle had turned it bright red, and there was no difference to be seen between the blood of the wolf and the blood of the boy.

From a snowbank I took handfuls of clean white snow and pressed them carefully against my cheek, so that soon the wound was cold enough to numb the hurting and I could try to dab more snow against it. My hands were shaking, I couldn’t make them stop, but I kept reaching for the snow. All I could think of was that my grandmother Suncatcher said any cut had first of all to be washed clean if it was to heal.

My fingers told me that the gash ran down past my ear to my chin, and that there was a flap of skin torn loose on my cheek. I tried to press the skin down and was glad I couldn’t see what it looked like.

After a while the bleeding seemed to stop. My tunic was wet with blood, but there was nothing I could do about that. My body was aching all over, and suddenly I felt desperately tired. But supposing the wolf were still alive, and came back? I was almost certain he must be dead, but I knew I had to go and make sure.

So, very cautiously, I took my knife in one hand and my tomahawk in the other, and in the dying light I went through the trees to the place where I had seen him fall down. There was blood on the snow all the way, and more when I found him. He had dragged himself along the ground a little way, but he was lying there dead.

He had died in just the way that he would have killed me, and I was glad that I was safe from him now. But I was not glad he had died.

I stood there, and in my mind I looked for my Manitou.

I said, “He was hungry and he wanted to live. He was like me. I’m ashamed I killed him. I am ashamed.”

And in my mind, the great fish hawk coasted over the trees, over the pond, down toward me. His voice was like the wind.

He said, “All creatures must die, in the end. It is possible that he in turn has killed you. Now you yourself must fight to stay alive. But honor your brother—honor him in his end. . . .”

And the voice faded as the wind fades, and he flew out of my mind. Snow was beginning to fall, and the daylight was nearly gone. Suddenly I felt terribly cold.

Trying to ignore my throbbing cheek, I went back to my cave and made a fire. In its flickering light, I saw what my Manitou had meant.

It is possible that he in turn has killed you. The wolf had eaten all my precious stock of dried meat. There were only a few tiny scraps of it scattered on the ground. He had been so desperate for food that to get to it, he had pushed aside a rock as big as himself, which I had been able to move only inch by inch. And now he had left me desperate.

I slept very little that night. The snow went on falling, lightly but steadily. Hunched inside my deerskin, I could hear the hissing of the snowflakes as they dropped on the fire. I was warm enough, but the gash on my face throbbed and ached, and I could feel that my cheek was swollen. I kept putting snow to melt near the fire, in a piece of a branch that I had hollowed into a kind of cup, and I drank the water, and tried to guess what Suncatcher would have had me do.

She had a medicine for everything. When we skinned our knees and elbows, she would use the bark of a particular kind of elm tree to help us heal. She taught us how to collect it, so I remembered how the tree looked—and I thought now that I had seen a little copse of them beside the pond. I kept hoping for dawn to come, so that I could go and look.

But first I remembered the other thing that my Manitou had said.

Honor your brother.

The wolves are our brothers, even though this lone wolf had been my enemy. All living creatures are our brothers, even those we must kill for food, and we are taught to pay them respect. So the first thing I did when the morning came was to go out with my tomahawk and a flat digging stone, and look for the body of the wolf.

He was covered in snow now, but I brushed it off his shaggy coat. The thought of skinning him jumped into my mind, but I pushed it out. Though his fur would have been warmer than my deerskin, that would have been no way to honor a dead enemy.

The ground was so cold and hard that I couldn’t dig a hole deep enough to bury him properly. But he was lying near a big rock among the trees, where the leaf mold was not frozen as hard as the dirt nearer the pond, so I scraped out a shallow space beside the rock and pushed his stiff body into it. This was hard work and took a long time.

I covered the wolf with snow again, and pulled some big stones over the top. It wasn’t a proper grave, but it was the best I could do.

Blood was running down the side of my head again; I should have been resting, not digging. But I couldn’t rest, not yet. I went to the pond, stepping through the new snow and blessing my mother for the thickness of my moccasins. After much stumbling along the banks, at last I found the clump of young trees I had remembered, and with my father’s beautiful, deadly sharp knife I cut out wide strips of the inside bark—asking the trees to forgive me, because in winter this would quite probably cause them to die.

“My wound will thank you,” I said to them, with the pain from my gashed face telling me that indeed it would, in a while.

And as I looked down at the frozen pond, a picture came into my mind. Perhaps it came from the Great Spirit, perhaps from my Manitou—or perhaps from the pond itself. We are all one. Suddenly I had a memory of the day my father first took me out to a frozen pond where the men were fishing. He had showed me that through a hole in the ice you could catch a pike big enough to feed the whole family, even in dark winter, even in water whose bitter cold would kill you if you fell into it.

If I could make a fishing line, I could fish for food, in this icy world that offered no food anywhere.

Back in my cave, I made fire again, and for the sake of mending my torn head, I sacrificed the gift I had been saving for my baby brother. I took out the little squirrel-skin bag I had made and threw away the dried-up squirrel’s tail, and with my knife I slit the bag so that it became once more a flat skin. Onto the skin I shredded the bark from the healing tree, drizzling a little water on it to hold it together. Then I lay down so that the wound on my face was against the bark and the skin, and with strips of deerskin I tied the skin to my head.

I slept that night lying so, and in the morning I tightened the strips so that the squirrel-skin stayed tied to my head as I moved about. It was a good thing there was nobody to see me; I must have looked ridiculous. But the bleeding stopped, and gradually the throbbing went away. I rested in the cave for a day and another night, and made sure the bark was close against the wound all the time.

Winter was deep enough now that the ice covering the pond below my cave was as strong as rock. I went down there with a flat stone in each hand and cleared away the snow, so that I could chop a hole in the ice with my axe. It took two days, and I had to hold my head carefully still all the time, but at last I had a hole big enough for fishing—though every morning there was a new layer of ice to break through.

For a fishing line I used my bowstring. I hated to risk losing it, and it was too short, but it was all I had. I’d made some line from my saved deer sinew that was strong, but it would have fallen apart in water. So with a hook made from a turkey bone, and one of my last lily roots for bait, I dropped my short line into the water and waited. And waited. After a long time I felt a faint nibble, but then nothing.

And then there was a jerk on the line so fierce that it almost pulled me into the fishing hole. I tugged back as hard as I could, and only just managed to yank the fish clear of the water before the line whipped out of my hands, and he went flying across the ice.

It wasn’t a fish at all—it was a big eel. He wriggled all over the place, and nearly got back into the hole before I managed to whack him on the head with my axe.

But as I hit him, my knife, loosened by all this flurry, flew out of its leather case on my belt and across the ice—and slid into the fishing hole. Without even a splash, it vanished.

I heard myself shout in horror, and dropped on to my hands and knees to stare into the hole. There was nothing I could do. It would have taken half a day to chop the hole any bigger, and just a few moments in that cold dark water would have frozen me to death. The knife was gone forever: my most valuable tool, which had done so much to keep me alive. The knife that my father gave me, and that I promised to bring back to him.

Kneeling there on the ice, I wondered if the knife had brought death to me, through the killing of the wolf.

I knelt there for a long time, trying to find my Manitou, to ask what I should do. But there was no feel of him in my mind, and he did not come.

I said to myself, trying to believe it, There is nothing you cannot do. With his help, there is nothing you cannot do.

So I got to my feet and reached for the eel, the cause of all the trouble. My line was sticking out of his mouth; he had swallowed the hook. That was a good thing, because it meant I could drag him home by the line instead of carrying him; his slippery skin was covered with a thick layer of slime and mud, from where he had been lying at the bottom of the pond.

I took him home and skinned him with the blade of my axe. It was far, far more difficult than it would have been with the knife.

But eels are good to eat, and I made his meat last for a long time. I felt myself growing stronger, and within a few days the wound on my face began to have the itchy feeling that showed it had begun to heal. But I still kept the squirrel-skin tightly covering it, with the shredded bark against the skin. There would be an ugly scar, but I wasn’t going to disturb anything until I was sure it had healed.

After a long time searching among the stones on the shore of the pond, eventually I found two stones to help me make a new knife. One had a shape friendly to my hand, one side rounded, one side straight. The other became my chipping tool, made of harder rock, to chip the first to a sharp edge. So in a while I had a knife again, though it was a hundred times less good than the white man’s knife at the bottom of the pond.

Three times in those days, I heard a thin harsh call from the sky, and looked up to see the red-tailed hawk coasting in a long arc above the pond. Each time he disappeared behind the trees. He was probably hunting, but I wondered whether he was also a sign from my Manitou—a sign of warning, or instruction, or change.

Then one night I woke up in the dark, though not because I was cold. I could still see a glow in my fire pit, a small red light in the darkness. Suddenly something above it caught my eye, in the piece of sky up there behind the trees, and I saw a wonderful thing that my father first woke me to see when I was a very little boy.

The stars were dancing.

It was a slow dance, like a game. They took turns. Every so often, one of them rushed across the sky and then hid himself. Then another. Then another. All in the same part of the sky, the northeast. They were like sparks blown out of a fire by the wind.

“Look,” my father had said that first time, holding me in his arms and pointing upward. “They are your ancestors, Little Hawk. Every year at this time they leap, they dance. It is Manitou. They are saying to us, ‘Look, we are still here. We are watching over you. We dance for you, in our beautiful home.’?”

Then he had taken me back into the house and put me back on my sleeping platform, and pulled the doeskin blanket over me.

“Remember them,” he had said.

So looking out from my lonely cave, this starlit night, I remembered them, though then it had been summer and now it was cold midwinter.

And I knew this was my second sign, and that it was time to plan my journey home.

That night the moon was not in the sky. Soon it would start to grow and we should be halfway to the Cold Moon, which would be the second of my three moons away. If I began to travel then, I should arrive back at the proper time. I knew the way to go, because I had been watching the star of the north, to which the Big Bear pointed, ever since I left. And I knew the land around our village so well that I should recognize it long before I reached home.

It was wonderful to think about this. Once I had begun, I found I thought of little else. I thought myself through it, minute by minute. First I should begin to hear the sounds, far off: the barking of dogs, the chopping of firewood, the calls of children playing. Soon after that I should smell the smoke rising from the roofs of the houses. And at last, across the cleared land, through the wide-spaced trees, I should see my own home.

I kept trying to decide what would be the best time to arrive. After one last night sleeping out in the cold, I could come in through the door flap in the early morning. My mother would just be up, feeding wood to the fire, starting to cook the first and biggest meal of the day. I could see her in my mind, in the warm house hung with mats and baskets, and lined with the sleeping platforms where the rest of the family still lay snug under furs and skins.

I thought of choosing a moment when she was turned away from me, and then slipping into the house and putting my hands over her eyes. Perhaps I should say “Mother” softly first, so as not to frighten her. Or better still, perhaps I should simply walk in and let her catch sight of me, so I could see the look on her face.

This was a game I played with myself often in the cold days and the long nights that followed. I rehearsed my first words to my father, my apologies for losing his knife. He would be regretful, but not angry. I invented my first meetings with my sisters, my grandmother, my uncles and aunts—and with my friend Leaping Turtle and the two other boys who left the same day that we did, on the journey to become men.

I wondered how they had survived the big storm. I wondered how they had changed—because I had certainly changed. Whether or not the elders would count me as a man, as a warrior, in some way I had grown up.

I also knew I was exceedingly dirty and I stank, and I longed to be able to strip off in the sweat lodge and get clean again. I was thinner than when I left; my mother would be horrified and want to fatten me up. But of course I had learned to eat less now, and I was tougher and quicker, I thought, because I also worked harder than I ever did before.

The thing that would most distress my mother would be the great scar on the side of my face. The wound had healed itself; one morning I had woken up and found the squirrel-skin fallen away, and there was no pain when I reached up and felt my cheek and my chin. But the skin was lumpy, and here and there I could feel points where a fragment of bark had embedded itself in the long scar. All my life now, people would look at this ugly scar before they looked at the rest of me.

But that wasn’t much to pay for being still alive.

There was one thing I wanted to do before I left. I made my way to the edge of the salt marsh, all white now, with little icebergs in its creeks. Straining my eyes in the white glare, I gazed all around until I found the white hummock that was the island where my tomahawk was born.

I sent the little island a farewell, and wondered whether I would ever see it again.

Early the next morning I buried my fire pit under dirt and snow and cleaned out my cave so that it looked as it did before I came. It had given me shelter in a hard time, and I was grateful. I thanked the place, and I left.

The journey home was hard and slow. Each morning I set off early, but each day before dark I had to make a nest for the night so that I shouldn’t freeze. Each time, all over again I had to find a sheltered place between trees or rocks; all over again I had to cut pine branches to keep me from lying on icy ground. It was hard to be on the move in winter. My deerskin was a stiff, clumsy garment that caught on the trees. I chewed bark to cheat my stomach as I trudged through the snow.

On bright days the sun told me which way to go; at night, the gleaming stars told me whether he was right. If I was so cold at night that I could hardly breathe, I made a fire. Sometimes I heard wolves howling, but they weren’t close. I wondered why the solitary wolf had never joined them; I hoped I was forgiven for killing him.

The journey seemed endless, but gradually excitement began to grow in me as I thought of food and warmth and comfort—and most of all, the people I loved. I swore to myself that I’d never say a bad word to any of them again, not to my mother or father or even Quickbird.

And I stopped trying to decide on the best time to arrive at home. The moment I caught sight of my house, nothing would stop me from running toward it and in through the door.

The trees were more widely spaced now, with no scrub between. This was land that had been burned over for farming; I was near the village. I gave a shout across the snow, but heard no answering voice or barking dog, not yet. Then I saw ahead of me a collapsed structure of branches that I recognized: it was the remains of a tower from which we watched over the corn the summer before, to keep away the animals.

I started to run.

I was in a field of dead cornstalks beaten down by the snow, and in the distance, through the trees, I saw a roof. My bow and arrows jumped against my back as I ran.

It was a bright sunny day; the sky was clear blue. The roof that I could see was the sweat lodge—I knew its shape. I ran past it into the center of the village, breathless, feeling a huge smile on my face. I was home.