فصل 07 - بخش 01

SEVEN

But as I passed the sweat lodge, something made me slow down. Though it was broad daylight, I could see nobody anywhere in the village. No smoke was rising from any of the houses. And the snow around them, mounded in drifts where the wind took it, lay smooth and unbroken, with no sign of footprints.

I tried to tell myself that everyone was away on a hunt, even though it was winter. Then I caught a faint smell in the air. I sniffed harder, casting my head round like a dog. It was the smell of rotting, the smell of death. Something was terribly wrong.

I headed for my own house, stamping through the crusted snow that lay knee-high everywhere, and I stumbled over something. As I scrambled up, I found it was a man’s foot, heel upward.

I stood there, staring. A dead man, unburied, under old snow. I wasn’t brave enough to dig and find out who he was.

Feeling sick with fear, I went slowly to my own house. Snow lay in a drift against our entrance. A little had been dug away, but there were no footprints.

I kicked aside the rest of the snow and said a wordless prayer to the Great Spirit, and I went in through the hanging flaps of deerskin.

A beam of sunlight slanted down from the open hole in the roof. The baskets still hung from the walls, the pots stood beside the fire. There were ashes in the fire pit, but the house was cold and empty.

A great shout came out of my throat, all my fear turning itself into noise.

“Mother! Father!”

At the far end of the house there was a tiny movement in the shadows, and a small whisper of a voice.

“Little Hawk? Is that you?”

My grandmother Suncatcher was lying wrapped in furs on the furthest sleeping platform. I rushed over to her and knelt beside her, holding her.

“Grandmother, where are they? What’s happened?”

She seemed very small, and her face was thin, hollow-cheeked. She looked up at me without any expression.

“They are dead,” she said.

I stared at her.

“They all died,” she said in that breathy whisper. “There was a terrible sickness. All died.”

“Mother? And Father? The girls, and my brother?”

“All died,” she said. “All the village.”

I felt I was in the middle of a nightmare, and that although I knew nothing was real, I couldn’t wake up.

But it was real.

“Everyone died?”

Suncatcher tried to speak, and failed. Her throat was too dry.

I scrambled up and looked round wildly. There was a bark bucket on the floor near the fire pit, half full of icy water, with a wooden ladle hooked to its edge. I knew that ladle—I had watched my father carve it from the burl of an oak. I dipped it into the water through the crust of ice and took it to my grandmother, helping her to lift her head, and she drank from it in little sips.

When she had enough, she raised her hand. It was a tiny hand now, its bones like the bones of a bird; she was dreadfully thin. So I drank the water myself; I drank three ladles full, like a man dying of thirst. I could feel Suncatcher’s big eyes on me.

“Be strong, Little Hawk,” she whispered.

There was nothing to say to this.

But now she was staring at me. At the side of my face, at the long puckered scar I had never yet seen myself.

Don’t look, Grandmother. Not now. Not yet.

I jumped up. The house was so cold, I had to make it warmer or my grandmother would die. Kindling and logs were piled by the door as they had always been; the bag of milkweed fluff and dried moss was hanging beside the fire bow, just as always. I seized everything in a kind of frenzy, and made a fire.

Suncatcher watched the flames catch.

She said, in a whisper, “Your father had the sickness first of anyone. He died in two days. Then the baby. Then your mother. I sent your sisters to the women’s house and I nursed your mother, but she died and so did they.” She paused, waiting for breath. “White Eagle and Quick Fox had died by then too, and their families after them. And all. And all.”

“Running Deer?”

“Everyone.”

“Did something poison them?” I said. “What had they eaten?”

“No,” Suncatcher said. “It was nothing that they ate.”

“Then what?”

She lay there quiet for a long time, looking at nothing, and then she took a long breath and let it out again.

“I have heard of it before but never seen it,” she said. Her voice was very weak and tired. “It is a disease from the white men who come here from the sea. It jumps to you in the air and burns you up, and then it jumps to the next person, and the next, and the next. A terrible disease, a plague. We have no medicine for it. The medicine man did his best, but he died too.”

I reached out and touched her face. “You didn’t die, Grandmother.”

“No,” she said with great bitterness. “The Great Spirit allowed one useless old woman to live, amongst all this death.”

There was nothing to say to that either.

She looked so weary and old, and her words came out so painfully, but I had to understand what had happened.

“Where did this plague come from? There are no white men here.”

“Trading,” Suncatcher said. “Our people trade.”

“But not with white men. My uncle White Eagle has seen them, but that was in the north. He said they come in big boats to catch fish, and go away again.”

“They come closer now. They trade for furs.”

A picture flashed into my head, of a pile of furs in our house and my father holding up a bearskin in front of him so that his head was sticking up over it where the bear’s head would have been. He was laughing, happy. I did not often see him laugh.

“But they don’t come here, Grandmother. I don’t understand.”

Suncatcher closed her eyes and lay there silent, her mouth a thin unhappy line. Then her eyes opened again and looked straight into mine.

She said, “Four moons ago, your father and White Eagle and Quick Fox went away to trade.”

“To the villages up on the river, yes.”

“Not just to the villages. Your father had heard of a white man hungry for furs who was leaving to sail back across the sea for the winter. The weather was kind so they took canoes down the river and found him. And they made a good trade; they were very happy with it.”

She stopped to rest, to capture more breath. A cold place began to grow in my heart as I thought about what she was saying.

“But when they came back with their trade, the white man’s plague came with them,” Suncatcher said. “I think it is like a snake that grows slowly and quietly and then strikes. It waits its time. I think it does not kill white men. It kills us.”

I said, “My father gave me a beautiful knife to take with me. A white man’s knife. That must be why he went to trade, to get me the knife.”

“It was one part of his trade,” Suncatcher said. “One part only.”

“If he hadn’t gone to trade for my knife—”

“Stop that!” my grandmother said sharply. For a moment her voice was strong, like my Manitou in my vision. “Little Hawk, it is not for us to tell how great and terrible things come about. Only the Great Spirit can see all. Your father and your uncles went to trade for whatever things the white man had to offer, not for one little knife. This load is not for your back, nor for any man’s.”

All I could think of was my father’s pleasure in giving me his knife, and the glow in my mother’s face when she saw it.

“I couldn’t even bring the knife back to him. It saved my life, and I couldn’t bring it back. It fell to the bottom of a pond.”

“A good place for it,” Suncatcher said.

She lay back, exhausted, and her eyes closed again. Light from the fire flickered on her lined old face, with its strong straight nose. My mother had that same nose.

My mother is dead. I shall never see her again. My father is dead, and my two sisters are dead. My baby brother is dead. I shall never see any of them again.

I had to find something to do. I fetched more logs from the woodpile inside the door and built up the fire. The flames leapt up, warming the house.

I poured water into my mother’s biggest clay pot and set its pointed base into the hole at the side of the fire pit. Into the water I dropped a handful from each of the baskets hanging on the wall: onions, garlic, lily roots, dried cranberries. I had watched my mother do this so often that I hardly needed to think. I wanted to ask my grandmother a hundred questions, but first I needed to feed her, or she would die too. I wondered how long it was since she had eaten.

I could see now that although furs and skins were mounded on my own sleeping platform, there were none on those where my parents and my sisters used to sleep. Each wooden frame was covered only with a woven bark mat. While Suncatcher slept, very slowly I went all round the inside of our house, looking.

All the familiar tools were in their places, and everything for cooking. There was enough food for a month or more—I knew that the rest of the winter supply for the village was buried deep in the cold ground, wrapped in baskets and mats. But there was no sign of my parents’ clothes, or those of my sisters, nor of any of their personal possessions.

There was a sick feeling in my throat as I faced the fact that they were indeed dead. When we die and are buried in the ground, our friends and family put with us all the things that were most precious to us, or that we might need in an afterlife that resembles the one here on earth. My father would certainly have been buried with his bow, and his tomahawk.

The only hunter in this family now was me.

On a shelf above my sleeping platform, with my own clothes and belongings, I found my sharp stone knife that I had before my father gave me the one he got from the white man. It was an old and trusted friend, and I was very glad to have it in my hand again.

So, using it, I shredded two handfuls of dried meat and added them to the pot beside the fire, which was beginning to steam and smell good. There was no more light from the smoke hole in the roof now, but in the dark circle up there I could see one bright star.

When I went outside, night had swallowed the village, and all the stars in their moving patterns were blazing out of the black sky. Their light glimmered on the snow, but the only sign of life in the world around me was the little glow of the entrance to our house, and an echo of firelight in the smoke rising from the roof.

Oh my Manitou, I thought, please watch over me and tell me what to do.

Then I went back indoors and gently woke my grandmother, so I could give her some hot soup. I helped her to sit up, very carefully. I was almost afraid she might break.

She sat propped up by the furs of her sleeping nest and slowly spooned up a bowlful of soup while I wolfed down three. Gradually some color began to filter back into her bony grey face.

“D’you remember when you last had anything to eat, Grandmother?”

“No,” Suncatcher said. Then she shook her head, as if she were exasperated with herself. “I am ashamed,” she said.

“Ashamed?”

“We are put here to live out the time the Great Spirit wills to us, but I had given up my joy in the earth. I lay down in this bed to die, Little Hawk. It is not so hard to die, at my age, if you no longer eat or drink. The body is already tired.”

My throat closed up, and I could feel tears filling my eyes. I stood there holding the bowl very tightly and not looking at her. I am a man now. We are strong; we do not weep.

Suncatcher could sense this. She tried to speak without emotion.

“I had lost track of the days and nights,” she said. “I thought you would not be back for a long time. And you are young and strong—I knew you would survive. You were not part of my thinking. Forgive me.”

I made some sort of noise, and I nodded.

“I was the last person alive in this village and I did not want to live,” Suncatcher said. “I had seen my sons die, and my daughter, and my grandchildren, and all my friends.”

She stopped.

Looking at the grief in her small fierce face, I loved her very much. She too was strong. She did not weep.

“I don’t want you to die, Grandmother.”

“No. Now there are two of us.”

She held out her arms to me and I knelt down and hugged her, but we did not cry. At least, only a very little.

Suncatcher said, “You have seen your Manitou, have you not?”

“Yes. I have.”

She knew better than to ask more than that.

She said, “And the scar on your face says that you have come through danger.”

“It was a wolf. I killed him.”

I found I couldn’t say anything more than that. And again, Suncatcher did not ask.

“We will make a plan,” she said.

Under her instruction, I took several kinds of dried herbs from small woven pouches hanging on the wall near her bed, and heated them in water. She was making a drink that she said would strengthen us both; she said we should drink it every day. She had me help her walk around the house, though not yet outside, so that her legs would get used to moving again.

She told me a little more about what happened when the plague came. It was a dreadful disease; it filled the body with pain and made it very hot. Then the heat would go down for a little but come back worse, and soon the person would die. Often the skin would have a yellowish color at the end. None of our traditional medicines made any difference, nor the sweat lodge, nor any of the prayers and sacred rituals that our medicine man desperately tried. One after another, families died: most often, Suncatcher said, the small children died first, and the very old, and then the rest. All the women in the women’s house died, including my sisters.

“Day after day,” she said, “those of us who were still alive buried those who had died. They were poor burials, because the ground is so hard. And fewer and fewer of us were left. Toward the end, the dead had to be left in their homes. If they are still there, perhaps they should not be disturbed.”

“There is a man lying dead out in the village. Under the snow. I must give him rest somehow.”

“You cannot dig frozen ground,” Suncatcher said. “Even though I think that is the body of my brother Morning Star.”

Morning Star was our medicine man, the wisest person in the whole village. She told me that he had ordered her to go home to rest, one day when she and the few who were left had been working without sleep for days. She was so tired that she could hardly walk, and he took her back to our house to sleep and brought her food. The next morning she heard only his voice, from outside the house.

“He said, ‘The others are dying, Suncatcher. I am the last, and now I have the sickness too. You can do nothing for me, you must stay where you are. And the Great Spirit be with you.’?”

Suncatcher sat looking into the fire.

“I called out as loud as I could, ‘I love you, brother.’ But there was no answer. I don’t know if he heard me. So since there no longer seemed any reason to go on living, I decided I would simply lie here until I too died.”

She looked up at me. “And then you came back.”

For seven days Suncatcher and I took care of each other, until she looked stronger and more confident—and so perhaps did I. More snow fell, a long soft snow, mounding itself against the houses until they half-vanished into it. Now they were a little range of round white hills. I went out and dug a path away from our own house to the pile of firewood my father had had us gather before the winter came. Every house had such a pile. Every day I brought wood back for our fire pit, but Suncatcher made me swear not to investigate any other house.

“We have food enough,” she said, “and there is danger in those houses. The plague is still there, eating the bodies of the dead until it can be driven away. And I do not have the skill for that. Keep away from them, Little Hawk. Swear.”

So I did.

And then came the morning when I had brought in wood and was feeding the fire, and Suncatcher was pounding dried corn in the oak-tree mortar that our grandfather hollowed out for her. We had heard no footsteps, but suddenly the house brightened as the door flap was pulled open. We stared.

Leaping Turtle was standing in the doorway. He was wrapped in a rabbit-skin blanket and covered in snow. His face was thinner, his eyes huge with horror.

He said, “What has happened?”