فصل 08 - بخش 01

EIGHT

For many days in the long winter, Suncatcher, Leaping Turtle, and I lived together in this house. She cooked for us; we hunted and trapped for her, and collected firewood. The three of us kept one another alive. We were all that was left of the old village. Suncatcher prayed with us and even sang for us, in her voice that was scratchy now but still found its note. She said that now she had two grandsons.

When Leaping Turtle had come back, he had found his home buried in unbroken snow. He dug his way through to the door; inside, the house was empty and cold. Staring around the deserted village, he caught sight of a thread of smoke rising from just one snow-mounded roof at the far end; it was us, of course. Like me, he knew something terrible had happened before he even asked.

Suncatcher told us that Leaping Turtle’s family had died early in the plague: his mother and father, his two brothers and his sister. They had been buried in a place not far from the village that was easy to reach: an outcropping of rocks where enough of the frozen soil could be dug away to put bodies to rest and cover them with slabs of rock too heavy for digging animals to move. We both knew the place; we had played there often when we were small boys, jumping to and fro. Jumping perhaps from the same rocks that now covered our dead.

We went there through the snow, Leaping Turtle and I, to say farewell to our families and to pray to our ancestors to receive them, and the Great Spirit to bless them. We stayed there a long time, without talking. We both knew that we were no longer boys; sometimes I felt I had lived through as much as an old man.

Before we went back, we looked hard at the rocks in that place and tried to decide which of them might be moved, and where we might still dig some soil. Although my grandmother wanted us to keep away from the houses that might hold bodies killed by the plague—she thought there were two—we knew that sooner or later we had to put these people to rest with proper ceremony. Especially our medicine man, Morning Star, still lying frozen out there somewhere under the snow.

“Suncatcher says that the plague will jump to us from their bodies,” Leaping Turtle said.

“But we can’t leave them unburied. I buried the wolf who fought me—and these are our brothers and sisters.”

“Yes. They are.”

We stood there unhappily on the high rock, looking out over the trees.

Suddenly Leaping Turtle grabbed my arm, pointing. It was a clear, freezing cold day, bright with sunshine, but out in the blue sky a pillar of grey-white smoke was rising. As we watched, there was a break in the smoke—and then a new puff of it rose, darker this time. Another break, another puff. Then a third.

Then the smoke rose again, in its unbroken pillar.

“To the west,” Leaping Turtle said. “It’s the village on the river.”

“Are they talking to us?”

“Three smokes—remember? It’s the greeting for anyone who sees it. Three just means ‘I am here.’?”

I was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of other living people. “We have to answer!”

We scrambled down into the snow and hunted for sticks, leaves, anything that would burn. Soon our moccasins were soaked, our fingers frozen. It was a long time before we had enough kindling, and the sun was beginning to drop down the sky.

The pillar of smoke had gone. But Leaping Turtle had a firestone and some moss at his belt, and we managed to make a fire on the tall rock. The wood was so damp that it smoked well.

I pulled off my tunic to cover and uncover the smoke.

“What are the answers? One puff means danger.”

“Two says come. Four says, I am coming.”

“Best to send three, like them. So we are saying, ‘Look, we are here too.’?”

So we sent our signal, to tell that there was life still in our village. But there was no answer, and I pulled my tunic back on in a hurry.

We checked our traps on the way home, and we had a big rabbit for Suncatcher. She was pleased by the meat, but even more by our sight of the smoke in the sky.

“If there were still sickness in the village, they would not signal,” she said. “You boys must go there. You should not be in this unhappy place.”

“Not without you,” I said.

Leaping Turtle said, “We go nowhere without our sachem.”

She looked at us and shook her head, but she smiled a little. I knew she could never go on a journey, though. The cold had done something bad to her feet, in those last days before I came back, and she could hardly walk. Though she would never show me her feet, I had glimpsed her ankles, and the skin was very dark and tight over the thin bones.

Leaping Turtle and I had grown up together. Our lives had been like two brier vines twining round each other. We had followed all Running Deer’s hunting rules together, learned to sing and pray and stamp the ceremonial dances together; we had swum and trapped and played games together for as long as I could remember. But now we were truly brothers; we had known it since that hard testing moment when we had to ignore each other on our solitary quests. In spite of everything that had happened since, I think we both felt that our life together now was like a reward from the Great Spirit for our obedience then.

Leaping Turtle’s time alone was as hard as mine, though he went inland instead of seaward, so the blast of the northeast storm toward the end was not quite so fierce. Fierce enough, though. He saw no deer but he trapped rabbits, often enough to have many skins that he stitched together—with pine-root thread and a rabbit-bone needle—into a blanket. It was his cloak by day and his coverlet at night, and it kept him alive, though my grandmother clicked her tongue over the hard, half-cured skins. As for my deerskin, she had taken one look at it and made me throw it away.

I never asked Leaping Turtle how long he had to fast before he found his Manitou. The vision of your Manitou is a private thing, not to be revealed even to your brother until the proper time.

In the next days Suncatcher tried often to persuade us to leave her and go to the village by the river. She felt strongly that our village was no longer a place for us; that no living creature should have a home there until the spirits had been set to rest. Leaping Turtle and I talked and talked, whenever we were away from the house, and we decided to do two things.

One, we would not leave her alone. Instead we would build a kind of litter, in which we could carry her with us to the village on the river. It might be a journey of seven or eight days, but we thought she could survive it.

Two, before we went, we would find the body of Morning Star and lay him to rest near our families and friends.

So we did these things. We dug in the snow to find Morning Star, and we wrapped our largest mat round his body and sewed it closed. It was the first time I had touched a dead man. The sewing was not very good but we did our best. He was not as big as I remembered—he seemed almost the size of a child.

We scraped out a shallow grave in the burying place and dragged him there, and when we had put earth over him, we pulled as big a stone over the top as we could manage. Then we said prayers for him to the Great Spirit, and told him we were sorry we didn’t know the words for a proper ceremony. He was a medicine man famous through all our nation, and should have had a big solemn funeral.

Suncatcher was not pleased when we told her we had done this without her, but she knew she would not have been able to walk to the burying place. She said some prayers of her own for Morning Star, and at dawn the next day she sang for him, and we listened.

Then we cut down small trees to make a litter, and trimmed off their branches. On the trodden snow outside the house we lay down two hazel saplings, each of them twice the height of a man, and in between them we lashed two shorter pieces and interwove them with strips of deerskin. So this made a kind of bed where Suncatcher could lie, with two handles at each end for us to carry her.

Telling this takes a very little time; doing it took much longer. Suncatcher was anxious for us all to leave the village now that we had convinced her to come with us. She still forbade us to enter the other houses, for fear the plague would jump to us from any dead still inside.

“But we touched Morning Star, we buried him, and we are still here, Grandmother.”

“Risks may be taken for a great man,” Suncatcher said. “But I will not put two young lives in danger again. It will be forgiven.”

And she came to the entryway of the house and stood outside, to watch our litter-building.

It was while she was standing there, leaning on a walking stick we had cut for her, that we heard a shout from the edge of the village, and saw a group of figures coming toward us. We all stood there staring. They were the first living men we had seen for a long time.

There were three of them, and they came from the village by the river. Two of them Leaping Turtle and I recognized instantly, because they had been so good in the games played at a gathering of the villages last summer. The gap since then seemed like a lifetime.

Suncatcher knew all of them.

“Hunting Dog,” she said as they came hurrying toward us. “Wolfchaser. One Who Waits.”

This last one was an older man in a deerskin cloak, with ceremonial red stripes on his cheek and forehead. He took Suncatcher’s hands.

“I give thanks that you live, my sister,” he said. Then he looked at us, and to my surprise he knew our names. “And Little Hawk, and Leaping Turtle.”

“We give thanks too,” said Suncatcher. She had discarded her stick and was standing as straight as she could, her voice strong. “We are all that is left of our village. All else is eaten by the white man’s plague.”

Now that I looked at One Who Waits, I remembered his face. My father knew him; he had eaten in our house. He was still gazing at us with an odd, haunted look. He shook his head, and there was a silence. Then he said, very low, “Too many of our young have died.”

The plague came to their village as to ours, they told us. It ran fast through the youngest boys and girls, and killed many others too. The elders decided that the surviving families should move away from what had become a place of death—even though this was their winter home, even though the building of new dwellings would be much more difficult in the cold and snow.

So they had done that, and were still resettling themselves in a valley not far away. And they had been trying to find out how far this dreadful plague had spread through the nation. Of the five villages who would have been able to see the signals they sent into the sky, only two had sent an answer.

Leaping Turtle said, “We didn’t know whether you had seen our signal. We were afraid it was too late.”

Wolfchaser said, “We saw, and we came. And there is one person from your village who is now in ours, and will be very glad to see you.”

“Who? Who is it?”

He smiled a little. “Soon you will see,” he said.

And although they had come a long day’s journey, they set to work to help us finish the litter for Suncatcher—which, they said diplomatically, was an excellent piece of design but could perhaps be a little stronger. Suncatcher went into the house to make food for us all, One Who Waits went with her to exchange more news, and the two younger men pulled out their tomahawks and went in search of more saplings. By the time night fell, we had a litter sturdy enough to carry a large bear.

There were not really enough skins and blankets for six people on the sleeping platforms that night, but the fire burned warm and I kept it fed. And Suncatcher fed all of us with stew and cornpone as if she were welcoming a normal visit from neighbors, in normal times. I remembered that night for long afterwards, as if it were a glowing bright star in a very dark sky.

At daybreak, we left our village forever. We were so busy packing bundles of anything that could be useful, and making the litter comfortable for Suncatcher, that we had no time to say a proper good-bye. But as we walked away through the trodden snow in our small procession, Wolfchaser and Hunting Dog carrying the litter, Leaping Turtle, One Who Waits, and I laden with bundles and baskets, I heard my grandmother’s brave voice in the cold morning air. She was singing a chant of mourning, for the people and the place that we were leaving behind.

We walked all day, with one pause only, and just as the light began to fade we came to the new village that these valiant people had built, and were still building. There were perhaps twenty houses, and more partly finished, made in the usual way, with saplings set in a circle or oval and their heads lashed together in arches. The shingles that covered them had been brought from the old village. No new snow had fallen here since their building started, so the houses were dark hummocks in the white world, with strands of smoke rising from their roofs.

One Who Waits called out, loudly, and one by one people began to emerge from the houses, happy that their trackers had come back again. Some of them shouted a glad greeting as they recognized Suncatcher. I trudged over the snow with my bundles in a daze of fatigue and relief, and at first I didn’t notice the figure of a girl running from one of the houses toward us. She ran fast, faster than all the others, heading straight for me, and I broke my stride and dropped my bundles just in time to catch her as she ran into my arms, laughing and weeping both at the same time.

It was my little sister, Quickbird.