فصل 02 - بخش 02

TWO

On the day that I was killed, Leaping Turtle took his grief and his rage to our father Yellow Feather, but was not comforted. Instead he was persuaded, by our peacekeeping leader, that he should not seek vengeance. “Remember that there are good white men as well as bad,” Yellow Feather told him, “and remember that there is strength and safety for us in living alongside these people in peace.”

So the next day a group of our people went quietly with Leaping Turtle through the trees to find my body and to carry it home to our village, where my friend tamed his own sorrow to comfort my sister Quickbird and my grandmother Suncatcher. They grieved in the old ways, with the sounds and tears of mourning, blackening their faces with charcoal because the light of life was gone, and they buried my body with its head to the southwest, and my knife and my bow and arrows beside me. Leaping Turtle had found the knife still in my belt when they went to take my body home. But he had not been able to find my tomahawk.

None mentioned me by name after I was gone. It is our custom. One Who Waits took some of my clothes and hung them ceremonially in a tree near where my body was buried. There they hung until the wind and weather tore them apart, and birds took torn pieces to help make their nests, and the rest fell into dust.

As for me, I was free but not yet truly freed, and so am I still. I am spirit, outside time but still following its flow. I am held here by the disharmony caused by my violent death, which would change the whole course of life for the boy John.

And I am within boundaries. I can see past and present, though not future. I can hear speech and thought no matter what its language. I may not intervene. I may be seen, if I choose, and I may communicate, if I choose, but only in a certain place, and at certain times. Each of us who has lived on this earth knows the place to which he or she would choose to belong.

The Great Spirit in his wisdom holds me, like the bird I was named for, to wheel over all, to observe all, and to tell this story.

To tell the story of a boy and an axe, a tree and an island. And to wait until Little Hawk is freed to fly.