by Ellen Datlow
The day I was born my father sang songs into the night, as my mother’s silence frightened him. No other child of hers had been brought into the world without restlessness and fear of the life that would fall from her. No other child of hers came into the world singing. No other child of hers was lame, born with the leg turned in and the foot shorn off. She had dreamt of this time, dreamt me into being, formed me through her words and her songs and my father’s pipe, but she would never see me as I was, the broken leg, the bent hip, the club foot. No other child of hers would fall from her body, eyes ringed with the moon, wide open, challenging with my stare. Only those born with their eyes open tempt the Little People to come round, for they are the ones who are bold, the ones the Little People like to keep for themselves. My mother would not tempt the Hutuk Awasa with her screams, for they would see me as their own and take me away, take me to the place where water, earth, and sky meet in the holes in the ground and water bubbles forth, singing its own song, and air rising to the top. She banished all sign of water when the pains first came upon her, sent away the men as well as her sisters, and kept closed mouthed, so that no one would hear her scream, cry out, as wave upon wave shook my life out from within her and forced me to the shore. I would not cry out as well, but when she lifted her shaking hands to me, my eyes were what caught her first. She would never let the Hutuk Awasa have me, never let them see me, and my father’s singing would keep them away.
The fire rose, an ascent of prayers to the darkening sky. A cool wind rose off the river and soon seeped into the cracks between clothing of the hunters. The fire was warm, but their bellies were empty. As the one who sang the charm song continued his prayer, the other looked and saw, in a clearing near the water, three small eggs. Cracking the eggs into the fire, he cooked them and prepared to divide them with his companion. “Where did these come from?” asked the one who sang the song.
“They were here, at this camp,” said the one who had cooked.
“Who has laid them?” asked the one who sang.
His companion replied, “They were here in camp, waiting for us to eat.”
“I will not eat what I do not know,” said the one who sang.
His companion was hungry and set to eat the eggs. On the first bite, the eggs slid down his throat and into his empty belly. They were light as air, and tasted of smoke and fire and water and life. They filled him, and he craved more.
They say the one born with the crooked leg fears no one, and I was no different. Don’t step over pools of water, my mother would say. I laughed. I am the yellow bird, hoshi lugna, I fly over and the ones who are underneath love me. No harm comes to me. Even the yellow bird with the lame foot can fly. She can hunt with the men, lead them to the deer. Fly away. Earthbound, water laden, she can still fly over the underneath, the land of the water people, land of the Hutuk Awasa, the little ones who come and steal children, steal hearts, turn them cold, spit in the faces of their mothers, pour ash from hot coals in the hair of their fathers. I am one club foot ahead of them. My legs are longer and my stride does not matter when the yellow bird wings take flight.
The one who sang stoked the fire. “The deer will surely show himself tonight,” he said, “and I must stay and watch for him. You sleep.”
And his companion did, and all night he dreamt of water and wood. In his dream, his hands and feet would not move. He woke, feverishly, his companion keeping watch over him.
“My hands…” he whispered, and could not move them.
Once I saw one of them in the woods. Them. The Little People. In a clearing of oak, tracking the men as I did, as they gossiped their kabucha plays, I turned and stepped over a log. Too late, I saw the shimmer of sky beneath it. I stood still, did not move, became stone. The Hutuk Awasa would not see me if I did not stray. If you step over the shadows, they awaken, look for the one who wakes them, take your soul, whisper evil thoughts in your ear, cause you to spit in your mother’s face, rub ash in your father’s hair. But if they do not see you, they will look for you but never find you.
I saw her antlers first, the wildness of her hair, the moon in her eyes, the trees in her walk. Antlers rising from the pool beneath the stump, and I saw her eyes, looking into me, but she could not see me. Her fingernails, filled with black mud, dragged on the ground, the sound causing me to shake, but I ground my teeth to stand against the cold. Her hooves beat a dance on the wooded earth as she moved like a deer across the stump and toward the river. I saw her antlers dance in the shaking light and I knew she would search for me until she found me, her breath cold against my neck, dragging me down with her back to the cold, wet underground sky. Hutuk Awasa. My teeth were like stone. I would never belong to her. I prayed the men would not find her and me together and know it was I who released her.
The boy who would become The Boy Who Was reached me first. I heard my brothers’ voices shaking off the trees, the moss, the russet earth. They were singing a hunting song and my own voice had left me, chasing the deer. He reached out, touched my hair, touched my heart. “Iyi Tanakbi,” he whispered. My name had never become so much of me until that moment, until he spoke it aloud in the voice of stars, the sound like water over stones. My heart leapt to my mouth and I opened. I cracked beneath the sound, became liquid. His skin did not touch mine, but with his words the world between us stopped, and I was his. “Iyi Tanakbi.” The first wave lulled me into his embrace. The second tempered me to his touch.
“The Woman Who Is the Deer,” I said, my voice steady, my moonlit gaze locked in his watery eyes, “she emerged from this place.”
Only his voice mattered. Only his touch without skin, breath of heartbeat, words of love, became real. “Iyi Tanakbi.” His lips found mine, sliding against cool water and damp oak.
Nashoba, his brother, was the next to arrive. Yuka Keyu, my brother, was the third. The boy who would become The Boy Who Was turned his head away from me and toward the river. “She has seen the deer,” he said, “there.”
And he ran further into the woods, my brother following. Nashoba, staying behind, turned and looked at me, his eyes sending me home. He would not know, he could not have known, that it was I who freed her. I would never tell him. I would never tell anyone, save for the one who would know my heart.
The one who sang moved closer. “You should not have eaten those eggs,” he said, concerned for his friend. “You are having trouble now. Go to sleep, and soon you will awaken and the illness will pass.”
And sleep he did, but his dreams were even more fitful and frightening. In his dreams, his feet and legs were numb, and he could not move. When he woke, his fevered cries brought the alarmed attention of his companion. “It is the eggs,” his friend said. “Go and sleep the sickness away.”
And he dreamt again, of the world beneath this one, of a world of coldness and dark, of vast underground tunnels that led from this world to the world of the spirits. And he was frightened because he could see into both worlds, and he knew that something was happening to him, something that had been set into motion that he could not control.
He woke, unable to move. His hands and feet had grown together, seamless. His friend looked upon him in horror. “Go to the village, and find my family,” the one who ate the eggs implored his friend, “and they will help me.”
The one who sang ran through the woods and came to the village. He rounded up his friend’s family as well as his own, ran back to the place by the river that he had left. All that remained was the skin shed by a snake and a trail leading to the river.
He had shown me kindness, where no one else would. He had shown me tenderness, his touch cold, his eyes dark as the whirlwind. They told me I could no longer speak his name, but I screamed it from the top of my voice until the bottom of my voice was no longer. They said that Iyi Tanakbi, the bent leg, the crooked step of the Bird Clan, lost her mind and grieved for Ali Anugne O Chash as if he still lived. They said she wandered the shores of the Pearl River searching and searching and would die there,
searching for Ali Anugne
O Chash. Her fingernails had grown long and ragged, filled with silt as she dragged the mud for her lost love, the one who had gone into the river a man, tallest of the tall, and become the Water Panther, never leaving.
My mother insisted I marry immediately. They were afraid I would speak his name and he would return for me, but if I married another, his claim to me was no longer valid under our law. A warrior was chosen from the Wolf Clan, a son of the Peace Chief. I was sullen. I was lost. I was not even allowed to speak his name. My mouth opened and his name tumbled from my tongue, but before he could be free my mother clamped her hand upon my mouth, my sisters wrestling me to the ground, my brothers sitting upon me so I could not move.
The moon around my eyes grew wider until I agreed to their demands. I would marry this man from the Wolf Clan. I would be silent and never speak the name of the man I loved again. I allowed my mother to trim my nails, allowed my sisters to shell comb my hair, allowed my brothers to smile in appreciation, allowed my father his horses. And when their backs were turned and the moon around my eyes had waxed, I took my chance.
I tore my hair and went to the river. All of this had been set into motion because I, a foolish and rash girl, had not looked to see the pond and my feet and I’d stepped over it, waking the deer who crawled out from the whirlwind water and entered the world in a thunderstorm. And my brother and the one I loved had chased her into the woods, and only my brother returned. And Ali Anugne O Chash was The Boy Who Was because I had made him so.
His voice stirs softly upon the water grass, the edge of a stream. Everywhere I hear him, feel his heart beating, feel his breath upon my skin. I stand at the river, dropping tobacco, crushed mint, magnolia, cedar, and sage. I do not listen to the warnings of my mother and my sisters. I wander singing my own songs, songs not of our language but in the language of our enemies. I am bold. I laugh, skip over water as if taunting them to take me. They will not. For I am too foolish to be ever lost to the Hutuk Awasa.
At night in the woods I dance naked with no fire. Even the Anpanshe Falaya, the Long Hairs, the ones who do harm, fear me. Even the deer who became a woman will not approach me, for grief binds the Hutuk Awasa, keeps them close to the world they so want to live in but cannot or they will die. I have set her free, woman who is a deer, and the spirits know that if they take me I will destroy them all.
And I hear his voice. Iyi Tanakbi, a whisper of breath from a breeze upon the water, Iyi Tanakbi.…
I stand over the water, stretch my arms wide.
The creek dances at the touch of my toes, stirring at my bare feet. Only now do I stand tall, my clubbed foot and my crooked leg moving of their own accord. I grow taller, more beautiful, as the water dances around my misery. Iyi Tanakbi.…
His hands roam the hollows of my ankles, ice at his touch. My feet are rooted straight, sinking in the mud as the water moves up my calves to the place where my knees join. Iyi Tanakbi.…
His skin is slippery, cool, hard, and smooth as he moves up my leg, the curve of my thigh, the swell of my hip. I do not cry out. Instead I look to the starless night sky under shimmering, swirling water, and looking up I can no longer see myself but drown in his kisses, his touch, the tongue that flicks between my lips as he drags me under.
Carolyn dunn is a wife, mother, daughter, journalist, teacher, poet, fiction writer, and catechist born in Southern California. Her work has appeared in the anthologies The Color of Resistance, Reinventing the Enemy’s Language, and Through the Eye of the Deer, and Kenneth Lincoln’s Sing with the Heart of a Bear: Fusions of Native and American Poetry. Her poetry has been collected in the volume Outfoxing Coyote, and she is co-editor of two anthologies of Native American fiction: Through the Eye of the Deer (with Carol Comfort) and Hozho: Walking in Beauty (with Paula Gunn Allen). Currently pursuing a Ph.D. from Saybrook Graduate School in San Francisco, she is a member of the all-woman Native drum group the Mankillers, whose CDs are All Woman Northern Drum and Comin to Getcha!; as well as of the indigenous rock band Red Hawk.
Her Web site is www.hanksville.org/storytellers/dunn.
Author’s Note:
For over ten years now, the Deer Woman spirit has been nagging at me to tell her story. She is one of the Little People, as we call them in the southeastern Native nations: Choctaw, Cherokee, Creek, Seminole, Chickasaw. The Little People are our fairies and sprites, who are not necessarily good or evil, but have been known to bend the rules a little bit.
Deer Woman’s stories are about power and knowledge, and how to use that power and knowledge in the correct way. She is a spirit from whom we learn how to maintain harmony and balance in our relationships, especially in marriage and other committed relationships. Deer Woman teaches us that too much of a good thing can be harmful, and that we must maintain a balance of everything in order to remain healthy.
“Ali Anugne O Chash (The Boy Who Was)” is based upon a traditional Mississippi Choctaw story that my late mother-in-law, Juanita Anderson, used to tell. It is a story of transformation in many ways, a story of obsessive love and woman’s power that come together at one moment in the distant past to unleash the power of the Deer Woman upon the world.
Non-Indians tell us these stories aren’t true. Does Ali Anugne O Chash exist in this earth below the muddy waters in Mississippi? Did Iyi Tanakbi pine for him so much she was swallowed into the water to join him forever? Maybe not. But let me tell you, there are people who have seen the Water Panther and his wife firsthand. Many of them are my family. And they keep telling the stories so we won’t ever forget what is really truth and what maybe isn’t. And maybe that is just what the spirits want us to hear.
Remnants
Kathe Koja
It’s the first thing you see, when you come to my house: A thicket, a picket, a fence of wine bottles, soda bottles, jars of mustard and jam. I wash them all first, don’t think I don’t, wash them clean and green and brown and clear, wash them so they sparkle in the sun. When it’s sunny. Sometimes it rains, rains all night and the glass and the plastic get wet, run threads of water down to the sidewalk, down the cracks in the concrete like little rivers half-dammed by cigarette butts, the plastic tops of take-out coffees, the odd dull shine of a coin, run till everything is mud and the rain stops and the sun comes out again.
I don’t save the coins I find; I don’t need money. What I need is material, stuff to make things out of: like the bottles, or my hanging forest of beautiful plastic bags—do you know I have over one hundred kinds of plastic bags? From over one hundred different stores? I know, because I counted. I even made a list: bags from K-Mart, and Costco, and Schiller’s, and SavMor, Speedy’s and Quikky’s and Reddy-Rite-Now.… One hundred stores! Who could go to so many places, buy so many things? Who would want to?
They make a secret sound, my bags, ripped and slit and hung like leaves from the branching arms of coat racks and fence posts and ladders missing rungs, like tree trunks propped and leaning, or braced like scaffolding against the house—this used to be a house, you know. Not a nice one; I can still remember living here, or someone did, I’m not sure who, but there were bedrooms, two bedrooms and a bathroom with a toilet, and a kind of front room where people sat and there was TV. And a kitchen. I won’t forget the kitchen, the stink and scald of it, the chipped metal teapot, the white bleach scour of the sink.… It’s buried in my forest now, that sink, filled with rocks and concrete chunks and dirt, all the shovel could carry, all I could lift before my arms couldn’t hold any more. I filled it up good and covered it over, and then covered that with plastic, a wrinkled tarp as blue as the sea that murmurs with a sound like waves when you step over it; a safe sound.
Not that it’s all safe here; that’s not the point. But it’s good, you know? A good place, a place where you can just… be, just stand and think, or watch the whirligigs, you know what a whirligig is? I make them out of plastic jugs, tinsnip patterns of milky white, or the dull silver of aluminum cans. Real metal, iron a
nd like that, is too heavy, it can’t really spin, and whirligigs need to spin, to move when the wind does, around and around so fast you can’t tell what’s there beyond the movement, as if speed herself were twirling on the tiptoe end of a pole.
I fixed them up high, where the wind is, way up on the peaks of the house. It was hard to get up there—and harder to get down, oh my, with no one to hold the ladder, I just hung there and hung there and hung there until that meter reader came. She was so nice.… But I knew when I made them that that’s where they were meant to go, where they belonged. It’s important for things to be where they belong, don’t you think? The whirligigs on the roof, the sink sunk deep into the ground, and me here, working in my own front yard.
I like everything in my yard: the bottle fence, the Mirror Pond, the zoo where I keep the lawn animals—deer, ducks, flamingoes, I even have some plastic dogs. But my favorite place of all is the bag forest. Sometimes I call it Sure-Would Forest, like I sure would like to live out there if I didn’t have to go to sleep inside. It’s all so pretty, especially when the wind blows: the new bags firm and crackly, puffing outward like sails, the old ones fluttering, tattered and soft like ragged flags. People think a plastic bag lasts forever, but you know it really doesn’t; it breaks down. Like plastic bottles get more brittle; like whirligigs spin themselves apart. Like I told the ladies, the DPW ladies: it’s all just entropy. Isn’t that a nice word? I invented it. En-tro-pee. It means “grow up.”
At first I thought they were giants, those ladies, their shadows standing over me while I planted Popsicle sticks in the dirt. (Have you ever tried it? It really works.) Then I thought they were, you know, princesses or something, the one lady with her headful of beautiful black braids, the other with her shiny gold glasses, it seemed like things that princesses would wear. And who else but magic princesses would appear like they did, out of nowhere, just all-of-a-sudden there on the sidewalk? My sidewalk, where hardly anyone ever comes?