Wabi

by Joseph Bruchac

  The wolf cub cocked his head as I did so. Somehow, I could read what he was thinking. Are you coming back?

  I had helped enough. His little belly was as round and taut as one of the drums the humans struck with sticks when they sang and danced. It was time for him to be on his own.

  “I am going,” I hooted. “Travel well.”

  I glanced down once as I flapped my wings to gather height. Malsumsis was watching me intently.

  Without wings there is no way he can follow me. That is what I assumed as I soared over the treetops, leaving him far behind. I reached my nice hidden roosting place, settled in, and slept soundly all through that day.

  What woke me up was not the welcome return of darkness. It was a little voice whimpering from the base of my tree.

  Hungry. Want to eat.

  Strangely, I was not upset as I looked down. I felt something like pleasure when I saw the wolf cub there, sitting back on his haunches and smiling up. Although he did not have wings, he did have a nose. I should have remembered that no creature has a stronger sense of smell than a wolf. He could have found me even if I had gone four times as far.

  I shrugged my shoulders. Then I spread my wings and hopped off the limb. It was going to be a long night.

  Luckily for both of us, that season had brought forth more rabbits than usual. As the narrow face of the moon became full, I fed my little friend and he grew. Each day Malsumsis slept faithfully at the foot of my tree and each night I went out in search of food for him. The moon thinned and filled again. Now he was hunting on his own, creeping up and pouncing on mice and voles in the meadow. Soon he’d be catching his own rabbits.

  But even once he was able to get most of his food by himself, he did not leave me. Was it because I had saved his life? Or was it that he felt some strange liking for me? Those questions I cannot answer. All I knew was that wherever I flew, the little cub came trotting after me.

  Then, one night when I woke, I heard a different sound from below.

  Look down here.

  I looked. Malsumsis was sitting there proudly, the carcass of a grouse resting at his feet. He had brought food for me.

  I dropped down to the ground and plucked feathers from the grouse’s chest as I held it firmly with one foot. Malsumsis sat back, watching me accept his gift. I dug my beak in. Ah, still nice and warm.

  When I was finished, Malsumsis nuzzled me gently and lowered his head. I leaned forward and began to preen his hair.

  A large shape came floating down out of the night and landed on a low branch just above us. Malsumsis looked up and growled. Even though he was still just a cub, he was ready to protect me.

  “Be calm,” I hooted to him in a reassuring voice.

  There was no need to worry about the one who had just joined us. It was, of course, my great-grandmother. Now that I was a full-grown owl, I no longer saw her every night. I still went to her whenever I needed guidance. But I had not even thought to ask her what to do about this wolf cub who now believed that he and I belonged to each other.

  “Wabi, are you starting your own wolf pack?” Great-grandmother whootuled. I could hear the amusement in her voice.

  I might have said no, but I didn’t want to hurt the cub’s feelings.

  “Great-grandmother,” I said, “this is Malsumsis. He is my good friend.”

  I didn’t say anything about how I had saved him and then fed him. If I knew my great-grandmother, she’d been somewhere watching me all the time.

  “Wabi,” she said, chuckling, “do you want to be a human?”

  “No!” I said, clacking my beak in annoyance.

  What a ridiculous question that was. Why would my grandmother ask it?

  She looked down at me and nodded. “Do you know the story the humans tell of how the dog came to them?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  Just two seasons ago, while hiding in my favorite cedar near the village, I had overheard Dojihla telling some smaller children that very story.

  “Sit down,” she had said. “All of you pay attention. Dog was once like the wolf. Then the human beings were created. All the animals were given a choice about how they would live. All the other animals wanted to either go their own ways or treat the humans as prey. They were as foolish as some of the boys in this village who think they are grown-ups even though they are still just silly boys. But not dog. Only dog chose to live with the humans. They promised to always be friends to the people—even those who were as stupid as those boys in our village that I just mentioned, like Wikadegwa and Onegig and Agwegajezid.”

  After hearing her story, I began to pay more attention to the dogs. It was true. Those dogs seem to be the most loyal creatures in the world. Even when they were treated badly, they still stayed by the humans, guarding them and following them.

  Some of those humans—the kinder ones—were very good to their dogs. Dojihla, despite the way she treated the big boys of her village, was one of those who treated her dogs very well. I liked watching the way she played with them, throwing things for them to catch and bring back, wrestling with them. It looked like fun as they romped about. But that did not mean I was envious. By taking care of a wolf cub, I was not acting like a human being raising a dog. Not one bit. I was not trying to imitate the humans.

  Why would an owl ever want to be one of those pathetic, featherless beings?

  I looked up at the branch. Great-grandmother was gone. I had been so lost in my thoughts that I had not even noticed her leaving.

  Malsumsis nudged me with his nose.

  Harruf? he barked.

  “Yes,” I agreed, nuzzling his neck with my beak before spreading my wings. “Let us go hunting.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Miserable

  I WAS MISERABLE. I HAD never felt so unhappy or confused.

  I sat on the branch of the cedar tree, peering out through its thick, protecting boughs that hid me from sight. My second eyelid was closed against the light of the sun. I have not mentioned it before, but that is yet another way that the Great Darkness made us owls better than human beings. We owls were given two eyelids for each eye. That second inner eyelid, which is filmy, can be closed to clean our eyes or protect them from getting hurt. It also cuts down the brightness of day when an owl cannot sleep at the normal time.

  But I was more than watchful. I was ill at ease, confused, upset, and several other things I could not find words for. I felt as if I were being spun about by a whirlwind. What was happening to me?

  Malsumsis sensed my disquiet. We had been hunting together with the usual success. Seasons had passed since he was a small starved pup, and my friend had grown into a huge wolf, bigger than any I had ever seen before. Even after he was grown, Malsumsis had stayed with me, as loyal as he would have been to his own pack that had disappeared. It was strange the way they had vanished. There was no sign of them anywhere in our valley. The last time he had seen his pack was when he fell into the river as a puppy and was washed by the swift current downstream, where the long, hard hands that pulled him out had been those of the mojid.

  Each time we hunted, we also looked for signs of Malsumsis’s family, but with no luck. What we did find in the way of family was more of my own. My sister had been staying in the far end of our valley, well away from my hunting grounds.

  One night I was flying high, the soft warm wind under my wings, looking out across the night land that spread beneath me. I looked in the direction where the sun always disappeared below the horizon. First there was the forest stretching beyond in a carpet of dark green. Then there was the blue mountain and the hills circling around it like bear cubs following their mother.

  Beyond that mountain were even higher mountains, and beyond them? I did not know. Once an owl has found his or her own hunting ground, that is where he stays. I knew, from having heard the humans talk, that there were other human villages off in the winter land direction, the summer land direction, and in the direction of the dawn. There were stories abo
ut those places. Some humans went there often. But none of the humans seemed to know anything about what lay beyond the night mountains. No one ever went that way. In the past, no one who dared to travel over those mountains had ever come back.

  What was to be found there? I wondered as I gazed. Had Malsumsis’s pack gone there? Were there other creatures even more dangerous than the mojid and the gagwanisagwa and Toad Woman? Were there other owls there?

  Then, to my surprise, I heard something below me. It was another owl. It was not calling from some faraway valley but from the edge of my own hunting grounds. What nerve! I glided down to take a look. A fat male owl, perhaps half my size, was sitting on one of my perches on the overhanging limb of a big hemlock tree.

  I landed quietly behind him. Not only was this fat little owl too stupid to stay in his own home ground, he was also not even watchful enough to have seen me land. He was so much smaller than me that I didn’t feel the need to do anything more to get rid of him than say a few well-chosen words.

  “You are on my branch,” I said.

  The fat little owl swiveled his head so fast to look at me that he almost fell.

  “Who?” he said, edging quickly away from me toward the end of the branch, which began to bend under his weight. “Who are you?” There was terror in his voice as he stared up at me.

  But I didn’t answer him right away. Though many seasons had passed, I recognized that voice of his even if he didn’t recognize mine. It was my bullying big brother. He was the one who grew up to be a runt!

  “Who-o-o?” he said again in a trembling voice. He was so far out on the end of the limb that he was almost upside down.

  “Move!” I hooted loudly. That was all he needed to hear. He flopped awkwardly off the branch, and almost landed on Malsumsis’s head. My wolf friend had been waiting at the bottom of the tree and watching. He woofed at my brother, who managed to finally get his wings spread and flap away in panic.

  It was hardly a victory for me. He was so pathetic. I shook my head now, remembering. The memory suited my foul mood. I noticed a hare, dropped down to the ground to grab it, and carried it over to Malsumsis. I didn’t tear off a single piece of meat, even though Malsumsis waited patiently, as always, for me to start feeding first.

  “Whoo-ah-whooo,” I hooted halfheartedly. “Eat it all.”

  Malsumsis did as I said. A few gulps and the entire hare was gone. Then he looked at me and whined.

  What’s wrong?

  “Nothing,” I said.

  He nuzzled me with his nose. I didn’t respond. He jumped back, whimpered, flattened himself on his stomach as he crawled toward me. Then he rolled over onto his back and let his tongue loll out. Very funny. It didn’t cheer me up.

  I tilted my head to look up at the sky. It was starting to show signs of dawn. Soon the humans would come out of their upside-down nests to go down to the river and bathe.

  “I have to go,” I said to Malsumsis.

  I jumped up into flight and he did not follow me. He saw where I was headed. He usually did not accompany me when I went to watch the human beings. Their dogs did not like his scent and would complain loudly, drawing the attention of the humans to him.

  It was not that Malsumsis was afraid of humans and their dogs. He could easily beat any dog, even a pack of them, and I doubted that any human was a good enough shot to hit my friend with a bow and arrows. Not only had he grown to be the largest wolf I had ever seen, he was also the fastest and most agile. But he knew that I liked to watch those human beings without disturbing them or calling any attention to myself.

  And so I watched and waited, feeling worse and worse. The pain in my gut was like being impaled on the sharp end of a broken branch. I sat there hoping that when I coughed up my next pellet of fur and bunny bones, the pain would come up with it, tumble to the ground with a soft thump and be gone.

  Urp. Cough. Spit.

  No such luck. Pellet ejected, pain still present.

  Then, at last, Dojihla walked by. She was wearing her white doeskin dress decorated with porcupine quills that had been sewn on to make a pattern of leaves and flowers. As soon as I saw her, my pain went away. I felt happy just watching her walk past.

  And suddenly it came to me. I understood what it was that I was feeling. It explained so much. Such as why, during the cold moons of the last winter, I hadn’t been one of those male owls filling the night with hopeful burbles and hoots, just waiting for the higher pitched voice of an interested female owl to answer me.

  I looked at Dojihla and realized that I had fallen in love with her. That was it! I felt like singing one of those sweet little owl love songs that thrills your chosen one right down to the pinfeathers. I wanted to share a branch with her and lean my head against her.

  Then it hit me like a great gust of sleet-filled wind. I would never find Dojihla sitting on a branch beside me. She was a human, not an owl. I was in love, but there was nothing I could do about it.

  CHAPTER 13

  She Goes By

  DAYS AND NIGHTS HAD PASSED since I realized that I was in love. How many? I don’t know. All I knew was that I was happy when I could see her and miserable when I couldn’t. I had worn all the bark off the tree limb by impatiently rocking back and forth.

  Where is she? Ah, here she comes.

  I sat in the tree and cooed softly to myself as Dojihla passed. Naturally she didn’t see me. Dojihla. Isn’t it a beautiful name? It is almost a song. Dojihla, Dojihla. And it is perfect for her. It means “She goes by.” Which is what she did whenever I saw her. She just went by, not noticing me hidden in the cedar tree.

  And what if she had looked up? All she would have seen was an owl. Admittedly, a very large, extremely capable young male owl. She would surely have taken note of the fact that he was an owl well above average. No way could she miss that special gleam of intelligence in the eyes, the sensitivity of the beak, the way each feather had been so elegantly preened. All right, I know. I was dreaming.

  These days, to be honest, most of the dreaming I did was daydreaming. I was not sleeping the way I should. I was spending so much of my time awake during the day that I was actually dozing off at night. If it hadn’t been for the hunting that Malsumsis did and his insistence that I always take the first bite of whatever he caught, I probably would have been losing weight. But just having the chance to watch Dojihla made my sleepless days worth while.

  It wasn’t a sudden thing. My feelings for her had grown over the years the way a sapling grows with the passage of seasons until one day you realize that a tall tree is standing where once there was just an open place in the forest. It had begun with watching the children play, back when she was one of them, and wishing that I could join in. I had grown used to the way she talked, the way she laughed, the way she was always the first to ask questions . . . the way she bullied the other boys and girls.

  Season after season, Dojihla had always been the leader in whatever mischief they all got into. She had been the first to try to walk on the thin ice on the ponds, the first to climb to the top of the tallest tree. (She even decided once to climb the very tree I was in. I had to scuttle to the far side, hunch down, sit very still, and pretend to be the broken stub of a branch.)

  Dojihla! She was the one who led the other children on hunting expeditions with their small bows and arrows. She even dared, with the bravest of the other young ones, to venture into a certain swamp where it was rumored that a child-eating monster lurked. (Of course, you know that was not true—at least not after I got through with Toad Woman.)

  One of Dojihla’s favorite games was going out with a group of boys and girls to search for someone they called the Village Guardian.

  “The Village Guardian,” she would say to whatever group of children she had managed to gather to listen to her opinions, “is a tall, strong, handsome man. He roams the woods by himself, protecting the people from any danger that might threaten our village, such as monsters.”

  “Are there really m
onsters?” some small child might ask.

  “Oh, yes,” Dojihla would say, nodding her head wisely.

  “They are as real as our Village Guardian himself.”

  That amused me. I knew that there was certainly no such human as the Village Guardian. If there were, I would have seen him while I patrolled around the village each night.

  But Dojihla was determined. In fact, when she was younger, she used to lead the other children on expeditions to find him. They would convince this noble but shy person to come and live in the village with everyone else.

  “This time,” Dojihla would say, as she outlined a plan to climb a steep cliff, “we will surely find the Guardian’s hiding place.”

  It was hard not to chuckle at her insistence that this imaginary being really existed. Especially when she and her hapless band would fail to find any evidence of her mythical hero and she would look at the dirty scratched faces of her troop, and say—to their dismay—“I have a better idea. Now we’ll search the blackberry thicket!”

  Even the bigger boys never tried to contradict her. If they did, they found themselves on the ground with Dojihla sitting on their chest and making them eat grass.

  Of course now that Dojihla was a young woman, she no longer wrestled with the boys. That was not through any choice of her own. She didn’t seem to be afraid of anyone or anything. When a certain gleam came into her eye, it meant “Move out of my way or I will move you out of my way.” Isn’t that wonderful? But now, more often than not, the boys she had played with either acted bashful around her or stared when they thought she wasn’t looking. (They were extremely careful to not be caught staring. The last young man Dojihla had noticed gaping at her was hit in the face by a fistful of river mud.)

  Several seasons had now passed since Dojihla had led a group of other young ones on one of her quests. Her parents were relieved about that. I knew this for a fact, having listened to their conversations about their daughter. They used to worry that she would be hurt during one of those foolhardy expeditions, but they never told her not to go. Now, though, they had the opposite worry. They were afraid that she would never go.