Foragers

by Charles Oberndorf

  “Yes,” said Lightfoot Watcher.

  I faced Lightfoot Watcher.

  “You have seen it?” asked the almost-a-man.

  Lightfoot Watcher hesitated under I’s gaze. I didn’t know why she wanted Lightfoot Watcher to lie. “Yes,” Lightfoot Watcher said. “The animal has two teats like a woman who’s given birth, but she has no infant to nurse. Its skin is as dark as the darkest earth. It lived in a boulder for a number of days, and then it left.”

  “Do you know where it went?”

  “The healer tracked it, but its trail disappeared.”

  “Was there only one animal?”

  “Yes.” Lightfoot Watcher’s voice sounded different. The lie was audible.

  The stranger widened his eyes and looked to I. “Was there only one such animal?”

  “Yes,” said I.

  That should have been the end of it. The animal was seen, and the animal was gone. There was no reason for the Stranger to talk further or to know anything about the Winding River, where I and Flatface and Talk Too Much lived. But the Stranger had more to say, and he did not avert his eyes while speaking. “I come from far away. Where I live there are many like the animal with teats. These animals flock together like birds in the sky. They cannot stand to be alone. They eat food like our food. They use land the same way we use land. But they breed constantly. They breed so often that their women always need teats.”

  Lightfoot Watcher listened with such dismay that I began to doubt what the stranger was saying. The words sounded like one of Talk Too Much’s swamp stories, where the evil thing in the swamp that ate children was always described as having several terrible habits along with its taste for children.

  The Stranger continued. “I want to find this animal and take her away. She should be returned to where she lives. Tell me about the boulder that she lived in.”

  “I was told it fell from the sky,” said Lightfoot Watcher.

  “Tell me where it is,” said the Stranger, and he was smart enough to give eye to Lightfoot Watcher.

  I, too, looked to Lightfoot Watcher, who said nothing, who did not live by the river, who had no reason to keep another male far away, who owed no favors to the healer for whom she had done much without exacting any promise in return.

  “Tell me the reason you won’t tell me.”

  Lightfoot Watcher said, “Where the boulder is there is one man and another and another.”

  “I am not seeking a mate. I want to find the animal and take her to where she lives.”

  “The boulder,” Lightfoot Watcher said, “is by the lake. I can show you the trail.”

  “I have seen that boulder. It rests on the beach. It trails gray and blue fabric in the water. There is one deeper in the woods. I need your help to find it.”

  I didn’t believe these words about a boulder trailing fabric. She was surprised by how readily the Stranger had met Lightfoot Watcher’s lie with one of his own. Having no argument to make, she instead leaned forward. “Go away,” she said. “Go away from here. If you must find the animal, find her on your own. There is no woman who gathers or hunts near the boulder who welcomes you. You now sit in a house full of wisdom. This is not a place to sleep or to eat. No one welcomes you here. No one has food to share with you. Go away.”

  I backed out of the hut and stood away from the opening. Lightfoot Watcher stayed where she was. Her daughter looked to one woman then the other before going to stand beside her mother. The Stranger watched this, waited a moment, then stood. The large bundle the color of muddy water had straps, and he slid his arms through them until the bundle was secure on his back. Without a word, gesture, or look, he left the Many Huts and disappeared into the woods. What would he really do if he found the animal?

  Lightfoot Watcher and her daughter did not want to remain in the Many Huts, and they left for the clearing where they had spent the previous night. I remained alone, and she almost followed the mother and her daughter. She did not want to meet the Stranger again, and she was sure he would return. He did not have the hands of one who could live in the woods.

  The Many Huts’ emptiness was no longer peaceful; there was something very empty about this kind of solitude. There was hut after hut after hut, and it looked as if the Many Huts had been built without meaning, as a way of filling up time when one was tired of staring at something, tired of finding food, and tired of people.

  She returned to the edge of the clearing where the pole rose from the ground. Near that was the first hut, and she entered it. There was a circular hole in the roofing that allowed light to enter. In the center of the floor was an earthen bowl still damp with rain water. From the large bowl, radiating outward, were small gutters to carry the rain out of the hut. There was a tarabayza‚ the word her mother had used, a word that I recalled with some ease: four wooden legs rising as high as a woman’s legs, and across that a surface as flat as a cleared camp: a series of tree trunks split in half, smoothed over, laid down flat side up. Atop the tarabayza were the tools, each one made of the same material as her gzaet. Beside them were several stones for sharpening the blades of several tools. The tools themselves were old, so old that they were dented and stained with splotches, and not one had the same color as the boulder in the clearing. Her mother had said there had been more tools when she was a child, and that the tools had looked better. The tools were as old as the gzaet, as old as the knife she carried and used only for healing.

  The next few huts had more tools. I went on to other huts to look for different kinds of wisdom. She saw male wisdom provided for a woman, perhaps so she could wisely choose whose gifts to accept. She saw clay laid out in such a way so she could learn how to make a pot for cooking. She saw different kinds of knots, more than she had known existed. She saw different styles of thatching. And she saw female wisdom. She saw drawings upon rocks of animals and ways to butcher them. She saw drawings of ways to hold a child as she emerged from your womb.

  There was no drawing or depiction of the animal or the boulders it might live in. There was no depiction of any kind of animal that was shaped like a person and flocked like birds. She started glancing into huts, skipping huts as the day progressed and the light dimmed. She headed finally to the older huts, the ones toward the center clearing. The thatching had gone gray with time, and a musty smell filled the clearing. In one hut there were drawings with more lines and colors than she had ever seen, but the colors were as soft as sand, and she could not make out what was drawn. The drawings were not made on rock or wood, and the fabric she touched crumbled a bit. In the end she found nothing of use. A slazan woman who had seen such an animal before had never come to the Many Huts to share that wisdom.

  Then she looked through the huts a second time, casting quick glances inside each one to look for a second kind of wisdom. And she found nothing. She saw no sign of slazans who wore skins as thin as leaves, the color of muddy water, who wore sandals that left tracks like the tracks of the animal with teats.

  She finally left for the clearing where Lightfoot Watcher and her daughter awaited her. Lightfoot Watcher worried that the Stranger might find them so close to the Many Huts. The daughter echoed her mother’s fear. They followed the paths south until the forest light dimmed, then found a clearing where they could build a fire.

  Now that she felt safe, Lightfoot Watcher asked questions to the point of rudeness, and I found she had no interest in answering. She wanted to sit in quiet solitude on the other side of the fire and concentrate on her thoughts, which rushed over her mind like low water over rocks—there was no wisdom about the animal, no wisdom about the Stranger, each had worn the same kind of skins, the Stranger had said he knew where the animal lived, the Stranger was a man who came not in search of a place to gather food or a woman who would accept his gifts and then mate with him, but instead came in search of the animal—but each time she could almost make sense of these thoughts and hear a clear voice in the soft rushing waters, Lightfoot Watcher asked another of her question
s, and all sound was lost.

  Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter asked the question that made all thought impossible. “Do you think the strange man will follow us back to the boulder?”

  The Thirteenth Day

  At dawn Lightfoot Watcher said she could not gather that morning: her belly weighed too heavily. I left to gather alone knowing that when she returned, Lightfoot Watcher would have walked off with her daughter and her digging stick and found some quiet place in the woods to deliver her child. No one was in the clearing when she returned, and all she could hear were the sounds of the forest. She divided the food she had brought back, and she mashed up some smoked meat. Lightfoot Watcher knew she shouldn’t have asked I to take one of the twins. Another woman could not do for her what only a mother should do. You had to take care in the way you nourished your life. If you take all a bird’s eggs, there will be no eggs when you are older. If you shoot all the lightfoot in a clearing, there will be no lightfoot to hunt when you’re hungry. If you take all the berries, there will be no berries to attract the lightfoot. Afterward you will always be hungry for the rightness of things.

  If she had not been so weighed down by these thoughts, I would have heard Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter much sooner, the quick trampling of a child running through the woods. “Healer!” she called out. “Healer!”

  I stood up, expecting to hear about the child who was born.

  “The baby’s coming. It’s out of the womb and coming, but the water hasn’t broken.”

  Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter ran off, and I followed. Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter knew exactly where to run, and soon they came upon her mother.

  She was crouched down, her back pressed against a smoothbark tree, her knees bent outward, her feet firmly planted. Her pubic apron was off, and she had tied the kaross so nothing hung below her waist. Before her she had dug two holes, one for each placenta. When I knelt before Lightfoot Watcher, she saw that one hole had been dug deeper than the other. The ground was dry.

  “The water hasn’t broken,” said Lightfoot Watcher.

  “I can break it.”

  Lightfoot Watcher said nothing. She groaned instead. The head was making its way out. There was a shimmering color covering it.

  “May I touch you?” said I.

  Lightfoot Watcher opened her eyes wide: yes.

  I wished she were back at her hut and hearth, back where she kept everything. She had the ideal tool for this: long, thinner than any stick, pointed, and made of the same thing as the gzaet. Here all she had was her medicine knife. She withdrew it from her sheath. “Be as still as a rock.” The head was pressing against the water skin and emerging from Lightfoot Watcher at the same moment. Lightfoot Watcher’s thighs were taut, her head was back, eyes closed. Now it was like playing music; you knew what to do, you moved with ease and with speed. I pinched at the water skin, pulled it toward her, and sliced through with the knife. The waters flowed out. The infant came out with equal ease, virtually landing in I’s hands.

  Lightfoot Watcher looked to the healer, eyes open. “Is it a girl?”

  “It’s a boy.”

  “I will bury it.”

  The second child was also a boy. I stood aside while Lightfoot Watcher accepted it into her hands. It sucked in air and life. It cried and continued to breathe. It accepted its true body, and the true body remained.

  The child suckled from his mother’s teats after they returned to the clearing, and the daughter ran about the nearby trees with an excitement she couldn’t contain. She sang one of the healer’s healing songs like it was a game song.

  I barely noticed this. Each thing she owned was where she had left it, but everything looked different. She scanned the ground for the three-clawed spoor of a foodgrabber‚ but she couldn’t find one. Instead she found tracks belonging to the Stranger.

  Lightfoot Watcher said, “Have you mislaid something?”

  I looked up. Lightfoot Watcher’s hand caressed the infant’s head. She did not need a new worry. “No,” said I. “There are longfoot tracks.”

  “We have enough meat.”

  “Yes.” She looked at the spoor. The tracks went in the direction of the Many Huts. Why had the Stranger come here? “We have enough.”

  She looked through her bag and her kaross, and she found nothing different. But she was sure that the Stranger had gone through her things.

  They remained there for the day. Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter left with I at midday to gather for the journey back to Winding River. In the camp the infant slept or nursed, and Lightfoot Watcher had eyes for nothing else. She said nothing to her daughter, and while nursing she acted as if her daughter did not exist. That afternoon she sat on one side of the fire and told I that if the child still breathed when she returned to the Small Lake that she would give it a private name.

  “What name?” her daughter asked.

  “It’s a name for me and my son.”

  Lightfoot Watcher’s daughter looked away from her mother and over to the healer. I wanted to take the daughter into her arms, but the daughter needed to learn her solitude. I averted her eyes.

  I left the clearing to be away from Lightfoot Watcher. She wore her carry bag, and her healing knife was in its sheath by her hip. She did not go where she first had planned. She instead followed the trail toward the Many Huts and found the Stranger’s spoor as he approached their encampment and as he left. The daughter’s question kept sounding again in her head; I did not want the stranger to follow them to Winding River. The afternoon light had started to walk up the trees and toward the sky. I headed toward another part of the woods.

  The darkness was almost complete when she returned to the clearing. The daughter was curled up by the fire, a skin covering her body. Lightfoot Watcher stared into the fire, the infant in her lap.

  “I am here,” said I before she sat on the other side of the fire, “and I am cold.”

  “The fire,” said Lightfoot Watcher, “is here to be shared.”

  I had no words to share. She listened to the nighttime voices and to the way the fire burned.

  Lightfoot Watcher said, “Several days ago the woman you call Arm Scars told me another anger story when you had left hut and hearth.”

  I said nothing.

  “One woman and another told her that the healer who lived by Winding River would go where a dead body lay and cut up the body to see its insides and the way they were put together. One and another woman said the healer is sure to have breathed in one true body and another and is sure to be crazed and unreliable.”

  The story, in part, was true. When I first had learned the gzaet’s music, she would also try to learn the music and shape of a person’s body. Every now and then someone she tried to heal was too sick, too hurt, too old to be healed. That night, if the person was someone she did not know, if one of the moons was bright, if the trails were absent of nightskin spoor, she would go to the dead body and learn its shape with her knife. She tied fabric around her head to cover her mouth, so she would inhale only air. It was not something she did often, and each time she did it full of fear as the forest darkness, so much darker against the moons’ brightness, closed in around her. She said to Lightfoot Watcher, “No healer I know has done such a thing.”

  Lightfoot Watcher looked away from the fire and out into the woods. “I can understand why a healer would say what you have said. I can understand why a healer would be wise to apply her knife before scavengers applied their teeth. I can understand how the music might not touch what the fingers have not touched.” She lifted the infant to her teats. He squirmed for a moment, yawned, then relaxed. “All I ask is if the one I buried has felt the blade of a healer’s knife.”

  “No,” said I, her voice harsh, because anger was the best smoke to fill the air and hide where you had burned truth into ashes.

  “A woman gives birth alone. It is not often one woman knows where another has buried a child who has not breathed.”

  “The child,” said I,
“is buried and will remain buried.” Lightfoot Watcher nodded, but I did not know what the gesture meant.

  That night, before she slept, I lay back and remembered the feel of the slick surfaces of tiny muscles and the way they slid along fragile bones, and she heard patterns of music in her head, songs she had played for infants who had breathed in a true body but who soon after faced death as quickly as birth: a fever burned the infant’s eyes empty, skin swelled with an insect bite, an older child pushed or twisted too hard, or a pointed-ear had taken a good bite before the mother scared the animal off. Now, as she saw muscles that moved kicking legs or arms that barely reached or fingers that gripped, she heard the music differently, some of the patterns changed, and she played them over and over in her head, until she was sure she would remember them, so she could play them one day if such musics were needed again.

  The Fourteenth Day

  The next day’s journey was a difficult one for I. She had dreamed so often of having a daughter who would gather with her, who would sit by her side and watch her play the gzaet, who would one day become healer and let I properly enjoy a woman’s solitude; she had imagined this so carefully that she had forgotten how different each mother was. Of course Lightfoot Watcher would hug the infant to her, of course she would suckle him every time he cried, of course she would have much less energy for a daughter who should be learning her solitude. But her very proper and respectful daughter did not want to be forgotten like the remains of unripe fruit that’s been tossed aside after several mouthfuls, hunger making bitterness acceptable to the tongue. So the daughter stayed off the path and ran through the woods, dodging around trees, shouting out anytime she saw a patch of itchleaf or saw a crawling hardbite‚ anything that might have once attracted her mother’s concern. Lightfoot Watcher, whom I now thought of as Son Watcher, looked up the first time to say, “If you recognize it, you are big enough to stay away from it.” Then she would say nothing, but she did look up each time that her daughter called out. This didn’t seem to be enough, because the girl ran farther and farther from the path and called out louder and more often. The baby cried once, and Son Watcher raised him to her teat.