Great Sky Woman

by Steven Barnes

Frog found himself watching not the dance but the play of light and darkness. While the other boys were lost in the facts and fantasies, Frog etched images on the ground, thinking of shadows.

  Shadows. Men. Shadow-images of men. What were they? Fire was alive, he knew. It ate, it breathed, it died if drowned or neglected. It roared with anger through the brush, it drove game and was given a portion of the food in reward.

  But what were shadows? They might be the soul-force, some form of num… he wasn’t certain, and had never heard a story that really helped him understand. But when he stared at them, he thought of sacred drawings on Great Earth’s rocks and trees and wanted to make such images himself.

  Frog shook himself from his reverie. The two visiting hunters had retired for the evening, and Uncle Snake had stopped dancing. His muscular torso gleamed in the firelight. “Men are weaker than beasts,” he said, panting. “But we have fire! And we have spears! And by the shadow of Great Sky, we choose what will live—” His right hand opened. Within it lodged a black pebble. The boys groaned in appreciation. “And what will die!” He opened his left, revealing a white pebble.

  “My father is a great magician!” Scorpion whispered to Frog. Frog said nothing, irritated that Scorpion would say “my” instead of “our.”

  Even distracted by thought, it seemed he had been the only one to see Uncle Snake take the pebbles from his waist pouch as he danced. Had no one else glimpsed that furtive motion? The other boys remained entranced. No, they had seen nothing. Then Snake sank to the ground in ritual conclusion. The boys drummed their feet on the ground in appreciation.

  Snake’s single eye peered up, locked with Frog’s.

  Uncle Snake knew that Frog knew.

  And Frog knew that if he said nothing about it, neither would Uncle Snake.

  At night they lay back against their skins, and Frog pointed up at the clouds. “It looks like a baobab,” he said.

  Scorpion squinted. “How do you see that?”

  “You cannot see it?” Frog asked. He pointed up at one foamy edge. “The trunk, there. And the edges are branches. And the stars are like shrikes, perched on the branches.”

  For a moment Frog thought that Scorpion understood, might answer with his own discovery. That would be good, to have at least one brother, or stepbrother, who could see what he saw.

  Instead, Scorpion said: “If you are trying to fool me, I will beat you.” Genuine anger made his voice brittle.

  “Perhaps I was mistaken,” Frog said, and stretched upon his hide and tried to sleep.

  In the morning, his stepfather let the visiting hunters lead the boys through a variety of rolls and movements designed to stretch and strengthen their bodies, to prepare them for wrestling. “Watch the monkeys when they awaken!” Uncle Snake said as they suffered. “They do not just get up and spring for a sunfruit. They bend and twist and yawn and stretch. Look at the great cats. They stretch before they hunt, and before they lay down, and they are greater killers than men. We must learn from them.” His ravaged face made it impossible to dispute his hard-won knowledge. Some of the other boys thought the wounds were terrifying. Frog found them beautiful.

  So, thought Frog, these were the lessons of the hunt chiefs and the boma fathers. It was good to hear these secrets, the things that men knew. Perhaps when he knew more of them he would no longer be afraid of Scorpion and the larger boys.

  One at a time, Snake wrestled with the newcomers, and they demonstrated how hunters grew strong in the northern bomas. Then they taught the boys. Frog lost more than he won, of course, but he lost “pretty,” which was considered better than winning “ugly,” or without grace, as Scorpion often did. And of that, he was justly proud.

  Afterward, they breakfasted and then left for the hunt, Frog feeling as springy and light as his namesake.

  “See this indentation?” Uncle Snake brushed his fingertip against a cloven zebra print at the root of a nettle-bush, stopping it at a tiny break in the smooth, rounded edge. “It means that the hoof is cracked. He has been in dry land. Little water to drink. Walking over rocks. That crack means that he cannot run well. Track him. This one is ready go to the mountain.”

  Snake lowered his face to the ground and sniffed. “Tell me,” he said. “What are the other prints?”

  Frog studied the ground. He knew what his uncle was asking. A hunter had to stalk one animal at a time. If another beast was unlucky enough to come across his path, and in so doing to offer up its flesh and spirit, then so be it. A true hunter studied scat, prints, weather, territory and tools. He understood that the morning’s wrestling was not merely exercise for the body but a way of knowing the strengths and weaknesses of his brother hunters as well. At a glance, he had to recognize the individual animals in a herd, determine their health and mood, and choose the ones who were the best bet.

  Zebras were a mainstay of Ibandi cooking. Frog knew that they lived in groups, like men. Unlike humans, they loved the company of other animals: gnu, ostriches, antelopes and wildebeest. This was good: tracking a zebra meant opportunities for a fruitful, belly-bursting hunt.

  Frog could not throw a spear as far as his fellows, or run as fast, but he remembered everything, and could separate tracks made one upon another upon another. What he learned here, he would never forget. “Oryx, kongoni, gazelles, eland and serval,” his strong, wise uncle said, pointing out indecipherable impressions in a bewildering tangle of tracks. The eland tracks were a bit like the zebra tracks, the oryx’s were more heart-shaped, and the serval’s four toes made it easy to mark out.

  Scorpion blinked. “How do you do that, Father?” Some of the other boys nodded their own confusion.

  Frog kept his thoughts to himself. How could the others not see?

  “Open your face-eyes. Practice,” Snake said. “Who can tell me when zebras begin to mate?”

  No answer from the other boys. Snake’s single eye seemed to look right through Frog. I know you know. Tell me.

  “The third spring,” he replied.

  Snake grinned and ruffled Frog’s hair affectionately.

  “How many young are born at a time?”

  Frog did not answer, although the eyes of his fellows were upon him. One, he thought.

  “One?” Scorpion finally ventured.

  Uncle Snake nodded and led them on. Scorpion puffed his chest out. “See?” he said to his stepbrother. “You don’t know everything.”

  “You are right,” Frog said. “I still have much to learn.”

  Scorpion seemed to walk a little straighter and stronger for quite some time.

  The sun was directly overhead as they crouched in tall brush, peering out at the dusty plain, a stretch of lightning-burned grass.

  “How many in a group, Uncle?” Frog asked.

  Snake squinted his good right eye. “One to four hands,” he said.

  A younger Frog had imagined all zebra to be much the same, but under Snake’s painstaking tutelage he knew them to be of infinite variety, each with its own temperament, stripe pattern and length of mane. Each had a slightly different eating and sleeping cycle. Narrow, short, long, they were as individual as faces in the boma.

  Some zebra had narrow and closely spaced stripes covering most of the body and extending down to the hooves. Mountain zebras, found in Great Sky’s foothills, had narrower bars on the body than on the rump, like plains zebra. Some had little striping at all.

  The flesh of plains zebras often sizzled on Ibandi spits, and their skins made broad-striped coverings for Ibandi huts. Their hues ranged from black to dark brown on a white to buff background. In some cases, there was shadowing on the flank and rump between the dark and white striping.

  One precious day at a time, Frog Hopping learned his lessons.

  Late that day, they came to the edge of a vast, burned clearing, and in that space Uncle Snake shushed them and had them hunker down to watch as, distantly, two leopards stalked four gazelles. The quartet faced the boys, chewing at the new growth while making
certain the humans were distant enough to pose no threat. They seemed not to see the leopards at all.

  The cats were to the side, mostly hidden in the grass. One breath at a time, they edged closer to their prospective meals.

  “Watch carefully,” Uncle Snake said. “The leopards are fast and strong but also smart. They do not waste their num. The leopards will get close before they spring.”

  Frog didn’t know who to cheer for. The gazelles? The leopards? The cats edged around the burned grass, and by instinct or cunning they kept a tree between themselves and a gazelle with a slight limp.

  Yes! To Frog’s delight he realized that he had detected the animal’s weakness, even without Snake’s urging. He was a hunter!

  When Frog’s nerves were at the edge of breaking, the leopards sprang. The four gazelles all spotted the cats at the same time, and the chase was on.

  Three of them vanished into the grass, but the fourth was cut off by the male leopard, and in doubling back fell into the claws of the female. The dust hadn’t settled before Frog saw that its throat was in the female’s jaws. More dust flew as its legs scrabbled. It seemed to Frog that the leopards were oddly gentle, almost as if they were protecting the terrified beast as it settled down into death.

  “Sometimes the hunter wins,” Uncle Snake said, watching, “and sometimes the prey.”

  “Uncle Snake, which are we?” Frog asked.

  “Both,” Snake replied. “We are both.”

  “The first to complete his bow wins a song,” Snake said.

  This was an important moment. Frog had been given bows before, but not allowed to make his own. Not until now. A hunter in the brush always brought his tools with him, but sometimes it was necessary to improvise.

  Snake gave each boy a measure of dried and stretched antelope gut. Their only tool was the stone knife all Ibandi boys carried in their waist pouch. All the rest they were obliged to find themselves.

  Frog searched until he found a sapling that spoke to him, whispering, I am the one, in the plant language a hunter could hear only with his heart. With his stone knife, following instructions given by Uncle Snake and the other boma males countless times, he whittled it into the perfect shape and length. From his heel to his shoulder it stood.

  He attached the antelope gut, looping it over notches at either end of the bow. He slipped the gut over one of the tips, set his foot against the secured end and bent it, slipping a loop around the other end. When he released the tension it sprang to life, filled with energy and power, awaiting his touch.

  His chest swelled with pride. His first bow! It would spend more time unstrung than strung, of course. He did not want the life to leak out of the wood.

  Frog presented his creation to Uncle Snake, who examined it without expression. Doubtless he would have enjoyed it if Frog had been swifter to complete his task. Instead, he was the fourth of eight. Scorpion had been faster, and Frog thought his bow looked better as well.

  One at a time, Snake urged the boys to test their new weapons. Scorpion’s eye and arm were strong: he hit the stump of a lightning-burned tree with little effort. Frog hung back, hoping that Snake would forget him, but had no such luck.

  “Here is an arrow,” Snake said to Frog. “Hit that rock.”

  Frog drew, aiming where Snake had indicated. He felt the sweat start from under his arms—not from the heat, although the sun was broiling them all. His cousins watched, eyes sharp and curious.

  Frog aimed as carefully as possible, pulled the string back and let fly, missing the rock by a handsbreadth.

  “Practice,” Uncle Snake said. The right side of his mouth curled up in a smile. “Good, but no song.”

  After they had finished, Snake gathered the boys around. In the dust they drew images of buffalo and antelope, simplified so that they looked little like Father Mountain’s four-legged except perhaps for the horns.

  “I will show you special signs, signs you must know,” said Snake.

  “Why?” asked Lion Tooth, a boy from Wind boma. Lion Tooth wore a necklace of gleaming cat fangs, and chopped his hair so that it was short on the sides and high along the back of his head, like a lion’s mane. Five years older than Frog, he had accompanied Uncle Snake on his outing as an assistant.

  “Because tongues change, but the signs are more constant,” Snake answered. “You can go horizon to horizon and farther still, meet bhan and other men. Those you meet may not speak as we do, but they will understand the signs.”

  The other boys nodded, but Frog repeated Lion’s question. “Why?”

  “Because all men live the same life,” he said. “We are born. We grow. We mate, father children.” With each of these words, his fingers traced lines in the dust, images representing these states of life. “We grow old and die.”

  “All men do these things?” Frog asked.

  “All men.”

  Frog thought carefully. “Why do we have to die?” he asked.

  With a hint of exasperation, Uncle Snake drew them around him in a circle, and beneath the full moon, he danced them a story.

  Once, a long long time ago, there was a tribe who lived beside a lake. They were much beloved by the sun and the moon, and by Great Mother and Father Mountain. One day after they had placed a beloved medicine woman in the ground they asked: “Why must we die?”

  Father and Mother had pity on them and gave them the gift of eternal life. So they lived and they loved, and nothing could kill them, and they lost fear. When they lost fear they made mistakes while hunting, and often slept holding starving children, their swollen bellies protesting the lack of food.

  Next, they lost love. When no one died, they lost the joy of new life, for the children. Husbands and wives no longer made love to each other, because they were busy exploring and playing games.

  But as time went on, all that could be learned in life had been learned. There was nothing to do, no adventures to have. They cared not about one another, and they forgot their hunting, so that much of the time they were cold, and hungry, and alone.

  They lived on, and with no fear of death their days at length lost their spice, and life lost its color.

  One at a time they went to Mother and Father. They prayed in the shadow of Great Sky, asking Great Mother to give them any gift that would make them love and learn and taste life once again.

  She gave them Death.

  And this time, they understood, and were grateful.

  “Signs,” Snake spoke in conclusion. “We hunt. We build fire. We fight against animals and men. We walk far. Each of these things we do, and all men do. If you know these signs, you can speak to others who have the knowledge.”

  “I will study,” Frog said. “Who makes the signs?”

  “They have always been.”

  “Could one make new signs?’

  Uncle Snake looked at Frog with something close to suspicion. “Why? There are no new things. All that is has always been.”

  “Always?”

  “Always.” He stopped, and seemed to take Frog’s question more seriously. “I tell you what. Find one of these ‘new things’ and bring it to me. Then we will speak.”

  Chapter Ten

  As the group turned northward, they retraced their steps such that Frog knew they would eventually pass the bhan boma a second time. Regretting his earlier, unkind thoughts, Frog promised himself to leave some bit of food behind, as had Uncle Snake.

  Suddenly, without consciously understanding how he knew, Frog became aware that something was wrong. He sniffed the air, catching the scent of burnt wood and something else, something that churned his stomach. The wind shifted, and the smell came to him more clearly: burnt flesh.

  It was only later that his eyes detected the first plume of smoke.

  Frog’s fists tightened as he glimpsed the first burned hut. Holes and gaps were torn in the thorn walls, as if some kind of desperate fight had raged within. He could almost hear the screams drifting in the wind. The stink of their terror drowned o
ut that of their scat and piss. The burned and mutilated bodies of the small, strange, sickly people were sprawled around the sand as if life had never burned in their eyes at all. Men, women, children. All dead. Snake and the hunters entered so carefully they might have been stalking leopards. Only after they searched carefully did they allow the boys to enter.

  “There are terrible things in the world,” Uncle Snake said. The death on the left side of his face seemed to have distorted the right. “I am sorry that you must learn of them so young, but the time has come. Come, see.” Frog retched, his mind and stomach overwhelmed. Some of the other boys also lost their food, and no one shamed them.

  Frog walked so softly he barely left footprints, looking at everything, eyes wide as he passed the bloodied corpses. He had never seen violent death before, although he had seen dead babies, and Hot Tree’s eldest daughter had succumbed to fever two summers past.

  He gasped as he approached their hearth: someone had emptied his bowels atop the stones. No question: that was human scat lumped in the ashes. The insult was almost beyond imagining.

  Frog poked at the dark lump with a dried willow stick. These invaders were human—judging by the size and texture of their scat, large men who ate generous portions of meat. His attention was drawn to a few interesting flecks of vegetable matter, which he probed with the tip of his stick. There… little white seeds speckled within. He didn’t recognize them at all.

  Frog examined the feces, their thickness, the dryness at the surface and the moistness within. Remembering the previous day’s blazing heat, he decided that this violation had happened yesterday.

  Then Scorpion yelled, “What are you doing, staring at shit! Come! Wounded man!” and Frog sprinted to the boma’s torn gate in time to see one of the hunters dragging in a wounded bhan on a bloody zebra skin.

  It was Silent Warthog, who just days ago had held a sick, flyblown baby in his arms and offered them shelter, however poor.

  Scorpion was shaking. Frog had never seen his stepbrother like this, shivering and weak. Frog touched his shoulder in sympathy, and Scorpion took his hand, held it tightly.