by Linda Hogan
BUSH WAS a brooding type of woman. She was, most always, exactly as she appeared to be. She had no need or use for social graces. Complex and simple at the same time, she was the right woman for the island of frogs, the island of feral children and wolves, of healing milk.
I don’t remember what it was about her I most disliked, but even in all the beauty, the discomfort of my being on the island with her was like a claw in my chest. It nearly hurt, her silence. Something in her, I felt, was unreachable. She carried a bit of darkness about her eyes. It wasn’t the kind of darkness that grows when someone is sick, but a deeper kind, the kind a well of water holds. I didn’t like her, but why should I have been different from anyone else? Surely not just because she had once loved me. And not because she was the one who knew my story, because she was in no hurry to tell me anything she knew about my life.
For a long time, I did not unpack the suitcase. I was convinced for days, then for weeks, that I would return to the mainland soon with Husk. I watched to see when our supplies were low, sending a psychic message across the lake, closing my eyes, praying to water and whatever else might reach him. Seeing him in my mind’s eye.
But just before he came each time, with Archway cookies for me, Bush divulged a part of the story I’d wanted and searched for. Once in a while, as the wind came up and the leaves blew from the trees, Bush would say, “Your mother was like the wind. Sometimes she was the winter wind and she chilled our bones and snapped frozen branches off the trees.” My mother, she said, was a storm looking for a place to rage. But there were times, she said, when Hannah was a warmer wind. “We were fooled then. We’d let her near and then she changed into ice and turned against us.”
With Bush, I didn’t feel as soft as I had on Adam’s Rib. I said what I thought, as if to fill the great silence. Once, frustrated with these tales, I looked at her and said, “You’re just saying that to keep me here. You just want me here to do all your work.”
And she laughed.
Taking offense at her, I went to my room and slammed the door. Sheepish, I came out in time for supper.
But it was true; she said just enough to keep me there. And I had to earn each word. I helped her prepare for cold weather. I sealed the gaps around windows, brought in wood. Bush disappeared at times, taking a canoe out into the water, returning with fish. I helped where I could, in spite of my anger and frustration. Some days I worked beside her in the garden, or at the stove or sink. At times, she put the bones for LaRue in place and told me another piece of history. Once, waiting for water to boil, she told me about the two trappers everyone called Ding and Dong. Each had accused the other of trespassing his traplines, springing the other’s traps and stealing the animals from the trap. The conflict grew. Finally one of them shot the other, then set out for the far north, where no one would bother searching.
She put a pin in a vertebrae. “You know who it was? Who stole from the traps?” She looked at me.
I resented the quiz. “What’s your point?” I said.
“It was Wolverine; they do this.”
I looked at her. “What’s that? Wolverine?”
“That’s what everyone wants to know.” She laughed. Not a hostile laugh. An easy one.
“Is that all? You’re just telling me that?”
Later, out stacking wood for the coming winter, I said, “You are too strange.” I was surprised at my own honesty, but who could lie on such an island?
And she said, “Your mother was a skin that others wore. The man your mother lived with kept animals in cages and they would cry at night like humans.”
I stacked the wood, washed dishes, used Pine Sol in the outhouse, and thought, always, about her few words. Sometimes they made sense. But still there were times I was determined to leave the island. I didn’t like it there and I wasn’t comfortable with Bush. I didn’t know then that what I really wanted none of us would ever have. I wanted an unbroken line between me and the past. I wanted not to be fragments and pieces left behind by fur traders, soldiers, priests, and schools. But so many nights, when it began to get dark, Bush would go outside and fill the generator with gas and create warm light and a room full of intimacy and she would say one more thing, just enough to keep me there, just enough to tie me to her and the island as if I were staked to it like the little floating raft of land with spiders.
And so I remained.
One day I unpacked the suitcase and put my clothing in drawers. Husk came and went many times. I swept the floors that had been at sea and I began to like them, and the stones, and the still-open windows. I grew accustomed to the green reaches of the vines and the floors that creaked at night when Bush walked over them.
WHEN RAIN FINALLY CAME, it started at night. I’d carried a lamp to my room and sat on my bed until late, thinking, trying to remember Dora-Rouge’s animal song. By then I had given up closing the window and one of the vine’s leaves had turned red. Green dragonflies floated in on the last of warm breezes, and drifted around the room.
A light rain fell at first, but soon it grew stronger, then fell in great torrents. It had the force of a sea behind it. There was roaring thunder. The sound of water lashing down filled me with such a longing, an ache in my chest I could not yet fathom, but now know as the animal heart yearning its way into being, pulled out of a song. I was drawn to the window, magnetized. Outside, the white stones of the footpath were shining beacons. In a flash of lightning, the trunks of trees were straight and pale, and downhill the island of spiders was visible. The sky broke, pieces of earth and mud flew up against the house and the water shining on the turtle bones made the skeleton look whole and alive, a pale turtle wanting to swim in the falling sea of a wet darkness.
With the window wide open, I lived inside water. There was no separation between us. I knew in a moment what water was. It was what had been snow. It had passed through old forests, now gone. It was the sweetness of milk and corn and it had journeyed through human lives. It was blood spilled on the ground. Some of it was the blood of my ancestors.
When I slept it was deeply, finally. I slept into another light as the sound of occasional thunder jarred the floor of the house.
At the first light of morning I sat up in bed. The storm by then was dark green and there was still a rhythmic song of falling water, but a larger noise was behind the rain, a great disturbance of air. I went to the window and looked up. In the first spread of light above us was a cloud, a great cloud of flesh and feather so thick the sky itself appeared to be moving as the wings of tundra swans clattered together, as they pulled themselves south. Their voices seemed to wake the land itself, which at that moment lived only for the great, beautiful birds, the sky full and moving. I wasn’t dreaming. I had no need to dream. This world I’d entered, however strange, was dream enough with its dark roots, its instinctual light and full sky. I had traveled long and hard to be there. I’d searched all my life for this older world that was lost to me, this world only my body remembered. In that moment I understood I was part of the same equation as birds and rain.
FIVE
AFTER I SAW the way storms moved in, I began to wonder how Hannah had survived the storm and its angry waters. I wondered at times what she, my mother, had thought of that world with its island of spiders, its fish leaping out of the lake, the plaintive cries of loon and wolf. What had she seen in the low sky that rested on water and land? What had she thought of the storms that moved in so quickly and gave themselves back to water? I wondered, too, what the world had thought of her. Our lives, the old people say, are witnessed by the birds, by dragonflies, by trees and spiders. We are seen, our measure taken, not only by the animals and spiders but even by the alive galaxy in deep space and the windblown ice of the north that would soon descend on us.
SIX
THE PEOPLE at Adam’s Rib believed everything was alive, that we were surrounded by the faces and lovings of gods. The world, as described by Dora-Rouge, was a dense soup of love, creation all around us, full and in
telligent. Even the shadows light threw down had meaning, had stories and depth. They fell across the land, and they were filled with whatever had walked there, animal or man, and with the birds that flew above.
Or, as Husk put it, “One day this will be proven true. You wait and see.” Even the tools and the fishhooks were alive, he maintained, and the ball-peen hammer.
At first, when Dora-Rouge and Husk said these things, I saw earth as a seed, with some great life stored inside it, waiting, the way a blood spot waits inside an egg for the next division of cells. And gradually I saw this world as that which gave birth to fish, the great natal waters parting to make way as birds left the sea and opened their wings in air.
The stones, too, were alive, the stinging nettles, the snails of Fur Island, and the tree which folded its leaves when touched by human hands. When I thought of this while walking the island, I felt its life. I remembered and loved it. I suffered for the felling of this world, for those things and people that would never return.
Not only this, but the division between humans and animals was a false one. There were times, even recent times, when they both spoke the same language, when Dora-Rouge’s song was taken into account. “When humans forget to respect the bond,” said Bush, “Wolverine takes away their luck in hunting. That’s why LaRue never catches or takes a living thing.”
I didn’t ask again what a wolverine was. I’d already begun to think it was an animal with no true description. This time I just listened.
Bush was right about LaRue, the dealer in bones and hides and preserved fetuses. One day, after the rain, he knocked on the windowsill to get my attention. I went to look out. “Where’s the glass?” he asked. The window was wide open.
“Go to the door,” I told him. It seemed more proper.
He had come to take me on the long-ago promised fishing trip. He was tall and had to bend over to get through Bush’s door. “Are you ready to go? It’s still wet out. It’s the best time to catch fish,” he said.
“Ready? You’re late.” It was obvious I was perturbed. I didn’t try to keep this secret. It wasn’t just in my voice, either. I looked him over thoroughly. It bothered me that he’d come to my window.
“Hey, it’s tomorrow, isn’t it?” He shrugged, barely apologetic. Even his hat was camouflage. He didn’t want the fish to see him coming.
Finally, I consented to go. Fishing was a skill I might need in this place. And I might also impress Bush with my catch.
“Just a minute,” I said. “I have to tell Bush.” But he followed behind me to the garden.
“I’m going fishing,” I yelled at her and started to walk away, but as soon as he saw Bush, LaRue smiled and ogled her and walked straight into a branch. Bush didn’t seem to notice at all. It was as if he were invisible to her. And LaRue himself wasn’t the slightest bit humiliated, as I would have been.
He canoed to a little cove not far away, a quiet place with water that, unlike LaRue, looked deep. We stood awhile on the grassy shore. “Here,” he said, handing me a pole. “When you get a nibble, lift up.” He demonstrated how I was to jerk the pole.
“Okay,” I said. I practiced a few times.
“Hey. Watch that hook.”
“Sorry.”
I decided to walk a distance away from him. I saw a place I thought fish would like.
“Hold still!” he whispered loudly. “Just walking they can hear your feet on ground.”
“Well, I want to go in the shade.”
“Shh. Don’t talk. They can hear your voice.”
According to LaRue, my red T-shirt, also, was too bright.
“They can see you,” he said. Also, they could feel our presence.
“Here, use this.” He handed me another weight, instructing me how to drop it into the water and move it slightly along. “You aren’t holding still enough. Oh, shit, you got a bite. Pull up! Jerk it! No, it got away.”
AgainI tried to find my own spot.
“Be more still.”
“Then how come I’m the only one catching any,” I said, and I made a big show of the one, new to my hook, trying hard not to show my excitement.
With all my noise, my visibility, my loud feet, I was the one who caught fish. And not in any of the manners, styles, or techniques he insisted I use. And not jerking them as hard as he instructed either. I felt an inner glee.
As we left, LaRue put my two northern pike on lines and pulled them, thrashing, through the water alongside the boat. “Aren’t you supposed to kill them first?” I asked. I felt squeamish and sorry for the fish as they struggled to be free.
“This keeps them fresh.”
I didn’t like it. They wanted to live. When finally we stopped just short of the path to Bush’s, he said, “Come over here,” and placed them on rocks and cut the skin off them while they were still alive, not killing them, not removing their organs.
“Kill them!” I insisted.
“They’re too hard to kill.” He was irritated. “They don’t feel anything. They don’t have nervous systems. What, do you have a Bambi complex or something?”
“Then how can they feel your presence? Kill them,” I insisted. He was a poor excuse for an Indian.
Inside myself, I knew different things about fish, and I hadn’t even lived among other natives. I knew it from my heart. He offended the spirits of fish, I know this now, inside and out. And not long after the killing of the fish, a storm moved in suddenly, a dark cloud running in from the horizon, looming over us all at once. A wind came up, then pelting rain, half-ice, and as we headed toward the house, I felt the electric surge of lightning through my body, my hair rising up, a jolt in the spine.
“Shit! That was a close call!” LaRue said. “Hurry!”
I knew the lightning sought him out. I moved away from him. Of course, he would say it was just coincidence.
Another bolt touched down.
When we reached the house, Bush was at the door, worried about me. I could see that she did not want to invite LaRue in, but due to the storm, she had no choice.
After he left, I told her about the fish. She said there are consequences to human sins. “Some say Wolverine is a human gone wild,” Bush said. “That’s how it knows to hide out and escape capture. They know how to walk in the prints of other animals, especially those of men, like a shadow following them. That’s how Wolverine watches to see how humans treat the animals. And you never know where Wolverine is. He could be in the bushes outside your house. You would never see him. He’s a dark animal, large-jawed, with strong teeth and a terrible smell. A person must be careful what they say about the animals. They have another kind of listening. They can even hear your thoughts.
“There are proper ways of approaching animals and fish,” Bush said. “Just as there are proper ways to approach a woman.” She was putting together a beaver as she said this. She fed it a pinch of ground bark. “LaRue knows neither of these.” She worked slowly.
I have never forgotten how LaRue left the fish on a slab of stone, without skin or flesh. They were still alive, gill slits moving. Just a reflex, LaRue said. I hated him. I was certain Wolverine had trailed LaRue’s big feet, gone to meet him in a wide circle, to take away his luck and good fortune, both of which were already greatly diminished. I vowed I would never fish again. But he’d been partly right, I think now. About what the fish knew or heard.
• • •
THERE WERE TIMES when I felt strangely comforted by Bush’s words, by being on the island where I could see anything and everything coming toward us from all directions across water, could smell chimney smoke from a fire I had made myself. On those days there was a kind of peace. But at other times, even on warm days, I felt a chill. At those times, even during the most ordinary moments, there was a wariness in me—I kept an eye out for Wolverine or other furtive creatures. I would occupy myself by straightening up my room and cleaning my comb and brush, looking at the amber, and at my own face in the tiny smudged mirror that I kept inside my
purse. It was the only mirror in the house and sometimes I looked at myself in moonlight, in private. I noticed I had sad eyes, and made a mental note to look more cheerful. I tried to imagine what I’d look like without scars.
One day I dropped the mirror and it broke into many pieces. For a while I kept these, looking at only parts of my face at a time. Then I had no choice but to imagine myself, along with the parts and fragments of stories, as if it all was part of a great brokenness moving, trying to move, toward wholeness—a leg, an arm, a putting together, the way Bush put together the animal bones.
Finally, I gave up on the pieces of mirror. I gave up on all surfaces, even the taut skin of water. I knew what it held, what it could hold. As for people, I began to read their eyes to see what kind of souls they had. To look deeper. Bush, for example, had a soul strong as hardwood, and she was loved by the land. Nature loved her. Frenchie was a spirit sad and masked.
I began to see inside water, until one day my vision shifted and I could even see the fish on the bottom, as if I was a heron, standing in the shallows with a sharp, hungry eye.
I did fish again, after all, in the canoe with Bush, finding the fish with my eyes.
“How do you do that?” Bush wanted to know.
I was proud of my new talent. “I just look,” I said.
We treated the fish well. We respected their lives and their deaths. We put them out of their pain as soon as they were caught.