Solar Storms

by Linda Hogan

  “But I came all this way.”

  “I know,” said Bush. She took me on her lap like the mother I never had.

  ALTHOUGH I TRIED AGAIN to contact Hannah, I didn’t see her again until two weeks later, when she was dying. By then, we’d been forced out of the room at Mrs. Lampier’s. The policemen had come by with an order to evict us. Too many people, it read, were inhabiting too small a space. The fire department wouldn’t permit us to remain. But we knew it was because Bush had been going to the meetings and had fierce opinions about the dams, and she’d been speaking out.

  We made an attempt at finding a new place, one we could afford. But nothing was available. No one would rent to us. So, with nowhere else to go, Tulik insisted we move into his house, the house surrounded with the whalebone fence, the pieces of which looked like teeth though they were ribs. “Ena, you’re practically family, anyway,” he said. He called her by her real name.

  Even so, Tulik had little room. Or what we called room, anyway. We could help keep up the house, he told us, though no one could ever keep up with him. He had mighty energy and he needed little rest. Worse, he was more orderly, even in a small, crowded place, than Dora-Rouge had ever dreamed of being. The only person he allowed to be messy was the dog, Mika, who left fur in her wake. Mika was the offspring of two of his favored onetime sled dogs.

  Indoors it was dark. It was a house where, in summers, outside light came in through cracks in the walls, and in winter, the light from inside fell out across snow and ice, looking like fracture lines in the earth where inner light and fire were opening, breaking out. Like Pangaea.

  The house itself was brown wood, stained from the weather, and some of the wood was beginning to rot. It had once, long ago, been painted white.

  A small globe of the world sat in one of the windows. Tulik used it when he read the news, which he did daily, and when earthquakes occurred, he looked always at the other side of the world to determine where aftershocks might strike. Always there was balance, he said.

  He was a tribal judge, one of the elders. Despite the fact that he’d gone snow-blind once while out with his dog team, and still squinted in bright light, he was a good hunter. With Tulik, it seemed as if the world had conferred something special on him. People recognized it and valued him.

  He lived with his daughter, Auntie. She was called that not because she was an aunt, which she was, but because the word sounded comforting and so like the language of her mother, like some other gentle words from the north. So it was a name, not just a title.

  The young people all called Tulik Grandfather, and all of us in the household called his grandson just by the name Grandson. I didn’t even know his Christian name, Calvin, until years later, in court.

  As neat and orderly as Tulik was, that was how sloppy his daughter, Auntie, was. She balanced him out, she said, like aftershocks around the globe from a recent quake. Then she laughed. Auntie, one of the few people at the Fat-Eaters who wore glasses, had been a star trapper. She was a wide-boned, rugged woman who laughed often and deeply, told off-color stories and sang. She wore tight jeans and she was taller than most. She was a woman who lost things, left her keys in the car, left her glasses in places she could never see. She was trying to quit smoking the first day I met her, and when we moved in she was working on a dark blue quilt in order to occupy her hands. I remember her, always, as I saw her that first time. She sat in a little slant of light from a lantern, a light that fell across her face and touched the edge of her glasses. And she wore a red cotton sweater.

  Bush and Auntie hit it off like old friends. They were change-minded in the same fierce ways, but they had different ideas about how it should come about and they argued incessantly until their voices were little more than background noise. They were both so idealistic that they seemed younger than they were, and neither of them was tolerant of injustice of any kind. The two of them balanced each other as well, not in the realms of order and chaos, as with Tulik, but like day and night, summer and winter, two parts of the same thing. Bush was quiet in her ways, while Auntie was loud and often mistaken for aggressive. She would rise to any occasion as long as there was conflict; the rest she left alone. And she carried her medicine with her always. Not in the kind of bag made out of the tail of a beaver—those were considered improper and offensive to the animals—but she carried her help in soft white doeskin. And in both women, no matter how they tried to hide it, there was a softness that shone through. Together, I thought, as I listened to them talking outside at night, they formed the one woman I wanted to be someday, with a large portion of Dora-Rouge added to the recipe like flour or leavening, the thing that held it all together.

  Another woman lived there but only from time to time, a tiny woman named Luce. She came from a reservation down South. She had come to be with her family; they were protesting the diversion of the rivers, which ultimately would affect their own waters down below. Luce, proud of her intellect and her ability to read, looked at the weekly papers through a magnifying glass. She, on reading what was happening in the world, would always say, “It’s time we stop this.” And, “This must end.”

  “NO MORE COTS,” I declared to Bush, on moving into Tulik’s house. I looked him, too, in the eye with courage and said my back hurt.

  “Okay. No problem,” Tulik said. He smiled what I came to call his no-problem smile. “We’ll fix up the sleeping platform.” It was a wide shelf, the thing people with large families and frequent guests used to house others who traveled from place to place fishing or hunting. Entire families slept together on them, the many children tossing and turning, and parents snoring. Seeing it, I was sorry I’d spoken. By contrast, a cot now looked like a room at the Hilton. Plus, a cot would have been too small for Grandson and the cousins who visited now and then, curling up beside me, and stealing my blankets. I felt shunned, relegated to the world of sleeping children, and was sorry that I’d ever complained. But I kept silent about this. I had pride, but I began to sleep with Agnes’ coat over me.

  AT FIRST I hated having no privacy in Tulik’s crowded space, but then I learned that privacy, like beauty, was skin-deep. Also, I claimed a corner of Tulik’s for my own in daylight hours, a fraction of the little room on the side of his house where the cabinet radio stood with no electricity to fire it. I placed my amber there, in the corner the room slanted toward, a pillow to sit on, my hairbrush and pencils. I wrote my dreams there. Sleeping with the blue fur coat, I had many.

  I grew accustomed to our closeness. And to our silences. We had ourselves more strongly than I’d ever had in any private room. There were never invasions into thought or dream. The others knew the secret of dwelling inside their bodies, remaining there. They knew the secret peace of silence. And I grew to love Tulik. We were close, he and I. When I woke in the intimate space of morning, Tulik was already awake. At the break of day I heard his movement, his footsteps on the floor, the sound of the door opening and closing, the morning smell of smoke. After he went outside, when the door closed, I’d get up and pull on my jeans and go join him outdoors, my hair still tangled. Together we were quiet as we prepared for the day, him praying, me being silent, looking toward the marshes to the east. Then, when we were done, I’d go back inside, splash water on my face, wake Dora-Rouge and give her a warm washrag to clean herself. She had begun to fail since losing Agnes. Daily, as I combed her hair, she seemed weaker.

  One morning outside, Tulik looked across the land and said to me, “You know, Angel, here a person is only strong when they feel the land. Until then a person is not a human being.”

  I looked at him, not certain of what he meant. But it occupied me, this thought, and soon I saw that Tulik was right. On this land, a person had to live by feeling. There was no other choice. Dreaming, too, could be counted on; the best hunters still found their prey by dreaming the maps to the dark eyes of deer. There was a deep intelligence in this, and I, too, was feeling the rhythm of it inside myself. My heart and the beat of the land,
the land I should have come from, were becoming the same thing.

  One day while I was out, Tulik returned from the mail plane with a letter from John Husk. It was addressed to Agnes. DoraRouge told me to open it. It was written neatly. It said:

  Dear One,

  LaRue bought The Raven for $125 and I’m using the money to come see you. I hear there’s a way to get there. We’re worried here because we haven’t heard from you. How is your mother? Did Angel find Hannah? We had a strange ice storm, and so close to summer, too. The fish are still dying. I’m worried about you. Should be there about the 5th.

  Love everlasting.

  So Husk had not received the letter telling of Agnes’ death, after all. Now it was too late to get word to him. We were certain the mail was being intercepted. I looked forward to his visit both with happiness, because I’d missed him, and with apprehension for the grief he would discover, finding Agnes gone.

  “The fifth?” said Dora-Rouge. “That’s coming up soon.”

  SIXTEEN

  WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Bush spread the beaver furs on the platform and looked at Tulik. Tulik’s assessment of things went beyond his skills as a judge. His appraisal of people was most always on the mark; he could size up a man’s drunkenness in a glance, could determine when a child would be born by the way a woman walked, and whether it would be a boy or a girl. He knew the best time to plant a cold-weather garden, and he knew the winters of furs. Except for that of Wolverine, that is, because he, like everyone else, couldn’t remember seeing one, just a hint, a wide head in the shadows of trees.

  The furs were heavy and rich, even I could see that. Tulik laid a hand on the thick fur on top. “This one, one like this, would bring fifty dollars.”

  “You’re kidding.” Bush looked at him to see if he smiled. This was an extremely high price for the time. It was 1973, and the top cost of a beaver fur was thirty dollars, even with inflation.

  But Tulik knew these things because he’d had a hand in them for so long and he had an eye accustomed to weighing and measuring. Beaver furs he knew the best. “It’s a heavy fur. This one was taken in the winter of 1948.”

  “How do you know?” I asked him.

  “It was the year when winter was early. It fell in August. Beaver were few that year,” he said. Exporters had intercepted several traplines the year before and taken all the furs, leaving the native trappers no choice but to overtrap in order to trade for food and supplies at the post.

  “You see these longer hairs? And the thickness?”

  I leaned forward and looked, touched the dark pelt.

  “A skin this size then was equal to that of two lynx.” He looked at the fur beneath it. “This one is 1936, the time when a nearby village grew so hungry and cold they set out for a hunt carrying only rotted meat and sinew to eat. It was all they had.”

  Starvation, even now, was not to be spoken except in English or French, as if saying it would bring the skinny ghost of hunger back to the people who feared it. So all Tulik could say was that the hunters had vanished. They had gone far north to the place where beaver built dams of stone, to that spare place where the wolves became so hungry they were forced to eat beaver and sharpen their teeth on rocks. That was the year the dead remained frozen outdoors until late spring, standing, blue and thin and solid, gazing out at where hunger had come from.

  IN THE OLD DAYS, according to Tulik, the world was created by Beaver. “Yes,” he said. “There were no other creatures but them. They were the ones.” This was when trees were still in sky reaching down with their roots, looking for a place to take hold. It was when the world was still covered by water. At that time, ice lay down on half of every year. They were the ones. Beaver took down trees from the sky; they brought up pebbles and clay from somewhere beneath the vast waters. They broke the ice that had shaped itself over the water. They swam through it and they made some land. With pebbles and clay. When trees were still in the sky. They laid sticks down across the water. It was like a trail the new creatures and nations and people to come would walk across. In those days the faces of spirits lived on the water and windblown snow. There were no other creatures, none, except beaver who rose out from the darkness beneath waters, out of the lodges and dens and burrows of the world, places the rest of us have never seen, places at the center of earth. The only light was what came from inside the stars, from inside the yellow of trees. There was just freezing and thawing until Beaver took down some of the trees from sky, leaving nothing behind but teeth marks and wood chips. Beaver brought up clay and mud from the deep. Beaver created a pool, then a bog, then living earth. When Beaver shaped the humans, who were strangers to the rest of creation, they made a pact with them. They gave their word. They would help each other, they said. Beaver offered fish and waterfowl and animals. The people, in turn, would take care of the world and speak with the gods and all creation. Back then, the people could hear the beaver singing. Back then they still sang out loud. A song haunting and sweet. Back when there were no lights except in the eyes of animals. This is true. It’s what Tulik said. Like the voices of children coming out of water, so beautiful.

  WE LIVED THERE by natural light. Each morning, with the cracks of light coming through the walls of the cabin, we all sat together and drank coffee and ate greasy bread with margarine and sugar on it, a diet which agreed with me. At this time we related our dreams to one another, seriously at some times, and with laughter at others, as when Dora-Rouge dreamed she was a lounge singer. But whatever the dream, the faces of Tulik’s family were open faces, the eyes tender in a way I had not known before, even at Adam’s Rib.

  ONE MORNING, just after the arrival of Husk’s letter, I dreamed my mother was dead and that there had been a storm of ice pellets violently crashing to earth.

  “What did the place look like where she lay?” Tulik wanted to know.

  “It was a small room.” I tried to see it again. “Snowshoes hung on the wall above her bed.”

  He fingered his thin mustache.

  “The floor sloped,” I told him.

  Tulik said, “You better pack your things. You will have to go to her.”

  I looked at him for a long time, at his short, thick eyelashes, his narrow bones. Then I got up from the table and went to my corner of the room and packed a few things.

  Bush stood up as if to help me, but both Tulik and Dora-Rouge shook their heads. “She should go alone,” Dora-Rouge said.

  Bush looked embarrassed.

  Tulik pushed back his chair and got up from the table. “I’ll see if I can get a drop-off with the mail carrier.” As he walked out the door, he looked back once at Bush. She had doubts about me going to the place where Hannah lived. But things had changed. My need for protection was gone. If the dream was right, Hannah was harmless now. Bush was, after all, from another land, from the south, from another people. Maybe she didn’t understand this, I thought. The land here might love her, but it did not tell her the things it told the rest of us. It kept secrets from her. It excluded her. At times she even seemed lost.

  Bush watched Tulik walk away.

  “We’re in luck,” Tulik said when he returned. He was cheerful. He had offered the mail carrier’s son and assistant twenty-six dollars, nearly all he had, to take me to Hardy. “Mikky will take you. But you have to go today,” he said. “Hurry, get your things.” He took the money from behind the coal bin. It would cover a little more than gas.

  I bustled around. “I’ll pay you back. I promise.”

  But he only laughed in that deep way of his, soft at the same time his manliness would never be in doubt, even at his age. Even in his Eddie Bauer “fashion plate” sweater with blue snowflakes on it, the sleeves were pushed up to reveal his muscular brown arms. “Is that all you’re taking?” he said.

  But I had already learned how little to carry, how little I needed. Now how little I wanted.

  And when the young man, Mikky, came to take me to the plane, I carried only one small plastic bag of th
ings.

  As we walked to the plane, we chatted idly about the weather. Alongside Tulik, Bush followed behind us, trying to stay out of the way. Then, before I knew it, I climbed up into the little two-seater, strapped myself in, waved good-bye to Bush and Tulik, and the plane rattled across the land, over small houses, waters, the broken forests of trees. There was smoke in the air above spare, tired-looking settlements.

  We stopped once to pick up mail from a village, and then flew again over waters, canvas tents, shabby villages, and shabbier towns. Once we saw wolves curled up in balls beside the blood-wet rib cage of a deer. Mikky, the mailman’s son with rosy cheeks, flew lower to show me. “See? Right there.” He pointed.

  “I see them!” I said, excited.

  Finally, the wheels touched down near the remote and quiet Hardy. Mikky let me off at the point where the road to Hannah’s ended. He took out a piece of paper that looked official, scrawled a map for me to walk by, and left me standing at the edge of the dirt road that he’d used as a runway.

  I watched the plane leave, the grasses and bushes whipped by its wind. Then it was all quiet. I felt abandoned. I tried to get my bearings. There was no sun, no way of determining which way was which, but I set out to walk the four miles, following the map. I thought of Tulik’s words about strength, and as I walked I felt the land, the way a human being might feel it.

  There was an overpowering silence, not even the sound of a bird. Nettles grew between trees, and it seemed the land had overgrown the human worlds that had wandered through. They’d left their marks, however; I passed a rusted bulldozer, a burned-out area, and a place of cut trees where a road had once been planned, started, and then forsaken. Beyond that, away from the trees, was the place where military planes had used Indian land for a bombing range, for target practice.

  Woodsmoke came, blue-gray, from a little cluster of buildings that were partway down a small hill. My heart skipped, thinking it was Hannah’s. But according to Mikky’s map, I turned off before reaching those buildings. Wind carried the smoke, passed by me, and then vanished. A dog barked in the distance.