by Linda Hogan
When Dora- Rouge told Tulik about the plants that grew in my sleep, he said, “Dreams rest in the earth.” By that he meant that we did not create them with our minds. One day, after I’d drawn a plant, he said, “I know where that one is. Come on.” With great energy, he prepared to find it, rain or shine. We went searching for other plants, too, me wearing my rubber boots, trying to keep up with him. We tramped across land and swamp. As we walked through mosses, Tulik pointed out landmarks. We searched for the little elk lichens that grow at the edges where light and shadow meet. We canoed through marshes and waded in mud.
Some of the plants we would cut. Others had to be pulled by the roots, but only if there were enough left to survive. Each had its own requirements. We were careful, timid even, touching a plant lightly, speaking with it, Tulik singing, because each plant had its own song.
“I feel stupid, talking to plants,” I said to Tulik one day.
“What’s wrong with feeling stupid? Entire countries are run by stupid men. But,” he said, “soon you won’t feel that way.”
Some plants we tied with string and hung from the dark ceiling of Tulik’s house. Some we let dry for several days. Later we’d boil a plant or powder it and mix it with fat into a paste, with Tulik stirring the dark, bitter liquids until the house smelled dank with the mustiness of remedies. Some plants were from marshes, others from meadows. All were our sisters.
I sampled all the remedies and teas, sometimes drinking the bitterness of wormwood or maybe a cup of bluestem, to see what its effects were, all the time telling the plant, “Thank you,” because you have to speak with the plants even if it feels foolish. There was the mikka plant that took down the heat of inflammation, and scilla, a tea that would open the body for childbirth. I tried the salves, ate the soapy-tasting mixtures. I began to learn them and soon, as Tulik had said, I no longer felt embarrassed.
“Sing over this,” Tulik said one day, handing me a leaf.
“But I only know a death song.” All I remembered was Helene’s song and I was forbidden to sing it. I couldn’t remember Dora-Rouge’s animal-calling song, though I recalled the sound of it.
If all of Tulik’s remedies failed to help an ailing person, if all his roots and songs and teas were ineffective, Tulik sent for a woman from the east. She came when there was nothing to be done but to sing into the patient, to place new songs inside their body, songs that would replace illness with a song of mending. The woman’s name was Geneva and she seemed to shine with a kind of inner light. I thought of her as something like the sun, appearing from the direction of dawn, walking toward us from the eastern morning light. Geneva had a graceful walk and quiet ways, and even though I thought of her as an old woman, I realize looking back that she wasn’t much over forty.
Geneva traveled with a girl a few years younger than I was. I didn’t know the girl’s real name, but we called her Jo. On the first day Geneva came with this young apprentice. Jo and I became fast friends. We were rare, younger women who lived with older people and learned from them, but even if we hadn’t had that common bond, I would have loved Jo. In some ways, she was like a wizened old lady. In others, she was light and young. When she walked it was with an air of floating; she was quiet with an inner happiness. She specialized in treating bronchitis, yet she was still young enough and modern enough to say things like “That’s cool.”
Jo wore jeans and a single long braid fell down her left shoulder. She was skinny and tall and looked like a no-nonsense woman one minute, but in the next she could be a girl again, laughing, her voice almost like the sound of glass or bells.
I looked forward to the appearance of Jo even though she only came when someone was in pain or sick.
One day an old man at the settlement had something like a stroke and could not get up out of bed. I’d gone to the square little house with Tulik and the two women. The man was tired-looking, and his head was turned to the side; his eyes were open, but he couldn’t move. He was covered by a white sheet, his arms on top of it. When Geneva and Jo arrived, they stood on either side of him and sang. When the two women opened their mouths to sing in the small, tan-painted room, the sounds that came out were like nothing I’d heard before.
I was greedy to learn the songs. “Teach me,” I said. “I want to know that song.” And we would walk through the grasses laughing and singing, me sounding terrible, barely even able to keep time. Jo hardly noticed that I had no gift or talent, barely even a voice.
In those days, we were still a tribe. Each of us had one part of the work of living. Each of us had one set of the many eyes, the many breaths, the many comings and goings of the people. Everyone had a gift, each person a specialty of one kind or another, whether it was hunting, or decocting the plants, or reading the ground for signs of hares. All of us together formed something like a single organism. We needed and helped one another. Auntie was good at setting bones, even fractures where bone broke through skin. I was a plant dreamer, even though I barely understood what that meant. Tulik knew the land and where to gather herbs, mosses, and spices. He knew the value of things. Dora-Rouge knew the mixtures, the amounts and proportions of things.
Bush, too, had another gift, among her many, though I’d been led into thinking her skills were only those of fishing, hunting, and making financial deals with shopkeepers. I might never have known Bush’s other gift except for the day I was at the stove putting pieces of cut meat into a kettle of hot lard. Outside, a terrible noise, a dynamite blast, broke through the land. I jumped, turned suddenly, a careless movement, and the kettle of boiling grease tipped over. My arm was burned badly, seared. I could tell at once that it was a terrible burn. I cried out. I smelled my own flesh cooking and it made me sick. Aurora yelled, too, as if to match my screaming. Without wanting to, without knowing it, my legs ran out the door and down the slope to the ice-cold water. Tulik followed behind me, unable to keep up, calling, “Angel!”
I ran from the fire until winded. I fell into the water, lay down inside its coolness.
Auntie had followed behind Tulik, and as Tulik reached me, he shouted at her, “Get Bush. Hurry!” He yelled in the old language so I wouldn’t hear him. But I understood him. He said, “It’s a bad burn. Very bad.”
Auntie turned and ran toward the meetinghouse.
At the water, he leaned over me. Tulik was so tender. He couldn’t bear for me to feel pain. His eyes were filled with tears.
By the time Auntie returned with Bush I had stopped screaming and become silent and still.
Then it was Bush who bent over me, breathless from running, her face near mine. She lifted my arm from the water and looked at it. And when she put her hand over the heat, I screamed, “No! Don’t touch it!” By then I was shivering from the cold.
But she said, “It’s okay. It’s going to be all right.” As cold as it was, she lay down beside me.
“It’s bad, isn’t it?” I asked, remembering the smell of my own flesh burning. I felt strangely disconnected from my body, from the pain I knew was there. Then I felt sick and started to cough.
Bush took hold of my arm, held her head over the burn. “Hold still.”
I saw her hand become very red. She spoke to the burn, spoke with it, and said, “Burn, go away. Coolness enter.” With closed eyes, she said, “Heat, leave this skin.” She said this in many ways, as if trying to get the language right.
To my surprise the pain began to dim. The heat of it began to cool.
I’d burned my thigh as well, but didn’t notice it until later. Some of the hot grease had splattered into my right shoe.
By evening, the pain had lessened enough that I could rest and sleep. Tulik looked in Ek’s book to see what to use for fever. “Three-leaf,” he said. He went out the door, returning a few hours later with muddy boots, a sweat-stained shirt, and the little plants that looked something like clover.
I slept that night on the bed where Tulik usually lay, behind the dark curtain, on a fur, soft and comforting. The bed smell
ed of Tulik, of fresh wood and sunlight. I slept.
By then Tulik had sent for salve from Geneva. The salve arrived later that night. It had been carried by runners. They’d sent the message from town to town, then returned the jar of salve in the same way, each one passing it to another as in a relay.
I had a slight fever. Bush said she thought it was from the burn itself.
Later I lay there thinking of the words Bush had used to talk fire away. I’d never heard of such a thing before. Every new thing I learned about her raised her in my esteem. Bush was still coming together in my mind.
Later I learned that there are those who can stop bleeding just by talking to it. It seemed too simple. I wondered if I could talk loneliness away, or scars. Maybe it was how Dora-Rouge had talked with the water or how Agnes had spoken with, and learned from, the bear.
AURORA WAS THE CHILD of many parents. We shared in her care. At night, in my wakings, I tended to her. Sometimes when she cried out with a dream, Bush picked her up and carried her about until she slept again. Or Tulik would stand beside her and speak with her, calling her “my grandfather,” and saying such things as, “Although this world is painful, be glad you are here with those who love you.” Auntie, of course, slept much too soundly to hear the child, or at least that’s what she said.
Sometimes now, even as the summer diminished, there was a kind of twilight. On those nights when I was awake in the soft shadows of night, I would look at the face of Grandson, then slip outside, into the intimidating beauty of the land. I’d walk down close to water and look across at an island in the lake. This island meant much to me because of the stories told about it and my ancestors who went there and what befell them.
It was the island where Ammah, one of the creators of life, lived. On Ammah’s little island were shining things, things that grew. Ammah was the one light that remained in the shadowy history that had nearly obliterated our world. Ammah fed all life and was its protector. On the little island were seeds, grains and grasses, nests and eggs. Some of the nests were nests made with the translucent, blue-edged wings of dragonflies, and these, I was told, shone with moonlight. The silky down of plants was stirred up in every passing breeze. Ammah was the protector of spring eggs, caretaker of the abandoned nests of winter, of the unborn, of promise.
One of the trees on Ammah’s Island had been toppled under the five-hundred-pound weight of an eagle nest and even from a distance I could see its roots sticking up like thin fingers from the ground, reaching toward the moon. There, also, some trees were new, infant trees rising out of those that had decayed and fallen.
The seeds of corn lived there. An old man, long before Totsohi, had left the seeds from the journey south in a clay jar for Ammah to watch over. It was from the same corn Dora-Rouge possessed.
Ammah’s Island was a place of hope and beauty, and no one was permitted to walk there. Never could we put a foot down on it. No person could trample hope, could violate the future. But at times, some days, I sat in a canoe and daydreamed out across the water at the place Ammah protected, and I liked to see the island on my sleepless nights and mornings. I was told Ammah was a silent god and rarely spoke. The reason for this was that all things—birdsongs, the moon, even my own life—grow from rich and splendid silence.
EIGHTEEN
WHILE WE WERE AT the Fat-Eaters, the ideas of Thomas Edison reached through narrow wires and voltages and watts and kilowatts into the virgin territory of the north. Electricity came. At Holy String Town and at the Fat-Eaters, electric wires ran, weblike, to all the little houses and huts sitting askew on the world. At Tulik’s a single wire came in through the wall, traveled across the room, and ended in the white globe of a lightbulb that dangled from the ceiling.
Soon after the journeymen and electricians left, the electricity, hooked up for the first time, followed its path from the dammed water and entered Tulik’s house. In a split second, the world changed. Even the migratory animals, who flew or swam by light, grew confused.
On the first evening of light, I followed Tulik and his dog, Mika, outside. There were new shadows. All across the land that had been created by Beaver and by the slow dance of glaciers centuries before, streetlights cast a pale circle on the ground.
Everyone was outside calling to one another, saying, “Look. It’s on.” They chatted and laughed. It was brighter than the weak, yellow glowings of lamps kindled by generators, sharper than the blue-circled flames of gaslight. And compared to oil-lights and lanterns of the past, it was harsh and overly bright.
“It looks lonely, doesn’t it?” Tulik said.
I wouldn’t have thought those words myself, but he was right. There was a loneliness to it. “You’d think the opposite would be true,” I said.
From outside, we could see the light inside small, spare windows of houses.
Under our feet, the moist ground gave a little. The outer lights, not yet really needed, were carried by poles that had been cemented by workers from warmer climates into unsolid ground. At places, the top layer of permafrost had thawed and the poles already slanted. It made the place look uncomfortable, temporary, and chaotic. To the west was a stand of spindly trees. With the touch of light that fell across their pale trunks, they looked naked and unreal.
The people at Holy String Town were the ones who had wanted electricity. Few people at the Fat-Eaters wanted light or power, not that kind anyway, but once seen, it could easily have become a need or desire.
With the coming of this light, dark windowless corners inside human dwellings now showed a need for cleaning or paint. Floors fell open to scrutiny. Men and women scrubbed places that had always before been in shadow. Standing before mirrors, people looked at themselves as if for the first time, and were disappointed at the lines of age, the marks and scars they’d never noticed or seen clearly before. I, too, saw myself in the light, my scars speaking again their language of wounds. But it seemed the most impressive to those who had not long ago used caribou fat or fish oil to fuel their lamps.
Little did anyone know that this light would connect them with the world, and in what ways.
Before this, I had given little thought to light. Now I thought about it, and of all the things that glow in the dark and have power: fireflies, lightning, eels. Once I saw ball lightning, mysterious and strange, lay itself over the backs of cattle standing beside a road. And there was the blue of swamp fire we’d seen burning in the sky, back when Agnes was still alive, miles distant along our way to the north.
I thought of how the speed of light travels, light from the sun, even the light on the face of the radio. I had never before thought of the radio as a miraculous invention, that a crystal from earth pulled voices out of air and distance, but now that Tulik had electricity, I listened to the radio and was forced to consider also the speed of certain kinds of darkness, because it was darkness that traveled toward us. It was a darkness of words and ideas, wants and desires. This darkness came in the guise of laws made up by lawless men and people who were, as they explained, and believed, only doing their jobs. Part of the fast-moving darkness was the desire of those who wanted to conquer the land, the water, the rivers that kept running away from them. It was their desire to guide the waters, narrow them down into the thin black electrical wires that traversed the world. They wanted to control water, the rise and fall of it, the direction of its ancient life. They wanted its power.
LATER, I thought back to Tulik’s words about loneliness. By then, I knew what loneliness was. It was larger than the way I missed Tommy. It was the enormous river now gone. It was drowned willows and alders. It was the three dead lynx caught in a reservoir, ten thousand drowned caribou. It was the river traveling out of its raging, swift power and life into such humdrum places as kitchens with stoves and refrigerators. The river became lamps. False gods said, “Let there be light,” and there was alchemy in reverse. What was precious became base metal, defiled and dangerous elements. And yet we would use it. We would believe we needed it. W
e would turn buttons on and off, flip switches.
One smart village of Crees to the east of us rejected electricity. They wanted to keep bodies and souls whole, they said. Some of the Inuits said if they had electricity then they’d have indoor toilets and then the warm buildings would thaw the frozen world, the ground of permafrost, and everything would fall into it. They saw, ahead of time, what would happen, that their children would weaken and lose heart, that the people would find no reason to live.
Tulik believed them. So did I. Like the sleepers on that beautiful island in the lakes, we preferred darkness.
The one consolation for Tulik was that he could, at last, hear the old radio that he kept so well polished, the blond radio with cardboard under one of its black, uneven, feet. The first thing he did was to climb on a chair, reach up to the outlet, and connect the radio that was, next to Mika, and Ek’s book, his most prized possession.
“Be careful!” Auntie called. The chair rocked dangerously. Auntie went over and held it, looking up at Tulik.
When he turned it on, we heard only a little music behind the static, but Tulik smiled and said, “It sounds pretty good. Don’t you think?”
The dog turned its ears forward like the one in the old Victrola ad. Tulik scratched his ear. “What do you think, eh, Mika?”
Luce, sitting under the light reading, said, “Did you know ostriches dance and shake for no apparent reason? Just because they love life and have zest?”
A RADIO PROGRAM called “Indian Time” came on daily at noon. It kept us up with Indian country news, and it wasn’t long before relatives, friends, and even a few strangers came to Tulik’s house at lunchtime in order to hear what was being said. And so what if it was lunchtime and they happened to be in the neighborhood and were offered food as well? It turned out to be an expensive radio, as many of the people sat close together, eating and listening. Sometimes they made comments. When Bush was present, she stood quietly beside Dora-Rouge or leaned against the wall, her arms over her chest, as if she was in a hurry and no longer rested in chairs.