by Thomas Perry
The owl rose high into the air and a high-pitched screech came from its throat, then echoed from the rocky glen Jane had just left. The owl circled above her and called again. Jane could hear the sound of the wolf’s claws scraping the stones as it came up out of the gully, then heavy paws thumping the leafy ground, and the grunting breaths growing louder.
Jane turned again and ran. There was no concealment now, because the owl flew low under the canopy of trees, its wings flapping only to make the curves, sometimes a few feet behind and sometimes so close that Jane turned to strike out at it, but always screaming with that almost-human voice to tell the wolf where she was.
Jane ran with a sob in her voice, feeling the futility of it. An owl could see better than she could, and easily avoided her blows, and a wolf could run all night if it could smell its prey. As soon as she had thought of smelling, she imagined she smelled something pungent in the air. Was it something she had invented because she wanted it so much, or was it really smoke? It must be smoke. All she had to do was follow the smoke to the village, a clearing somewhere ahead where people slept in their longhouses and tended their crops and made love and sang. All she had to do was reach a circle of light. She ran beside the path, weaving in and out of the big trees so the owl couldn’t swoop in behind her neck with its talons.
The owl seemed to sense that it didn’t have much time. Maybe it smelled the smoke too, and maybe it had known where the village was. It stopped screeching and swooped upward.
Jane stepped back onto the path and sprinted, lengthening her strides and holding her head high to open the airway, pumping her arms and knees. She smelled the smoke more strongly now, and she knew she was close. She would dash for the nearest longhouse, duck under the bearskin flap that covered the door, dive through the little anteroom where the corn and beans and squash were stored, and roll into the little circle of light thrown off by the first cooking fire.
She could see a sharp off-turning in the trail ahead, and she knew this must be the path that led up to the village. She cut across a patch of low three-leafed plants she thought were strawberries, but as her ankles slashed through, her skin began to burn. It was poison ivy, but she didn’t care. She dashed up the path, climbing higher and higher. She reached the little plateau on top and stopped.
There, in the clearing, was a strange, horrible sight. The wolf had begun to change back into a man, and he squatted on human legs beside a pile of green brush that he had half-ignited with his human hands. It was smoking heavily but giving off no light at all. The man stood and turned his wolf snout toward her. She could see the sharp yellow teeth and the eyes that gleamed like pale gold-green beads. “Hello, Jane,” he said. “Smell the smoke?”
Jane heard something behind her. The owl alit and began to change back into a woman. “You’re ours now.”
“No.”
“We’re going to make you into a skin woman. He’ll flay the skin off you carefully, and I’ll sew it back together, and we’ll hang you from that tree limb over there. The soft breeze will fill you up a little and there will be a sound like a quiet song coming from your mouth. People passing by on the trail will look up this path and see you. Maybe they’ll just want to pass the time, and maybe they’ll be alone and running, looking for a place to rest and someone to help them. But they’ll stop. They’ll step off the trail and up this little path alone.”
Jane threw herself on the woman, digging her fingers into the throat with her left hand and drawing back her right for the first punch. She could feel the witch changing shapes under her hand, first the scales of a snake and enough of the neck free so the head could curl around and sink its fangs into her forearm, then the scales turning into thick fur and the body widening into a lynx, the jaws now chewing to get free of the hand.
Jane swung hard and woke to the light streaming through the white curtains onto the polished hardwood floor of the bedroom. She held her eyes open in the glare, her breaths coming fast and shallow, afraid that if she closed her lids the dream would still be there. She spun her head and saw Carey, then slowly began to calm down. She was wet, covered with sweat so her nightgown clung to her. She sat up and waited for the dizzy feeling to pass, then eased her weight off the bed. She looked at the clock radio on the nightstand. It was almost six. She walked down the hall quickly, turned on the shower in the guest bathroom, pulled the nightgown off over her head, and threw it on the floor. In a few minutes she would be clean and clear-minded, and Carey could awaken to hear her making his breakfast downstairs.
As she stepped into the shower, she tried to get over the dream. Since she was a child she had heard people clicking their tongues and saying that dreams of the Old Time had begun to come back. The pessimists said it happened only to Senecas who had begun to forget who they were and what they were supposed to do. They were paying the price for repressing their true inclinations. There were others who said the dreams were returning because the supernaturals had stayed on the land with the Senecas all this time and finally gotten used to the way things were now, just as the Senecas had. They recognized that the people had not changed in any way that mattered, and so they had begun to touch them more often in sleep.
Jane felt the terror and claustrophobia of the dream beginning to wash away with the hot water and mental exercise. There wasn’t much mystery about it. She had been holding down a quiet tension since the night when she had agreed to marry Carey. She had done the little she could do to make herself unobtrusive. She had taken a new name and moved into a house that no runner and no chaser could know about. She was living as quiet a life as a woman could. She had even been careful to leave untouched all of the things that pertained to Jane Whitefield: the old house looked occupied, the telephone was connected, the mail carrier still came every day.
She had told Carey that she had kept the house as it was because she couldn’t think of a way to keep her old life from popping in to alarm the new tenants. It had not been exactly a lie, but it was part of the truth. What she had not mentioned was that anyone—victim or persecutor—who was able to satisfy himself that she had moved out of that house, and not merely gone on a trip, might keep looking and find this one. The old house kept them one extra step away from here—not much protection, just something that might buy her the time to see them before they saw her.
The dream had been her subconscious mind protesting, reminding her that the few small obstacles she had placed to hide her own trail were pitiful. No matter how fervently Mrs. Carey McKinnon wanted to ignore it, Jane Whitefield could not forget that the trail behind her was full of wolves.
9
Jane parked her car in the gravel driveway in front of the small frame house under the big hemlock tree. When she got out she stepped into a little cloud of dust that settled on her shoes. A dog in the back yard began to bark, then dashed toward her with menacing yaps. It was a little black mongrel with brown eyebrows, the kind that she had seen running around yapping on the Tonawanda reservation since she was a child, so she knew what it would do before it did. It ran up until it was five feet away, then straightened its forelegs, skidded to a stop on the grass, and began to hop up and down, wagging its tail.
“Maggie,” came a deep voice from the porch. “Come.” The little dog trotted happily around Jane once, then scampered up the steps onto the porch and ran through the open screen door to alert the others in the Peterson house. “Hi, Janie,” said the man. He stood up from his rocking chair so Jane could see him over the railing. He was very tall and had the square-chested, long-legged look that she remembered noting in his father when she had come here with her own father for visits in the old days.
“Hi, Billy,” she called. “Is this a good time?”
“There is no bad time,” he said as he put a sprig that had fallen from the hemlock into his book to mark the page, set it on the stack on the wicker table beside him, then folded his reading glasses into his shirt pocket.
He met Jane on the walk and let her hug him, then le
aned his head down and turned his cheek to catch her kiss. “Married life agrees with you, Janie.”
He said it in Seneca, so Jane answered in Seneca. “The old man wanted to come too, but I made him go to work so I could keep being a grand lady who wanders around doing nothing.”
As they stepped up onto the porch, he saw her notice his books, and reverted to English. “Just some reading for my undergraduate course in the fall. Basic abnormal psychology.”
“What we used to call Nuts and Sluts.”
“That’s the one,” he said. “The department makes me take a turn every third year.”
The little dog pushed through the screen door again with its nose, and then a woman nearly as tall as Billy with hair like Jane’s came out from behind it holding three glasses of lemonade on a tray. “Hi, Janie,” she said. “I thought you might like a cold drink.”
Jane took a glass. “Thanks, Vi,” she said, and they exchanged pecks on the cheek while Billy took the tray to keep the other glasses level.
Violet Peterson sat on the porch swing with Jane and smiled. Jane looked around her. “Did you sell the kids?”
Violet said, “They’re in school, believe it or not. Veronica’s taking a computer class every morning, and Delbert’s doing art.” She glanced at her watch. “I pick them up in an hour.”
“So serious,” said Jane.
“It’s great,” said Violet. “If I don’t make them do something in the summer they run around in the woods like—”
“Like we did,” said Jane.
“Exactly,” said Violet. “Kids are wonderful, but anybody who says they don’t drive you nuts is in a state of denial.” Her lips pursed and she said slyly, “You’ll see.”
Jane sipped the cold lemonade and listened. The red-winged blackbirds at the edge of the marshland a hundred yards away were calling to each other.
Billy said, “You have something on your mind?”
“You must be a psychology professor,” said Jane. “It’s kind of a delicate problem. Delicate politically.”
“Politically?”
“I came to see my friends Billy and Violet, but before I go, I want to do some lobbying with Sadagoyase.”
She could feel the weight of ages as he stared at her. Sadagoyase meant Level Heavens. It was the name that had been given to the member of the Snipe clan who held that sachemship in each generation since the first Sadagoyase, one of the forty-nine who had sat at Onondaga with Hiawatha and Deganawida to establish the Iroquois League. Each of them for a thousand years had probably sat in front of the doorway of his wife’s house on a day like today, with the blackbirds calling in the hot sunshine, and listened to a woman like her who had come to talk politics.
“Is this about the gambling?” asked Violet.
“Yes, I’m afraid it is,” said Jane. “I’ll bet you’re both sick of it.”
“Not at all,” said Sadagoyase. “It’s good that you came, because I’ve been meaning to give you a call about it.”
“Me?” asked Jane. “I thought I was being clever sneaking around to the sachem of another clan. Why would you call a Wolf?”
“You said it was delicate politically. It’s been voted down four times, but it keeps coming back up. I need to know what key people think, the ones who are educated and can sway public opinion.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Everything I see about it tells me to leave it alone and let other people decide. I’m not here to offer advice about the general issue. I just wanted to make one little point and skulk away.”
“But I’m asking your advice.”
“I’m not the one to ask. Whitefields haven’t lived on the reservation in three or four generations.”
“Being a Seneca isn’t a matter of residence.”
“I had a mother who started out Irish. A colleen, as they say. It sounds like the name of a dog that’s not quite a collie, doesn’t it?”
“Cornplanter had a father named O’Bail. Mary Jemison was a year out of Ireland when she was captured. She had thirty-nine grandchildren by Hiokatoo. You want to tell their great-great-grandchildren they’re not Senecas? There’s probably nobody within rifle shot of here who doesn’t carry DNA from somebody who was adopted twenty generations back. It’s a nonissue.”
Jane sighed. “I would love it if the people could have a little dependable money coming in. There are already over a hundred Indian casinos all over the country, and I heard somebody refer to gambling as ‘the return of the buffalo.’ But I’ve got worries. If I say those worries out loud, people I love and respect are going to say things that hurt me.”
“What will they say?”
“They’ll remind me in that quiet, gentle way people around here have that I’ve never been poor. And I’ll know that they could have said more.”
“What could they say?”
“I’m one of them too. Maybe I would say it to myself. There I would be, this doctor’s wife who lives in a house like a fortress in Amherst, driving Carey’s BMW up to the dilapidated council building to tell them gambling money isn’t good for the nation.”
Sadagoyase raised his eyebrows. “Maybe living that life makes you objective. The traditionalists, the longhouse people, trust you because they know you’re at least as conservative as they are. They’re an important constituency.”
“I’m an anomaly, and they know it,” she said. “I’m a leftover Indian Rights radical from ten years ago. A lot of what I know comes from the Old People, but a lot doesn’t. It comes from staring at old archives at Cornell and Rochester that were written by Europeans who studied us the way doctors study viruses. I’m not a radical now. I’m a spoiled rich woman who has a hobby.”
“Good for you,” said Sadagoyase. “I’m a professor teaching the theories of a dead man from Vienna. Now answer my question and I’ll listen to whatever you came to tell me.”
Jane shook her head and smiled sadly. “All right. Here goes. I’m not a spiritual believer in the Gaiiwio of Handsome Lake. I don’t believe there’s anything left after we’re dead, at least not in broad daylight like this. But whatever happened when Handsome Lake got drunk and passed out in 1799, he woke up with some sense. I think there wouldn’t be any such thing as a Seneca now if he hadn’t.”
“You want to be more specific?”
“Don’t sell any land. Accept as much education as you can get, but keep up the ancient cycle of celebrations. Drinking liquor might be fine for whites, but for us it’s poison. Don’t abuse your wife and kids the way whites do. And—here it comes—don’t gamble.”
She glanced at her old friend, but Sadagoyase was waiting in silence. She said, “He didn’t mean don’t play the peach-pit game or bet on snow-snake matches. He was a warrior, brought up in the Old Time. He got his scalping knife wet at Devil’s Hole. He was saying, ‘These are the temptations that the modern world is sending our way. Watch out.’ I think he was right.”
“What about now?” he asked. “Is he still right?”
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “For hundreds of years the Five Nations kept the peace, managed a unified foreign policy with fifty or sixty other nations, and played the Dutch, English, and French off against one another. Now on half the reservations there are competing governments and splinter groups, and Iroquois burning their own buildings and taking shots at each other. And every time one side looks like it’s losing, they call for intervention by the New York State Police or Quebec or Ontario Provincials, or the Canadian or American federal governments. They’ve always gotten it, and they always will.”
“Are you worried about hard feelings or loss of sovereignty?”
“I don’t think those are two issues. They’re the same. I’m not saying all of that would happen at Tonawanda. But it would be especially stupid if any of it happened here. Everybody around here knows that in 1838, when the state was kidnapping chiefs to force them to sign the land treaty, not one single chief from Tonawanda let himself be caught. I hope people remember
that the reason for that was that the chiefs were willing to risk their lives to disappear, and the people were willing to risk theirs to hide them. That’s not just why we’re still here. It’s who we are.”
“So what you’re afraid of is just that I’ll get dehorned?”
“Not you, Billy—Sadagoyase. Once gambling comes in, you’ve got to think of what else happens. New York State will want a vested financial interest the way they did with the Oneidas, and they’ll have to police the gambling and everything around it.”
“That boat sailed in 1821,” said Sadagoyase. “The State of New York versus Tommy Jimmy.”
He needed only to allude to the case because it was one of the legal precedents that had established the boundaries of the modern Seneca world. A witch named Koquatau had murdered a man at Buffalo Creek, and Tommy Jimmy had been appointed by the council to act as her executioner. He had followed her into Canada and, as soon as he had her back on Seneca land, had cut her throat. He had been defended at his trial by Red Jacket, one of the greatest orators of his time, and acquitted on the grounds that he was following Seneca law. After that, the state had asserted its jurisdiction.
“Same principle, different consequences,” said Jane. “There’s a big difference between having the cops investigate a crime every ten years and having dozens of them move in with you to protect the financial interests of the legislature and its cronies.”
“What cronies?”
“Building hotels and casinos can’t be done without money from outside. That means some big corporation with investors and boards of directors is going to have more to say about what goes on here than we are. It may have occurred to you that Senecas haven’t had a lot of luck trusting either the state of New York or corporations in the past. This state has a perfect record. It has never, even in the most minimal way, lived up to any agreement that it has ever made. It has never even felt itself constrained by federal laws.”