Always Coming Home

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Always Coming Home Page 11

by Ursula K. Le Guin


  O mothers of my mother,

  let this wind bear blessing!

  For Kesh who leave the Valley, mostly members of the Finders Lodge, the fear of dying outside the Valley, not being buried in Valley ground, is real. The Kesh sense of community, of continuity with the dirt, water, air, and living creatures of the Valley determines them to overcome any ordeals in order to get home to die; the idea of dying and being buried in foreign lands is black despair. There was a story told about a group of Finders exploring down the Outer Coast, who got into a chemically poisoned area; four of the group died. The four survivors mummified their companions’ bodies, with the aid of the bone-dry desert climate of the South Coast, and so were able to carry them home for burial—four alive carrying four dead for a month’s journey. The feat was spoken of with sympathy, but not with admiration; it was a bit excessive, a bit too heroic, for Valley approbation.

  The deaths of animals must be included in any account of Valley funerary practices.

  Domestic animals killed for food were addressed before or during the act of killing by any member of the Blood Lodge—any adult or adolescent woman. She said to the animal:

  Your life ends now,

  your death begins.

  Beautiful one,

  give us our need.

  We give you our words.

  The formula was gabbled without the least feeling or understanding, often, but it was never omitted, even by a housewife wringing the neck of a chicken. No animal was killed for use unless a woman was present to speak the death-words.

  In Wakwaha and Chukulmas, and by some in other towns, a handful of the blood of a slaughtered animal was mixed with red or black earth and made into a little ball, which was kept in the Blood Lodge rooms of the Obsidian heyimas; these balls were used in making adobe bricks for repairs or new constructions.

  Whatever parts of a butchered animal, domestic or wild, were not prepared for food or other uses were promptly buried by members of the Tanners Art, usually in a fallow field on the planting side of town. It was customary to set out some bits or bones on a hilltop on the hunting side, “for Coyote and Buzzard,” when a big animal was butchered.

  Wild animals hunted had each their song, taught by the Hunters Lodge. The hunter sang or talked to the animal he was hunting, silently while the hunt was on, aloud at or after the kill. The songs varied widely from town to town, and there were hundreds of them. Some of the fish invocations are rather curious.

  TROUT SONG FROM CHUMO

  A shadow.

  A dry shadow.

  Pay no attention.

  Be praised.

  FISHING SONG FROM CHUKULMAS

  Shuyala!

  Come find hands!

  Come find tongue!

  Come find eyelids!

  Come find feet!

  DEER HUNTING SONG FROM CHUKULMAS

  This way you must come,

  delicately walking.

  I name you Giver.

  A very old deer hunting song from Madidinou is related to the butchers’ formula:

  Deerness manifests a death.

  My word is grateful.

  (Deerness is the noun deer in the Sky Mode.)

  BEAR HUNTING SONG FROM TACHAS TOUCHAS

  Whana wa, a, a.

  The heart is there.

  Eat my fear.

  Whana wa, a, a, a.

  It must be done.

  You must come in.

  You must be sorry.

  Bears were killed only when they posed a threat to livestock or people; the meat was disliked, and not usually brought in to town, though hunters on extended trips might eat bear. “You,” in this song, is in the particular form, not the generic. The hunter is not hunting “bearness,” any bear, but is after a particular bear, who has made trouble for the hunter, and for bears in general, and who therefore ought to be sorry.

  BEAR’S DEATH SONG FROM SINSHAN

  Rain darken earth,

  blessing falling

  from the Sixth House,

  heart’s blood falling!

  The bear was the sign of the Sixth House, the House of Rain and Death. The old man who sang this song said, “Nobody in this town has killed any bear since Grandmother Mountain erupted last. That is a good hunter’s song, though. Even when a child hunts a wood rat he ought to sing that song. The bear is there.”

  According to the theory of the four souls, animals possessed all four kinds, but the system got very vague when extended to plants. All wild birds were considered, essentially, to be souls. The kin-soul of an animal was its generic aspect: deerness, not that deer; cowness, not this cow. The apparent confusions and evasions of the Valley idea of reincarnation or transmigration of souls begin to clarify here: this cow that I now kill for food is cowness giving itself to me as food because it has been properly treated and entreated, and again it will give itself to me as a cow, at my need and entreaty; and I that kill this cow am a name, a word, an instance of humanness and—with the cow—of being in general: a moment in a place: a relationship.

  Named domestic animals, pets, were believed by the superstitious to return as eye-souls or breath-souls, and sometimes as earth-souls, giving rise to animal ghost stories. A well-known Grey Horse Ghost haunted a canyon in the rough hills behind Chukulmas. Earth-souls of ewes who died in lambing were troublesome in the fog in the fields of Ounmalin.

  Ghost stories of a moralistic nature involve hunters who hunted on the “planting side,” or who failed in courtesy or respect towards the animal they hunted, or who killed immoderately, without need. The latter kind of story, often told at Bay Laurel Lodge campfires, relates how a hunter is terrified, abased, and perhaps hurt or killed by a manifestation of the generic animal, The Deer, The Wild Swan, supernatural in size, beauty, and power. In stories of hunters who omitted the rites of the killer, who “did not speak to the death,” a ghost of the particular animal he killed comes to lead the hunter astray in an endless hunt and into madness, accompanying him constantly, visible to him but to no one else. There was a man spoken of in Chukulmas who was apparently an actual instance of this kind of guilt-haunting. He was not an ordinary “forest-living person” or solitary, but lived without shelter, fled at the sight of human beings, and never spoke. He had been a young man named Young Moon of the Obsidian. What his transgression was, nobody knew for sure, but the assumption in the Hunters Lodge was that he had killed a doe and fawn “without singing,” that is without speaking even the essential formula at the death, a brief, worn-down version of the butchers’ formula:

  Beautiful one,

  for your death my words!

  This formula was spoken by a hunter shooting, by a trapper opening the trap, by anyone felling a tree, by anyone taking life. That it could be forgotten was not considered a possibility. Young Moon’s omission was deliberate; therefore punishable.

  Even when a corn-borer was squashed, a mosquito swatted, a branch broken, a flower picked, the formula was muttered in its ultimately reduced form: arrariv, “my word[s].” Although the one-word formula was spoken as mindlessly as our “bless you” to a sneeze, it was always spoken. The speaking of it maintained and contained the idea of need and fulfillment, demand and response, of relationship and interdependence; and that idea could be brought fully to mind when it was wanted. The stone, as they said, contains the mountain.

  One- or two-word formulas of this kind were known as pebbles. Another of them was the word ruha, spoken when one added a pebble (a material one) to the cairn or heap at certain places—by certain boulders, at crossroads, at various places along the paths on Ama Kulkun. The word was without other meaning to most people than “the word you say when you add a stone to a heya cairn.” Scholars of the heyimas knew it to be an archaic form of the root -hur-, to sustain, carry along, take with one. It was the last word of a lost sentence. The present stone contains the absent mountain. Most of the “meaningless” matrix-syllables of songs were pebble-words. The word heya was the word that contained the world,
visible and invisible, on this side and on the other side of death.

  Pandora Sitting by the Creek

  THE CREEK OF Sinshan below big rocks makes a pool on gravel, shallow, the gravel rising into an island in the middle of the pool. The banks of dark adobe overhang it, a few feet apart. At the outlet of the pool the rib-bone of a steer lies half in the water, whitish. In the still water deep under the undercut bank where roots make tracery, the tail feathers of a dead bird lie moving slightly on the water. The curled claw can be seen under the brown-feathered corpse hanging in the clear water in the brown shadow. Half the branches that cross the creek are dead and half alive and some it’s hard to say. There are no fish in the water but there are waterskaters on it and many gnats, flies, and mosquitoes in the air. Above the floating dead bird gnats or small flies dance in a swarm. The people are dancing the Summer.

  FOUR ROMANTIC TALES

  THE ROMANTIC TALE was a popular genre. The stories were written or printed, often existing in several editions and collections. The favorite collection, from which these four stories come, was called Under the Vine Leaves, and there were copies of it in every town of the Valley. Oral versions of these stories were secondary; they were retold aloud sometimes around the hearth or at the summerhouse, but the primary or “authentic” version of the Romantic Tale was the written one.

  Some of the stories appeared to be genuinely old, others to seek stylistically to achieve an impression of age, or of timelessness. No name of an author was included in the collections or on the manuscripts. Although place detail was vivid and exact, as in all Valley literature, the time when the story was supposed to have occurred or been written down was usually left unclear.

  The common theme of the Romantic Tales was transgression. Millers and Finders often figured in them; their professions contained an element of moral risk, in Valley eyes, and they were perceived as dangerously attractive people—people on the threshold.

  In “The Miller,” it is not stated that the miller is of the same House as the woman, but he addresses her with the second person singular form used only to members of one’s House, with whom sexual intercourse is forbidden. Like most of the Romantic Tales, this is a cautionary or counterexemplary shocker.

  The Miller

  The miller of the mill at Chamawats on the River said to a Red Adobe woman who came with corn to be ground into meal, “Wait here outside the mill. Do not come inside.”

  The woman had come alone from town. It was raining, the wind was blowing cold, and she had no coat or shawl. She said, “Let me just stand inside the doorway while I wait.”

  The miller said, “Very well. Wait in the doorway, but come no farther in, and keep your back turned to the room and your face turned to the outdoors.”

  She stood in the doorway of the miller’s house, and he took the sack of corn into the house of the wheel. She waited. The cold wind blew in the door. A fire was burning in the hearth in the room behind her. She thought, “What harm can it do if I go in there?”

  Presently she came into the room, close to the fire; but she came backwards, with her face turned to the outdoors. She stood there with her back to the fire.

  The miller came in through the house, behind her. He said, “I have been milling all day; the stone is too hot, and I cannot grind your corn now. Come back for it tomorrow.”

  The woman did not want to go and come back in the wind and rain. She said, “1 will wait till the stone cools.”

  The miller said, “Very well. Wait in this room, but do not come into the other room, and keep your face turned to the outdoors.”

  He went back to the wheelhouse. For a long time the woman waited in the hearthroom, and heard nothing but the river running and the rain falling and the millwheel turning. She thought, “What harm can it do if I go into the other room?”

  Presently she went into the inner room to see what was there. There was nothing in that room but the bedding rolled up and beside it a book. She took the book and opened it. On the page she opened it to, there was nothing written but one word: her name.

  She was frightened, seeing that. She put the book down and went to the hearthroom to leave the house; but the miller was standing in the doorway. She ran back into the inner room. He followed her, and said, “Unroll the bedding.”

  She unrolled the bedding and laid it out. She was afraid of him, although he did not hurt her. He told her to lie down on the bed, and she lay down. He lay down with her. When that was done he stood up naked and gave her the book, saying, “This is yours.” She took it and turned the pages. On each page of the book her name was written and no other word.

  The miller had gone out of the room. She heard the millwheel turning. She fastened her clothing and ran out of the house. She looked back and saw the high millwheel turning in the rain. The water that ran from the blades of the wheel was red.

  She ran into the town crying out. People came to Chamawats, to the mill. They found the miller. He had leaped into the millrace, and the wheel had taken him up and crushed him down. It was still turning. After that the mill was burned and the millstones broken. There is no place now called Chamawats.

  Lost

  She lived a long time ago in the First House, they say. Her mother’s household was in a house called The Red Balconies that used to be in Chukulmas, not far from the Hinge of the town. She joined the Finders Lodge as soon as her middle name, Withy, came to her, and right away she asked to come on a journey they were going to make over to Green Sands on the Inland Coast. People in the lodge said, “You haven’t had enough education yet. People in this lodge go on short trips first, and on long ones after they’ve had some education.” She did not listen, but pleaded to come. They said, “You give us no good reason for changing the way we usually do.” On a morning of early summer a group of the Finders started off for Green Sands. They took no novices along, because they wanted to travel fast and cover a good deal of territory.

  In the evening of that day Withy was missed in her household. The people of Red Balconies began to look for her, after nightfall, and to ask about her. A young man who was a novice in the Finders Lodge said, “Maybe she followed them this morning.” Her family said, “Is she crazy, then, to do something like that?” But in the morning, when she had not come home, they said, “Maybe she did follow them.”

  Some people in her family and her House decided to go that way to look for her. An old man of the Finders Lodge went with them to show them the way the group would have taken to Green Sands. The young man was of her House, and he came along. When they started climbing up into the hills above Redgrass Creek in the northeast range he got impatient, thinking that the old man was leading them too slowly. He had been in those hills; he said, “I know the way. I’ll look on ahead.” The old Finder said, “Stay with the group.” But he did not listen. He kept getting farther and farther ahead of the others.

  Withy had followed the people going to Green Sands, starting an hour or two behind them. She followed the way they went up Antelope Mountain. Where they had turned down Garnet Creek to use the low pass south of Gogmes, she missed the track and went left, on up the mountain, following the trail they had not taken.

  She thought that if she caught up with them in the Valley or in the near hills they would be angry with her and send her back; but if she did not catch up with them till they were clear outside the Valley, though they would be angrier, they would have to take her along with them to the shores of the Inland Sea, and so she would get the journey she wanted. So she followed the trail up Antelope Mountain and over onto Five Fires Mountain, not going very fast, and when night came she slept by the trail. In the morning she went up to the high pass on Five Fires Mountain, and stood there. Behind her the rivers ran to the River; before her they did not. She thought, “Maybe I should go back now.”

  As she stood there she thought she heard voices ahead of her, far down the pass, and thought, “I have nearly caught up with them already. All I have to do is follow them.” She w
aited awhile and then went on across the pass.

  Presently the trail divided. She took the east fork. After she had walked a long way down, that trail divided. This time she took the northwest fork, telling herself that she saw the tracks of her people on the trail. She followed one trail and then another, following the tracks of the deer round and about in the chaparral and the hillsides of chamise. She began to understand what she was doing, and tried to go back. Everywhere she looked there were paths and trails, and on them the tracks of people, going uphill and downhill, southeast and northwest. Wherever she looked, she thought the people she was following had gone that way. Instead of going back up to the pass or the ridge so that the land could lead her back into the Valley, she followed the deer up onto Iyo Mountain, going on and on, not knowing where.

  The young man, Jade, had learned to follow tracks in the Bay Laurel and the Finders Lodge, and when he came to Garnet Creek he looked at the paths and decided that the Green Sands group had gone down the creek, but that she had gone on up the mountain.* When the other Obsidian people and the old Finder came there, they saw the tracks going down the creek, and followed them.

 

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