Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  ‘Hey, Coyote, we are coming!

  You called us, you sang us,

  Coyote, we are coming!’

  Then Coyote said, There’s no use arguing with these people. I fed them dirt and stones and now they belong here. Next thing they’ll come up out of the river onto the land. I’m going away.’ She put her tail down low and went away up into the Southwest Range, up Bear Creek Canyon there, onto Sinshan Mountain. That’s where she went.

  “The people came up out of the River when the fires died out. For a long time they lived on rock and ashes and dirt and bones and charcoal. Then the forests began to grow again, and they began to gather and plant, and the animals came back, and they began to live together. So that’s how the human people came here. It was Coyote.”

  Behind the ridges above the sacred place, to our left, is Sinshan Mountain, long, massive, and serene, the late sunlight marking one deep fold of shadow on its flank.

  Let us not ask Thorn if she believes her story. I am not certain what the word believe means in her language, or in mine. It is best simply to thank her for telling it.

  “That’s a Serpentine story,” she says. “They tell it in the heyimas. The Blue Clay people have a song telling it, too, they sing it coming upstream from the Salt Journey, you know. There’s a good Adobe story. It’s about people raining down out of the volcanoes. You might ask Red Plum to give it to you.”

  So we do that. It’s a while before we find Red Plum, who isn’t at home in her household in Five Hearth House. “I believe grandmother’s at the heyimas,” says her granddaughter—their, and our, word believe in this sense indicating uncertainty, or unwillingness to be precise. She suggests that we come around in the evening. When we do that, the old woman is there on the balcony, shelling beans. “I was drunk last night,” she says, with a gleam of the eyes and a flickering, secret smile of satisfaction, not shared with us. She is small, rounded, fine-wrinkled, formidable. When we get around to asking for the story she does not seem disposed to share it either. “You don’t want to hear that old stuff,” she says.

  Yes, we really do.

  Unmistakably she is disappointed, expected better of us. “Anybody can tell that story,” she says.

  Her emphasis is on the word tell, with the sense of “repeat, recite.”

  Long-legged, good-natured Thorn, who always feels responsible for us, says in a tone between deference and humoring, “But they want to hear you tell it, Red Plum.” In this usage, tell has the sense of “say, speak,” with an indication of making or inventing. But Thorn’s emphasis is on “you.”

  Is this then a myth we are to hear from Red Plum, or a tale, or an invention of her own, or some combination of those possibilities? There is no way to be sure. She is evidently quite vain, and Thorn may be merely flattering her; but if the story is actually hers, by gift or making, we are asking a considerable favor of her to give it to us. Uneasy, we bring out the tape recorder, intending to assure her that we will not use it without her permission, but as soon as she sees it her manner changes. “Oh, well,” she says, “I have a terrible headache. I can’t talk loud, it hurts my head. You’ll have to put that machine up close. I haven’t been that drunk for a long time. Stock says I was singing so loud he could hear me above-ground. That’s why I’m so hoarse, I suppose. Well, then, you wanted the story about where the people came from. Is that working now? The story tells about people coming out of the mountain when it erupted. Have you seen the mosaic wall in Chukulmas, the big picture in the house there they call Volcano House? It shows what it looked like when the mountain erupted.”

  Red Plum’s stepson interrupts. “But that’s not the same eruption—that picture’s of the eruption a hundred years ago, four hundred years ago—”

  He is probably speaking for our benefit, thinking that foreigners might get confused, but the old woman is annoyed. “Of course it isn’t the eruption in the story! What do you want to go mixing things up for like that? What a fool! Maybe these people from outside the Valley have seen a volcano erupting and know what it looks like, but nobody living here at this time has seen one anywhere near here, and I’ve lived here more of this time than the rest of you…So there’s a picture in Chukulmas, if you want to go there to see it. It’s very dramatic. They used red glass for the fire. So then, there was a time, there was a place, some time, some place, in the Four Houses, heya, heya heya, heya heya, heya heya, heya, there was no time, there was no place. It was all bare, bareness was all. There was nothing, not any thing, there was not. Bare and thin, not light not dark, nothing moving nothing thinking. No shapes and no directions. The sea was all mixed up with the dream, death and eternity were the same, smooth, not moving or going, the waters mixed up with the sands of the beach and the air so that there were no edges, no surfaces, no insides. Everything was in the middle of everything and nothing was anything. No river ran. In the sea and air and dirt the mortal souls were mixed in, mixed up, and they were bored, bored with no change and no moving and no thinking. They were bored, all that no-count time, all that no-time not being in no place. There was a boredom, a restlessness. They moved, in restlessness they moved, they shifted, those grains of sand, dust-grains, soul-motes, ashes. They started rubbing together a little, shifting around, falling a little, dancing a little, making a little noise, very soft, less than when you rub your finger and thumb together, less, less than that, but they heard the little shifty noise they were making, and made it louder. That was the first thing, the noise, the first thing made. They made that music, those mortal souls. They made the waves, the intervals, the tones; the rhythm, the measure, the beat. The sand singing, the dust singing, the ashes singing, our music started there. That is the music. That is what the world is still singing if you know how to listen, they say, if you know how to hear it. So our music starts with the dust singing, our musicians play that note to begin the music and to end it, and that is also the note you hear before you touch the drum. But still there was restlessness and wanting. So the music got louder and moved, it changed, the tone changing to make tunes and chords, the measure changing upon itself, so that things began building up out of the music, crystals, and drops, and other shapes and forms. Things began to draw apart and pull into themselves; there were edges and meetings; there were outsides and insides; there were hinges and partings. There were things and spaces between things, and the sea with waves and breakers, the clouds moving with the wind in the air, the mountains and valleys in the land, shapes of rock and kinds of dirt, they came to be, they came to pass. But still the souls in the sand and dust were restless, and some more than others. The coyote soul was in some of those sand-grains, some of those dust-motes. The coyote soul wanted more kinds of music, chords with more voices, disharmonies, crazy rhythms, more going on. The coyote soul began moving and shifting. It let the dust and sand lie there and pulled itself together out of everywhere, out of everything, from all the beaches and plains and deserts. Doing that, pulling itself together, it left gaps behind, holes in the world, empty places. By unmaking it made darkness. So light came in to fill the holes: stars, sun, moon, planets came to be. Shining began. Brightness came to pass. Where Coyote had pulled things apart, the rainbows came to be to bridge the gaps. Across those bridges the Four-House People came walking. They came shining and walking into the earth world, and there was Coyote standing with her tail down and her head down, shivering, and looking around. There was a lot of music going on now, loud, too much of it, everything shaking and trembling and rumbling, earthquake everywhere, where Coyote had pulled loose and left gaps and darkness. ‘Hey! Coyote!’ the people of the Four Houses said, standing on the rainbows, looking down, calling down. But Coyote didn’t know how to answer. She didn’t know how to talk. In the earth world nobody had spoken. There was no speaking, only music. So Coyote sang the coyote music. She put her head up in the air towards the people and howled. The people on the rainbow laughed at her. They said, ‘All right, Coyote, we’ll teach you how to talk.’ And they tried to do
that. One of them would say a word, and the word flew from the mouth, an owl; the next word was a bluejay, the next a quail, the next word was a hawk. One of those people spoke puma. One of them spoke deer. One spoke a word that came out in long leaps, it was jackrabbit, and the next word came out hopping, it was brush rabbit. One of them spoke the oak trees. They spoke the alder, the madrone, the digger pine. They spoke the wild oats and the grapevines. They talked, and their words were all the people of the earth, bears and pond-scum and condors and lice. They talked grass, they said dragonflies. Coyote tried to learn to talk as they did, but she couldn’t do it; she just howled. However she shaped her mouth, nothing came out of it but the howling songs. The sky people laughed, and so did the earth people. Coyote was ashamed. She put her head down and ran to the mountain. We say she ran to Ama Kulkun, because this is our story, but you understand that it might be Kulkun Eraian, or a mountain that we know nothing of, a mountain of that time that place, that it is a mountain in the Four Houses. So she ran to the mountain of the Eighth House, of the wilderness. In her shame and anger she went inside the mountain. It was her heyimas. It was the heyimas, the sacred house of the wilderness. In there, inside, in the darkness, Coyote ate her anger and drank her shame, ate the fire in the earth, drank the boiling sulphur springs. In there with her will she went into herself, deep in, and made there in the darkness the he-coyote. There in her womb she made him. There in the mountain she gave birth to him. While he was being born, coming out, he shouted, ‘Coyote is talking! Coyote is saying this word!’ After the he-coyote was born she fed him with her milk, and when he was grown they came out of the mountain, on the mountainsides in the chaparral, and mated. The other people watched and saw that, and they all began mating then too. It was a big festival, that day. That was the first Moon Dance, and they danced it all over the earth. But there inside the mountain, in the heyimas of the wilderness, where Coyote had eaten out the inside, it was hollow, a big, dark cave or gap, and this hollow filled up with people, human people all crammed together. Where did they come from? Maybe from Coyote’s afterbirth, maybe from her turds, or maybe she tried to talk there inside the mountain and spoke them; nobody knows. They were in there, crammed in the dark, and so the mountain began speaking. It talked. It said fire, lava, steam, gas, ash. It erupted, and with the ashclouds and the fiery pumice flying out the human people came flying out too, spewing up, raining down all over the forests, all over the hills and valleys of the world. At first they set a lot of fires, but when they cooled off they settled down where they landed and began living there, making houses and heyimas, getting along with the other people. We say that we landed closest to the mountain, we didn’t fly as far so we didn’t hit as hard, and we stayed smarter than the other people who live in other places. They got the sense knocked out of them. Anyhow, so here we are, the children of Coyote and the Mountain, we are their turds and their words, so they say, and so it began, they say. Heya, hey, heya, heya, heya.”

  If we went to another village, or another heyimas, or another teller of tales, we could no doubt obtain another Origin Myth; but let us now thank Red Plum (who smiles secretively) and go on up the Valley eighteen miles or so to Wakwaha, Holy on the Mountain, where the computers are.

  “Cycles” of fifty years and “gyres” of four hundred and fifty, referred to in some documents and used by archivists as a dating system, seem to be of little significance in daily usage. Most people can tell you what year of a cycle it is, and these figures are useful for keeping track of vintages, birthdays, the age of a building or an orchard, and so on, just as with us, but they are not invested with a character of their own, as our years and cycles are (1984, the Twenties, the Thirteenth Century, etc.), nor is New Year’s Day a festival. In fact there is some confusion about what day it is. Formally, it is the fortieth day after the solstice of winter (the forty-first day in leap year, every fifth); but in the Planting Lodge the new year is spoken of as beginning at the equinox of spring; and popularly and in poetry the year begins when the new grass begins to grow and the hills turn green, along in November or December. People seldom know what day of the year it is (they are counted straight forward from 1 to 365) unless they are concerned with managing some ritual activity that is counted out in days, and then they are more likely to count from and to the full moons. The great festivals are determined by the solar and lunar calendar; all other activities, meetings of councils, lodges, arts, and so on, are usually arranged by agreement to meet again in four days or five days or nine days after the next full moon or when somebody asks for a meeting. All the same, years, cycles of years, and cycles of cycles exist, and with them as foundation, surely we can begin to place the Valley in history, here at the Exchange.

  The only person in the Exchange at the moment is Gather, a man of sixty, whose lifelong passion has been the retrieval of data concerning certain doings of human beings in the Valley of the Na. At last we have met a historically minded person, and now we’ll get somewhere! But there are problems. Gather gladly shares with us the programs he has worked out for obtaining data—overwhelming quantities of data—and will even help us get paper if we want it all printed out so we can take it home to read; but his approach to the material is not historical. His principle of ordering the information he obtains is not even chronological. To him, it appears, chronology is an essentially artificial, almost an arbitrary arrangement of events—an alphabet as opposed to a sentence.

  Surely the Memory Banks are chronologically, ordered?

  Yes, that is one system of data classification; but there are so many systems, all cross-indexed, that unless you know how to limit your program very cannily, a request for the data in chronological order on even a minor cultural phenomenon, say the etymology of the word ganais, or the methods of leaching the tannin from acorns, may result in several hundred pages of print-out, almost entirely statistical. Where in all the data is the information? Gather has spent his life finding out how to find out.

  His interest is domestic architecture. He is a member of the Wood Art. It seems he has not done much building; his interest is intellectual, almost abstract, a fascination with the formal significance and occurrence of certain architectural elements and proportions. It is these he seeks through the thousands of years of accumulated data, the billions of trillions of bits in the Memory.

  He brings onto the display for us a beautiful computer-generated plan of a house. The display is not in dots of light on green jello, but crisp black on matte white, like an unusually well-printed page, and is about a yard square; if color display were relevant, it would be in color. The image revolves till he holds it at the angle he wants. What he hopes we will see is a certain proportion, the mathematical scheme of a certain building, which he adores as an ideal. We would need a good deal of training to see that, but we can see that this house is beautiful, and please him by saying so; and also that it is quite different from any house we have seen in the Valley. So after a while we inquire, “When was this house built?”

  “Oh, a long time ago.”

  “Five hundred years?”

  “Oh, a great deal more, I think—but I didn’t record the length of time—” He is getting flustered, feeling our disappointment as disapproval. He thinks that we’re thinking, Just like a man! “I’d have to reprogram for that information, of course that’s no trouble, it would take a little time—I just didn’t…” think the date was of any interest. We reassure him as best we can. “Here,” he says, “I think I came at this set chronologically,” and, hopeful of retrieving our good opinion, he brings onto the display another set of plans and elevations: a delightful little temple. “A heyimas aboveground,” he explains. “That is, let me see, here, yes,” and the screen flashes sets of figures faster than the untrained eye can follow, “two thousand six hundred and two years ago from now, in Rekwit, I think, yes, where Rekwit is at this time, I mean, of course.”

  “But Rekwit isn’t in the Valley.”

  “No. Over across the Inland Sea
somewhere.” Geography doesn’t interest him either. “Now here’s something quite similar the Memory gave me.” Another little temple or house. “That’s in a place called Bab, on the old south continent, let me see, well, about our hundred years ago from now, or two thousand two hundred years ahead of that one in Rekwit. Do you see the same three-two proportion?” He is off again, and we have to let him ride his hobbyhorse awhile; his relief and pride in having got us what we wanted, a date, are infectious.