Always Coming Home

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  Eventually I can mount my own hobbyhorse again, asking cautiously, “How would one obtain data on primitive life here in the Valley?”

  Gather scratches his jaw. “Well, in the times of primitive life, there was no Valley of the Na, I think? This continent wasn’t here…”

  Ever and again one runs into this bedrock of the Valley mind, the “common knowledge” of the people, what is perhaps their true mythology: unquestioned, unreasoned (though questionable and reasonable), traditional lore: the general outlines of what we would call historical geology, including plate tectonics, of the theory of evolution, of astronomy (unsupported by any telescope capable of seeing the outer planets), and of certain elements of classical physics, along with elements of a physics not familiar to us.

  After a little mutual explanation and laughter, we establish that what I meant was primitive human life. But this combination of words does not mean much to Gather, nor to the computer. When requested for assistance in obtaining information on primitive human life in the Na Valley, the Exchange, after a brief communion with itself, reports that there is no such information.

  “Ask about information on primitive human life anywhere.”

  With this, Gather and the Exchange begin to ask each other questions, and to get results, and presently (he keeps the display in the graphic mode, since we aren’t trained in TOK) they begin to come onto the screen: little broken hominid teeth, bones, maps of Africa with dots, maps of Asia with dashes…But that’s the Old World. What about this one? O brave new world, that has no people in it!

  “They came across a land bridge,” I say doggedly, “from the other continent—”

  “From the west,” Gather says, nodding. But is he talking about the same people I’m talking about?

  The ones that were met by Coyote?

  That mythology, that unquestioned tribal knowledge that includes plate tectonics and bacteriology, must include what I’m after. “What were the beginnings of the way you live here, of the nine towns? When was Wakwaha founded—how long ago? What people lived here before then?”

  “All the people,” Gather says, confused again. He is an insecure person who finds life difficult and retreats easily; he has spent his life much alone here, in communication without relation.

  “I mean human people.” It is very hard for me to keep in mind that “people” in this language includes animals, plants, dreams, rocks, etc. “What human people lived here before your people?”

  “Just our people—like you—”

  “But of a different way of life—foreigners—like me.” I don’t know how to translate “culture” into his language more exactly, and the word “civilisation,” of course, won’t do at all.

  “Well, ways always change. They never stay the same, even when they’re very good ways, very beautiful, like that house, you know. They stopped building like that, but then maybe somebody else does it, in another time, another place…”

  It’s hopeless. He doesn’t perceive time as a direction, let alone a progress, but as a landscape in which one may go any number of directions, or nowhere. He spatialises time; it is not an arrow, nor a river, but a house, the house he lives in. One may go from room to room, and come back; to go outside, all you have to do is open the door.

  We thank Gather, and go down the steep street-path-steps of Wakwaha and past the Hinge, the Springs of the River, and into the dancing place. The roofs of the five heyimas of Wakwaha are thirty and forty feet high at the apex of the stepped and ornamented pyramid, the four-sided roof that rests upon the five-sided underground chamber. On past the dancing place in a grove of magnificent young madrone trees is the long, low, stuccoed adobe, tile-roofed Library of the Madrone Lodge of Wakwaha. The Archivist greets us.

  “If you don’t have a history,” I say to her, “how am I to tell your story?”

  “Is a ladder the way to climb the mountain?” she says.

  I sulk.

  “Listen,” says the Archivist—they’re always saying that, these people, very gently, not an order but an invitation, “listen, you’ll find or make what you need, if you need it. But consider it; be mindful; be careful. What is history?”

  “A great historian of my people said: the study of Man in Time.”

  There is a silence.

  “You aren’t Man and you don’t live in Time,” I say bitterly. “You live in the Dream Time.”

  “Always,” says the Archivist of Wakwaha. “Right through Civilisation, we have lived in the Dream Time.” And her voice is not bitter, but full of grief, bitter grief.

  After a while she says, “Tell about the Condor. Let Stone Telling tell her story. That’s as near history as we have come in my day, and nearer than we’ll come again, I hope.”

  STONE TELLING

  PART TWO

  FROM THAT DAY my mother would not answer to her middle name Willow, and told people to call her Towhee, though many were reluctant to do so. To go back to a first name is to go against the earth; and though the towhee is not altogether a sky-dweller, being often on the ground picking up corn with the poultry and seeds with the quail, and not altogether a wild bird, since it walks about the common places of towns, yet it comes from the Four Houses and returns to them, and its name should come to one who does the same. Cave Woman and Shell talked with my mother about the name, but she would not change her mind. It was set away from the earth.

  Soon after my father left Sinshan, we heard that all the Condor men had left the Valley, crossing the hills on the north road. On that day my mother joined the Lamb Lodge. She gave a lot of time to them, and learned their arts and mysteries, and became their butcher. I kept apart from all that, not only because I was still a child, but because I did not like it, and knew my grandmother did not like it. As it seemed to me, my mother had sent my father away; and I could not forgive her. Since he had spoken to me from the doorway, asking me to wait for him, the passion of my love had gone to him. I thought I did not love my mother at all. I thought continually of how my father would come back to me on his big horse at the head of a line of soldiers, and find me waiting for him. My loyalty to him made my difference from other people a virtue, and gave unhappiness both a reason and a term.

  I danced the World that year, my ninth, the first I danced. With Valiant and Ninepoint and all the people of my House of Earth I danced the Sky, and in the sky the people of Cloud, Wind, Rain, Clarity danced the Earth with us.

  The Five Heyimas of Sinshan

  From then on I worked harder with Ninepoint, and also with Patient of the Madrone Lodge, who read the histories and narratives of Sinshan and the Valley with a group of us children. I began to spend more time at the pottery shops with Clay Sun. I worked on the little plot we used, and each year I did more shared work in the Fields of Sinshan. In my twelfth year I was initiated into the Planting Lodge, and also began to learn Blood Lodge songs. My grandmother’s hands became so rheumatic that she could not spin or do fine weaving, and my mother did the weaving, but I did not work with her. What I enjoyed most was making pottery, and I began to do it fairly well. Every summer I would go out for four days from Gahheya into the coyote’s house, and on my third walk like that, going northwest along a creekbed in a gully outside Hunch Mountain and thinking about making pots, I found a bank of very fine blue clay in the dry creekbed. Several times I brought as much of it as I could carry to Clay Sun, who was pleased with it. I offered to show him the place. He said it would be better for me to keep it in my mind and use. He was a kind, warm man, a widower with three Obsidian children who were always dirty or muddy; he called me Owl Pot instead of North Owl, and he called his children the pots. He thought of very little besides clay, and shaping, and glazing, and firing. It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the m
ind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.

  Two years after my father left the Valley, my grandfather came up from Chumo to live in his wife’s household again. Though she did not like him she had never put him out; he had left. Now she took him back, partly because she thought he needed her, and partly, I think, because since her hands had become crippled she was ashamed of doing less work in the house and town, and she thought he might work in her place. In fact she did a great deal of work, as always, and he did little. He spent his time with the Warriors. He had come to Sinshan to be a speaker in that lodge, and to bring more Sinshan men into it. The Warriors had been doing more and more things the Bay Laurel boys were supposed to do-scouting, watching the outside ridges, making weapons, training people in the use of guns, having trials of strength and endurance, and teaching various kinds of fighting. Before the Warrior Lodge began, the Bay Laurel Society in Sinshan had not been very lively. They planted tobacco and cured it, of course; and they went camping over on She Watches, and sang, and kept a box full of very old guns which they oiled and polished but did not shoot. Some of the men in charge of the Bay Laurel said, “Listen: a while ago, our boys used to go scouting over on the wrong side of the hills, stirring up the people over in those valleys; then those people would send their boys over here, and sheep got stolen, and people were afraid to go out alone, and we had to start talking about smoking and having a war. That hasn’t happened in Sinshan for forty or fifty years. A while ago, we made guns and trained with them, then pretty soon the boys got into quarrels with boys from Ounmalin and Tachas Touchas, and feuds began, and young men were killed on the roads, in the hills. That hasn’t happened for a long time. What do you want it to happen for?”

  The Warrior speakers said, “Go in peace; go about your farming and hunting and herding; we’ll patrol the ridges.” They said, “We want only a few, the bravest young men,” but they took any man who asked to join.

  My cousin in Madidinou, Hops, began to wear the undyed clothing and became a Warrior too; his middle name came from them, Spear. My cousin Pelican, his sister, was my age, and we still were good friends. I told her that I was glad Hops hadn’t taken one of those Warrior names like my grandfather Corruption, or Corpse, or Maggot, or an old man in Madidinou who had taken Dog Shit for his last name; but I thought Spear was pretty silly—he might as well call himself Big Penis and be done with it. She didn’t laugh. Nobody ever wanted to laugh at the Warriors. She told me that Spear was a powerful name, and all the names I made fun of were powerful names. I didn’t care. I kept out of all that and did not want to learn about it. Since our household was full of Warrior and Lamb Lodge talk now, I spent more time outside. I did not go regularly to Patient’s classes, so I learned very little history, and read almost nothing; I worked at the pottery with Clay Sun, and in the sheep-folds and pastures and fields. Twice in those years I went with the great flocks down to the saltgrass pastures at the Mouths of the Na, staying there all through the Moon. The summer that I was thirteen years old, I went up the Valley with some other young people, and then alone on Ama Kulkun. I walked beyond the springs of the River, through the Five Houses and through the Four Houses to the house that has no wall. Yet I walked in ignorance and it was the kindness of the lion, the mercy of the hawk, that held me on the way. Things were not right in my household, and my people did not see to it that I got a proper education.

  I know that Valiant worried about my ignorance and carelessness, and that she and Ninepoint talked about it; but I would not listen to their advice, and she was not willing to argue with me. She was worried about her daughter, too, and in pain often, and lowhearted. I think she wanted to send her husband away, but felt that she could not, because he did some of the work she could no longer do, and so she thought my mother and I needed him in the household. I would have danced on the rooftops to see him go, but a child cannot tell her grandmother to put her grandfather’s things out on the landing.

  As for my mother, Towhee, she was always silent and aloof, as if, when she refused to speak to my father, she had stopped speaking to anyone. I did most of the sheepherding now, and she did Lamb Lodge work. She and my grandfather got on well enough, since the Lamb women were a kind of woman Warriors. They performed some wakwa together; some Lamb women took power names—Bones had used to be Brodiaea, and Finch took the middle name Putrid. All those who performed the Purification wakwa called themselves, while they were dancing, the mawasto. That word was the Condor word marastso, army, which I had heard every day when I went with my father to the camp in Eucalyptus Pastures. Once I said something about it, and Corruption and Towhee both jumped on me with both feet, denying that the word was a Condor word, and telling me that I could have no knowledge about such matters since I had not been taught by the Warriors or the Lambs. I was immensely angry, that what I knew to be so should be denied. I did not forgive them for that denial.

  But I was still a child and able to forget fifty things while doing fifty others. Some of my agemates were adolescent, but I was slow at that, and not sorry to be so. I thought about being a Blood Clown, but was too lazy to go start instruction at the Blood Lodge. My closest friend in those years, a Blue Clay girl called Cricket, had already been initiated into the Blood Lodge and wore undyed clothing, but her middle name had not come to her, and she and I worked and played together as children. In the fields, or with the sheep, or gathering, we would bring our toys along and play stories with them in between fits of working. Her toys were a human person made of wood, with elegant knee and elbow joints so that it took lifelike positions, and a mangy old lambswool sheep that she used to sleep with as a baby. Mine were a rabbit made of rabbit skin with the fur on, a wooden cow, and a coyote I had made myself out of scraps of buckskin. I had tried to make it look like the coyote on She Watches who had sat and looked at me the first time I went alone on the mountain. It did not look like that coyote, or any coyote, but there was something heyiya about it; when we played stories and talked for the animals, I never knew what the coyote was going to say. We made long stories with those five people. Their town was called Shikashan. A boy called Lark Rising from the Red Adobe often played with us; his toys were three beautiful redwood animals his mother had carved for him, tree squirrel, ground squirrel, and wood rat. Cricket always made up the best stories to play, but she only wanted to play them once and then make a new one. Lark Rising wrote three of them down and made an offering of them to the library in his heyimas, called “Stories About Shikashan,” and we were all proud of that. So those were good times.

  Digger Pine

  Often in the evenings I would go and my cousins would come from Madidinou to Blue Rock to meet and talk. But there the Warriors got between us again. Spear no longer gave a flower or a pebble to the rock or brushed it with pollen or even spoke to it, although Blue Rock is the strongest heyiya in all the Fields of Sinshan and Madidinou. Pelican said ruha to it when her brother wasn’t listening, or put a pebble down near it as if she just happened to be putting a pebble down. But when we talked about it, she agreed with Spear and not with me. Spear said that there had never been sacredness in rocks or springs, but in the mind-soul, the spirit, only. The rock and the spring and the body, he said, were greens, that kept the spirit from pure sacredness, true power. I said heyiya was not like that; it was the rock, it was the water running, it was the person living. If you gave Blue Rock nothing, what could it give you? If you never spoke to it, why should it speak to you? Easy enough to turn from it and say, “The sacredness has gone out of it.” But it was you that had changed, not the rock; you had broken the relation. When I argued that way, Pelican would start to agree with Tie, but then she would agree with her brother when he talked. If Blue Rock said anything to her, she was not listening. None of us was.

  After I was thirteen, Spear did not come to Blue Rock with his sister. Many boys living on the Coast go off with the Hunters or the B
ay Laurel, and make a sweathouse to sleep in, and keep away from girls, which I could understand; but the Warrior way of living on the Coast was to forbid the young men even to speak to adolescent girls. My side-grandfather Ninepoint talked about that once to his grandson, who had taken the name Vile, when I was there to hear. He said, “You call yourself Vile but you act like Puffed Up. Are you so afraid of girls you have to make war on them? Are you so afraid of yourself you have to fight with yourself? Who do you think you are, to be so afraid of, anyhow?” If I had been less willful and fearful, I could have learned much I needed to learn from Ninepoint; but he was a stern person, and I was unwilling to let him scold me for my laziness and ignorance. I look back now and see that I was afraid to love him, as if to love him were to be disloyal to my father Kills. But I heard what he said to Vile that time with pleasure, for I was humiliated by Spear’s avoidance of me, and hated the Warriors with all my heart.

  My grandfather spoke with contempt to his wife and mother and granddaughter and all women, and therefore I felt great contempt for him; but out of respect for the household I tried not to show it. My grandmother did, when she lost her temper. Once she said to him, “You’re trying to be like those Condor men, who are so afraid of women they run a thousand miles away from their own women, so as to rape women they don’t know!” But that blow missed Corruption, who was too hard to feel it, and hit my mother Towhee instead. She was in the hearthroom with me and heard what Valiant had said. She hunched up, swallowing pain. Then I turned on my grandmother in anger, because I was holding the Condor in my heart now as the name of the freedom and strength my father had given me for that half-year he had been with us. I went to the doorway between the rooms and said, “That’s not true. I am a Condor woman!”

  They all stared at me. Now the blow had hit them all, but most of all my grandmother. She looked at me with desolate eyes. I went out of the house, out of the town. I went up Sinshan Creek to the springs of the water, and sat there for a long time, angry at myself and everybody in my household, everybody in Sinshan, everybody in the Valley. I put my hands in the water but there was no washing away the stuff that choked up my heart and mind. I could not even say heya when the guardian of the spring came as a junco, lighting on the wild azalea bush above the spring. I longed to go walk on the mountain again, but knew that if I did it would be no good; I would not put my feet in the tracks of the lion, on the way of the coyote, but would walk the circle of human anger.