The Gathering Night

by Margaret Elphinstone

  Next morning the men went down to Shellfish Narrows to rebuild the fish traps. Often the winter River is so angry it sweeps everything away; sometimes it’s kind and leaves a few stakes still standing. This Year the River had not been kind. The men spent all day cutting and fixing new stakes. We women dug the withy fences out of the dry sand and set about mending them. No one had been at this Salmon Camp last Year; there was a lot of work to do to get everything mended. It rained all day, but at last the sky cleared. The red Sun shot its dying rays across the sea. Above us, Mother Mountain glowed purple in the last light. Hills and islands moved closer as, one by one, stars pierced the deepening sky like sparks rising from far-off spirit-fires.

  That night we sang to the Salmon. Our song told the Salmon we were at the River waiting for them. We called on them to come back:

  Come, Salmon, home to your River!

  Your River is waiting for you

  Come, Salmon, leap up the high falls

  Your River is waiting for you

  Death is looking out for you

  Like a Mother watching for her young sons to come home from the sea

  Come, Salmon, come to your River!

  Your People are waiting for you.

  We sang one song after another. Light Moon rose over the hill where Salmon River springs. She was already waning, telling the Salmon that soon Seed Moon would follow her, and they must hurry towards the River where the People waited. The evening light had barely faded when the morning began to glow with the beginning of another day. Our last song trickled into silence. Dogs and children had long been asleep, curled up together in little mounds by the warm hearth. We brought furs from the tents and covered the children up. Sorné laid damp turfs over the fire. Men and women wrapped themselves in their cloaks and stretched themselves on the ground to sleep under the watchful eyes of the new day.

  Until Seed Moon rose, we women were able to fish from the boats every day. Our nets were full of saithe, and, on calm days when we paddled out beyond Driftwood Island, some fine fat cod as well. We wrapped them in dulse and roasted them, then feasted off the delicious white flakes. Until the great storm lashed the River into a fury, Haizea and Itsaso guddled for stray trout in the pools below the falls. They didn’t get many, and sometimes we had to send them to do more useful work collecting sea-roots and shellfish along the shore. While we were fishing, the men went off to their Hunting Camp on the side of Mother Mountain, where Salmon River begins. The red deer calves were still young enough to be run down with dogs, and twice Sendoa and Amets came back with hinds in milk as well, though that’s always a tough kill – a mother, whether People or Animal, will always fight harder for her young than for anything else.

  But before I can explain what happened next at Salmon Camp, I need to take you back to River Mouth Camp and tell you about the first winter that Osané spent with our family.

  She didn’t speak.

  I don’t mean she was quiet, or she didn’t talk much. I mean what I said: she didn’t speak. Not one word. When we left Gathering Camp, taking her and Kemen with us – we had to make another boat before we left, our family had suddenly grown so much bigger – she didn’t say a word on the journey. I thought it would be better when we got to River Mouth Camp. I was wrong. She didn’t speak all winter while we were there. Nor did she speak when we got to Seal Bay Camp. Not a single word for many Moons – two hands-full! Now it was Seed Moon, and Osané still hadn’t said one word to any of us.

  She was still saying nothing. Sometimes I wanted to shake her; I was sure she could speak if she tried. After all, I was the one that had put compresses of eel fat, plantain and yarrow round her neck every day until her bruises healed – no one knew better than I that there’d been nothing the matter with her throat since Swan Moon.

  It wasn’t that she was unhappy with us. I’d realised she was feeling better right back in Yellow Leaf Moon, when she started making herself new clothes. She’d brought nothing when she came to us except the deerskin tunic and woman’s skirt she was wearing. She never fetched anything from her parents’ tent, so she had no leggings, no shoes, no winter furs, no knife, no needles, no awl, no thread . . . Kemen made her a knife when we got to River Mouth Camp. I saw him carving the haft and I asked him what he was making.

  When he told me I burst out, ‘Osané’s got two hands of her own, hasn’t she? What kind of a woman doesn’t even make her own knife! You know I’d have lent her mine to do it with! It’s fair enough if you cut the blades – I can well believe they never taught her – but surely she can do the rest! You’ll teach her the worst—’

  Amets seized me from behind and put his hand over my mouth. ‘I think it’s me who’s let my woman learn the worst habits, Kemen! It seems to be my wife who thinks she’s in charge round here!’

  I pulled his hand away, and pretended to grab him just where it would hurt. ‘And so I am, Amets! Certainly I’m the only one with any sense! We all know what men think with!’

  ‘Ah, would you!’ He wrestled me round and got me in an armlock. After that I was laughing too much to say anything. Kemen just grinned, and went on carving a groove in the haft of Osané’s knife.

  At least Osané made her own sewing things with her new knife. I let her take whatever she wanted from the basket of clean bones. She chose a swan bone and made herself a needle case, then spent half a day decorating it with swirling patterns; I thought she’d do better to get on with making her needles. But I soon found out what a quick worker she was. I gave her such furs as I could spare before Amets and Kemen started bringing in new pelts – mostly hare and deer, but there was one thick foxfur. Osané scraped the hides until they were soft tawny-grey, and when her tunic was sewn she decorated it with everything she could get. I was astonished at how much she’d collected already: she had it all hoarded away in a little bark box. She kept adding new things – polished beaver teeth, otter claws, fishbones, feathers and grasses. She strung necklaces and bracelets for herself and Haizea out of seeds, nuts, acorn cups, cowrie shells and polished bones. She also made some for me, which strangely touched my heart. She even decorated her sealskin boots with otter claws. She used my foxfur to make a winter cap, and kept the tail hanging down the back. It showed off the colour of her hair. Osané might not have a word to say, but she knew just how pretty she was, and she knew how to make the most of it too. When Kemen brought back a winter hare from the hill she made herself white gloves – white gloves! – and a tippet for her neck. Even her leggings had swans’ feathers threaded down the seams on each side. As for her hair, I never saw such a girl for washing and combing it – she even washed it in the River in winter. I told her she’d catch a chill and die of it: she just smiled and carried on plaiting it, threading in feathers and seedheads, and all the rest of it. But she never shirked her work – she certainly looked after Kemen’s clothes as well as she looked after her own. And she wasn’t vain: Osané just likes decorating things. Even now, she never so much as makes a birchbark bucket without carving swirling patterns all over it. It’s never bothered me; I was glad to see her doing something that seemed to make her happy.

  The spirits were kind when they brought us Osané. I was very happy when she got pregnant. I was quick to spot that glow – it made Osané look lovelier than ever. I didn’t tempt the spirits by saying a single word, but Osané soon noticed that I was giving her the choicest bits of meat – liver, kidneys, hearts, fish roes and so on. She took them with a secret smile. I hoped all would be well: my little Esti was lonely at River Mouth Camp away from her cousins. If my brother had lived he’d have taken a wife, but I doubt if she’d have wanted to come to live with us. Not many women choose to leave their own families, though they usually get a good welcome if they do, especially in a family that doesn’t have daughters. Anyway, sometimes I thought about how it had all turned out: how Bakar was lost, then Kemen came, then Osané came, and in the end it was through them that Bakar was given back to us.

  When Osané got pregnant
my mother had been away for more than two Moons. I wasn’t looking forward to her return very much. I thought it would be better, now our family was getting bigger, if we had two summer tents instead of one. One morning Osané and I were sitting outside the winter house at River Mouth Camp sewing new soles on our men’s sealskin boots – sometimes in winter we never seem to do anything else – when I suggested we use some of our extra hides to make ourselves a new tent. Osané gave a big smile, dropped Kemen’s boot with the needle still in it, and jumped to her feet. We started looking through the hides at once.

  ‘We’ll have them ready to take with us in Auk Moon,’ I told her. ‘We’ll have them scraped and cured before we leave, and we can make a frame as soon as we get to our spring Camp, and sew the hides there. We can get birchbark then too.’

  Osané always looked as if she were listening. Now I’d got used to her I found it quite easy to do all the talking. After all, I’d had to listen to my mother all my life, and I hadn’t always agreed with what she said. Osané usually did everything I suggested, sometimes better than I could. Of course, as she wouldn’t speak she couldn’t argue with me, but sometimes she’d set about things differently from how I’d told her. She didn’t do that often, but when she did she sometimes turned out to be right.

  My mother never came to Seal Bay Camp – that’s where we went in Auk Moon when the sea wouldn’t let us through to White Beach Camp – she went off across Long Strait somewhere. So we only started using our new tent when we got to Salmon Camp. It was much better than the old one. If we’d known how little we’d see of my mother we mightn’t have bothered with another tent. When the weather was bad my father and Haizea spent their days in our tent anyway. When I suggested they sleep with us too, and then we could use the old tent as a store, they both refused. So at night Amets, Esti and I had the right hand side of the hearth to ourselves, and Kemen and Osané had the left.

  I lay awake the first night gazing up at the new hazel frame, the carefully sewn hides and the birchbark lining up above. Through the smoke hole I could see the stars. Never, since I left my mother’s breast, had I lain on the right side of the hearth. Now it was I, not Nekané, who lay down at night and sat by day in the right-hand place next to the cooking place behind the hearth. I was now the one who could reach everything I needed without getting up. I was the one who could tell everyone, even the men, to take their boots off when they came in, and all the other things they must do, or not do, inside my house. With only two women in the tent both Osané and I slept in the best places next to the hearth. ‘Like two of the Wise already!’ I said to her. Osané smiled.

  Haizea said:

  We got to Salmon Camp early enough to catch elvers. Ortzi and I always used to make elver traps together. Now I persuaded Itsaso to come with me. We cut birchbark and rolled six traps. Alaia gave us calfskin. We spoilt the first bit of skin making the holes too big and she was cross, but she let us have more. We made channels in the stony rapids along the edges of Eel Stream, just above the beach. We weighed our traps with stones and asked the Eel spirits to be kind to us. They listened, even though Alaia said the Year was too old. I believed my father more than Alaia. He said the Year counted on its fingers, and whenever it reached a hand-full it told the Eels to give themselves unstintingly. I could just remember it happening before. Now I wanted elvers for my father – he didn’t get enough meat because of not being able to chew.

  One day the elver traps were so full they were nearly all eel and hardly any water. We tipped the elvers into a rush basket. They nearly reached the brim. They wriggled and swarmed in circles of shining ripples, black and brown. It was like trying to pick up threads of water – they just slipped out of our fingers – so we cupped our hands and shoved wriggly scoops into our mouths. They tasted fresh and fishy, tickling our throats as they went down so we couldn’t stop laughing. Itsaso laughed so much she fell down the bank; I stuffed the basket between some birch stems and rolled down after her. There’s a ledge of grass down there, bright green from otter spraint. We lay on our backs giggling; above us bright birch leaves danced under the Sun.

  When I was a child I thought all these things would last for ever.

  Early in Salmon Moon Itsaso and I were picking mussels at Shellfish Narrows when we saw the salmon coming in. The tide had turned: the River was starting to flow the other way in soft surges of salt water. Down among the seaweedy rocks the pools were filling. Colder water swished round our ankles. My basket was full. I swung it on to my back and looked at the swirling tide. Dark shapes like twilight shadows flickered through the seawater.

  ‘Itsaso! The salmon! They’re here!’

  We raced back to Camp, dodging between the oaks along the path above the gorge. Some of the women were back already, their baskets full. Osané was roasting pignuts in the ashes. Esti had a little scraper of her own and was helping Osané smooth out the ash. Osané gripped the back of her tunic with one hand to stop her falling in the fire. Alaia and Sorné were scraping the fat off a fresh deerskin. The stripped carcass of a young stag hung from my father’s oak tree. The men were lying in the sunshine doing nothing – at least, they had nets piled all round them, and netting-needles lying on top, but that’s not the same as working! You know how men are useless at getting any work done when they’ve just been hunting! All they’d done was take that stag from a trap – its antlers had got caught in the noose. You couldn’t say that was hard work! But men always say they’re tired from the hunt when they’ve been away for a day or two. The truth is they’re worn out from making their own fires and cooking their own food. Actually what men do best in the world is lying in the Sun.

  ‘The salmon have come! They’re at Shellfish Narrows! The salmon are coming in!’

  The men leaped up. Even my aunt Sorné put aside her work and struggled to her feet. I ran back to Shellfish Narrows with the men. They soon saw I was right. The salmon were rolling in with the tide, over the trap and through the open gap between the fences. From the cliffs of Shellfish Narrows we looked down on rippling silvery backs as the fish surged into the River. The men waded in upstream, pulling the withy gate across the gap in the upper fence, and wedging it between the stakes at either side. Sendoa and his brothers came and stood beside us, dripping. Amets and Kemen had climbed out on the other side.

  Slowly the tide slackened. The flood eddied aimlessly between the cliffs of Shellfish Narrows. Small waves lifted the last fronds of seaweed at high water. A soft swell rocked to and fro, a hand’s length above the lower fence of the fish trap.

  ‘Now!’

  Sendoa signalled across the narrows to Amets and Kemen. Kemen waded into the water beside my sister’s husband. There’d been a lot of talk among the women last Year at White Beach Camp about Kemen not being much of a hunter when it came to catching birds. Some of them said he wasn’t really much use to us. I was glad Sorné was getting a chance to see that wasn’t true. Kemen grabbed his end of the lower gate and wedged it hard between the stakes. The waves funnelling between the cliffs were as tall as he was, but that didn’t bother him. Amets felt along the bottom of the gate with his feet to check it was right down across the gap underneath. He stood on the frame and pushed it down with all his weight. A stone was stopping it. All at once Kemen dived head first like an auk and disappeared under the water. Amets was so startled he let the next wave slap his cheek and knock him off balance. Suddenly Kemen bobbed up next to Amets, and held up his spread palm so we all knew the gate was fixed.

  Everyone said afterwards that Kemen must have had some Auk in him from the Beginning, to be able to dive and swim under water like that. Women are usually better at seeing what’s under the sea, because we dive after oysters in the hot Moons. It’s not as easy to keep your eyes open in the water as men think. You have to remember not to breathe as well. Most men never even try it – well, they have us women so they don’t have to, do they? Sendoa was shouting at us: ‘You – Ortzi! Haizea! Bring down the spears! And you can get that net r
eady to drag the fish down to the lower gate. Keep it away from the spears though, whatever you do!’

  Ortzi didn’t want to work with a girl. Itsaso hadn’t followed us back to Shellfish Narrows. Ortzi was angry that Sendoa was treating us both as children even though Ortzi hadmade himself a spear specially for Salmon Camp. He wouldn’t speak to me, though it was hardly my fault. Everyone knows women can set nets just as well as men can, but when the salmon come we all have to pretend it’s the same as hunting. That’s because the fish give themselves so freely that all you have to do – nearly – is ask them to leap into your basket. Women have to be much cleverer when they go fishing, which we do all the rest of the Year, you may have noticed! But when the Salmon first come, and you couldn’t fail if you tried, fishing suddenly has to be a man’s work. I wonder why . . .

  But that Year, when Ortzi was first lost to me, I never wanted to grow up and become a woman. I was pleased when the men let me help, even just pulling a net about. When I was a child I still believed everything they said!

  We got five baskets-full from the fish trap in just one night. Some of those salmon were too heavy for Ortzi or me to lift by ourselves, so we had to work together. The men carried the baskets uphill through the oaks back to Salmon Camp. Ortzi and I had two salmon each, strung over our shoulders; even so, we were struggling to keep up. Just one basket of salmon kept everyone feasting for two days. We split the rest open and laid them on the rocks to dry. We made a smoky fire and set up a shelter over it to dry the deer meat. It would do for later – after all, we’d been eating deer all winter.

  It’s always good when the salmon first come. After eating white fish the salmon are so rich and pink and greasy – they fill you up like meat, until you’re only fit to lie in the Sun and rest your bulging stomach. For a few days it’s wonderful, and then you get used to it. By the end of Seed Moon you feel like one more salmon would make you sick. But isn’t it good while it lasts! In the spring Moons there always seems to be more work to do than anyone can get done, but in Salmon Moon you just have to walk as far as the River and you’ll always find more fish coming.