Then he broke my arrow. He did it quickly, snapping it like a twig and throwing it into the fire. I wanted to stop him, but I knew I should not. Fletcher is the master of arrows, and all arrows are his, even the ones I make for myself.
I wake up in darkness. The low hum of the air conditioner dampens any sound from outside. My nose is dry, cracking inside, and my head hurts. I spin in the darkness and remember that I have drunk too much of the black rum. I feel the sadness and sickness that comes from the liquor. I listen, as I always do in the night. Maybe the liquor hides the Little-Men from me. Maybe there are no Little-Men. But I am still afraid in this mill-house. I feel them, I think, sometimes. I feel they are angry with me. Or maybe they are just angry.
Someone is crying. It is Chelo. He cries because his mother is dying. The missionary said it is because she lived a bad life, and she must accept it. He must accept it. But it is the old logger that is to blame, I think. He put his death into her before it killed him. A woman should not outlive two husbands.
It only takes a day, now, to reach the village. With five days off from work, we decided to stay two days. Now I wish we had not gone. Yalai was there, still, with her shop. She will not speak to me anymore. But she will sell me rum. She is still cold in her eyes, as before. Cold and strong like the river. She will outlive me. She will outlive all of us.
I don’t remember coming in last night. Chelo and I started drinking before we reached the logging-camp. He is mourning his mother. I can’t say what I’m mourning. But it was I who bought the rum.
I raise myself on my elbows. “Chelo,” I tell him in our own tongue, “be strong. She will live. You’ll see. You’ll be paid again next month, and then we can buy her more medicine.”
“The medicine doesn’t work. The Murphy said so.”
The Murphy—the missionary in the village—would know. He is a healer, one of theirs they call “Doctor.” He knows about their illnesses.
I roll over, facing away from him. He still follows me, like he did years ago. Maybe there is a Little-Man in him that wants to remind me how I have failed. Maybe it is Fletcher’s death that waits in Chelo. Waiting for his time to strike me from behind, like the arrow you never see, never hear.
Fletcher never taught me to make arrows. But he showed me how to make the hunter’s bow. While his wife was preparing Civet for the feast, he took me to the longhouse. Mama was weaving on the boards of the high room where the morning sun came in. She was sitting in the sunlight, the weaving stick between her feet, humming a weaving-song. She did not see me enter with Fletcher, but kept pulling the cords and knotting them back and forth. Fletcher touched my shoulder and nodded his head at her, so I went to her to show her I had come back from the forest. First she touched the spot on my neck.
“Did you cut yourself?” she asked me.
“No.”
“It looks like blood.”
“He put it on me,” I said, and pointed to Fletcher.
She squinted at the shadow behind me. Fletcher was quiet. Mama was quiet, too. She stood up and rolled her unfinished cloth around the weaving stick. She did not look at Fletcher.
“Where is your Husband, Ayani?” Fletcher asked.
She would not speak to him. Instead, she thrust an arm towards the hills.
“Tell him I will take the boy to the mountain. He will go to the tree now.”
She looked down at her feet and said nothing. Then she turned away from us and disappeared into the gloom of the rear.
“Mama?” I called for her, but she did not answer. I went to follow, but he stopped me with a touch on my shoulder.
“Come. You must come with me now. We have a thing we must do before you can return.”
I was too scared of him to say no. We walked a long way, along the ridge towards the high lauan trees. I watched his feet as he led the way. This I learned about Fletcher from walking with him that first time: when he walked, he moved with perfect precision. His feet thought for themselves, like the feet of Leopard-Cat. His legs placed every footfall exactly where it was best to step, like the legs of Mouse-Deer. His arms swam through the underbrush, gliding smoothly through the thicket like long-tailed Macaque goes through the branches above. His head scanned the forest, taking in all sights and sounds like wide-eyed Tarsier. But his body he held like a man, his torso and his chest never rising or falling, never tilting this way or that, always in balance. He must have been older than any man of the village, but he moved like a man half his age and twice as strong. I began to understand the honour I was receiving.
He took me to the highest lauan tree that stood on the top of the hill above the longhouse, and had me sit. He gave me water from a gourd at his belt, and he gave me a leaf to chew. He called it kampar. It was strong-tasting and made me gag, but he had me swallow it all with small sips from his gourd. I coughed many times, and my nose began to run and my lungs hurt like I had breathed in smoke. My eyes burned and I squeezed them shut to stop the burning.
Then he showed me how to make the Little-Man. He began to tap me on the chest where the blood was. He was singing, and my ears were ringing from the coughing. I thought I was coughing up a bit of stuff from my lungs, trying to clear them, but it fluttered in my chest like a live thing. Like a butterfly.
When his song ended, he whispered in my ear. “Let the Little-Man out. The Little-Man that you trapped today.”
I tried to cough it up, but it wasn’t in my lungs. It was in my chest somewhere, and just as I felt I couldn’t gasp another breath, something came out of me. It seemed to come out of my chest, not out of my mouth, but in my mouth there was a taste like blood.
“Good, good,” he said, and massaged my back until I could breathe again. My eyes stopped stinging, and I felt a calm come with the end of my coughing, like falling into your hammock after you have walked all day, toe-to-heel, on the forest-tracks. He made me sit on a root of the tree and rest.
Sitting with him there up on the hill in the sunlight, the biting flies were at my hands and feet, and I swatted at them while we talked. He said that before he could teach me to hunt properly, I had to have the Little-Man taken from me.
“Today, you think you killed Civet. You did not. He gave you his life. So you took his death as well.”
I told him I didn’t understand. The flies were distracting me, though they didn’t bother Fletcher.
“When a thing, whether fish, or bird, or beast, gives his life, he also gives his death. The death must be spoken for, or it will always look for a chance for vengeance.”
I slapped a biting fly. “Even flies?”
“No. You do not understand. Listen to me. When a thing gives its life. Chooses to give it. In sacrifice. Civet gave you his death. You are a man, so his death is a man for you. A Little-Man that waits for you, waits for a chance to pierce you like he was pierced by your arrow.”
“Where did it go?”
“I put him in the tree. You will learn to do this.”
“Why?”
He looked at me with those eyes. I stopped slapping the flies. Under those eyes I felt like a fly myself. He could just swat me down, and my death would take me away just like that. It would mean nothing to either of us.
“I understand,” I said slowly, because I did. This pleased him.
We talked for a while. He spoke slowly, in a gravelly voice. I asked him about the tree. He smiled and touched it, both of his dry dark hands clasped around the rough grey bole before him.
“Many deaths live in this tree. Fletcher before me filled it with deaths. And Fletcher before him. It is full of deaths, this lauan. You will fill it with your deaths when you return from the hunt. And one day, if it is your fate, you will know a Little-Man has come to a youngster, and you will teach that one to put his deaths into this tree.”
“Do all the hunters do this?”
“No, only the Fletcher.”
“Why?”
> “Why should flies matter? Come. Before the day is over, we must plant a panaka-vine.”
Everyone knew what the panaka-vine was for. “To make a bow?”
“Yes.”
“For who?”
“Who do you think? Your mother?”
“But it will take years to grow!”
“Of course. And when you are ready, it will be ready.”
The air is better outside the dormitory. You can hear the forest awaken, before the sawmill begins. Out on the edge of the forest where the yellow earth is carved deep by the rain, the air is moist, and rich with the smell of soil. They are building again. This means they are first tearing down. Clearing.
Soon the yellow-cap men will come out of the mess-hall and start up the great yellow machines, but for now the rhythm of the birds and the hissing of the crickets and the cicadas and tree-frogs weaves around me. The music swells and fades like a vast pair of lungs, breathing in sleep. My heart stirs with their song, and I feel the spirit of Leopard-Cat still there, crouched in the darkness of my chest.
I breathe deep the musty scent, and catch a whiff of pig, reminding me of why I’m out here.
Balthazar the cook gives me a two-handled stock pot, deep and heavy, filled with tailings and mash for the pigs. His back hurts him as he leans out of the back door and lowers it down to me. He complains, grinding his golden teeth as I take the pot off his hands. The dogs under the kitchen floor get up and follow me, but not all the way to the fence. I don’t think they like the smell of pig. I don’t, either, but it is better than diesel-smoke, which robs the body of its strength.
I look around, but nobody is watching. Behind a board by the sty I have a cracker-tin. Inside I keep some money and my cigarillos. I can’t keep them in the dormitory, they get stolen, so I keep them here with some dried meat and a fire-piston. Only I feed the pigs, so my secret is safe, even the other tin, the new one. Before I dump out the pig-swill I light a cigarillo from the piston’s burning punk and blow the smoke into the roof of the sty so it doesn’t show in the mill-windows.
The smell of tobacco wakes the pigs. They come running up, tails and ears bobbing, their little black eyes hungry. They remind me of someone, but before I can think who, Chelo calls me. He is calling me up the hill. I point to the stock pot with my chin. He shakes his head. He looks angry. No. He looks worried. He hunches forward and begins to run down the hill to me with little quick steps, his hands out, jiggling in the early light. He has grown fat here, in the mill camp. His chin wobbles. I know who I was thinking of, now. But that thought makes me worried, and I do not laugh. I stub out the cigarillo and pick up the pot as he reaches me.
“Did you hear about Raul, big-brother?”
“The foreman?”
“He is in the infirmary, getting bandaged up.”
I chuckle. “Did he cut off his pee-pee?”
“No, big-brother, I am serious. He has been beaten.”
The pigs are pushing each other aside to get at the peelings. “Who by?”
“Villagers, he thinks. It was dark. He was locking up and saw people in the shed.”
“Does he know who?”
“No, big-brother. It was dark.”
He calls me big-brother now and sometimes I call him little-brother, just like the villagers do. But it upsets me. More than Raul being hit would upset me, I know. Raul is a liar and a thief. I tell Chelo I suspect he has been selling the yellow-caps’ things to the villagers and maybe this time he was cheating them.
“Is he hurt?” I ask.
“Not much. They hit him on the face. But they took everything.”
“Everything in the shed?”
“Yes.”
“We’re lucky, then.”
“Big-brother?”
“No work today. Not until they replace what was stolen.”
Chelo grins and snorts with laughter. More than ever, he looks like a pig. I am afraid for him. Run, little-brother. Run away. But he does not.
I never took a wife. I don’t regret it. Not now. But for a long time, I did.
Seven years it took to make my bow. Fletcher and I tended the vine and made it grow into the right shape. When he and I hunted together, we would always go check on my vine before going to the hill to fill the spirit-tree. I had learned to make the Little-Man without kampar-leaf. I could feel each death in me. I had learned how to keep them in place so they would do me no more harm than the biting flies and I learned how to put them into the tree.
But the days became harder. We had to walk further, then, to hunt. There were more villagers coming, and they often went into the forest, chasing away game with their boots and their rifles and their stupidity.
Sometimes the villagers would come to the longhouse. Not often, but often enough that they learned the trade words: one, two, three, rice, knife, salt fish, yam, pork, cassava, taro, gold, glass, venison. Words like that. At first they had little to trade except gold coins and gold teeth. They were a poor people, and their hair was red and brittle because they were hungry and had nothing but millet.
Later on, they had meat again because they brought their black buffalo from the down-lands. But before, during the hungry time, during those first years while I was waiting for the vine to grow, the down-landers were at war. The warriors of the other country, the big country in the north had killed them with great machines like dragonflies, and the villagers were afraid to go down to their old lands or to clear fields to raise cattle on.
Chelo learned their tongue. He told me they were poor because there were too many of them to live in the village, and not enough for everyone to eat. They were poor hunters. We traded meat with them, because they were so bad at getting it themselves. That way, I gained a good steel knife that I used to make my bow. They said it was “steel from the legs of the sledge that moves itself.” Now I know they mean “steel from the springs of a truck,” but then I did not understand.
When I cut the vine and made my bow, I made it alone in the woods. I made several bows in the seven years before that. Each was better than the last, Fletcher said, but only the last one mattered. This bow was made from only one piece. It was cut with only one knife, and Fletcher warned me that if I should break it, or break the knife in making it, that I should never make another. That is how the Little-Men tell us our fate. Fate is for only one man at a time.
That year, I almost took a wife. Or I should say she almost took me. Living with Fletcher, I did not go with the girls like the other boys did. So when it came time for me to take up my new bow, I had no woman to make the patum, the wrist-guard, from her hair. Yalai made mine and she came to me when I was alone with the knife and the bow was almost finished. Her footfalls were quiet, but not timid, and she kept her eyes high. I put down the bow and she knelt in front of me, tied on the patum to see if it fit. It did, and she laughed at her cleverness. “You must keep it now,” she said and went away smiling. The strength of her spirit warmed my heart.
Yalai was always the only one for me, and I courted her with gold, but I did not win her over. We ran out of time for that.
Chelo and I do not want to be drawn into some other kind of work, so when Foreman tells us we are not working today, we go up onto the hill to watch the yellow-caps bring down a big lauan tree. When the charges go off, there is a flash of fire that fades before a huge crack like thunder shakes the air around us. Every bird for as far as the eye can see rises up into the air at once. It looks as if leaves from every tree are falling up into the sky. For a second, the whole forest holds its breath.
Fletcher used to say that Death comes with every breath. Every time we breathe out, the breath-spirit waits for a sign from Death. If we do not die, we breathe again. And again. And again. But one day, Death nods, and the breath-spirit leaves forever. I waited for the forest to breathe again.
“Was that one of them?”
I know what he means. “A spirit-tre
e? No. No Little-Men in that one.”
The tree starts to fall. Its shaft is perfectly straight, shattered on one side from the dynamite. I think of a feather, drifting softly down to the forest floor. But when it strikes a lesser tree, there is the shimmer of splinters flying, then the sound of smashing and screaming of wood. The sound makes me shudder.
The cracking and shifting dies at last and the drone of chainsaws begins, great flies buzzing in the woods. We turn away.
“Hey you. You guys. Hey!” says a voice from behind. It is Tommy Dos Santos, from our work-gang. He is the only down-lander in the camp, tall and yellow-skinned. We watch him approach and say nothing.
“Raul told me to find you,” he says, out of breath, when he comes close. I’ll never get used to how the villagers smell. Sour and bitter. Fletcher used to think it was from eating beef and palm-oil. But we all eat the same now, out of cans. Tommy still smells like a villager.
“There’s going to be some company-men,” he says.
“You mean more yellow-caps?”
“No, big men. VEE EYE PEAS. Foreigners. From the head office.”
“Why are they coming here?” said Chelo. I was worried, too.
“I don’t know. Maybe they want to see what’s going on.”
Chelo wrinkles his brow, but I am curious. “Why did Raul send you to tell us this, Tommy?”
He has the goodness to look embarrassed. “He wanted me to say that you are not to talk about what happened last night.”
“You mean we are not to let them know he let the shed get robbed.”
“He didn’t let it. They beat him.”
I say nothing.
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