"Do you want some water, Sweetness?"
Susan nodded, solemn as a child, preoccupied—dreaming awake of what was happening to her.
After Catania gave her a sip of water, the girl cried out, startled by a sudden stinging pain. It frightened her more than the deep, slow, rolling cramps. She felt that something had torn inside her.
When Catania smiled down, it made Susan angry. Who was Catania, who had to stick a peeled hazel twig up her so she wouldn't have babies from being any man's Sunday doctor—who was she to be grinning as if she knew what this was like?
The sudden sharp pain came again, and Catania saw Susan frown so severely she became ugly, her face flushed dark and straining. She groaned a long groan that ended in a gasp, and her knees rose higher. "Oh ... Mountain Jesus!"
Dummy Olsen sat up against a pine tree. Susan had wakened him, calling out. He stretched, yawned, then stood up and walked over to see what was happening.
When Susan saw him, she screamed, "Get away! Get away!" And put her hands down to cover herself.
Dummy looked at her, astonished, with his mouth fallen open. He began to cry, and Joan got up, turned him away, and walked back into camp with him.
"Oh, I'm sorry," Susan said. "... I'm sorry." And she heaved into another spasm, grunting and grinding her teeth.
After a while, Catania saw the top of the baby's head bulging slowly out at Susan's groin, stretching the circle red.
"Push again."
But Susan shook her head. "No," she said. "No."
Mary One-eye elbowed Catania aside and stared into Susan's face. "Finish your work," she said.
Susan gasped and took a breath. She took another breath, screamed through gritted teeth ... and the baby's head came out of her.
"It's coming!" Catania knelt with her hands ready. "The baby's coming!"
A contraction shook Susan and rippled through the muscles of her belly. She threw her head back and shouted. Blood flicked across Catania's arms as the baby's shoulders shoved free ... and it spurted out, wet red, into her hands.
* * *
Susan woke before dawn with the baby at her breast. She had forgotten whether it was a boy, so she looked—and then remembered she'd called him Sam, after his father.
She thought he seemed like Sam, already—sturdy, restless, and strong. Catania and Sally Auerbach were sitting beside the sled, and they said so too.
They could hear Trappers singing at fires across the camp, singing softly so as not to disturb the baby. It seemed to Susan this child was a promise of luck for them, and new beginning.
"Is he perfect?" she said to Catania, just to be sure, though all the women had said he was perfect.
"Better than perfect," Catania said. "Big Sam would be very proud of you."
"Big-Sam then ... and Small-Sam now," Susan said, and went to sleep.
Sally said she'd watch them, so Catania walked through the camp looking for Tattooed Newton, to thank him for having said such a lucky thing by the stream, about a charming baby coming to save Susan.
She found him with Jack and some other men in a long clearing farther down the creek. They were drinking vodka in celebration of the new Sam. The moon was up, and its light shone with the star-lights of the Dog, the Bear, and the Belt.
Here, in this open field, the men had almost a hunter's distance. They were night-shooting at pale split-pine stakes—shooting, it seemed to Catania, for the joy of feeling the longbows jump in their hands, hearing bowstrings hum, and seeing the swift stitching of arrows' flight through shadow.
The pine stakes were missed as often as struck. Del Richardson, Pat Weber, Harold Auerbach, and other young men shouted and chased though darkness, wrestling and tripping, looking for the misses. Arrow fletching tufted the field like small pale flowers in moonlight.
Catania watched the men a while, concerned someone might be hurt with so much drunken shooting and running here and there in darkness. She watched a while, then went away and left them without the weight of woman-care or a woman's words, so they might play like boys a little longer.
... In the morning, barefoot in dark green robes, their long hair braided in coils on their heads, Garden women came past the Trapper camp. They carried cloth bags with them for picking little forest friends, and sang as they walked along the creek, their robes swaying. They were singing a song about the Marrying Mister Snow.
Some little children had come, and ran everywhere among the sleds and fires. The Trappers laughed and caught them, played with them roughly, rolling the children over like puppies, picking them up and squeezing them till they squeaked.
Then their mothers called, the children scurried to follow... and the Trappers looked after them, standing sad with empty hands.
The morning grew warmer, so the shallow snow thinned and crumbled. No new snow had fallen in the night, though the fringe ice lingered along the creek's edge. The forest's sky was a darker blue than the mountain skies had been, and high clouds like tufts - of ermine sailed and sailed across it on a southern wind.
Jack woke Catania, who'd been up most of the night sitting by Susan and the baby. She yawned and stretched, then got up and put on her moccasin-boots and buckskins to follow him through the camp to the dog-lines. Torrey was there, his shirt off, picking spring ticks from Three-ball's ears. Garden May, the top of her robe folded down and tucked into a green sash, was kneeling, helping him, and slapping Three-balls on the muzzle when he tried to bite her.
It was the first time Garden May and Torrey had been seen together. It appeared they'd gotten tired of disliking.
"This weather's getting too warm," Torrey said. "If Warm-times were much warmer than this, I wouldn't have liked Warm-times."
Three-balls growled, showing his fangs, and Torrey and Garden May both hit him on the head with their fists, thump-thump, so he blinked and grumbled.
"We're going into Gardens," Jack said, "—to find a present for Small-Sam. I can trade my boot knife, if they don't want a pelt."
"They'll want the knife," Garden May said, as if the Garden people weren't her people anymore. "Let me see it."
Jack slid the knife from his moccasin-boot, and Garden May took it and weighed it in her hand. The blade was heavy, sharpened along both edges, and more than a man's hand long. The handle was the blade's wide flat tang, wrapped in steel wire.
"It's fifty-fold iron strip and steel," Jack said. "That's Mohawk work."
"How'd you get it?" Torrey said.
"Without honor. A man came at me who was too old to be fighting. If there'd been a way, I would have sent the knife to his son and said I was sorry. But those days were gone."
Garden May gave the knife back. "One of the Bracelets will give you a fine baby's present for it."
Torrey stood up from Three-balls, said, "This weather will bring more ticks," and pulled on his shirt to go into Gardens.
Garden May went with them, her naked breasts striped with green paint.... Catania, as they walked along, imagined Jack on sun-glare ice in a terrible fight with a gray-haired tribesman—a true red-blood with a worn, dark, deep-lined face, black eyes, and eagle feathers at his throat.
They walked into Gardens through sunshine that made the Trappers squint. People were friendly toward them, bowed little bows to Garden May, and she bowed back.
The valley was full of sunlight come down between tall trees, brightening the green and patches of snow. A light haze drifted in the air; faint layers of dust and pollen shifting like woodsmoke with earth-smell and goat-smell and potato-smell.
The Trappers heard loom shuttles clacking on the slope where the weavers worked, and Catania said, "Perhaps a woven-cloth thing." She stepped ahead to lead them along the high path past Mary's house... then out onto the field where the cloth was made.
This was where the clicking and clacking sounds had come from, from eight big looms spaced across the clearing. There was a woman sitting tending each one, with a boy sliding the shuttle back and forth for her through the web of b
ecoming-cloth.
By each loom, on platforms set above the ground, other women sat cutting cloth with hook-blade knives, then folding, and sewing along edges.
Above the slope from the looms, were wider platforms with long wood tubs of dye, each full of bright red juice, or bright yellow juice, or blue, or green. Men were tending these, soaking woven cloth, stretching it, then wringing it around peeled wood posts.—These men were splashed with the colors of their cloth. They were singing some soft song, but Catania saw that they worked as men, not dancing their tasks as those in the first-pulp paper mill.
A tall dead pine to the right, its bark stripped away, was draped with a huge cloth dyed bright yellow and blue. The cloth hung wide from the tree's crown, flowing over its branches in rich folds to gather in furling color at its trunk.
"Last drying," Garden May said. "We hang them up with a rope and pulley."
"We had little trade-pulleys," Catania said. "But we didn't have blocks and tackles. We read about them, but we didn't have them."
The colors in the cloth were wonderful—so rich that the blue and yellow stripes seemed to tremble and shift places in the sunshine.
"Blanket-pelt," Jack said. "A little woven goat-cloth blanket."
"Perfect for the baby!" Catania did a little dance. "So fine for him in this warming weather, instead of fur."
"The correct thing," Garden May said. "And blankets for babies are made here. But what is a lucky color for him?"
"We have no lucky color," Catania said. "We have lucky words and numbers...."
"Green and yellow are Gardens' lucky colors."
"He was born at Gardens," Jack said, "—and should have their luck." He went up to the first loom, Catania and the others behind him, and raised his voice above the clacking. "I have a knife to trade for a blanket."
The woman looked up at him, then back to continue her work. She pointed with her little finger at the loom to her left. "Her husband fights," she said.
The Trappers went over to that loom, where a younger woman was working. She glanced up at them, but didn't seem friendly. There was a brown birthmark along her jaw.
"I have my short-blade knife," Jack said, "—to trade for a blanket."
The woman stopped stepping on her loom's toes, and looked up at him. "A blanket for you?"
"No," Jack said. "For our new baby. His name is Small-Sam."
Then the birthmark-woman seemed more friendly. "Let me see the knife."
Jack drew it from his moccasin-boot and handed it to her.
"This is not a short-blade knife," the woman said.
"Shorter than my other one." He unsheathed the long knife at his belt to show to her.
The woman turned the boot-knife in her hands. "Has this done anything unlucky?"
"One unlucky thing," Jack said, "—how I got it. But I used that bad luck up. Now, it's a clean knife, and I could give it to Mountain Jesus or the Rain-bird, and not be concerned."
The birthmark-woman plucked a thread from her weaving, touched the knife's edge to it, and the thread parted. "My husband is a fighting man," she said, "—a Gold Two-bands. This is something he would like."
"Tell him it's Mohawk work," Jack said, "—balanced to turn once in a campfire throw, turn three times to catch a man running away."
"What colors do you want your blanket?"
"Green and yellow," Catania said.
"We have a bargain." The birthmark-woman reached out and slapped Jack's hand with a hand that sounded hard as his, from looming. Then she got up and went away, and the Trappers and Garden May sat on their heels in the sunshine, to wait for Small-Sam's blanket.
They saw the birthmark-woman talking with other Garden women at a folding-and-cutting-and-sewing platform higher on the slope.... The boy who'd been making her loom's shuttle go back and forth stood on the loom's framework and rested. He stuck his tongue out at Garden May, and wiggled it.
She got up and walked toward him, and the boy laughed and ran up to where the men were dying the woven cloth. Garden May made a finger sign after him.
"He's my daddy's sister's son, Charles," May said when she came back. "He's so bad, I like him."
The Trappers and Garden May waited, and Jack took out a piece of tobacco—the third piece he'd won playing checkers with Carlson Gold-bracelets. He used his big knife to cut it into smaller pieces, and they chewed and spat while they waited.
After a while, then a while longer, the birthmark-woman came over to them, carrying folded cloth.
"Here," she said. She shook out the folds—and a small and very beautiful blanket came down. It was striped yellow as a bird's-egg yolk, and green as hemlock branches, and was sewn along its edges with red thread. A little flower of the same red thread had been stitched into each corner of the blanket.
"Is the bargain accomplished?" the woman said.
"It's a fine blanket," Garden May said, when the Trappers said nothing.
Catania reached out and touched it. There were tears in her eyes. "It's beautiful as the baby," she said.
Jack drew his long knife and held it out to the birthmark-woman. "Give your man this knife, also," he said. "It's old-steel work, and has never failed me."
But the woman smiled, shook her head, and wouldn't take the long knife. "The bargain is accomplished," she said, folded the blanket, and handed it to Catania.
Torrey touched it with a finger. "It's soft."
Very happy with the baby's blanket, and Garden May happy for their happiness, they walked back along the high path to Mary One-eye's house and called down to her, but no one was there.
They went on to the creek's fast water, and along the bank, going two by two, Torrey and Garden May in front. Catania saw those two were walking as together people, not just people who fucked. She wondered what a wise woman would see, watching her and Jack walking side by side. She wondered that, then imagined the blanket was a blanket for their own baby, and they were always-together people.
Crossing the creek bridge, they walked up the slope to the Trapper camp. .. . Just past the first fire, Tattooed Newton stepped out from a stand of three small pines. He was armed, and there was blood on his face.
"We have trouble, Jack," he said.
Trouble.
FROM THE JOURNAL OF DOCTOR CATANIA OLSEN
CHAPTER 14
"The Olsens and Bailey came for me." Tattooed Newton said. "I killed Jim—at least, his guts are out. And Chapman and I were fighting, but I had to quit."
"Why was that?" Jack said. He walked over to his fire in no hurry, picked up his lance, bow, and quiver. "Why quit fighting?"
"Joan and Del came. She has Lucy."
Catania took great care to put the baby's blanket down on a hide, to keep it safe; then she picked up her bow and quiver. She felt no fear or surprise at the trouble, only weariness.
Torrey had run to his fire and come back armed. Garden May came with him, carrying an ax.
"They're up past the pines," Newton said. His forehead was cut; blood was running down his face. "Chapman, Bailey, Joan, and Del. Micah and Tall-David are up there too."
"Let me talk to them," Catania said, but Jack was already walking away up the slope. He went eagerly, as if to people waiting with a gift for him. Newton and Torrey followed.
"No one can hurt my Nine-fingers," Garden May said, as she and Catania trotted to catch up.
They went past pines, and Catania saw other Trappers, twenty or more, standing downslope by the creek. They were armed, and watching, but weren't coming up the campground.
Jack led into another small stand of trees, then stopped to look and listen. Through the foliage, Catania saw Newton's face beside her, streaked with blood. His dark eyes looked darker.
"You sure Jim Olsen's dead?" Jack said.
"I stuck him, first thing," Newton said. "He was quick, but he's dead or dying.—I'll tell you who's friendly up there. Myles Weber is up in a tree; he shot Bailey in the leg. They'll leave him alone for a while."
Jack stood amid the pines' green branches, thinking, as though what was happening was only interesting. "All right," he said. "We'll go up there now. I don't want them settling in."
"We kill them?" Torrey said.
"No," Jack said, and led them up through a scattered grove of small evergreens.
The others were waiting past those trees, across a narrow field. There were much bigger trees standing behind them like a wall. It was where the forest started again, south of Gardens.
Nearby, on puddled snow, a Trapper lay on his side with a double handful of shining red and blue guts out in a heap. Catania saw it was Jim Olsen. His dead face was white as bone. Beyond, Chapman Olsen and Micah Olsen stood together, armed. Tall-David Richardson and Del Richardson were to their left.
Joan Richardson stood beside her son, with Lucy Edwards kneeling before her. Lucy's hands were tied behind her back. Joan held a knife to Lucy's throat; there was a fine line of blood under the blade.
"Be still, Newton," Jack said, though Newton hadn't moved.
Behind Joan, Bailey Auerbach was sitting against a tree-trunk. There was blood on his right leg.
Jack walked out across the field as if there were no trouble, using his lance as a staff. His bow was across his back, unstrung.
Newton and Torrey followed him, Torrey to his left, Newton to his right. Catania strung her bow and set a broadhead arrow to the string. Then she and Garden May went out into the field.
Catania was frightened, now. She had trouble catching her breath.
"Hello, Jack," Joan Richardson said. "Some Trappers aren't doing what you say, anymore." She smiled down at Lucy, moved the knife-blade slightly.
Catania heard Newton make a soft humming sound.
"Look up to the left," Torrey said. They looked—and high in a tall tree, a buckskin shirt, stuck on the end of a bow-stave, was waved through green branches. "Old Weber. They can't shift that way, or he'll kill a couple of them."
"Jim's dead," Chapman said, and took a long step to the right, away from Micah, for room to draw his bow. He had an arrow nocked.
"Do," Catania called to him, "—and I'll kill you." She had turned to her left, drawn and leveled her bow, aiming at him from a rock-throw away, just past Jack. The arrow's fletching rested at her cheek.
SNOWFALL Page 18