by Andre Norton
“This is a beaver, yet not a beaver.”
“That is true,” Yellow Shell spoke for himself.
“You bear a pipe?” The Eagle looked at him. “Do you speak for the beavers?”
“For myself only. The medicine otter said that the Raven had great power, that he could aid me in becoming all beaver, all other once more.”
“But this is not a matter of the pipe.” The Eagle’s sweep of clawed foot was impatient. “It is the matter of the pipe to which Storm Cloud has been summoned. What speak the otters?”
Stone Foot’s paws moved deliberately, giving to his signs the dignity of a ceremonial speech in his own tongue.
“There is much trouble along the river. Those who serve the Changer fly and raid. The minks take prisoners for him, and we know not what becomes of them. Our spirit talker has sung and his dreams have been ill ones. We would know what the Swift Flyers, the Mighty Wings, have seen in the land. For even the edges of the Sky Country are theirs and little can be hidden from their strong eyes.”
There was another pause before the Eagle made answer. “It is true there is a new coming and going. The Changer’s village has moved close to the place of Stone Trees, though the hunting there is poorer. It is as if they must wait there for someone, or something to happen. Spirits walk by night; you may sense their passing. But to know more than that, we must search—and we have left well enough alone.”
The Raven bowed his head in a vigorous up and down. “Yes, yes, it is better not to draw the eye of the Changer, lest he be minded of one. But does your spirit talker fear that the time spoken of is near—that the world is about to be turned over?”
Cory saw all the eagles shift uneasily, their heads turn from the Raven to the otters. He could see that the bold question disturbed them.
“There is always that to be feared,” Stone Foot returned.
“So. Well, the Thunderbird dwells yonder. We shall burn sweet smoke such as he loves to have blown into his wings, and cry aloud to the wind what we fear. But also, tell your chief,” Storm Cloud continued, “that we shall search from the air and learn what we may. None of those who serve the Changer can out-climb or out-fly us, as they shall learn if they match their powers against ours.”
Again there was movement among the eagles as they drew themselves tall on their perch rocks with their pride as strong to see as their war shouts would be heard.
“The Swift Flyers, the Mighty Wings, are great ones, undefeated in any battle,” signed Stone Foot. “If this they will do, then all along the river shall know that we will be prepared for any war, if war is what they should bring upon us.”
Together with Red Head he began to rewrap the medicine pipe, securing each fastening. But the Raven turned his attention now fully on Yellow Shell.
“You have come to Raven,” he said. “Raven’s ears are open to hear what you would ask.”
“It is as I have said—the medicine otter told me that if I would be as I was before the Changer looked upon me, I must come to the Eagle and the Raven.”
But the Raven was shaking his head. “I hold the calling of spirits, yes. They are sky spirits, and wind spirits, and a few earth spirits. But the powers of the Changer they cannot break. They can only tell you where to seek an answer, they cannot give it to you.”
“And will you ask them for me?”
Storm Cloud’s beak clicked together in a sharp sound, drawing Yellow Shell’s attention. As the beaver looked to him, he signed:
“To do that requires a mighty singing. Such singing is not done for nothing. We have no old peace with your people, nor have we any friendship or brotherhood with you, Beaver-who-is-not-wholly-a-beaver.”
“Friendship is a matter of giving as well as taking.” The Yellow Shell part of him made a bolder answer than Corey might have used. “I ask not to be given where I do not give. What would you want of me as a price for such a singing?”
The Raven did not answer; it was as if he believed this a matter of bargaining between Yellow Shell and the chief. He himself was content upon Storm Cloud’s decision.
“You are of those who master water,” the Eagle said after a long moment’s pause. He might have been trying to determine some manner of payment of benefit to his tribe, thought Corey. “This, our lake, is sometimes too full. Rocks tumble from the cliffs and close the stream that empties it, and then there is much hard labour to clear them free. Twice have storms so filled it that lower nests have been washed away. Dig you a way for water to run, one that we may use at such times, and this singing shall be yours.”
“I am but one beaver,” Yellow Shell countered. “This may be such a task as would need a whole clan to do.”
Storm Cloud’s bill clicked again, impatiently. “A whole clan does not ask for spirit singing, but you do. Therefore it is your task. And perhaps only you can find a way to use the stream that is, clear it more easily of rocks.”
“What I can do, I shall,” Yellow Shell promised.
The otters had the pipe recovered, were ready to be gone, and Storm Cloud had already assigned two of his warriors to fly them down the mountain. But Yellow Shell had a few moments to talk with them. He signed a wish that they might find his own people and warn them against marching south into these river lands where trouble was gathering. And this, Red Head agreed, they would do, sending their best scout north. Then the otters were snatched up by the eagles, who seemed to want to rid themselves of their guests as soon as possible, and Yellow Shell was left behind.
Storm Cloud, too, was a-wing, heading back to the crags, and only a young eagle swooped about the beaver. Even as Raven signed, “Split Bill will show you the waterway,” the eagle’s clutch was hard upon him, and he, too, was borne skyward in a fearsome soaring.
Raven’s Sing
Yellow shell looked over the terrain when the eagle warrior dropped him at the outlet of the lake. There was a stream that fed through a narrow gap and the beaver could see how a fall of rocks from above would dam it. But this was not a trouble his people had had to face before, for their task was usually the making, not the clearing, of dams.
He swam along the river outlet, nosing at both banks, trying to find some way to deepen the flow of water. But he could not see any method of tunnelling through the stone of the cliffs.
Since the present outlet was so banked with rock, he returned to the lake and began to explore its banks at this end. The eagle who had brought him grew bored and flew away, and Yellow Shell was left alone to face what seemed a hopeless task. But the beaver stubbornly refused to admit defeat.
In the end his forelegs and head suddenly broke through a screen of brush into a hole in the mountain cup. If all the basin had been formed by a volcano in action, then this crack had come at that time, with a later spread of molten rock to roof above it. When Yellow Shell padded into it, he found not the crevice he had first expected but a channel, which brought him, by a very dark way, out on the open mountain side on the other side of the basin wall.
He went back to the valley of the lake and squatted down at the edge of the water, eating a hearty meal of freshly stripped bark while he studied the bank by that fissure. It was a big job for one beaver working alone, but he could see no other possible way to provide the eagles’ lake with an emergency overflow exit. By mid-afternoon he was at work.
The bank of the lake must be undermined, cut through so that there was an open spillway into that crack. He dug with his forepaws until they were as sore as they had been from travel over stone. Rocks had to be loosened and pushed from side to side, then firmly embedded again to make a kind of funnel into the spillway.
He worked through the last of the daylight, keeping on into the night, stopping only now and then for a much needed rest or to eat again from the food about him. Now he had a raw gash in the earth, partly walled in with stones and such pieces of hard saplings as he could pound and wedge in for security. Mud mixed with broken brush was then plastered over that foundation, all to form a channel
. The whole thing was the height of his body above the present level of the lake, and at that end he built another wall of small stones, to be easily shifted by the strong claws of the eagles when the need arose.
He was lying with his sore feet in the lapping waters of the lake at the next sunrise, so tired he thought that he could not easily move again. But to the best of his beaver skill he had provided the eagles with the safety they needed. Let the river leading from the lake again be sealed by falling stones and they need only pull out the thin dam corking this outlet, and the flood would pour through the new channel. Of course there was no way of testing it until such a calamity occurred, and Yellow Shell wondered dully if they would demand such proof before they fulfilled their part of the bargain.
There was the whir of wings in the air above him and the eagle who had brought him there, or one enough like him to be his twin, landed on the edge of the restraining dam Yellow Shell had built. He teetered there as he looked down into the channel the beaver had cut and walled.
Yellow Shell was too tired to lift his paws in any language sign. But he nodded, first to the lake and then to the spillway he had made, hoping that the eagle, if he were a messenger, would understand that the task was done.
The bird’s sharp eyes shifted from the animal to the cut leading to the dark hole in the basin side. Then his claws formed a series of signs.
“This is a way through the rock?”
Yellow Shell pulled his sore paws from the soothing water to sign back:
“A way through the mountain wall. When the water rises, pull the stones now under you. There will be a new way to drain—”
The eagle bent his head to survey the dam on which he perched, touched his beak to one of the topmost stones as if testing its stability, or else estimating his chance of being able to move it when the need arose. Apparently he was satisfied, for without another sign to Yellow Shell he took wing and was out over the lake in a couple of sweeps, heading, the beaver noted, not for the village on the island but up to the crags where Storm Cloud and his escort of warriors had gone the day before.
Yellow Shell combed at his muddy fur, wincing when his sore paw hurt, but intent on making himself clean if the eagles were to come to inspect his handiwork. Their pride was known to all the tribes, but the beavers were certainly not the least among the People. He wished he had his boxes of paint, his ceremonial beads and belt, that he might make a proper showing. For, looking at his work of the past hours, he thought he could take pride in it.
The eagle who had come to inspect did serve as a messenger, for more mighty wings were visible in the morning air and very shortly Storm Cloud, together with those who must be his subchiefs and leading warriors, settled on the dam. They looked at the dam, at the cut behind it, at the crevice into which the waters would be funnelled when the need arose. Yellow Shell signed to the eagle chief the purpose of each part of the spillway.
Now—would the eagles demand from him a demonstration—one which would mean that he must somehow dam that other river outlet and turn the water into this? At the very thought of such labour, his paws burned and his back ached. But it would appear that Storm Cloud was not so suspicious of the beaver’s skill.
The eagle chief himself walked along the now dry funnel, thrust his head and shoulders well into the hole of the crevice. But he did not go all the way through. Perhaps he could see the light at the other end, which was now more visible since Yellow Shell had also cleaned the exit to allow easy passage.
The eagle chief came back to face the beaver.
“It is well,” he signed. “You have made what was needed. Therefore we shall now do as we promised.”
He must have given some signal that Yellow Shell was not aware of, for one of the waiting warriors suddenly caught the beaver and rose into the air. Yellow Shell closed his eyes against that fear of being so far from the safe ground and hung motionless in his bearer’s hold as the wind blew chill about him.
They did not return to the shore across from the village island where he and the otters had been deposited before. Rather they climbed up to the crags from which Storm Cloud had come. Here was a flat shelf on which the beaver was dropped and he sat carefully as close to its middle as he could without his distrust of these heights being visible to his hosts—or so he hoped.
The rock about him was cracked and broken and these holes and crevices seemed to serve the birds as lodges. One such opening faced Yellow Shell now. They were all patterned with drawings to celebrate coups and deeds, not only of the living warriors who now inhabited them but those of their ancestors, for the eagles must have lived here a long, long time. But the lodge of stone that Yellow Shell faced was very different from the others in that its painted border was all of pictures showing strong medicine. And, as Yellow Shell hunched there looking at those, Raven hopped forth from the crack of the doorway. He clapped his wings vigorously and, at his summons, two young eagles came from behind him, one carrying a small drum painted half red, half white, the other a bundle that he put down carefully beside a spot on the rock stained black by many past fires.
The eagle who had brought out the bundle now went to one side, pulling back to the fire site in three or four trips short lengths of well-dried wood that he built up into a tepee shape. This done, he went to perch with the other eagles, except for the one with the drum. There were rocks for their sitting all around the open space. Yellow Shell turned his head from right to left and saw that all the birds had settled down quietly in a ring, though he did not turn his back on Raven to see if they were also behind him.
Now the drummer began to thump with the claws of his right foot, first gently, then with more force, so that it sounded at the beginning as might the mutter of thunder as yet far off, growing stronger and stronger.
Raven took a coal from a firebox, set it to the tepee of wood, tossing into the flames that followed substances he took from his bundles.
Smoke came, and it was coloured, first blue, then red—and there was a mingling of strange odours to be sniffed. The puffs of smoke did not spread, but rose in a smooth, straight pillar to the clouds as had the signal fire of the otters. Yellow Shell, straining back his head on his thick neck to watch them climb, thought that this looked more and more like a rope reaching to the Sky Country—which, here on the mountain top, could not be too far away.
Was Raven planning to use that to reach the Sky World and talk there with the spirit peoples?
It would seem not. Once the smoke was thick and climbing well, Raven fastened dance rattles to his feet, took up turtle shells filled with pebbles. Then he began to dance about the fire, and as he danced he sang, though the words he croaked had no meaning for Yellow Shell.
Tired as he was, the beaver tried to fight sleep; yet in spite of all his efforts, his head would nod forward on his chest and his eyes close. Then he would straighten up with a start, glancing around hurriedly to see if the eagles or Raven had noticed.
But they were watching only Raven. Finally the fight became too much for Yellow Shell and there was a moment when he did not wake again, but went further into sleep.
And he dreamed, knowing even as he dreamed that this was a spirit dream and one he must remember when he awakened.
He was flying high in the sky, not borne so by one of the eagles so that the dread of falling was ever with him, but as if he, too, had wings and had worn them all his life.
Below him stretched all the world as was known to Yellow Shell. There was the lake from which his clan had begun their march south. And he saw them now, recognizing each and every one of them. They had an otter in their midst and were watching that animal’s flying forepaws. So Yellow Shell knew that the warning against the south had reached them and they would now turn back, or perhaps east or west, to safety.
And he saw the river, and the swamp marsh of the otter village where warriors now made new spears and squaws were working on a mighty gathering of food, as if they thought that their island home might be under si
ege.
There, too, was the mink lodge where he and Broken Claw had been held captive, and there he saw the minks lashing beaver slaves, thin, worn, undersized, to work building new canals. And Yellow Shell ground his teeth together in hot anger at the sight.
But all this was not what the spirits wished him to see. He was swept along, rather than flew, to the southeast, with the mountains of the eagles now at his back. So he came to a land that was prairie, changing to desert in places. There was a village and he saw that it was one of the coyotes, and now he knew that what he was to be shown was the stronghold of the Changer.
Down and down he dropped over that village, until he feared that any one of those there would raise head to the sky and see him. But none did, for the spirit dream was his protection. And he came to ground before a skin-walled lodge set a little apart from the rest. On it were pictures of great and strong medicine, so that he feared to put out a paw to raise the flap of the doorway. Yet that he must do, for the need that had brought him there so ordered him.
Thus he came into the lodge and recognized it for one of a great medicine person. But the spirits of his dreams raised his eyes to the centre pole of the lodge and to the bundle hanging there, and he knew that this was what he must have for his own if he would be only Yellow Shell again. But when he reached up his forepaws to seize it, there was a billow of dark and stinking smoke from the place of fire and he leaped back, a leap that took him through the door flap into the open again. Then he found that he could not return, rather he was again soaring into the air, heading away from the coyote town, back to the eagle mountain. And at last he sat in the rock crags, across the smoking fire from Raven, who no longer danced. The drumming had stopped and the drummer was gone, so were the eagles who had watched. It was the beginning of night.
“You know,” Raven did not sign that but croaked the words in beaver, which, though harshly accented, were plain enough for Yellow Shell to understand.