While only partly listening to Kaiauk, I surreptitiously looked around and was delighted to see Meemz and Tetepano following Chacháquises into the glade. While Kaiauk was just a few years older than Ascopo and I, they were of middle age and were accomplished hunters. Ascopo and I flopped down on the ground on our bellies, heads resting in our hands, and listened with rapt attention. Kaiauk, being older, tried to pretend otherwise, but was also hanging on every word. Tetepano was the best storyteller of the group, but at first I couldn’t tell whether or not he was the best hunter.
My favorite hunting story was about how a big buck outwitted Tetepano. The men were out hunting, searching for deer, but the buck was lying in a bed of grass, hunkered down so that he was invisible to the hunters. The buck waited until the men had passed by him, then jumped up and ran back in the direction from which the men had come. The men were startled and missed the chance to shoot at close range, but they saw where the buck had disappeared into a pocosin, so they tracked him there. Figuring that he would come out of the opposite side, Tetepano went to the left and his companion, Meemz, to the right, with a plan to meet on the other side of the pocosin. Tetepano swore that he could hear the buck moving in the thicket, and pulled his bow, ready to unleash an arrow. Just then, Meemz emerged from the other side and came face-to-face with an arrow strung in a bow. It was a close call, but even small children learn never to release the string until they see the eye of the prey.
The two men decided to plunge into the pocosin, and in such close quarters, thought they could probably dispatch the buck with their spears rather than the bow and arrows they normally use, so they unstrung their bows to prevent them getting tangled in the brush. Working together, they moved back through the pocosin, which was slow going because there were so many green briers that bound everything together. When they finally reached the other side, they were surprised to see that there was no buck and no evidence that he had come though the pocosin.
Just as they were wondering what could have happened, Tetepano noticed the tall grasses were moving out beyond the western edge of the pocosin. When he called Meemz’s attention to the movement, they were stunned to see that the huge buck was creeping along on his belly and was already well away from the thicket. Only his antler rack gave him away. When the buck realized he was visible, he leapt up and dashed away before the warriors could even think about stringing their bows. The huge old buck had outsmarted them.
By the time this story ended, the fire had burned around the base completely, and we set to work with stone hatchets, chopping out the burned wood. Then Chacháquises set another band of rosin into the groove, which was easier to pack now that a section was hollowed out. It burned a little deeper, and again we chopped with the hatchets. It took most of the day to fell the tree, but the day was full of stories. It was not very hard work, just waiting for the fire to do the work for us, but it took a whole day before the tree was on the ground, and then we had to use the same process on the top to get rid of all the branches. This was a little more exciting since we let the flames get larger. They crackled and popped, but as soon as they really started to get hot, Chacháquises poured water to slow the fire down. We worked until dark, when it was fun to watch the fire sparkle as we listened to good stories.
Tetepano seemed to be the one who most loved to hunt. Many of his stories were funny ones about being outsmarted by the animals he hunted. Meemz whispered to me that the reason Tetepano was a good hunter was because he never made himself out to be too important. He humbly gave the animals their due, making himself look inept while the animals seemed to win, but he always brought home food and was recognized as the best hunter among the other men in our village.
In one story that particularly intrigued me, Tetepano described his prowess with an atlatl, as well as how he learned humility. The atlatl is an old tool, used less frequently than bows and arrows, but Tetepano boasted that he could throw a spear with the atlatl as fast as his companion could shoot an arrow from a bow. It was not an idle boast, but to boast of a kill in the presence of the animal is inviting bad luck.
When his hunting party discovered several deer grazing at the edge of a meadow, Tetepano made his boast. Both Tetepano and his partner disguised themselves with complete deer skins, reducing their human smell and providing camouflage. By pretending to be deer, the hunters could get close enough to kill the deer with a well-thrown spear or accurately aimed arrow after standing up and tossing the hide aside. When Tetepano and his partner leapt up to shoot, a covey of six chúwquaréo, or red-winged blackbirds, burst from the ground where just a few moments before, six deer had been grazing. Tetepano understood immediately that his boast had been heard by the deer, causing their transformation and escape, and he knelt right there, broke both of his spear-points, and asked forgiveness for his offense.
I asked many questions of Tetepano, especially about the atlatl. Ascopo asked many questions, too, but his were mostly about the hunt and how the animals reacted. Without a man around the house, I had very little experience with the bow and found it intimidating. The atlatl seemed more intriguing, perhaps because of its rarity. Ascopo was already proficient with bow and arrow, providing his family regularly with small game animals and competing with his brother to bring back the most. Boys were not allowed to kill deer until their preparation for the husquenaugh, and Kaiauk loved to remind us that he hunted deer regularly.
As we lay down to sleep that night, Ascopo and I next to each other, I whispered nervously to him, “Do you know if we are the only two undergoing the husquenaugh? I haven’t heard a thing from Roncommock, but you’ve been out with these other men.”
“Yeah, I have heard,” Ascopo replied sleepily. “The twins will be with us. Four of us in total.”
“The twins?”
“Yeah. Andacon and Osocan. They are already such good hunters, I bet they get a deer the first day. Haven’t missed a rabbit since they could pull a bow, I am sure. I hope you can kill a deer before the husquenaugh begins, Skyco.”
I slept fitfully that night with stories of deer and atlatls dancing in my dreams. What if I didn’t kill a deer? I couldn’t even make it into the husquenaugh in that case, defeated before I could even try.
Once I awoke to the howl of a red wolf, calling to its hunting partner. I shivered with unease, though I knew the wolf was not really dangerous. Red wolves hunted in pairs and, like us, deer were their favored prey. While red wolves never harmed healthy adult people, there were stories from tribes in the high mountains farther west about larger, rangy grey wolves that hunted in packs and could kill a human. Ascopo made a little snort in his sleep and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I suppose after my encounter with the bear and what with thinking about the upcoming deer hunt and husquenaugh, I felt a bit anxious, and it took me some time to fall back asleep after being awakened by the howl.
Morning arrived at last and I was the first one up and moving about, adding wood and stirring the coals of the fire to life so that we could cook food. Ascopo awoke as soon as he heard me stirring. He was probably dreaming about the hunt.
Ascopo and I wondered about the process of hollowing out the tree into a canoe, but our questions were soon answered. It turned out to be not much different from putting the tree on the ground. In both cases, we smeared a section of the tree trunk with rosin, producing a small, controlled fire that burned the wood and made it easier to chop out. However, when we hollowed out the trunk, we used oyster shells in addition to our stone hatchets. The shells were sharp and cut the wood quickly and cleanly, but they broke frequently and dulled rapidly.
Ascopo said, somewhat wearily, “Look at that huge pile of oyster shells at the edge of the glade. Do you suppose we will go through all of them before we are finished with this canoe?”
I just nodded my head. Since oysters did not occur in the fresh waters of the Chowan or the western sound, they must have been collected during a fishing expedition to
the coast. It turned out that Ascopo was correct: we worked through entire the pile of shells over the next few days. When I cut and scraped with a shell, I could usually work the whole area I was assigned before my shell wore out, but the stronger men, by pressing harder and cutting away more wood with each effort, typically used up two shells before we fired the section again. As the shells wore down, we put them into a basket for later disposal.
Roncommock’s emphasis on quality and the importance of this canoe to future members of our tribe was well intentioned and helped to ward off our fatigue, because it was easy to tire from the repetitive and slow-going tasks. As soon as we had the initial shallow opening carved, we divided our group into pairs. I worked with Tetepano, Ascopo worked with Chacháquises, and Kaiauk worked with Meemz. Memeo joined one pair or another. With three sets of workers, Tetepano and I worked the middle section while the other two pairs attacked the ends. We burned and scraped, burned and scraped, as the shallow hollow slowly grew deeper. At least it was easy to keep the fire alive because some section of the trunk was burning nearly all the time. But with the fire burning constantly, smoke was often blowing into my face and making me cough. It was hot, too. Even before the sun reached its zenith on the first day, I was already wearying of the work, and we had barely begun to cut into the canoe.
Luckily, it was time to break for food. Chacháquises added a few handfuls of dry corn and beans into a pot along with some water.
“Skyco,” he called to me, “please bring me a few bay leaves to give this some flavor. You can find them, can’t you?”
“Sure,” I replied. Bay trees were common in this glade near the creek, and I found the pungent leaves in a moment.
While we waited for the food to cook, Memeo asked Ascopo to carry the basket filled with worn shells out to the midden. The basket was woven of reeds and reinforced with slender willow branches added to the weave around the mouth of the basket and across its bottom.
“Could I help?” I queried, eager to try something different. Ascopo glanced at Memeo, who nodded his head in agreement. Then, Ascopo helped me put a strap around each shoulder and another—the tumpline—across my forehead, just above the hairline. With the basket loaded, the tumpline bore some of the weight, relieving my shoulders of the full burden. The tumpline also helped steady the load as we hiked over some rough terrain on the path to the midden. Our village midden, where we dumped all our refuse, was at the edge of the village, not particularly close to the glade where we were building the canoe, but we hauled the shells there anyway. Ascopo walked with me.
“Is it heavy?” he asked.
“You bet it is,” I grunted.
“I’ll carry the next one, then.”
We spent many days carving the canoe. Whenever I grew tired and the quality of my effort began to suffer, I took a break. Sometimes I carried away a basket of worn shells and other times I sprinted to the now dwindling pile of unused shells and selected those with the sharpest edges, distributing them among the scrapers. It felt good to exercise my leg muscles instead of just my arms and back. Sometimes, Ascopo and I worked close together and could talk to each other, but often Memeo stationed us at opposite ends of the canoe.
One night, as I lay next to him, I said to Ascopo, “Do you think Tetepano would teach me to throw the atlatl?”
Ascopo laughed out loud and was immediately shushed by one of the men.
“He’d better. You are going to be in trouble when we get to weapons training. You never hunt with me anymore since you missed that rabbit by the length of your whole body!”
My face burned as I remembered the incident. We had gone out to hunt together at his urging and when I missed the rabbit, it started to run away, but Ascopo hit it from behind me with a single arrow. Not only had I missed an easy shot, but Ascopo hit a difficult one perfectly. We hadn’t been out together on a hunt since that day. I’m still embarrassed.
At first, our work on the canoe was just rough work, scraping out hunks of blackened wood and leaving long grooves behind. However, as we approached the more delicate phase of the project, the work slowed because Memeo began to oversee every aspect. Now, the fires were smaller and we scraped out less wood. After each round, Memeo inspected our work and determined how large an area to fire next. Through this deliberate process, he slowly sculpted the wood, and the tree trunk began to take on the shape of a canoe. As the pleasing form appeared before our eyes, the once tedious tasks of hollowing and scraping gave way to a sense of accomplishment and feeling of pride.
Ascopo and I had plenty of time to talk with one another because Memeo slowed the work down to a crawl as he carefully considered the final shaping required to complete the canoe. Although Ascopo and his brother Kaiauk were in the same family clan line, the bird clan, as Memeo and Chacháquises, and were expected to be good carvers for that reason, both were more interested in hunting than in carving. Ascopo’s name came from a sweet bay tree, important to carvers because they used its white, sweet-smelling wood to create food utensils.
His brother, Kaiauk, was named for a gull. How his mother knew he would turn out to be a noisy busybody was beyond my ken, but his name sure seemed to fit him.
Kaiauk kept asking me to tell the whole story of my encounter with the bear, and with Ascopo’s additional urging, I soon acquiesced. Both of them said more than once that they wished they had been there, which struck me as strange, but then Ascopo said that if he had the encounter and been able to draw his bow while looking the bear in the eye, he would feel like a seasoned hunter. The bear was a test to Ascopo, a test of hunting skill, but when I faced the bear, it was just a dangerous animal that I wanted to scare away from my friend. I never even considered killing it, but that was all that Ascopo thought about. I decided to keep the suggestion that the bear was my guardian spirit to myself because that knowledge might make Ascopo jealous. Even Kaiauk seemed more interested than I would have liked.
For five days with nearly perfect weather, we carved and scraped under Memeo’s careful eye until the canoe achieved the proper depth and shape. We shaped the outside, too, but only slightly, by removing the bark and tapering each end. Then, old Memeo took the rough skin of a shark and rubbed the inside of the canoe to perfect smoothness. It was his self-appointed responsibility to polish the interior of the canoe, and he did not allow anyone else to assist him. When he finished, the canoe was truly beautiful, smooth as a stone tumbled in a stream.
This canoe was large enough to easily hold twenty men and their gear. Ascopo and I climbed aboard, and the sides rose nearly up to our armpits. Each end tapered to a blunt point on both the inside and outside. The canoe was wide enough that two men could sit side-by-side, but they rarely did so because it cramped their paddling. For Ascopo and me, it was easy to lie down side-by-side, which we quickly did when Memeo unexpectedly walked into the glade. Concealed as we were, he passed by without seeing us, never casting a glance into the interior of the canoe. He was too busy fussing about paddles.
We carved paddles from small rakiock trees that the men hacked down with hatchets. The men quickly whittled the paddles into shape, but Memeo was a hard taskmaster. He pointed out to Kaiauk that his paddle was too thick, and to Tetepano that the two sides of his paddle were not the same shape. Both held their tongues, but kept on smoothing the handles and removing any rough spots with sharkskin. After Memeo left the glade, however, Tetepano handed his paddle to me and found another project that needed doing.
I was working on the paddle when Roncommock reappeared in the glade. Although I felt as though I had learned a lot about building a canoe, what I really wanted to do was paddle it, and I asked Roncommock if I could help launch the canoe and participate in its maiden voyage down the river and into the sound. He looked at me closely, and when he agreed, I nearly yelped in excitement. Ascopo elbowed me in the ribs and whistled in appreciation. He was already going, of course. But then Roncommock tempered my exciteme
nt by saying, “This trip will form the basis of your spirit quest, Skyco.”
When Ascopo heard that, his eyes widened in astonishment.
“Skyco will begin a spirit quest already? He hasn’t even been husquenaughed!” Ascopo seemed almost offended.
“It has been decreed,” is all that Roncommock would say. Ascopo closed his mouth and his eyes changed back to normal size, though they now watched me warily.
In order to pick up the canoe, we needed twenty strong men from the village including all those who had been working on it. Neither Ascopo nor I participated in the haul because we were both significantly shorter than the grown men, but we followed eagerly along behind the party.
Kaiauk and the other men had to carry the canoe a long way through the forest to the nearest water with enough depth, which was a small creek that was a tributary of the big river. Memeo walked ahead of them, clicking his tongue whenever a man stumbled, and constantly pointing out roots and overhanging limbs until one of the men said that the reason he was stumbling so often was that Memeo’s excessive attention to the roots caused them to grow in self-importance.
As Ascopo and I trotted beside the men, he kept looking over at me, but he never said anything about the spirit quest. That could only be a bad sign, for Ascopo never held back his thoughts.
The men launched the canoe into the water carefully, and only Memeo climbed into it. He walked up and down, checking for leaks, even though none of us expected any. Still, it was his right as the canoe builder to be the first to enter the canoe. Once satisfied, he motioned to the rest of us to get in, and the six others who had worked on the canoe construction climbed aboard. I took a paddle and went up to the front of the canoe and Ascopo sat just behind me, since we were the two lightest of the group. The heavier, grown men sat in the middle, but Meemz, who was the best paddler and did most of the steering, commanded the rear, with Kaiauk just in front of him. We were staggered, first man paddling on the right, next one on the left, and so on down the line. Ascopo and I were given strict instructions not to wiggle around in the canoe, which would unbalance us and might cause the canoe to roll over. I could feel the canoe rock from side to side as each man stepped in.
Spirit Quest Page 6