“Funny,” I said, “I thought brothers helped each other, no matter their birth order.”
I never had a problem with the flocks of chúwquar éo or of grackles, but a noisy group of parakeets surprised me once. They were not afraid of me, and simply flew up as I ran toward them, hovered for a few moments, then descended again as soon as I was past them. They were beautiful birds, bright green with yellow and red faces, but they were destructive in the fields, using their strong beaks and feet to rip open the husks and get to the pagatowr, and they were always in flocks of many birds. I swatted and yelled and jumped and screamed, and only after actually striking one did it give the alarm and the whole flock flew away while I stood sweating and panting from the effort. Since there was very little damage, I doubt anyone even knew of it.
A couple of days after the runners left, Roncommock announced the final harvest. We started along one edge of the field and stripped the ears from the stalks, taking care to minimize damage to the other crops in the field, especially the okindgier that were using the stalks as support for their vines. Some of their pods were still green, and we left these on the vines still climbing up the corn stalks. But the brown pods we harvested along with the pagatowr.
We also collected the different types of macócqwer, including big round pumpkins, soft yellow squash, and various types of gourds for water bottles, rattles, and other containers. We used the dry macócqwer for making rattles or drinking vessels, but harvested some throughout the summer while it was small, tender, and good to eat. The different macócqwer performed different functions, but whether large or small, orange, yellow, or green, all turned brown when they were fully dry and the seeds rattled around inside them. The biggest macócqwer formed our water vessels and they had long necks that made it easy to carry them, and through which we filled them with water. The smallest, egg-shaped macócqwer made the best rattles, and if the seeds did not make enough noise, we added pebbles or shells through a hole before we attached the macócqwer to a stick for a handle.
Like the seeds of okindgier, the seeds of pagatowr were beautiful, too, and early pagatowr was even more colorful than the later variety. Some kernels were blue, some were red, some yellow, and some white. We harvested dry ears of both varieties, rubbed the small round kernels off the cob, and saved their seeds for planting. While we ate most of the early pagatowr fresh and only stored its seed for planting, we stored all of the late pagatowr as dry seed. We either boiled it whole or ground it dry into a powder. Some, of course, we saved for next year’s planting. We burned the cobs in the sacred fire just as we burned the bones of the deer we killed for food.
With everyone pitching in for the harvest, we completed the task quickly. Mother prepared the seeds from late pagatowr in a way that made them more nutritious and added an interesting flavor to them. In order to remove the skins from the seeds, she soaked the dry seeds in water that contained ashes from the sacred fire. By vigorously stirring the mixture with a wooden paddle, the seed coats fell off as the seeds themselves swelled up, and then she dried the cleaned seeds again as hominy. She stored the hominy for wintertime.
Once all the runners returned, and with the final harvest gathered, the village was abuzz with anticipation. Other villagers had been arriving for the past two days, and now the final group, from the closest village no less, came straggling in. At last we could begin. At midday of the first day of the ceremony, we held a big feast, with food contributed from all the other villages.
In the center of the village, the central fire grew in size. Several pots with different versions of succotash boiled merrily. Strips of deer meat and whole fish broiled around the fire. Roots of several types roasted for most of the day, buried under coals along the edge of the fire. Some were too hot and spicy for my taste, but the older adults loved them. Although we ate the early pagatowr, we did not eat any from the final harvest, saving it for the end of the ceremony.
On this first day of the busk, there was no dancing associated with the great feast as there was for other ceremonies. We just ate and prepared ourselves for the next three days. People were solemn and respectful, considering the importance of the coming few days. Even Ascopo was subdued.
After the feast was over, the cleansing began. The men tossed all the animal bones and the dregs of leftover food from the bottom of the pots into the sacred fire. Tetszso and Chaham located fish scraps from somewhere and tossed them on the fire. Women brought out any food that was stored from a previous year, and burned it in the fire as well, with my mother presiding over it. We set aside only the new crops, harvested during the current season, to save for the upcoming winter. Roncommock stirred the fire so that all the discarded food burned to ashes while the men observed him. All chanted rhythmically, thanking the spirits and telling them that we were purifying the village.
Meanwhile, the women cleaned everything. They swept all the houses, and even my sister worked hard to help any older women who struggled with the tasks. Every single wigwam was spotless. They threw any broken or damaged wooden utensils into the fire, and I saw Mamankanois tossing on a spoon that I was sure I saw her use yesterday. They burned baskets with holes or tears, and a whole pile of them came out of Poócqueo’s wigwam where she must have been storing them. Some just looked a little weird, not really damaged, and I wondered if they were my sister’s early attempts at basket weaving. I’d ask her when I got the chance. Under the direction of Roncommock, men cleaned and raked the area around the sacred fire. They burned damaged bows and I thought I recognized a few that Coosine had used with us boys. Men crushed damaged pottery to pieces and the women added the pieces to the fire.
Once the fire consumed all the damaged goods, Roncommock stirred it until the fire burned down to ashes. For the first time in a full year, the fire burned out. Nothing remained except for the broken pottery shards and a few grey ashes. It made me uncomfortable to see the fire pit cold and dark, without the orange flames or glowing coals we relied on to cook our food and keep us warm.
Before the participants left their villages, they too cleaned, burned, and purified their towns. They extinguished their sacred fires. Anyone coming upon their towns would think them deserted. The villages looked dead without their fires, but there was no one left to tend the fires anyway. They were here, with us, at the busk for our tribe.
Roncommock raked up the few ashes and the broken pottery and placed the materials in a basket. Tetszo hauled the basket to the river and tipped it in, pouring it all away. Then Roncommock dug a shallow hole, lined it with leaves of uppówoc—our sacred tobacco—and added one of the ears of the late pagatowr. He covered the hole with sand. Keetrauk and Chacháquises hauled more sand from the river bank, which they poured on the site of the sacred fire and the ground around the dancing pole, then Roncommock raked both areas clean, leaving a smooth, white surface.
Then all the men who had survived the husquenaugh gathered at the site of the sacred fire, but women and children returned to the wigwams. The men fasted for the rest of the day, the entire second day, and into the beginning of the third day, and they did not depart from the site of the extinguished fire, guarding it constantly while the fire was out. While they fasted, they drank the black drink and purged into clay pots that were set around the edges of the site expressly for that purpose. Eracano constantly walked around the site of the fire, mumbling as he conversed with the spirits and asked for their protection. His fasting caused him to lose weight, and we could practically watch him shrink in width and stature from the arduous duty.
While women and children ate food and underwent normal activities, all were expected to be quiet and respectful. There was no running and shouting, no vigorous games. It was difficult, with so many new people in the village, not to play games, but the children waited patiently just like the men. During the men’s fast, no one hunted, and mothers put away their boys’ small bows and arrows to keep temptation at bay. The four of us who were neither hu
squenaughed men nor small children skulked around together. There was not much for us to do, and it seemed strange to have a few days of forced inactivity, especially since we had trained so hard through the spring and summer.
At last, on the morning of the third day, everyone walked down to the river where we washed and purified ourselves. There was no horseplay this time. We scrubbed clean with sand, soaped up with yucca roots, and made sure we rinsed every inch of our bodies clean, in the same fashion that Roncommock used with me when I first entered training. We reapplied bear grease to our skin and refreshed the stiff grease in our hair. I grinned at the other boys with their fresh, spiky haircuts. We all looked like young warriors now. Soon, we hoped, we would be.
We returned to the village and gathered around the site of the sacred fire, waiting. When the sun was directly overhead, Roncommock started a new fire. He used a piece of dry sycamore wood as a flat base, in which he cut a notch. Using a slender stick from the dried, flowering stalk of a yucca as a spindle, he wrapped a dry deer sinew once around its middle and tied either end of the sinew onto a deer rib bone. The sycamore grew with its roots in the water of the river, and we used yucca in our cleansing ceremonies, making both of these types of wood clean and pure. The deer parts had come from the animal that we boys killed as part of our husquenaugh preparation. It was necessary to coax the purifying, sacred fire from wood that was itself pure by using a deer that had given itself to a noble cause.
Stepping down and placing his weight onto the flat piece of sycamore to hold it steady, Roncommock pressed the spindle firmly down into the notch of sycamore with a whelk shell. Then he sawed back and forth with the bow made of bone and deer sinew, which caused the wrapped yucca spindle to rotate in the sycamore block. He began to sweat as he sawed and chanted, sawed and chanted, not very quickly, but in constant, orderly motion. It seemed to take forever until a dark powder from the wood fell into the notch and smoke started to rise, but he did not stop his effort. He continued the sawing and chanting until the smoke grew thicker and a glowing ember became visible, then he finally stopped sawing and carefully poured out the ember into the nest of a bird he had been saving for that purpose. He blew gently, encouraging the newborn fire to take hold. Everyone was tense, wondering whether he would be successful. The fine, dry grasses and fibers in the nest accepted the flame, and he added small twigs and splinters of pine to make the flames grow. Once the tiny fire was clearly burning, the shamans of the other villages took over, adding wood to the fire and gradually increasing the size of the pieces until the fire again roared from its sacred, central location.
Once the new fire was burning strongly, Roncommock added a pinch of uppówoc powder and another ear of pagatowr. The flames leapt up hungrily and changed color, accepting these offerings. He thanked the spirits and asked their blessing for the new year, then he turned to the crowd of villagers standing around the fire. He asked that all wrongs be forgiven and that any grudges against the living or the dead be lifted. He called out the names of all the members of the tribe who had died since the last busk and asked that they release their obligations and not walk as ghosts among us. He welcomed new members born, married, or adopted into our tribe since the last ceremony and asked the rest of us to welcome them into the tribe.
All the men then chanted the words of a sacred prayer together. In one voice, they asked for victory over enemies, success in hunting and fishing, and camaraderie for members of the tribe. The women took over as the men finished, and they asked for the safety of their houses and fields, ease in births, and abundant harvests of their crops. The children, which included me, because I had yet to undergo the husquenaugh, and my sister, who had yet to start her female courses, all said that we would obey our parents and bring honor to our tribe. Our part was a little less in unison, but we said the important words, the littlest ones just nodding their heads while we four, young, soon-to-be warriors led the group.
With the prayers finished and the fire burning once again, the women cleared us away and began preparing for the great feast, which we held on the fourth day. They brought out new pots and new spoons, which the shamans blessed. All the shamans took part in a dance around the sacred fire, then each of the shamans from the other villages took some of the sacred fire and started another fire, and women from that village built it up and began to cook around it.
By the morning of the fourth day, more food bubbled in pots than could be imagined. Each village had a slightly different version of succotash, with flavors ranging from ginger to mint to sassafras, and I tasted every single one of them. Whole haunches of deer and bear were roasting over the fires, sending up the most delicious aromas of smoky meat. I noticed that Andacon sliced off a piece while it was still cooking and took it away to eat. People from our westernmost village even contributed flesh from a bison that one of their hunting parties had killed. It had more fat than a deer, but less than a bear, and it sizzled as the fat dripped out onto the embers. Many different types of fish cooked slowly on high-set grills, and a sturgeon wrapped in wet leaves and buried alongside the fire in the fresh sand baked gently. We ate like we never do at any other time. Everyone ate some of the late pagatowr, which was prepared by boiling it in a special, previously unused pot. We added nothing else to the pot so that the pagatowr was not contaminated.
We danced around the fires and we danced around the dancing circle. We danced and ate, and ate and danced. We held a great celebration that lasted the entirety of the day. As the sun left the sky, Roncommock announced that the ceremony was concluded and that the new year began with the rising of the sun, but the party wasn’t over. In fact, it had just begun. All of the participants gathered around the fires that their shamans set and they kept the fires burning all night long. Children stayed up as late as they wanted, playing with the children from other villages. Adults visited each other late into the night, catching up with relatives and friends who lived in different villages of the tribe. Some people never went to sleep. When the villagers left the next day, shamans carried embers in special clay pots constructed especially for the purpose of carrying the new, shared, tribal fire back to their home villages. Once they started their own fires, they broke the pots and threw the shards into the fire they kindled.
In this way we began a new year. We honored our crops and we asked for help from the spirits. We threw out the old and started again with the new, and this included our food and our promises to other people. All began fresh and pure, uncontaminated by events from the past. It was a chance to start again, with a clean conscience. This year, however, the end of the busk held anxiety for me, because the husquenaugh followed hard on the heels of the new year. Was I ready to face this most difficult of trials?
Husquenaugh
At last it had come to this. I laid in a dark wigwam, full of smoke. The herbs on the fire made my skin burn and my head ache. The smoke was thick and oily with resins that dulled my mind. I felt hunger, more hungry than I had ever felt before. I lost track of time in the dark hut. We just laid there, in a state close to death.
I remembered happier times. My earliest memory passed before me and I saw both my mother and my father. My mother held me, but turned me gently from her breast and set me down on a warm fur. She pointed to the door and I saw the dark mat drawn aside as someone stepped inside and a momentary beam of brilliant sunlight created an aura of radiant whiteness about him, then just as quickly disappeared as the mat dropped down to close the opening. My father had returned, victorious, from a hunt, for he had a daub of animal blood on his forehead. He smiled, leaned down, and reached for me and I saw my own fat little arms reaching back. I felt warm, happy, and content.
Next, I recalled a moment of fear. I was picking juicy, ripe blackberries with my mother and sister. We worked deep into a patch and I kept stepping forward, going farther and farther inward to reach another. When I tried to turn and get out, the prickles caught in my hair and skin and bound me to the tall can
es. I started to struggle, but the thorns grabbed and stuck me. I called out in alarm and did not hear my mother answer. Twisting more and more, I became even more tightly tangled and gashes tore into my arms and legs from the relentless, unforgiving thorns. I twisted and turned, felt pain and fear as ever more thorns pierced and gripped my flesh. At last my mother arrived and began to untangle me from my blackberry bonds, breaking branches and pulling me free with her hands. I sobbed in terror, finding it hard to breathe until she swept me up into her arms. Free at last, held close in mother’s arms, I felt her stiffen as she suddenly stopped and stepped backwards. Lying across the path in front of us coiled a large rattlesnake, menacing in its thick body with dark chevron stripes across its brownish back. It climbed out of the blackberry patch just a few feet from us. If the thorns hadn’t stopped me, I would probably have blundered into it. The combination of the fear of entrapment and the following encounter with the snake etched deeply into my memory.
Then I recalled the feeling of belonging when I stood on the sand dune. I sensed the spirit world all around me—felt part of a great river of time. I knew the spirits communicated with me there, and I tried to focus on that thought, the likelihood of success, to get me through my current situation.
The husquenaugh is a difficult challenge with underlying purpose. It is a ritual meant to train our bodies and wills to withstand hardship, to persevere, and to succeed. The men on the fishing expedition paddled for days, eating little, drinking little, and paddling hard. Hunting expeditions and war parties were no easier. Warriors might jog for days with just a little water to sustain them, sleep one night in a field, and then wake up and fight to the death. We trained our bodies to willfully endure such hardships, which was part of the purpose of the husquenaugh.
The husquenaugh prepared our minds in other ways, too. Spirits watched us, tested us, determined whether each boy was worthy and which among us might become shamans, medicine men, or chiefs. Although my family line was one of chiefs, the husquenaugh tested whether I qualified for that role or failed miserably. By forcing my body to endure privation, I focused my mind on understanding my place in the world and my role as chief.
Spirit Quest Page 20