by Susan Cooper
I was listening and watching all the time for the wolf to come back, but there was no sign of him.
The skin was heavy. I cut off one of the deer’s legs and made my way back down the trail with the leg and sinew and brain bundled up in the skin. I pulled a big flat rock on top of them, and reckoned there was just enough of the day left for one more trip, so I went back to the deer, very cautiously. One wolf would be bad enough, but if he had summoned a hungry pack, that could be the end of me.
The carcass was just as I had left it. Hastily I hacked off as much more meat as I could carry. As I turned to go, I saw a movement among the trees.
I called to the wolf, “The rest is for you, brother.”
And I was gone, and nobody followed me.
* * *
By the end of my second stumbling journey the sun had gone down and it was almost dark. I was very tired and very dirty and I thought longingly of the sweat lodge. But of course all I could do was clean my hands and my clothes with snow, and make a fire.
While strips of the deer meat were cooking I buried the rest deep in a snowbank beside the cave, along with the skin, and then I gorged myself on the meat while it was still half red. It tasted wonderful. My stomach felt as tight as a drumskin. And I was asleep so fast that when I woke the next morning I couldn’t remember the careful way I must have covered the fire, and put my tools and leftover food inside the cave. Perhaps my Manitou made sure I did all those things.
The weather stayed kind, though wintry; for days, the air was still and the sky was blue. There was no sound or sign of the wolf, nor of any more deer. The moon rose very small and late, and the night sky was black and cold but blazing with stars.
And I was part of it all. Since that day when my Manitou came, I had stopped thinking of myself as a lonely boy separated from his family. Like the trees and the rocks and the pond, I was here, part of the pattern, doing what I had to do to survive. Each of us had our own part in a long harmony of things, a balance. The dead deer and the dead squirrel were part of it too. Without ever thinking it out, I had discovered why my people sent their boys out on this solitary voyage of learning.
I was burning my fire almost continuously now, and not just for warmth. I cut the raw deer meat into long strips and hung them on sticks around the fire so that they slowly dried. At the same time I did my best to cure the skin, though it was a poor copy of the proper way I had been taught. I scraped and scraped the inside of the skin with the blade of my tomahawk and cleaned it with snow. At night it generally froze, but this didn’t seem to do it any harm. In the mornings I rubbed ashes into it, then scraped and cleaned it again. The only thing wrong with it was the small hole my arrow had made.
I used the deer’s brain, too, when I’d thawed it out. At home, my mother would have made it into a kind of soup and soaked the hide in that, but all I could do was mash it up with snow, using my patient tomahawk, and rub the mixture into my deerskin. After a day and a night of this I did more rubbing, more scraping, more cleaning—and in the end the skin was clean enough for me to wrap it around myself, like a kind of cloak. The brain treatment was supposed to have softened it, but it was very stiff, and it smelled really bad. Still, I probably smelled bad myself, by then.
One day I went back to the place where I had skinned the deer. Nothing was left but the bones, picked almost clean by other creatures as hungry as I was. One of them was the wolf. I could see his big pawprints among the jumble of smaller ones, with the pad and the four toes, and in one frozen print the faint marks of his claws as well. So he was still alive, and he was still alone; there were no other wolf tracks. It must have been his strong jaws that had cracked a few of the biggest bones lying on the snow.
The prints looked about two days old. He was still nearby. At least he, like me, had a full belly for now.
I went back along the trail and turned off to look at the patch of trampled snow where the deer had rooted for acorns. There were the tracks of squirrels, but no new signs of deer. I went on through the small trees, where the snow was thinner than in my pine forest above the rocks—and then suddenly I came out to a great open sweep of sky and snow-patched land, and saw that without knowing it, I had come very close to the coast. Out on the horizon I could see the line of the sea, a dull blue-grey, with white lines of surf moving very slowly as the big waves rolled in. Closer, the land was flat except for three white hillocks where there must be trees, holding more snow than the land around them.
I stared out, and then I realized where I was.
This was the coastal marshland to which my father had brought me six months earlier, and those hillocks were the islands in the salt marsh—on one of which the stone head of my axe had grown into a tomahawk, in the embrace of a bitternut hickory tree.
I was so pleased with this discovery that it was a few moments before I noticed something else. Though the sun was still shining and the sky blue, the northern horizon was dark with a mounded line of clouds. They were massive thunderclouds, taller than I had ever seen, and they were coming closer very fast, growing to fill the sky. I felt the first stirring of a breeze against my cheek as the air began to move. Very soon I should be overtaken by a very big storm.
Instantly I forgot the salt marsh islands and I went back as fast as I could, through the woodland to the pond, and round its shore to my cave. The wind picked up behind me as I went. It was coming from the northeast, and a big northeasterly storm was always the most dangerous part of winter for my people. The only comfort I had was that the cave faced away from the pond, so that the rocks would be some protection.
For a wild moment I thought of trying to outrun the storm by fleeing into the woods—but only for a moment. Where could I go? The wind would catch me and I’d freeze to death very fast. Instead I must tuck myself into my rocky cleft as a wild animal would, and hope I could outlive the storm.
Nobody had invaded the cave, and my food was still there. Hastily I made a fire, to have its warmth for at least a little while. I folded my stiff, shapeless deerskin around myself, and I waited.
And the storm came.
SIX
The most frightening thing of all was the noise. It grew and grew, as if the Great Spirit were angry with his people, shouting in a rising fury. Overhead, the big trees began to creak and groan. The wind howled into my fire, bringing icy snow with it. Hastily I put the fire out, and I clutched my deerskin round my body and pressed myself into a corner of the cave. Everything I owned in the world was there with me, like a tiny family: axe, knife, bow and arrows, the strips of dried deer meat tied in bundles, the squirrel-skin bag. I could hear thunder rumbling as the wind rose.
The storm raged on. For hours and days I lay there, curled up under the deerskin, sometimes sleeping, sometimes half-dreaming. If I was hungry, I nibbled deer meat. If I was thirsty, I sucked on snow. There was so little light that it was hard to tell night from day. I had become an animal like a winter squirrel: sleeping away the bad weather in its nest, emerging again when the sun shone.
And in the end, on the fourth day, the storm blew itself out. The constant high howl of the wind dropped to muttering gusts. I stretched out my cramped arms and legs and pushed aside the icy branches that had been protecting me, and suddenly I saw sunlight.
I stood up, with the deerskin round me like a cape, and stared out at the snow. The storm had left such beauty behind it; the trees glittered in the sunlight and above their white branches the sky was blue as a robin’s egg. Nothing moved but occasional hunks of snow falling to the ground here and there, as the sun warmed the branches where they lay.
I could hear in the distance a long low rumble, going on and on without a pause. It took me a moment to realize that this was no longer the wind, but the roar of the waves breaking on the shore, way out beyond the pond and the marshland. It was the voice of the sea, whose anger would last much longer than the storm that had stirred it into life.
I spent the rest of my day clearing the snow away from the cave
and digging out my fire pit. When night came, the star-scattered sky was clear of cloud, and through the trees I saw a full white moon rise, banishing the stars and casting black shadows over the gleaming snow. So I knew I had been away from my home and my village for a whole month. It was a long time, and in it I had become a different person.
Every day I went scouting through the snow, and I saw no other living thing except the small birds who hopped and foraged through the branches above me. Once, in a rotting hollow tree near the pond, I came across a pile of lily roots, a wonderful discovery; it was probably the winter hoard of a muskrat. I took away only half of it and left the rest for him and his family, and I set no trap to catch him.
I was setting traps in other places, though, and one lucky day I caught a turkey.
Perhaps it was the smell of the roasting bird that brought back the wolf next day. He came close enough to snatch up the turkey’s entrails, which I had buried in the snow among the trees. He was clearly very hungry indeed, to go after such worthless stuff, and he didn’t behave as most wolves do. When I shouted at him, he crouched down and snarled, baring his teeth as if in challenge.
I threw a rock at him, and he moved to one side but still stood there, poised, belligerent. For a long moment he stared at me, and then he turned and loped away, still with a slight limp in his foreleg. I climbed on the rock and watched until he was out of sight.
I was uneasy that night, knowing that he was close again. Though the wolves are our brothers, he was a strange lone wolf, surviving on his own, and I didn’t trust him. I took care that my food was always at the back of the cave, hidden behind a rock, and at night I banked up my fire so that it would burn for a long time. The moon was growing thin again, and a wolf’s eyes could see better in the dark than the eyes of a boy. Fear made me sleep lightly, and whenever the fire died, I brought it back to life, to burn till the dawn came.
The turkey was small, and lasted only for two days. Nothing came to my traps, and there was no sign anywhere of the tracks of deer. I was staying alive now only on a few lily roots and the brittle strips of deer meat that I had dried, and I ate very little at a time so that they would last. And perhaps they would have lasted, if it hadn’t been for the wolf.
It took a lot of wood to keep the fire burning all night, and much of my day now was spent hunting and cutting dry branches and trees. The forest floor was full of dead wood, but I had to go further and further away to find more, digging for it in the snow. One day before the light began to die, I came back out of the trees dragging a big oak branch, and I saw something that made my heart stop for an instant.
The wolf was in my cave, crouching, eating.
I shouted at him angrily, and grabbed up the branch as a weapon. For that moment I was an animal just as he was, defending the food that would keep only one of us alive. But this time, I had no arrow to shoot at him.
He crouched in the cave, facing me, snarling. He looked huge, all gleaming teeth and yellow eyes, and in the same moment that I swung the big branch at him, he leapt at me.
The branch knocked him off balance, so that he missed me, but I lost my own balance too, rolling over, banging against rocks. I scrambled up, pulling my knife out of my belt, still yelling, half out of my mind with rage and fear. With both hands I held out the knife in front of me, wheeling, facing him.
The air was full of flying snow and splintered branches, and the noise of our voices, screaming boy and snarling wolf. And the wolf spun round and leapt at me again.
I don’t know why I didn’t die then. For that one moment, I knew my life was over. The wolf was leaping at my throat, mouth open, teeth bared, because that is the way wolves kill their prey always, aiming to rip out the throat and bleed the animal to death. But in the flurry as he crashed into me, instead his claws carved a gash down the side of my face, and he ran his own throat onto the knife held out at arm’s length in both my hands.
As I fell sideways the sharp knife ripped across his neck and blood came spurting everywhere. We were rolling in a whirl of bodies and blood, dirt and snow, terrible noises coming from both of us. I found myself stumbling backward into the cave, blinking through the blood that coursed down my face, still holding out my knife in front of me with two rigid arms.
But even though he was so big, and far stronger than me, the wolf was no longer attacking. He rolled to and fro, as if he were trying to stop the bleeding. He got to his feet and began to lope away, but he was staggering, and when he was almost hidden by the trees I saw him fall down.
My heart was still beating so fast it was like a drum in my ears. I stood there gasping, and the side of my face was beginning to hurt furiously. My cheek was wet, and hurt too much for me to want to touch it.
I came slowly out of the cave onto the trampled snow. Our battle had turned it bright red, and there was no difference to be seen between the blood of the wolf and the blood of the boy.
From a snowbank I took handfuls of clean white snow and pressed them carefully against my cheek, so that soon the wound was cold enough to numb the hurting and I could try to dab more snow against it. My hands were shaking, I couldn’t make them stop, but I kept reaching for the snow. All I could think of was that my grandmother Suncatcher said any cut had first of all to be washed clean if it was to heal.
My fingers told me that the gash ran down past my ear to my chin, and that there was a flap of skin torn loose on my cheek. I tried to press the skin down and was glad I couldn’t see what it looked like.
After a while the bleeding seemed to stop. My tunic was wet with blood, but there was nothing I could do about that. My body was aching all over, and suddenly I felt desperately tired. But supposing the wolf were still alive, and came back? I was almost certain he must be dead, but I knew I had to go and make sure.
So, very cautiously, I took my knife in one hand and my tomahawk in the other, and in the dying light I went through the trees to the place where I had seen him fall down. There was blood on the snow all the way, and more when I found him. He had dragged himself along the ground a little way, but he was lying there dead.
He had died in just the way that he would have killed me, and I was glad that I was safe from him now. But I was not glad he had died.
I stood there, and in my mind I looked for my Manitou.
I said, “He was hungry and he wanted to live. He was like me. I’m ashamed I killed him. I am ashamed.”
And in my mind, the great fish hawk coasted over the trees, over the pond, down toward me. His voice was like the wind.
He said, “All creatures must die, in the end. It is possible that he in turn has killed you. Now you yourself must fight to stay alive. But honor your brother—honor him in his end. . . .”
And the voice faded as the wind fades, and he flew out of my mind. Snow was beginning to fall, and the daylight was nearly gone. Suddenly I felt terribly cold.
Trying to ignore my throbbing cheek, I went back to my cave and made a fire. In its flickering light, I saw what my Manitou had meant.
It is possible that he in turn has killed you. The wolf had eaten all my precious stock of dried meat. There were only a few tiny scraps of it scattered on the ground. He had been so desperate for food that to get to it, he had pushed aside a rock as big as himself, which I had been able to move only inch by inch. And now he had left me desperate.
I slept very little that night. The snow went on falling, lightly but steadily. Hunched inside my deerskin, I could hear the hissing of the snowflakes as they dropped on the fire. I was warm enough, but the gash on my face throbbed and ached, and I could feel that my cheek was swollen. I kept putting snow to melt near the fire, in a piece of a branch that I had hollowed into a kind of cup, and I drank the water, and tried to guess what Suncatcher would have had me do.
She had a medicine for everything. When we skinned our knees and elbows, she would use the bark of a particular kind of elm tree to help us heal. She taught us how to collect it, so I remembered how the tree looked—an
d I thought now that I had seen a little copse of them beside the pond. I kept hoping for dawn to come, so that I could go and look.
But first I remembered the other thing that my Manitou had said.
Honor your brother.
The wolves are our brothers, even though this lone wolf had been my enemy. All living creatures are our brothers, even those we must kill for food, and we are taught to pay them respect. So the first thing I did when the morning came was to go out with my tomahawk and a flat digging stone, and look for the body of the wolf.
He was covered in snow now, but I brushed it off his shaggy coat. The thought of skinning him jumped into my mind, but I pushed it out. Though his fur would have been warmer than my deerskin, that would have been no way to honor a dead enemy.
The ground was so cold and hard that I couldn’t dig a hole deep enough to bury him properly. But he was lying near a big rock among the trees, where the leaf mold was not frozen as hard as the dirt nearer the pond, so I scraped out a shallow space beside the rock and pushed his stiff body into it. This was hard work and took a long time.
I covered the wolf with snow again, and pulled some big stones over the top. It wasn’t a proper grave, but it was the best I could do.
Blood was running down the side of my head again; I should have been resting, not digging. But I couldn’t rest, not yet. I went to the pond, stepping through the new snow and blessing my mother for the thickness of my moccasins. After much stumbling along the banks, at last I found the clump of young trees I had remembered, and with my father’s beautiful, deadly sharp knife I cut out wide strips of the inside bark—asking the trees to forgive me, because in winter this would quite probably cause them to die.
“My wound will thank you,” I said to them, with the pain from my gashed face telling me that indeed it would, in a while.
And as I looked down at the frozen pond, a picture came into my mind. Perhaps it came from the Great Spirit, perhaps from my Manitou—or perhaps from the pond itself. We are all one. Suddenly I had a memory of the day my father first took me out to a frozen pond where the men were fishing. He had showed me that through a hole in the ice you could catch a pike big enough to feed the whole family, even in dark winter, even in water whose bitter cold would kill you if you fell into it.