by Susan Cooper
If I could make a fishing line, I could fish for food, in this icy world that offered no food anywhere.
Back in my cave, I made fire again, and for the sake of mending my torn head, I sacrificed the gift I had been saving for my baby brother. I took out the little squirrel-skin bag I had made and threw away the dried-up squirrel’s tail, and with my knife I slit the bag so that it became once more a flat skin. Onto the skin I shredded the bark from the healing tree, drizzling a little water on it to hold it together. Then I lay down so that the wound on my face was against the bark and the skin, and with strips of deerskin I tied the skin to my head.
I slept that night lying so, and in the morning I tightened the strips so that the squirrel-skin stayed tied to my head as I moved about. It was a good thing there was nobody to see me; I must have looked ridiculous. But the bleeding stopped, and gradually the throbbing went away. I rested in the cave for a day and another night, and made sure the bark was close against the wound all the time.
Winter was deep enough now that the ice covering the pond below my cave was as strong as rock. I went down there with a flat stone in each hand and cleared away the snow, so that I could chop a hole in the ice with my axe. It took two days, and I had to hold my head carefully still all the time, but at last I had a hole big enough for fishing—though every morning there was a new layer of ice to break through.
For a fishing line I used my bowstring. I hated to risk losing it, and it was too short, but it was all I had. I’d made some line from my saved deer sinew that was strong, but it would have fallen apart in water. So with a hook made from a turkey bone, and one of my last lily roots for bait, I dropped my short line into the water and waited. And waited. After a long time I felt a faint nibble, but then nothing.
And then there was a jerk on the line so fierce that it almost pulled me into the fishing hole. I tugged back as hard as I could, and only just managed to yank the fish clear of the water before the line whipped out of my hands, and he went flying across the ice.
It wasn’t a fish at all—it was a big eel. He wriggled all over the place, and nearly got back into the hole before I managed to whack him on the head with my axe.
But as I hit him, my knife, loosened by all this flurry, flew out of its leather case on my belt and across the ice—and slid into the fishing hole. Without even a splash, it vanished.
I heard myself shout in horror, and dropped on to my hands and knees to stare into the hole. There was nothing I could do. It would have taken half a day to chop the hole any bigger, and just a few moments in that cold dark water would have frozen me to death. The knife was gone forever: my most valuable tool, which had done so much to keep me alive. The knife that my father gave me, and that I promised to bring back to him.
Kneeling there on the ice, I wondered if the knife had brought death to me, through the killing of the wolf.
I knelt there for a long time, trying to find my Manitou, to ask what I should do. But there was no feel of him in my mind, and he did not come.
I said to myself, trying to believe it, There is nothing you cannot do. With his help, there is nothing you cannot do.
So I got to my feet and reached for the eel, the cause of all the trouble. My line was sticking out of his mouth; he had swallowed the hook. That was a good thing, because it meant I could drag him home by the line instead of carrying him; his slippery skin was covered with a thick layer of slime and mud, from where he had been lying at the bottom of the pond.
I took him home and skinned him with the blade of my axe. It was far, far more difficult than it would have been with the knife.
But eels are good to eat, and I made his meat last for a long time. I felt myself growing stronger, and within a few days the wound on my face began to have the itchy feeling that showed it had begun to heal. But I still kept the squirrel-skin tightly covering it, with the shredded bark against the skin. There would be an ugly scar, but I wasn’t going to disturb anything until I was sure it had healed.
After a long time searching among the stones on the shore of the pond, eventually I found two stones to help me make a new knife. One had a shape friendly to my hand, one side rounded, one side straight. The other became my chipping tool, made of harder rock, to chip the first to a sharp edge. So in a while I had a knife again, though it was a hundred times less good than the white man’s knife at the bottom of the pond.
Three times in those days, I heard a thin harsh call from the sky, and looked up to see the red-tailed hawk coasting in a long arc above the pond. Each time he disappeared behind the trees. He was probably hunting, but I wondered whether he was also a sign from my Manitou—a sign of warning, or instruction, or change.
Then one night I woke up in the dark, though not because I was cold. I could still see a glow in my fire pit, a small red light in the darkness. Suddenly something above it caught my eye, in the piece of sky up there behind the trees, and I saw a wonderful thing that my father first woke me to see when I was a very little boy.
The stars were dancing.
It was a slow dance, like a game. They took turns. Every so often, one of them rushed across the sky and then hid himself. Then another. Then another. All in the same part of the sky, the northeast. They were like sparks blown out of a fire by the wind.
“Look,” my father had said that first time, holding me in his arms and pointing upward. “They are your ancestors, Little Hawk. Every year at this time they leap, they dance. It is Manitou. They are saying to us, ‘Look, we are still here. We are watching over you. We dance for you, in our beautiful home.’ ”
Then he had taken me back into the house and put me back on my sleeping platform, and pulled the doeskin blanket over me.
“Remember them,” he had said.
So looking out from my lonely cave, this starlit night, I remembered them, though then it had been summer and now it was cold midwinter.
And I knew this was my second sign, and that it was time to plan my journey home.
That night the moon was not in the sky. Soon it would start to grow and we should be halfway to the Cold Moon, which would be the second of my three moons away. If I began to travel then, I should arrive back at the proper time. I knew the way to go, because I had been watching the star of the north, to which the Big Bear pointed, ever since I left. And I knew the land around our village so well that I should recognize it long before I reached home.
* * *
It was wonderful to think about this. Once I had begun, I found I thought of little else. I thought myself through it, minute by minute. First I should begin to hear the sounds, far off: the barking of dogs, the chopping of firewood, the calls of children playing. Soon after that I should smell the smoke rising from the roofs of the houses. And at last, across the cleared land, through the wide-spaced trees, I should see my own home.
I kept trying to decide what would be the best time to arrive. After one last night sleeping out in the cold, I could come in through the door flap in the early morning. My mother would just be up, feeding wood to the fire, starting to cook the first and biggest meal of the day. I could see her in my mind, in the warm house hung with mats and baskets, and lined with the sleeping platforms where the rest of the family still lay snug under furs and skins.
I thought of choosing a moment when she was turned away from me, and then slipping into the house and putting my hands over her eyes. Perhaps I should say “Mother” softly first, so as not to frighten her. Or better still, perhaps I should simply walk in and let her catch sight of me, so I could see the look on her face.
This was a game I played with myself often in the cold days and the long nights that followed. I rehearsed my first words to my father, my apologies for losing his knife. He would be regretful, but not angry. I invented my first meetings with my sisters, my grandmother, my uncles and aunts—and with my friend Leaping Turtle and the two other boys who left the same day that we did, on the journey to become men.
I wondered how they had survived th
e big storm. I wondered how they had changed—because I had certainly changed. Whether or not the elders would count me as a man, as a warrior, in some way I had grown up.
I also knew I was exceedingly dirty and I stank, and I longed to be able to strip off in the sweat lodge and get clean again. I was thinner than when I left; my mother would be horrified and want to fatten me up. But of course I had learned to eat less now, and I was tougher and quicker, I thought, because I also worked harder than I ever did before.
The thing that would most distress my mother would be the great scar on the side of my face. The wound had healed itself; one morning I had woken up and found the squirrel-skin fallen away, and there was no pain when I reached up and felt my cheek and my chin. But the skin was lumpy, and here and there I could feel points where a fragment of bark had embedded itself in the long scar. All my life now, people would look at this ugly scar before they looked at the rest of me.
But that wasn’t much to pay for being still alive.
There was one thing I wanted to do before I left. I made my way to the edge of the salt marsh, all white now, with little icebergs in its creeks. Straining my eyes in the white glare, I gazed all around until I found the white hummock that was the island where my tomahawk was born.
I sent the little island a farewell, and wondered whether I would ever see it again.
Early the next morning I buried my fire pit under dirt and snow and cleaned out my cave so that it looked as it did before I came. It had given me shelter in a hard time, and I was grateful. I thanked the place, and I left.
The journey home was hard and slow. Each morning I set off early, but each day before dark I had to make a nest for the night so that I shouldn’t freeze. Each time, all over again I had to find a sheltered place between trees or rocks; all over again I had to cut pine branches to keep me from lying on icy ground. It was hard to be on the move in winter. My deerskin was a stiff, clumsy garment that caught on the trees. I chewed bark to cheat my stomach as I trudged through the snow.
On bright days the sun told me which way to go; at night, the gleaming stars told me whether he was right. If I was so cold at night that I could hardly breathe, I made a fire. Sometimes I heard wolves howling, but they weren’t close. I wondered why the solitary wolf had never joined them; I hoped I was forgiven for killing him.
The journey seemed endless, but gradually excitement began to grow in me as I thought of food and warmth and comfort—and most of all, the people I loved. I swore to myself that I’d never say a bad word to any of them again, not to my mother or father or even Quickbird.
And I stopped trying to decide on the best time to arrive at home. The moment I caught sight of my house, nothing would stop me from running toward it and in through the door.
The trees were more widely spaced now, with no scrub between. This was land that had been burned over for farming; I was near the village. I gave a shout across the snow, but heard no answering voice or barking dog, not yet. Then I saw ahead of me a collapsed structure of branches that I recognized: it was the remains of a tower from which we watched over the corn the summer before, to keep away the animals.
I started to run.
I was in a field of dead cornstalks beaten down by the snow, and in the distance, through the trees, I saw a roof. My bow and arrows jumped against my back as I ran.
It was a bright sunny day; the sky was clear blue. The roof that I could see was the sweat lodge—I knew its shape. I ran past it into the center of the village, breathless, feeling a huge smile on my face. I was home.
SEVEN
But as I passed the sweat lodge, something made me slow down. Though it was broad daylight, I could see nobody anywhere in the village. No smoke was rising from any of the houses. And the snow around them, mounded in drifts where the wind took it, lay smooth and unbroken, with no sign of footprints.
I tried to tell myself that everyone was away on a hunt, even though it was winter. Then I caught a faint smell in the air. I sniffed harder, casting my head round like a dog. It was the smell of rotting, the smell of death. Something was terribly wrong.
I headed for my own house, stamping through the crusted snow that lay knee-high everywhere, and I stumbled over something. As I scrambled up, I found it was a man’s foot, heel upward.
I stood there, staring. A dead man, unburied, under old snow. I wasn’t brave enough to dig and find out who he was.
Feeling sick with fear, I went slowly to my own house. Snow lay in a drift against our entrance. A little had been dug away, but there were no footprints.
I kicked aside the rest of the snow and said a wordless prayer to the Great Spirit, and I went in through the hanging flaps of deerskin.
A beam of sunlight slanted down from the open hole in the roof. The baskets still hung from the walls, the pots stood beside the fire. There were ashes in the fire pit, but the house was cold and empty.
A great shout came out of my throat, all my fear turning itself into noise.
“Mother! Father!”
At the far end of the house there was a tiny movement in the shadows, and a small whisper of a voice.
“Little Hawk? Is that you?”
My grandmother Suncatcher was lying wrapped in furs on the furthest sleeping platform. I rushed over to her and knelt beside her, holding her.
“Grandmother, where are they? What’s happened?”
She seemed very small, and her face was thin, hollow-cheeked. She looked up at me without any expression.
“They are dead,” she said.
I stared at her.
“They all died,” she said in that breathy whisper. “There was a terrible sickness. All died.”
“Mother? And Father? The girls, and my brother?”
“All died,” she said. “All the village.”
I felt I was in the middle of a nightmare, and that although I knew nothing was real, I couldn’t wake up.
But it was real.
“Everyone died?”
Suncatcher tried to speak, and failed. Her throat was too dry.
I scrambled up and looked round wildly. There was a bark bucket on the floor near the fire pit, half full of icy water, with a wooden ladle hooked to its edge. I knew that ladle—I had watched my father carve it from the burl of an oak. I dipped it into the water through the crust of ice and took it to my grandmother, helping her to lift her head, and she drank from it in little sips.
When she had enough, she raised her hand. It was a tiny hand now, its bones like the bones of a bird; she was dreadfully thin. So I drank the water myself; I drank three ladles full, like a man dying of thirst. I could feel Suncatcher’s big eyes on me.
“Be strong, Little Hawk,” she whispered.
There was nothing to say to this.
But now she was staring at me. At the side of my face, at the long puckered scar I had never yet seen myself.
Don’t look, Grandmother. Not now. Not yet.
I jumped up. The house was so cold, I had to make it warmer or my grandmother would die. Kindling and logs were piled by the door as they had always been; the bag of milkweed fluff and dried moss was hanging beside the fire bow, just as always. I seized everything in a kind of frenzy, and made a fire.
Suncatcher watched the flames catch.
She said, in a whisper, “Your father had the sickness first of anyone. He died in two days. Then the baby. Then your mother. I sent your sisters to the women’s house and I nursed your mother, but she died and so did they.” She paused, waiting for breath. “White Eagle and Quick Fox had died by then too, and their families after them. And all. And all.”
“Running Deer?”
“Everyone.”
“Did something poison them?” I said. “What had they eaten?”
“No,” Suncatcher said. “It was nothing that they ate.”
“Then what?”
She lay there quiet for a long time, looking at nothing, and then she took a long breath and let it out again.
“
I have heard of it before but never seen it,” she said. Her voice was very weak and tired. “It is a disease from the white men who come here from the sea. It jumps to you in the air and burns you up, and then it jumps to the next person, and the next, and the next. A terrible disease, a plague. We have no medicine for it. The medicine man did his best, but he died too.”
I reached out and touched her face. “You didn’t die, Grandmother.”
“No,” she said with great bitterness. “The Great Spirit allowed one useless old woman to live, amongst all this death.”
There was nothing to say to that either.
She looked so weary and old, and her words came out so painfully, but I had to understand what had happened.
“Where did this plague come from? There are no white men here.”
“Trading,” Suncatcher said. “Our people trade.”
“But not with white men. My uncle White Eagle has seen them, but that was in the north. He said they come in big boats to catch fish, and go away again.”
“They come closer now. They trade for furs.”
A picture flashed into my head, of a pile of furs in our house and my father holding up a bearskin in front of him so that his head was sticking up over it where the bear’s head would have been. He was laughing, happy. I did not often see him laugh.
“But they don’t come here, Grandmother. I don’t understand.”
Suncatcher closed her eyes and lay there silent, her mouth a thin unhappy line. Then her eyes opened again and looked straight into mine.
She said, “Four moons ago, your father and White Eagle and Quick Fox went away to trade.”
“To the villages up on the river, yes.”