Call Down the Stars

by Sue Harrison

  The line suddenly grew slack and Water Gourd again twisted it around the hand grip. Then the line was taut again, this time pulled straight down from the side of the boat. Water Gourd leaned over the edge. He could see the otter, large and dark, distorted in the depths. Suddenly it sped up through the water, moved so quickly that Water Gourd’s only reaction was to raise his hands and cover his face. The otter reached the surface, flat nose bubbling out spent air, dark lips drawn back from yellow teeth. The animal leaped at him, and Water Gourd, without thought or reason, clenched his hands into the otter’s thick pelt. The otter, twisting and snarling, drew in great breaths of air and curled to snap at the bloody spear protruding from its side.

  Daughter began to scream, and Water Gourd felt the pain of the otter’s teeth as it bit his arm, once and again, then too many times to count. Water Gourd tried to drop the animal into the sea, but it embedded its teeth into his forearm, locked them there, and would not release its grip. Dark clots of blood gouted from the otter’s wound, and finally Water Gourd was able to reach his knife.

  He plunged it into the otter’s throat, but it took the animal a long time to die. Finally, as the otter’s blood ebbed, so did its strength, and Water Gourd was able to use the blade to pry the jaws from his arm. He dropped the otter into the bottom of the boat where it lay with jaws clenched, feet scrabbling, gouging out wet splinters of cedar with its claws.

  “Stay away,” Water Gourd shouted to Daughter, and she kept her distance, staring with rounded eyes, one finger plugging the circle of her mouth. When the animal’s death throes ended and it was still, she pointed at Water Gourd’s arm, at the shredded skin that hung like a fringe from a wound that gaped from elbow to wrist.

  “He eat you,” she said.

  Water Gourd’s legs gave way, and he slumped to the bottom of the boat. A wound that horrible would attract spirits of illness. Fever would take him, and he would die. But he looked at Daughter and said in a loud voice, “No, he did not eat me. We will eat him.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WATER GOURD’S RUSH FIBER coat was beyond repair. Seams, stressed by days in salt spray and nights without a woman’s needle, had frayed and split. The otter’s teeth had shredded the sleeve into tatters so fine that they were good for nothing but hook streamers—false promises of minnows swimming. Water Gourd bound the coat around him as best as he could using strips of fish skin.

  Worse, far worse, his arm was nearly as shredded as his jacket, the muscle bared and bloody.

  He washed his wounds in sea water, grinding his teeth closed over the scream that rose into his throat at the bite of the salt. What skin he could salvage he stretched over the wound; the rest—chewed into frothy strands—he pared away with his knife and added to his bait pile.

  The deeper toothmarks and gouges still bled, and when Water Gourd had done all he could to clean them, he sat for a moment to calm his breathing, mindlessly watching the swirl of patterns made by blood in the water at the bottom of the boat.

  Most of it was otter blood, he assured himself. He stretched his good hand toward the mess and spoke those words to Daughter.

  She nodded her head, said, “Otter, him blood,” in a soothing voice, as though she understood Water Gourd’s need to believe what he told her.

  He sat until his heart had slowed, until he felt a sleepiness begin to steal over him. His thoughts descended into a comfortable haze, then, for a moment, cleared, and he realized the trap of that sleepiness, brought on by shock and loss of blood. He forced himself to once again use his knife, this time on the dead otter.

  He stretched the animal out in the bottom of the boat. He was too tired, too hurt to care about what the bloody water would do to the pelt.

  Suddenly, foolishly, he couldn’t remember how to butcher an otter. Should he cut off the head, like hunters did with seals, towing them behind their boats until the longworms that lived in the animal’s intestines had fled the cooling body? Or should he cut from chin to anus, peel away the pelt, then empty the body cavity and squeeze out the contents of the gut into the sea? He finally decided on the latter. If there were longworms, he would deal with them when he found them.

  He used his feet and his good arm to rip the hide away, did not bother to skin paws, head, or tail. He chopped each of these off whole, put them over the side of the boat with broken prayers, muddled and confused. He hoped that the otter’s spirit would recognize his gratitude, in spite of his arm, and that the pieces would come together again as a whole animal, to swim in the sea. He stripped away thin slices of the muscle, gave some to Daughter, and ate one himself.

  The flesh was thick and muddy-tasting, as salty as the sea, but when it had rested in his belly for a while, he felt some of his strength return. He lay the pelt, skin side up, over his lap, scraped away flesh and blood vessels and bits of fat, working slowly, stopping often to rest. Daughter sat watching him, her fingers in her mouth.

  “Him blood,” she said once, removing her fingers to point at the bottom of the boat. Beyond that, she was silent, brow furrowed, eyes on Water Gourd’s seeping wounds.

  By the time night fell, Water Gourd had the hide scraped well enough to use as a blanket. He sluiced the water and gore from the fur, wrapped himself and Daughter, fur side in. For the first time since they had left the Boat People’s land, Water Gourd was warm enough to sleep well, and in the morning, though his arm was stiff, he felt stronger.

  He butchered the otter, sliced the meat thin, and plastered it up the sides of the boat to catch salt from the sea spray. He cleaned out the guts, sliced some into bait, left other pieces long to dry and braid. He saved tendons and sinew to make fish line, and the shoulder blades in hopes they could be fashioned into a paddle. He had forgotten to save the teeth before he gave the otter’s head to the sea. How foolish! They would have made good fish hooks. At least he had the bones.

  He and Daughter ate again. The meat wasn’t good, but it was filling, and it gave strength, and being otter, it might even help guide them toward land. Perhaps by always eating fish they had prolonged their journey, content as fish were to stay in the depths.

  Water Gourd’s wound still bled, but a hard crust had begun to form over the muscle, making the arm less painful. He used a bit of otter gut to bait a hook, and fished most of the day. He caught nothing. Once, gazing out at the horizon, he thought he saw land, but with the haze of fog that rose from the water, he could not be sure.

  The wind was calm, and he tried to be thankful for that, though he thought that a storm, if it did not swamp their boat, might drive them to some shore.

  By night, his thoughts were tangling themselves into strangeness, as though he dreamed with eyes open. He wondered if he had given Daughter anything to eat. Yes, otter meat, he remembered.

  And water? They had so little. He untied the gourd that hung from his waist and allowed her a sip, then took a drink for himself. When the sun set for its short night, he saw that Daughter was shivering. Strange, Water Gourd thought. He himself was too warm. He wrapped Daughter into the otter pelt, felt her relax in his lap as sleep claimed her.

  Surely his mind would clear if he could sleep, he reasoned, but his arm throbbed, and though he had loosened the ties that bound his tattered jacket to his body, he was still too hot. Finally he moved to one side of the boat, leaned over so he could settle his wounded arm into the seawater. The salt no longer burned, and the water pulled the heat from his body. He shivered, was suddenly too cold, and with the shivering finally understood that the wound had begun to draw spirits of sickness. He thought of laying Daughter in the bow of the boat where whatever evil he had drawn to himself would not touch her, but he was shaking too hard to let her go.

  Finally his trembling woke the child, and she pulled herself away from him, stood up on spindly legs, her feet splayed. She stepped out of the otter skin and tried to cover him with it. He pulled her to his lap, wrapped them both in the pelt, and was finally able to sleep.

  In his dreams, Water G
ourd again battled the otter, but when he raised his knife to kill the animal, it changed suddenly from otter into Bear-god warrior. The warrior lunged at Water Gourd’s throat, drawing back his lips so Water Gourd could see that the man’s mouth was filled with otter teeth. He screamed himself awake and realized that Daughter, too, was screaming, shaking as hard as Water Gourd had been before he fell asleep. At first, he was afraid his sickness had claimed her as well, but when he soothed her with gentle words, told her he had only been dreaming, she stopped shaking. He cradled her on his lap until she again fell asleep.

  The sky was still dark with no hint of dawn, and so Water Gourd knew he had slept only a little while. The longer they traveled, the shorter the nights had become. If he was home, in his own village, Long-day Celebration would be near. For a moment his thoughts strayed to the feasts that would be held in the Boat People’s villages, but then he remembered the Bear-gods. There would be no celebration at his village, and who could guess what the Bear-god men had done to other Boat villages?

  What if there were no celebrations at all? What would happen? Perhaps the sun, insulted by their negligence, would not linger the next year. Then winter would return too quickly, and the people would go hungry.

  The Bear-gods were heathens and fools. Who could expect them to understand that all the ways of the earth must be kept in balance, one season with another, one village with another?

  Water Gourd’s anger rose, and he moaned in his helplessness. Perhaps he was the only Boat man alive on the earth, the only one who knew the ceremonies and the proper ways of life, and he was here in this outrigger, destined to go where the current took him, and now at the mercy of fever and illness.

  He lowered his arm again into the sea. The elbow was swollen and impossible to straighten. Angry red lines streaked up toward his shoulder. The cold water helped deaden the pain. He wrapped his uninjured arm around Daughter and lifted prayers for a heavy rime ice on their boat by morning, enough to help refill the water gourds. He was so thirsty.

  His prayers were answered. He and Daughter were awakened by the clattering sound of frozen rain, the stinging pelt of tiny ice balls.

  Water Gourd, the ache of his arm so huge that it seemed to swallow his entire body, roused himself from dream-tortured sleep and began scraping up handfuls of ice, filling his mouth over and over until he realized that he must give Daughter ice as well, and collect enough to melt and fill his gourds. He lifted his head and opened his mouth, then pointed and nodded until Daughter did the same. She closed her eyes against the sleet, but kept her mouth open.

  Like a little bird, Water Gourd thought, and tried to remember some prayer he could say in gratitude for what she meant to him. But all he could think of was a song men sing when the juice of fermented fruits and grains makes them foolish. That song was more about women than gratitude.

  The ice melted to slush in the bottom of the boat. Water Gourd scooped it up until the fingers of his good right hand were numbed into a claw. He found his bailing gourd and used that, then with a ballast rock beat the ice from the edges of the boat. When he had filled all his gourds, he began to throw chunks into the bow, but finally, afraid the weight would sink them, he started to heave the ice into the sea.

  The work drained his strength until he could do nothing but huddle with Daughter under the otter pelt, holding a deer hide blanket over their heads.

  “Enough!” he finally bellowed, startling Daughter into tears. “We have longed for fresh water, begged for it until our mouths were cracked and parched, and now you give us so much that our boat sinks? What kind of gift is that?”

  Thunder roared from the clouds, and Water Gourd cowered, afraid. How foolish of him to question the sky! Surely the spirits of pain spoke through him, for he was a man who knew the ways of respect.

  The thunder came again, and again, then a crack of sound and lightening, the brightness so quick that Water Gourd would not allow himself to believe what his eyes had seen—a mountain in the distance.

  “I dream,” he said, and made himself small under the dark fur of the otter pelt.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HIS ARM HAD CRACKED and was leaking pus. Water Gourd kept it now almost always in the sea, and once in the middle of a dream considered cutting it off, letting it float away. Perhaps then it would carry off the evil spirits of illness, but the thought never became more than that, an idea that he did not have the strength to act upon. If Daughter had been older, he might have asked her to do it, to cut the arm off and release him from the agony of putrefaction into the cleaner pain of the knife.

  Thoughts of knives and cutting became so great that they pushed away all other dreams, and each time he awoke, Water Gourd was surprised to see the arm still with him, misshapen and discolored, skinned like the carcass of an animal.

  Three days after the ice storm, he could no longer hold down food. The fever gripped his mind, and he grew to hate the sun as it burned through the fog and into his eyes. He dreaded night when the darkness confused him, tormented his thoughts with images of death.

  Daughter’s small face, pinched with concern, floated before him, and sometimes he felt her cool hands against his skin. But other times it seemed as though he had not seen her for days, and he worried that she had fallen into the sea. Did she know enough to stay away from the edges of the boat? Weren’t children always falling—into water, on stony beaches, into hearth fires?

  Then he would see her once again, her presence comfort enough that he would allow himself to sleep.

  Daughter squatted on her haunches in front of the grandfather. She didn’t know much about sickness, only that it frightened her, and she was afraid now. Sometimes the grandfather grew so hot that his skin almost burned her hands when she touched him, and at other times he was so cold that he shook the outrigger with his shivering.

  She pulled a piece of otter flesh from the side of the boat and chewed at it. Most of the slices the grandfather had put there had frozen to the wood during the ice storm, and when the ice finally turned to water, the meat remained, hardened and stuck, as though it had melted into the boat. It tasted bad—sharp, bitter—and sometimes her stomach ached after she ate it.

  They still had fish, gutted and tied to the outrigger poles, but Daughter was too small to reach them. Gulls had begun to swoop down and tear them away, battling with one another over each piece. They made her angry, those birds, stealing her food. What would the grandfather do when he woke up and saw that his fish were gone? Would he think she had been greedy enough to eat them all herself?

  She found a water gourd and took several swallows, then held it up toward the grandfather so he would see it, but he didn’t wake up. She pulled a little at the otter pelt he had wrapped around himself, but though he mumbled something, he did not open his eyes. She set the gourd down in the bottom of the boat and crept onto the grandfather’s lap, pulled a corner of the pelt over herself.

  She had forgotten her mother’s face, but she remembered the smell of her and the good milk that came from her breasts, warm and rich and sweet. Grandfathers didn’t have milk; at least this one didn’t. If he did, he never offered it to her, but he was warm and was good at catching fish.

  She looked down at her left foot, at the red scar on the side where her little toe had once been. It had hurt when he cut it off, but it didn’t hurt now. She had thought it might grow back, but so far it had not. She remembered the fish the grandfather had caught with her toe. Her stomach growled when she thought of that good fish, its fat, oily flesh.

  She was tired, but she tried to keep her eyes open. She didn’t want to be asleep when the grandfather woke up. She needed to tell him to catch more fish. She raised her maimed foot to his face, held it there as long as she could, hoping that if he woke and saw it, he would be reminded of fishing. But finally she was too sleepy to do even that.

  Her eyes closed, and in her dreams her mother came to her, offered her a soft brown nipple, and when Daughter sucked, it tasted like fish.


  The grandfather’s voice woke her. At first Daughter thought that he was crying. He began to struggle as though to free himself from the otter pelt. He thrust his good arm up, then brought it down hard. His elbow caught Daughter on the side of the head. The blow stunned her, and she cried out, rolling herself into a ball and sliding from his lap. It was night, but the moon was full, and Daughter could see well enough to understand that whatever the grandfather struggled against was outside the boat. She backed away from him, put her fingers in her mouth, and watched.

  Something had hold of his arm, the hurt arm, the one he kept in the water. She wanted to see what it was, but she was afraid. What if it was a fish so large that it pulled him right into the sea? What would she do then? She wasn’t strong enough to keep the grandfather in the boat. She began to cry, but finally crept forward and grabbed one of the grandfather’s ankles. If the fish wasn’t too big, maybe her strength would be enough to hold him in.

  She looked at the grandfather’s face, saw to her surprise that his eyes were closed.

  “Open eyes,” she called to him. “Open eyes!”

  His eyes popped open and he stared at her, but still, he seemed as though he were a man asleep.

  “Pull!” she said. “Pull hard.”

  He shook his head, blinked.

  “Pull,” Daughter said again.

  He opened his mouth and roared such a terrible sound that Daughter lost her grip on his ankle and sat down hard in the cold water at the bottom of the boat.

  But as he roared, he pulled his arm from the sea. It came up dripping with long brown strands, which at first Daughter saw as rotted flesh. She scurried to the bow of the boat, sat there on ballast stones that poked hard into the bones of her rump.

  Then suddenly, to her surprise, the grandfather was laughing, laughing as he had when they caught the first fish. She covered her face with her hands, but split her fingers so she could see between them. He was cradling his arm on his lap, unwinding the brown. Eating it! Daughter gagged.