by Harper Swan
Sounds of children playing came from behind the double tent, and Willow was moving around the clearing when Raven checked to see if anyone had returned. Her sister had the appearance of a wilted flower. Her shoulders slumped, and her long hair fell forward around her bowed head, unbraided and messy. Clearly, she hadn’t slept well due to Bear callously spending his first night back not with her but out in the lean-to. A pang went through Raven. Willow was suffering because she’d cared enough for her younger sister to want her close by.
She remembered with shame how, after the first onslaught, she’d all but invited him to continue. They’d coupled as thoughtlessly as rabbits several times during the night.
Willow began stoking the fire, bending over the hearth. She didn’t look up or respond when Raven entered the clearing and warmly greeted her. Neither did she make any comment when Raven began telling her about straightening the Longhead’s arm. She finally finished with the fire and squatted before the hearth opposite Raven, her face a frozen frown. Raven stopped talking.
Light clouds crossed overhead, their shadows webbing the clearing while Raven’s heart went cold, like an icy stone, as she understood that her sister regretted sending for her. Willow might even have said certain things about Raven so that Bear would cast her out as he’d threatened.
Excited laughter burst from where her nieces and nephews played. Raven looked at the neat clearing, the well-built double tent and lean-to, and the warm, cozy hearth from which she might soon be banished. She wondered how she could have been so stupid as to not listen when her father talked about the importance of tribe. Raven grasped now that without the tribe, she would be nothing, an animal dead on the steppe.
She pressed her tongue against the back of her teeth, probing the gap, and anger sparked through her. Surely Willow had suspected that could happen. With so many men dying, not only from disease but also hunting wounds, it was common enough for a bereft woman to be taken in by her sister’s mate, sometimes as his additional mate or most often only temporarily.
Raven flung her words across the fire: “I am like a newly crafted spear, a just–knapped quartz blade, a fresh kill. One day soon, I will be as a worn spear, a chipped blade, an old kill. The freshness will be gone. I assure you that things will soon become more like they were before I arrived.”
Willow’s eyes flipped up. For a long beat, she looked through the smoke at Raven, her face astonished. Then she sighed. “You always were full of words. Sometimes they worked for you, and sometimes they didn’t,” she said sharply, but her face relaxed.
Willow had thawed, and she remained so, even when Bear returned to the lean-to, night after night.
For four days, Raven visited the enclosure, making sure it was cleaned regularly and the captive was being given food and water. On the fifth day, she went by later than usual. She’d been collecting plants daily and taking them to the camp healer, Old Cloud, a timeworn woman who welcomed her help. The day before, Raven had interrupted her gathering to set traps near the burrows of steppe hamsters that had moved into the valley.
According to Bear, the trackers who’d followed the Longheads would probably return soon, and then the captive would be released. She didn’t say anything to Bear—he would make some jab about feeding lions—but she’d decided the Longhead should have fresh meat for his journey. The string traps were set to catch the hamsters at dusk when they left their burrows, so she went to check them first thing upon awakening the next morning. Willow could always use any trapped hamsters for a meal if the trackers hadn’t returned by late day.
She hurried, hoping that predators hadn’t found the traps during the night, but she needn’t have worried. She found four large adult hamsters with their legs noosed. Raven picked up a nearby hand–sized rock. “In this manner, the Earth Mother feeds her children,” she murmured, touching the rock to forehead and chest. She ended the hamsters’ struggles with quick blows and took out a small quartz blade to clean them.
But before she could begin, a strong feeling came over her that she should go immediately to the pen and check on the captive. She could clean the hamsters later or, if he was released sometime during the day, he could clean them himself after he left. She decided to gift him with the blade. He would at least have something ready-made to take with him.
Yet she lingered at the burrows, kneeling in the grass, rubbing small ripples on one side of the knife, left from its crafting. She rarely used the blade for anything. It had been her father’s.
The reddish color was unusual for quartz. It looked as if it had been dyed with red ochre or as if blood had soaked into the stone. He’d handed it to her from his death pallet, saying, “You were born with well-sharpened edges, but no matter how much I struck you, I was never able to shape your core. You’re made up of something that’s too hard in some ways and too soft in others.”
She placed the blade in her smallest bag and attached it to the bound hamsters using the bag’s drawstring. The captive would know what to do with her gift.
When Raven got to the pen, the hamsters hidden in her herbal pouch, the guards were dismantling it. “When did he leave?” she asked, trying not to sound frantic.
“Right after the trackers arrived,” one of the guards said. He grasped a post and with a groan pulled it out of the ground.
“And when was that?”
“The sun had only just topped the lake trees,” he said.
Raven stepped back as the post thudded onto the ground.
“We followed him until he passed the boulders, then we came back.”
She looked at the sun, barely over the trees. He hadn’t been gone long, and she remembered an area with large boulders from when she’d first come down the valley. If she hurried, she could catch up and give him the hamsters.
Raven nodded her head. “Very well, I’ll leave you to your work.” She swatted lazily at a beetle trying to land on her tumble of hair, which she hadn’t taken time to braid that morning, and then she sauntered away as if what he’d said was of little importance.
At the camp’s edge, her fingers quickly secured the pouch’s leather straps so it rested tightly on her back. She began running and soon spotted the large boulders a short way up the valley.
His large footprints, with their splayed toes, were easily found. She tracked them, running when she could, all her senses focused on her surroundings. The spring day was clear. The morning hummed with bees enticed down powdery throats of newly opened flowers, and butterflies flitted about as she sprinted along.
In the distance, buzzards flew. Raven could barely keep her eyes on the ground for watching them. Ever since her failed attempt to rescue the baby, their arrival filled her with foreboding. She momentarily slowed her pace and shaded her eyes, looking upward. They had probably scented an old animal carcass, or… they had spotted something freshly dead.
But she quickly realized the buzzards were only searching, their spiraling dance across the sky moving toward her, the innermost buzzard becoming briefly the outermost as they glided closer. She forced herself to stop watching them and continued on.
The trees and foliage became thinner. Raven was some distance from the camp and felt anxious. She looked up from tracking often, eyes darting everywhere. Large predators and their prey mostly stayed away from camps, avoiding the frequent food searches and constantly burning fires. The tribe depended heavily on fire for safety, hence the Fire Cloud tribal name. Clouds of smoke could be seen hovering over a Fire Cloud camp from far away. However, Raven had come a good ways from the camp’s smoky protection. All she saw, though, was a fox ambling along.
Raven followed the footprints up a path that parted heavy grass. It looked like the path she’d returned on while carrying Fern’s baby. She’d held the infant close under her parka to warm the small limbs, and its lips had moved like a minnow’s mouth against her le
ather tunic as it made dry, mewling gasps.
Wetness dimmed her eyes, and she almost missed the Longhead’s tracks veering off the trail. Alongside a plummeting stream, deeply sunken footprints wound up to where rocks dammed the stream’s downward flow, the water forming a pool before noisily spilling out on its way to the lake. She saw signs of him all about the pool edges, including a leather skin he’d covered himself with while in the pen. Partly eaten bulrush tubers lay scattered about.
A twig cracked, and he walked out from behind a tree as if he had hidden there until he’d recognized her. Even at a distance, the red marks and chafing left from the ropes stood out. Seeing his neck raw like that made her own neck prickle.
But now the ropes were gone, and he had safely started his journey—in large part because of her and the things she’d done. She lowered the weighted pouch onto the ground, lightness filling her chest along with her limbs, and grasped the hamsters by their bound legs, eager to reveal her cache.
She held them toward him. “Aulehleh,” she sang, the sounds lolling cheerfully in her mouth before going out over the pool. She hoped that she had formed the word correctly enough for him to understand her.
He must have taken some sort of meaning, because he came directly toward her. Not slowing or picking his way, he walked across stones and briars alike with his odd gait, as if his feet were hardened leather. Although he had on his filthy lower skins again, he had bathed. His damp hair and beard were a mass of reddish-brown waves. Even his eyebrows had curled from the water, she noted as he got closer.
He reached out, but instead of taking the dangling hamsters, he grasped her forearm. Raven looked down, perplexed by his broad hand clutching her.
Now the hand of his injured arm was reaching up slowly for the hamsters, and she thought that if she yanked that arm sharply with her free one, the pain might distract him enough for her to pull out of his grip. But she didn’t make a move.
Instead, she lifted her eyes to his face, disturbingly near hers, and became lost in his features. She wanted to use her fingers to rework things, to press that huge brow down and to reshape the nose to be smaller. Her observation was cut short when he tossed the hamsters aside and pulled her down with him onto some new-growth plants thickly covering the ground.
Over the days of his captivity, Raven had become used to entering the space around him. But she became undone when he was the one to close the gap between them in such a sudden and complete manner. Her mind flailed, trying to figure how best to escape, but her limbs betrayed her by freezing stiffly, and the small sounds quivering in the air, she realized, were her own whimpers.
She could only guess what his expression meant as he looked down at her. His hands went to her neck, and she began to tremble, thinking of how he’d forced the bison’s head almost to the ground. But he was only reaching for her necklace.
He fingered the shells for a few moments, turning them over. It reassured her, his curious touching, until she became unnerved once more upon observing his large fingers, broadened at the tips, good for grasping—or choking. He eased his hand down her tunic top, placing his palm on her chest, and she knew he could feel her heart’s violent beating.
He was saying something. His vibrating, rumbling voice was low, almost whispering, as though he were soothing a fretting infant. His face was not unkind, and Raven’s thumping chest calmed a little.
Then he was moving quickly, as if he realized too much time was passing. He pulled off his lower skins and pushed up her tunic.
Her breath quickened, and a surge of wildness pushed through her, not entirely caused by fright, when his weight and surprising warmth pressed her into the plants.
He lay beside her, panting for a little while afterward, one heavy thigh over her legs, pinning her. Raven twisted herself onto one elbow and slowly reached toward his face. No longer feeling a need to change and rework everything, she simply focused on whatever was beneath her hand, letting her fingertips roam from top to bottom. Under his lips, which were defined like notched stone, although soft, his bearded chin slanted back sharply. Perfectly made for close suckling. She tried to imagine what he had looked like as a baby with that chin tucked into his mother’s breast.
He took her fingers away and smelled them, and suddenly she was on her back again. And perhaps she was wrong to do so, Earth Mother help her, but she yelled without restraint into the blue sky over them, having lost all caution along with fear, and she thought he had somehow made her into his kind and kindred.
He lay still on her for a long while, his broadness covering her. Raven felt strangely tranquil, almost paralyzed, and she drifted off, dreaming again of ravens. The fledgling raven landed beside her raven self as in her other dream. But that time when the young one cajoled and begged, Raven’s throat pouch was so full and swollen she thought she might burst if she couldn’t feed it. She had dipped her beak down to its open, pink-lined one when she awoke.
He was gathering things. He tied the hamsters onto the waist of his furs before putting them on. He widened a hole in the skin taken from the enclosure and stuck his head through it so his chest and shoulders were covered. Then he walked over to a limb that seemed to have been formed into something like a spear.
Raven noticed, as she straightened her tunic, that their time in the plants had made a kind of nest and that much of the nest was made of fox flower, the very thing she’d put in Fern’s medicine—enough to sicken her but not nearly enough to kill her. She pulled up a scant handful and rolled over languidly to reach her pouch, tucking the plants inside. She yawned and stretched before kneeling to put the pouch straps over her shoulders. As she was about to get up, her shadow disappeared.
For a large man, he moved silently. Raven hadn’t seen him approach, but he loomed over her. Not giving her time to rise, his good arm and hand swooped down and pulled her up by the wrist. There had been no way for her to know that she was one of the things he would gather before going on his way.
He walked rapidly up the valley toward the hills leading to the steppe, pulling her with him. She didn’t resist and wondered at the lethargy sunk throughout her body and mind, her thoughts oozing, slow and sticky.
But he wasn’t mired along with her in that honey-filled trance. The bone-jolting rapidity with which he hauled her along began rousing her, and she thought about their ultimate destination. Raven had no idea what living with Longheads would be like, or even if she could manage to stay alive in their camp.
Leaf had told her they ate their dead when they were starving. She wondered if they would eat her if she died when times were bad and whether she could eat one of them if hungry enough. Perhaps after what had happened that day, there was no act too strange or base for her. But she didn’t want to find out.
“No, no,” Raven said loudly over and over, so he would understand the word. “No!” She scrabbled at his fingers in an effort to peel them from around her wrist and tried to pull her arm out of his grasp.
He paused and looked back at her with brows lowered, clearly irritated, and then continued dragging her along.
After they’d gone on for a while, she gave up trying to get loose. She began crying in a quiet, hopeless way.
He stopped suddenly, dropped his spear, and turned to face her. Her wrist fell free. Before she could react, a hand clapped down on each of her shoulders. Her reflection in his eyes was surrounded by green, and it seemed to her that he smiled right before his hands lifted up and off.
Raven flew down the valley like a swallow released from someone’s fist, leaping rocks and streams, feet barely touching the ground. Once she’d covered some distance, she paused to adjust her pouch. She looked up the valley, hoping for a last glimpse, but he had already gone out of sight.
California, Early Twenty-First Century
Despite his earlier misgivings about the seriousness of Genetics and
Me, Mark is impressed with what he sees on his tour. The company has obviously committed to providing a reasonably priced product so the general public can pursue their individual genomes.
“Really wish you would stay a while,” Greg says, back at the conference room door, behind which erupt gusts of laughter and animated chatter. “You’re what—only ten minutes away at the Sunnyvale facility?” He raises his hands up, palms out. “Promise you won’t regret it.”
Mark feels like a complete jerk—Greg has done his utmost to be a gracious host since they first met. Perhaps he should stay. After all, he is there to forge a goodwill connection. “Okay,” he says. “For a little while.”
“Great.” Greg opens the door. “Come with me up front. I’ll introduce you to everybody.” They wind through the crowd, and Mark sees a lot of curious looks glancing his way. He stops at one side of the podium, trying not to fidget.
“Listen up, folks.” Greg taps the microphone. “I’ve got just a few things to go over before we dig into that wonderful-smelling bison chili and other goodies. First, I want to let everyone know that we have a distinguished visitor with us today. More distinguished than even he realizes,” Greg says with a chuckle, looking at Mark.
Mark wonders what Greg is talking about. He wants to look away from the blue eyes boring into his but concentrates on maintaining eye contact.
“This is Mark Hayek from the Parkinson’s Institute, one of our new research partners. But that isn’t what impresses me most about him,” Greg says. “Mark, when Genetics and Me heard about recent research showing that Neanderthal ancestry can be found in the genomes of many people living today, we used that research to work up the percentage amounts each of our customers carries. And of course, we also did it for ourselves, and that’s what today’s party is all about.”