The girl stopped dancing. She turned her body to the first strong rays of the morning light and stood silent. The old sister pulled the string on the leather apron and let it fall to the girl’s feet, leaving her body naked and complete in the center of the people. The large basket of fine flat weeds woven through the long white days past in preparation for the girl’s time was carried into the center of the ring and set at the girl’s feet. She placed one foot in its wide straw bowl, then the other foot, she stood within its round shape of boundary, only she, with all the women before her, knew the secret sign of the weave banded darkly around the rim. The old sister slashed a finger dipped in the bright, blood colored earthen paint down from the center skin of the girl’s head to the point of her chin, “Head. Head. Keep out the wind. Head. Head. Keep thee quiet. Head. Head. Keep out the rain. Head. Head. Keep out the pain. Serve this woman well.” She streaked the red down the sides of the girl’s neck, the length of her arms to her fingertips, “Arms. Arms. Bear the burden. Arms. Arms. Bear the wood. Arms. Arms. Bear the babies. Arms. Arms. Hold the husband tight.” Her fingers worked quickly, spiraling the paint around the bulge of breast and down the curve of stomach. “Breasts. Breasts. Hang heavy with the milk. Feed all babies full with your juice. Be warm for the man. Stomach. Stomach. Have no cramps. Hold tight. Be strong. Grow big. Don’t let the babies go too soon.” The paint flashed down the girl’s legs and covered her feet, “Legs. Legs. Be light. Be swift. Walk far. Carry the woman to her end. Feet. Feet. Don’t split. Run uphill. Don’t die in the cold. Carry the woman far.” The old sister dried her hands of the paint on the girl’s back until it blazed like the rising Sun. “You will take this,” she held a flat basket to the girl’s mouth. The girl dipped her head, touching her lips to the mixture on the straw plate, the fragrance rose in her nostrils flared wide inhaling what she had denied herself during the four days past, she felt her whole body awaken, ache with the hunger she had learned to live in harmony with, she sucked up the mixture of tough Deermeat and pinenut soaked tender in sagbrush water, the saliva ran freely from the corners of her mouth and she threw her head back, full with the first heavy taste of food, her teeth ground at the chunks of meat, her throat working, sucking at something solid for the first time in four days, then it tightened, burned at the back of the girl’s mouth, pained with its own dryness as the girl spun her head down and spit the food to the ground. “Ahhhh,” the old sister smiled in her patient eyes. “You are wise. You are strong. You denied yourself. You have the power to deny yourself. You have the power. You are the Woman.” She brushed the girl with the warm ashes of the night’s fire, stroking her face gray, then down her shoulders and over her body. “The girl dies out of you, you are not lazy, you endure the pain, of the stomach with no food, of heavy burdens, of hard travel, you are swift, you stand straight when you are weak, you give up all you have, you are a Woman. Go Woman, go and bathe, wash the selfish girl from you and be clean. Woman, go into your time, go Woman.” For the first time in four days the girl lifted her eyes and looked at all the people, her eyes filled with the sight of men and women equally, and over their heads the Sun broke full in the Sky. It was a new day. She saw it for the first time. The small girls gathered to her person, they laughed with the Birds, anxious, as she stepped from the bowl of her basket and threw it into them. She watched their young bodies struggle together until one girl emerged with the prize, she held it high at the ends of her arms, beyond reach of all the outstretched hands, she did not want to part with her good fortune, she alone held the sign woven into the basket, and this would bring her easy from the girl into the Woman when it was her time. Blue Breast raised his hands and pronounced his joy, “My friends, those that have gathered to the sign of the daughter of my wife’s fire on the mountaintop and come here to follow her through the night into her time of the Woman in the new day, I ask you who are weak from giving your bodies to the Dance of the Woman to fold your legs that have carried you well through the night and sit with us on the blankets to feast the new Woman who walks among us, to fill your stomachs on the sweet meat of the running Antelope, to suck the sugar eggs of the Bees and drink the black juice of the Sunberry.” The food was brought heavy in the baskets and laid open on the ground as the husband of her mother spoke from the heart and the girl fled. She fled to the river to wash the youth from her body. When she reached the river’s edge she sank into the coolness of the flowing waters and let it strip the paint and ashes from her skin. She waited patiently until the last traces of red and gray smeared from her brownness and clouded in the current to be carried downstream. She felt the new lightness of her body and the shortness of her chopped hair and it left her unfamiliar to herself. She searched in the blue ripping surface for the image of the Woman she now was. The reflection she saw caught in the quick movement of the water was that of a man. His image loomed over her, splashing across the wet surface to the far bank. She turned slowly until she met his body as it slipped from its image into the water with her. His hands came to her and stroked the wetness of her short hair. She felt the strength of the fingers smooth the hair straight against her face. His body swelled and her legs moved beneath her to meet his weight pushing her down against the bank. She sank deeply as he came into the heart of her body, the mud growing up full around her back.
Gayabuc did not hear the sound of the women far behind. In his head there were no women. The face of his mother did not live in his thoughts and it had been many days since the young face of the mother of his own son lost its color, then its flesh, then ceased to exist in his thoughts even as an obscure skeleton. In the head of Gayabuc there was only space for the Fox to live. His feet carried him blindly behind his father through the forest to the place of the Rabbit while he sat within his own memory of the white days past, matching his eyes with those of the unblinking Fox; from this height he looked down to where they ate the flesh from their bodies. “Gayabuc.” He heard the name, it floated into him, seeking to attach itself to his person, to move him back to his place. “Gayabuc.” It came again, a stone dropped in the quiet water, a boulder rolled in his vision, separating him from the Fox, for the moment it was gone, slipped from sight in the blink of an eye. “Gayabuc,” his father put a hand to his shoulder and stopped him. “What say you? The Sun is heavy in the Sky, soon it will drop. Ahead is pelleu. Ahead is the Rabbit. We have walked the day. The Rabbit will wait. We will camp. Make ready, and prepare the nets. What say you? Tell this to those that follow.” Gayabuc turned and told the people that in this place at the edge of the tall trees where the land broke out in front of them flat and newly green for the distance of a valley a camp they would make. With evening the people prepared their nets, they had been woven and pulled together strong during the long white days past, the plant fiber was tough and had been dried thoroughly before being meshed securely in squares no larger than four fists that would stop the thrust of an Animal the weight of a man’s arm. When light turned to dark the net of each family was lashed to that of another until the final net rolled out in one long piece the length of three hundred men standing shoulder to shoulder. The people slept deeply the first night in the new camp, each knowing the net of his family served as a link in the barrier that would stop the run of the Rabbit. In the first light of the morning the men took the net and walked along the far side of the flat, green hard land until for a long time they were out of sight of the women. When the women had finished eating the pinenut mush left in the bottom of the baskets from the early breakfast of the men a boy came quickly in among them. He stood, his thin chest heaving and running sweat in the morning light. The women waited for his words. After he was certain that all had gathered around him and given up their eating he used his power wisely, he did not speak. The women said nothing, waiting only for his word, one of them left and hurried back to the boy with a straw cup rolling spring water over its brim. The boy swept the cup from the woman’s hand, tipped it to the Sky and drained the water into his panting chest. “EieeeYah,” he
flung the empty cup to the ground and sat on a rock. “The men …” he let his breath out slow, directing the words to the patient eyes surrounding him. “The men have set the net.” With the end of his words the boy was left sitting alone on the rock in the middle of camp, the women were gone, flung far across the green field in a noisy line, slashing with sticks the soft wet grass, kicking the freshswirled holes in the Earth, clacking a sharp sound out in the morning air as they beat two stones together in their hands, on they marched, beating the air with their tongues, running one between the other, their loud shouts female, urgent, hysterical, “Pelleu, run run! Rabbit, run run! Flee your home! Flee your home or we will eat you! Rabbit, run run! Pelleu! Pelleu!” Before them the grass moved, swayed with the rushing brown bodies. “Rabbit! Rabbit!” The grass swelled, trembled with an immense movement. “Rabbit! Rabbit!” The field was alive, frantic with fierce waves of brown. “Rabbit! Rabbit!” The grass ended and the ground rolled out flat and barren. “Pelleu! Pelleu!” The brown bodies broke from their cover and hurled themselves through the air, the desperate flight carrying them great lengths over the hard, bare land. “Rabbit! Rabbit!” The women stormed from the grass onto the bare ground, directing the flood of frantic movement before them, the dust from the blind race obscuring their shouting faces. The men could see them coming. They stood waiting behind the long net as high as their thighs arched out across the bare ground, anchored at each of its two far ends by an old man and a small boy. They could see it coming now like a great brown wind. They waited behind the barrier, each guarding his family’s section of the net, waiting to take what would come into it, what was his. They watched as the great crest of the brown wind drew closer, seeing in its dusty wake the blurred, dirtstreaked faces of the women. They waited with clubs clenched firmly and the sharp stones poised over their heads, some just held the strength of their hands at ready. “Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit!” The sound clawed at their ears, cried out through the wave, pierced the pounding bodies as the ground shook loose, boiled up and the first rabbit struck the tense net. A club swung and cut through the air with the full force of a blade, separating the head from the thumping body wedged fiercely in the barrier. “Pelleu! Pelleu!” All along the net the rabbits hit, the lunge of their brown bodies slamming out of the air against the armed wall, their weight sagging the woven strength with a full and final thrust. While the Sun rose and sat at the top of the Sky the men beat back the brown waves, their clubs thudding into soft Animal’s skulls, crushing the temples in the slush of blind instants, tearing the struggling bodies from the trap of the net and slamming them silent to the ground. “Rabbit! Rabbit! Rabbit!” The furious force of the women drove from behind, their sticks cracking into bones of the swirling movement at their feet, the warm blood splashed on their dusty bodies. The children descended from the sides in screaming spears, the sudden swing of their blunt sticks ending the crippled flight from the layered mass of broken bodies. The net sagged with its burden, the stakes driven into the Earth to support it all along the line snapped and sank with the weight. “Aeyieee! Aeyieee!” The Rabbit Boss threw his hands to the sky, the robe of his rabbit blanket hung loosely about his shoulders and swayed over the ground. “We have our want today,” his voice rose large over the sudden silence. “It is today we have our need.” His eyes moved quickly up and down the distance of the line, a thick gray blanket of bodies piled high, forming a soft fence between the people. “We have today our need. Today there is no hurry. Let us stop. Let us return to our home. It is today we have our need.”
2
“THAT RABBIT’S got big all of a sudden Joe. What do you call it?”
“Don’t need to call it nothing. Don’t never ask nothing of it.”
The boy leaned forward, his nose stuck up like a dog pointing at the stiff ears of the soft gray animal, “How do it know what to do then if you don’t ask nothing of it?”
“Rabbits know what to do. They ain’t like people. They don’t have to be told. You just leave them be and they’ll go on and do just what they always have.”
“Well it could be,” the boy settled his back against the stiffness of the chair, “but I can’t see a whole lot what it is they done. This one though, sure has got big all of a sudden.”
“It’s all of a sudden if you consider winter to spring all of a sudden. I don’t. A man could die. A man could get born. All of that time there is a lot of coming and going, no matter which side you look at it from. It’s a hard time. It ain’t all of a sudden.”
“What are you going to do with that there rabbit Joe? You going to throw it in the pot and boil it?”
“Haven’t figured it yet.”
“Me myself, I don’t like stewed rabbit. It don’t taste healthy. Whenever I eat it I make sure to hold my nose. My mother says that’s not polite. She says it’s the same as all other meat. I don’t think so though.”
“You just keep a hold of your dog’s collar there. He don’t seem so choosy what’s served up on his plate.”
“Maybe I should get him on outside,” the boy stood up, jerking the dog’s head back.
“Maybe you should,” Birdsong opened the door and let the sun into the room.
“You know if you don’t want to eat it,” the boy stepped out into the open and turned his back on the sun, “my paw will give you two bits for it.”
“Your paw had a chance to buy this rabbit back last winter but he passed it up. It won’t never be for sale again. Besides, it ain’t no two-bit male, it’s a six-bit female.”
“Could I let my dog go now Joe?”
“Sure, don’t bother me none.”
The boy let the collar slip from his grasp and the dog ran out from the house and into the ditch along the road, his nose tunneling in the thick green blades of grass.
Rabbit Boss Page 13