The Animal Wife (2 page)

M
Y FATHER
was named for a bird—the swift—because he was born in winter, when the Bear wants us named for animals. I must have been born in some other season, because my name is ordinary—Kori. I was very young when my mother divorced my father and took me to live among her people on the Fire River. I don't remember the journey. She must have carried me.

The first time I remember seeing my father was at the Fire River when I was almost grown. My mother's brother and his people, together with my stepfather's people from lodges on Woman Lake, were camped on the north bank of the Fire River where it winds out onto the plains. The whitefish were running, and on the day Father came the new crescent of the Strawberry Moon rose just before daylight. That afternoon, while we were resting at our fires or in the grass shelters we had built to keep off the wind and the biting flies, I heard someone say, very quietly, that two men were in sight. We all stood up, and our men reached for their spears.

The grass on the plain was long and soft. Under the wind it moved quickly and easily. Because the day was warm, the air was also shuddering, wobbling. So much was moving that we couldn't easily see the faraway shapes of the two men. But we watched as they got nearer, one behind the other. They were strong, not tired, and they came fast.

After a while they stopped to lean their spears against a wormwood bush. This was good, since it showed they weren't coming to fight us. We looked at each other, happy about that. Soon we saw their faces. They were men of the mammoth hunters. Their hair was soft and pale, the color of grass or of a lynx's fur, and they were bearded. One of them wore no decorations on his shirtor trousers, but the other wore fringed sleeves. He also wore a necklace made with an amber bead and the eyeteeth of a large meat-eating animal. Of the two, he seemed to be the elder, and he walked first.

From afar his eyes searched the faces of the people waiting for him. He smiled, then laughed, then called out, "Bala! I'm here! Are you well?"

What was this? Bala was our headman, my mother's brother. But almost everyone, even people who weren't his kin, spoke to him carefully, thoughtfully, calling him Child of Tiu, or else Uncle, showing the respect that everyone felt for him. Almost no one called him just by name, just like that: Bala. I looked up at him and saw that he was squinting, trying to see the face of this new man. "Is it my brother-in-law?" he asked himself, starting to smile.

The two men hurried to us, and soon were hugging the men of our camp, who crowded around them, laughing and shouting as grown men will when they meet after a long time. Most of the women watched from a distance. My mother, I noticed, slipped away from the others when she saw who had come, and sat on her heels by our grass shelter, her eyes hard, fixed on the face of the man with fringed sleeves.

In time the younger of the newcomers glanced at Mother, then nudged the other, the man in fringed sleeves. "There's Aal," he said, pointing at my mother with his lips and chin. The man in fringed sleeves turned slowly for a look at her. When their eyes met, he nodded a greeting. For a moment she stared hard; then, raising her chin, she looked away. The man in fringed sleeves turned back to his welcome.

Soon Mother stood up, smoothed her trousers, and passed her hand over her braid. Then she came quietly to Uncle Bala and touched his elbow. When he bent his head, she put her lips to his ear and whispered something.

But Uncle wasn't a man for whispering. "If you don't want to be near him, go!" he said aloud. "How long has it been since I shared my fireside with Swift?"

Mother turned on her heel and strode away, and I stared at the man in fringed sleeves. Even before I had heard his name, I had guessed he was my father.

 

For the rest of the afternoon, my father and the other stranger sat on their heels in the cleared, ash-covered space in front of Uncle's grass shelter, where most of the men and boys of our camp crowded together to look and listen.

The other stranger was Father's young half-brother, and his name was Andriki. He was almost as tall as Father, but still quite young. I noticed that the eyes of both men were pale, like my eyes. Most of my mother's people had dark eyes, or good eyes, as Mother called them, something she and her kin shared with reindeer and other good animals. As Mother often said, pale eyes were found on lions and other bad animals. So it made me happy to see pale eyes on two such good, tall, strong men.

The fringes on Father's sleeves, like feathers on a bird's wing, showed that like the birds he belonged to the air, which meant he was a shaman. And the fat, curved teeth in his necklace were a lion's! Anyone with lion's teeth in his necklace would seem sure of himself, but Father was very sure of himself. His half-brother treated him respectfully. So did Uncle Bala and the Fire River men.

Uncle threw fish on the coals, to roast for his guests. While the smell of cooking blew down the wind, many of the women joined the men at Uncle's fire to hear my father talk about some of the people he had left behind. Uncle Bala asked first about Father's third wife, Yoi, who had been born here at the Fire River. Among us lived many of her kin and members of her lineage. So far, said Father, she had had no children with him. Otherwise she was well, and, said Father, she sent her greetings to all the people. A murmur of pleasure went through the little crowd at these words. The people at Bala's fire remembered Yoi well.

What of her two nieces? the people asked. Those two were last seen at the Fire River when their aunt went north to marry Father. The elder of them had died, said Father, but the younger was married. She lived at his lodge, and she too sent greetings to the people of her lineage. We murmured again, not all of us as loudly. These nieces had only visited us once, years before. I, for one, didn't remember them.

Father also talked about his journey. For almost the length of a moon, he told us, he and Andriki had followed a mammoth trail that led from the Hair River across the plains to the place where, in the fall, mammoths crossed the Fire River on their way to a winterground. At the start of their journey, Father and Andriki hadseen many bison. Then they had seen reindeer and horses, but nothing after that until they were within two days' walk of the Fire River. Why? There was no water on the plains.

Father and Andriki had dug milkroots, which they had squeezed for the juice. They had eaten dry berries still clinging to the bushes from the summer before, they had snared bearded partridges and ground squirrels, and they had killed and eaten an old male lion whom they had caught following them. Once they had found hyenas on a saiga and had taken the carcass. I listened carefully to Father's stories of the things they had eaten, seeing in my mind's eye how I might find food if I should ever make so long a trip.

When the fish had been eaten and the two men had wiped the fish fat and the black of the coals from their faces, my father began to talk of lineages. He praised the lineages of the Fire River, saying that good and strong people came from them. This pleased all of us, as Father seemed to be talking of our lineages. Then he praised the lineage of a woman who had lived here long ago, a woman who had been a famous shaman. Some of the women then reminded Father of people who belonged to the old shaman's lineage. Father smiled. He knew. Wasn't Yoi, his third wife, who now waited for him at the Hair River, of this lineage?

Who cared? Women own the lineages, and as far as I knew, only other women wanted to hear about them. I wanted to hear more about the long journey across the dry plains. So did the other boys who had crowded in to listen. But we were disappointed. People began to talk of marriage gifts. Then Father reminded the adults of some carved ivory beads he had given to Mother when he married her, and a long discussion of these beads began. We lost hope of hearing anything more interesting. When the shadows of the bushes grew long over the plain and the sun set into the lines of clouds on the horizon, the adults were still talking of marriage gifts.

But not to me. My body was at Uncle Bala's fireside, squeezed between two of my cousins, but my ears were trying not to hear. Instead I was concentrating on a daydream of the springtime, of something that happened near a camp we had shared with people who were now camped upriver. I was in a willow thicket, watching the girl named Pinesinger kneel on the trousers she had just taken off, about to go down on her elbows in front of me. Over hershoulder she was watching me. Two rows of raised scars, the marks of Ohun, led my eyes across her pale, bare rump, which at my touch went rough with gooseflesh.

I was torn from my daydream by Uncle Bala's voice, now almost exasperated. "How can we return your gifts?" he cried. "Years have gone by. Your gifts have been given away in other people's marriages. We can't get them back. You should have spoken sooner!"

"So that's how you think," said Father sadly.

"I'm reminding you of what happened," cried Uncle Bala.

"But now a way should be found to make things right," said Father. "After all, you got your sister back. I have no gifts and no woman."

"But you're married to Yoi!"

"Yes, for many years, but Yoi is childless," said Father. "And her lineage, like Aal's lineage, is from here."

"What can I do about your women?" asked Uncle Bala. "How are they my responsibility?"

"How not?" asked Andriki.

"Who caused this childlessness and divorce?" asked Uncle Bala. "Was it me?"

"Didn't your sister divorce my half-brother?" asked Andriki. "How can your lineage shrug off the blame?"

"Why did my sister have to leave?" asked Uncle Bala. "Doesn't she say that my brother-in-law mistreated her?"

"No one mistreated your sister," said Andriki. "She mistreated herself with her quarrelsome ways. Her disposition ended the marriage."

"Then shouldn't my brother-in-law have spoken sooner?" Uncle Bala cried. To Father he said, "Wasn't Kori a baby when you and my sister divorced? Haven't the gifts you gave for Aal been carried far away? What's done can't be undone. You ask too late. Look at Kori."

Father's eyes widened, and he looked around at some of the other boys. I realized he thought that one of them was me.

"Not them," said Uncle Bala, touching my shoulder. "This one is Kori."

Father turned, and for the first time he seemed to see me. For a moment he said nothing. I saw gray hairs in his beard and at his temples, and many lines around his pale blue eyes. He stared, blandand knowing, like a lynx. Our eyes met. "Kori." The lynx face nodded a greeting.

"Father," I said.

***

That was the first day of Father's visit. At night he and Andriki slept beside Uncle Bala's grass shelter and, when the air grew cold, got up to warm themselves by Uncle's fire. But because my cousins and I had been too busy listening to the men to gather fuel for the night, there was nothing but a ball of dung to burn. I knew this because I had moved my sleeping-skin from Mother's shelter to Uncle's.

When I saw Father and Andriki hunched over the tiniest of coals and heard them talking softly about firewood, I got up and offered to get fuel for them.

"Are you Kori?" asked Father. In the dark, he hadn't recognized me.

"Yes, Father," I said.

"Thank you, Kori. We'd like to warm ourselves."

So I walked through the starlit camp, among the shadowy grass shelters, and wherever I saw someone awake at a fire, I asked for fuel. Soon people had given me a handful of branches and several balls of dung, and these I brought to Father. Then the fire burned up, and the two men smiled at me as if inviting me to sit with them. So I did. The three of us sat quietly at Uncle's fire. Then, as I looked at Father and Andriki in the firelight, it almost seemed that I belonged with them—as if three of us from Father's lodge were visiting Uncle Bala's fire.

A
LL THE NEXT DAY
Father talked with Uncle Bala and the Fire River men. At night Father talked privately with Uncle Bala, and after Uncle Bala went to sleep, Father talked even more privately with Andriki. All that time I stayed near them. When they talked, I sat behind them, listening. When they ate, I ate. When they went out on the plain to urinate, I went to urinate too. Sometimes my mother or my stepfather would call me to do something—to gather fuel, perhaps—but I pretended I didn't hear and wouldn't obey.

By morning of the second day Andriki was calling me Botfly. It made me sad, that nickname, since my mind's eye saw a botfly hovering, unwanted, near the leg of some animal. Yet nickname or no, I didn't stop following my father, even though all he did was talk.

The second day was like the first—people talked about lineages and marriage gifts. Father insisted that the Fire River people had already gotten all there was to get—they had been given presents for my mother, then they had gotten my mother back, and then they had been given more presents for her by my stepfather's people. Father had nothing.

Uncle Bala insisted that the Fire River people no longer had the gifts given by Father's people. Nor did they have my mother anymore, because she had married my stepfather. Worse, my stepfather's people hadn't given many gifts, because the marriage was recent and the marriage exchange was still incomplete. So it was really Uncle Bala's kin who now had nothing.

Sometimes, to emphasize what he was saying, Uncle Bala would offer to give Mother back to Father. Also for emphasis, Father would seem to agree. "You know I want your sister," he'd say.

"You'll have her," Uncle Bala would cry. Then he would call to Mother, but of course Mother wouldn't come.

Everyone knew that both men were just pretending. Even I didn't think that Father really wanted Mother, any more than Mother wanted him. And I didn't think Uncle expected her to answer his calls.

But in the late afternoon, when Uncle happened to call her as she was passing by, Mother surprised us all by striding up to Father, her nostrils flared with rage. This time, with her hand hiding her mouth so that Uncle Bala couldn't see what she was doing, she pursed her lips to form a ring around her tongue, the sign for shitting anus. Father's eyes flew wide at the awful insult, and he started to stand up, as if he meant to lay hands on Mother. But Andriki grabbed his arm and jerked him down. "Be easy, Brother," said Andriki.