The Animal Wife (36 page)

But Pinesinger wouldn't speak. Still sobbing, she opened her shirt and offered her nipple to her son, but he was crying too much to take it. I looked around for Muskrat, who was just getting out of our deerskins. Our eyes met. She went to Pinesinger, and taking the baby in her hands, she cradled him gently, sang a little, and put him at her own breast. After a while he took her nipple. But whatever had happened must have upset him greatly. He would nurse for a moment, then stop to cry some more. "Hi?" whispered Muskrat, wondering.

I wanted very much to ask what had happened. Up from the cave many people were coming—Graylag and his wives, Yoi and Father, my aunts and uncles, and many others, all talking at once. Taking over our fire, they made a thick circle around Pinesinger, crowding Muskrat and me to the side. Many people sat on their heels to talk to Pinesinger, while Father stood over her, looking down. Waiting to hear someone apologize to Pinesinger, I was surprised when some of her kinswomen began to scold her for starting trouble and insulting Yoi. "Of course you were beaten!" said her eldest kinswoman, Graylag's wife, Teal.

A sad story unfolded. Poor Pinesinger had been jealous of Yoi and Father. She had let herself speak angrily to Yoi but hadn't been ready for Yoi's answer, which, because Yoi was so clever and was standing so close, had caused Pinesinger to forget herself. Unwisely, she had pushed Yoi, who was taller and stronger. Yoi had snatched the baby out of Pinesinger's arms, thrust him, screaming, into Teal's arms, then seized a stick to hit Pinesinger. Rooted to their places in the circles around the fires, the other people had been caught by surprise and hadn't gotten the stick away from Yoi until she had forced Pinesinger through a fire. The peace had been spoiled, the fire too, and most people were angry with Pinesinger.

I must say, when the story was told, I felt like laughing. I had only felt angry when I thought that Father might have raised his hand to Pinesinger. Since the problem was with Yoi, it was less serious—or so it seemed to me. The people began to stand up, to look around, to think of going back to their beds and their fires. I saw no reason why the whole trouble should not be forgotten then and there.

But to my surprise, Pinesinger refused to stand up. She refused to go back to the cave. She would live with Yoi no longer. "Hear me, Aunt!" she said to Teal, her kinswoman. "I won't be treated so carelessly. Since my husband lets my co-wife attack me, I'll live with my stepson, Kori."

And she did. That is how Pinesinger and her baby came to live with Muskrat and me and our baby on the plain above the cave. There was barely enough room for Pinesinger's sleeping-skins in Muskrat's good shelter, but from that night on she made her bed there, squeezing Muskrat up against the poles. But nobody worried about that.

***

Just before the full moon, there came a soft south wind that trembled in the feathergrass. Then came heat. The faraway line of blue hills seemed to wobble when we looked there.

On the night of the full moon, as Muskrat was about to cook a frog for me on the embers of our fire, we heard women's voices on the trail leading down the bank of the low ravine. I thought I heard Pinesinger's voice among the rest. When I looked at the river, I saw her with many of the other women. They were starting to bathe. Into the shallow water they splashed, until the river seemed alive with naked bodies. The heat had caused the women to do this, the heat and the light of the full moon. Perhaps also the fleas in the cave had done their share—usually women sing and play in water, but that night the women weren't playful. Rather, they sat right down and began scrubbing purposefully with sand.

Beside me, Muskrat was looking too. Suddenly she opened her shirt, took out the baby in his sling, handed him to me, and hurried down the trail. Soon I saw her on the sandbank, stepping out of her clothes. Naked, she walked into the river, wading past the other women out into the fast water, until she was chest deep. There she lowered herself so that the river flowed through her hair.

The pup ran back and forth on the bank like a gray shadow in the moonlight. He even waded belly deep into the river, to get as near as he could to Muskrat. But she had begun to scrub her hair and took no notice of him. He didn't dare swim and soon backed up to the dry ground. I saw him later, his legs still wet, half hidden in the grass. In fact, while I had been watching Muskrat, he had stolen the uncooked frog.

In the cave below the men were very quiet. Like me, no doubt, they were watching the women. How could they not? After a summer of good food, the women were round and smooth, and when they were wet they shone brightly in the moonlight. Their wet hair shone like mica. Naked and slowly washing, they were beautiful to see.

Later some of Graylag's women began to clap and sing. All the women stood up then, formed a line where the river was shallow and the bottom was sandy, and danced to their own singing, crooking their elbows, lifting their knees very high, double-stepping with stamps and splashes at certain beats of the song. They sang:

 

Our legs are thin
Our breasts are narrow
Our eyes are small
Our necks are long.
When our husbands call
We answer, "Kiak! Kiak!"
When our children call
We answer, "Goorgoorong!"

 

The song was called "The Crane." My mother once knew it. No wonder these women were singing it—it is a song for the water's edge, a song for bathing, and with their many Fire River lineages, these women would enjoy a Fire River song.

Behind me the moon shone down on the moving water, making it sparkle with points of light, and on the wet, dancing bodies of the women as they moved along the sand. One among them caught my eyes; she was Pinesinger. Ah, but she was very beautiful. She always had been, and until old age changed her she always would be. I watched how her wet hair lay still, stuck to the skin of her back, how gracefully she moved her round arms and legs, how the moon shone on her milk-filled breasts, on her perfect hips, how the long, curved line of her throat showed against the moonlit sky. Ah! How was it that my father preferred Yoi?

As my eyes ran over Pinesinger's body, which my own body well remembered, I noticed her belly. It seemed round. Was she pregnant? I told myself she could not be. Her child wasn't able to stand unless someone held his hands for him. Even then, the most he could do was to stiffen his legs and bounce. But he certainly couldn't walk, and years would pass before he could live on hard food without his mother's milk. Again I told myself that Pinesinger could not be pregnant.

Even so, I couldn't help but compare her with the other women. I didn't know the women of Graylag's lodge—his two pretty daughters-in-law, for instance, who were Father's kinswomen—and it didn't seem right to be staring at them as if I were a woman curious about a woman's thing. Right or wrong, though, I saw that most of the other women had flat bellies. But wasn't Pinesinger more recently delivered? Wasn't her child younger than the other children? The only woman with a younger child was my woman.

I looked around for Muskrat. For a long time I didn't see her. I had almost decided she had finished washing and started back when I noticed a wet, dark head moving through the water far downstream on the other side of the river, making for the opposite bank. It was Muskrat, of course, swimming like an animal, with her face raised. But why was she on the far side of the river?

Alarmed, I watched her. Into my mind's eye came a frightening scene: Muskrat gone and me left with the baby, without milk to feed him and with no one to help. In my arms my boy was gazing at the sky, his large eyes bright with moonlight. I looked down at him, then back at his mother, whose dark form, like an otter's, had reached the far bank and was hauling out of the river onto a wide, flat rock. There she stood up, stripped some of the water from her skin, and leaped to the bank, where she strode along, a shadow in the moonlight, not stopping until she was as far upriver from the other women as she had been downriver before. I saw that she planned to swim back to us after all, and would allow for being carried by the current. Much relieved when at last she waded in, I watched the progress of her dark head in the moonlight, and when she waded out on our side I remembered to look at her belly. Muskrat's child was much younger than Pinesinger's, but Muskrat's belly was as flat as a man's. So it was hard not to think that Pinesinger was pregnant. Surely Father had made her so. The child would be my half-brother. As Andriki was to Father, so that child would be to me. By the Bear!

Yet what would a new child mean for the child in her arms? For my child? I didn't often give much thought to Pinesinger's child, since my thoughts were so much on Muskrat's, the child I had a right to think about. But right or wrong, both boys were mine. Now a new child of my father's would be pushing against my son, pushing him before he was strong, before he was named.

This could not be good. In the Camps of the Dead, the lineage hears about it. The elders of the lineage think the living are playing with them, disrespectfully calling for one of them to come and be born to a woman who already has a baby. No woman can feed two children at the same time, or not for long, so the spirits of those children know they have made the long trip from the Camps of the Dead for nothing. They must go right back again.

How could Pinesinger have gotten pregnant so soon? Didn't she care for my child, even if perhaps she should never have had him? Was that his fault?

As I watched the slow dancing of the women, I listened to the song, wondering about it. What did they mean with their strange words, those dancing women? When my mother used to sing the song I must have been very young, too young to know that a woman's secret lay behind the crane's answers to her husband, her children. If I had asked my mother to explain the song, she might have laughed at me, but she would never have explained. Women's secrets are about children but are not shared with children.

So I waited in the moonlight with my son in my arms, we who knew nothing, listening to the river, to the singing, to the wind in the long grass of the plain. The sky was huge that night, with moonlit clouds like mountains in it. Very, very far away I heard mammoths, and later lions. Below me in the cave a child began to cry. It was a baby—perhaps the baby who was mine with Pinesinger. Most likely, I thought, it was he, since the voice sounded very young. Soon I knew it was he; from the riverbank the women heard him too, and Pinesinger left the dancers, put on her clothes, and climbed the trail to the cave. In a moment the baby was silent.

Then, still smelling of the river, Muskrat stepped from the shadows, reached out her hands, and took our son from my arms. She spoke to him in her language, calling him Kiu Ngarr, as she did very often those days. I didn't like to hear it, but what could I do? After all, it wasn't a real name. The baby gave a little cry of joy when he saw Muskrat. I noticed the wolf too. He seemed to have followed Muskrat up from the river. As was his habit, he threw himself down at a distance from our fire, but not so far he couldn't make sure he was near Muskrat. Now and then the firelight made his eyes shine green as he watched her from the long grass.

***

Of the two bad things that mark that time for me, Pinesinger's pregnancy was the first, but Muskrat's hidden doings were the worst. These were accidentally discovered by Andriki and to my shame were made plain to all the men.

One day we men went hunting. All together we were many, and as we walked our line was very long. There were the four brothers who owned the hunting—Father, Maral, Kida, and Andriki; their sons who were old enough to hunt—me and Ako; and the husbands of Father's kinswomen—Marten, Timu, and Elho. Timu and Elho were the sons of Graylag, who also came with us, bringing his stepson, the Stick; his nephew, Raven; and Raven's son, White Fox. The old Dust Moon was still in the sky on the morning we started. We headed southeast to the short-grass plain where the summer before we had killed a cow bison, where Father said we could always find horses. The day was warm and windy, and the clouds, almost always overhead that year, made shadows as they slowly flew by.

With all of us carrying nothing but our spears, all walking fast without packs or women, away we went, one after the other behind Father, the long grass parting to let us by. In the evening we were very far from the cave but had not seen game. Just at dusk we saw horses a long way off, and we decided to stalk them in the morning.

We camped on the plain. Before dawn we set off for the horses, who had thought themselves safe from us since we hadn't at first hunted them, and before the sun had gone far on its way we had surrounded them. We were so many that the herd could not escape us. We killed a yellow mare. The spears that killed her belonged to Andriki and to Timu, Graylag's son, and the division of meat began as we sat down to take off her skin. Because we were so many, and because Andriki and Timu were in-laws in a way, the division of the mare was done with much talk and difficulty. We made the division fairly and kept our speech polite, but it strained us to do it, and the day passed before our work was done. So we camped a second night on the plain. Not until the next morning did we bring the meat back to the cave.

When we got there, we found the women gone. This was not surprising—they had gotten hungry while waiting so long and had set off to find their own food. But there was plenty of meat for all, and no need to wait for the women to eat it with us. Father and the other men sat down by the ashes of the dayfire near Muskrat's shelter and looked around for fuel. Against the shelter lay several piles of sticks and dung that Muskrat had gathered, and while I went for one of these piles, Andriki went for another. He bent to pick it up, then suddenly drew back as if he had seen a biting spider. But he would have stepped on a dangerous spider. Instead, in a strange, quiet voice he said, "Kori, look here."

I went to see. Stuffed into the thatch of the shelter was a little bundle wound loosely around with the spotted bark of a redberry bush. Andriki poked at the bundle with a stick. It fell out from the thatch and lay on the dust in the sunlight. The bark dropped off. Not knowing what to say, I looked down at it. What was it?