The Animal Wife (43 page)

***

As for Muskrat, her people never came back, and I never saw her again. I never saw our son either, although while I went with Father and the other men on our useless trip for vengeance, I had a wildly happy feeling that I would find him, grab him up in my arms, and bring him home, even without Muskrat. He was to Pinesinger's son what Andriki had been to Father. In a strange way, having him back would have been like having someone in Andriki's place again.

Yet that was not to be. Instead I began to dream of Muskrat's son. Each year in my dreams he grows older. It is as if the Woman Ohun wants me to remember him, since She knows he is mine in spite of everything. I wonder if he dreams of me.

Of course, Pinesinger's oldest child is also mine. In truth, I can't forget this, although during the winter that followed Andriki's death I might have liked to. Each day Pinesinger's pregnant belly grew, and the time of the birth of Father's child got nearer. Meanwhile she was trying hard to feed my blue-eyed son. She complained that her breasts grew small, but in this she was no different from any other woman trying to nurse a child in winter.

The winter was no easier than any other. We killed a bear, the one Andriki and I had seen crossing the plain. We treated him just as Father had told us to—we did not crack his bones for marrow and we left his head where it lay, with fat between his teeth. Even so, during the Lodge Moon and the Hunger Moon the deer left the forest and two tigers came, the Lily and a wife he had brought from somewhere, so all of us knew hunger.

Then one day, when the Moon of Roaring was new, Pinesinger said that she was cold and wanted firewood. She left the lodge, and when she came back she was no longer pregnant. Nor was she carrying any baby except my blue-eyed son. What had happened? No one asked her. Nor should anyone have asked her. Her milk could hardly feed one child. She had simply chosen to feed her older child, the child who had already proved he could live through a winter, the child she knew. I for one didn't like to imagine what might have happened to the new baby out in the snow. I tried to forget that anything had happened, although that child would have been to me as Andriki had been to Father. Everyone was unhappy, but so it was to be.

***

That same winter Pinesinger's blue-eyed son learned to walk, in a way. In spring he was given his name, perhaps the strongest any man can be given, since the name honored the Bear. It was I who chose the name, on a fresh spring morning at Father's lodge, just before we went to the Hair River.

Pinesinger and I were filling a waterskin by the lake, one of Muskrat's old tasks. I had given the boy my birchbark dipper and was showing him how to scoop up the water. "See how well he does that," said Pinesinger. "He can walk. He knows me. He could have a name."

"It's true," I said. "He could." Then I drew a deep breath and looked at the forest around me. On the tops of the trees the spruce needles shone in the morning sun. In the grass by the lake a spider's web shone all beaded with dew. And the water shone. Wind in the night had blown the broken ice to the far end of the lake, and the water rose and fell in front of us like someone breathing freely, glittering, breaking in tiny waves against the mossy stones at our feet. Now and then, from somewhere deep in the spruce woods, came the creaking, singsong voice of a tree. Summer, the time of plenty, was near. Once again we had lived through a winter. Once again the Bear had sent us animals to hunt and had not killed us. Instead, once again He was showing us the open water, letting us feel the spring sunlight there by the lakeshore, in the cloud of scent and pollen from the pines.

I watched my tiny son, who, no taller than my knee-high moccasin, was sitting on his heels on a rock just as I was sitting, but with his two hands, strong and clumsy, grasping the dipper. Here was a hunter whom the Bear would favor. I felt grateful to the Bear, but to name a child Bear would be out of the question. Yet as certain tigers have names that hide their real name, so do bears. "Call him Brown," I said.

"Yes, that's good," said his mother. And she did.

***

When Father began to hear Pinesinger's child called by a name, he brought her into his bed again. Then I thought that Father would be happy. At last, it seemed, he was going to have what he had always wanted—a child from the lineage of Sali, the great shaman from the Fire River whom Father so much admired. But Pinesinger didn't become pregnant by Father until the fall of that year.

She was still pregnant in the summer of the following year, when almost all the people who had kin at the Fire River went to visit them. I didn't go, because of the mammoths. There had been very little snow in winter, and by early summer the meltwater pools on the plains went dry and the mammoths seemed ready to drink from the river. So we hunted them. I'm glad I stayed—even without Andriki we killed a young male mammoth who knew no better than to use the steep trail down to the water. We ate like lions, and my share of the hunt was part of a tusk, a piece longer than my arm and so heavy that I could hardly lift it. If I had gone to visit Mother, I would have gotten none.

When the others reached the Fire River without me, my mother was very disappointed. Yet she was so taken with Brown that I wonder if she would have noticed me. She told everyone that having him there was like having me as a child again, because he looked exactly like me when I had been his age. She told everyone that the first time she saw him, she thought he was me turned back into a child by the Woman Ohun. She said she couldn't remember that he wasn't her grandchild, since he looked as if he should be her grandchild. By mistake, more or less, instead of calling him Nephew, as she would call almost any child, or Stepchild, as she might have done, since she and his mother had both been wives of the same man, she kept calling him Grandson. I was told that many people laughed privately at this, so I was glad I hadn't been there to see it. Most of all, though, I was glad Father hadn't seen it. It was just like my mother to say unexpected things and to embarrass the greatest number of people, especially Father's people. Andriki once said that she had been a meddling old in-law even when she was beautiful and young.

The people who visited the Fire River were Yoi and pregnant Pinesinger; their kinswomen, Teal and Men; Meri's husband, White Fox; Graylag's son, Elho; Graylag's stepson, the Stick; and the wives of these men. All but Elho's wife had kin there. The visitors left the Hair in single file very early one morning, disappearing into a heavy mist that lay on the plain.

For all Father seemed to ignore his women, he began at once to speak of the time when his wives would return. In fact, he spoke of
them
every day very fondly, as if he had never known anything but happiness from either of them. In the evenings he carved jewelry for them from his share of the ivory. By the time they were expected back, he had made two beautiful pendants, one for each, neither larger nor better than the other.

At last, one evening in the Moon of Fires, a line of people was seen gently swaying in the red grass far away. Father thought his wives had come, and he hurried out to meet them. To his great disappointment, he found everyone except Yoi and Pinesinger. These two had stayed behind. Father tried hard to hide his feelings, but from the way his eyes closed and his voice grew quiet, we knew that they were strong.

That evening, as we sat in his cave around the two fires, the men at one, the women at the other, hearing the travelers tell of their visit and their journey, I happened to hear him whispering over his shoulder to Teal, who sat back to back with him. He asked where his women were and why they hadn't come home. In her strong voice, Teal answered. As soon as their group had reached the Fire River, Teal explained, Father's two wives had become good friends. Both of them had stayed with Pinesinger's mother, Eider, who was related to Yoi in the same way that Teal was related to Yoi—their mothers had been sisters. So the women were lineage cousins. But there was more. Because Yoi's dead sister and Eider had been close in age, Yoi looked up to Eider as to an elder sister.

Warmed by Eider's joy in them, Yoi and Pinesinger had found it hard to remember why they had ever disliked each other. As a result, the two co-wives had begun to call each other Sister. Pinesinger had shared Brown with Yoi, and by the end of summer the boy hadn't known which woman to call Mama. That was as it should be with the children of co-wives. Anyway, as long as Yoi and Pinesinger were at the Fire River, Eider had not allowed any trouble between them, or allowed them to stay anywhere except together at her fireside with her.

Yoi and Pinesinger had been so happy to be in their childhood home, so free and comfortable among the members of their lineage, that their kin had easily persuaded them to stay for the rest of the year. Someone would walk them to the Hair someday, their relatives had promised. More likely, though, people had said, their husband would miss them so much he would come for them himself. He would want to get his child, born to him from the lineage of the famous shaman Sali. Ah yes, a little boy had been born to Pinesinger in the company of Eider, Yoi, Teal, and Meri, one mild evening in the Moon of Grass—more often called the Moon of Foals by the people at the Fire River.

In case Father came for his wives and infant, Uncle Bala had sent a message. He wanted Father to remember that gifts were still owed for three of his wives—for Pinesinger, of course, but also for Yoi and even for Mother. Now that I was married to Frogga, Bala thought that the question of Mother's ivory necklace could be raised again. There seemed little chance that Mother would return it, Bala said, so perhaps Father should stop asking for it and let it become one of the gifts given to my lineage by my wife's kin. Bala wanted to remind us that he often thought of Father as Frogga's father's brother. Yet even if Father was just a half-brother, he was a headman, so people expected a gift. "A big gift" is what Bala meant. The necklace would help people remember Father for his giving, not just for the women he had taken away with him, Bala said.

"Didn't I say this would happen?" Father asked me late that night at the men's fire. He was still trying to hide his disappointment over his missing wives. "Didn't I say that your mother would allow any marriage if she could keep the necklace? Was I right?"

This was where Andriki would have agreed strongly with Father, adding a few words of his own against Mother as well. At the men's fire we held our breath, as if in the dark, in the flickering shadows, we might yet hear Andriki speaking.

Then it began to hurt me that we were waiting for his voice, even if we didn't mean to, so I answered heartily. "Hi! You spoke of that necklace when I first came here, Father. I didn't think Mother would be so greedy, but you know her. Is she keeping the necklace? Let her! There's enough ivory by our camps each summer for all the relatives of all the Fire River women. The women know it, and their relatives know it. And if the mammoths learn about the trail, we'll find another way to hunt them. We will! It's in our nature. Right now at the Fire River the people are talking about us, our strength, our mammoths, our hunting lands, our ivory. Aren't we feeders of foxes and killers of meat?"

"We are!" answered most of the men.

L
ONG AGO IN ASIA
and across the northern part of the New World, the story of an animal wife was apparently popular. It occurred in many places in slightly different forms, as the quotes that open this book are meant to show. The story is about a man and a woman who is really an animal in human form. In China and Japan the woman is a fox, but on our side of the Bering Strait the woman can be other animals too. The theme, however, is very much the same wherever the story is told: a man finds a woman with something unusual about her—she's alone in the woods, perhaps. Ignoring any suggestion that she is not quite what she appears to be, the man falls in love with her. She becomes his housekeeper or his wife. Although in most stories she keeps her animal skin somewhere on the premises (an ominous gesture that the man prefers to overlook), the man is happy with her because of her helpfulness and beauty. Sooner or later, though, he unwittingly does something wrong. In response, the woman puts on her animal skin, resumes her animal self, and vanishes into the woods (if she is a mammal) or into the air (if she is a bird). If she and the man have had children together, she takes them.

The animal wife stories seem always to be told from the man's point of view—they are ostensibly stories of a man having a strange or disappointing experience—and consequently they never end happily, because the wife is really an animal disguised as a woman, not a woman disguised as an animal, and once she leaves she never comes back. In contrast are "The Frog Prince" and related stories, popular in European folklore, in which a man who has been malevolently converted into an animal is rescued by a woman from the misery of his base, bestial state. Frog prince stories have happy endings.

***

This novel is a companion piece to an earlier novel,
Reindeer Moon,
for which I am indebted to a number of very helpful sources. These are listed in
Reindeer Moon.
In addition, however, I used the following works. For translation from the Russian I would like to thank my husband, Stephen Thomas.

 

Chard, C. S. 1974. Northeast Asia in prehistory. Madison and London. U. of Wisconsin Press.

Giterman, R. E. 1968. The main developmental stages of vegetation in northern Asia in the quaternary. Transactions of the Geological Institute, Academy of Sciences, vol. 177. Nauka Press. Moscow. In Russian.

Johnson, C. W. 1985. Bogs of the northeast. Hanover and London. University Press of New England.

Kynstautas, A. 1987. The natural history of the USSR. New York. McGraw-Hill.

Tilson, R. L. and U. S. Seal, eds. 1987. Tigers of the world: the biology, biopolitics, management, and conservation of an endangered species. Park Ridge, N.J. Noyes.

 

As in
Reindeer Moon,
the economy and physical environment of the people in this novel are loosely based on those of the Ju/wa Bushmen of Nyae Nyae in Namibia, in the days when the economy of the Ju/wasi was that of hunting and gathering. The cold savanna of the Siberian Paleolithic was interestingly similar to the African savanna, with a vaguely similar terrain and a similar fauna, although the latter was obviously adapted for heat instead of cold. The personalities, material possessions, culture, religious life, and social life of the people in this novel are entirely fictional and bear no resemblance to the Ju/wasi now or ever.