The Animal Wife (7 page)

Andriki wanted to cook the liver. Whipping his firesticks out of his belt, he held the female stick under his foot and whirled the male stick in the little vulva. In no time the female stick made smoke, then fire, which Andriki fed with grass, then dung and twigs, then branches, then the liver, which caused the rising smoke to curl like a cloud with such a delicious, heavy smell that our mouths watered.

One of the lions sat up and sniffed the air. Then all the lions got to their feet and began to move toward us, showing us that there were not five of them but eight. Pinesinger began to weep. "Don't turn and run," warned Father, picking up his spear. But how could we stand off so many lions? They came quickly. When they were near, they began to trot. We backed away, trying to fix them with stares, trying to speak to them firmly, to tell them that the meat belonged to us, not to them, but they came steadily until they were almost at the meat. Then, with a loud roar like a thunderclap, one lunged toward us. If she was trying to scare us away, she succeeded. We turned and ran, overtaking Pinesinger, who had ignored Father's warning.

At a great distance we stopped to watch the sad sight—the big yellow bodies close together around my mare, now with her legs waving as the lions tore at her. Near them our fire burned brightly. We saw from the way the smoke rose straight and freely that the liver was gone.

***

I thought we would leave Uske's Spring, but in those days I didn't yet know Father. He pointed out that lions or no, we would find more animals here in a single day than we would ever find on the open plain, and that we should hunt rather than leave. The lions wouldn't bother us again for a while, because thanks to me, their bellies would soon be full.

When Pinesinger heard this she sat down and stared at the horizon, speechless with anger at Father. At last he noticed her and began to tease her gently. We saw that he wanted to coax her into a better mood. When Father wanted something, it was hard to deny him. Soon she gave him an unwilling smile.

Andriki raised his chin to beckon me, and I followed him across the short grass of the plain toward a line of brush that could hide a herd of horses. It seemed that we were to take ourselves away again, to leave Father and his new wife alone. Before we stepped into the bushes, we looked back to see them sitting side by side. It made me sad to think how easily Father forgave Pinesinger, and how easily he could tempt her.

So Andriki and I spent the rest of the day wandering over the plain, digging and eating onions and other bulbs as we found them and sleeping in a juniper thicket when we knew the lions were asleep, while the sun was in the top of the sky. Here and there we found horse tracks and horse dung, but never horses. Every time I thought of Father and what he and Pinesinger must have been doing, I also thought of the lions eating my horse, and I tried to put Father and the lions out of my mind, since all of them, that day, were taking something from me. Father may have thought that the plain around the water was crowded with animals, but Andriki and I found none, and when the sun was low in the sky we turned back, stopping once to dig onions for Father and Pinesinger.

As our eyes searched the grass for the hollow round leaves, we saw an unexpected thing—charred sticks and a few fire-blackened stones, right at our feet. We almost stepped on them. An old campfire! We bent low to look closely. No tracks were there, and no ashes; they must have been washed away by last winter's melting snow. Among the sticks we found a bit of flint shaped like a blade, but much smaller, as if someone had made a spear to kill a bird. We searched some more, and in a tuft of grass we found a strange thing without meaning, a sinew string tying together two broken pieces of a branch. That in itself was not very interesting. What made it strange was that the branch had been peeled and horse's teeth and feathers were dangling from it. What was it?

I looked at it from all sides. It wasn't anything. Yet someone had made it. It seemed to carry something foul around itself, something to do with spirits. Looking troubled, Andriki took the thing from me and put it in his hunting bag to bring to Father.

***

I was glad to find that Father and Pinesinger had not spent the day in complete thoughtlessness. They had cut juniper to make a high brush fence that would keep the lions from walking up to us at night (although not so high that a lion could not jump over). Also they had gathered wood and built a fire.

Father's forehead wrinkled at the sight of the horse's teeth and feathers we had found. "What is this?" he asked Andriki. But Andriki didn't know. Father and Andriki talked for a while about what the thing might be for and what people might have made it, but they knew of no one who had been here. If the people were from the Fire River, they would have visited their relatives among Father's people at the Hair. If they were from the east, from the Black River or the Grass River, they especially would have taken time to visit Father, since Father's group and their groups had recently gone to great trouble to tie themselves together, to share hunting. There had been an exchange of women. Never would these people stay on Father's hunting lands without first visiting him to tell him, lest secrecy lead to suspicion and misunderstanding, to a break in the carefully made ties. So surely the people who had camped here had been strangers.

Soon an angry tone grew in Father's and Andriki's voices. Strangers, like lions, came to do harm, they said. The ugly branch seemed proof of the strangers' bad intentions. "We should hunt those people down," said Father. "They must be animals to stay here without making themselves known. I'd like to hear them tell me why they think so little of us."

"You won't find them," said Andriki. "They were here long ago. Perhaps they were traveling far. Perhaps they were homeless. Anyway, the camp wasn't used long. And there weren't many of them; they needed only one fire."

"Yes, but who were they?" said Father.

His question, of course, could not be answered. As for me, although I had sometimes met people I didn't know, I had never met people nobody knew. I had never met a real stranger. I tried to imagine what one would look like, but no image came. Were they men or women? Young or old?

Strangers! I remembered hearing of an evil man from Pinesinger's lineage who long ago had gotten one of his kinswomen pregnant and then had run away to escape the family's anger. His kinswoman had died bearing the child, but the kinsman-lover was said to have lived for the rest of his life almost as a slave among strangers in the west who spoke like animals. He couldn't understand them. They didn't understand him. But only people who didn't understand his evil would have let him stay. Perhaps those were the people whose horse teeth and feathers we had found.

I thought to ask Father, but suddenly he threw the peeled branch over the fence and turned to Pinesinger. "We must watch over my woman," he said, catching her braid. "The strangers would steal her." Her head bent from Father's grasp, Pinesinger laughed, glancing at me from the corner of her eye to learn how I took his playing.

Andriki sighed. I saw that he too might feel jealous of Father. "No doubt," he said gloomily, which made Pinesinger look from me to him, teasing and satisfied.

"How is it that you worry about strangers?" she asked Father gaily, showing that while we were gone they had found a way to make light of their differences.

"They would take you away," said Father.

"Wouldn't you bring me back?" Pinesinger laughed. Father gave her a wide, delighted smile.

The air seemed heavy with the doings of Father and Pinesinger. What they had been up to while Andriki and I were gone, they would surely continue as soon as it was dark, expecting Andriki and me to ignore them. How could we ignore them? Some of us had to listen for the lions. Like a fox in fox-mint, Father had grown silly over Pinesinger. It was shaming.

But I suppose I would have sat there, staring at my feet, if Pinesinger had not complained about food. "Is this all?" she asked when I put onions for each of us into the fire.

"Yes," I said.

"You came back before dark with nothing but onions? Where is the meat you said was so plentiful?"

It was Father who had thought that meat would be plentiful. I looked at him now, to see if he was going to let Pinesinger annoy me. It seemed that he was—everything she said pleased him. "I killed meat this morning," I said carefully.

"But you lost it," she said. "Robbed by animals. What did you do all afternoon?"

"I? What were you doing, that gives you the right to ask?"

The anger in my voice surprised everyone. Pinesinger looked at Father, waiting for him to correct me.

"Watch your tongue, Kori," he warned. "Is it for you to decide what your stepmother asks?"

"I'll ask whatever I like," added Pinesinger.

"Then ask him," I said, pointing with my lips at Father. "He's listening to you. I'm not."

"Kori!" said Father.

"Father!" I said. "You're letting her provoke me."

"She'll do what she likes, and you'll respect her," said Father.

"I won't," I said. "I killed a horse, but you lost it. I brought onions, but this stepmother isn't satisfied with onions. What does she want of me?"

"Meat," said Father.

I could hear from his tone that he was joking, trying to slow the anger that was growing between us, but for me his joke came too late. "Then I'll bring meat," I said, standing up and taking my spear from the juniper fence.

"Will you!" said Father. "From where?"

"From where I got it last night. I'm going to the pool." No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I hoped Father would stop me. I didn't want to spend a night alone.

But Father was looking at me with admiration. "Good!" he said. He turned to Pinesinger. "My son is fearless," he told her. Then I had no choice but to go, so I went.

***

In the long shadows of bushes that crept across the plain, I tried to keep to the lowest ground, so my outline wouldn't show against the sky. I tried to watch the wind to see where my scent might be flying, and I tried to look for lions behind every patch of wind-tossed grass. And I tried to walk carelessly, to seem indifferent to danger, as long as I was in sight of camp. But on that evening of all evenings, I remembered a saying: "A lion can hide in clear air."

At last, from afar, I saw the dried husk of the mammoth carcass with its long hair moving against the setting sun. It made me think how much time must pass before dark, let alone before morning. Then I knew my fear was coming, and I breathed deeply, trying to calm myself, so I would think clearly, so I would feel steady, with my fear pushed down.

Only frogs were at the pool in the evening light. Fresh tracks showed that a herd of bison had come and gone recently. As I scanned with half-shut eyes the rim of the great hollow that held the pool, I saw against the distant, moving grass the smooth, round stillness of the head and ears of one of the lions. Keeping low, I tried to make my way to the carcass without his noticing me. Perhaps he was watching something else or just gazing at the air, as lions will. His head and ears didn't turn to follow my movement.

By the pool I rubbed mammoth dung in my hair and under my clothes between my legs and in my armpits. Then I looked into the carcass to be sure nothing was hiding there, and saw only the arch of the ribs, the huge gray spine, and the dim light shining through the dried skin. I crept inside.

Soon I felt hungry and uncomfortable. I couldn't sit up straight, but I didn't dare lie down. Why had I come here? If I had sense I'd start back to camp while the daylight lasted, working out an excuse for myself along the way.

I soon gave up this idea. Why was I even thinking of leaving? The person I would have to face was Father, who thought me brave. If I went back, my show of fear would shame him. Also, I would shame myself in front of Pinesinger. I couldn't do that. I would have to stay.
If you aren't ready to be here,
I said to myself in my mind,
then get ready.
I put my arms across my knees and laid my head on my arms. What would happen would happen. I hoped I could accept whatever the Bear sent me.

During the long, dim twilight, the lions walked heavily to the pool. The expressions on their blood-darkened faces seemed serious and important. Just like people, the eight of them spaced themselves evenly along the edge of the pool. Crouching low, letting their eyes roam as they drank, they slowly splashed their tongues against the water.

Before the lions left, the sandgrouse flew down among them to drink, as they had the night before. Flight after flight came, the little grouse crowding at the edge of the pool as if the excitement of their thirst was so great they had lost all caution. The high, loud murmur of all their anxious voices and the heavy rushing, rushing of their wings felt like blood pulsing in my veins, like madness in my head. But as suddenly as the first flight had come, the last flight flew away. In the silence the birds left behind I heard the lapping tongue of only one large animal.

To pass the time, to try to think of something other than fear and hunger, I looked around at the inside of the mammoth carcass, which I could see quite well in the last of the daylight. Had the mammoth been a male or a female? The sexual parts were gone, but by the lower front leg was the dry husk of a breast. A female. Above my head were her arching ribs. Right where I was sitting her heart had beaten. I wondered what had stopped her heart. Surely no animal, not even a lion, would think of attacking a full-grown mammoth. Only a person would do such a thing, and then only in a safe way. But out here on a plain, where the mammoth could fight back? No person would dare. Had the mammoth died of old age? I could see through her hollow neck to the edge of her lower jaw, where huge stained teeth lay in or near their sockets. Some teeth were worn, but all looked useful. She hadn't died of old age. Could she have died of sickness? I didn't know.

I looked at her left hind leg, lying on the ground. Around the outer part of her leg skin still clung, showing how wide her foot had been, like the stump of a big tree. But from the inner part of her leg and foot, from the knee to the toes, her skin had been torn away. Here small animals, perhaps foxes, had picked out her flesh and cleaned her bones. As I stared at these bones, it came to me that their shape was familiar, although until last night I hadn't seen the bones of a mammoth's foot before.