Call Down the Stars (43 page)

“Cen, who did not know Gheli was Red Leaf, took the baby daughter as his own and named her Daes after the woman he had loved, the mother of his son Ghaden. Many years passed and this second Daes grew up.”

“There are too many names here to remember,” one of the women complained.

“You are right,” Kuy’aa said. She shrugged her shoulders. “But this is the story I have decided to tell. Leave if you want. Not every story is for everyone.”

The woman stood and worked her way through the crowd to the climbing log.

“The rest of you, go if you wish,” Kuy’aa told those who remained. “It is a difficult tale to understand, and some of you have been listening nearly all night.”

She waited quietly, helped herself to a water bladder while others left the lodge. When there were only a few left, Yikaas thought she would begin, but still she waited, humming a song under her breath. When another man left and an old woman followed him, then Kuy’aa lifted her voice to sing the song out loud.

“According to storytellers,” she said, “this is something Daes often sang.”

Kuy’aa sang it twice, in both languages, a child’s song about trees living their summer lives, then sleeping through the winter. She sang until even Yikaas was losing his patience waiting for the story. Finally, he heard someone at the top of the ulax, saw a woman’s feet on the climbing log. It was Qumalix. He turned his head away, pretended not to notice her, but still his heart was glad, and when she sat down he could not help but glance at her.

“I am about to tell the story of Daes,” Kuy’aa said to her, and Qumalix nodded as though she had come to hear that very tale.

“I had hoped you would tell her story,” Qumalix said, her voice polite and soft.

“I had hoped to have opportunity to tell it to you,” Kuy’aa replied, and Yikaas realized that the old woman had been waiting for her, thus her long explanation, her song, her water drinking.

Then Kuy’aa’s words rang out in the River tradition of storytelling: “Once in times long ago, a woman named Daes lived in a River village with her mother and father and baby sister. She was a large woman, wide of shoulder and as tall as a man, and she was also strong like a man, able to use a bow to kill animals and yet also gifted with needle and awl.”

So Kuy’aa began.

Fish Camp, Yellow Creek

6435 B.C.

Daes threw the head of another fish into a caribou hide bag to boil for stew. She pulled her knife lengthwise over the fish’s belly from tail to gills and tossed the egg sack into another bag for drying. She emptied the guts into a bark container to be saved for the dogs, cut out the backbone, then tossed the fish to her mother. The two meaty halves were joined only at the tail, and Gheli laid it skin side down, flat against the slab of wood she used as a cutting board. She deftly slashed the pink flesh into diagonal slices, careful not to cut through the skin. Then she pushed it aside to be hung on drying racks.

Daes was angry at her mother, and with each slice of her knife, that anger grew. Summer had ended. They needed to leave their fish camp and return to the winter village. There were so few fish spawning, it was hardly worth staying, and besides, she and her mother had dried and smoked enough fish to last through two winters.

She thought of the people who would now be in the winter village, repairing summer damage to the lodges before leaving on the fall caribou hunts. She loved the hunts—the long days of walking, the hope of seeing the herds with every crest of a rise, the tang of cold in the air, the smell of summer-weary grasses and seeded flower heads. She was one of the strongest women in the village, and her strength was much needed when the people built brush fences to direct the caribou to the hunters. And each year she lived in hope that her father would allow her to join the men with her bow and take caribou herself.

Women seldom hunted, usually stood with the children as part of the fence, waving lengths of red-dyed caribou hide to frighten the animals into the surround, where hunters waited with spears and bows. But storytellers told of women who had been gifted with weapons. Those women had hunted caribou. Daes’s father seemed as proud of her hunting abilities as if she were a son. Perhaps someday he would let her hunt caribou, too.

Of course, if she and her mother stayed too long in this fish camp, they would miss the hunts. And there was always the possibility that if they did not soon arrive at the village, the people would believe they had chosen to spend the winter elsewhere. Then someone might claim the circle of sod and rock that was the base of their lodge. Her father had dug nearly an arm’s length into the ground before lining the dirt wall with stone. Like a First Men’s lodge, he had explained, better to stand against the wind, better to keep away the cold, using the earth like a blanket.

The village site was high, built on a rise of sand and gravel, so they could dig into the ground without worry of flooding themselves in spring when the tundra changed from the hard crust of winter to the soggy wet of summer. Still, no one else in the village had built a lodge like Cen’s, but Daes had little doubt that one family or another would be willing to live there, snug and warm against winter winds.

She looked at the racks of fish, felt despair wash through her, cold as river water. At least three or four days for those fish to dry, most likely longer. And what if her mother decided to smoke them after that? Worse, they still had a weir set in the river and were still catching fish.

Did Gheli think they could live on fish all winter without the fat of caribou? Did she think Cen would not worry when he returned from his trading trip to find that they were not yet in the village?

Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time that had happened. Whenever Cen left to trade, Daes’s mother changed, as though her husband took all her common sense with her. Almost always, they left the village, found some new place for a fish camp, far from other camps, and many days’ walk from the Four Rivers village. Gheli nearly always went upriver, where the fishing was not as good, for most salmon did not run that far or were caught in the weirs set downriver.

A sudden wail told them that the new baby was awake. She no longer made the short, breathless cries of a newborn, but was still very little. At least she was old enough to smile at them and so seemed a little more like a person. Daes had been glad when she was born, but had also felt a little sadness at how happy her father had been, even though the baby was a girl. He had the man Ghaden, that brother Daes did not even know, and now this new daughter, whom her mother had nicknamed Duckling.

He also had Daes, but she knew that she had another father, one her mother would not talk about. A lazy man, worthless, Daes had heard the old women of the village say, cupping their hands around their mouths as though they were ashamed even to mention him.

At least Duckling was a girl. What chance would Daes have had to keep a place in Cen’s heart if the baby had been a boy?

“I’ll finish the fish, Mother,” Daes said. “Go feed her.”

Gheli nodded and went to the baby, reached up to take the carrying board from the branch where it hung. Daes watched her mother settle herself back against the tree, untie the baby from the carrying board, and slip her under the soft summer parka to nurse.

Her mother closed her eyes, wrapped her arms around the child, now only a bulge over Gheli’s stomach. Again Daes felt a sudden thrust into her heart, a rise of senseless anger against the baby.

She was a pretty child, would most likely grow to be one of those delicate women that all men seemed to favor. What good did it do them, a woman like that? She would never be able to hunt, might not even be strong enough to survive the birth of children. Look what had happened to Bird Hand’s wife. Of course he should have known better than to take himself a tiny woman, big as he was. Who could doubt that he would put a large baby into her, one that she could never push out? She had lived four days trying to birth that child before both she and the baby died.

Bird Hand and Daes had always been good friends, had hunted and spent nights together in a hunter’s lean-to. The year after Daes’s first moon blood, he had claimed her as a man claims a woman, and Daes had been sure that he would take her as his wife, but when he offered a brideprice, it was for the pretty-faced Lake Woman.

Daes had tried to forget that day, but the images often returned to her, thudding into her head like the blows of an ax against a tree: Bird Hand’s walk through the village, the bundle of caribou hide he was carrying, the ground squirrel pelts in his little brother’s arms as the boy followed. She remembered that as the two neared her father’s lodge, how her heart grew so large it seemed near to bursting within her chest. Then the terrible weight of her disappointment as Bird Hand called out a jaunty greeting, but passed by.

She had been sitting outside the lodge, sewing a parka she had intended to give him. She had watched, unable to move, so lightheaded that she was sure she would fall if she stood. She could hear the joy in his voice as he spoke to Lake Woman’s father, and she saw his politeness as he presented the first portion of Lake Woman’s brideprice. He had made three trips that day from his father’s lodge, and each time his arms and the arms of his brother had been full of gifts. With each trip, Daes had felt the darkness grow inside her, until it was so large it had pushed her heart up into her mouth so that she could not speak, could scarcely breathe.

And what did he have to show now for all that giving? A dead wife and a dead son, cut from Lake Woman’s belly to lie beside her in death.

Daes did not like to admit to the hope that had taken root during the long summer she and her mother had spent alone in this fish camp, but now, as the caribou hunts neared, she knew that Bird Hand must be considering a new wife. What man did not want a woman to accompany him on the hunts, to butcher the animals he killed? Of course, his mother and his oldest sister, nearly a woman, would go, so perhaps he would still live in his sorrow and take no wife to his bed. But few young men were like that, and Bird Hand might decide that he wanted a large, strong woman, one who could not only butcher his animals, but help him hunt as well.

But how could she be his wife when he did not even know where she was?

Her frustration made her knife work all the faster, and she sped through the gleaming heap of fish so quickly that her mother finally called out and cautioned her to be careful, clean the fish well, or they would rot in storage.

“I’ve done this all summer, Mother,” Daes answered. “You think I’ve suddenly forgotten how?”

She seldom spoke to her mother in anger, and when she did, she usually dropped her head, lowered her eyes. But this time her mind was so filled with fear of loss that she looked directly at Gheli, though she knew that was more of an insult than her words.

Daes watched with lifted chin as Gheli set her teeth into her bottom lip and seemed to struggle over what to say. She finally began to fuss with the baby, giving no answer at all.

Some small part of Daes was ashamed, but mostly she was angry. She began to work even more quickly, so that the curved stone blade of her knife was nearly a blur to her eyes.

When she finished splitting the pile of fish, she saw that her mother had fallen asleep where she sat, and Daes’s anger burned even stronger against the woman. She thought about packing her own things and leaving alone, but instead moved to where her mother had been working and began slicing each fish to the skin, stopping when she had a heap, to hang them from the drying racks.

When she had completed that job, she cleaned her knife at the edge of the river, then stood silently for a moment looking out at the tops of the willow stake weir. She and her mother had slanted the weir across the river, so it would funnel the fish toward the bank, where they were easily caught with gar or basket net.

For a moment, Daes considered catching those few that had swum into the shallows since morning when she and her mother had taken the night’s catch. But then she looked back at their lean-to, at the stacks of caribou packs already filled with dried fish, and she realized they had so many that even with their three dogs and she and her mother carrying, they would have a difficult trip back to the village.

Daes took a long breath, fixed Bird Hand’s face in her mind, then removed her caribou hide leggings and tied her parka up around her waist. She waded into the river, crossed over, battling the current. Once on the other side, she began to pull the willow stakes up from the river bottom, allowing the current to take them and the woven branches that formed a web between the stakes.

The cold water made her bones ache as though knives were scraping away her flesh, but her anger still burned hot enough to keep her fingers warm. She had most of the stakes pulled when she heard her mother shouting.

“Daes! What are you doing!”

“We have enough fish, Mother,” Daes called.

She pulled another stake.

“We will go when I say so!” Gheli shouted, but Daes acted as though she did not hear. Her mother scurried away from the riverbank, and Daes smiled when she realized that Gheli was still holding the baby, could not come after her until she had put the child in a safe place.

By the time Gheli had laced Duckling into her carrying board, Daes had only three stakes left, those closest to shore. She stepped up on the bank, ripped up handfuls of grass, and used it to rub the feeling back into her legs. Her parka was wet to the shoulders, and she sluiced water from the sleeves.

“Build another weir,” Gheli said, her voice calm but strong.

“Why?” Daes spread her hands toward the trees. “Look, the leaves have turned. Summer is over.”

“We need more fish.”

“We have more than we can carry,” Daes said. “Do you plan to make two trips to the village and miss the caribou hunts?”

“Your father will bring enough meat for winter from his trading trip. We don’t need to join the hunts.”

“What if something happened, and he cannot bring meat?”