People of the Owl: A Novel of Prehistoric North America (North America's Forgotten Past) (11 page)

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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

BOOK: People of the Owl: A Novel of Prehistoric North America (North America's Forgotten Past)
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“Cane Frog wasn’t happy either. She and Deep Hunter would have been overjoyed to wrest control of the Northern Moiety away from me, let alone take a chance on gaining leadership of the Council.”
Clay Fat was watching her through his expressionless brown eyes. “Very well, Wing Heart, you’ve pulled the proverbial hare out of the hollow log yet again. What about the endless tomorrows? You have two sons, the last of your lineage. White Bird has a great future ahead of him, but you can’t risk him on another venture like this one. Somewhere, sometime, some barbarian is going to kill him, or his canoe is going to be swamped in a spring flood, or he’s going to catch some foreign disease and die. Beyond the protection of our city, the world is a dangerous place. Tens of tens of things could happen. Somewhere out in those distant places something will eventually get him.”
She nodded, aware of just how frightened she had been of exactly that.
“And it’s not like you have a lot of choices.” Clay Fat tilted his head back to stare up at the thatch overhead. “Mud Puppy is your only other child.”
“Would to Mother Sun I had had a daughter out of that mating
with Thumper. I could marry her to some daring young man and send him upriver. If he didn’t come back, I could marry her again, and again, and again, until one of them got it right and brought me back another four canoes of Trade.”
“You wouldn’t even need that,” he told her. “You would have an heir. A daughter to carry your line on into the future.”
“Correct.”
After a pause, he added, “You could always name Mud Puppy Speaker. Then it wouldn’t matter if White Bird didn’t come back.” He laughed one of those deep belly laughs.
“You find that funny, do you?”
He straightened his face; the attempt failed in the slightest to mask his amusement. “He’s young. He might change. You know, grow out of it.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Mud Puppy, grow out of it?”
“Boys do. When they step into the world of men they can’t help but change.”
Snakes! He’s almost a man now, but you’d never know it.
“He thinks differently than any boy I ever knew. I’m at my wit’s end. Water Petal has him in the sweat lodge. I’ve made an appointment to have the Serpent take him up to spend the night atop the Bird’s Head. Maybe that will scare some sense into his witless noggin. He’s completely hopeless! His brother returns, the most important event in the lineage in how many winters, and he’s looking at a cricket in a jar!”
Clay Fat nodded, his head oddly cocked. “In the last few moons I have come to discover how important leadership of the Council is to you, Wing Heart. Tell me, if it came right down to it, would you declare him Speaker?”
“Perhaps if I’d been hit in the head too hard, or if lightning struck me.”
“I’ve stood with you through the last moons, Wing Heart. Stood with you when many urged me to look elsewhere for obligations. Your clan and mine have made a good alliance through the endless turnings of the seasons.”
“What are you getting at?”
“All jesting aside, I need to know something.”
“Very well.” She had ceased spinning her cord. “What is that thing, old friend?”
“What would you do to retain Owl Clan’s hegemony? What would you do to keep your leadership?”
She felt trapped in his wary brown-eyed stare. The universe might have narrowed to the two of them. “I’d do anything, Clay Fat. I’ve
lived all of my life preparing for the leadership. I
don’t
want to give that up. I
won’t
give it up.”
“Then you’d do anything to keep it?”
She nodded, wondering what this was going to cost her, wondering where it had come from. What did he suspect? Worse, what did he know?
“Anything,” she reaffirmed.
He contemplated her in silence, his eyes prying into her souls, as though to see what she really meant. In the end, he sighed, relaxing, his smooth smile returning. “Then you will understand when I tell you that I … my clan cannot allow Spring Cypress to marry White Bird. Your son will insist. You must refuse.”
Mind racing, she asked, “Why?”
Clay Fat’s expression had turned bland again. “I almost made a terrible mistake, Wing Heart. But for the return of your son, I could have lost a great deal and found myself and my clan in the same position as Frog Clan is in today. At the bottom, mucking about in the silt for scraps. Obliged to everyone. I will support you, do what I must to maintain your leadership, but I want you to understand that I am going to strengthen the position of my lineage.”
“And who were you thinking of?”
“Copperhead.”
“Mud Stalker’s cousin? He’s twice her age.” Her mind wrapped around the implications of Rattlesnake Clan brokering an alliance with Snapping Turtle Clan.
“Copperhead is freshly widowed.”
“He used to beat Red Gourd when she was his wife. Some people think he killed her.”
“That was never proven by her clan.” Clay Fat seemed nonplussed.
Her voice dropped. “You’d do that to Spring Cypress?”
The corners of his mouth twitched. “Let’s just say there is a compelling reason, shall we?”
“What does Graywood Snake say about this?”
“The Rattlesnake Clan Elder understands and agrees.”
She studied him thoughtfully.
So, you, too, had abandoned me. White Bird’s return caught you off guard, didn’t it? Now I catch you scrambling to reclaim your balance.
As if he could read her thoughts, he said, “Make this thing easy for me, and I shall give you my obligation for the future.” He paused. “Besides, it might not be so bad, having an ear close to Mud Stalker. As you well know, Elder, the future is a very uncertain place.”
N
o son of mine has the luxury of fear
. The words echoed around in Mud Puppy’s head as he followed the Serpent up the long steep slope of the Bird’s Head. Having almost completed White Bird’s cleansing, the old Serpent had finally come for Mud Puppy.
The old man wore a simple fabric breechcloth bound to his waist by a cord. From it hung several small leather sacks that held who knew what kind of magic potions. A patchwork cloak made of muskrat hides draped the old man’s shoulders. He might have been a walking skeleton, thin muscles hanging from his old bones. Mud Puppy couldn’t help but notice how the old man’s knees and feet seemed so big in comparison with his skinny legs. In all, the Serpent was the most frightening man Mud Puppy had ever known.
His entire body tingled, partly from fear, partly from the ordeal he had endured in the sweat lodge purifying himself for the coming night’s trial. The endless hands of time he had spent alternately roasting and dripping sweat in rivers, versus those few moments when Cousin Water Petal tipped a pot of cool water over his head, had left him feeling oddly weak, though rejuvenated.
“I don’t know what your mother’s after, boy,” Water Petal had told him ominously. “She’s been over to the island”—she referred to the Turtle’s Back—“talking to the Serpent. Something you did set her off. What was it this time? Did you leave a worm in her water cup? Or did she catch you with your butt up in the air, peeking under leaves when you should have been doing chores?”
“It was my cricket,” he had started to explain, but Water Petal had silenced him by pouring another bowl of chilly water over his head. She had just passed two tens of winters, and should have given birth to three or four children by this time; her abdomen now bulged with her first. Those sharp black eyes of hers intimated that she would rather be anywhere than helping Mud Puppy with his ritual cleansing. A sentiment he shared. But when the Clan Elder ordered, people obeyed, especially those in the lineage.
Despite a deep-seated fear in his belly, he and the Serpent finished the long climb. The Bird’s Head, a huge mound of earth, dominated and guarded the western edge of Sun Town. It rose as if to scrape the sky. So high, so huge was it that from the peak Mud Puppy could see the entire world. He could look down on the tops of trees. People looked like mites as they inched along below him.
The old man wheezed, one hand to his chest as the wind whipped his filmy white hair. A faint flush had darkened the wrinkled mass of his platter-flat face; but thoughtful eyes hid deep behind the folds of his skin. His gaze drilled through Mud Puppy like a perforator on a stick.
Mud Puppy fought to still his sudden fear, shamed by the loose gurgle in his bowels. A desire grew in his souls to turn around and run down that long slope on charged legs. Anything to get away from this inspired and terrible place.
His heart began to pound as they topped the highest point. The world spread out before him to the west. The vista made his bare feet curl, toes biting into the crumbly clay soil. They were so high here that when he looked upward he half expected to see the clouds rubbing against the Sky dome. The feeling gave him the giddy sense of seeing the world as a bird must, everything below him, so far below. He might have been Masked Owl himself.
“In the beginning”—the Serpent raised his hand, pointing at the tree-covered western horizon—“at the Creation, the Sky was cracked off from the Earth. That is a most important event. Do you know why the Great Mystery did that?”
Mud Puppy swallowed hard. Would the Serpent give him that same disgusted look that Mother did? He shook his head in a hesitant no.
“Take a moment and consider,” the Serpent told him mildly.
Mud Puppy tried to avoid those hard black eyes. He let his gaze wander, his mind half-locked with the terror of his situation. He had never stood at the top of the Bird’s Head. The enormity of the high mound staggered him. How had his people ever managed to build such a mass of earth, basket by basket, one turning of the seasons
after another? Could such a miracle really be of human manufacture? Had hands really built this monument to the gods? It had to be the highest point in the world—though the Traders said that other mountains, far to the northwest, were higher.
Along the western base of the great mound he could see the narrow pond that filled the mighty trench his people had dug into the ground. It glinted silver, like a gleaming worm stretched across the greensward. It was said that monsters lurked under that deep water. Had his people unwittingly opened a door to the Underworld in their effort to erect this huge mountain of earth?
“That’s not where the answer lies,” the Serpent murmured, as if reading his thoughts.
Mud Puppy reached down to pull nervously at the frayed flap of his breechcloth.
It was the clay.
The thought just popped into his head. His people needed the sticky gray clay. No mound of earth the size of the Bird’s Head could be raised out of the rich brown silt that covered the ridge. The deeply buried clay was necessary to give the huge earthwork stability. Without it, the silt would soften and flow in the rains, slumping and sagging, until the Bird’s Head sank right back into the ground from which it came.
The picture formed in his head: a digging stick being driven down into the hard gray clay and leaving a scar, just one of a number of similar scars in the side of the excavation pit. Like jagged alligator teeth had gnawed the soil away.
“Why did the Great Mystery rip the Sky away from the Earth?” the Serpent’s voice reminded.
Mud Puppy raised his head to stare at the glowing clouds, backlit by the dying sun as they scurried northward. Here, so high above the Earth, the southern wind tugged at him as it rushed up from the gulf, the smell of forest, swamp, damp earth, and spring flowers carried on its warm caress.
“Because the Great Mystery didn’t like it that way?” Mud Puppy guessed.
“And why would that be?” The Serpent bent down, his eyes prying away at Mud Puppy’s.
“Because a question is always hidden inside another question,” Mud Puppy whispered, and instantly winced, afraid that the Serpent would hiss and strike—lash his frightened souls right out of his terrified body.
Instead, the terrible black eyes softened. The old man nodded, which made the wattles on his neck shake. “You are smarter than your brother was when he was your age.” The Serpent arched a grizzled eyebrow. “Yes, there is always another question inside a
question. But for the moment, I need an answer for this one. And, boy, I do not expect you to give me the answer right now. Indeed, I expect you to think about it, to study it. The answer isn’t what you would expect. Certainly not one to be given off the tip of your tongue like an insult or a compliment. Think, boy. Consider it long and hard.”
The old man abruptly turned, faced the east, and used one knobby hand to spin Mud Puppy around so that he looked out over Sun Town. The effect took his breath away. In the growing twilight the arcs of concentric ridges spread out to the left and right in a huge curve. Houses, like warts, might have been marching away along the length of the ridges. The immensity of it—coupled with the perfect symmetry of those nested curves sculpted so artistically onto the plain—left him awed.
As he looked down the long eastern slope the Bird’s Head fell away from his toes in a broad ramp that widened as it fanned out like the spread tail feathers of a great hawk. At the base of the tail the huge clan grounds created a gigantic half oval transected along its midline by the steep bluff running north-south above Morning Lake.
Two large poles, one for the Northern Moiety, one for the Southern Moiety, marked the geometric centers of the offset circles. The six rows of ridges were in turn interrupted by breaks that separated the clans. In the north, Mud Puppy’s Owl Clan occupied the easternmost ridges, Alligator Clan lay in the middle, and the Frog Clan’s ridges ran right to the base of the Bird’s Head on the west. A use-beaten avenue that ran due east-west through the town separated the moieties’ plazas north from south. The westernmost ridges on the south belonged to Rattlesnake Clan. Another gap on the southwest separated them from Eagle Clan.
Unique to Eagle Clan’s territory, a narrow earthen causeway led straight as a stretched cord for three dart casts beyond the city to the southwest. There the Dying Sun Mound rose above the plain in a flat-topped oval. Yet another gap separated the Eagle and Snapping Turtle Clans. The latter occupied the far southern course of the ridges.
Two small mounds lay within the plaza area. The Mother Mound was situated at the edge of the eastern drop-off. A two-tiered earthwork, its flattened southern side supported the Women’s House: the large menstrual lodge where women resided during their moontied cycles. The fact that a woman’s cycle was tied to the moon had provoked considerable speculation. The moon, after all, was a masculine
being. But then, without male involvement, a woman was incapable of bearing children. In the end, the location of the Mother Mound had been chosen by sighting from the center of Sun Town to the northernmost point where the moon rose on the eastern horizon at the end of its eighteen-and-one-half-turning-of-seasons migration across the sky.
On the south lay the Father Mound, with its gaudily painted wooden-and-thatch Men’s House. The rites of war, of the hunt, and Trade were conducted there. Mud Puppy had never seen the inside of the Men’s House. Boys weren’t allowed. But someday, when he was admitted into manhood, he would. Terrifying stories circulated among boys of his age, tales of the curious ceremonies and bloody initiations that occurred behind those secretive walls. Similar to its maternal opposite to the north, Father Mound had an odd relationship to Mother Sun. When sighting southeast, the Father Mound was in line of sight of the point on the horizon where the sun rose on the shortest day of the turning of seasons—another oddity, but one that made sense when placed in context of the People’s struggle to achieve unity and harmony. Opposites crossed, brought into balance, that was the central spiritual force that bound the People together.
Mud Puppy could see it in the form and beauty of Sun Town. The disparate moieties, the constantly bickering clans, north and south, east and west, sun and moon. Sun Town unified them all in the form of the great Sky Being, Bird Man. He had sailed down from the Sky World on fiery wings to shape the Earth after the Creation.
From above, Sun Town looked like a huge bird, its wings curved protectively around the clan grounds. The Power of the place seemed to pulse in the evening.
And there, out in the purple water, he could see the Turtle’s Back, where his brother should be taking the last of his sweat baths and preparing for the final night of purification.
“Look at what you see, boy,” the Serpent told him. “No other place on Earth is like this. We live at the center of the world. The gods and spirits know this; they are reminded each time they look down. It was here, on this spot, that Bird Man first touched the Earth after the Creation.”
“It is huge,” Mud Puppy said in awe as he looked north across the fields and patches of trees to the distant Star Mound. From here it looked like a bump rising above the tree line. Star Mound provided protection from the terrifying Powers of the North, the way
Bird’s Head protected the People from the dangers of the West. Winter came rolling out of the north, dark and cold, while in the West, death lurked, and Mother Sun died.
Two smaller mounds had been built, one to the north, the other to the south on a line that transected the Bird’s Head. The conical Spirit Mound three dart casts due north was where the people offered gifts at sunset on the summer solstice. She would need them to sustain her in her southern flight as she perpetually fled Father Moon’s infidelity.
The flat mound at the end of the earthen causeway three dart casts to the south was called Dying Sun Mound. It was there, on the winter solstice, that people implored Mother Sun to begin her journey northward across the Sky.
“From where you now stand you can look straight south across the Dying Sun Mound.” The Serpent pointed at a pole that rose from the shoulder of the Bird’s Head. “Each day, at midday, that pole marks Mother Sun’s journey across the Sky. On winter solstice, the tip of the shadow falls right here, where your feet now stand, marking the shortest day of the winter.” Then the Serpent turned north. “And at night, you look straight north to the Great North Star, around which the Sky World turns.” He pointed at a second pole. “By standing here, and bending slightly, you can see that star night after night, season after season. It is because the North, for all of its terrors, is a place of stability unlike the realm of Mother Sun. She and Father Moon are forever advancing and retreating across the sky, he pursuing, she fleeing. Forever mindful of the time he betrayed her bed by locking hips with another woman.”

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