The Spirit Keeper (13 page)

But when I turned to Syawa, he wasn’t smiling in approval as I expected. For a fraction of a second, I saw a flash of something odd in his eyes, an emotion I did not recognize. It was akin to sadness, but it was so much more than that, filled as it was with longing, despair, and what I can only describe as excruciating pain. Then it was gone and he smiled broadly as he put his hand approvingly upon my shoulder. I grinned like a tail-wagging pup whose master has deigned, at last, to pat his head.

Our balance restored, we resumed our Journey.

~12~

T
HOSE DAYS AFTER DEPARTING
the French trading post were the pleasantest I’d e’er known. Having become trail-hardened, I no longer suffered from aching legs and feet, and because I could communicate, if crudely, with my companions, I had some inkling of what was required of me each day. By this time I perceived Syawa was not about to press his suit upon me ’til I understood a great deal more about his world and his ways, so I focused my energies on the many lessons I was being asked to learn. And, finally, because I now had some vague idea of our destination, I knew, roughly, what to expect for the foreseeable future. The journey was bound to be arduous, but my companions had made it before and seemed confident they could make it again.

Best of all, the anger between the men was gone. Oh, I could detect a certain undercurrent now and then, a sore spot they both took great pains to avoid, but, for the most part, they talked and joked as if there had ne’er been a dispute. Knowing I was the source of their discomfort, I tried to stay out of their way as much as possible, but when I was left alone with my own thoughts, I went a bit crazy. I missed my family, my home—I fretted about being pursued by the French traders. Thankfully, Syawa ne’er let me brood for long. Whene’er he saw my eyes glaze o’er, he’d urge me to let go of the past, trust in the future, and just enjoy our Journey.

And so I did. Our days were filled with trotting through the woods and our evenings passed in amiable camaraderie. I still needed much advice about camp living, but Syawa seemed to enjoy teaching me and Hector said nothing more about me.

Some days after we left the French trading post, ’twas monthly time again, and knowing how peculiar the Indians are about this, I fretted my companions’ response. Sure enough, as soon as they realized my condition, they backed away and maintained a goodly distance for the duration. Through that time they would not suffer me to touch their food nor tools nor supplies. They would not talk to me nor, for that matter, look at me. In short, tho’ I was rarely more than thirty feet away, I was utterly alone for five days. At first, of course, I felt as if I were being shunned, but after a day or two I began to enjoy the break. I had no work to do, tho’ they left me plenty to eat, and I no longer must struggle to communicate. In fact, ’twas almost as if I were a dragonfly perched on a nearby leaf, watching my companions without affecting them in any way.

That was when I realized how much my presence altered their relationship. When they could talk with me, I was the center of everything, but during the time they were prohibited from me, they reverted to their private language of mere grunts and glances. They were relaxed in a way they ne’er were with me, and when Syawa told his stories, Hector was as happy as e’er I saw him. I was almost sorry when my bleeding ended and, after a ritual bath and a cleansing in smoke of all my personal items, I was once again included in all activities.

One of the stories Syawa told during my isolation concerned the creation of the world. ’Twas a fanciful tale involving a bird, a turtle, and a few other creatures I could not immediately recognize from Syawa’s description. The plot involved bringing mud up from the bottom of an infinite ocean and using that dab of mud to make the world. Because I had been unable to question Syawa at the time he told the tale, I thought about it a lot. The evening after my companions and I were once again in communication, I questioned him about his story. Did he truly believe a turtle made the earth? Did he believe animals actually talked to one another?

Smiling, Syawa assured me that not only did animals talk together all the time, but trees and flowers and rivers and rocks had plenty to say as well. I smiled at his teasing. It dawned on me he was serious only when he went on to say quite sincerely that he did not presume to know how the earth was made, but someone had told him about the turtle, and it was as likely as any story.

Syawa asked how
I
thought the earth was made. I contemplated his question, realizing I’d ne’er really thought about it before, other than to accept without question the explanation in the Bible. Reluctant as I was to follow the command of the French priest, I proceeded to tell the story of Creation from Genesis, which, tho’ I knew the passage word for word, was very hard to convert into gestures. Ne’ertheless, my friends attended with great interest ’til I had Adam and Eve happily situated in the Garden of Eden.

After I finisht, howe’er, Syawa looked confused. He wondered if something had been lost in translation, because he said I told two different stories—one in which a Spirit made men from mud and one in which a Spirit created man in his own image. Was I telling him this “god” of ours was made of mud?

I frowned, surprised this discrepancy had ne’er occurred to me. Then I shrugged and said this was just the story someone had told me and I didn’t presume to understand it.

We talked for a time about gods and men. Syawa thought it curious that both our stories centered on mud, but Hector said this was not surprising, considering how covered with mud we all were most of the time. At the moment it was all too true—thanks to the spring rains, the three of us were pretty much always filthy. E’en when we emerged from a cleansing bath, we must wade through mud on the bank in order to get to the drying fire, which meant we were ne’er mud-free.

The more we talked about mud and how central it was in our lives, the sillier we became. Syawa went to the creek bank to make his own little people out of mud, whilst Hector painted himself with mud and declared
he
was the Creation of the Mud God. I laughed at them both as I made mud-balls to throw at them. When one of my lobs hit Syawa’s little tribe of mud-people, he grabbed up a handful of mud and tossed it at me. Laughing, I darted away from the ensuing barrage of mud-globs whilst Hector went over to stomp on what was left of Syawa’s mud-people, proclaiming himself a Jealous God. Both Syawa and I then turned our mud-throwing toward Hector ’til Hector tackled Syawa and they ended up wrestling on the creek bank, wallowing in the mud.

I laughed and laughed. When my companions realized how hard I was laughing at them, they both turned to me, the whites of their eyes and teeth glowing in their mud-dark faces. Realizing my peril, I screamed with laughter and tried to scramble to my feet, but the two of them caught me and dragged me into their mucky pit. Soon I was as covered with mud as they were, and we were all exhausted from laughing.

It took a long, long time to go to sleep that night. Warm tho’ the night was, I was still chilled from the bath I had been forced to take. I also couldn’t stop chuckling. Then, just as I finally started falling asleep, I remembered the French priest and thought how appalled he would be to see how I shared Scripture with my savage friends. I couldn’t help but start giggling again.

 • • •

The next day the weather was unseasonably warm, and it just kept getting hotter and hotter as we walked. By mid-day I was drenched with sweat, but Hector kept pushing on, determined to cover a certain amount of territory. Altho’ I previously attributed his urgency to the belief we were nearing our destination, I knew now that Hector was actually concerned about reaching certain landmarks along the way. At this point he was determined to reach what he called “the Great River” before it rained further.

His efforts were not successful.

By mid-afternoon huge gray clouds filled the sky and the very air felt strange. It was hot, so hot, with a strong, gusty wind blowing against us like the breath of some great slavering beast. I was not the only one who was uneasy. We stopt on an open knoll, the three of us looking up at the sky. “Those low clouds,” Hector said, frowning at the white, wispy clouds racing o’erhead, “they’re going north.”

“But the higher clouds,” Syawa said, nodding at huge, rolling gray blobs, “they’re going west.”

I looked at my companions, alarmed. “Wind on face
comes
from west!” I gestured. “What this mean?”

Syawa glanced at me, his face grave. “It means we must find shelter.”

With the sky rapidly darkening, Syawa pointed to an enormous downed tree. Hector stuck his head into a hole in the side of the trunk and pulled back to say there was a sizable cavern wherein we could ride out the storm.

I thought he had lost his mind. I had no intention of crawling inside that black, dank, musty hole filled with dried bear droppings! When the sky turned green, however, I changed my mind.

I had seen violent storms in Pennsylvania and heard talk about cyclone winds, but I ne’er dreamt of nothing like this. Nor, apparently, had my friends. As they stufft our things into the tree trunk, their faces were enough to terrify me e’en if the wind wasn’t already howling, peppering us with leafy debris. Syawa dove into the hole, pulling me with him as Hector pushed from behind.

Rank with urine, this den had clearly been occupied ’til recently, and, as Syawa wrapt a thick arm ’round my shoulders to draw me closer and thus make more room for Hector, the thought occurred to me the bear might return, looking for shelter from the storm. I asked Syawa about this, but before he could answer, the storm intensified and a theoretical bear became the least of my worries.

Tho’ ’twas dark as pitch in that den, lightning flashed almost continuously, eerily illuminating the opening. I turned my face to see Hector’s silhouette, his head leaning back against the den wall, his face lifted, almost in repose. He was no longer unduly alarmed, nor was Syawa, whose encircling arms were my refuge. Every time thunder crashed too closely, I flinched and buried my face against Syawa’s chest.

For some time the wind and rain whirled horizontally through the forest, but then hail began pounding our tree trunk with a sound as loud as the end of the world. Hector reached out to grab one of the hailstones; it barely fit into the palm of his hand. When he tried to hold our tent cover o’er the hole to keep our den dry, the wind nigh pulled it from his hand, so he ended up wrapping the hide o’er his shoulders and shifting ’round to block the hole with his body.

“You not afraid?” I asked Syawa, having to yell e’en tho’ my mouth was mere inches from his ear.

“Afraid of what?” Syawa shouted back.

“Of dying!” I wailed, then whimpered at a blast of thunder.

Syawa’s chest rose and fell in steady rhythm. “We all die,” he shouted into my ear. “To die here, now—would be good.” He nuzzled his face in my hair.

He began to sing a soft, flowing song, and I held on to him, trying to slow my gasping to match the gentle rise and fall of his own chest. I concentrated so hard on his breathing that all else disappeared. His song went on and on, unaffected by the wind gusts or thunder blasts, and after what seemed like a long, long time, the winds howled less and the rain became a mere deluge instead of a raging tempest. Hector said something and I looked up to see that he had shifted ’round and was peering out the hole. When Syawa asked him to repeat what he’d said, Hector turned his head and said louder, “Maybe we made the mud god angry and he decided to stomp on
us
.”

The thought of God being as silly as Hector had been the night before was so incongruous with the desperate danger we were in that we all laughed. The more we laughed, the more giddy we were with relief, euphoric to have survived. Syawa suggested maybe the mud god sent this storm to scrub the mud from our ears, so Hector leant his head out the hole to let the pouring rain do its job.

Almost immediately he pulled his head back to say a bear was coming. I gasped, clutching Syawa, but they both only laughed harder. Hector said a bear the size of a wigwam was coming to reclaim its den, and he described how it was doing a victory dance because it drove off the storm. When I tried to lean o’er Hector to see this crazy bear for myself, he said it ran away because it saw my hair and thought its den was on fire. We all laughed and laughed.

I knew then what Syawa meant. If the tree crumbled and we all died together right then and there, it would’ve been a good death indeed.

 • • •

But we did not die that night. We crawled out of the tree in the morning to find a glorious, if extremely muddy, spring day. This, Hector said ruefully, was proof the mud god was indeed behind it all, because the entire world had once again turned to mud.

I was weak from hunger, for we’d had no food since the previous morning, and tho’ Hector quickly pulled a fish from a stream, we could build no fire and thus had no way to cook it. Hector and Syawa shrugged and ate the meat raw, but I was reluctant ’til I tasted the warm blood on my lips. Then hunger took o’er, and I joined my friends in a feeding frenzy.

Thanks to fallen trees, debris, and standing water, we traveled only a few miles that day. We picked up sticks along the way so they might dry by nightfall, enabling us to get a small fire going. With that, we dried larger sticks ’til we had a reasonable blaze on which to cook our meat and warm our damp bones—which was good, for the weather had become quite cold.

As we sat ’round the fire, Syawa kept looking at his hand, frowning. I asked what was wrong, and he showed me a splinter between his finger and thumb. Hector rose to get a mussel shell to pry it out, but I told him not to bother. One of the things I had packed when preparing to run away was a sewing kit with steel needles, thread, and scissors. I had shown my friends these items long ago, but they had little interest in sewing. Splinter extraction, however, was another story.