The Storyteller Trilogy (128 page)

“But why not wait until the baby was born? Why kill Star, too?”

“Then there would be more babies. Star was young. She would have given you many children.”

“She was your daughter,” Chakliux said softly.

“She was your wife,” Long Eyes answered. She licked her lips, moved her feet in a quick shuffling dance as though she were pleased with herself. “Do you know how easy it is to kill someone who thinks you are old and weak?” she asked. She raised the knife, twisted it and closed her eyes as though she was caught in the remembrance of Star’s death. “The baby, when I cut it out, was a girl. I might not have killed it had I known. Your wife, she was so sure she carried a boy.”

As she stood with her eyes closed, Chakliux moved quickly toward her, but suddenly she slashed out at him, nicked the palm of his right hand with the tip of her blade. He jumped back.

“You are like your Cousin mother,” Long Eyes said. “She was more difficult to kill.”

“My mother?”

“That one who died in her bed. Didn’t you listen to my riddle? What better way to avenge my husband’s death than to kill those you love?” She lifted her knife, plunged it into the air as though to show Chakliux what she had done. “She fought. But I was the one with the knife.”

“And now you have decided to kill me,” Chakliux said.

“I cannot kill you,” Long Eyes told him, “but perhaps there are others in this village who will do so when they see what you did to an old woman who could not protect herself, one who could barely speak.”

She raised the knife, and though Chakliux dove toward her, tried to knock it from her hands, she plunged the dark blade into her neck before he could reach her. She dropped to the floor, her hands cupped at her throat. She looked up, but Chakliux saw that her eyes were not on him. He turned. Sok and Take More were standing behind him.

Long Eyes moaned, closed her eyes and then was still. Sok took a blanket from Chakliux’s bed and covered her.

Yaa peeked in from the entrance tunnel. “She is dead?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Chakliux, and opened his arms to the girl. She ran to him and hid her face against his chest. “So you understood my riddle,” he said.

“I remembered Sok’s sun parkas,” she told him. “And Take More was with him in the hunters’ lodge.”

“Long Eyes killed her own daughter?” Sok asked.

“And our mother,” Chakliux told him.

“Then Red Leaf did not,” said Sok. “And Aqamdax did not.”

“No, and now there is no one left to seek vengeance.”

THE NEAR RIVER VILLAGE

Wolf Head was a large man, his voice so loud that K’os heard him scolding his wives while she was still outside the lodge. She called out, waited until the younger wife opened the doorflap. The woman’s eyes rounded with surprise when she saw K’os.

“You have come back?” she asked, then gasped as K’os pushed past her into the lodge.

She came in behind K’os, sputtering apologies to her husband. K’os pulled River Ice Dancer’s amulet from the neck of her parka, held it so Wolf Head could see. His eyes moved from the amulet to her hair, cut short near her ears. Wolf Head stepped forward, clasped the amulet, then looked hard into K’os’s eyes.

“You recognize it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“I come in sorrow to tell you that your son is dead, killed by the Four Rivers People. They stole his dogs and travois, furs and meat, but I was able to escape from them and return to you with a few of his belongings.”

Wolf Head looked at his wife. “What did she bring?” he asked.

“Two dogs, a travois,” she said.

K’os saw the young woman glance at her sister-wife, River Ice Dancer’s mother.

“My tears flow for you,” K’os said, and the woman turned away. “The things they stole were the bride price your son paid for me. I will help you win revenge.”

“What did he give for you?” Wolf Head asked.

“Eight dogs, six travois, pelts and meat and fish. The Four Rivers People stole all of it, but I was able to—”

“Be quiet. You have too many words for a woman.” Wolf Head leaned close to his younger wife, whispered something, and she hurried from the lodge.

He was rude, but K’os had known that Wolf Head was a hard man and treated his wives poorly. She held back her anger, did not allow it to color her cheeks or edge her words.

“Six dogs, you say.”

“Eight.”

“Six travois.”

“Yes.”

He turned away from her and paced the length of the lodge. “Fox pelts?” he asked.

She nodded. “Fox and lynx, wolf, caribou hides,” she told him.

K’os heard a noise at the lodge entrance, saw that the wife had returned. Gull Beak was with her.

“This slave says she was wife to that one who stole the dogs and travois from our village,” Wolf Head said. “She claims he gave my fox pelts as part of her bride price. She has returned two of the dogs.” Wolf Head drew his lips back in a smile. His teeth were long and yellow. “Treat her well,” he said to Gull Beak. “Few slaves would be so loyal.”

K’os let out her breath in a hiss. “I was wife to your son, River Ice Dancer,” she cried.

“During the past moon someone stole my dogs and travois, my furs and much meat from my cache. You think
my
son would steal a bride price from his own father?” Wolf Head said. “Foolish woman. I have no son.”

THE GRANDFATHER LAKE

AQAMDAX’S EARLY-MORNING WORK
was done, wood gathered, the dog fed. She banked more snow around her tent and added spruce boughs to the entrance tunnel she had made of bark and willow poles.

When she was finished, she untied Snow Hawk, took the dog with her to the lake. The ice that covered the shore rose in thick hard ridges, but when it reached the lake it smoothed into a wide white plain that spread as far as Aqamdax could see. She walked until she came to a place where the wind had swept away the snow and the ice was bare. She padded the palm of her mitten with a strip of caribou hide, then used a stone hand ax to begin another hole. She measured the width of the hole against her forearm to be sure it was wide enough to hold her fish trap. She worked until her hand was numb from pounding and her fingers would no longer grip the stone.

“Tomorrow we will finish it,” she finally said to Snow Hawk.

The dog was curled near the hole, tail over nose, back against the wind. Aqamdax had food enough to last until she caught more fish. Three hares were buried in the snow at the floor of her entrance tunnel, and she still had some dried salmon, a little caribou meat, blackfish that she had caught in a net suspended between two holes in the lake ice. Snow Hawk still hunted for her own meat, and sometimes, like Biter, brought back part of a carcass—ptarmigan or hare—for Aqamdax.

Still, Aqamdax was often hungry, but who was not hungry in winter? She did not let herself think of the full caches at the Cousin River Village, or of the seal meat and oil her own people would have put away. Instead, as she walked back to her lodge, she thought of the grayling or pike she might catch tomorrow in her trap.

The sky, heavy with clouds, was darkening toward night, and the wind gripped Aqamdax like hands, pushed her as she walked, drew tears from the corners of her eyes. She wiped them from her face, then stopped short, reached down to grip the ruff of fur at Snow Hawk’s neck. She crouched beside the dog, felt the animal tremble. Through the brush, she could see her lodge, its peak dark against the snow. Smoke spiraled from the top, more than should come from a fire banked before she went to the lake.

Night Man? she wondered. She shrugged her pack from her shoulders, pulled out her spear and crept closer. With her belly growing, she was more clumsy and did not throw the spear well. What chance did she have?

She crooned a song under her breath to calm herself and tried to think. Perhaps she should wait until night, get some of the meat she had hidden in the entrance tunnel and walk to the Near River Village. Eight, ten days might take her there. Perhaps some man would accept her as his wife, especially since she had Snow Hawk.

Yes, she would do that, but she would not wait for night. She could check the snare traps she had set in that direction. Surely she would have caught something. She had set so many….

“We will go now,” she said, whispering the words to Snow Hawk, but Snow Hawk suddenly jumped away and began to bark in quick joyous yips like a pup. Aqamdax stood, and when she saw the one who came from the tent, she could not move, could not speak. She waited as he ran to her, Snow Hawk jumping at his side.

“You are not dead,” were her first words to him, and Chakliux, his laughter broken by tears, held her close and answered, “Nor are you.”

“How did you find me?”

“Ligige’ said she told you to go to the Grandfather Lake. I was afraid that your son would call you and you would go…”

He pushed back her hood and buried his face in the softness of her hair.

“But then you found my camp.”

“I saw that your fire was banked and the coals were still alive. I saw that you had cached your meat, so I knew that you had decided to live.”

He put his arm around her and walked her to the lodge. She knelt and crawled inside, waited as Chakliux followed her. He squatted beside the hearth and added more wood to the flames.

“You were right,” Aqamdax said. “My son does call me.” He looked at her with fear in his eyes, and she moved into the light of the fire, clasped his hands and set them over her belly. “Each night he calls,” she told him, “but not from the lake.”

She smiled as his eyes grew wide, as his laughter filled the walls of her lodge. Then he wrapped her into his arms and claimed her as wife with his tears.

H
E WAS STILL ONLY
a boy, his arms and legs thin with much growing yet to do. But the old woman could see that he had changed. Though he was boy outside, inside he was more nearly a man. The People had celebrated their return to the winter village with a feast. The caribou hunt had been good, and the old and very young who had been left behind were content now with bellies full of caribou meat.

For the first time in many years, she sat with the other women in the storytelling lodge, her mind open for the storyteller’s words. The boy sat down in the Dzuuggi’s place and began to speak. His words carried full and strong. The old woman listened and felt the stories fill her anew with understanding.

Then the boy did something no Dzuuggi had been able to do for years, the skill lost in the years before he was born. He lifted his voice and brought it from the smokehole of the lodge, then from the doorflap and from the hearthfire, so it seemed as though each person was telling his own story in his own words.

And when he spoke about Chakliux, the boy took off his boots. The old woman heaved herself to her knees and lifted her head until she could see past those who sat in front of her.

“’Ih!” she said in amazement.

The toes were webbed like otter toes; the foot was bent and ready to swim.

Cry of the Wind
is a study of war and war’s most natural and tragic aftermath: revenge. Like its prequel,
Song of the River
, it weaves a story around the inhabitants of the Near River and Cousin River villages and is set in ancient Alaska.

Many of the characters and plot elements are based on Native mythologies, two of which perhaps need further explanation.

In traditional Native literature—which is, of course, oral literature—heroes and villains abound. Often the villains are very evil indeed and are used as foils for the heroes of the stories. Sometimes, especially for those of us who have grown up within the nebulous gray world of situational ethics, this stark dichotomy is difficult to understand.

Quite obviously, I have followed Native literary traditions in creating my villainess K’os and the villain Anaay. In an effort to make their behavior believable to modern readers, I have given them motivating factors and mind-sets that provide a psychological basis for their actions, but I would ask my readers to remember that they represent a long-standing tradition in North American Native literature: the classic, unredeemable antihero.

The second mythological tradition is that of the nuhu’anh, known by many names, including windigo, witigo, outside man, and woodsman. Most groups of northern Native peoples tell legends about the windigo or nuhu’anh. In my studies, I have noticed that in areas with an extremely cold climate and limited winter food resources the legends take on more mystical and terrifying proportions than among those peoples who experience less winter starvation. The Aleut and some of the Athabascan peoples generally consider the nuhu’anh a nuisance more than a threat—someone whose behavior has mandated exclusion from his or her village. The nuhu’anh may kill to steal a wife or food but is seldom if ever cannibalistic, like the windigo/witigo of the Ojibwa or Cree.

Scientists have only recently begun to believe there is a physiological basis for windigo mythology. Research points toward the possibility that people who face extreme fat deprivation under bitter weather conditions may suffer delusions that lead them to believe other humans are food resources—animals that may be legitimately butchered. It is interesting to note that though Native stories offer many different ways to kill a windigo, one often cited is to pour hot fat down the windigo’s throat.

I have had a number of requests from readers asking that I explain the concept of the “handful,” which I use in the Storyteller Trilogy to denote counting. According to what I have been able to find through my research, most Native peoples of North America based their counting systems on five (rather than ten, as we do), thus the concept of the handful—five fingers.

For those who, like me, are mathematically disadvantaged, I offer this explanation in the hope that it will help. In a base five counting system, the sequence of numbers one to ten would be as follows: one, two, three, four, five, five plus one, five plus two, five plus three, five plus four, two fives. Eleven would be two fives plus one…and so on.

The reader may notice that in this trilogy, and in my previous trilogy (
Mother Earth
,
Father Sky
;
My Sister the Moon
; and
Brother Wind
), the First Men count by tens. The Unangan or Aleut people upon whom the First Men are patterned have (and this is very unusual for Native Americans) a base ten number system. Thus, in my novels I include two number systems, one used by the First Men and designated by “tens” and the other used by the Walrus Hunters and the River People and denoted by the term “handful.”