“Not just to the villages. Your father had heard of a white man hungry for furs who was leaving to sail back across the sea for the winter. The weather was kind so they took canoes down the river and found him. And they made a good trade; they were very happy with it.”
She stopped to rest, to capture more breath. A cold place began to grow in my heart as I thought about what she was saying.
“But when they came back with their trade, the white man’s plague came with them,” Suncatcher said. “I think it is like a snake that grows slowly and quietly and then strikes. It waits its time. I think it does not kill white men. It kills us.”
I said, “My father gave me a beautiful knife to take with me. A white man’s knife. That must be why he went to trade, to get me the knife.”
“It was one part of his trade,” Suncatcher said. “One part only.”
“If he hadn’t gone to trade for my knife—”
“Stop that!” my grandmother said sharply. For a moment her voice was strong, like my Manitou in my vision. “Little Hawk, it is not for us to tell how great and terrible things come about. Only the Great Spirit can see all. Your father and your uncles went to trade for whatever things the white man had to offer, not for one little knife. This load is not for your back, nor for any man’s.”
All I could think of was my father’s pleasure in giving me his knife, and the glow in my mother’s face when she saw it.
“I couldn’t even bring the knife back to him. It saved my life, and I couldn’t bring it back. It fell to the bottom of a pond.”
“A good place for it,” Suncatcher said.
She lay back, exhausted, and her eyes closed again. Light from the fire flickered on her lined old face, with its strong straight nose. My mother had that same nose.
My mother is dead. I shall never see her again. My father is dead, and my two sisters are dead. My baby brother is dead. I shall never see any of them again.
I had to find something to do. I fetched more logs from the woodpile inside the door and built up the fire. The flames leapt up, warming the house.
I poured water into my mother’s biggest clay pot and set its pointed base into the hole at the side of the fire pit. Into the water I dropped a handful from each of the baskets hanging on the wall: onions, garlic, lily roots, dried cranberries. I had watched my mother do this so often that I hardly needed to think. I wanted to ask my grandmother a hundred questions, but first I needed to feed her, or she would die too. I wondered how long it was since she had eaten.
I could see now that although furs and skins were mounded on my own sleeping platform, there were none on those where my parents and my sisters used to sleep. Each wooden frame was covered only with a woven bark mat. While Suncatcher slept, very slowly I went all round the inside of our house, looking.
All the familiar tools were in their places, and everything for cooking. There was enough food for a month or more—I knew that the rest of the winter supply for the village was buried deep in the cold ground, wrapped in baskets and mats. But there was no sign of my parents’ clothes, or those of my sisters, nor of any of their personal possessions.
There was a sick feeling in my throat as I faced the fact that they were indeed dead. When we die and are buried in the ground, our friends and family put with us all the things that were most precious to us, or that we might need in an afterlife that resembles the one here on earth. My father would certainly have been buried with his bow, and his tomahawk.
The only hunter in this family now was me.
On a shelf above my sleeping platform, with my own clothes and belongings, I found my sharp stone knife that I had before my father gave me the one he got from the white man. It was an old and trusted friend, and I was very glad to have it in my hand again.
So, using it, I shredded two handfuls of dried meat and added them to the pot beside the fire, which was beginning to steam and smell good. There was no more light from the smoke hole in the roof now, but in the dark circle up there I could see one bright star.
When I went outside, night had swallowed the village, and all the stars in their moving patterns were blazing out of the black sky. Their light glimmered on the snow, but the only sign of life in the world around me was the little glow of the entrance to our house, and an echo of firelight in the smoke rising from the roof.
Oh my Manitou, I thought, please watch over me and tell me what to do.
Then I went back indoors and gently woke my grandmother, so I could give her some hot soup. I helped her to sit up, very carefully. I was almost afraid she might break.
She sat propped up by the furs of her sleeping nest and slowly spooned up a bowlful of soup while I wolfed down three. Gradually some color began to filter back into her bony grey face.
“D’you remember when you last had anything to eat, Grandmother?”
“No,” Suncatcher said. Then she shook her head, as if she were exasperated with herself. “I am ashamed,” she said.
“Ashamed?”
“We are put here to live out the time the Great Spirit wills to us, but I had given up my joy in the earth. I lay down in this bed to die, Little Hawk. It is not so hard to die, at my age, if you no longer eat or drink. The body is already tired.”
My throat closed up, and I could feel tears filling my eyes. I stood there holding the bowl very tightly and not looking at her. I am a man now. We are strong; we do not weep.
Suncatcher could sense this. She tried to speak without emotion.
“I had lost track of the days and nights,” she said. “I thought you would not be back for a long time. And you are young and strong—I knew you would survive. You were not part of my thinking. Forgive me.”
I made some sort of noise, and I nodded.
“I was the last person alive in this village and I did not want to live,” Suncatcher said. “I had seen my sons die, and my daughter, and my grandchildren, and all my friends.”
She stopped.
Looking at the grief in her small fierce face, I loved her very much. She too was strong. She did not weep.
“I don’t want you to die, Grandmother.”
“No. Now there are two of us.”
She held out her arms to me and I knelt down and hugged her, but we did not cry. At least, only a very little.
Suncatcher said, “You have seen your Manitou, have you not?”
“Yes. I have.”
She knew better than to ask more than that.
She said, “And the scar on your face says that you have come through danger.”
“It was a wolf. I killed him.”
I found I couldn’t say anything more than that. And again, Suncatcher did not ask.
“We will make a plan,” she said.
Under her instruction, I took several kinds of dried herbs from small woven pouches hanging on the wall near her bed, and heated them in water. She was making a drink that she said would strengthen us both; she said we should drink it every day. She had me help her walk around the house, though not yet outside, so that her legs would get used to moving again.
She told me a little more about what happened when the plague came. It was a dreadful disease; it filled the body with pain and made it very hot. Then the heat would go down for a little but come back worse, and soon the person would die. Often the skin would have a yellowish color at the end. None of our traditional medicines made any difference, nor the sweat lodge, nor any of the prayers and sacred rituals that our medicine man desperately tried. One after another, families died: most often, Suncatcher said, the small children died first, and the very old, and then the rest. All the women in the women’s house died, including my sisters.
“Day after day,” she said, “those of us who were still alive buried those who had died. They were poor burials, because the ground is so hard. And fewer and fewer of us were left. Toward the end, the dead had to be left in their homes. If they are still there, perhaps they should not be disturbed.”
“There is a man l
ying dead out in the village. Under the snow. I must give him rest somehow.”
“You cannot dig frozen ground,” Suncatcher said. “Even though I think that is the body of my brother Morning Star.”
Morning Star was our medicine man, the wisest person in the whole village. She told me that he had ordered her to go home to rest, one day when she and the few who were left had been working without sleep for days. She was so tired that she could hardly walk, and he took her back to our house to sleep and brought her food. The next morning she heard only his voice, from outside the house.
“He said, ‘The others are dying, Suncatcher. I am the last, and now I have the sickness too. You can do nothing for me, you must stay where you are. And the Great Spirit be with you.’ ”
Suncatcher sat looking into the fire.
“I called out as loud as I could, ‘I love you, brother.’ But there was no answer. I don’t know if he heard me. So since there no longer seemed any reason to go on living, I decided I would simply lie here until I too died.”
She looked up at me. “And then you came back.”
For seven days Suncatcher and I took care of each other, until she looked stronger and more confident—and so perhaps did I. More snow fell, a long soft snow, mounding itself against the houses until they half-vanished into it. Now they were a little range of round white hills. I went out and dug a path away from our own house to the pile of firewood my father had had us gather before the winter came. Every house had such a pile. Every day I brought wood back for our fire pit, but Suncatcher made me swear not to investigate any other house.
“We have food enough,” she said, “and there is danger in those houses. The plague is still there, eating the bodies of the dead until it can be driven away. And I do not have the skill for that. Keep away from them, Little Hawk. Swear.”
So I did.
And then came the morning when I had brought in wood and was feeding the fire, and Suncatcher was pounding dried corn in the oak-tree mortar that our grandfather hollowed out for her. We had heard no footsteps, but suddenly the house brightened as the door flap was pulled open. We stared.
Leaping Turtle was standing in the doorway. He was wrapped in a rabbit-skin blanket and covered in snow. His face was thinner, his eyes huge with horror.
He said, “What has happened?”
EIGHT
For many days in the long winter, Suncatcher, Leaping Turtle, and I lived together in this house. She cooked for us; we hunted and trapped for her, and collected firewood. The three of us kept one another alive. We were all that was left of the old village. Suncatcher prayed with us and even sang for us, in her voice that was scratchy now but still found its note. She said that now she had two grandsons.
When Leaping Turtle had come back, he had found his home buried in unbroken snow. He dug his way through to the door; inside, the house was empty and cold. Staring around the deserted village, he caught sight of a thread of smoke rising from just one snow-mounded roof at the far end; it was us, of course. Like me, he knew something terrible had happened before he even asked.
Suncatcher told us that Leaping Turtle’s family had died early in the plague: his mother and father, his two brothers and his sister. They had been buried in a place not far from the village that was easy to reach: an outcropping of rocks where enough of the frozen soil could be dug away to put bodies to rest and cover them with slabs of rock too heavy for digging animals to move. We both knew the place; we had played there often when we were small boys, jumping to and fro. Jumping perhaps from the same rocks that now covered our dead.
We went there through the snow, Leaping Turtle and I, to say farewell to our families and to pray to our ancestors to receive them, and the Great Spirit to bless them. We stayed there a long time, without talking. We both knew that we were no longer boys; sometimes I felt I had lived through as much as an old man.
Before we went back, we looked hard at the rocks in that place and tried to decide which of them might be moved, and where we might still dig some soil. Although my grandmother wanted us to keep away from the houses that might hold bodies killed by the plague—she thought there were two—we knew that sooner or later we had to put these people to rest with proper ceremony. Especially our medicine man, Morning Star, still lying frozen out there somewhere under the snow.
“Suncatcher says that the plague will jump to us from their bodies,” Leaping Turtle said.
“But we can’t leave them unburied. I buried the wolf who fought me—and these are our brothers and sisters.”
“Yes. They are.”
We stood there unhappily on the high rock, looking out over the trees.
Suddenly Leaping Turtle grabbed my arm, pointing. It was a clear, freezing cold day, bright with sunshine, but out in the blue sky a pillar of grey-white smoke was rising. As we watched, there was a break in the smoke—and then a new puff of it rose, darker this time. Another break, another puff. Then a third.
Then the smoke rose again, in its unbroken pillar.
“To the west,” Leaping Turtle said. “It’s the village on the river.”
“Are they talking to us?”
“Three smokes—remember? It’s the greeting for anyone who sees it. Three just means ‘I am here.’ ”
I was suddenly overwhelmed by the thought of other living people. “We have to answer!”
We scrambled down into the snow and hunted for sticks, leaves, anything that would burn. Soon our moccasins were soaked, our fingers frozen. It was a long time before we had enough kindling, and the sun was beginning to drop down the sky.
The pillar of smoke had gone. But Leaping Turtle had a firestone and some moss at his belt, and we managed to make a fire on the tall rock. The wood was so damp that it smoked well.
I pulled off my tunic to cover and uncover the smoke.
“What are the answers? One puff means danger.”
“Two says come. Four says, I am coming.”
“Best to send three, like them. So we are saying, ‘Look, we are here too.’ ”
So we sent our signal, to tell that there was life still in our village. But there was no answer, and I pulled my tunic back on in a hurry.
We checked our traps on the way home, and we had a big rabbit for Suncatcher. She was pleased by the meat, but even more by our sight of the smoke in the sky.
“If there were still sickness in the village, they would not signal,” she said. “You boys must go there. You should not be in this unhappy place.”
“Not without you,” I said.
Leaping Turtle said, “We go nowhere without our sachem.”
She looked at us and shook her head, but she smiled a little. I knew she could never go on a journey, though. The cold had done something bad to her feet, in those last days before I came back, and she could hardly walk. Though she would never show me her feet, I had glimpsed her ankles, and the skin was very dark and tight over the thin bones.
Leaping Turtle and I had grown up together. Our lives had been like two brier vines twining round each other. We had followed all Running Deer’s hunting rules together, learned to sing and pray and stamp the ceremonial dances together; we had swum and trapped and played games together for as long as I could remember. But now we were truly brothers; we had known it since that hard testing moment when we had to ignore each other on our solitary quests. In spite of everything that had happened since, I think we both felt that our life together now was like a reward from the Great Spirit for our obedience then.
Leaping Turtle’s time alone was as hard as mine, though he went inland instead of seaward, so the blast of the northeast storm toward the end was not quite so fierce. Fierce enough, though. He saw no deer but he trapped rabbits, often enough to have many skins that he stitched together—with pine-root thread and a rabbit-bone needle—into a blanket. It was his cloak by day and his coverlet at night, and it kept him alive, though my grandmother clicked her tongue over the hard, half-cured skins. As for my deerskin, she had ta
ken one look at it and made me throw it away.
I never asked Leaping Turtle how long he had to fast before he found his Manitou. The vision of your Manitou is a private thing, not to be revealed even to your brother until the proper time.
In the next days Suncatcher tried often to persuade us to leave her and go to the village by the river. She felt strongly that our village was no longer a place for us; that no living creature should have a home there until the spirits had been set to rest. Leaping Turtle and I talked and talked, whenever we were away from the house, and we decided to do two things.
One, we would not leave her alone. Instead we would build a kind of litter, in which we could carry her with us to the village on the river. It might be a journey of seven or eight days, but we thought she could survive it.
Two, before we went, we would find the body of Morning Star and lay him to rest near our families and friends.
So we did these things. We dug in the snow to find Morning Star, and we wrapped our largest mat round his body and sewed it closed. It was the first time I had touched a dead man. The sewing was not very good but we did our best. He was not as big as I remembered—he seemed almost the size of a child.
We scraped out a shallow grave in the burying place and dragged him there, and when we had put earth over him, we pulled as big a stone over the top as we could manage. Then we said prayers for him to the Great Spirit, and told him we were sorry we didn’t know the words for a proper ceremony. He was a medicine man famous through all our nation, and should have had a big solemn funeral.
Suncatcher was not pleased when we told her we had done this without her, but she knew she would not have been able to walk to the burying place. She said some prayers of her own for Morning Star, and at dawn the next day she sang for him, and we listened.
Then we cut down small trees to make a litter, and trimmed off their branches. On the trodden snow outside the house we lay down two hazel saplings, each of them twice the height of a man, and in between them we lashed two shorter pieces and interwove them with strips of deerskin. So this made a kind of bed where Suncatcher could lie, with two handles at each end for us to carry her.