The Animal Wife (21 page)

The name of this animal was tai tibi. Two of them were tai tibidi, and many of them were tai tibisi. Tai Tibi was also the name that Muskrat's people used for Ohun. Think of it!

At first no one believed there was such a thing as a tai tibi. Some of us thought that Muskrat was describing an animal we knew but was using the wrong words. When she drew the tracks of a tai tibi in the ashes of our fire, Maral thought it was the badly drawn likeness of a roe deer's track in mud.

Then at last I remembered the strange eyetooth in Muskrat's necklace. Never since I was a small child had I seen a tooth or a track I couldn't recognize. Also, people wear the teeth of animals they respect, and what could deserve more respect than an animal named for Ohun? So the tooth on the necklace could have been the tooth of a tai tibi. I wanted to ask, but then Muskrat would have known about the bundle of clothes, and these might have held some sort of signal from her people, so I said nothing.

***

At the beginning of Muskrat's stay with us, the other people didn't like her. The men ignored her, and the women complained about her careless ways. If Rin hadn't stopped her, Muskrat would have fouled our lodge with her menstrual blood. But Rin had gathered moss for her to put between her legs. We asked each other what the women of her people might do when they menstruated, suspecting that the answer might be something we didn't want to hear.

Also, although the body of my woman was very fine, very beautiful, her face was flat and had been made ugly by the long blue buttocks scar. The skin of her buttocks, though, was plain as a child's. Rin and the others soon learned what Andriki and I had noticed right away: that the buttocks of my captive had no scars, although she was old enough to have them. We saw that Muskrat would have to take her chances in childbirth, since without the scars she wouldn't have Ohun's protection.

But then, in many ways Muskrat surely offended Ohun. She pointed rudely with her forefingers, sometimes with both at once, not only at things but also at people, and once she even counted the people of the lodge, as if they were beads in a marriage exchange! Her habits weren't clean, and when she tried to use our speech her words were thick and ugly, as if she carried a stone on her tongue. I overheard the women saying that she would urinate while standing. She would lower her trousers, spread her legs, bend forward a little, and turn her feet out.

She also didn't know what to do with her clothes. Sometimes she wore her trousers backward. Until Rin showed her how to braid her hair, she pulled it all back and wound a string around and around it, so that it looked like a child's foot in a moccasin. After she learned how to braid, her hair looked loose and messy, since she didn't braid well. Sometimes at night Rin would comb and braid her hair for her, talking angrily as she did, yanking the comb. Rin always talked angrily when she combed someone's hair—she was angry at the tangles, not at the person. But Muskrat didn't know this, because she couldn't understand our speech. She would try to hold her hair above the comb, but Rin would slap her hands away. Then Muskrat would fold her hands in her lap while her eyes shone with tears, although her face wore no expression.

One day I felt itching in my groin, and when I visited the latrine I looked at my crotch closely. I was very disappointed to see crotch lice. Because I had been free of lice since I had bathed in the Hair River with Father on our way to his cave, I knew these new lice came from Muskrat. I made up my mind to say nothing but to try to pick them off myself privately. Yet lice cannot be kept secret very long in a lodge in winter. They creep about. Soon everyone was scratching.

Early one morning when the air was so cold our breath froze in our nostrils, we made big fires in the lodge, then put our clothes and sleeping-skins outdoors in the shadow of the lodge to freeze any lice hiding in them. Inside we sat naked, searching our pubic hairs, throwing the lice and nits we found into the fires. We killed many, but not all. Some lice escaped notice, and soon we were itching again.

It wasn't hard for people to guess how the lice had come. Then the feeling against Muskrat grew large indeed. When she crawled through the coldtrap with her full waterskin or with a bundle of wood, or when at night I went to her bed near the door, all talking would stop, as if people had been speaking of her. They hadn't, of course. They fell silent because she had caught their attention and they didn't want to go on with their talk in her presence. But the silence was worse than words, and I couldn't help but feel that people were against me for bringing her.

But what could I do? I couldn't turn her loose. She was ours, at least for the winter. Besides, I loved her.

***

Perhaps because winter was just starting and no one wants to go through a winter with people ill at ease, Rin kept telling the others that having Muskrat could be good as well as bad. It was bad that we, with too few hunters, had to feed another woman in winter. But it was good that I could get children for the lodge on Muskrat while giving the wife's share of my hunting to Frogga's family, since a slave and a stranger could never be a wife.

The truth of that I had seen at once. With whom would my kin exchange marriage gifts? I laughed to think of it—running after Muskrat's queer little group, offering them ivory. It would be like trying to give presents to animals! And what gifts could they give to us? Even if we knew where they were, they had nothing we wanted.

So in time, perhaps because people saw Muskrat's value, or else because they feared a winter of bad feelings more than they disliked Muskrat's strange looks and manners, the men as well as the women began to show some kindness to her and to me. For a while they made sure that she got enough to eat, which meant they gave food from their own shares. If not, she would have gotten nothing, or I would have had to feed her always from my share, since she was not related by kin or marriage in any way to any of us and had no rights to anyone's hunting.

At first, besides me, only the women shared with Muskrat. Later Maral and Andriki did the same. I thought nothing about it. It seemed to me that my uncles were showing the same thoughts for Muskrat as the women showed, nothing more. But after a while I came to think my uncles had another reason.

One day I was with my uncles hunting to the north of the river. We were following a reindeer trail made the night before, and when we came to a ridge where the country sloped away from us into a basin, Andriki asked me to climb a tree to see if I could spot a shortcut to the reindeer in the countryside below. Trying to catch sight of the herd, I stayed a long time in the tree, while Andriki and Maral sat on their heels, waiting. Soon they began to whisper something about a woman. I didn't pay much attention until I overheard Andriki say my name. Then I strained my ears, and heard Maral whisper, "Face you," and later, "Clasped legs." Shocked, I climbed down and looked at my uncles. As if nothing had happened, they both stared blandly back at me. "Well? Are there reindeer?" asked Maral. But I felt too shaken to answer. I had seen why these men gave meat to Muskrat. As Wolverine had lain with Mekka, the First Man's woman, my uncles had lain with mine.

It was often our practice not to talk while hunting, so my uncles hardly noticed my silence on the way home. Yet my thoughts were like a storm. My mind's eye saw Muskrat like a beetle on her back, bending her legs, holding them open to show Maral and Andriki the secrets of her vulva, that private place that is for men to feel but not to stare at. I saw her smiling up at them shamelessly, sweetly. Why wouldn't she? Weren't they the senior owners of the lodge? The best hunters? And why wouldn't they want to try her? What rule, in their eyes, left her to me?

Sometimes it was Andriki and sometimes it was Maral whom my mind's eye saw kneeling between her legs, lowering his chest to her breasts, his belly to her belly. I saw her clasp his back with her arms and his hips with her thighs. I saw her pull herself up to him like a beetle. In the cold air, my face burned. My uncles had looked on my woman as if they had watched her in childbirth, something not for the eyes of any man. Yet she had shown herself! Perhaps she had asked them to look on her. Surely she had asked them! How else could such a thing come to be?

That evening in the lodge, after Muskrat as usual took a waterskin and crawled out through the coldtrap, I waited a short while, then followed. In front of the lodge I found myself alone. The woods were growing blue with evening, and in the silent, bitter air I heard, like the rasping wingbeats of a red she-cuckoo, the soft, even crunch of Muskrat's footsteps in the snow. I hurried after her and caught her arm. Surprised, she turned to face me.

"Woman!" I said. "You lay with Andriki, I know!"

"Andriki," she repeated stupidly, open-mouthed, nodding.

"You lay with him!"

"Yas? Andriki?" Her eyes were squinting, and her speech was dull and slow.

"You lay with him! Lay with him! You!" I jabbed my finger at her chest and made the handsign for coitus.

Muskrat didn't know our handsigns, but this was clear enough. Her eyes flew wide as she stared at my fingers.

"Maral! Andriki!" I said.

"Maral? Andriki?" she repeated, troubled.

It was all the answer I needed. I slapped her with the full strength of my arm. She fell. Bending, I slapped her again, once, twice, as she struggled away from me. I saw blood on the snow. Her nose was bleeding. I picked up the waterskin and threw it at her. "Finish your work," I said, and turning on my heel, I went back to the lodge.

Long after dark, long after I had begun to worry that she had run away or that the tiger had found her, Muskrat came back with the waterskin. In the very dim light of the lodge I saw that she had washed her face, which was red with cold, and although a greenish bruise was starting on her eye and cheekbone, she showed no sign of blood or crying. She didn't look at me but took her place by the door of the lodge, unfolded her ragged sleeping-skins, and lay down. A feeling of great relief came over me to see her; I would have liked to lie beside her, bringing my own sleeping-skin to cover us both, but like the walls of a lodge my anger stood around me. I lay in its center, my eyes open but not seeing, my thoughts dark.

A
S THE DAYS PASSED
my silence and anger brought questions from everyone. Everyone noticed that I slept alone. At last Maral asked what was bothering me. I didn't dare tell Maral. But later, as I was following Andriki home on a reindeer trail after an unlucky day of hunting, he called the question over his shoulder. By then my trouble had grown so large I couldn't refuse to answer, so I did. Andriki turned his head to look at me, and through the frost on his beard he laughed aloud. "Hi, Kori!" he said. "You think we lie with your woman? Don't we have wives?"

"Then how is it you know so much about her?" I asked quietly, sure he wouldn't be able to laugh at that.

"What is it we know?" asked Andriki, puzzled.

So I reminded him of his whispered talk with Maral the day I had scouted for reindeer from the tree.

"Haven't we seen you?" cried Andriki. "Do we have to do as you do to know what our eyes see?"

This shamed me very much. I hadn't thought of people watching us. Yet I could see how they might—our outline in the sleeping-skins, the way our heads showed, could cause wonder.

"Many of her ways are different from our ways," I said stiffly.

"True!" cried Andriki. "She doesn't know the ways of Ohun. She has the ways of animals. Just that would stop me. You can remember what I'm telling you the next time you suspect me." He thought for a moment, perhaps about the hidden insults his words carried. "But if I'd found her, I'd lie with her," he added with an uncle's loyalty. "She's young and beautiful. Any man would want her. But she's yours. You found her. You took her! No man would lie with her after that, to risk starting bad trouble in a lodge in winter. No woman is worth fighting for, not in a lodge in winter! Anyway, who has the courage to fight a man like you?"

That he was trying to joke away my doubts made me happier than I had been since my suspicions began. In the quiet woods I followed Andriki in grateful silence.

The wind rose, carrying snow, and soon the snow came heavily. Andriki's feet disturbed a ptarmigan, who burst up, startling us. We both threw our spears and both missed it. Away it flew on white wings. We looked at our spears to make sure they were not broken.

"My wife and I were like you and Frogga," said Andriki as we walked on. "When we were married, she was very young. I had two other women while I was waiting for her. Both of them I still remember. You'll remember this muskrat-woman long after she's gone."

"Gone?" I asked. "Where will she go?"

"Why, I don't know," said Andriki, as if he himself were surprised by the idea. "I just said it, that's all. One of mine died. The other was a widow whose second husband came from the Black River. Now, I suppose, she lives there. But yours could stay with you. You could have many children by her. And more with Frogga." Andriki walked in silence for a while, a gray shape ahead of me in the falling snow. "I might marry again," I heard him saying. "I think about it. I think next summer I may take Hind to the Grass River to see if her parents will give me her sister. Hind would like her sister as a co-wife. You've never been to the Grass River. You and your Muskrat could come with me. Well? Will you?"

"Gladly," I said into the cloud of snow.

"Then maybe we'll do it. But first we must get through the winter," said Andriki.

***

Before long I could see that the snow would be heavy. All signs of the trail had vanished, and the air was thick with snowflakes slanting among the trees. Soon I couldn't see where we were and would have been lost if not for Andriki. But he strode on as if he were following a mammoth trail in summer. The Bear was guiding him, as He guides all men and animals in their home country, as He would have guided me at Woman Lake where I had grown up, as He would someday guide me through the Narrow Lake country after I came to know it. But that day I couldn't even see how far we had come. All landmarks, even the lake, had vanished in the whirling snow. Suddenly Andriki went down on one knee in front of me and ducked through the door of the coldtrap. I had hardly seen the lodge before I was inside it. We were home.