The Animal Wife (32 page)

I was right, although we almost lost the colt. As I was carefully walking, setting my feet in the hunter's manner, little toe first, no scuffing, a nightjar burst up shouting in front of me, its voice so loud my heart stopped. I had been thinking of lions. The next thing I knew the men were running, chasing the colt, who at first dodged among us, his little hooves pounding. Then he screamed, and I knew he had been speared. For one so small he struggled greatly. Maral and Marten held him down while Andriki cut his throat.

As we finished butchering, which we did very quickly because he was so small, we sent Ako to camp with meat, and soon the delicious smell of cooking floated in the air. Wiping the blood from ourselves with grass, we picked up the hide and the rest of the meat and went into camp all together. Most trouble fades with the smell of good food. On the way to camp I felt Father's hand fall lightly on my shoulder. He meant that he wasn't going to hold Muskrat against me. That made me happy. In the starlight, I smiled to thank him. He seemed not to notice, which was his way.

The colt was delicious, tender and sweet, his flesh filled with juice if not fat. Without waiting for my first piece to cook through, I lifted it with a stick from the burning dung and began to eat it anyway. The women got up and came to eat with us. Pirit and Frogga came too, stunned with sleep, rubbing their eyes as they waited for their shares. Pinesinger arrived with the wolf behind her, not just following her but pressing against her as it shrank from the rest of us. She had been suckling it. I wondered what Father had said to her, what threat he had made or what reward he had promised, to get her to do that.

I looked around for Muskrat. She wasn't there. I was surprised, since when food was cooking she was always watching, never failing to let her face show that she wanted a share. Not liking to think of her being so tired that she missed a chance to eat, I got up and went to wake her. I found my sleeping-skins unrolled but no one in them. "Muskrat!" I called, but no one answered.

I walked all through the camp then, looking at everyone's place and in everyone's bedding. I looked at the people around the fire, and I looked at the black shadows on the starlit plain. I saw everyone else, by now glancing around doubtfully to learn what was the matter, but I didn't see Muskrat. Muskrat wasn't there.

W
E WAITED
, thinking she had gone to relieve herself. When she didn't come back, we looked in the shadows of all the bushes. She wasn't anywhere. In fact, while we peered into the night for anything moving, the plain grew so still it was almost frightening—no animal called, not even the nightjar, who had kept up his ugly shouting long after I had frightened him. Yet a woman doesn't vanish like an animal. Was this Father's doing?

After a time the air began to move again, very slowly, faintly chilling our skins as it went by. Again the cloud shadows crept over the stars, and again the nightjar began his loud, tiresome call. "She was here—I saw her on the plain just before dark," said Rin. "I thought she was looking for fuel."

"I saw her sitting in the bushes," said Pinesinger. "She was too tired to gather fuel. She left that work to the rest of us, although we were tired too."

"Staring at the dark does no good," said Father. "If she wants to hide, you won't see her. Remember that she didn't want to come with us."

"But she was tired," I said, although I knew the other people had no plans to help me look for her. "Why wouldn't she rest now?"

"What better time to escape you?" asked Father. "She has to cross a short-grass plain. By daylight you'd see her."

Of course he was right. By daylight I would see her, and I'd bring her back, too. I said nothing, but made up my mind to look for her when the sun rose. My mind's eye saw her trail in the dew. Then one last thought came to me—the Lily. "Uncle," I said to Andriki, the only person still on his feet, still looking out over the moonlit plain. "What of the Lily? Would he follow us? Could he have taken Muskrat?"

Andriki looked down at me thoughtfully while rolling my question through his mind. "No," he said at last. "He's too big. Where would he hide? Anyway, his habits wouldn't let him come here. He stays in the trees, and after snow melts he doesn't go far from the lake. He likes his drinking water. And he was still eating his moose. Why would he walk so far to hunt so small a thing as a woman when if he rested in his thicket he could get another moose?"

In time most of the women built their own little fires and lay down by them to sleep. The men slept too. I had no fire—Muskrat hadn't gathered fuel for me—and I couldn't sleep, so I sat alone by Father's fire. The air was moving faster by then, chasing sparks from the ashes, whispering in the grass and in the bushes. Overhead the clouds had gathered, but stars showed above the horizon, and once again I felt the size of the space around me, as if the plain went over the edge of the world to the stars. I was as small as a waterbear in that space. If I got lost, no one would find me.

So it was with Muskrat. Unless she called out or built a fire, we wouldn't find her. Maybe her homeland was open, huge, so that when she saw the space she felt free. When I was a boy, I once threw a stone at a wheatear and stunned it. I took it in my hands. Then I felt it moving, and put it on the ground to see what it would do. For a moment it squatted with its rump down and legs flat, swaying a little and looking at the sky. Then suddenly it flew. I remember its bobbing, hurrying flight, its rear getting smaller and smaller, with its little gray feet curled in fists under its tail. Was it the same with Muskrat? Did she leave when she saw the big sky?

***

Late at night I heard someone beside me. The fire was no more than embers; I added fuel. The flames showed Pinesinger warming herself, sitting on her heels with her shirt open. I saw her baby asleep in his sling, his dark head far back, his eyes shut, and his small mouth open. In the shadows behind Pinesinger shone the green eyes of Father's wolf. Strange that a wolf should have stayed while a woman ran away, but so it was to be. I nodded a greeting to my stepmother. I thought she was sitting a little too close to me, but I had nothing to say.

The same was not true of Pinesinger. Under her breath at first, louder as she forgot herself, she leaned forward and with her face next to mine began to denounce Father. Calling him selfish and cruel, calling him an animal, she said so much so fast that I couldn't quite understand her. Her dark eyes blazed with tears, and her face grew red in the firelight. I could feel the heat of her breath. The matter was that Father had made her suckle his wolf pup, but a little time passed before I knew that.

Perhaps it was wrong of her to lose control, to speak in such a way about Father, and perhaps I should have tried to stop her, but in truth I was amazed by what she was saying and was afraid Father might be listening. "Stepmother," I whispered, pointing with my lips at Father's long, dark shape stretched out in his deerskins just beyond the firelight, "he'll hear you."

"He won't. He's sleeping," said Pinesinger furiously, turning to look for the wolf. "Your father can sleep. I cannot, with that nose nuzzling me." Seeing the two green eyes, she flung a handful of dirt at them. The pup cried out and the eyes vanished.

"But didn't you agree?" I asked Pinesinger.

"Of course I agreed. Don't you know your father?"

I did, of course. If he asked something of me, I wouldn't refuse him. He was too strong a person, and the headman too. People didn't refuse him.

"That's why you must tell him," Pinesinger went on. "Tell him I won't do it. Tell him the animal is taking milk that belongs to a child. You must do it, Kori."

Again I looked at Father's long, still form. Black in the shadows, he lay motionless. I felt sure he was listening to us. Too old to sleep soundly and too much of a hunter by day not to think of those who hunt the plains by night, he would have an ear up and open, listening for everything, even in his sleep. Knowing he might hear me, I said nothing.

But my silence wasn't enough for Pinesinger. "I'm afraid of him," she insisted. "I don't want to anger him, yet I can't please him. I don't know what he wants me to do or where he wants me to go." She thought for a moment and then, perhaps in case Father after all was listening, she added, "I think he's angry because of this child of mine. He thinks I lay with other men, and for revenge he makes me suckle an animal."

Now that wasn't true, not as I saw it. Nor was it true that Pinesinger couldn't please Father. He was pleased when she did as he asked. Although I could have told this stepmother of mine what lay ahead for her, at least as far as Father's plans went, I kept silent, as I had promised. "Who can know his thoughts?" I asked.

At last Pinesinger seemed to see my discomfort. She leaned close to my ear and whispered, "For the sake of your child—and he is yours, Kori—make your father free me from this animal. If he won't free me, kill it. I'd kill it, but he'd know if I did."

She made a person think—I'll say that for Pinesinger. She wasn't an animal to be feeding a pup with the milk of her body, milk that belonged to her baby and mine. The thing was, though, I couldn't quite see how it was right for me to spoil Father's plans for a hunting helper. He had a plan in mind when he dug out the pup—he had been making his plan for a year or longer. What the plan was, I didn't know, but did I want to spoil it before I understood it? I thought not. Besides, would feeding the pup really harm the baby? Again, I thought not. A she-wolf is no larger than a woman, yet a she-wolf has milk for many pups. How could just one hurt my stepmother's milk?

The fire had become a red glow in the smoldering dung, a mound of embers that the wind flamed now and again. Lit by the fire, Pinesinger's angry eyes searched mine for an answer. I couldn't help remembering how, in a haze of green leaves, the same face had watched me just a year ago, just before we made love by the Fire River. Then I would gladly have killed an animal if she had asked me. In fact, I would have done anything at all for that carefree and beautiful woman. Anyone would. But things were different now. The child might be mine, it was true, but the woman didn't seem the same. Also, she and the animal were Father's.

***

When a faint yellow glow in the east showed that at last the old moon was coming, I lay down and fell asleep, then woke to feel air passing over my face. When I opened my eyes I saw, almost at ground level, that the haze of moonlight had grown very bright. I had hardly slept a moment. Something had wakened me. The hair on my skin lifted. Something was moving. I heard a footstep, then another. Something was slowly creeping upwind toward my back. On short grass, where a tiger can't hide, he must finish his hunting by the time the moon rises. Before my eyes, the first bright spot of the moon came over the horizon. I reached for my spear and turned over.

There stood Muskrat. Her head, her tangled hair, were dark against the stars in the dome of the sky, but her legs in her sagging trousers showed against the pale band of light that was growing on the eastern rim of the plain. Without a word and very slowly, as if she were in pain, she bent down and untied her moccasins. If she saw me turn, she gave no sign. Instead she drew her feet out of her moccasins, first one, then the other. Then, so slowly that she seemed exhausted, she untied her belt and let her trousers fall.

The day before she would have had to tug them down, but now with a soft noise they dropped around her feet. She stepped out of them and knelt beside me, and I saw from her loose belly, a belly that sagged from her ribs and hipbones, that her baby had been born.

Of all the things that might have taken Muskrat away from us, her baby had not occurred to anyone. Shocked speechless, I watched her. Shrugging one shoulder, she drew her arm out of its sleeve. In the same way she freed her other arm, so that the shirt hung around her like a bag, the sleeves empty. Leaving it like that, she sat on the ground beside my deerskins, and using her feet to kick them open, she put her legs in next to mine, chilling me with her icy touch. Then she eased herself onto the skin beside me and lay down. As she did, I noticed a large wad of moss wedged into her crotch. It was a pad to stop the blood that flows from women when they menstruate or after they give birth. No such moss grows on the plains—Muskrat had brought it with her. She had no pack—she must have carried it in her clothing. So she hadn't run away, but instead had given birth, and for at least two days, ever since the day before we left the lodge, she had known she was going to do it.

Where Muskrat had been standing, the pale light grew. It was almost morning. In the dark camp beyond us, people were walking around, adding the last twigs and balls of dung to the ash-covered embers of the fire. I heard Father telling Pinesinger to make up his pack. Would he expect Muskrat to travel? She lay on her side, her back to me, her legs in the sleeping-skins, her arms hidden in her shirt. Unless Muskrat had left the baby somewhere, it was also hidden in her shirt.

I looked down at her. Her eyes were shut and her lips were parted; she was already fast in an exhausted sleep. What must have happened to her during the night, alone on the plain without even a fire? And where was the baby? Was it a boy? A girl? Was it early? Was it living? Healthy? Was it there at all? Inside her shirt, Muskrat's arms were folded. Her shoulder made the only lump I could see. Yet a new baby is very small.

Carefully, slowly, so as not to wake or frighten her, I lifted the hem of her shirt. There was her waist, her loose, empty belly sagging toward the ground. I raised the shirt higher. There were her ribs, each one showing, rising and falling with her even breath. Gently I raised the shirt higher still, pulling it so softly that she wouldn't feel it move. There was her bony elbow, crooked below her round breast. There was her nipple, almost black in the gray light, erect in its circle of skin, lumpy like a plucked bird's. Like our women, Muskrat had this "skin of Ohun"—like our women, she too was joined to the air, the place of spirits, birds, and shamans. At the end of the nipple clung a drop of milk.