Brother Wind (13 page)

Lemming Tail’s eyes snapped, and she hissed at Woman of the Sun. “What do you know of pain, old woman? You have no children.”

“Pah!” said Woman of the Sun. “I know pain. I birthed four and lost four. I know pain.” She turned her back on Lemming Tail and walked in slow, careful steps to the oil lamp. She settled herself on a grass mat, picked up her sewing, then lifted her head to say, “Because something happened before you were born does not mean it did not happen. Do you think the spirits made this world just for you?”

But Lemming Tail, her forehead furrowed against another pain, did not answer, only leaned against the rope and pulled, this time screaming out with words against her husband Raven.

Kiin clamped her hand over Lemming Tail’s mouth. “Are you a fool to curse your husband when you are giving birth? Shut your mouth. Spirits will hear you and take your child, perhaps take you.”

Lemming Tail pursed her lips, pulling in, so that Kiin knew she was gathering spit from the insides of her cheeks.

“You spit at me and we will leave you,” Kiin said. “Then you can have this child alone—you and whatever spirits you have called here with your curses.”

Lemming Tail’s eyes widened, and she clamped her teeth together, swallowed. “It is the pain,” she said weakly. “It is the pain speaking.”

“Then see you do not let it use your mouth again, Lemming Tail,” Kiin answered.

For a time then Lemming Tail was silent, but there was anger in the woman’s eyes, and she kept her lids half closed like a child sulking. By the middle of the day, she began to whimper, and soon, with each pain, she screamed, the screams filling the lodge so full that Kiin knew the sound would seep through the walls and into the Walrus People’s village. She was ashamed of her sister wife. What woman let her pain come out in cursing and shouts? Perhaps the last push, that tearing thrust, would make a woman scream, but why during the small pains, those no worse than what a girl-woman suffers in the first day of her first bleeding, why during those pains would Lemming Tail give voice to her discomfort?

“Get her something for her mouth,” Woman of the Sun said to Kiin.

Kiin nodded and sorted through her supplies until she found a stout piece of driftwood about the length of her hand. She brought it to Woman of the Sun, and with the next pain, when Lemming Tail opened her mouth to scream, Woman of the Sun thrust the stick between Lemming Tail’s teeth.

“Bite, bite hard,” she said to Lemming Tail. “The biting takes away pain.”

Lemming Tail clamped her teeth down on the wood, and finally the screams ended. In the sudden silence the lodge seemed larger, as if a crowd of people had left after a long time of arguing.

The day turned to night, and the night passed slowly. Woman of the Sun left the lodge, and after a time came back, a cup in her hand.

“What is it?” Kiin asked, leaning over the cup to sniff at what was inside.

“Only water, boiled with a few dried berries and a bit of willow bark.”

“It will help her pain?” Kiin asked.

Woman of the Sun shrugged. “If she thinks it will.” She went to Lemming Tail, who had wrapped the walrus hide rope around her forearms. The biting stick lay on the floor at her feet.

“It is morning,” Woman of the Sun said. She bent over Lemming Tail, laying a hand on her belly. “A good time for babies to be born.”

Lemming Tail did not answer, but Woman of the Sun held the cup to her lips. “Drink,” she said. “It will help the pain.”

Lemming Tail sucked in a mouthful of liquid and swallowed it, then took another. Woman of the Sun stroked Lemming Tail’s head, and squatting beside her, slipped one hand under Lemming Tail’s grass apron. Lemming Tail groaned.

Woman of the Sun wiped her fingers on the grass mat at Lemming Tail’s feet and stood. She clicked her tongue at Shale Thrower, who had spent the night sitting behind Lemming Tail, bracing the woman’s back with each pain. Woman of the Sun turned to Kiin with a smile on her face. “He is ready to be born,” she said.

Lemming Tail suddenly screeched, and Kiin hurried to her side. “One more push, one more,” Kiin said, and she clasped Lemming Tail’s wrists, steadying her grip on the rope.

Shale Thrower braced her feet against the floor and leaned against Lemming Tail, the two women back to back. Lemming Tail screamed again, then rose up, crouching on the balls of her feet.

“The baby comes!” Kiin said.

Woman of the Sun pressed her hand gently against Kiin’s shoulder. “Be quiet or you will frighten the child back up into its mother,” the old woman said.

Kiin nodded, then reached forward to turn the baby as the dark head emerged from the birth canal. Another pain and the shoulders came out, then the child slid into Kiin’s hands.

“A boy!” Kiin said and laughed. “A boy, Lemming Tail. You have given us a hunter!”

Lemming Tail moaned as the afterbirth slid from the birth canal, then she loosened her grip on the rope and eased herself back to lie on the floor.

“Three necklaces,” she said, panting to catch her breath. “Tell Raven I want three necklaces. And puffin feathers for my parka. A son is worth at least that much.”

Kiin tied off the baby’s cord and wiped him clean, then held him out to Lemming Tail, but Lemming Tail waved him away. “I will feed him later,” she said, and let her hands flutter at her neck. “Three necklaces,” Kiin heard her whisper. Lemming Tail smiled and closed her eyes.

Kiin glanced at Shale Thrower. Shale Thrower shrugged her shoulders and said, “You nurse him. I will burn the afterbirth.”

Woman of the Sun snorted and left the lodge. Kiin squatted on the floor, the baby in her arms. She held Lemming Tail’s baby to her breast. He opened his mouth and after several tries closed his lips and sucked.

He was a well-formed baby with fat arms and legs and a thick thatch of black hair. His sucking was strong, and when Kiin stroked his cheek with her finger, he did not pause at her touch, but only sucked harder. Something about his face, the tilt of his brows, reminded Kiin of Takha, and for a moment she had to close her eyes against tears.

“You have the wrong son,” some troublesome spirit seemed to whisper.

“Shuku is in his cradle,” Kiin answered.

But the spirit said, “Takha, Takha. Where is Takha?”

And afraid the spirit might tell her secret to one of the Walrus People, Kiin said, “He is dead. Let the dead nurse him.”

Herendeen Bay, the Alaska Peninsula

“Y
OUR MOTHER,” THREE FISH SAID.
“Please, please get your mother.”

Samiq opened his eyes to see Three Fish squatting beside him in his sleeping place. She moaned and pressed her hands against her belly. Her breath came in short puffs from circled lips.

Samiq shook his head to pull himself from his dreams.

“Your mother, go get your mother,” Three Fish said again.

Samiq slipped from the warmth of his sleeping robes and pulled on his parka. His hand caught in the parka sleeve, and he held his arm out toward Three Fish. “Pull my hand through,” he said, but Three Fish, her face drawn into a grimace, only shook her head at him.

He caught the end of his sleeve with his teeth and pulled it taut until he had worked his hand out. “I will be back,” he said, then stopped. “Should I help you to the birthing lodge?” he asked.

“I cannot. I cannot,” Three Fish gasped. “The pain is too great. But take your weapons so there will be no curse.”

Samiq realized that his wife’s hands were red with blood. He pulled spears and harpoons from the weapons corner, forcing open the fingers of his right hand to clasp them as he climbed to the roof hole. He ran to his father’s ulaq, called down for his mother.

Chagak came, her face so pale that it looked like a moon rising from the darkness of the lodge.

“Three Fish is bleeding. The baby is coming,” Samiq said.

“It is too soon,” Chagak mumbled—as though she spoke to someone, not Samiq, but Samiq heard the words and felt the beginning of fear like a sharp pain at the center of his heart.

He followed his mother to his ulaq, but waited outside. It was not good for a man to be present during a birth. Woman’s blood was a strong curse against hunting. He climbed to the top of the ulaq, squatted down beside the roof hole. He could hear the murmur of his mother’s voice, a soothing sound, but could not make out her words. He looked out toward the bay, and while he waited, he made himself think of the whales that had come to them last fall.

Those whales had given enough meat and oil to get the First Men through the winter, with some left for the starving moons that come before the birds and seals return in spring.

Would whales have shown themselves first to a woman who would soon die? No.

Samiq lifted prayers to the whale spirits, asked them to remember the Whale Hunter woman who was his wife. He remembered the questions that had come to him in his last fasting. Here near the North Sea whales were more powerful than any other animal, but to the Caribou People, in the land where they lived, caribou must be more powerful. Did they, then, pray to some other spirit, not the spirits of whales? His father had told him that the Walrus People said there were places without mountains, where a man could see only land or sea, stretching to the edge of the sky. How could the people there pray to mountain spirits? Was there some spirit greater than all? Greater than whale or mountain?

Almost, he lifted prayers to that spirit; almost he asked the help of that one. But suddenly he was afraid. Was he shaman to call a spirit unknown to his people? So instead he turned his thoughts back to the whale spirits, to their powers, and he asked them to give strength to his wife, a Whale Hunter woman, and to the Whale Hunter child she carried.

Three Fish’s face reddened and she screwed her eyes shut, pressed her lips into a thin line over the jagged edges of her teeth.

Those teeth, Chagak thought. Those sad teeth. They had been the first thing she had noticed about Three Fish when Samiq had brought the woman back with him from the Whale Hunters. Three Fish had been boisterous, loud. Even that first day, Chagak had realized that Samiq was embarrassed by his wife, that he held no feelings of pride or joy toward her.

I would have gladly sent her back to the Whale Hunters then, Chagak thought.

“And now?” The voice was the sea otter’s voice, pushing into her thoughts.

“I love her,” Chagak said simply. She blinked away tears. What did it matter if a woman’s teeth were broken, if her words were sometimes too loud? What did those things matter when you knew that her soul was large and filled with goodness?

Three Fish moaned. The bleeding had stopped, but the baby was too early. It would be too small to live.

Then the otter voice said: “Sometimes small babies live. Remember Amgigh. His arms and legs were so thin you could see the blood pulse beneath his skin. And he lived.”

Yes, Chagak thought. Amgigh had grown into a strong man. Lived to give Kiin a son. She turned toward the west, toward the sacred mountain of her long-ago village. She meant to pray, to beg for the child’s life, but her prayer was a command, as though she were a shaman or village chief. “This baby will live,” she told Aka. “It will be strong.” She waited for the otter to scold her, to remind her of the proper way to offer prayers. But then she heard the otter’s voice, and the otter repeated her words.

Samiq walked to the pile of driftwood he had set up as a target and picked up his practice spears. An ache in his belly reminded him that he had not eaten, but he walked back to his place in the gray beach sand, turned, and threw again. He had started by counting: five practice spears thrown once, five thrown twice. He had kept count up to ten and two, but now could not remember the times he had thrown. Four tens, perhaps five.

He threw his spears again. After the fifth throw, he pried the throwing board from his hand. His fingers had stiffened, almost without his notice, during the months since his injury, and now it was difficult for him to force the hand flat. Only the one finger, splinted to direct his throwing board, was still flexible.

“At night,” he said aloud to his hand, to the spirits that directed his spears, “at night I will have Three Fish splint each finger.” But when he said his wife’s name, the sound of it came to his ears like a wail of mourning. “Three Fish,” he said again, this time a whisper. He crouched on the gravel, looked out toward the bay. Women died giving birth, and Three Fish had been bleeding.

“Do not die, Three Fish,” Samiq said. He clasped Kiin’s shell-bead necklace as though it were an amulet. “I have lost Kiin. I cannot lose you. I do not care if you give me a son. Just do not die.”

He began chants to the whale spirits, but felt his prayers drawn up toward something stronger, perhaps some mountain, perhaps the sun. Perhaps some spirit not bound to earth or flesh, some spirit that lived as mystery beyond the thoughts of men.

Three Fish’s labor lasted through the night. When the sun rose, Chagak went outside, faced the east, and welcomed the light. The welcoming was something she had learned as a child from her Whale Hunter mother, something she had lost in the years since the massacre of her father’s village.

She closed her eyes and saw the brightness of the sun as a glow of orange through her eyelids.

Chagak heard Three Fish groan, and so went back into the smoky darkness of the ulaq. She knelt beside Three Fish. She was crouched in the center of the ulaq, clasping a kelp rope that hung in a long loop from the rafters.

Chagak pulled aside Three Fish’s woven apron and ran her hands over the woman’s belly. “The baby is almost here, Three Fish. Almost here,” she said. “Push. Push hard.”

Three Fish clamped her mouth shut and strained.

“I see the head, daughter,” Chagak said. “There is hair, much hair. Push.”

Then the baby came, in one rush so fast that Chagak nearly let the child drop to the floor. “A boy,” Chagak said.

“Will he live?” Three Fish asked, her voice as rough as lava rock.

“He is small,” Chagak answered. She laid the baby on the finely woven grass mat she had made and dipped a soft strip of sealskin into a wooden bowl filled with warm water. She wiped away the birth blood from her grandson’s eyes and mouth as she waited for the cord to stop pulsing.