“Old Mother Moon, grin no more,” Father crooned.
Father was like a new man, dressing quickly—though lopsidedly—in his ceremonial doeskins and goose-bone vest. He then took the bow down from its stand and caressed it.
“I treat it with the bear grease you bring me to keep it supple. I work it with leg and arm on its lower reaches as much as I may. I can string it given time, and can then flex it with my legs. It is beyond me to stand and draw. I could not have done it before my injuries. Proud Scalp, however, I am sure could have bent it. This was made by medicine-men on the upper reaches of the Good River, made for a demon. But it was made by a man and may be drawn by a man. The Mud Waters have among their number a brawny fellow who I am sure can draw this bow. However, until the demon curse is lifted—either by you drawing the bow, or the Mud Waters slaying you—he does not dare.”
Father then spread his legs as evenly as he could and presented the unstrung bow and string in both hands. This was a heavy bow of layered horn, hard wood, spring wood, and sinew. It had made by the most expert craftsmen among the Northern Mountain Cousins, who were, like the men of the Saltwater Grass Country far into the Summer Lands, renowned for plying heavy bows.
Stands-with-demons took the bow in his left hand and turned it over, a year now since he had felt its weight. He had strung it often, seventeen times, but had never been able to draw it to his ear, to do it justice. He looped the cord of greased dear tendon—a cord he had provided a year ago—around the bottom end. He then stepped through the bend that would be created by his half-sitting action and strung the bow, with a little more ease than in years past. That was the easy part. He had, like Father, in his long-spent youth, renowned strength in his legs.
He now held the strung bow before their eyes with his left hand. The shape was that of a half-smiling moon. This device was, however, the dark dream of the damned. One demon had used this to rub out and maim every warrior of a small but proud nation, a nation that was now but an unwanted orphan to their cousins, a focus of morbid reverence to their once fearful enemies. This final thought brought some fire into his belly.
Father then squatted on his haunches and began chanting the demon tongue, those phrases he has remembered and repeated as a mantra since that terrible encounter on the Little Prairie. It just sounded like mumbling to him. But Father thought there was medicine in those otherworldly words.
He shed his bow from its place where it was strung across his back, slipped on his finger skins, and breathed deeply, drawing the string in one easy motion, and exhaling as the bow slowly creaked and his back and shoulders ached. The bow did not stop creaking until his thumb touched his jaw, which was greeted by Father’s whoop of joy.
That was easier than I could have hoped. Father probably just loosened it up, finally. In any event it is unbent no longer.
Father was on his knees crying and rocking, with something across his thighs. Stands-with-demons slid the bow over his back and spoke in the deep voice he had come to be known for, “Come with me Father. Your torture is over. Join me with our cousins in the Smoke-Shrouded Mountains.”
“I would like to, Acorn, but I have promised the Mud Waters that for their indulgence of me and their gifts that should the Bow Unbent leave this place, I shall remain, as an advisor.”
He calls me Acorn, still fiercely my Father, not wanting the demon taking his place. There, an owl hoots above the lowest rise.
“Father, the Mud Waters come. I must go. But when I return, you shall come with me.”
In answer Father held up the demon’s long-knife of steel, encased in a hard wood and buckskin sheath. “Keep this with your quiver. When it comes to tomahawk and club reach you will have a knife to outreach them both.”
He took the long knife and slid it into his arrow case, removing three arrows in the process, placing two between the fingers of his bow hand and knocking the third, a good, broad-headed, bear arrow. He nodded to Father, who was wide-eyed with joy, chanting his demon song, a song of mumbles and lazy words that did, as recited by Father, have some resemblance to what he recalled of the demon’s conversation with him and Mother, seated on the canoe log, as the rest of the people held back in terror, tending to the dead and wounded. He stepped out of the shelter into the clear winter morning, his back to two rivers, facing the rolling, snow-covered, wooded hills through which he had been tracked.
Demon, be with me. For I have not killed a man, only bears, and those are not three bears emerging from the trees above.
