He ran on feet so heavy they were light. He felt nothing but the spinning of the world—Grandfather had said that it spun through a deep, perpetual night. Even his heart pounding in his jaw and scattering blood across the snow from his gaping mouth and wounds was but a distant drumbeat that belonged to some other.
He crested the ridge and saw a phantom—black as night and flitting among the trees—off to his left. It vanished and he felt—no heard—the gasp of a breathless woman.
No thoughts were his. No visions of hope cast up across his mind’s eye. He was an animal, a killer in the moment, his nape hairs prickling with the ecstasy his body felt for the hunt, even if his mind was deeply disconnected from Mother Earth.
He could see her tracks, where her little feet pushed through the snow off to the East and North, toward the Pushing River lands—a snarl escaped his lips as he crouched and came on toward the great tree behind which this enemy woman skulked. He would capture, he would rape—he would kill!
A whimper came from behind the massive oak in response to his inhuman, slathering snarl, made all the more grotesque by his tongue lolling to the side through the ruin of his mouth, above a broken jaw. He was sore hurt, felt it now in his bones that he was maimed, was adopting the unreasoning fury of a wounded bear.
He lengthened the stride of his low stalk, ready to sprint left or right, to pin her by one leg to Mother Earth and then have his way. His crimson drool reached to the snows and dragged as his hot breath hissed from his ruined mouth. He stopped to sniff the air, to determine the level of fear of her who shook and whimpered on the other side of the tree. When he sniffed though, his nose—apparently broken like everything else—let out a terrible snort and a globular mass of bloody mucus hit the snow.
At the sound of this beastly snort the figure of a woman leaped out from behind the tree with a curse that sounded like a sneeze. She was short and stout, in her middle years—almost too old to bear children—was dressed in the blue-painted doeskins of a Pushing River maiden, though she should have been long married, and was holding a baby in its bundling board before her face. The baby was not yet named, only weeks old, having been borne to Mouse Owl and Nuts-under-corn just before the first big snow.
He rose to his full height, trying to look into the woman’s eyes, but she raised the baby so as to prevent eye-contact. He spoke in the Longhouse way, through globs of blood and spit, “Give me the baby and I shall give you a quick death.”
The woman then lowered the baby and held it between her breasts, breasts, of a giving aunt. Her face was, well, ugly. Her left eye looked off to the side, and she had a mole that sprouted hair on her right cheek. She curled her lips in a snarl, “I will not give The Baby to you, warrior. The Baby needs a mother. Are you to nurse The Baby? Your people are dead—not a live tit in that burning camp.”
Kill her. She does not deserve rape.
He must have glared for she fell back with a start and held the baby close, and began yammering, “I trailed behind the warriors. The Whiteman called Oak coughed on my baby and it died, like the elders are dying from his evil cough back up on the Pushing River. It was his baby. He used me—no warrior wanting a crooked-eyed girl, not even a girl anymore. I came to save a baby, to steal away a baby that would have been mashed against a tree. The woman gave The Baby to me before she was killed—she knew I was a blessing!”
She was becoming frightfully agitated, her wild eye looking up in the sky and her other boring into him as she screeched, “I am Bundle of the Pushing River Bears. I am a good mother—the best, the fiercest! I will nurse The Baby and make it fat. I will bind your wounds and make you well. I will spread my legs and make your baby!”
He was dumbfounded, the urge to kill having fled like pigeons in autumn. The snow was swimming like the waves of the Big Salty, his ears ringing, Mother Earth spinning off into the Everdark…
The scream of the woman came like a screech from an eagle. He had been fading, pitching forward to fall. The crazy woman was now kneeling beneath him holding the baby up into his face, “The Baby says, ‘do not fall warrior!’ The Baby says, ‘Stand!’”
He straightened his knees and looked down into her crazed eye, as the other one seemed to look for enemies—or ghosts, or whatever disobedient eyes looked for. She then stood straight before him and snarled with a kind of crazed power in her voice, “You are a Hairless One, a son of The Sun! You are too strong to die. The Whiteman called Oak could not kill you! Your sons will spring from my belly like full-grown sun-colored warriors with no hair! We will people Mother Earth—I say this, by The Baby!”
We need to name the baby, lest I go insane like her.
The insane woman was dancing in tiny circles in the knee deep snow, holding the nameless baby up to the sky. He still felt malice toward her, being of an enemy people, and having accompanied those who slew his people. He could barely stand to look upon her face. He had never had time for a wife, just wanted to be the warrior; had fled camp on the hunt whenever Mother suggested a wife. This crazy, ugly woman’s insistence that she would be his wife infuriated his natural independent urge, so he struck back, with a cruelly that he regretted even as he said it, “You are ugly to the eye, and crazy to the ear. I will not mate with you, Pushing River Woman. You may consider yourself my sister.”
She looked at him with a great expression of hurt in her face, a hurt that was held deeply in her eyes, both the obedient straight-gazing eye and the disobedient star-gazing eye. A tear rolled down from the crazy eye and the mean eye narrowed. She gathered herself, kissed the baby on the head, covered the little head back up, and said, “I would have been the best wife you could hope for, ‘man without a people!’ So be it. Bundle does not beg—not any longer. I will be your sister, but, I am the elder. According to custom you must agree to the man I choose for a husband to me, and father to The Baby.”
He slurred, “No Pushing River dog will you marry.”
She smiled, “Those dogs passed up their chance for Bundle. It’s a Southern Mountain Man for me—or a Whiteman with a houseboat and riding animal. I will be your loyal sister. I say this before old Mother Moon and Thunderer, by The Baby!”
She held the baby in the air as if Thunderer needed a closer look and glared this way and that as if the very trees were witnessed to some sacred pact. They stood there for some time, until the roar and crackle of the flames behind them and the hideous song of buzzard and crow came on the smoky breeze.
Hush, last of the Sons of Fierce Woman—for the baby was a girl—nodded his agreement and began to trudge mindlessly to the East, toward the sun that was just then rising behind the gray cloudbank. Bundle followed him by his side, never a step ahead, never a step back, always looking ahead, and at him, with that one crazy eye.
There has got to be a blind Whiteman I can leave her with while I begin the rubbing out of her kind.
With one eye on him and one eye on the endless trees and snows, Bundle said, in her odd way, “You are easily read. Do not think that you can escape my powers—particularly now that we are siblings. You take me to the Whites, to leave us safe with the houseboats while you rub out the people that cast me off and rubbed yours out.”
I knew she was a weird woman—a spirit eater.
He continued on in silence, but not her. “You here that, Baby, Uncle Bald One shall avenge us. We are the perfect little family.”
I am surely cursed.
