WAVERLEY AND I rode past Bear’s place and down the river to Wayah. The wind was coming toward me, so I smelled it first. The fragrance of woodsmoke, cabbage and beans cooking, hides curing, people smells, animal smells. All sorted together and not at all unpleasant but welcoming and comforting. It reminded me of my own membership among human beings, but in a sad distant way.
Coming in, I heard the crack of an axe splitting wood, the clatter of cook pots, laughter, chickens clucking, babies crying, and dogs barking. The accents of their voices sounded someway different from all the chickens and babies and dogs I had previously known. Grey smoke drifted among the trees and hung low over the river, and the last light fell through it parceled into scant downstrokes. People moved about conducting their lives at the end of day among cabins all huddled together in the narrow green cove. A pair of young girls went dragging a big limb of hickory deadfall home for firewood, the points of the branches scratching jittery marks in the dirt behind them like long lines of script.
It began raining slightly, faltering and inconclusive, and then it stopped. Bear’s wirehaired dog, the color of fireplace ashes, went loping across the road without appearing to recognize me and then headed off past the corner of a fenced cornfield and into the woods like he was after something or had pressing duties somewhere in the distance and was late in their performance. Two boys shot long cane blowguns at a mark, and the darts fetched up quivering into a shake set up against a fodderstook. Three skinny brown boys stood thigh-deep in the river, wavering in their stance as their feet slid on the round mossy stones of the riverbed. They made a show of shooting fish with bow and arrow but were mainly roughhousing with one another and were lucky not to pierce their bare insteps with the arrow points. I could see them shivering in the cold water. They were about my age, possibly a year or two younger. Some of the people looked at me and some did not. No one spoke.
At every new sound and sight, Waverley went sideways with his ears pinned back. I talked steadily to him in a low voice to calm us both. We passed on through the village and went a considerable way out the other side until the road became a rocky trail pitching up nearly vertical alongside a whitewater creek toward the high mountains. It was almost dark when we turned and headed back.
Then the sun was gone and Wayah was the color of smoke. The slim poplar trunks fell straight and pale as string hanging from the dark sky. Amber firelight lit unchinked cracks in the walls of the bark-roofed cabins gathered at the side of the black river. It was becoming a chill evening. Nearly everyone was inside. A man loaded the crook of his left arm with firewood from the pile beside his house. The pale angled faces of the split wood shone bright in the final light of evening. I startled a woman pissing by the roadside. She squatted with her skirts discreetly fanned around her and smiled up at me with an open broad face as I rode past. A constant hum of human sound came from the buildings, the sound of a beehive pitched low, not even enough volume to overwhelm the river flow or the hiss of the woman’s relief. A dog barked, and from way up the cove another dog barked in answer. Then they both fell silent, as if other than expressing greetings they had nothing to communicate. The river face was interlocked curves of black glass, motion frozen. Past the village, a last man fished with a cane spear. He stood posed with an arm cocked above his head. A pine torch stobbed into the soft dirt of the riverbank cast a yellow circle of uncertain light around him. One sharp motion and a brook trout, pierced to the root of its bowels, flashed silver in the torchlight.
A LONG BLACKSNAKE lived in an old oak tree down near the place in the creek where I dipped my water. My uncle used to say not to worry too much about snakes, poisonous or not, for they are more afraid of us than we are of them. That sentiment has not been borne out by my encounters with snakes, for many of them would rather fight than yield an inch. This one, as soon as I approached, would rear up from its home fifteen feet up in the tree where the trunk crotched into two fat limbs. It would hiss and flatten its yellow neck like a hood and offer to fight. I would fling stones and hope it did not choose to launch itself down on me. And as further sign of the contempt the local animal world held for me, during that entire first summer, a raccoon chose the second step to the porch as his nighttime place to take a big black oily shit, punctuated with various seeds and berries.
But in fairness I should add that not all animals disdained me. If I turned Waverley out of his corral while I was doing outdoor chores, he would follow me wherever I went, walking with his nose just touching the small of my back. I would cook him horse biscuits at the hearth, and they were just like people biscuits from my aunt’s recipe except that I added a lot more salt and didn’t wash my hands before mixing the dough.
THE LANGUAGE CAME to me fairly suddenly, and it was a good thing it did, for back in that whole white part of the map, linksters were few indeed, there being no more than five people who could render either language into the other. I listened hard to Bear and all the traders passing through the store, and within a few months I felt the words and their pattern begin to come on me and settle in my mind with great ease and gentleness. The words were just there in my mind. I didn’t know how or when I’d gone from tsis-kun, the general word for bird, to ka-gu’, the particular word for crow. From ani-tsila’-ski to awi-akta, flower to black-eyed Susan. And then the proliferation of verb tenses—much more numerous and tedious than in English—began to make some sense, so that before very long I could talk and account for gradations in the flow of time without everything having to be happening right in the present instance.
Around that time, Bear’s jokes began falling within the range of my understanding. Previously the only way I knew he was telling a joke was by his tone of voice and a certain cadence to his speech, and the only way I knew the joke was over was that he began laughing. But even after I could understand most of what he was saying, I still didn’t think his jokes were funny. The characters were mostly animals, and the humor seemed to arise from their behaving exactly as one would expect them to do. Deer wary and frightful, bear ponderous and irritable. I tried to tell him my favorite joke, the one about the hunting dog named Old Blue whose main talent is his ability to hump raccoons to death after they have been shaken to the ground from their tree. Every old man swapping knives and pocket watches on benches outside county courthouses knows it, as do all twelve-year-old boys. Like certain personality traits and eye color and the shapes of one’s fingers, the joke skips generations. It passes over the fathers, and the boys get it from the old men. The joke requires a great deal of careful preparation in the telling, particularly the magic division of its structure into three parts, three hunts. The dog’s owner bragging endlessly to his companions about Blue’s prowess must not be shortchanged. The first two hunts—recounted with attention to wood lore, weather, landscape, attire—end, of course, in the man climbing the tree and shaking down the coon, at which point Old Blue exercises his talents to their fullest extent. The result in both cases—dead coons. On the third hunt, after more excruciating detail, the dog’s owner again climbs a tree to bring down a coon. He shakes the limb. But the coon, an extraordinarily large one, holds on and shakes back. The man slips from the limb. His laconic shout to his companions on the ground as he falls never fails to amuse me. Hold Old Blue.
When I finished telling the story, Bear did not laugh and looked more puzzled than amused. He asked what kind of dog Blue was. Any old kind of dog? A Plott hound? What? And then he had questions as to the name. For his people, the color blue denoted loneliness, defeat, despair, failure, loss. Why did the man name his hunting dog Blue? It was bad judgment and made no sense.
In other words, our two languages are not particularly suited to being rendered into each other. And so if you try to do it very literally, you end up with a lot of foolishness. O Great White Father. Many moons ago. Forked tongue. Firewater. Utterances like those of articulate and very pompous children. In the other direction, we sound equally foolish. All translations miss something. Some miss almo
st everything. Irony. Indirection. Complex metaphors. Straight-faced humor. Damped-down anger. The human touch.
ONCE I LEARNED to talk and understand, Bear had a great many things he wanted to say. A rush of stories poured out of him, personal history and belief. He held a certain disdain for agriculture and was one of the old-style Indians who found hunting and gathering a higher calling, a finer freer way of living than being prisoner to a little plot of tilled ground. Bear considered himself a student of the lives of the predators, and he numbered himself among them. Nothing in life suited him better than a chunk of meat cooking on a switch held over a hickory fire.
But a great upheaval and replacement was taking place among the animals. As the old ones disappeared, disturbing new ones arose in their places. Chickens were not even worth talking about. Bear still thought of them as new birds, provisional pending further evaluation. When he ate one he always expressed his slight approbation in a tone of surprise. Beeves at least had context. They corresponded with the general withering direction of the world in that they were understandable as a sad version of bison suffering under a bad spell of existence, in process of some terrible diminishment. The people would eat the meat of beeves, but generally without much enthusiasm. And as for milk, Bear considered it a nasty business. He never could learn to drink it. Nor were beeves the least bit exciting to hunt. They would stand in your dooryard and let you shoot them from the porch. What kind of hunting was that?
Swine, on the other hand, had no local precedent at all, but Bear talked with a great deal of excitement about hogs. He insisted that white men were kin to swine the way his people were to wolves, and the irrefutable evidence for his opinion was that hogs and white men had erupted into the world simultaneously and equally unexpected. He said the original white men to pass through the mountains were Spaniards wearing crested metal helmets and riding on the first horses ever seen. But despite their swift mounts, the white men traveled with exquisite slowness and enormous effort because they spent more time trying to keep their vast herds of swine and slaves all aimed in the same direction than they did actually moving forward. A few of the Spaniards’ stray pigs escaped, but the people soon killed and ate every one of them. Then, several generations later, the Scotsmen and Irishmen brought hogs in greater numbers.
The old Celts’ most brilliant idea in the direction of animal husbandry was to let hogs run loose in the woods during spring and summer and then to hunt them down like game in the fall. It saved work on the one end and provided entertainment on the other.
Free range animal husbandry began easy enough. Turn some young pigs out into the mountains to eat mast for the summer and hope you can find them in the fall when you’re hungry and they’re fat. The problem was, you could cut identifying earmarks in every possible pattern—smooth crop, half crop, swallow fork, under bit, under keel—and still, come hog-killing weather in the fall, a few rebels would manage to escape. Hogs smart enough to live through the winter multiplied without the interference of man and once again became violent hairy beasts. Given but a few generations, the survivors and their offspring transformed into an old style of swine, their bodies relapsed to a wild pattern. They got long-headed and grew red back bristles and sprouted long yellow tusks. Their temperaments became dangerously militant and bloody. Come some cold wet November a few years hence, instead of walking into the pen of a fat and muddy pink pig, smooth and inert as a river boulder, and burying an axe between its resistless ears, you had to pursue fleet fierce animals with the ability and the will to gut you open as they fled across the highest ridges. You did it at your own peril, like hunting bear or catamount.
And left to themselves in the wild, the pigs became smart. Bear said some of them even learned to catch fish. He swore he’d seen them plow their snouts in creek bottoms to turn up crawfish. In the spring when the redhorse were running, he said he’d seen boars wade out chest-deep and come dragging two feet of fish back to the bank and eat it whole, head to tail, while it was still flipping.
The upshot was, wild boars made excellent hunting. Men chased them with dogs, and it was a bloody business. Wounds and fatalities fell on all three sides. In the fall of the year, Bear could not get enough of it. He had bred boar hounds for many generations of dogs, and he remembered the best one among them with great love all these years later. The kind of love where pairs of tears form in the outer corners of the eyes but do not fall. The dog was the only one Bear had ever bothered to name—and that only barely, for all he could think to call him was Sir. It was a foreign word Bear had learned back in the Creek War, when he had fought under Jackson, and though the whites seemed to put a great deal of stock in it, Bear had never quite got the hang of using it.
Sir, the dog, was stocky, colored muddy yellow, with bright searching eyes. As to personality, Sir was strict and sage and settled, a good influence on his fellow dogs. And he possessed an unerring sense of direction home, whereas any of the others might take off following an interesting scent trail and never be seen again, not even having enough sense to follow their own smell back to the house.
During one desperate encounter on a long hunt up toward Big Choga, Sir had been gutted by a boar with a head the size and shape and color of a blacksmith’s anvil. A swipe of tusks as long as knife blades laid Sir’s belly open from his ribs nearly down to the testicles. Instead of mercifully shooting the dog, Bear cupped the wet pink-and-blue ropes in his palms, spilled them back inside, and stitched the bleeding belly back together with his kit for patching moccasins, which consisted of whang strips cut thin from a groundhog hide and a fat steel needle blistered with rust. Having done all he could, Bear laid Sir under the shelter of a poplar to die and then went on chasing after the anonymous dogs and the murderous boars.
Three days later, Bear passed back across the same ridge dragging an improvised two-pole sledge loaded with dripping hog parts, and there lay Sir, still living, a baleful look in his eye, a deep growl rippling his black lips like windblown curtains. Bear scooped him up in his arms and placed him amid the meat and pulled him home. Sir not only healed enough to go back hunting but was, if anything, more passionate than ever about the chase of hogs, as if every one of their kind that fell into death under Bear’s rifle was Sir’s personal retribution for never shitting effortlessly again.
ON DARK NIGHTS when I lay on my pallet listening to the sounds outside the window, I tried to match the names of creatures Bear had taught me to their various calls and signals. The peeps and creaks of insects and amphibians, a lone night-roaming skunk or possum crashing through the bushes as loud as a family of bears or panthers. Night birds in the trees. Martens and minks and other dark-goers stepping crinkly in leaves. One word bothered me especially. Yunwi-giski’. Bear said it denoted a cannibal spirit, an eater of man. Bear’s people had lived here since some dim elder time and knew this place with an intimacy and depth that could not be improved upon. Why would they bother having such a word if there were no such things as cannibals in the immediate vicinity? Example in point: they had a word for a hog bite. Not two words, one word. Satawa. My opinion was that if hogs are biting you so often that you have to stop and make up a specific word for it, maybe lack of vocabulary is not your most pressing problem. The other thing that struck me is that this was a language with little interest in abstractions but of great particularity in regard to the things of the physical world. If they had a word like Yunwi-giski’, how could there not be its physical correspondent out roaming the night woods hunting for the meat of people?
But at such times, it always calmed me to remember the girl with the silver bracelets, to think of her scent, the way she stepped inside my big wool coat and shivered against me. Two forlorn children finding comfort with each other. More than once I went and buried my face in the coat’s lining, and every time the smell of lavender was fainter than before. As if the girl who had stood within its compass was fading from the world.
WHEN I CAME to the end of the shelf of unsellable books, I began slipp
ing a few additional titles into my orders. Thirty pounds of baking soda, six iron kettles, a mixed dozen of red and blue and grey strouds, shot and powder, five hoe heads, two plow irons and the associated collars and harness, a keg each of sweet and sour pickles, one slim copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther in the Malthus translation.
I was careful. A French dictionary and grammar in one order and Manon Lescaut in the next. If the antique gentleman noticed these oddities, he must have felt that a book now and then was not worth a quarrel.
THAT FIRST WINTER was horrendous. The first snow fell before the leaves were off the trees. Most of the month before Christmas was bitter cold. Mostly I remember that on the coldest nights, long past anyone’s reasonable bedtime, I heated water over the hearth fire and dippered it onto oats and bran and drizzled the mush with dark molasses and carried the bucket out to Waverley in his run-in shed. It was a porridge I would not have discriminated to eat myself. I went out even when many degrees of freeze pushed faceted curls of ice from the broken ground of the store yard or when snow stood deep in the woods. Nights when it was crackling cold and the stars were hard points in a black sky and the snow squealed like mice under the weight of my feet. Such nights, I had to clear Waverley’s water bucket by lifting out a silver lens of ice. I would hold it to the moon to view the fractured light and then spin it away to shatter against a distant black tree trunk. Waverley would bury his snout in the steaming oat bucket nostril-deep and eat with powerful messy suction until he was forced to come up for air. Then he would raise his head, oats in his eyelashes, take a long in-breath all the way from his belly, and then go down for more. All the while, his slow brown eyes looking at me thankful and happy. I would put my hand under Waverley’s blanket of wool batting and waxed canvas, and, no matter how bitter the night, touching his shoulder was like palming a loaf of bread fresh out of the oven.