A blue jay called close by, answered by another cry. She shied instinctively as it broke from cover and swooped above her, and swore as the screw top popped off the canister and water slopped all down her trouser leg.
Her aunt said nothing when she got back to the cabin, just took the carriers from her. Agnes waited to see what chores she should do next. Aunt M set the water down and slowly walked over to where Agnes stood by the door. She reached up and plucked something from the crown of Agnes’s head and from her shirt collar. Then she opened her hand to show two blue feathers. She smiled.
‘It’s time. Come with me.’
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13
Looking Glass Lake, day two, afternoon
A fire burnt on the far side of the yard. Flames leaped transparent in the sunlight, causing the air to waver like a mirage. Flat rocks lay heating at the ashy white centre of the hearth. The heat was intense as Aunt M led Agnes past the fire towards a low dome built half into the hillside.
‘Take off your clothes,’ Aunt M instructed. ‘Go in.’
Agnes did as she was told, stripping down, then she moved the stick that held the skin flap in place and stepped into a dark space smelling of earth and pungent smoke.
The floor was marked out with white quartz rocks laid in a circle, radiating from a central boulder like the spokes of a wheel. Low wooden platforms, strewn with blankets and animal skins, lined the walls. Agnes seated herself on one of these. She had never taken part in a sweat lodge ceremony before, never been in a sweat lodge. It was rather like a sauna, both in principle and function, but she had a feeling that whatever went on inside was likely to be a little different from anything that happened at the local health club.
Sweat-lodge ceremonies were not traditional to the Haudenosaunee, but Aunt M was not averse to adopting and adapting the practices of the other peoples. The ways to wisdom were many. She did not see one religion, one nation or one people as having a monopoly on the truth. Her own path had led her to different teachers from different traditions. She had brought what she had learned back with her, introduced it into her practice and used her medicine power to help, to serve, to teach those who came to her. If the sweat-lodge ceremony was Lakota, what did it matter?
The flap pushed aside again. Aunt M came in, using a forked stick to push a white-hot ash-flecked rock into the centre of the circle. She manoeuvred it into a depression just below the white quartz boulder. Then she left and returned with another and placed it on the other side, and then others until there were six in all. One for each direction, one for the earth and one for the sky.
She returned for the last time and addressed Agnes.
‘In here I am Kanehratitake, Carrying Leaves, and you are Karonhisake, Searching Sky. We left Miriam and Agnes with our clothes at the door. D’you understand me?’
Agnes nodded.
‘Good. Now. Speak when I tell you, do as I say, and don’t interrupt. Is that clear?’
Agnes nodded again.
‘Very well. Let’s get started.’
Aunt M unwrapped the sacred pipe and filled it with tobacco from the otter-skin pouch. The pipe was short, the bowl and stem of polished black stone. It was of an unusual type, and very old. Aunt M lit the pipe and offered the smoke to earth and sky and the four directions, then she offered the pipe to Agnes. Agnes took a puff, trying to hold the smoke inside her, but it made her eyes water and she had to try hard not to choke on the thick acrid stuff. Her aunt rested the pipe in the centre of the circle and pinched herbs from the bundles suspended from the ceiling. She cast the leaves on the hot stones where they writhed, curling and withering before igniting in tiny puffs of fragrant smoke.
The lodge was heating up. Aunt M let the door flap down and covered the entrance with a blanket. They were engulfed in a blackness so total that Agnes could not see her hand in front of her. All she could see was the hot stones shining crimson in the darkness, suffusing the quartz boss at their centre, filling the rock with a deep fluid rose-pink glow.
Aunt M sprinkled water with an eagle feather and the temperature rose still further until Agnes didn’t know if she could stand it. Sweat broke out all over, plastering her hair to her scalp, rivuleting down her body, dripping from her eyebrows, pouring like tears all down her face. She sat up, feeling that she would faint, and was hit by another wave of heat as Aunt M sprinkled water again.
She was failing the test before it had really started. She wanted to shout into the suffocating steamy blackness, tell her aunt that she could not take it, could not stand it. She was not ready. All this was alien and terrifying in some deep way. She wanted to plead, to be allowed to leave, but the words would not come out. Her throat constricted, pushing her voice back down to her chest, and her tongue lay heavy in her mouth.
When they started, Aunt M had been as gruff and down-to-earth as she ever was, but now she was different. Agnes had not known her like this before. She was speaking in the old language and she sounded like someone else, someone who would not like being interrupted. Silenced, Agnes stared at the central quartz stone. The pink glow was waxing and deepening; the surface flickered, mothlike shadows playing across it, as if something was moving deep within it, testing for a place to get out.
Her aunt spoke on, intoning and chanting, calling on the spirits until the words seemed to hang in the air, dancing there like dust in sunlight. Behind the words came a drum beat, deep and clear, as constant and near as the beating of blood in the ear. The turtle rattle scattered its sound to the four directions and bare feet thudded on the ground, going round and round in a ritual dance.
Agnes made one last effort to get up and leave, but it was too late for that. She could no longer resist what was about to happen. Any strength that remained was draining from her. She could no longer sit upright or keep her eyes open. She collapsed backwards on the bed, the slippery silk of animal fur and the soft roughness of woollen trade blankets against her skin. She felt at one with the heat and darkness, as if she had become part of it, or it had entered her. It was as if she had no weight. Her limbs felt loose at the joints. At pelvis, hips, spine, the bones, muscles and sinews seemed to be disengaging one from another. There were no limits to her. She was unravelling from the inside, becoming nothing, part of everything.
Agnes closed her eyes in the heat and steam of the sweat lodge. She woke to air that was dry and cold around her. She was no longer Agnes, or even Karonhisake, Searching Sky. She was no longer American or Haudenosaunee. She was English, and her name was Mary, and she woke to find that she was dying, freezing to death.
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14
Mary’s story
The snow had stopped falling and the wind had dropped to nothing. I woke in an ice cocoon and lay, still curled, surprised to be waking at all. The sky arched above me, diffused to milky blueness by the thin crystal crust formed by our breath. It was like being inside an egg.
I woke alone and listened for the wolf’s return. Where had she gone? Why had she left me? Without her I would die, was surely dying already. I could not move, this ice cave would be my grave. To save me and then desert me – the thought struck me cruelly and set tears forming to slide down my cheeks and glaze my face. I was about to give up, consign myself to my fate, when I heard a voice speaking as if in my ear:
‘Be of greater faith. Do not doubt that I love you. Just because I cannot be with you, does not mean that I love you less.’
Then I heard something else and not from the realm of the spirit. It was coming towards me. I thought it was her, coming back to me, but then I huddled in my pit, holding my breath as if even breathing could cave the roof of delicate crystal and give me away. No dainty-stepping wolf would make that sound. The snow creaked and creaked again with the steady tread of man. Not many, but more than one. There were no calls and shouts as the tread came nearer. Except for their heavy trudge, they moved in silence. Each step was accompanied by a swishing sound of powdery surface snow. Not boots. Snowshoes – such as the Indi
ans wear.
My ice shell cracked and broke. I looked up, expecting to see the face of a painted stranger, and I saw Jaybird looking down at me. He stood wrapped to the eyes in raccoon skins. I didn’t know how he came to be there, how he found me in all that white wilderness, but I knew that it was him.
My face was a frozen mask. I could not even smile back as his sloe-black eyes widened in gladness. I stared back, thinking that my mind deceived me, that this must be a dream. One last glimpse of the life I wished before the cold claimed me and I went into the final darkness.
The arms that reached down for me were real enough. His white teeth showed in a grin as he dropped the edge of his fur cloak and bent to pull me from my icy sepulchre.
He knelt, brushing the snow from my face, then he shouted and another figure came up behind him. His grandfather, White Eagle, wrapped in a bearskin. He stepped forward, his lined face cracking into a smile. He bent down, touching my face, my nose and cheeks. Jaybird pulled his fur-lined mittens off with his teeth and tugged at my sodden sheepskin mitts. He held my hands between his own. His grandfather pulled off my boots and examined the flesh of my hands and feet as he had felt my face. He said something and stood. Jaybird tenderly fitted my hands into his warm mittens and rubbed my bare feet, breathing on them and chafing them between his hands.
‘What did he say?’
Jaybird smiled, ‘He says she cared for you well.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘Last night Grandfather dreamed he met a she-wolf in the forest. He rose before first light and told me to prepare for a journey, to bring furs and spare moccasins and mittens. We found her waiting in the clearing below the cave. She turned, wishing us to follow her, and she led us to you.’
‘How can that be? She kept me from freezing. She was here with me. I don’t understand.’
‘There are many things that are hard to understand.’
He continued rubbing my feet until the blood returned. The pain was so acute that I cried out.
Jaybird smiled. ‘That is good. The feeling returns like fire and ice together, but it is good. Here. I brought these for you to wear.’
He reached inside his furs and brought out a pair of winter moccasins, with rabbit-fur lining and fitting like boots to the knees. They were warm. He must have carried them tucked next to his skin. He put them on for me, deftly fitting them on my frozen feet.
I had been utterly numb; now returning sensation brought a flood of emotion quite as painful as the burning I felt in fingers and toes. I clung to him and he wrapped his fur mantle about us, lending me the warmth from his body as I sobbed out my relief and joy. He wiped the tears from my face and tucked the raccoon robe around me, then he turned to build a fire.
‘They will see the smoke.’ I feared what would happen if fire brought men from the settlement.
‘They will not come in this.’ He nodded to the drifts all around. ‘They would sink to their hips. They do not have shoes for snow.’ He set me by the fire. ‘Do not get too close. The blood must return slowly.’
He crammed snow into a little iron pot and set it to heat. He reached into a pouch and brought leaves which he crushed and dropped into the heating water. When it was ready, he poured it into a clay beaker.
‘Drink that and eat.’ He gave me a strip of dried meat pounded with fat, pungent and sweet with juniper and berries. ‘Chew it slowly.’
He left me then to help his grandfather cut branches and saplings to weave together into a carrying frame, the kind the French call a travois. When it was ready, they wrapped me in the furs, the raccoon cloak and the great bearskin, tucking them carefully all about me, and strapped me to the frame. They kicked snow over the hissing fire, burying it and smoothing the ground around. They strapped their shoes back on and White Eagle swept a branch over the clearing so no one would know we had ever been in it. Then Jaybird fixed the burden strap across his forehead and pulled me along.
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I was cold to the very core, even the furs did little to warm me, but the jolting rhythm of the journey soothed me and I must have slept. When I woke it was towards evening. The first stars were appearing and we were at the base of a great cliff face. I recognised it as the place of their winter cave, but I could not see how we would get to the level of it.
‘You must leave me here. I’m too weak to climb –’
‘We cannot do that.’
Jaybird cut me off and he and his grandfather stood, heads cocked, listening intently to a sound borne on the wind, one howl answered by another, distant, then near.
I started in fear, thinking the noise might be made by dogs from the settlement.
‘We must get you up there.’ Jaybird began to undo my strapping. ‘Settlers are not all we have to fear. Mohawks have been raiding deep into our territory. They may reach as far as here. Each moon, they grow bolder, even in this time of great cold.’
A yelping howl sounded again, this time very near. I froze as a grey form emerged from the trees at the edge of the clearing. It was a wolf, and a big one. As she came closer, I realised that I knew her. She must have followed us here. She sat on the snow, yellow eyes watching. White Eagle spoke to her, his tone one of deference, humble thanks and reverence. He took a pinch of tobacco from his pouch and threw it up into the air, so that the wind would carry it to her.
‘What is he doing?’
‘He is thanking her. He offers tobacco to her because she is spirit, manitou, very powerful and special to you. To be chosen by such a one is to be greatly honoured. Grandfather thinks ...’
But I did not need it explaining further.
I looked at her and the yellow eyes blinked and shone bright in recognition. I did not need White Eagle to tell me who she was. This was my mother. Just as my grandmother could go into a hare, so she had taken the shape of a wolf to save me yet again from the malice of men. I inclined my head and uttered my thanks, sorry that I had ever doubted her. She gave one last low whining cry and then she turned and melted into the shadows of the forest.
Night was coming on apace and the cold was getting bitter. Jaybird hoisted me over his shoulder and started up a narrow path, zigzagging across the face. The way was steep and stony and sometimes the path disappeared altogether and he was forced to climb from rock to rock. I feared many times that my weight would be too great for his strength, that he would drop me, or that he would slip and that we would both tumble down into the abyss, but he kept on climbing, slowly and methodically, and at last we approached the lip of the cave which was their winter shelter. His grandfather must have taken another path, for he was there before us and helped pull me onto the rocky ledge.
The cave was as I remembered it. A wide mouth opened in the mountainside and led into a chamber so large that its margins were lost in shadow. White Eagle crouched down to feed fir twigs and cones into the red embers of the fire, adding more wood as the kindling caught and setting stones to heat.
Jaybird carried me to a low bed spread with furs. He removed my moccasins and gloves. I tried to struggle up. It was not fitting that he should do this for me, but my fingers were next to useless in their clumsiness. I could not unclasp my cloak, let alone manage the hooks and buttons and fastenings on my other clothes. I told him to leave it, but he shook his head.
‘They are wet. It is necessary.’
He stripped me of my sodden outer clothes, but I told him that I could manage the ties on my undergarments. He turned his back as I finished undressing. I slipped naked between the thick furs and he brought more. I thought I had begun to thaw, but I was suddenly taken by violent chills and fits of shivering until my teeth were rattling.
Jaybird wrapped hot stones in deer skins and slipped them into the bed with me. White Eagle came to look at me, then went through to another chamber. He returned with a white bearskin and threw it across me; then he took small bunches of herbs and birch-bark folds of powders from his pouch. He pinched leaves from the dried bundles and crumbled them into a black
trade kettle, then he emptied the contents of several packets. I could smell the spice of sassafras and powdered sumac as he stirred.
He tasted the infusion and sweetened it with honey; then he withdrew, leaving Jaybird to tend me alone. He brought the hot drink to me. When I could not hold the cup and my teeth clashed against the rim, he held my head steady and tipped the liquid down my throat. Still I could not get warm. Jaybird replaced the cooling stones with newly heated ones. He tucked the white bearskin more tightly round me. The bear who owned it lives far to the north and has the thickest fur of any creature; Jaybird told me this, but it could have been a threadbare blanket of the meanest stuff, for still I could not get warm.
Jaybird built the fire higher and higher until the flames leaped. Animals and men leaped with them. The figures carved and painted on the walls seemed to be moving, stepping down from their places, until the cave was filled with gods and spirits in an endless round. As they danced, so they chanted, a song with no end and no beginning. I was gripped by a feeling of such awe and amazement that my shivering broke out anew.
Jaybird was at a loss as to what to do, how to tend me. Finally he gave me the warmth of his own body. He came into the bed with me, fitting his limbs along mine and giving me his heat. It was then that the drumming started, beating slow, then beating fast; slow, then fast. As did my blood. So did my heart.
The drumming grew faster and faster and a flute sounded, sometimes slow, shrill and plaintive, but then playing higher and higher, up and up the register, until I could scarcely stand it. Then the playing broke off. The antic dance stopped. The world ceased its spinning and I was no longer cold.
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