Ghost Hawk

  Wolfchaser said, “They do not belong here. Yellow Feather wants all the medicine men to ask the gods to send them away.”

  “And if not,” Swift Deer said fiercely, “we shall shoot our own arrows!”

  Wolfchaser looked unhappy at this—but suddenly a deer came leaping toward us and we heard the sounds of the drive, and we were all shooting arrows not at the white man but at deer.

  I did not forget those two faces, though: the determination of Swift Deer and the unhappiness of Wolfchaser.

  We killed twenty-three deer; the share for our village was fourteen. Swift Deer was in charge, fittingly. We all gathered in silence as he cut off the tongue and the left hind foot of each animal, for an offering, and called out a prayer of thanks to Mother Earth and the deer spirit. His voice echoed through the trees and the blue sky above, and there was a silence—and into it came the high harsh call of a red-tailed hawk.

  My eyes stung, and I sent a silent greeting to my father, and to my Manitou.

  We gutted the deer, and tied their forelegs together and then their hind legs, and we carried them home, each one hanging by the legs from a pole carried by two strong men. It took all night and half the next day, but it was a triumphal procession, and our return was greeted with cries of praise and delight. In the crowd I saw Suncatcher’s dark, lined face brightened by one of her rare smiles, and Quickbird was shrilling like a happy child.

  That night, after the skinning and cutting up of the deer, the village had its traditional celebration of the hunt, thanking the Great Spirit for the defeat of winter by spring. We sang, we danced, we ate till our stomachs were so tight that they hurt. For the first time this collection of rebuilt houses, a broken community trying to make a new life, felt happy and whole.

  But One Who Waits, who came back from Yellow Feather’s council just before we arrived, was restless and uneasy. He greeted the hunters warmly, and led the triumphant Deer Dance, but whenever I caught sight of his face afterward it seemed to be looking at something a long way away.

  * * *

  One morning I came bursting into our house with a raccoon I had trapped, so big that I could hardly carry him, and I found One Who Waits sitting beside Suncatcher, talking. Their heads came up, they broke off. They both looked so grave that I knew I had interrupted something serious.

  I dropped my raccoon on the floor and stood there, confused.

  Suncatcher said, “Little Hawk, perhaps—”

  “Let him hear,” said One Who Waits. “It will be common knowledge soon enough.”

  He waved at me to sit down, and turned back to Suncatcher.

  “It is true,” he said. “I think our father Yellow Feather will have us offer help and friendship to the white men, now that our pleas to the spirits have not sent them away. For one thing, he is a man who does not enjoy war, and for another, the plague has so weakened us that, as you know, we have been paying tribute to the Narragansetts for many moons now.”

  “Perhaps indeed the white men will be strong friends,” Suncatcher said. “Though they seem more like reeds than trees, if the winter has killed half of them.”

  I said tentatively, “Grandmother?” I was asking permission to say something, and because I was now a man they both respected that, and looked at me.

  “Yes?” said Suncatcher.

  “The things that they make are strong,” I said. “The metal things, like my knife, and the weapons called guns.”

  One Who Waits sighed. “What have you heard about guns?” he said.

  “That they are sticks that make a loud noise and shoot at you, not an arrow but a fast ball of metal.”

  “Which can kill more surely than an arrow,” he said. “Yes.”

  “My father,” I said, very formal because I was asking a serious question of an elder, “what do the white men want, besides our furs?”

  One Who Waits said, “I think our father Yellow Feather fears that they want the land.”

  TEN

  But the white men were still a long way from our village, and as spring began, life was so busy that nobody had much time to worry about them. We tapped the maple trees, collected the sap in buckets, and carried it back to the older women, who boiled it down gradually over slow fires.

  When the sap was thick, it was poured into wooden molds to harden into cakes of sugar. Quickbird and her friends would splash dribbles of it into the remaining snowbanks, to harden into little sweets for the children. So many children had been killed by the plague that there were only five left in the whole village, three girls and two boys, and everyone spoiled them. Suncatcher said they were the rulers of the village, and she spoiled them as much as anyone. Often I found all five sitting in our house while she tried to teach them to rub hemp stalks into fiber, and told them the old stories.

  When the maple sap was all boiled down into those hard cakes, to last through next winter, it was time to burn the underbrush from the land that would soon be planted. That was a job for everyone, even the children, armed with little brooms for beating back the flames, because the fire had to be kept from eating up all the trees.

  One day, when the powdery black ash lay smoking in the fields, and the medicine man had just finished making the prayers for rain to wash it into the soil, Wolfchaser came running into the village. His voice rang out before we even saw him.

  “The fish are running!” he was shouting. “The fish are running!”

  Each day one of us had been sent on a long journey to the river to watch for the start of the spring run, when the herring and shad and bass come rushing up from the sea to the higher parts of the river where they will spawn. They are one of our many spring gifts from the gods. I loved being on watch, staring into the stream, hoping to be the first to see the flashing silver bodies and to run with the news, but it was Wolfchaser who was the lucky one.

  And soon everyone from our village, and the other surviving settlements too, was camped in rough shelters by the river. The men were scooping up fish with nets and spears, the women splitting the slippery gleaming bodies and hanging them on racks beside rows of fires, to smoke and preserve them for the rest of the year. Fish soup steamed in pots beside their fires, and we ate it every day, along with fish grilled on sticks.

  The dogs stole fish from the fishermen and for once nobody minded, because there were so many. One Who Waits’s favorite dog ate so many that he threw them up—whole fish, because he had bolted them so fast—and then to our astonishment he ate them again.

  Quickbird saw what he was doing, as she came to us on the riverbank to collect another basket of fish. She made a loud noise of disgust.

  “How can you do that!” she said to the dog.

  The dog grabbed his last thrown-up fish and ran away with it.

  Leaping Turtle laughed at the expression on Quickbird’s face. “Animals waste nothing,” he said.

  Quickbird picked up the basket we had just filled with small twitching silver bodies. She sighed.

  “Everything smells of fish,” she says. “Even the air, even the trees. You, me, Suncatcher, we all smell of fish—I shall be so glad to get back to the sweat lodge!”

  Leaping Turtle stopped laughing. He was looking past her, past the women and the smoking fires, toward the camp.

  He said, “Who is that?”

  One Who Waits and Hunting Dog were walking from the camp toward the river, and there were some strangers with them: an important-looking warrior wearing an ornate beaded headband with an eagle feather, and three others.

  Leaping Turtle was suddenly very tense, staring.

  “White men!” he said softly.

  They were two men and a boy, the first white men I had ever seen. They were dressed very strangely, in thick dark clothes from their necks down to their feet, and one of them was wearing a hat like a kind of dark basket on his head. Their skin was not white like snow, but it was lighter than ours—though there was not much of it to see, because both men had a lot of hair on their faces.

  The
boy was dressed just like them, even though he was quite young, perhaps seven winters old. He gazed around at us with his eyes wide and his mouth open, smiling. He was a very unafraid boy; you could tell that if one of the men hadn’t had a firm hand on his shoulder, he would have been running to join our own children—two of whom were already there, peering at him from either side of Quickbird’s deerskin leggings.

  All the men beside and in the river had paused. They stood still, looking. Swift Deer and Wolfchaser came forward to join us; Swift Deer was very wet, and shook himself like a dog. The drops of water prickled against my skin like cold rain.

  One Who Waits called out, “My sons! You remember the one they call Squanto?”

  “Greetings!” said Swift Deer.

  Wolfchaser said, “We greet you!”

  Their voices were dutifully warm, but there was a thread of uncertainty in them that made me feel they had no idea who this man was.

  The important man nodded his head to them.

  One Who Waits raised his voice so that everyone could hear. The fishermen had come clustering round now, and the white man in the hat looked a little nervous.

  “Yellow Feather wishes us to be helpful to these white men,” he said. “He tells us they are friends of our people. They are in care of Squanto, because he speaks their language.”

  Squanto looked round at us all. He clearly knew he was somebody special.

  “They are called Thomas Evans and Benjamin Wakeley,” he said. “They are Englishmen. We are here only a very short time. Yellow Feather wishes us to show them the way we take the fish. I have taught them how to catch eels and how to plant, but this they can only learn by watching.”

  “Perhaps they would like to join us?” said Swift Deer, dripping.

  There was a ripple of laughter, and Squanto frowned.

  “You may continue with what you are doing,” he said loftily, “and that will do very well.”

  Suncatcher stepped forward from the cluster of women beside the smoking fires. She had a small bowl in each hand, and so did two of the others. “May I?” she said to One Who Waits.

  “Please,” said One Who Waits, extending his hand.

  Suncatcher said to Squanto, “We should like to offer them some fish soup. You too, of course. You must all be hungry after your travels.”

  Squanto eyed the soup hungrily, but he spoke to the Englishmen in their own language. They too looked at the bowls, but without enthusiasm; they bobbed their heads politely to Suncatcher but they shook them to Squanto, and talked. They were clearly saying no thank you.

  “They give you thanks, but they say they would like to watch the fishing,” Squanto said. He added, with a hint of scorn, “The white man is not good at eating our food.”

  Swift Deer said briskly, “Come then!”

  Beckoning to the white men, he loped back toward the river, and the others with him. Soon the fishing began again, and Wolfchaser was in the water demonstrating with wide sweeps of his arms the way that our fish weirs worked. These are woven reed mats in the water that make the fish go in a certain direction to be speared or scooped up; it is much like the way we caught the deer on the deer drive. Squanto, translating when he had to, was taking breaks to swallow a bowl of soup.

  The white men were watching Wolfchaser so closely that they didn’t notice when the boy left them and came toward Quickbird and the boy and girl sheltering behind her. He smiled at them. They were Little Fox and Turtledove, and they looked at him solemnly. Then suddenly Turtledove beamed, and she showed him the toy she was holding.

  The boy’s father looked up, saw where the boy was, and called in alarm. Squanto patted his arm soothingly; they talked.

  Squanto called, “Be careful not to frighten the child! Keep him in his father’s sight!”

  Quickbird waved. Turtledove and Little Fox and the boy were playing cup and ball. He seemed to know it already; perhaps all children everywhere play the same games.

  Quickbird looked down at them. “Look how different they are!” she said. “The same, but so different!”

  Little Fox and Turtledove were wearing deerskin shirts and moccasins, because it was still cold even though the spring was coming. If it had been warmer they would have been wearing nothing at all. The white boy was all wrapped up in heavy woven cloths and leggings, and his moccasins were made of some very stiff uncomfortable-looking leather. He was saying something to Turtledove, but of course she couldn’t understand him.

  “Tell him your names,” Quickbird said. “Like this.”

  She took the boy’s hand to get his attention, and pointed to herself. “Quick bird,” she said slowly. “Quick bird.”

  Turtledove grabbed his hand in turn. “Turtle dove,” she said, poking herself in the chest.

  The boy said with some difficulty, “Turtle dove.” He pointed at her. “Turtle dove,” he said again, grinning in triumph.

  Then he pointed at Quickbird.

  “Bird,” he said.

  We went through this with Little Fox, and then the white boy tapped his own chest. “John,” he said.

  We all repeated it. Pleased, he looked round at all our faces—and stopped at mine.

  I was next to him, but much taller, and he hadn’t looked closely at me before. His eyes widened as he saw the ugly scar on my face. They were blue eyes, as blue as the sky.

  He put up his hand and touched my scar very gently.

  “Oh,” he said softly. His voice was full of sympathy, like a woman’s.

  Then he said again, “John,” tapping his chest, and he raised his eyebrows to me in a way that clearly meant, What’s your name?

  “Little Hawk,” I said. I pointed to myself.

  “Hawk,” said John. He smiled at me. “Hawk.”

  Suncatcher came to us with a handful of the very smallest pellets made from boiled-down maple sap, that were kept as treats for children. Little Fox and Turtledove beamed and stretched out their hands, and John watched them.

  I took a few of the pellets from Suncatcher’s hand, and squatted down and held them out to the boy. He came closer, looking at me solemnly with those wide blue eyes, and helped himself from my outstretched palm. We saw the eyes widen as he tasted the sweet maple, and we all laughed.

  So did he. He laughed, and patted my arm.

  “Hawk,” he said.

  Soon the white men came back, satisfied with their fishing lesson, and the boy’s father came to find him. Seen close, he was a man not much older than Swift Deer, in spite of all the hair on his face. He wore the hair on his head long, like a woman. I sensed a faintly sour, unwashed smell about him, though the smell of fish masked almost everything around.

  He put his hand on John’s shoulder, and nodded to us in a friendly way.

  John pointed at me. “Hawk,” he said to his father helpfully. He added something in their language.

  “Ah,” said the man, and he caught my eye and smiled, nodding again. I saw his eyes go to the scar on my face.

  Then Squanto came and took them away. Our people insisted on giving them two baskets of fish, since there were so many, sent by the Great Spirit not just for us but for all people. One Who Waits sent two of the younger men to go with them, carrying the baskets, and I wished I were one of them. I had found an odd, warm excitement in me at having looked into the eyes of a white man for the first time. They were blue eyes, like his son’s.

  Small John turned as they left, and waved to me.

  * * *

  Squanto, said One Who Waits a few days later, had learned the language of the white men by living in their country. He and some others were carried there in a boat to become slaves, and he was there for some years before a white man from a different tribe brought him back again. Nobody seemed to know exactly what happened to him in the white man’s land.

  “When he came back, like Little Hawk and Leaping Turtle, like so many, he found the plague had taken most of his village,” One Who Waits said. “So his life was twice changed. He is useful to Ye
llow Feather, because without him we could not talk to the white men. But—”

  He stopped talking then, and took a thoughtful pull at the pipe we were all sharing. We were in the sweat lodge, back from the fish and the fishing; it was wonderful to feel the sweat washing the dirt and the stink out of our skin.

  Wolfchaser said, “I think you do not like this Squanto, my father.”

  “It is hard to know what is in his mind,” said One Who Waits. “But he has done me no wrong.”

  “He was foolish to let the white men take so many fresh fish from here,” Wolfchaser said. “They surely spoiled before they could eat them.”

  Swift Deer said, “You forget what he said—he is teaching the white men to plant. Those fish were not for eating.”

  And I remembered the pattern that Suncatcher and my mother used to have my sisters recite: fire before hoes, fish before seeds, corn before beans, beans before squash. Here in the village the women were into the second part of the pattern already. Now that the rain had washed the ashes of the burning into the cleared ground, they had dug the soil into little hills with their hoes, made of big clamshells lashed to sticks. Each hill was a big stride away from the next, and in each they had buried several fish, deep enough to keep their smell from the searching nose of Brother Raccoon, who would certainly have dug them up again.

  The fish would rot and feed the soil, and when the leaves on the white oak were the size of a mouse’s ears, the women would plant four kernels of corn in each hill. Some days later they would plant a bean near each seed of corn, so that the bean vine would climb up the cornstalk, and when the leaves on the oak trees were full out and dancing, they would plant squash seeds between the hills. Then the squash vines would cover all the rest of the ground and keep weeds from growing. I always liked to see this pattern; it was a harmony.