I nodded my head and repeated my words.
She pulled at her ears, looked at the ooze left on her fingers. I feared the jerking again but this time she shook her ears of river. “Too much water,” she said with a shaky smile and wiped her ears with her fingers. “I do not remember being in the water,” she said to me and then to Shard, “or that Asiam came swimming too. Who took my memory?”
My eyes dropped, uncertain about what to tell her. “You slipped,” I said. “Maybe you hurt your head when you fell.”
“You were not pushed?” Buck Brush asked.
“No!” I said, alarmed that any would think that of me. “We walked, and then she fell.”
“Maybe,” Wren said. “But it is like I am when Wuzzie says that spirits talk with me. Tired after. Did the spirits speak?”
“It took Flake and I to bring you out, and we are tired too,” I said. “Any would be tired in that water. Look how fast it flows.”
“Did they, Asiam?” Shard asked, but his voice carried no blame now. Across Wren’s body he reached for me, lifted my chin with his fingers until I searched his face. He dropped his hands. “No one needs to know you interrupted what the spirits said,” he told me, his voice as soft as Flake’s ear. “Were they speaking when she slipped?” his question almost a whisper.
Tears pooled behind my eyes. “I tried to sing the songs,” I said my voice catching in a sob. “But I do not know them!” My teeth were chattering, and I held myself, felt my body rock back and forth. “I could not let her go, not in the flooding paahoona. I chose to save her, not to anger, not to interfere. I do what I should do.”
I would have cried for Wren’s life if I had not made my choice. Now I cried for mine and what I feared would happen when I heard the next words, words that carried danger and marked the peril of my choice.
THE SEVENTH KNOT
THE WIND KNOWS MY NAME
You belong where we allow you, where I say you can go,” the voice neither woman nor man said. Still shaking in my fear and cold beside the river, I knew without looking who spoke to me.
It is the announcement of my distance that will always be, perhaps the moment when Wuzzie determined that I would leave. It seems strange now when I think of it, that the same event that let me see how much I wished to stay should be the moment that marked the beginning of my leaving.
“I will tell you when the spirits talk. I will tell you what they say and where they send you. It is where I say,” Wuzzie said with biting words. His eyes darted. “Where I say,” he hissed, “not where you choose to take yourself. What makes you think you are wiser than spirits? Not to interfere—that was your instruction.”
“She’s mine to teach,” a welcome voice said. “Or have you forgotten the black wehe you wear?”
Lukwsh pushed her large frame beside Wuzzie, set him off balance with her body and her challenge.
Wuzzie sucked in breath, clenched his teeth together. He steadied himself but stood silent.
I wondered what power Lukwsh had to keep Wuzzie from doing harm as she handed a blanket to Shard and placed one over my shoulders, then hovered over Wren. With touches so tender I could almost feel them, she put her fingers to Wren’s face, gently caressed her skin as though making sure it was warm and responded to life. Lukwsh turned to me then, held me in the dry blanket.
I wondered why she risked her power to honor my poor being with the comfort and safety of her arms. Shard pulled the blanket tighter over Wren’s shivering, but he watched Wuzzie.
“She made a poor choice,” Wuzzie said to Lukwsh.
“Wren might not think so,” Shard said, surprising me with his defense.
“And I don’t,” said Lukwsh. “Spirits cannot talk to people under water, so her being there was not their will. Asiam knows this.”
Wuzzie grunted and spit in my direction. “She knows nothing. Spirits talk wherever they wish; water babies ask for things. Who knows if Wren was what they wished? Maybe they honor her by calling her to them. Maybe if she had answered without interruption she would be remembered always. Maybe her going with them would have kept them from taking away fish and ducks from the rest of the people. Who knows what visions Wren could see if her dance had not been stopped by this one.”
He turned his back then and ordered Wren carried along the east river bank to the river’s mouth and our camp at the fresh lake.
Lukwsh let him give the order. I wondered if she considered what Wuzzie said as she walked beside Wren.
I decided to tell no one of the words that told me what to do.
I became aware of a presence at my side. Shard said nothing, but he reached for my hand and rubbed the back of my fingers with his thumb. He looked straight ahead, his black eyes set like stone to the future. But the gesture and his choice to walk beside me warmed me for longer than the moment.
“I have decided,” Lukwsh said later. Flake sniffed at my hands as we sat, waiting for her decision. He tugged gently on my fingers with his teeth, his eyes sparkling in play.
“My friends come, Sunmiet and her husband, Standing Tall. From where I once lived, where my mother’s people stayed long ago. When they arrive, we will do more than dig for roots and fill ourselves with each other’s company. We will celebrate with a name-giving.”
“For Wren?” I asked.
“For Wren, who lives when she might not.” Lukwsh smiled. “And you, her sister.” She ran her tongue over her teeth, beneath her upper lip, raised her eyebrows in delight. “We will celebrate with e nanooma and see how Grey Doe and Wuzzie live with that.”
A sister! She had called me Wren’s sister! I could not believe what gift she gave me, how full her words had made me feel. So much excitement bubbled from within me that I felt a flutter in my stomach and a soreness.
“You swallowed paahoona paa.” She looked me over, her eyes searching. “Fix peppermint tea. For Wren, too,” she added, putting her hand on her other daughter’s forehead.
In between drinking tea, we began our assigned tasks of making treasure baskets, sifting seeds, lacing sagebrush cordage into nets and tightly woven shirts, racing time to be finished before the flower festival. By midmorning of the second day, the sun beaded up small balls on the sagebrush, and with wehe, we scraped clear ooze into baskets, rolled it between our fingers, and laid the soft balls on the edge of the low fire, roasting them to a perfect chew.
“Don’t forget to gather some pond moss and set it to dry,” Lukwsh shouted to us. “For Sunmiet’s baby.” She was always thinking, planning ahead.
To the sounds of dogs barking and birds lifting by the thousands from the lakes, Shard brought fresh fish that were dried by hot fires. He smiled at Wren and me, differently I thought. Stink Bug trapped squirrels far from the lake in the sagebrush and rye grasses and brought them back, flinging them to the ground, a frown carved into his face. Even Grey Doe found herself weaving tule mats at a rapid one-arm pace, her thin braids tied together in a knot over her chest to keep from being woven into her mats.
It was a grandmother’s place to participate in Wren’s name-giving as she had for Stink Bug and Shard when their voices changed. The people still called each other by their familiar names, but that did not take away the honor of a special naming. From the way Grey Doe enjoyed her efforts, allowed a smile to creep across her face, I knew the moo’a must not know of Lukwsh’s plans for me.
Lukwsh grew more concentrated in the night as she knelt before the fire chipping obsidian into wehe of many sizes, the soft chink-chink of her blade a song heard while I drifted into sleep. In the morning I saw the pile of thin flakes as dark as moonless night, noticed her fingers and palms crossed like deer trails with slivers of cuts, and felt sad to be part of the reason for such pain.
“Some pain is given freely,” she said when I mumbled something about her hands. “As a gift.”
She shared a thought new to me, one to put into a treasure basket for safe-keeping.
“You make too much,” Grey Doe complained on th
e third afternoon. The sky wore the color of snow water, and the fire felt good near my feet. I drank more hot tea, but my stomach still ached. “It is, after all, a name-giving for only one child.”
She checked the fire, motioned for me to bring more sweet grass for smoke. I heard her say behind me, “At least you have found a good use for that one, putting her to work for Wren’s day.”
I noticed Lukwsh did not answer.
I noticed too that Wren did not dance.
Instead she moved from place to place as I did, without the strange tapping and hand washing, without the delays. She did not drop and shake, at least had not. Something had interrupted her dance. But she also shook her head as if trying to rid her ears of bad water. And she did not always answer what was spoken—unless her eyes watched the speaker’s lips. I chose not to talk of it, wondered if others noticed, wondered what it meant.
The day before the flower festival, three horses arrived to the serenade of barking dogs. Flake’s bark was steady and high pitched. His shiny black body rolled with effort, short neck hair and thick tail raised. I placed a hemp rope around his neck, pulled on him, told him it was fine. He chewed on the rope, stood beside me, and barked less.
The two who sat tall astride sound mounts were a handsome pair. A third horse, smaller, was ridden by a boy somewhat younger than me. A child’s head poked out from behind the man, a girl’s. Painted shaptakai rested on blankets behind the riders. Flake began to bark again. The adults dismounted amid much hugging and giggling.
Lukwsh lifted one, two chubby children from the horses and nuzzled the nose of the third in a hooopu she removed hanging from a leather strap over the horse’s withers. The infant’s wide eyes searched the newness of this place with the sounds of birds and ducks and dogs and strange people scurrying about. A small circle of rawhide, crisscrossed with sinew like a spider web, dangled from the brace of the hooopu, caught sunlight and dreams.
Lukwsh’s friend was a woman of finer features, wore a prettier round face.
“You have come in time,” Lukwsh told her.
“To be eaten by your dog,” Sunmiet said, walking wide past Flake and me with a sway that reminded me of a gentle breeze moving through the tree tops. Her soft deerskin dress bore the scent of smoked wood; her waist showed the thickness caused by the births of three children. Thick, dark braids rested on still-high breasts.
“He is nothing,” Lukwsh said of Flake. “All bark and some whoo-whooing. But you are in time—”
“For the giveaway,” Wren told her, squeezing into the circle of activity, pulling on my hand as she moved. “For my naming!”
Lukwsh asked: “Uhamasu tukapu?”
“We ate on the trail,” Sunmiet answered, shaking her head, her shiny braids moving like whispers around her soft face. She looked as though she had just bathed, though they arrived at noontime after many hours of dusty riding.
From my place beside Flake, I watched Standing Tall dip under the neck of his paint horse. In silence, he tended the horses, removing the shaptakai from their backs rather than hug and touch hands to faces of friends. His black rock eyes, one drooping, turned to stare at Lukwsh now, Wren, then me. I felt his knowing—what everyone knew—that I did not belong.
I wanted to tell him that I would belong. That my longing to leave could be gently brushed aside by the tenderness of a mother’s blanket, the shared joys of a sister’s smile, the warm hand-touching of a friend. “My marking does not matter,” I wanted to say to him. “If I choose, I can stay.”
“I could have taken more time,” he said to Sunmiet, his words sour. “I am a fool to be here with brothers of enemies.”
“Oh hayah!” Sunmiet said. “It is an honor easily given to be present and accept Lukwsh’s namaka. She is of us, has made her way here. And we stayed long enough at Canyon City. Such strange men with their talk of gold. You are not afraid to be with brothers of those foolish men or with those small yellow people in little caps. You call them what? Celestials.”
“If I must be in company of strangeness, it would be better there than here,” he said, still staring at me.
“You would let old wounds keep you from—” She shook her head in some disgust before dropping her eyes.
Standing Tall’s face scowled.
“And the flower festival,” Wren continued unaware. “You can help make the dancing place.”
“It has been a long time since I saw one of those,” Sunmiet told her gently, turning her back on her husband. “Ann has never.” She brought the child to stand in front of her, help her through her shyness. Sunmiet’s smile dipped slightly as Standing Tall walked away, heading for activity near the Silvies without a word to her.
“Some things do not change?” Lukwsh said, shifting the cradle board to one arm and wrapping the other around Sunmiet, pulling her to her shoulder. “It is like a drink of spring water, seeing you. Here,” she said handing the cradle board to me. “The girls will take Aswan and Ann and—what is this onga’a’s name?”
“Owl,” Sunmiet said and glanced at me.
“You must tell me all the gossip,” Lukwsh said. “I know nothing.”
“Not true in this lifetime,” Sunmiet said, eyelashes fluttering in delight. She placed her slender fingers over her mouth as though preventing too much laughter from escaping.
She scooted Ann toward us with her hands. The boy chose to tag after his father.
I held Owl, the baby. I noticed the leather wrap and caught the faintest scent so common with a small one.
Wren wrinkled her nose.
“The pond moss is dry and in the bag,” Lukwsh said.
She and Sunmiet giggled, and Wren and I exchanged a look, noticing how easily we were relegated to the caring of children instead of the excitement of preparations or even eavesdropping on our elders.
Wuzzie could have been chosen. He attended the event, but in recent months, his feet had taken him away to the Modocs and bands south and east. He brought back talk of mind hunger, of an angry land used up by grazing cattle, of raids and wars, of army wagons loaded with food keeping the people in some places from starving—but with a price. When he returned, he spent less time talking. He watched more from a distance.
At first, he wanted me close by, ordered Lukwsh to send me in the mornings to tend his fires, move my fingers in his herb bags as he said. He corrected me with his strange eyes and sharp words and watched.
Then he drew away, and the times I was asked to help him mix his herbs and brews or hold the reflecting glass while he plucked his brows grew fewer than the mudhens left in spring.
He would leave, ride away, his short legs almost straight out from the sides of his gelded horse. He returned with words about dead people being brought to life or about tibos being whisked away so the people could have their lands back.
“All is to happen through the dance,” he told Grey Doe, words I overheard, words with strange meanings.
As I look back and consider all that happened next, I see now: Wuzzie did not wish me in his presence, even before I rescued Wren. Perhaps if he had been chosen, given the honor some said later was due him, what happened might have been prevented. But that is wandering in the past, something a wise woman knows better than to do.
So Lukwsh chose Thunder Caller with his loud, clear voice to be the speaker at the name-giving.
Thunder Caller was a headman whose views were often asked for, and it was an honor that he agreed to announce Wren’s name. Lukwsh had not asked Grey Doe’s permission for either the caller or the name.
“It is my choice,” she said when Grey Doe asked. “My way to discover a new Wren.”
I wondered if she had changed her mind about my place in the naming. Perhaps she could find no flower name that fit a marked child with brown eyes and pale hair.
On the day assigned, everyone gathered in the grassy area stomped down by dancing feet. In the center of the circle, Lukwsh’s baskets were stacked like woven treasures, filled to overflowing with namaka
and items for the meal. Some sat like hungry wolves around a carcass; others smiled and waited patiently, their eyes shining at anticipated delights. The scent of roasting fish and duck drifted near the circle. Older onga’a waddled about, clinging to their kneeling mothers, tumbling over their fathers’ shoulders leaned back in rest. All dogs were banished to beyond the circle, but Flake sneaked through, sniffed, sneezed, and found an old deer bone to chew near Shard’s feet.
“Our sister Lukwsh has invited us,” Thunder Caller began, standing up on his toes. His voice gave equal weight to all words, did not drop until the very end. “And we should honor her wishes to give a name to those she chooses so the wind will recognize this chi-ld.” He dragged the word “chi-ld,” making it two words, dropping his voice, announcing a pause.
A murmur of approval stirred through the gathering, for Thunder Caller was a man as old as Wuzzie but wiser in the ways of some things. He stood much taller, solid, like a tree unwilling to let the wind push it over, but top-heavy too, as his chest pushed out over his waist.
“So the wind will know fierce little Wren, who the river gave back,” he continued, his voice thundering across the marshes, above the din of birds arguing for nesting space in the advancing dusk. His thick braids held only spider webs of gray that showed white against his shirt decorated with porcupine quills and dyed seeds tied into designs of grasses and ducks and blue water.
“In the language of Lukwsh’s people,” Thunder Caller continued, “her new name means ‘the Curlew’s Beak.’ But it carries two meanings, both a bird and a flower. Two sides, as Wren has. Two worlds she walks in. The Wren that is a bird that shoots toward the stars. And one that dances with spir-its.”
Silence marked approval, and it greeted Thunder Caller who stood behind Wren and announced her name: “The wind will know her now as ‘Shooting Star,’ ” he said in Lukwsh’s Sahaptin language. “Shooting Staa-ar,” he repeated in Paiute.
Wren, Shooting Star, stood still as a blue heron in the center of the circle. Her face flushed. Lukwsh had pushed her gently into the circle as though she had not heard at first the calling of her name.