Split Feather Page 15

  So why couldn’t I see it through my fingers?

  It was a mystery, and delight.

  “Eat your soup,” the old woman said.

  I ate my soup, a thin broth of fish and seaweed and salt, wonderful, wonderful. My hands shook as I held the bowl to my mouth, spilling broth down my front in a thin trickle, and I cried out in distress, flinching away from the old woman’s hands. But she only wiped my face with a bit of cloth, and pulled the bearskin up to cover my nakedness, and patted me on the head.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” she said. Her voice sounded funny, as thin and watery as the soup had been.

  “Are you crying?”

  “Yes,” she told me.

  “Why are you crying?”

  Her old hands, wrinkled and strong as tree roots, pushed me back into the soft bed. “Sleep now,” she said, shushing me. “Sleep.”

  She sang, and I slept.

  She cooked, and I ate.

  She sang again, and I slept again, and this wheel kept going round and round, round and round forever, till one morning I woke to more than the feel of hunger gnawing at my belly. I woke to a memory.

  “Siggy,” I told her, clutching the bearskin to my chest. It was important that she believe me. “My name is Siggy.”

  “Yes,” she agreed, and the darkness shifted away from her smile. “You are Siggy.”

  I felt inordinately pleased with myself, but more thoughts pushed up behind the first, clamoring for attention, and they hurt my head.

  “Sleep,” she told me, and I slept.

  * * *

  Another time I looked around the little room, the stark white walls scribbled with smoke, the fire and the bones, and herbs drying on a rack near the fire. She sat on a little chair next to my bed, and a tiny little thing flashed and danced in the firelight as she frowned at her hands.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her.

  “Sewing,” she replied, holding up a garment for me to see. It was a pretty thing, a caribou parka the color of rain, and at the hem a line of black bears dancing. How had she caught the spirit of Bear like that, and why?

  “Who are you?” I whispered. She must be a very great person, to wield such powerful magic.

  “I am Catherine,” she answered, and her eyes shone as she looked at me.

  “Catherine.” The name tasted of mint tea and blueberry akutaq. “Catherine.” And then, “My head hurts.”

  “Sleep,” she sang, as she always did. And I obeyed, as I always did. It was who we were.

  * * *

  When next I woke, I knew who I was.

  I knew who she was.

  I knew. Everything.

  “I’m tired of sleeping,” I said. “I want to get up.” My voice was quavery and thin as Raven’s. I hated it. I hated the smell of my flesh and the rasp of the bearskin, I hated the white walls and the black smoke and the skulls and the fire. I hated the way the old woman’s lips pressed together, and the smell of fish soup. I hated the air.

  “So get up,” she said. She stood and stretched, laying the finished garments to one side, and took up a pale walking stick which rested against the wall next to mine.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out.”

  “I want to go, too. I’m tired of sleeping.”

  She pushed the door open just a crack. The wind was howling outside, scraping its claws on the outside of the hut, wanting in.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” I wasn’t sure, but I’d remembered enough about myself to know I was stubborn.

  “It’s warm in here, and safe. There’s food.” She opened the door a bit wider, and I could see a thin sliver of sunlight. I wanted that sunlight, more than I’d ever wanted food, or air. Or even coffee.

  “I’m sure,” I told her again.

  She shrugged and slipped out the door, but not before I saw her smile. I hesitated, frowning, and wondered if I’d just been tricked.

  Then I decided it didn’t matter. I stank.

  Rolling the heavy bearskin off, I swung my legs over the side of the mattress, grabbed hold of the old woman’s sturdy chair and pulled myself upright. I felt weak as a newborn kitten, and I smelled like three-day-old roadkill on a hot day.

  There was a basin of lukewarm water by the fire, and bear-fat soap, and a soft cloth that might once have been part of a flannel shirt. I bathed as best I could—which wasn’t anywhere near enough—and sat naked by the fire, hanging my hair to dry. Not because I was weak, I told myself. I just didn’t want to go out into the cold with a wet head.

  When that excuse had dried up, I pulled on the odd clothing the old woman had been sewing. A pair of hide leggings, surprisingly supple and comfortable. A soft white shirt, pullover parka… and a pair of purple fuzzy socks. Where the hell the socks came from, I couldn’t figure out.

  Tall mukluks, which ruined me for any other boots the second I’d slipped them on. A trapper’s hat and long mittens made of thick white fur, and I was set. Bundled up like a firstborn child, sweating under the weight, I stood before the door, ready to go out.

  Or maybe not so ready.

  In here, as the old woman had said, it was cozy. There was fish stew on the fire and a warm bearskin on the bed. I could take all of these clothes back off, I thought, and snuggle under the furs, and go back to sleep. As much as I’d hated this little room just moments before, now it seemed perfect to me, warm and snug and safe. Out there… I had no idea what was out there. What little bits and flashes I caught swimming through the murky waters of my memory didn’t inspire me to confidence, not at all.

  Leaving that small, safe place was the most difficult thing I ever did. I could have stayed inside, by the fire, let the endless days and the old woman’s songs wash over me and through me until there was nothing left but peace. Instead I chose pain, and grief, and life. I pushed open the door and toddled out into the bright sunlight and the…

  Holy fuck, it’s cold.

  It wasn’t just cold, it was cold. The few strands of hair that had escaped my giant fluffy hat were still a bit damp, and they froze solid as dry spaghetti before the door thumped shut behind me. I sucked in a quick breath through my nose and—I shit you not—my nostrils froze shut. The little line of exposed skin between my eyebrows and my lips stung like I’d been slapped, and my eyeballs felt like they’d been freeze-dried.

  “What the fuck?” I exclaimed, but it sounded more like “wuddafug,” and I spat fur and tried again. “Wuddafug?”

  The hat got into my mouth again. Totally not worth it.

  When I’d stopped trying to cuss, and figured out how to breathe through my mouth without inhaling fur, I took a good look around.

  Had I thought it was bright out? Only in contrast to the dark interior of the hut. Ice, ice and more ice, a bit of powdery dry snow, the little hut behind me, and, hey, more ice. Clouds the color of old bruises hung low and still against the dead-bone sky, but there was no sun above, none that I could see, and it felt as if none had ever shone on these frozen shores. No sun, and no moon or stars either. This was a world of ice carved from a hole in the ice, and no warmth could ever reach this place, nor light, nor hope.

  Wonderful, I thought. Hell has frozen over, and I managed to find my way here. Then I noticed—my demon was gone. Guess this wasn’t her idea of the perfect vay-cay. I smiled at the thought, and looked down to see a single set of footprints in the snow, leading away from the stone hut.

  Stay here? I thought. No use in that. Go back inside? Hell with that. Onward it is, then, Siggy. Heartened for no reason other than that I’d made a decision, I followed the old woman’s tracks.

  * * *

  The old woman wasn’t far from the hut, walking up and down the frozen shoreline. Her long gray braid hung down beside her face as she walked, swinging back and forth with every step like the pendulum on a clock, tock-tock. Her feet shuffled noiselessly through the snow, though occasionally she’d step on the very edge of the ice and it would shatter wit
h a sharp crack like a rifle shot, and I’d jump.

  I watched her at her task for a while, and then I joined in, though I had no idea what we were doing. There were a few oddments on the beach—a headless doll, a broken whiskey bottle, the corkscrew from a Swiss Army knife. She passed these by and kept searching, tock-tock, tock-tock.

  “What are you looking for?” I asked finally.

  “I have no idea,” she answered, never slowing or looking up.

  “Well, then how will you know when you find it?”

  “I found you, didn’t I?”

  I could hardly argue with that.

  We walked up and down the beach, up and down, tock-tock. The sky never grew any lighter, or darker, and the bruise-dark clouds never moved, but eventually the old woman sighed and turned back toward the hut, her finding-bag still empty.

  I followed. What choice did I have?

  Tock-tock.

  * * *

  “What is this place?” I asked her one day. Or maybe it was the same day—it was impossible to tell.

  “Adlivun,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if it was the name of the place or a name she was giving me. It kind of felt like both. “No place. Every place. In between. Take your pick.” And she bit the piece of sinew she’d been holding, breaking it in two.

  “Why are we here?”

  With those words came a faint dizzy feeling. I’d sat with her like this before, hadn’t I? Asked her this same question? She smiled and dropped the sinew into a basket of water.

  “You are here because you have lost your bear soul, and you can’t go anywhere without that. Not to the land of the living, and certainly not to the land above. You can’t go there with part of your soul missing, now can you?”

  I rolled my eyes. “That’s not even an answer.”

  “Do you want an answer, or do you want the truth?”

  I want a translator, I thought sourly. Someone who speaks old people. “If I’m here because I’ve lost my… bear soul… why are you here?”

  “I’m here to help you,” she answered, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. She stood, and stretched, and pushed the hood back from her face. Something, some trick of firelight and shadow, some expression in her eyes or the way she stood, something stirred in me a memory as deep as knowing my own name. I knew her.

  I knew her.

  “You’re Catherine,” I breathed. “You’re my grandmother.”

  “Well, of course I am, dear,” she replied. “Who else would go to Hell and wait for you, besides your grandma?”

  23

  For three days, we searched for dried dung and dead wood. I never saw any animals, or any sign of animals save these piles of dried dung, and I asked Grandmother about it.

  “Hutlani,” she said, and she wouldn’t say anything else.

  Once I found a living tree, an oddly twisted willow with roots spread out like a woman’s skirts. When I went to break off a branch, the old woman let out such a screech that I thought the End of Times had come again. She grabbed me by the ear and dragged me back to the hut and yelled at me in a fierce whisper, but when I asked her why it was wrong to break off so much as a living twig in this place, she still only said one thing.

  “Hutlani.”

  Then we had to sit quiet and still for the rest of the day, as apparently something might have been attracted by the sound of her shrieking, and she glared at me the whole time as if I’d been the noisy one. When I asked her what we were supposed to be so afraid of, she hissed at me, sssssst, and added for good measure, “Hutlani.”

  I was getting reeeeally tired of that word.

  Oh, and rules. So many rules. When we ate fish, we had to put the bones back into the river, which meant breaking through the ice. If we ate fish at night, we had to keep the bones on the windowsill till morning, and then take them out. There was no opening the door after dark, no letting the fire go out, no letting any part of any animal touch the floor. There was plenty of food, though when I asked her where it came from, she would answer only…

  …you guessed it…

  “Hutlani.”

  Once we’d gathered a sufficient quantity of materials, Grandmother built little fires in a wide circle all round the outside of her hut. There was a lot of muttering and measuring and re-measuring and more muttering involved, but by then I’d stopped asking questions and just went along with the program. Catherine, it seemed, was a bossy, stubborn old woman with no time to waste on fools.

  I liked her a lot.

  Sometimes in the evening, as we ate our meal by the fire, she would tell me stories. Stories of Raven, of Willow Grouse Girl, and Sedna—who, as it turned out, I’d met. Of girls who married Raven in disguise, of girls who were bears in disguise.

  “In the beginning all animals were like us,” she explained. “In the Distant Time all animals could take human form and shift back again, and they could talk. Some of them still understand Athabascan pretty well—that’s why you never speak their names if you’re going hunting—but only Owl can still talk to people. And Raven sometimes, but he’s a slick one. You gotta be careful with Raven.”

  That much I had figured out already.

  So many of her stories dealt with girls who were lost, girls who had been tricked, girls whose identities had been stolen from them. I knew she had been trying to tell me something without saying it directly, but I wasn’t sure what, exactly.

  “Grandma?”

  “Hmm?” She was arranging the fish’s bones on the windowsill so that he could see out.

  “Grandpa said… he said you didn’t give birth to my mom. That you found her.” I held my breath. I hadn’t half believed the story when Grandpa told it, but it was kind of hard to hold onto disbelief when I was sitting in a hut in the Underworld, trying to keep my voice down so it wouldn’t attract evil spirits.

  She pursed her lips, and I expected a hutlani, but I got a short, sharp nod instead. I let out my breath in a long whooosh.

  “So she was, what? A shapeshifter? Some kind of bear-woman?” My heart was pounding. “And what does that make me? Am I evil?”

  “Evil? You?” The old woman laughed, and clapped a hand over her mouth to hold in the sound. “Evil, you. Silly girl. You couldn’t be evil if you tried. You’re so good you glow, didn’t you know that? It’s why the demons keep attacking you. They want to put your light out… pffft.” She pinched her fingers together as if snuffing out a candle.

  “I’m good?” That was almost as shocking as the idea that I was half bear. “Wait… you know about the demons? So they’re real?”

  “Of course they’re real.” The fish bones having been arranged to her specifications, she sat down by the fire again, pulling an elaborate shawl over her shoulders and reaching for her knitting basket.

  Yeah, grandmothers still knit when they’re in the Underworld. Don’t ask where the yarn comes from… you know. Hutlani.

  “And all this time I thought I was crazy.”

  “Oh, you’re probably crazy. All the best shamans are, you know. Shamans, artists, musicians… and writers. They’re the worst.”

  “Wait… shamans? Now you’re telling me I’m a shaman?”

  “You are, or you will be.” She shrugged, bone needles clack-clacking as if they were laughing at me. “Nobody who spends time in the Underworld can just go back to their old life, you know. When this is over, you’ll be a shaman, or you’ll be…” She bit the yarn with her teeth and muttered the last part. “Drrd.”

  “Or I’ll be what?” I asked, though I knew better.

  “Dead, of course,” she said. “Eaten by the denaranida. Here, untangle this for me, your eyes are better than mine.” She threw me a ball of purple yarn.

  “The denawhatnow?”

  She held up a hand, and I could read it in her eyes.

  Hutlani.

  * * *

  When the last fire was lit, we stood in front of the little stone hut. I was shivering, and not just from the cold, though the cold was
enough to convince me that this was no place for humans, alive or otherwise.

  Grandma had impressed upon me the importance of staying quiet, not drawing attention to our presence with noise or unshuttered windows after dark—and above all else, never venturing outside in the night for any reason. Strange claw-marks and paw-marks and the occasional spooky-as-shit sounds gave me plenty of reasons to believe her warnings, and yet here we were, outside in the dark with a hundred little fires lit like beacons all around us.

  “So, we’re not hiding from the wicked spirits now,” I said, “we’re calling them in for dinner.” Shifting from one foot to the other, I peered out into the darkness. I’d never known how dark dark can be without stars, or moonlight, or anything.

  “We’ll be okay as long as we stay inside the circle of fire,” she replied. “Probably.”

  “Probably?” I stared at her.

  “Maybe.”

  “Are you laughing at me?”

  “Probably.”

  Now I knew where I got my smartass attitude. “Are you going to tell me why?”

  Grandma took my mittened hand then, as she hadn’t before, and held it in both of hers. Her eyes above the fur ruff were serious.

  “Siggy,” she told me, “you’ve lost your bear soul. And your yega is such a tattered mess, it’s a wonder that demon of yours isn’t wearing you like a coat.”

  “Yeah, uh, okay, I’ve lost my bear soul. I’ve been getting along okay without it, right? So just send me back or whatever, and I’ll be good. There’s no need for all this hutlani stuff.”

  “You don’t understand. Most people have two souls… the yega, and the nukk`ubedze.”

  I blinked. Yeah, there was no way I’d be able to pronounce that.

  “Every animal has a yega, but only humans have the nukk`ubedze, and people like you, people that come from the people-clan and an animal-clan, sometimes you have a third soul. You have a yega, and a nukk`ubedze, like other people, but you have a bear-yega, too, like your mother’s people.”

  “So, two out of three ain’t bad, right?”

  “It’s bad, Siggy. It’s very bad. It would be bad enough if you were just missing your bear-yega, but your yega is a mess, torn up like little bits of paper, and most of it is missing. You’ve had a bad life, Siggy—bad things have happened to you, and every time it was like a little piece of your yega tore away and went into hiding. Maybe it came here, maybe to some other place, but those bits of your soul can’t find their way back. Not without help.”