People of the Masks(20)

A quarter moon ago, new rumors of war had drifted in with the Traders. Blue Raven mused as he walked. The Walksalong Clan was part of the Bear Nation. For hundreds of winters the Bear Nation and Turtle Nation had been pushing against each other: The Bears pushing northward, then the Turtles pushing southward, and now, again, the Bears pushing northward. Ever since the Bear Nation began to cultivate crops and live in large fortified villages, they had been forcing the Turtle Nation to flee before them, or to blend their villages with Bear villages. Often this meant that longhouses existed alongside the traditional small conical lodges preferred by the Turtle elders. They all spoke similar languages, so melding was possible, but it was not easy.

Three distinctly different kinds of villages had resulted: Bear Nation villages, which generally had longhouses, like Walksalong; Bear-Turtle villages, like Grand Banks, which often had both small houses and longhouses, and Turtle villages like Paint Rock, with small conical lodges.

The Turtle Nation reckoned descent through the father, not the mother. This created great confusion when a member of the Turtle Nation wanted to marry someone from a Bear Nation clan, as often happened west of Pipe Stem Lake. In Bear-Turtle villages, a young man had to gain the permission of both the mother and the father before marrying their daughter. In Bear villages, women alone arranged marriages. In Turtle villages, fathers arranged marriages. The poor children were left to sort out the conflicting rules and taboos.

Bear-Turtle villages allowed children to choose which clan they wished to belong to, their mother’s or their father’s, but this compromise had resulted in chaos. If a man and woman divorced in a Bear Nation village, the children stayed with their mother’s clan. Their names remained the same, as did their status and future obligations. But if a child had been born in a Bear-Turtle village, and had chosen his father’s clan, he had to leave his mother’s village and go to live with his father’s people. Children too young to choose had their lives decided for them. Fathers generally claimed the boys, and mothers claimed the girls.

This strange mixture of customs, originally intended to maintain harmony between different clans, had become a source of mounting hostility—because people no longer agreed on how they were related.

Incest taboos had become impossible. Last summer a young woman from Walksalong Village, named Pebble, had wished to marry a man, Blackhawk, from Grand Banks Village. Because the Walksalong Clan traced descent strictly through the mother, only maternal kin were forbidden as marriage partners. The Walksalong matrons had approved the marriage. The Bear-Turtle council of Grand Banks Village, however, had refused to allow it. Blackhawk, it turned out, was Pebble’s father’s brother’s son, and in Bear-Turtle villages both maternal and paternal kin were forbidden as marriage partners.

Just thinking about it made Blue Raven’s head swim. No wonder warfare had broken out.

To complicate matters, Bear and Turtle used the land differently. Bear clans planted corn, beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco. While most people left the main village for hunting and fishing camps in the spring and summer, many women and children stayed to tend the crops, weeding, watering, burying fish to fertilize the tender plants, harvesting, storing, guarding the stores. As a result of constant use, every few winters, the soil gave out, and they had to move their villages to find new fields.

Bear-Turtle clans spent winters in their villages, but abandoned their villages in the summers and moved to smaller camps where they fished and hunted, gathered nuts and berries.

The Turtle Nation barely used the land at all. They threw some seeds in the ground and left, spending most of their time hunting and gathering the natural resources. They returned in the fall to harvest whatever the birds and insects had left them of their crops, then settled into their winter villages. Clearly they did not need the soil as badly as their cousins in the Bear Nation. There had been many clashes in the past; houses burnt, women and children stolen, food stores raided. Nothing unusual. Until now. The Traders claimed that the Turtles had vowed they would be pushed no more. They would band together and wage open warfare on the Bears.

Blue Raven had laughed at the very idea. The Turtles could barely get along with one another for six nights at their annual ceremonial gatherings. How, he’d asked, could they hope to band together for a long war?

Jumping Badger had connived and wheedled, using the rumor to convince the clan to vote for a raid to steal the child. When their approval came, Blue Raven had been stunned. Before he could try to reason with people, Jumping Badger had gathered his war party and disappeared into the forest.