“It is the price you must pay for now.” Masked Owl’s Dream words echoed in his memory. “Be worthy of me.”
“Well? Are you coming or not?” Little Needle was dancing from foot to foot. “Barbarians came with him! Six of them! They call them Wolf People, but they just look like real people, except different. You know, in their hair and what they wear. But then White Bird and your cousin, Yellow Spider, are dressed like them, too.”
Mud Puppy looked around, wondering where to put his cricket. “All right, I’ll come.”
“How can you be so unconcerned?” Little Needle almost shouted it.
“Because my cricket might escape!”
“Sometimes I think everyone is right, you’re nothing more than an idiot!” With that Little Needle turned and sprinted off into the darkness.
“He just doesn’t understand, does he?” Mud Puppy asked the trapped cricket as he set the cup down and laid a piece of polished slate over the leaf to keep his catch in place. Then he turned and ducked out into the warm spring night.
The Serpent
I watch the boy with my eyes squinted.
This evening, for the first time, I think maybe he’s not the half-wit people say he is.
There is a very old story my people tell in their lodges on cold winter’s nights—about a bridge guarded by animals. You see, we believe that there is a narrow log bridge that spans a deep canyon on the trail to the Land of the Dead. That bridge is guarded by the animals each person has known in his life. If the person treated those animals well, cared for them, and helped them, then the animals will be happy to see him and will guide him safely across the bridge to where his ancestors wait in the Land of the Dead. But if the person treated the animals badly, if he shouted at them or hurt them, they will chase him across the bridge, tearing at his heels with sharp teeth, or stinging him, or clawing his head with their talons, until he loses his balance and falls into a rushing river of darkness and is lost forever.
As I study the boy, I wonder.
He listens very attentively to everything alive, and often to things like windblown leaves that I’m fairly certain are dead.
But I could be wrong.
Innocence is the opposite of Truth, isn’t it? That’s what I’ve always thought. But perhaps it’s just the price, and maybe that price is too high.
The thought makes me smile.
Perhaps if I sought my solace in innocence rather than Truth, I would see what the boy sees.
I vow to watch him more closely.
Three
The scar tissue that crisscrossed Mud Stalker’s mangled right arm ached and itched. That boded no good. Mud Stalker, Speaker for the Snapping Turtle Clan, son of Clan Elder Back Scratch, ran idle fingers over the ridges of hard tissue. He had been but a youth when an alligator clamped itself on his arm and began thrashing the water into bloody froth. He had been insane with pain and panic, halfdrowned and vomiting water, when Red Finger had beaten the alligator off with an oar and pulled him from the red-stained water. It had nearly killed him, infection eating at his flesh, fever burning his souls from his body. It had taken several turnings of seasons to recover—and crippled his arm for life.
As the itchy feeling increased, he scowled, thinking it a sign. It was bad enough that White Bird had returned. It was worse that so many people were coming down to the canoe landing to see his latenight arrival. Mud Stalker stood between the beached canoes at the water’s edge and watched the people trooping to the landing. They carried cane torches down the slick incline from the high terrace above the lake; the yellow flames bobbed with each step. In the inky night the light might have been a Dream creature that flowed down the packed silt embankment.
Mud Stalker turned his head, staring out at the silent black waters where the canoes waited. Four of them, solid craft, floated less than a stone’s cast from the shore. They reminded him of fingers stretching out of the night, monstrous and black. The canoe’s occupants were standing, their feet balanced on the narrow gunwales. Over the babble of excited people, Mud Stalker could hear the grunting and clucking sound of the barbarians’ tongue as they talked. What could have possessed White Bird to bring them down from the north?
“Are you sure we cannot land?” one of the foreigners asked in Trade pidgin.
“Not until we are given permission.” That was Yellow Spider, another youth from the Owl Clan. Unlike White Bird’s family, Yellow Spider’s had declared him dead just after the Winter Solstice.
Mud Stalker turned his attention to where White Bird stood in the rear of the canoe. Even across the distance, he could see the young man’s teeth shining as he smiled, cupped hands to his mouth, and called, “What news?”