The Reindeer People

‘This one is honored that you would be so kind as to share the small and stale provisions of my tent,’ Tillu greeted him formally.

Carp belched politely and rubbed his belly to show the extent of his satiation. ‘Your home has been generous to me.’ His eyes followed Tillu as she bent and pulled her reindeer coat off over her head. She sat on her pallet to draw off her knee boots of fox fur soled with winter-taken deer hide. She pulled out the felt padding made by drying and pounding the tough supple stalks of sedge grass and put it by the lamp to dry. She stood barefoot on the cold packed-earth floor. The shaman stared. She was so different from the short stocky women of Benu’s folk. She was small, as short as they, but to look at her was to see her as a smaller, fine-boned specimen of a larger people. From elbow to wrist and knee to ankle, her long bones were proportionately longer than those of the women Carp knew. The difference made her unattractively thinner in his eyes. Her hair was finer, more brown than black, as were her eyes. The color of her skin was subtly warmer, as was her temperament. But Carp was willing to overlook these flaws, for she was strong and healthy, and almost young. Besides, women were scarce among Benu’s folk, and mostly taken. She would do.

Tillu avoided his gaze but could feel his thoughts. When she had first joined Benu’s folk, he had been more subtle. But Tillu had resolutely ignored his courting gifts and the unsubtle hints from Benu’s wives. She had no desire to be the shaman’s woman. No man had owned her since Kerlew’s father had left her, heavy with the child. She had not missed belonging to a man. Yet, among Benu’s folk, a woman without a man to rule her was but half a being. Women had their fathers, their husbands, then their sons to order their lives and protect them. At first the other women had pitied Tillu, alone in the world. But as time passed, she had become an uneasiness among folk. Could the spirits be pleased with such a creature as she? By their traditions, Carp could not force her, though she knew that if she stayed much longer with this group, the social pressure could become unbearable. Then, if Carp did take her against her will, no one would intervene, but would say that the shaman knew the desires of her spirit guardian better than she did herself.

At the thought, Tillu clenched her teeth. It would never come to that; she was leaving this night. She could afford to be civil, for one last time. She drew a silent breath. ‘And my son?’ she asked courteously. ‘Has he shown you the respects of our home?’

Carp rubbed grease from his chin. ‘The man of this tent has been most gracious to me.’ He inclined his head respectfully toward the pallet at the back of the crowded tent where Kerlew reclined. The shaman’s dark old eyes, flawed by gray clouds, voiced a silent challenge. Tillu took a step nearer her son.

Kerlew lay on his side, staring up at the shadows on the slanting wall of the tent. He wore only his breechclout of yellowed leather. His coarse black hair was unbound and cascaded about his face and shoulders. His gaze was empty, wandering. For an instant, she could almost see him as strangers did, as a boy rather than as her son. His face always attracted stares. His hazel eyes were very deeply set on either side of the narrow bridge of his nose. The closeness of his eyes to one another made his passing glance seem a peering and his stare an unbearable intrusion. More than one adult had cuffed him for that seeming rudeness. His lips were full and his prognathous jaw emphasized this. Small ears were flattened tightly to his large head, nearly hidden by his hair. His narrow hands waved gracelessly in the air, and he stared, entranced, at their shadows as they flowed and danced on the hide wall. At rest, his fingers curled in toward his wrists, and the thumb stayed in close to the fingers. It gave his hands a blunt and helpless look. But now they flapped at the ends of his arms, and their shadows mimicked them. As he dreamed, his mouth moved silently, speaking, and then laughed gutturally at some pretended reply. Anyone else would have assumed that he was feverish and wandering, or in a shamanic trance.

Tillu knew better. This was Kerlew, her strange one, in but one of his own peculiar self-amusements. A child not only homely but almost repellent in his strangeness. That which would not interest a sucking babe held him fascinated for hours. While other children built leaf boats to sail on a stream, Kerlew would stare, entranced, at the sunlight glancing off the whirlpool. Silent and dreaming, he would come home from such a day to be caught by the dancing of the lamp flame or the movement of his own shadow on the wall. He could forget to eat in his fascination with the globules of oil floating in his soup, or stand soaking in the rain watching the circles of the drops that fell on the puddles. Silent, staring, unresponsive to a gentle voice or his mother’s call. But Tillu knew he could be cuffed or shaken out of it and told to bring water, or fetch fuel, or take broth to one who was ailing. Last summer he had all but given up such foolishness, for she wouldn’t let him indulge in it. She had filled his days with simple chores, giving him no time for mindless staring, and telling him it was infant’s play not fit for a boy of nine summers. She had forced him to learn, repeating aloud to him lessons other children learned without words. ‘Kerlew. It is not polite to stand that close to someone. Move aside. Kerlew. Lower your eyes before a stranger. Kerlew. Do not touch another’s food.’ The endless repetitions of rules which children of two summers already knew instinctively, but which Kerlew had never noticed. Slowly, slowly, he had begun to learn and abide by it. But that was before Carp had taken him over. Before the plague of the bear. Tillu sighed at the memory and, as she took in a fresh breath, caught a peculiar odor in the air of the tent.

‘What have you given my son?’ she demanded in a low voice. She stepped forward to touch Kerlew, to check for the fever some of the wandering herbs could induce, but before she could lay a hand on him her wrist was gripped and Carp jerked her back.

‘Do women ask of shaman’s doings? A fine thing indeed! Shall I take up a needle and sew mittens for you while you venture out to bring down meat with a bow?’

‘He is my son!’ Tillu cried in anger.

‘No! He is my apprentice! And he must be trained, and initiated by rites that are not for women to know of. Your time to be his mother is over. I am the one who guides him now. Ask no questions, Tillu, lest the spirits be angered.’ He gripped her, eyes and wrist, and for a long moment she believed. Meeting the gaze of those clouded, gray-on-brown eyes that should not see but did, she felt her soul flutter within her, threatening to leave her body and take her wits with it. She felt the coldness of Kerlew gone from her, the pain of watching helplessly as he changed into someone she feared and loathed. She could smell the fetid breath of the magic, a dark and slinking thing that Carp could call out of Kerlew himself, a thing that would steal her son away from her more permanently than death itself. Then the anger in her hardened to resolve, and cunning. She freed her wrist with a quick twist and turned aside from the shaman and her son.

With pretended docility, she moved to the pots the women had left for her, helping herself to some bits of boiled meat still swimming in lukewarm water and oil. She kept her eyes averted before the old man, thinking quickly as she chewed slowly, and then licked the dripping juices from her fingers.

‘A hunter was born this night in the tent of Rak,’ she announced casually. ‘All the men feast about his fire on tongue and ribs. A fine healthy boy, as large as Elna could pass.’

‘That is a good sign,’ Carp announced officiously. ‘The spirits once more turn their faces toward us. My gifts to them and my hours of dancing have changed their hearts.’

‘So were many saying about the fire,’ Tillu agreed smoothly. ‘Some were saying that Rak would surely gift you well for the health of his firstborn.’

Carp immediately took up his coat and dragged it on. ‘Then they will be calling for me soon, to chant for a new hunter. Such a burden for an old man such as myself. Rak will press me to eat much meat to celebrate a new hunter, and to chant late under the stars, lest spirits come to steal his son before he has a guardian of his own.’ He pulled his hood forward to shelter his wrinkled face. ‘Then I shall have to arise early tomorrow, to read the will of the beasts to determine the boy’s guardian, and to mark him as a hunter with the first blood spilled tomorrow, and to offer the feast of the first kill to the spirits. Uh-yah. An old man must do without his sleep to secure the hunters of tomorrow.’

‘And your apprentice? Will you not stay to guide him out of his trance?’ Tillu pretended unconcern as she spilled a vessel of blood into the remains of the warm oil and water and stirred them into a thick soup. She hung the pot near the lamp to warm it further.

‘There is no need. He does not need the Smoke of the Traveler. I but burned some as an offering. The boy is gifted, for the spirits are ever with him, talking in his ears as loudly as chattering women. He will be a powerful shaman, and all will know him as my apprentice.’ There was undisguised pride in the old man’s voice as he pulled his skin boots up over his bony knees and knotted the thongs around them. ‘My thanks for the hospitality of this house.’

‘My thanks for honoring our cold and humble tent, and seeing fit to share in these poor foods.’ And her heartfelt thanks that he was finally leaving.

‘Uh-yah,’ Carp grunted. He stood a long moment, holding the tent flap up and looking at her. ‘Woman.’ Tillu flinched at that tone, like a dog nudged in a sore spot. ‘Tomorrow you will move my tent. Down here, next to yours. After the ceremonies. I will show you where I want it.’

She managed to keep her eyes and voice steady. ‘Why?’

‘Does a woman question a man when he says he will do a thing? Then a woman has lived too long alone, and has forgotten how the world is ordered.’ He let the tent flap fall. Tillu listened to the crunch of his retreating footfalls. She swallowed her sickness, her mind racing. Soon he would be at the fire, and the men would press him to eat boiled meat with them and drink the rich broth to celebrate the new hunter. There would be chanting far into the night. Carp would be very busy.

She poked at the wick in the oil lamp so that the flame burned lower. The light in the small tent faded, and the soft murmur of Kerlew’s voice ceased. His hands curled and fell to the skins beside him. He would be close to sleep now, full of his own idle stories. Well, let him. The work of this move would be Tillu’s, for the boy was still more hindrance than help with these things. Tillu stirred her blood soup, then took the vessel from its hanging string and drank slowly of the warmth. It gave her strength, and her courage grew.

She began to tidy her tent, eating what Carp had left of the delicacies the women had brought for her, wiping each pot as she finished with it and setting them aside. She set them on their sides on the earth floor of the tent, for they would not stand alone. Their pointed bottoms were designed to be nestled between the hearth stones in a fire. Their sides were rough where pebbles had been accidentally mixed with the clay that formed them. She set them down carefully, taking care not to crack any. She would take nothing that was not hers. She finished eating what there was and wiped her face and hands on a piece of skin. Putting her hands on her hips, she surveyed the task before her.

She wished that she had more to worry about. A little skin case held her sewing needles, awl, and sinew. Another larger bag held her healing herbs and the other supplies she used in treating the various ailments of the folk. A skillfully pegged-together wooden box, remnant of a stay with another people, held her extra reserves of herbs and roots and seeds. Besides that, there were her two cooking vessels made of baked clay and several baskets for gathering. Their sleeping pallets were no more than skins on top of piles of brush gathered each time the folk decided to stop and make a village for a few days. She had two stone lamps and a sack of oil. She thought regretfully of the dried slabs of fish, the pokes of berries in oil, the scored and smoked twists of meat she would have to leave behind. Some she could take, but not a winter’s supply. She could only drag so much. Her wits would have to feed them.

Luckily their winter clothing was new, sewn for them by Reena before the disaster. It would last them most of the winter. She would worry about replacing it when that time came. The tent itself was no more than stretched and scraped winter hides sewn together. The poles that supported it would become the poles of the travois she would drag it on. It was a heavy load for one, but such was the fate of a woman with no man and a son with the mind of a babe.

No! That wasn’t true! She fiercely rebuked herself for the thought. Kerlew was a good boy, a capable boy, and could grow to be a good man, if only Carp would leave him alone. His ‘training and initiation’ only made the boy grow more childish each day. She hated watching him revert to the strange, introverted behavior of his earliest childhood. Carp had undone the work of months. Once Kerlew had helped her gather her healing herbs, had done simple tasks of fetching and tidying. But all that had been changed by the bear.

Tillu mourned the event as she gathered her possessions and bundled them, grieving as if it had been her own son lost. It had been a tragedy, but only that, until the old shaman had cast his shadow over it.

Kerlew was terrified of bears. Tillu had seen to that, and refused to regret it. Mother and son were too often on their own, traveling alone, for her to think of a bear as prey. Her rule for the boy had been simple, the only kind of rule he could remember and keep. ‘If you see or hear a bear, you leave any meat or berries you have, and come quickly to me.’ It had always worked well for them, when they were traveling as two alone. But last spring they had joined with Benu’s folk. The other children had speedily learned of Kerlew’s differences, but nothing had given them as much joy as his fear of bears. It was sport for them to rattle the bushes like a bear, snarling and snorting, so that Kerlew would flee and leave them whatever fish or berries he had painstakingly gathered. Back at the tents afterward, they would gleefully tell how he had run, and how they had enjoyed their ill-gotten gains.

All of Benu’s folk, big and small, had found it humorous. Tillu had tried to believe it did not matter. Why let it rankle, when Kerlew himself would uncertainly grin as they told of it? Trying to tell him that he did not have to flee from the bear sounds made by children younger than himself only confused him. His old rule was too deeply ingrained in his soul. The children growled and Kerlew fled, to be teased later. Reena’s two youngsters had taken the most joy in it. Scarcely a day passed that Kerlew did not come racing home, empty-handed, after an afternoon of foraging. Tillu had hoped they would weary of their sport. Instead they carried it one step further.

It had been close to the end of the summer. Mornings dawned clear and cold, and it took the sun longer to warm the chilled earth. The long days grew short again. Soon the brief season of warmth would be gone and winter would seal the earth beneath her white mantle. The plant life of the land was in a frenzy of bearing. In the shadowed woods grew the lingonberries, dangling red under great leaves already gone scarlet. Blueberries on twiggy bushes ripened on the sunny hillsides, and in boggy places the ground was carpeted with red mossberries growing on their tiny, round-leaved plants. Under the clear blue skies, the children collected baskets of them, to mash and cook into pudding with suet, or store away in leather pokes filled with oil. Small hands and faces were stained purple and red at afternoon’s end.

Kerlew excelled at the monotonous work, crawling diligently over the ground, absorbed in his gathering long after the other children had abandoned their half-filled baskets to play. Reena’s small boys had made no effort at all to fill their vessels, for they had plans that would let them play all day and still return to the village with a trove of berries. They giggled but refused to confide it to the other children.

Kerlew had been picking alone, the other children long gone, when he heard the first of the growls. That much Tillu had been able to piece out from his hysterical account. Then he had seen Reena’s boys stagger from the bush, screaming and choking, red flowing down their faces and hands. ‘The bear has crushed us and clawed us, we die, we die!’ With a terrified howl, Kerlew had fled, racing back to the tents, where he screeched out the news of the slaughtered children. In moments the armed hunters and frantic women converged on the berry-covered slope, to find all the children clustered about Kerlew’s near-empty basket, filling their mouths with the sweet berries as they shrieked with laughter. The red stains had been only the crushed juice of berries smeared on their hands and faces. After the first commotion, all saw the fine jest that Reena’s boys had played. There was much laughter that night around the cooking fires.

But in Tillu’s tent, a shaking Kerlew refused to believe that all was well, that it had been but a jest. ‘The bear got them. The bear got them!’ he tearfully insisted. His breathing would not slow, and Tillu heard the long thundering in his thin chest. His eyes darted about the tent, and he winced fearfully from the shadows he himself made. She put him to bed and urged errimi tea into him, which he drank in gulping gasps. His face was white, his lips red as he panted. And as she knelt beside him that night, silently hating all children but her own, he had sunk finally into a stillness deeper than sleep.

It frightened her and she tried to rouse him, with no success. Abruptly his body began to jerk in sudden, painful spasms like a fish on a riverbank. His face contorted; he opened his eyelids on white eyeballs that stared blindly about. His breath shrieked in and out of his body, and yellow foam gathered at the corners of his mouth. In all her years as a healer, Tillu had never seen the like. She was trying to still his frenzied jerkings with the weight of her own body when she sensed the others behind her.

Carp had pulled her roughly away from her son, his face tense with excitement. ‘He sees, he sees!’ the old man had exulted, and, as if in answer to these words, Kerlew had begun to speak. The voice was not his. He sighed and moaned the words. Tillu’s Kerlew spoke as a child still, in a voice that piped like a shore bird. The voice that came from his heaving chest and snapping mouth now was the deep voice of a grown man. ‘Ah, they bleed, they bleed!’ he gasped. ‘The bear has found their blood! It spills from their mouths, see it drench their shirts. They will die now. They will die!’ The last words came out as a roar as Kerlew sat up on his pallet. His eyes rolled suddenly and were their startling hazel again, their foreign, empty hazel, as awful as their whites had been. He bit his tongue, and the froth that dripped from his lips was suddenly pink.

The children had shrieked and tumbled from the tent, with their frightened mothers close behind. Even the stalwart hunters had muttered uneasily and found reason to leave. But Carp had been exultant, and had sat by the now quiescent boy, holding his thin hand until the day dawned again. The next day he had claimed the weak and baffled boy as his apprentice.

Kerlew had no recollection of his seizure, but rejoiced in the sudden exclusive attention of a man held in such great respect by the rest of the folk. In the old man he had found not only a willing audience for tales of his fragmented dreams, but one who attached great importance to them. He had begun to mimic Carp’s gait and inflection, even his overbearing manner that made every request a veiled demand. He absorbed avidly all of Carp’s teachings about the shaman’s world, learning it as easily as other boys learned to make a spear head or draw a bow. After her first resentment, Tillu had grudgingly told herself that it might be a positive change in the boy’s life.

Then the children had begun to sicken. Reena’s boys were first, becoming weak and irritable, as their bodies spattered out all nourishment. Their bellies swelled, their skin stretched tight over the bones of their ribs and faces. They cried tearlessly, writhing in pain on their pallet. Tillu made root tonics for them, put poultices on their aching bellies, boiled pine needles for tea, to no avail. On the fifth day, they vomited great scarlet gouts of blood that drenched their shirts and bedding. They died.

The other youngsters of Benu’s folk sickened rapidly. Tillu was powerless, and Carp chanted and made sweet smokes to no avail. Before ten days had passed, of nine children there were four, and they but pitiful, staggering shadows of themselves. Kerlew alone of the children remained untouched by it. He no longer cringed and crept about in fear of the older boys’ beatings. Without the other children, he romped fearlessly on the hillsides, gabbling his stories to himself and laughing his strange, broken laugh. Carp watched him and nodded knowingly. Kerlew alone ran and shouted and played unmolested among the tents. Until the day Reena came shrieking to her tent flap, to fling bones and stones at him. ‘Leave us alone, brat!’ she had screamed at him. ‘Cannot you stop rejoicing in what you have done to us? Have not you punished us enough?’ She had voiced the fear the others wouldn’t speak; her husband beat her for her boldness, fearful of what she might bring down on them.

Kerlew had been touched by the spirits; he was theirs.

Carp had helped Tillu to move her tent, setting it up outside the village. Carp had forbidden the others to drive Kerlew and his mother away, saying that the spirits who had chosen Kerlew to be his apprentice would turn against the people that sent him away. Did they want to feel that wrath?

And thus had they lived these last two months, apart and yet united with the people who still ached from her son’s curse. Until tonight, when in her birth pangs Elna had called for Tillu, and Tillu had come. Tillu sensed a healing in this night, as well as a birthing. If she wished, if she were willing to pay the price, she would be a member of Benu’s folk. There would be other women to talk to, the work of a healer to do, the security of having a place within a people. All she had to do was abandon Kerlew to the old Shaman’s grip. She could give the boy to Carp, and stop worrying about him. She would become the shaman’s woman, under his protection. Carp never went without food and clothing. The best could be hers.

She shuddered. She knew she could never bear the touch of the shaman’s hands upon her. No matter how she stiffened her courage to endure it, she knew she would writhe and struggle against him. Better to be mounted by an animal than by one such as him. Better to flee these people, to be cold and hungry. Those things she could more easily stand. But the boy?

She looked down into the sleeping face stained with his father’s wildness. She could travel more rapidly without him. Carp could give the boy an easy life. He would not have to be forced to grow and change and learn. As the shaman’s apprentice, he would not be cuffed for staring, nor mocked for his awkwardness. Benu’s tribe would grow to prize his strangeness, to feel pride in their new shaman. It might be for the best.

Alone, her needs were simple. Since he had been born, he had made her life harder. She had gone from being a girl to being his mother. And he had never been an easy child. Even as a tiny babe, he had cried and struggled uncomfortably in her arms when she tried to cuddle him. No one would blame her. Not even Kerlew? She smiled ruefully. A season from now, he would probably be unable to remember her. What mother could love a child like that? Who would choose to be bound to such a burden? Her fingers reached, to push back a lock of his rough hair.