Ghost Hawk Read online

  I was amazed and delighted. And from the look on my mother’s face, I could tell not just that she too had never seen this knife before, but that she felt sure it would help me survive.

  I said, “Thank you, Flying Hawk. I will keep it as safe as my tomahawk. And I will bring it back to you.”

  I put the knife in my belt. I was ready. I went to the baby’s cradle and touched his smooth round cheek in farewell. He gave a small sigh but he did not wake. Someday, I thought, all this would be happening to him, too.

  We went out into the cold grey morning. My father and I strapped on our snowshoes and put our long bows over our shoulders. My mother kissed me on the forehead and handed my father a scarf of soft doeskin and a long deerskin strap. I smiled at her, and at Quickbird’s anxious face, and they were the last things I saw before my father bound the scarf across my eyes, tying it securely behind my head. Then he put one end of the strap into my hand; this was how he would lead me into the forest.

  “You will come back a man,” he said.

  My mother and Quickbird said together, one voice strong and one small and sad, “You will come back a man.”

  The strap tightened round my hand, and in my new darkness I followed my father away from home.

  * * *

  We walked, I suppose, for half the short winter day. It was fairly easy at first, once I made myself stride out in confidence that my father wouldn’t let me run into anything. Because our people had been burning and clearing and farming this land for ten years, there was good space between the trees, free of vines and scrub. Though I was walking in darkness, I could feel the breeze on my face, and hear the chickadees calling and the soft crunch of our feet through the snow.

  After a long time branches began to catch in the crisscross sinews of my snowshoes and in the top of my bow, and gradually my father slowed our pace. We must have reached the wild woods, where men had never yet cleared the land and the new trees grew up through a tangle of old ones that had died and fallen down. The only paths here were those of the deer and the raccoon, the possum and the fox—though even here, now and then, you would find one of the long-distance trails made by the feet of runners taking news of our people from one village to the next.

  I could see nothing at all, of course. Splatters of snow fell cold on my face sometimes, from the unseen trees above. My father was holding my arm now, no longer using the strap as a leash. We walked more and more slowly, until finally he stopped. I felt his fingers at the back of my head, and he untied the doeskin scarf covering my eyes.

  I blinked in the sudden daylight. There was no sunshine; the woodland was grey and white under the snow.

  My father grasped my shoulders with his two hands and looked me in the eyes, his face grave and strong. He said formally, once more, “Come back a man, Little Hawk.”

  Then he gave me a quick fierce hug and he turned and went away, disappearing into the trees and scrub. I could hear the sound of his snowshoes only for a very short time. Then there was silence, and I was alone.

  When I was a little boy, I had always liked being alone in the woods. My father enjoyed telling a story about a spring morning when I was about two winters old; he said I had slipped away from my mother and was not found for the whole of that day. Just before nightfall a search party found me sitting peacefully under a tapped maple tree, with my mouth open to catch the sweet sap dripping from the little hollow sumac stem fitted into a slash in the bark. The birch-bark bucket that had hung under the stem to collect the sap was empty at my side. For some time after that I was called Little Maple, because—they said, making my poor mother cross—I had chosen to be suckled by a tree instead of a woman.

  But this time I would be alone for a quarter of the year, and nobody would come looking for me.

  Leaping Turtle and I had often discussed the best plan for our first solitary days. We would recite our list to each other. Before dark comes, find a safe place for the first night. Make fire. Travel. Be ready for your Manitou to find you. Then you must eat, and hunt. Make sure you have made yourself a real camp before the hard snow comes. And look for the sun and the stars when you can, so that you can find your way back home at the end.

  There was no sun in this grey, cold day. I thought about what I would need soon for making fire, and looked round at the bare trees for a slim, straight branch the thickness of my thumb. That was easy; there was a thicket of small maples right next to me.

  I chose a tree, asked its pardon for cutting its lowest branch, and for the first time I took out my father’s knife. The thin metal blade went through the wood so fast that it flicked out at my wrist as well, and the blood welled up in a neat line on my skin. I sucked at my wrist, amazed. A knife so sharp was going to have to be treated with very great respect.

  I trimmed the branch into a stick, dropped it into my quiver to join the arrows, and began picking my way slowly through the trees. All our lives we had been taught to run races with each other, to run fast, fast—but to move always in the woodland as quietly as fox or deer. There were no sounds of life anywhere, and no animal tracks on the snow.

  After a while the land rose and became rocky, and it was harder to find spaces for my snowshoes. I took a long, awkward step forward—and fell headlong over a steep ledge, down through a mass of vines masked by snow.

  For a moment I lay there, dazed. This was the worst thing that could happen—an accident at the very start. There was pain in my leg, bent by a trapped snowshoe. Was it broken? The other snowshoe was gone. Something hard was digging into my ribs. When I moved my head, long vicious spines dug into my cheek, and I could feel the blood trickling down.

  So I knew I must have fallen into a great tangle of greenbrier, the toughest, prickliest vine in the woods. Nothing can kill greenbrier; it will climb a tall tree in a single season, and a small animal that runs into a really thick tangle can find itself held so fast by the spines that it never gets out. My sister Quickbird had found a little skeleton once, caught in a greenbrier patch near the village, with shreds of grey fur still attached; it might have been a baby rabbit. Even though Quickbird, like all of us, set traps for the rabbits that came after our crops, she had touched the little bones with one finger, and cried.

  But I was not a rabbit, and I made myself roll over out of the briers in spite of the sharp spines and the screaming pain in my leg. I took off the snowshoe. Its ash-wood edge was crushed at one side but not broken. Nor was my ankle, I decided when I felt it up and down. I held a handful of snow against it for the pain, and tried not to think about how I might have banged my head against a rock, or caught a greenbrier spine in my eye. My knife had flown out of my belt but was caught in the vines, still in its leather case, and out on the snow I could see my bow and its quiver, the arrows spilling out of it from the force of the fall. My other snowshoe lay there too, its binding still attached.

  The hard thing that had been digging into my ribs was my tomahawk. It lay there as if it were waiting for me, and it felt like an old friend in my hand.

  I hacked at the greenbrier stems to rescue my knife. Looking up now at the rocky ledge over which I’d fallen, I could see that the vine grew over it like a great snowy curtain—and that against the rock, behind the cascading vine, there seemed to be a dry space. If it was deep enough, perhaps I could shelter there for the night and rest my hurt leg.

  Moving faster, I cut away enough of the vines to make myself a space free of their grabbing prickles, under the overhanging rock. The ground there was soft with dead pine needles, and I could see bits of scat from some small animal—but the scat was old, and there was no sign of a nest. This really could be my first night’s shelter, in spite of the greenbrier.

  I strapped a snowshoe on my good leg, and tried to keep my weight off my bruised ankle by clutching at trees. Hobbling, I rescued my bow and arrows and set them under the overhang. Then I went scouting round the cluster of pine trees growing on this slope, until I found a big fallen branch that had clearly been there for a l
ong time. I chopped out a piece of it and brought it back, with an armful of dry twigs. Twice more I hobbled out to collect bigger pieces of dry wood, and after that I cut two live branches from the nearest pine tree, shaking the snow from the needles, thanking the tree.

  My ankle was hurting so much after all this that I had to drop the branches and sit on a rock, bent over like an old man. But only for a moment. The air was very cold; the grey light was beginning to fade. It was time to make fire.

  For now, there was only one way I could do that. I took out the stick I cut from the maple tree, and with the tip of my knife I cut a shallow hole in the piece of old pine wood and set the stick upright in it. Then I crushed some dry pine needles round the stick, held it between the palms of my hands and began rubbing my palms together, to and fro. They had grown very sore before I saw the first curl of smoke, but a flame jumped in the pine dust when I blew on it, and I fed my crackling little fire with small branches, and started to feel warm for the first time since I came out of our house. I also felt very hungry, but I knew there was no chance of finding food here.

  Then I remembered the greenbrier that had half-killed me.

  In my mind I was a small boy again, back in the spring fields, perched with Leaping Turtle on the rickety wooden platform where we were posted to scare the birds away from the new-planted seeds. And my grandmother Suncatcher came out into the field with a basket and her digging stick, and called to us.

  “Come down, little ones! Time for learning!”

  Having been trusted with work by our fathers, we didn’t take kindly to being called little.

  “We have duties, Grandmother!” we shouted importantly. “We have to keep the birds off!”

  Suncatcher snorted. “And do you see a single bird in this field while I am here? Come down!”

  And she led us to the enormous stand of spiny greenbrier that was kept at bay around a big dead elm tree near our planting, and showed us two things: how to pick its new shoots as a sweet green vegetable, and how to dig its roots.

  But now, just as the water came into my mouth from thinking about roasting greenbrier roots in my fire, I remembered the rules. I was fasting. I couldn’t eat, not until my Manitou showed himself to me. It was almost as hard a disappointment as falling off the ledge.

  All the same, in winter food must be taken when you see it, even if it is kept for later days. The ground was not quite frozen yet here under the trees, so with my tomahawk I dug up some small greenbrier roots, the size of my finger, and dropped them into my quiver with the arrows. There were a lot of pine tree roots too; they were very thin but tough, and I should need them to make snares. I teased them carefully out with the axe head and tucked them inside my tunic in a long bunch, to keep them from drying out.

  My fire was a dwindling glimmer in the black night. High up, through a narrow gap in the trees, I could see one bright star. There was no breeze, and the thin line of smoke from my fire rose straight up toward the star. Since I had no water to drink, I sucked some snow. I went a little way off to relieve myself; I came back and banked up my fire with wood and dirt. Then I curled up on my pine branches under the rock overhang and I went to sleep.

  I had been so busy thinking about how to stay alive that it hadn’t yet occurred to me to feel lonely, or afraid.

  FOUR

  I woke just after dawn, out of a dream about my grandmother Suncatcher. In the dream I must have been very small, because she was singing to me, though the song drifted away before I could trap it. Lying there half awake, I tried to send my thoughts to her. My grandmother is a strong, special person, a member of the tribal council and the center of our family. I wished she had been there on my last day, but she had gone to the women’s house with my sister Southern. Before she left, she gave me her blessing and she kissed me on the forehead, and she said, “You will see me first when you return, Little Hawk.”

  Though it had seemed an odd thing to say, since she knew how much I would be longing to see my parents and my sisters, I had said yes, of course I would do that.

  But return was a long way off: three moons from now. I stretched, on my bumpy pine-bough bed. I was cold and very stiff, and my fire was dead, but I beat myself with my arms for warmth. The strands of pine root fell out of my tunic, so I braided them into a long string and tied it round my waist, to keep it safe.

  It was a grey day again; the sky above the treetops was full of cloud. I kicked away the ashes of my fire and strapped on my snowshoes. My ankle ached, but it was much less painful than the night before.

  Blindly I set off through the trees and snow, with nothing to tell me which direction to take. All the world around me was cold and silent and empty, as if it would never change. A few flakes of snow began to drift down through the branches. I found myself longing suddenly for the warmth of our firelit house, with my mother grinding corn, singing a soft rhythmic song to match each thump as the pestle came down on the mortar. I made pictures in my head of my sisters separating deer sinew into threads, my father carving a burl from an oak tree into a bowl. I could smell a stew simmering in a pot on the rocks beside the fire, with deer meat in it and groundnuts and corn and beans. . . .

  I tripped over a tree root and fell headfirst into the snow. When I got up, brushing off snow and leaves, my eye caught a movement somewhere ahead through the trees, and I froze. Was it a deer? As my hand tensed to reach for my bow, I remembered regretfully that I couldn’t yet hunt.

  But it wasn’t a deer—it was my friend Leaping Turtle, walking purposefully, carrying a large branch. My heart leapt at the sight of him, and I shouted in delight. Happiness washed over me in a great wave—and then in the same moment vanished.

  The rules said that we were not allowed to speak.

  Leaping Turtle stopped as he saw me. Our eyes met, and on his face I could see the same quick anguished mix of feelings. We could not greet each other or even make any sign, let alone share our ordeal. The road to manhood had to be taken alone. We had to live as our fathers and our ancestors lived; we had to obey the law.

  So each of us went past the other, on through the trees, alone, away. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. The drifting snowflakes were cold on my face. I could hear the soft sound of my snowshoes moving through the snow. I stopped for a moment and strained for the sound of Leaping Turtle’s feet moving away too, but I could hear nothing.

  Sorrow made a great lump in my throat, but I walked on. On and on, up slopes and down slippery rocks. All that day I walked, until the light began to die. No birds sang. The snow had stopped falling; the air was colder than before. Before night fell, I found a low-hanging tree and made a nest for myself as I had done before.

  Day after day I walked on through the trees in the grey light, with no idea where I was going. I was cold all the time. It was so long since I had eaten that I was hardly aware of hunger, but I could feel myself growing weaker. I sucked handfuls of snow often, because water was allowed. Over and over again I thought about Leaping Turtle and wondered what he was doing, and whether we should ever see each other again.

  Each night I found myself a place to sleep and made a fire to keep myself from freezing. And I would sit by the fire for a long time, staring at the small flames, trying to empty my mind so that the Great Spirit could send me my Manitou. But nothing came.

  Then there was a day when snow began to fall again, slow but persistent. My heart sank. I had hoped to reach a place where I could build myself some kind of real shelter before the big snows came, but I had found nowhere yet. The day was perhaps half done.

  The snow kept falling. I reached a place where two big trees leaned together, and began yet again the long process of collecting firewood and green cedar branches. I cut bigger branches as well this time, to fit between the tree trunks like a kind of roof. Far away, very faint, I could hear wolves howling; it was like a warning. By the time I had a fire, darkness was all around my little flame-lit space.

  By now the snowflakes were coming very thi
ck and very fast. They hissed as they fell on the flames. Reluctantly I pushed dirt over the fire and pulled more branches around my little space. The air was so still that they stayed where they were, and in no time at all the snow had covered them, fat white flakes falling silently, softly, relentlessly, on and on. There was no sound anywhere.

  This would be a big snow, and it would take a long time. I curled up beside my bow and my quiver of arrows, and because I was dog tired, I fell asleep.

  When I woke, after what must have been a long time, there was a faint whiteness outside the branches covering me, and they were closer to my face than they had been before. Something told me not to move. Nothing was wrong with my curled-up body, warm with its own heat, and for once the air was not icy as I breathed it into my chest. But fear crept through me. What had happened outside?

  Moving just one arm as I lay there, I pulled an arrow from my quiver and pushed it out in front of me. It disappeared into thick, thick snow. I churned it round a little, to make a small hole so that I could see out. I was inside a snowbank, and the snow was still falling out there, in big silent flakes. If I were to break out of this tiny oppressive space, new snow would cover me before I walked even a few steps.

  I fought with myself to lie still. I tried to guess what my father or my grandmother Suncatcher would say to me, but thinking of them only made me lonelier. I was afraid.

  The thoughts ran around my mind like ants. I was totally alone, trapped in this cold snow-buried winter. I had failed to find my Manitou. Perhaps I was not worthy even to have a Manitou. I couldn’t go home. I should die like Southern’s friend who never came back from the woods, whose body was found many moons later half-eaten by animals. I should never see my family again.