Those children who did play with Yeikoo.shk’ often goaded him to pretend to be the bear. He had grown over the summer, big enough to crawl under his father’s skin and shuffle a few steps under its weight. Older boys, no longer children but not quite men, forced him to put on the bear so that they might wait in the brush and pepper him with headless arrows. The ones that hit the hide fell harmless to the ground, but many missed the mark and struck him on his bare arms and feet.
“What happened to you?” S’ee asked her son after one such hunting game. He refused to answer and did not cry when she rubbed balm into the welts and scrapes. Petulant, he slept by himself in a corner of their house, refusing his mother’s comfort and his sister’s entreaties, but after that night, he did not play with the village boys any longer and often wandered off to laze away the day on a tree limb or, when the salmon ran, to thrash about the water and the rocks. Three young boys spied him there waist-deep among the rapids, a salmon flapping in his jaws. His behavior and rapid growth did not go unnoticed among the adults. Shax’saani shared the gossip with her sister: “They say he is slow, your boy. A man’s body but a child’s mind.”
Yaan.uwaháa, the daughter, fared no better. She rapidly outgrew all of the other infants in the clan, spurted past the toddlers and young girls, and by summer’s end resembled a ten-year-old version of her mother. She had a keen sense of smell and was forever hungry, and more than once, her aunties had to chase her from their kitchen door with a broom when she came looking for a second breakfast. While they shot no fake arrows at her, the girls in the village showed less mercy than the boys. Group by group shunned her. Most nights she curled beneath the bearskin, missing her father, crying herself to sleep as the rain beat on the roof.
The two children ran away in early fall and were missing for one week. S’ee’s youngest brother, the one whose arrow found X’oots first, tracked them to a nearby hill where they had dug a fresh den. He found them asleep, curled beside each other, the bearskin their pillow, and he bound their hands to a long rope and led them back to camp like recalcitrant dogs. The tribal council’s fires burned late that night, and in the morning before anyone else had risen, Shax’saani visited S’ee’s bed and shook her gently awake. “My sweet little Dolly,” she said. “Come walk with me, and we’ll see the sun sneak over the trees.”
They strolled to the bayshore and watched a pod of orca swim past, leisurely hunting their breakfast. “When you followed the man, I was afraid for your life, and when you didn’t come back that day or the next or many months, I was heartbroken. There was no one to talk with anymore, and even after D’is—”
“Man in the moon,” S’ee giggled.
“After he married another, there was just no one left in the world. I still longed for you, and not a day went by that I did not think of you.”
“I missed you, too, sister.”
“When the brothers arrived with the news they had found you and then fetched our mother to send your clothes, my torment was over, and when you first walked through the door—after the smell off you cleared my head—well, my heart leapt like a babe in the womb.”
The last of the whales passed by. Behind them, the sun had cleared the firs on the far shore and now light sparkled across the waters. Shax’saani took S’ee’s hand in hers. “But you brought those two wild things into our family, and the men have made medicine to judge what must be done. They say the eating of the flesh of brown bear is now taboo. Only black bear may be taken for food. You may stay with us, Dolly, but your son and daughter must be exiled to the rain forest, for our own safety. They will become grizzlies one day and will surely kill a Tlingit, maybe your brother, maybe your sister.”
S’ee considered her sister’s words, picked up stones from the gravelly beach, and held them while she thought. “I am glad that no Tlingit will eat the brown bear from this day on, and X’oots would be happy, too. But they are my boy and girl, Shax’saani. Banish them and you banish me. Forever.”
“It’s not me, little sister, but the wisdom of the village.”