Taking her sister’s hand, S’ee forced open her palm and transferred the pebbles to her. The sun shone full on the bay. From over the ocean, a thin band of clouds gathered on the western horizon. She walked away without looking back, walked on through the village stirring with life, down the pathways that rained with salmon in the months before her birth. She walked past her mother’s home without stopping at the door, past her sisters’ homes, past her brothers’ homes with rack after rack of herring drying in the sun. Her children stirred when she entered, and she sang as the breakfast cooked on the fire, and when they had finished their meal, S’ee told them they must go.
Because the heavy skin baked in the sun, they took turns wearing the burden and bore to the shady side of trails where the mosses made the trees look like green ghosts. The trip took much longer than S’ee had hoped. Journeying with her children over the same path traveled years ago with her young husband, S’ee felt the circle closing. His spirit lingered, fell with the rain, rose with the mist. She recollected the tender way he cradled the babies in his arms, the grin on his face when he brought back to the den some treat like cloudberries or the warm haunch of a moose. The wildness of his eyes and how it freed her to be wild. The way he’d dip his head into a river and come up gleaming, the water racing off his skin, glistening at the tips of his hair. How fat he was in December and rail-thin come April. How he roared with delight when she bucked her hips beneath him. How he chose to be a man for her.
In the valley of the brown bear, she could find no one willing to speak Lingit with her, and every word had to be filtered through the ears and mouths of her children. Her sense, after their brokered conversation, was that the bears blamed her for the death of X’oots and for bringing the humans to the rain forest, and that while her children were welcome, she could not stay among them.
“I remember,” little Yeikoo.shk’ said, and led them back to the den where it had happened. S’ee could barely stand to be on the hill where her husband had lain, but they had no choice but to winter in their old home. Her son was the first to leave, stealing away one night in the middle of a snowstorm, mad with hunger and confinement. Word came later that he had headed north and inland to be away from man, and some say Yeikoo.shk’, the grizzly, terrorized the Yukon, fierce and smart as any Tlingit, had many cubs with many bears, and could not be tracked. Her daughter Yaan.uwaháa lasted that first winter and into spring when the cubs born that February emerged with their mothers, and the maternal pull forced her slow independence from her own mother. She was gone for good three years later, the victim of another party of hunters who, mistaking her for a true bear, shot her dead just above the headwaters of the river. One of her two orphan cubs survived, and three years later found one of the hunters sleeping in a grove and dispatched him into the next world with a swipe to the neck.
S’ee lived a long time above the valley of the brown bears. In warm months, she moved among them freely in an uneasy truce, teaching herself their ways, but they gave her wide berth. No custom or commerce would be shared. She could only watch their new families from a distance. The fragrance of foamflower and coralroot every June reminded her of the husband she had loved and lost, and in the long, cold months of winter, she dreamt of him, clinging to his skin, straining for his disappearing scent in the shabby fur. She felt as if she was becoming a bear herself as she aged. At twenty-five years, she could no longer stomach the sight of her own reflection in the water, and at thirty, she felt as if she had lived forever in the purest silence, bereft of all language she had once known. When the spirit came upon her to sing out her sorrows, the sound of her voice frightened her. On cold clear nights with the blanket draped across her shoulders and hooded over her head, she huddled on the rocks to count the stars, constellations strung like roe against the northern sky, though their names were long forgotten, praying that their lights would go away, waiting for the world to end.
Lost in her story, and feeling strangely responsible for its outcome, I averted my gaze from her shining face and studied her toes, which heretofore I had failed to fully appreciate. Her feet were beautiful and soft, as if newly sculpted, and I scrutinized their graceful lines, imagining all kinds of sensual activities, with a devout attention.
“Bup-bup-bup-bup.” The old man sang out a warning, and I looked up at the war club poised in her two hands lifted over her head and the mad glee in Dolly’s eyes as she prepared to smash my bean. With startling alacrity, he jumped next to her and shot out his right arm like a piston and clamped his fingers around her wrist. For all his ostensible frailty, the old bugger displayed an iron grip, and the club did not budge an inch.
“Vengeance is mine,” she hissed between her teeth.