The Animal Wife (10 page)

That was how I met my wife-to-be. I had never before been so badly disappointed. I stared at her and she at me, neither of us liking what we saw. Worse, hearing her name, Father at once began to speak of the marriage, telling Maral how Bala could help him force Mother's agreement. Then, while Father and Maral spoke on and on about the gifts, some of the women pushed Frogga toward me, telling her she had a husband. Frogga resisted, then cried and hid behind her mother. The women forgot her and went back to their talk. I tried to forget her too, until another woman came up behind me and set her down in my lap. Her smooth, bare skin was cool and damp. She struggled to get away, and I didn't try to stop her. Pointing her anus at me, she left on all fours.

By now the idea of the marriage had caught people's imagination. They soon made so much of us that the baby herself must have begun to wonder about me. To my annoyance and surprise I felt something grasping my sleeve and found her pulling herself to her feet beside me. She had come to put a fistful of ashes, wet with something, into my mouth. Everyone praised her. This made her show off—when I pressed my lips tight against whatever disgusting thing her strong little fingers were trying to feed me, she gave a shout and smeared the ashes on my chin. The people cheered her for feeding her husband and said what a good wife she would be. Frogga grinned and danced from the attention. It embarrassed me.

 

I've had better nights than that first night in Father's cave. Never had I felt so much a stranger. If at first I might have thought I knew who some of the people were, I soon got confused in the crowd and shamed myself by mistaking one person for another. I even mixed up my Uncle Maral with another man. I caught Father watching me, his mouth pulled down in disappointment. I also caught Pinesinger eyeing me with a triumphant sneer after watching me with Frogga. Perhaps I should have been more helpful to Pinesinger. Late at night, when the corners of the cave were filled with darkness and all the new faces were lit with firelight, the few onions vanished down the throats of other people, and I knew I wouldn't even get a bite to eat.

At least,
I thought,
I can drink from the river.
I stood up quietly in the shadows behind the circle of noisy people crowded around the fire, and taking my spear, I went to the mouth of the cave. No one saw me.

A
T NIGHT THE VALLEY
seemed deep and very wide, full of wind and moonlight. Far below I heard the river foaming over its rocks and over the white mammoth bones that lay in the water. Wondering what night hunters might be prowling there, I listened, but heard only the people chatting behind me. Except for the wind and water, the valley was silent. But silence doesn't mean much, not with lions. I slipped out of the cave, went very quietly partway down the trail, and listened again.

My right hand felt the balance of my spear. Light and dry, it felt good, very familiar. It was the same child's spear I had brought from the Fire River—Father had not yet kept his promise to show me how to work into a point the flint he had given me—but its easy weight gave me a good feeling. Much more sure of myself alone in the dark than embarrassed among strangers, I quietly followed the shadow of the ravine's wall until I was almost at the water. There I stopped again to learn what might be near me.

I smelled water, woodsmoke from the fire in the cave above, and the grassy smell of the two still-living mammoths, whom, after I stopped to listen, I heard breathing. I could also smell the raw meat of the cow mammoth's wounds. To learn more about her, I sat without moving, deep in the shadow of the rock wall, my spear ready. After a long time there came a deep, soft rumble, so low I could barely hear it, so low it seemed to come from everywhere, to shake inside me, pulsing my chest with the sound.

The cow mammoth had made it—she was calling. As if she were calling to me, I listened, while a plan took form in my mind. Then, taking a deep breath, I answered her.

Uncle Bala had often praised me for the animal calls I can make—they are as good as real, he told me. The rumble I made may have sounded far off to the cow mammoth, since my voice, compared to hers, was faint, but I must have sounded real enough to make her and her calf listen carefully. After I called, they suddenly fell silent. I heard nothing from either of them, not a rustle, not even their breathing, not a sound.

Suddenly the cow called again, louder, and I noticed the little calf against the sky. His head and ears were up, his trunk too. Alert and excited, he came hurrying toward me. Ha! Perhaps he thought another mammoth had come to help them! With all my strength, I threw my spear.

I hit him in the chest. He screamed. His mother started trumpeting and roaring, heaving herself around, flopping like a fish as she tried to get to her feet. I threw a stone hard at my spear to knock it out of the calf's chest, and when I heard the spear clatter on the rocks I threw stones at the calf's rump to chase him away from it. All this time the two mammoths were screaming, and when I felt gravel falling on me from the trail, I knew that men from the cave were hurrying down.

Before they reached me, I found my spear and shoved it between the ribs of the little mammoth, into his heart. He was as good as dead, in spite of his gasping and groaning, in spite of his mother's roars and screams. As the men from the cave crowded around me, I couldn't help but smile.

"Hi! What's this?" yelled my father.

"Father, I'm hungry," I said.

Then Father laughed aloud and put his arms around me, slapping my shoulders, rubbing my hair. "It's my son!" he shouted to the other men, crowded at the foot of the trail since no one dared go near the cow mammoth. "Was I right to bring him from the Fire River?"

But not everyone was happy. Although at first I didn't notice because the mammoth was making so much noise, many of the men were silent. Then one old man, whose name I didn't at the time remember, gave me an angry stare and said, "Look at the calf, where he's lying." I looked. The calf's last struggles had taken him within reach of his mother's trunk. "Now we'll have to kill his mother or we'll lose his meat. My son-in-law was supposed to kill this cow mammoth. Then he could have given ivory to me and my wife, as he still owes us for his marriage."

I might have known. At the Fire River, all the pieces of a carcass have owners, depending on who hunted and who killed the animal. What was true of meat would be more true of ivory. Now I saw that people hadn't left the female mammoth to die by chance, but had been waiting politely for her rightful killer to come.

Father tried to defend me. "We waited for your son-in-law," he said. "How long were we supposed to wait? If your in-law wants ivory, he should stay where it's found. What about the meat? Your in-law has been gone many days, and he can't expect us to starve while we wait for him."

But the old man didn't agree. "Kori is new here, and perhaps he didn't know he was interfering. But you knew. You might have warned him," he said sourly to Father.

"By the Bear! I would have warned him! If I'd thought he'd come into the ravine alone in the middle of the night to fight two mammoths with a child's spear, I'd have told him not to!" said Father.

Maral poised his spear. Sighting down its length, he said, "Enough talk. What happened can't be helped. Let's finish this." He threw the spear and hit the cow mammoth's side. She screamed. The other men threw also. Many of their spears struck deeply.

The mammoth grasped Maral's spear with her trunk, then pulled it out of her side. To my surprise she threw it at us. She didn't really aim, so the spear flew sideways and clattered harmlessly against the rocks. Even so, we stared in amazement. "My spear?" said Maral. "This cow doesn't want to give me ivory."

With great, loud groans the mammoth struck at the other spears in her body, then at her own front legs, where the broken, spearlike bones moved when she moved. She struck at her legs as if she thought her own legs were attacking her. I could smell her fresh blood, now flowing freely, and see it shining black in the moonlight. She was getting confused. From the streams of blood that ran out of her, I saw that she wouldn't live long.

At last she began to gasp and let her huge head roll. The men's voices grew excited and eager. At the happy sound of voices when a meal of meat is near, I knew the people weren't angry with me—or not most of them. Even so, I thought it best to apologize. "I didn't know you were saving this mammoth for some other hunter. I'm sorry, Uncles," I said respectfully.

"Never mind," said Maral. "After all, you killed meat for us. The women will thank you for that!"

The women! Already I heard them on the trail above, laughing and talking, making no effort to be quiet. "Wait," Maral told them, lest they rush up to the mammoths too soon. Impatiently the women crowded together near the foot of the trail while Maral threw stone after stone, hitting the cow mammoth in the eyes and ears to see if she flinched. She might have been living—I thought I heard her sigh—but her terrible strength was gone.

After a while Maral turned his back on her. Seeing that the mammoth was safe, the women hurried to the calf and lost no time in slashing chunks off him. Before the last women were at the carcass, the first were carrying meat back to the cave.

Their haste surprised me. Where were the manners of these women? I had been the hunter of the mammoth calf! At the Fire River, or at any other place I had ever heard of, people share the meat by how they are related to the hunter—the back legs for his in-laws, the front legs for his kin, the skin for his wife, and so on. Here, Maral was my uncle and also, I supposed, my in-law. Much of the meat should have been given to him. Instead the women were snatching whatever parts they could, without a thought for the owners.

"Father!" I whispered. "What's this? Why doesn't someone stop them?"

"Stop whom?" asked Father.

"Stop the women from grabbing! Don't they care for the hunter? Are they animals that they don't divide meat?"

Father laughed. "Do we divide water? No—we only divide what is scarce. Our women are always hungry for meat, and here, when there's plenty, they help themselves. Think about it! If we had a bison, we would divide it. But the meat of a bison is small beside the meat lying here. Lions and hyenas will eat their fill and still there will be more. Is one part of a mammoth so different from another that we should bother to divide mammoth meat?"

"What about the ivory?"

"Ah! The ivory! Ivory is different. The women won't help themselves to ivory."

"Who gets it?"

"Are you a child? How is it that you don't know?" he asked.

I couldn't answer. As far as I knew, all the men had thrown their spears into the mammoth. Perhaps they didn't know whose spear had killed her; perhaps that was why they all crouched at the carcass in the moonlight, poking the wounds to learn their depth, trying to decide. But whoever's spear had killed, it wasn't mine.

Father then answered his own question. "You don't know because your Uncle Bala's people won't hunt mammoths." This was true, of course. On the plain near the Fire River, where the riverbanks were low, the mammoths stayed together in large herds and drank fearlessly. Those mammoths chased people just as they chased lions. The lions stayed far away from the mammoths, and so did we. Father was right about us and mammoths.

He explained, "No one man can kill a mammoth. No one man can own the tusks. But the men whose spears made the big wounds and any man who risked his life in hunting her, they will have shares. Me, for instance—I'll have a share. I'll need it," he added, running his eyes over the moonlit backs of his two women as they bent to their work of butchering. Perhaps he was thinking of his tangled marriage exchange.

I looked at "the cow's tusks, curved moonlit shapes against the sky. One man standing on another man's shoulders would not be as tall as one of these tusks. If someone else had speared the calf, my spear would have been in my hand when the time had come to kill the mother. I might have thrown it into her and earned a share of the ivory. With ivory of my own, I could give gifts in my own marriage exchange and could even have a say in the marriage. So after all, my hasty act had harmed me.

Yet very late that night, as I lay on my back in the cave, my stomach filled with mammoth meat and my ears filled with the praise of cheerful, meat-satisfied people, I knew my night's hunting had also done me good. In-laws may not want you if you can't get ivory, but their daughters won't want you if you can't get meat.

B
EFORE THE MOON OF GRASS
grew round and rose at sunset, we had eaten the legs and rump of the little mammoth, and by the time the moon grew thin and rose into the dawn, we had finished the upper haunch of the female and had cleaned her thighbone to the knee. When I remember that summer, I remember eating. I remember my stomach feeling tight with meat.

At night we slept with our ears open, listening for lions in the ravine, planning to drive them off our mammoths with fire and stones. But only one old lion came. Sometimes we met him near the carcass, but he didn't bother us and we didn't bother him. The other lions, a pride who used our part of the river, stayed in the east, where that year the grazing animals stayed.

During the Moon of Grass we set snares along the riverbank to catch the foxes, hyenas, and wolves who came for a share of the meat; we caught several, which kept the women busy scraping and softening the skins. Late one afternoon a bear came. Some of us took spears and went quietly into the ravine, letting ourselves down the steep sides, not using the trail. The bear was partly inside the carcass, eating. We crept around him and all together threw our spears into him. That was funny! On the far side of me was Andriki. Suddenly his spear flew past me. He had missed the bear and almost hit me! We laughed at him for that. We took the skin.

By day we cut and dried strips of mammoth meat, and strips of bear meat too. When the strips were ready, long and hard like sticks of wood, we stacked them in the back of the cave. But soon we had more than we needed. The summer is short; in autumn we walk back to our winter lodges. What use did we have for more meat than we could carry?