Them Bones

Leake VI

Sun Man woke up the world like he always did.

‘Yee-Yeee-Yee!’ he yelled from his housemound, just as the edge of the sun peeked over the woods from the far side of the River.

I had been awake a few minutes; something in my body always woke me up before the old man screamed bloody murder every day. Took-His-Time and sunflower stirred in their skins. It was late winter, almost spring. The trees were beginning to bud, though this far south they’d only lost the last of their leaves two months before.

The sap was rising in everything, including me.

‘Has he ever missed a morning?’ I asked Sunflower as she got up. Her figure was back after the pregnancy that had ended the night of the tornado.

‘Not yet,’ she said. She went out to perform her matutinal ablutions.

‘Once,’ said Took from his skins, ‘we thought he was going to meet the Woodpecker. He had them prop him up in a doorway. He didn’t make much of a noise when he yelled, but he did wake up the people next to the plaza. Then he got well again. That was ten years ago.’

‘What happens if Sun Man doesn’t yell?’

‘The sun doesn’t come up,’ said Took. ‘Is all your stuff ready?’

Two weeks before, Took had been rummaging in his pile, then looked at me and said, ‘Time to go to the Hill.’

‘Shit Hill?’ I asked. Took didn’t usually make a big deal of things like that.

‘No. Pipe Hill. Five days up the River. If you’re going to be a pipemaker you’ll have to learn sometime. See some country, lug some big rocks around, break your fingers, stuff like that.’

‘Well, things have been pretty dull since the Old One came around. When do we go?’

‘Winter’s usually dull,’ said Took-His-Time. ‘Spring’s coming; lots to do then. Flower Wars. The traders come back. Planning. The Black Drink Ceremony, the Woodpecker Dance, then harvest. The year’ll fairly fly. This will be the last chance to get new pipestone for seven, eight months. I’m running out of effigy stuff.’

‘Like you used for the Old One’s spirit?’

‘Just the stuff. Hell, there can’t be more than four or five of those things left. But sometimes we get bears, sometimes buffalo come so thick and we kill so many you yarp when you smell bison meat, that I have to drive them away. The paroquets and the pigeons. There’s nothing better than a couple of dozen paroquets for supper, but after a week or so they’ve eaten your fields up. So I have to make a paroquet pipe so they’ll leave.’

‘Can’t you just use what you’ve got here?’ One whole corner of the hut was filled with fist-sized stones.

‘Uh, no,’ he said. ‘For pipes, I could use sumac root if I wanted to, burn a guy’s lips right off. But for the effigy stuff, I need certain kinds of stone. Don’t ask. Trade secret. I’ll have to show you when we get there.

That was two weeks ago. This morning we were leaving, which is why Took asked about my gear.

I started to ask him about getting the rocks back down the river, when Sunflower came back in. She kicked us on the bottoms of our feet.

‘Up, lazybones,’ she said as she kicked. ‘Guys are already fishing.’

Out of habit I packed the radio beacon in my gear. Not that we wouldn’t be out of range a day up the River, but because I thought I should. I put the carbine and some ammo in with my things, but I kept the carbine wrapped in its greased skins.

While we got ready, I watched a neighbor lady scraping a fox skin. Sunflower was in and out of the hut. An old man, much older even than Sun Man, really ancient, sat in front of his hut and smoked.

Smoking accounted for about fifty percent of a guy’s time. Took had a thriving business which I was slowly learning. He made all the pipes for individuals, for the religious ceremonies, for nabob Sun Men in far villages across the River. Every guy in the village had his own private tobacco patch that he cultivated. You didn’t touch another person’s patch. Each patch had a secret combination of herbs, tobacco, and weeds that the owner grew and smoked. Some of them smelled like burning tire factories to me.

Took-His-Time, being the guy who made all the pipes for everybody, was not allowed to smoke. It was part of the religion.

We carried our gear through the village, out the gate and down to the River, where the canoe we had fixed up the day before waited. Several people waved good-bye to us.

‘Paddling up this River,’ I said, ‘is like rowing through molasses.’

Took looked at me from the bow, his eyebrow raised.

‘Uh, honey,’ I said, finding the nearest Greek word. He and I still did most of our talking in Greek, although I had picked up enough of the mound-builder talk to sound at least like a simpleton when I talked. I could say things like ‘I own spear. Spear very straight.’ I could understand a lot more than I could say, except when people got excited (which happened fairly often) and talked fast. Pretty good for three months, I thought.

‘It’s a lot better coming back down,’ said Took. ‘Then it’s like paddling through olive oil.’

When we camped out the first night, it was like we were the only two people on the continent. We were on a little raised place back from the water. In the summer here the mosquitoes would only have been the size of moths, not the size of sparrows like they would be down at the River itself.

We had a fire going. Though it was late winter, there were still plenty of night noises. Alligators grunted, frogs chugged, birds screamed, bats flew over. There were snuffles and snorts all around.

Overhead the stars were like frost. Orion, the mighty hunter, bent his bow across the sky. On Cyprus during the blackouts, even after the Big War back Up There, the nights had never been this dark, the stars never so many or so bright.

Took’s face was outlined in the starlight.

‘What do you call that?’ I asked, pointing at what I thought was Mars.

‘I don’t call it anything much,’ he said. ‘The Traders call it Ares. The Northerners call it Loke. When we call it anything, we call it the One That Moves Backward Every Two Years.’

‘Ever wonder why it does that?’ I asked.

‘Because the Woodpecker told it to,’ said Took.

‘When you were with the Traders as a boy, did the Traders talk about the stars?’

‘All the time. They were great sailors, used them to navigate and tell time and things. Even so, I had to tell them they were way off.’

‘How?’

‘Well, I used to count the days I was with them, and when I got into the seven hundreds, I knew it had been more than two years. One time they were talking about calendars and dates and stuff; they said something that was wrong and I told them.

‘“What do you mean?” they asked me.

‘“There’s been half a day extra since you swiped me,” I said.

‘“What do you mean, half a day?” they asked.

‘“Well, every four years there’s an extra day.” I said.

‘“We’ve been using this here calendar for five hundred years now,’ they said.

‘“Then you’re probably planting your crops in late fall,” I said.

‘“You’re twelve years old and a heathen, what do you know?” they said.

‘I told them to look up in the sky at the One That Moves Backward Every Two Years, and decide who knows more. I wasn’t as good at it as Sun Man’s granduncle used to be, but I told them we had this big carved rock two days’ journey downriver from the village I was born in that told us when the extra days were coming. Somebody had copied it from the Huastecas a long time ago. All our people go down there and figure out when to do things by it. They didn’t believe it, of course.

‘That was fifteen years ago, before they really started trading with the Huastecas. Since then they’ve had this big conference with their priests, and all the East has thrown away its old calendars and got new ones.

‘They no longer plant in the winter, I’m told.’ Took leaned back on his skins and went to sleep.

I watched the pale dot of Mars, like a red nailhead driven into the sky.

The second and third days out, the villages got fewer and farther apart on the west bank of the River, while they got thicker on the east.

On the west the land lay flat with fewer trees. We passed a herd of buffalo, thousands and thousands, stretching as far as the eye could see, on the third morning upriver.

‘They’re gonna eat good this spring,’ said Took, pointing toward the next village on the west side of the River. ‘The buffalo must have come in late yesterday, otherwise hunters would have been at them by now.’

The villagers way across the River to the east were already putting out canoes. They’d seen the buffaloes. Their village was two or three times as large as Took’s, with dozens of mounds, some of them fifteen meters tall.

‘They build ’em right, don’t they?’ I said, pointing.

‘Way upriver,’ said Took, ‘they got a place Kohoka, bigger than all the villages put together. There’s a mound there five times taller, twenty times as long as that one. They’ve been working on it a thousand years, though, and there must be fifty thousand of them at it. They should have run out of dirt by now.’

I whistled.

‘Hell, Yaz,’ said Took. ‘Give us fifty thousand people, we’d build a mound so big you’d have to put a trench in it for the moon to roll through.’

On the fourth night we turned up a small tributary and made camp about four kilometers up it. There were already a couple of canoes put in up and down the bank, but the fires were already out and the people were asleep.

‘Go to sleep, Yaz,’ said Took, bedding down in the bottom of the canoe. ‘We’ll need it tomorrow.’

When we woke up the next morning, Took put me to work building a raft.

‘Why make a raft first?’ I asked. ‘We don’t have anything to put on it yet.’

‘We make the raft first,’ said Took, ‘because when we get back here with the cargo, we’ll be too tired to build a raft. Trust me.’

While I dragged dead wood down and lashed it together, Took was shaping long wedges out of hard wood sapling and working them in a fire he’d made. We made good progress. By noon, Took waved me to follow him. He picked up his wedges, a maul, and rawhide ropes.

We went through a small wood, following a hardpacked trail, then came out to a clearing. Above it was a small hill, and on the hill two or three guys were hammering away at the rocks.

We climbed through small rocks and scree. They hurt my feet, even through my boots. How Took did it in his moccasins, I don’t know.

‘Hey, Took-His-Time!’ yelled one of the men who was flailing away at a rock five times his size.

‘Hey, Tree-Gum!’ said Took, going up to him. ‘Meet my friend Yazoo.’ We held wrists a second.

He was a wiry old man, and he was farting so much I thought he had frogs in his breechcloth.

‘Breaking the kid in?’ asked Tree-Gum.

‘Sort of.’ Took looked at the sweating old man. ‘Aren’t you too old to be doing this by yourself?’

‘Oh, I’m not taking a load, I’m getting a heart-stone.’

Took looked at the three-ton boulder. ‘Well, we’ll be here all day. Come over to our fire tonight.’

‘Thanks,’ said Tree-Gum, then went back to jumping up and down on a sapling he’d wedged into the rock.

We went farther up.

Took leaned close. ‘He’s getting the exact center out of the boulder. Big medicine of some kind, something he can only do himself. You don’t ask about stuff like that. He’s from two days upriver from here. He must be eighty years old.’

Took was running his hand across a rock face with a fracture in it. ‘Here,’ he said, taking my hand, putting it up to the stone. ‘Feel that?’

There was a discontinuity in the texture as well as color across the break. Above, it felt like dry sandstone; below the crack the rock felt wet and greasy, smooth to the touch.

‘It feels like a salamander,’ I said.

‘Just the stuff we want,’ he said.

‘How much of it?’

‘The whole damn thing,’ said Took.

‘Jesus.’

By pitch dark we had holes punched in, wedges driven, and levers ready on a section two meters by one and a half.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ said Took.

I followed him as well as I could through the blackness. We made it back to camp. Took stirred up the ashes and got the fire going. We ate some jerky, pemmican, and dried nuts.

Tree-Gum came over, bringing something in a leather bottle that smelled like root beer. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Have some.’ We did.

He warmed his hands at the fire. ‘Damned winters are getting colder,’ he said. Took told him about the visit of the mammoth.

‘Hell, I ain’t ever seen one of those,’ said Tree-Gum. ‘Don’t much want to, either. You know the Huastecas were all the way up here last year? They been sending envoys farther up here every year, north along the River. Getting greedy for trade, I guess. They’ve whupped up on everybody down there they can, I reckon. Now nothin’s left but to buy and sell.’

He let another huge fart, and fanned the air with his hands. Then he stared into the fire. ‘We got to find a new Hill, Took-His-Time. Talked with a couple dozen pipemakers up and down the River. Pipe Hill here’s gonna give out in twenty, thirty years. Never thought I’d see it. Gonna be up to you young ’uns, like you and your here friend Yaz, to find it. I’m sure too old to go traipsing around these hills.

‘This has been a good Pipe Hill, though. Taken many a thousand pipes out of it, yes sir.’

Then he was quiet. After a while he got up and stretched. ‘Well, give my regards to Sun Man and that no-good sister of his. Come up to the place sometimes. I imagine you’ll be gone a couple of days by the time I get through here.’

We waved good-bye, and he walked out of the firelight.

‘Look out below!’ yelled Took, and the only guy working farther down the hill scrambled up even with us.

‘Gardy-Loo!’ I said.

‘Heave-ho,’ said Took. We heave-hoed. There was a groan in the early morning stillness, then a snap as one of our sapling levers broke. We pounded another one in and pulled again. Cables stood out in Took’s arms. I thought my temples were going to burst.

Then everything moved and I fell down. The hemisphere of pipestone separated itself from the rock face and began to crash and roll its way down the hill.

It took a propitious spin and went off through the woods toward the tributary, taking small trees with it.

The other pipemakers applauded.

‘I’ll be Woodpecker-damned,’ said Took. We grabbed up our ropes and headed off down the hill. As we got near the woods I looked back. Tree-Gum and the others were already back at their tasks. The old man was jumping up and down on a lever. Something slipped; a large crack he’d made in the boulder closed back up, splitting wedges. He shook his fist at it. For a second, you couldn’t tell whether he was taking the rock apart or putting it back together again.

We found the rock less than fifty meters from the water.

‘Lucky lucky lucky,’ said Took. ‘Here, grab this rope.’

Lucky or not, the sun was going down by the time we were ready to go.

The rock was lashed in the center of the raft. We’d built a small platform of logs across the back and made a skin tent on it. Took had made a sweep from small trees.

We tied the canoe to the raft and out into the current of the tributary. My muscles were all gone. It was a good thing the water pushed us along. I didn’t have the strength to pole, sweep, or paddle.

Took stretched out in the tent. ‘Uh, what should I do?’ I asked.

‘Nothing. Turn right when we get to the River. You’d find turning left extremely hard. Call me before the light’s all gone and we’ll put in.’

He was snoring almost immediately. I watched the horizon bisect the sun behind us. There was still plenty of light left. The trees thinned, then we were onto the delta. I never really knew when we got on the River – the tributary widened, then we turned south and the River itself was around us, the tributary gone.

A gar croaked ahead, and the frogs started up. The first bat of the evening dipped over the water, and then the sky turned honey-gold to the west, making the River an amber mirror. Herons waded in an indentation in the shoreline.

The River turned slowly ahead until it went out of sight, kilometers away. A whippoorwill cranked up, long and lonely somewhere toward the sunset.

‘Huck and Jim,’ I said.

‘What?’ asked Took.

‘Nothing. We’d better put in.’

Took leaned his head out of the tent.

‘Some big-ass river, huh?’