“Ask the Ravens,” Gray Feather said. “It’s said they know more about Crows than Crows themselves know.”
“Look,” Dar Oakley said. Below, seeming black as Bears against the snow, Crow People hunters came tugging an empty sled.
The hard freezes of that winter cracked the rocks above the trail the People took along the river, and when heavy rains fell in spring, the split granite loosened and slid down over the trail and the slope below. Mud covered the bare bones of the captive that in autumn the Crows and others had eaten. All this the overwintering Crows observed. Then on a green-flecked day Dar Oakley on his rounds came upon the captive who had become one of the Crow clan, there at that spot. He climbed stones, he prodded the ground with a digging stick here and there. He stopped, baffled, and sat unmoving, head low.
Dar Oakley knew what he wanted, and where it was. He flew near. There was no reason not to help.
First he had to get this one’s attention, the one now called One Ear. It might be that he was Crow clan now, but he hadn’t yet caught the trick of observing Crows and being guided by them. Dar Oakley took a low branch and called; he settled lower, on a rock above the trail. At last One Ear saw that he was being spoken to, and stood. Dar Oakley flew farther on—One Ear hadn’t been searching in the right place. He stopped now and then and waited for One Ear to clamber over the rocks. He alighted finally at the place where a pale bone protruded from the rubble, though he didn’t choose to remain there when One Ear saw and ran stumbling to the place. He watched instead from afar, going off now and then in search of food, returning to see that One Ear had gathered bones, more bones each time, some broken, strung with hard tendon and bearing scraps of black flesh: many but not all of the bones that had held that captive together. No longer useful for that or for anything.
What was it People wanted with bones? Had he known once and forgotten? One Ear squatting beside these had begun to sing; he took from his pouch some powdery stuff and with his spit made a paste that he drew over his cheeks in broad black stripes. He placed the bones in a Deer-skin he must have brought just for this, and put in other things, a stone knife, a belt of beads, dried meats. Then, still singing, he lifted it all and went upward away from the trail and a long way into the forest, to where stones had been piled—it was clear to Dar Oakley that they had been piled and had not gathered there by chance or the stones’ own will. One Ear laid the bones down, and pushed aside stones to reveal a hollow in the earth. With great tenderness, as though laying a child in its bed, he put the Deer-skin there.
He rolled the stones again over it, his cache—but why? No one would seek it out to eat it now—and he sat in silence there beside it. Dar Oakley was sure no one of the Crow clan of the People knew of this deed or this place, or ever was to know.
He began to speak then, words in a language Dar Oakley hadn’t heard before—he understood some of the Crow clan’s language, but this was different. And yet as One Ear spoke, and the spring evening closed around and the last of the melting snow breathed in the Hemlocks, Dar Oakley felt drawn once more into that realm Ymr where he had used to go. He remembered bones: the bones of the Saint that had spoken to him in the Brothers’ oratory, the bones that Fox Cap and her People had brought back to put in the houses made for them alone. Fox Cap’s own bones, cleaned and lying under the sun, her and not her.
One Ear raised his face to the sky, and saw Dar Oakley.
“Do you know Crow People words?” he asked. “I’ll tell you a story.”
And he did.
These bones, he said, were the bones of his brother. The two of them were born together, like two birds in a nest, or like the Good Son and the Bad Son who in the beginning made the world the way it is. They were unalike: his brother had been small and not strong, but he followed his bigger brother everywhere, and learned all the skills of fighting and hunting. When the Crow clan raiders surprised One Ear’s band returning to their home place from a hunt with skins and meat, his twin brother attacked them, first in the fight; when he was overcome, One Ear tried to rescue him, and was taken himself.
He told how this brother had died on the trail in this place, which Dar Oakley knew about, though he listened with care anyway.
Then One Ear rose from where he sat by the stones, and made his way down to the river. He removed his Deer-skin skirt and leggings and his feathers and necklaces. He walked into the water and sat to lave himself, wash the black from his face. He spoke softly in that language Dar Oakley didn’t know. When he was done, he stood and shook the last drops from his fingers.
“Now he’s not scattered,” he said in Crow-clan words. “Now he rests. Now he can be forgotten.”
Dar Oakley never afterward heard One Ear speak a word in the language he was born to, only the language of the Crow People. Yet from that day One Ear recognized Dar Oakley when he was near, welcomed him and gave him scraps and watched him. It was as though with Dar Oakley nearby, he could have his old self and not be in danger from it: his old self, kept in a Crow. The other People watched him greet Dar Oakley or summon him from hiding, and acknowledged his special power. They didn’t know that the two talked together when alone, in the way Dar Oakley had talked so long before with Fox Cap: One Ear in the People’s language, Dar Oakley in the Crows’.
People can have many names, or they could then: they shed one and gain another, or they have a name in one place and a different name elsewhere; a name they give and a name they keep. Dar Oakley’s name for One Ear was Hider; his name for Dar Oakley was Seeker.
“The Beaver said, ‘Old Turtle lives at the bottom of the Beautiful Lake of the North. He is the oldest being there is, and therefore the wisest. Also his ancestor was the being on whose back the world was made. Many say it was the Muskrat that piled up dirt on the Turtle’s back to make the world, but the Beavers say it was the Beaver.’ ”
The People were on the yearly journey to the Dawn Land, and they were carrying Beaver pelts for trading, so they’d asked One Ear for a story with a Beaver in it. They told stories to allay their fears: all through this part of the world, peace was supposed to hold, councils had made agreements, and female elders had ratified them. But you couldn’t be certain. Peltry was easier to get by robbing than by hunting.
“The Beautiful Lake was far away, and the journey was long,” One Ear said. He had told all his stories many times, making the different voices, imitating the waddle of the Beaver and the bobbing of the Crow so exactly that the listeners could hardly keep from laughing. If they’d been at home he’d have made rain fall (seeds in a long gourd) or played the voices of birds on his pipe.
“When they came to the Beautiful Lake, the Crow thought it must be the water that surrounds the earth on all sides, but the Beaver said no, it was just a big lake. Old Turtle’s home lay deep down in the middle of it. So the Beaver took mud and stopped up the Crow’s nostrils, and she took clay and stopped up the Crow’s ears, and telling him to keep his eyes tight shut, she dove with him to the bottom of the lake and Old Turtle’s house.
“Old Turtle didn’t want to come out—he never does—but the Beaver called to him that they had come to get wisdom, and had brought gifts. And after a while Old Turtle let them in. You know how slow the Turtle is—just like his clan, ha-ha—but Old Turtle’s even slower because he thinks so much.”
The long summer day was ending. The river flats where the loaded canoes were drawn up shone in the last light. Dar Oakley knew the story would go on into the darkness, but he’d sleep. After all, he knew the tale, even the tale as One Ear told it: how when the Beaver’s gifts had been shown and Old Turtle had fingered them approvingly, and the tobacco the Beaver brought had been smoked, it was time for Dar Oakley to tell his dream and ask his question.