In time it would become clear that these People, though they came and went on their ships, meant to stay. They brought with them not only iron and glass and nails and swords but also Barley to grow, and in time beer made from that Barley. They brought no gold, or very little—gold was what they expected to find everywhere here, but there was none, as the Small Ugly People knew.
And they brought Hogs, and Cows, and the Honeybee.
Clover came along too, seeds on the feet or in the baggage of the newcomers, and it spread and grew; the Honeybees took pollen from it, as they had from the same plant in the lands from which the new People had brought them, and from Clover they made honey. The Clover spread fast, great fields of it, faster than the new People themselves spread, and the Honeybee traveled with it. The old clans, who were soon in flight from the newcomers or afraid of their arrival, would call the sudden patches of pink and white blossoms the white People’s footprint; the bad news of Bee sightings moved from clan to clan, People to People. Because Death—the other great gift the newcomers brought—was sure to follow after.
One Ear didn’t return to that shore for many seasons, and when he did come back, in a coat like the coats worn by the new People, there was no one living there but the white settlers, squatting in thrown-up log shelters or in the empty dwellings of the seacoast clans. No People, none: the squatters told him that the People of the coastal villages were all dead; nine of every ten. The few left alive with strength to bury the dead had instead fled the newcomers’ awful power, only to be caught later as sickness spread.
What had happened? The new People seemed to think—One Ear had got a bit of their mouth-twisting language by then—that the realm of spirits had decreed the sickness and death, so that they, the newcomers, could have the land without a fight. One Ear thought it more likely that the beautiful beads they had dispensed so generously had in fact been a kind of weapon, one as unlikely as their swords and the guns that blazed and banged rather harmlessly, only far more powerful; a poison, a curse.
One Ear—immune, or lucky—tried to find and bury as many dead as he could, until he realized that he would be dead himself of old age if not something worse before he could even find them all. His tall frame was still erect; his hair now was streaked with gray. He turned West and North, toward the lands of the Longhouse People and the demesnes of the Crow clan. By the time he got there, the killing things, whatever they were, had already come; there, too, the dead lay unburied, and the villages were empty.
There were many Crows, though.
Nothing like it had ever befallen in the history of these Crows. Wolves and Ravens and Vultures too had never encountered such riches before. In the face of it, territories collapsed, feuds dissolved, the number and size of young increased. You could follow a faint scent and come upon a whole village of dead People, children dead in their dead mothers’ arms, healers dead with their drums and their herbs in their hands. There was no one who’d bother to drive a Crow off, and no need to defend a rich find until the corpse-openers, the Bears and Wolves, found it; if these dead ones were too whole to enjoy, nearby there were plenty of others farther gone.
Dar Oakley explained to me how he convinced the Crows of his demesne—which over time came to include lands and families that reached nearly to the Beautiful Lake where Kits had reigned—that he himself was responsible for this bounty. I didn’t understand how he did this; his reasons, and their gullibility, lay too deep within Crow nature for me to guess at. But as territories went unpatrolled and Crows grew so numerous that calls and messages could be passed quickly and far, Ka became different from the old mobile association of families and smallholdings and momentary alliances disputing resources. Crow destinies had converged in the place where Death had for a moment conquered, and there became a nation, great, mighty, and numerous. In that nation Dar Oakley was honored, heard out, followed.
One Ear was old when once again Dar Oakley came upon him, far from the place where they had come to know each other.
“You aren’t dead, then,” One Ear said, looking up into the Pine where Dar Oakley and some close associates were gathered.
“No,” Dar Oakley said. “Nor are you.”
“Do you know what became of my wife and daughters?” One Ear asked.
Dar Oakley had no answer he could give to that. He might have been in on the eating of them, or he might not. Many People hadn’t resembled themselves when dead, and Dar Oakley had little memory of most when they were alive; out of so many, there were plenty who got no attention from Crows, and were the spoils of others, almost unrecognizable by the time the Crows at length took possession. It had become a practice of some People clans to dress the dead in their best robes with their weapons or ornaments and bring them to the high rocks, or (if the mourners had the strength, and the dead one was small, or a child) lift them on pallets into the forest canopy. From there the spirits could be released—Dar Oakley explained this to the Crows, and what it meant for Crow-kind—thence to go West to the Sky Gate and the other world, where there was no sickness evermore.
“That’s where I go,” One Ear said. “To follow Death, as far as my legs will carry me.”
“We’ll go too,” Dar Oakley said, not knowing why he said it, or why he would want to go darkwise. But in fact the riches of this land were growing thinner now; the last People remains had mostly gone to dry bone and tendon, or been buried by winter heaves and melts. The incoming People arriving to take the emptied lands had come from places over the sea where Crows were feared and despised, companions of evildoers, blamed for the sudden deaths of children. They liked to kill a Crow when they could, nail it to a slab-wood door for a warning.
So the Crows went west, darkwise, toward the night sky. Kits had said that there was no end to darkwise, that it only turned again to daywise if you went far enough, and Dar Oakley believed that now; but it was hard to explain to others.
Years passed. A nation of Crows doesn’t travel fast, and One Ear was slow; he stopped for lengths of time in places where the dead could be examined, and those not dead could tell him their tales; for a time he settled with a female and gave her help and was himself cared for. Then he went on.
“I’m the last of the Crow clan,” he told Dar Oakley. “Though I never was one of them at all.”
The new settlers, moving faster, catching them up and passing them by in the rush to take land (land that they supposed, wrongly, had always been as empty of People as it was when they found it), would now and then see a tall, solitary Indian, unarmed, who seemed to have some power to draw Crows after him: when he appeared, so did they, numbers of them, taking what they could of eggs and chicks and sprouting corn, shrieking horridly in the trees, and then over a few weeks or months mostly gone again. Following, the settlers supposed, the Indian sorcerer.
All around the flock as they went, before, behind, beside, walked the dead: One Ear’s adopted kin, his birth People, many more never known to him alive. Faces always to the West, silent, not strong, but never resting. The new People settlers couldn’t see them, though they would somehow remember them anyway long afterward, when the world had changed and even the forests had changed.
Dar Oakley could see them. Perhaps because his old friend could, and told him of them; but when One Ear at last stopped walking and lay down for good beside his cold fire, Dar Oakley continued seeing them. Were they following the Crows? Sometimes he’d see some of them standing still, making no progress; or, confused maybe, turned around toward the places they’d come from, where they could no longer go.
He saw the dead alive. Not in another land where People guess or dream they are, but all around, in the ordinary daylight lands poisoned by the living. So many of them, in their Deer-skins and shell beads, so many. He got used to it. He went on seeing them now and then, one or two or more, for long seasons afterward, though never again One Ear, the teller of stories. Perhaps he was one of those who reached the Sky Gate at last.