What have you seen? What are people like?
What’s out there in this world we live on?
These are the questions we ask and the stories we tell,
And some travelers travel to find the answers
And tell new stories to those they meet.
One such I met this summer, at the farthest east
Of all the places I go. This man looked like
The northers and I could barely understand him,
But I could, and it got easier as we talked
Because he had only one thing to talk about,
Which was this world we live on, its shape and size.
All travelers agree, for we’ve seen it ourselves:
There is ice to the north, wherever you go,
And to the west is the great salt sea,
And to the south, again the salt sea,
Although warmer and more calm,
More in and out, and dotted with islands.
We all agree on this, we travelers,
As between us we have seen it all,
And some travelers claim to have seen it all
Themselves alone. Good. Maybe they are even
Telling the truth. I can’t say. But here’s the thing:
What about east? This norther man
Was like a lot of us, he had that question,
And more than that: he wanted to know the answer.
And no one had it.
So he took off walking east, he said.
He walked for days, he walked for months,
He walked for years. He walked east from the time
This question had come to him, in his youth,
And kept on walking until he was a man in the middle of life.
Seventeen years, he said, he walked east.
I asked him what he had seen on this life walk.
He told me of steppes that went on forever.
There were mountains like those to the west of here,
And some lakes bigger than any I’ve seen,
Little salt seas even, their water was salt, he said,
But mostly it was steppes.
You know what that’s like. The walking is good
If it isn’t too wet, and there are always animals to eat.
So there really was no impediment to him.
Yet there he sat, across a fire from me,
As far to the east as I had ever been,
But it was only the gate of worlds, a nice broad pass
Between low mountains to north and south.
It had taken him twelve years to walk back
To where we were. This he told me.
Finally I had to ask him: why did you come back?
Having gone so far, why turn around?
Why not keep going for the rest of your life?
He stared into the fire for a long, long time
Before he met my eye and answered me.
When I was as far east as I got, he said,
I came to a hill and went up it to look.
I was feeling poorly and my feet hurt,
And no person I had met for several years
Spoke any word I understood. All my dealings
Were done by sign, and you can do that
And still get by, but after a while you want a word
With the people you see. I Pippi could only agree to that!
And so, he said, he stood on that hill, and all to the east
Was just the same. There was no sign at all it would ever change.
I realized, he said, that this world is just too big.
You can’t have it all, no matter how much you want it.
It’s bigger than any man can walk in one life.
Possibly it just keeps going on forever.
Possibly our Mother Earth is round, he said then, like a pregnant woman
Or the moon, and if you walked long enough
You would come around to where you started,
Assuming the great salt sea did not stop you,
But really there is no way to know for sure.
And so I turned back, he said, because the world is too big,
And most of all, I wanted to talk to somebody again
Before I died. Having said that, having told his tale,
We stood and hugged, and he cried so hard
I thought he would choke. I had to hold him up.
Whether he had succeeded or failed
He did not know, and I didn’t either.
After that he calmed down, and we looked at the fire
Until long in the night, telling other stories we knew.
Before bed I asked him, So what’s for you now?
What will you do, now that you’re back?
Well, he said, to tell the truth,
I’m thinking I may take off east again.
— That is my story for tonight’s fire, Pippiloette said.-I have chewed off a bit of this long fall night for you.
After that they talked some more, and it seemed to Loon that Pippiloette had a way of not looking at Sage that seemed to indicate that the two of them had an understanding. Late in the night, when the fire had died down and everyone was asleep, Loon wondered if those two did not find each other. Also, if it might not be that Pippiloette had a similar arrangement with women in each of the packs he regularly visited. Heather had suggested as much one time with a remark under the breath.
When he thought what that must be like, Loon wanted to be a traveler too. Sage was the best-looking woman in their pack, the most desirable, with her big autumn tits ploshing together at her every move. It was not chance Pippiloette had made his arrangement with her. What would it be like to lie with a woman like that in every pack, each one different?
But these were just the spillovers of his feelings for Elga, which were so filled with spurting that the feeling extended from him in every direction. He loved all the women of the pack, and all the women of other packs as well. They were all people he wanted, and so were the female animals. He wanted the deer and the vixen and the ibex and the bear women, and the horse women of course. It was simply a world of desirable females. Sometimes the feeling flooded him, like the break-up of the river in spring. So when the nights came and he pulled all these feelings back together and poured them into the body of his wife, there in their bed and the whole world nothing but Elga, he felt like he had fallen into a dream where love was all in all.
And one night after they had fused and melted into each other in their nightly way, she nuzzled his ear and said, — I’m going to have a baby. Heather says it’s true.
Loon sat up and stared down at her.-You are?
— Yes.
— So. We did it.
— Yes. She grinned at him and he suddenly felt his face was already doing that. They kissed.
— We have to take care of it, she said.
— Does Heather know if it’s a boy or a girl?
— Not yet. She said she will in a few months.
— When will it come?
— Six months from now. So, the end of the fifth month. Right in the spring, the best time. Unless it’s a bad spring.
Loon tried to understand it, but couldn’t. It felt as if clouds were filling his chest. Or as if he had plunged over a waterfall he had not seen, into a deep pool. This Elga was his. The night when she had shown up at the eight eight bonfire, everything had changed-not just at once, although that too, but also more and more over the months since, with everything else that had happened, each step along the way finally leading to this entirely new place.
As Elga grew bigger with child that winter, she gained in influence among the women, like the moon over the stars. Sage didn’t like it, Thunder neither, but Elga had a way, even with them, of calming people. They felt her power in a reassuring way. Her silence could have been a withholding, but it wasn’t; it was more like an assent to the other person and her story. Often they told her things while she was helping them with their work, because she asked questions, and remembered the answers too. It was hard to resent such a person.
And now she was bringing a new child into the pack, which was a big thing. Normally the grandparents would be celebrating such an arrival, so there would be two or even four strong advocates of the new pack member, and there would be a discussion lasting through the whole winter as to which clan the new babe would become part of. In this case there were no grandparents, but as Heather and Thorn between them had taken Loon in when he was orphaned, it was their role to be like grandparents to this child.