clothing, feeling the hunger that would have to wait to be satisfied, but, most of all, feeling the despair that her son awakened in her. Would he always be this way, waiting for her to come home and care for him, heedless and helpless in the world around him? She didn’t move, she didn’t speak, she only looked on him, wondering what was missing in the boy, what she had failed to teach him, what it was that kept him from belonging to this world. She tried so desperately to make him right. But nothing changed him. He couldn’t even see his own wrongness. All her waiting, all her efforts at teaching him were useless. Lost in the swirling hopelessness, she stared at her only child.
‘Aren’t you going to start the fire?’ Kerlew demanded petulantly. He tugged at the covers she had pulled away. ‘It’s getting colder and I’m hungry. Is that all you killed today?’
The old rage, the rage she had thought left behind with his baby years, rose in her. The unfairness of this burden chafed and burned her soul. She towered over him, her anger giving her strength. With one hand she seized his shirt front, dragged him from the blankets to his feet. She all but threw him at the cold hearth stones. He staggered sideways, caught his balance awkwardly, and then suddenly crouched down, cowering before her.
‘No!’ The word ripped her throat. ‘No! I am not going to fix the fire! You are! You, the fool that let it go out! Even the youngest babe of Benu’s folk knows that the fire must be always tended. Without the fire we cannot live! But you, old enough to hunt, if you were not so stupid, you let the fire go out while you huddle like a baby and fondle some stupid rock. Give me that thing!’
She wrenched the reddish stone, polished by Kerlew’s touch, from his frantic grip and flung it through the tent door. Kerlew’s face went white. The stone vanished into the snow and Kerlew cried out. He dove after it, but she caught him by the back of his shirt and dragged him back, to dump him roughly on the cold earth by the hearth. She was shaking with rage and despair. This was her son, her boy who would soon be a man? This crouching creature that wept with anger because she had thrown a stone from the tent? It was unbearable.
‘I want my rock!’ he screamed furiously. He tried to rise from his place by the hearth, but she shoved him back. She snatched down the leather bag that held the dry tinder high above the earth floor. She flung it at him. The boy cried out as the bag slapped him and fell to the floor. She followed it with the fire-bow. She had no flint and strike-stone.
‘Make the fire!’ she commanded in a voice that shook the tent. ‘Now!’
‘I can’t. I don’t know how. I want my rock!’ He scrabbled away, but she seized him by the scruff of his shirt and dragged him back. Tears streaked his face.
‘You try. Now. You’ve seen me do it a thousand times. Now you try. Now!’
‘I can’t! I can’t! I want my rock! It was my rock, not yours.’ There was fear in his voice as well as defiance, and any other time it would have melted Tillu’s anger. But she was too cold, too hungry, and too tired of being the entire support of his world. She knelt behind him and seized his thin wrists, forced his hands to the tools. His hands were limp. He would not pick them up.
‘Pick them up! Right now, Kerlew! You pick them up and you try! Do you think I will always be here for you, to come home and make the fires and cook the food? What if I had gotten lost today? What if a bear had killed me, or I had fallen and broken a leg? Would you sit in this tent and cry, “I can’t!” until you froze or starved? Would you? Would you sit and stroke a rock until you died? Would you? What if I hadn’t come back today?’
The boy craned his neck to look over his shoulder at her. His mouth hung open and his closely set eyes goggled at her in terror. ‘Not come back? You not come back? Kerlew alone?’ His fear had reverted him to babyishness. His mouth hung askew, his bottom lip trembling wetly as he stared at her in mindless fear. Tillu was ruthless.
‘That’s right. Tillu not come back. Now you try. Try!’
The boy took up the implements awkwardly, waved them about helplessly, and then tried to fit them together. She held her anger as he made three faltering tries, then slapped his hands aside. ‘Fool! Like this. Your top hand here, like this. Your other hand here, on the bow. Try!’
He shrank from her touch, but she seized him roughly and put his hands in place. He moved the bow awkwardly, his hand bent in toward his wrist as he sawed back and forth. The stick, trapped in the loop of the bow string, moved unevenly, dancing out of its nest, spending the heat of its friction as it skittered over the face of the wood. Tillu reached past him to set it firmly in place.
‘Try!’ she rebuked him again. There was no encouragement in her voice, only command.
‘Ma-a,’ he began pleading, but she jerked herself away from him, stalked to the door of the tent.
‘Call me when you have fire.’
Despair was on his face, his breath coming in short sobs, but she lifted the tent flap and went out into the darkness.
The cold of a subarctic winter night snapped against her flushed cheeks. It made her realize she was sweating, that her anger had put heat back in her body. She trembled still with the force of her fury. Why did he always do these things? Why?
Then, as her anger died in the cold blackness of the night, shame came to warm her cheeks. She could hear the steady rasp of the fire drill from the tent behind her, and Kerlew’s voice as he sobbed and ranted to himself. The world loomed large and empty around her, but there was nowhere she could flee to escape that small mumbling voice and the angry confusion in his eyes. Tillu’s angers seldom left Kerlew repentant for his misdeeds. Instead, he would offer her his childish sullenness, and the wincing fear of her touch that cut her soul.
She had pitched her tent in a clearing in a small vale. At the edges of the clearing the forested hillsides rose. Pines were darker in the darkness, their swoops of branches laden with snow. Sometimes she felt a deep peace welling from the trees and snowy hills, felt cupped and sheltered in the palm of the forest. She heard the soft whicker of an owl’s wings as it drove into the clearing, the thin cry of the seized prey as it rose. The sound scraped her raw nerves and she shuddered. Tonight she sensed only the deep and eternal struggling of life to master its harsh environment. The most blind of newborn mice was better fit to survive than her son. Why could not she admit the futility of trying to make him learn? Kinder by far to let him go on as he was, until he met his eventual end. What good did she do him by forcing him to learn, by throwing him into the struggle and insisting he try?
He was as he was. Beating him would not cure it, as well she should know by now. Neither her tears nor her pleading had any effect. He was as he was. The most she could do for him was to let him take what small pleasures he could find in this world, and to bury him when he had finally blundered his way out of it. But what she was doing to him tonight was no better than beating him. Hadn’t he had enough punishment in his life? Had not other children and sneering adults given him enough misery to last him until the end of his days? Her heart swung in its orbit, and she felt her anger rise against those who mocked his differences, who pointed out his lacks. Who were they to judge? Who were they to say that what made him different also made him wrong and weak? Her anger burned hot at the women who shook their heads over him and turned away, at the men who looked at him with distaste and cuffed him aside. And she herself? She was no better.
She thought of his red stone and shame stung her. Futilely she turned to where it had landed. Whatever dent it had made in the snow cover when it landed was hidden from her in the dark. She stood indecisively by the area for a long time. She longed to get down on her knees and paw through the snow for the rock, as if this useless endeavor would somehow prove her love for Kerlew.
Tears
