bring him wood, but gathered it himself. He was apart from us and as resolute as a panther is in rising silently to its feet when the unwary footfalls and brush-rattling of its prey alerts it.
“Long Person, the river behind him, seemed to speak for him. A swift current full of many days of rain boiled past under a gray, close-hanging sky. Whole trees, parts of trees, all that the earth surrendered to it, bounced and ran in the flow. The river’s broad face was set deep in trouble, possessed and transformed. The river was furious. Here we were in the dense thicket of this man’s appetite. He wanted to show he could bring the river under his own control. He told us he had brought the rain to the Abeika country, to the north, and now it was here.
“We knew the rains had fallen so heavily that the river would rise and cover everything, that the flood was going to be great, that probably the corn would be lost this time and that there would be much mud in the fields.”
The old warrior took a breath and looked off into the trees. After a moment he sharpened his eye and returned to the twelve young initiates. He knew he had their attention. He knew he could take them anywhere. But he was incorruptible. There was only his knowledge and the straightness of his true talk.
“The prophet’s fire jumped eagerly and mischievously as if it were laughing at us. The reflection of it sparked across his face, yellow flashing on black. But we began to smell the river and its own intent. There were two things there, the prophet and the river. And the river had run its current long before the medicine ever was. We could smell the water and it was like the smell of a corpse long dead. It was sweet yet foul. You know yourselves, my young warrior boys, how the senses speak to your other intellect. Just as with Idjo, the deer. The female deer picks up the musk scent of the buck and goes to him. If you sense some danger, you are alerted by your senses which inform the mind. Like Idjo, you recognize something and you remain alert, ears up to the wind.
“The prophet had spoken to the stream. He had ministered unto it, had chided it to obey him. He had commanded it to rise as I tell you to rise and go. It was his star-bright knowledge, bestowed to him by Esaugetu Emissee, the Master of Breath, to conjure by. The prophet’s chanting and dancing and herbal ministrations had filled the Long Person with anger. Because he knew. He had interpreted. He had tasted everything and had thrown out what was not clean to him. Not to Master of Breath—to him. Only the purified for him! He thought his medicine was as pure as the fire. It was we who were polluted. And we and the miko and the elders, too, must be made clean to hear him. That was his talk.
“But we had begun to comprehend, too. And he continued to speak. I tell you, he had done a dangerous thing. ‘Listen,’ he said. So we listened. We hung there like fish drying out over the smoke pot. “And the river rose quickly, without so much as waiting for the clouds to break and the sun to shine upon it. It rose like a wrathful, vengeful giant, full of anger and darkness and running fast.
“We asked Eno the prophet, the kithla, for an answer. He replied that yes, he had brought it on. The miko would now listen and admit his talk in the council because his talk was straight. But he didn’t understand that the corn in the fields here and across the river was the people’s corn, and the deer we hunt was the theirs, and the clay the women take from the banks to make the bowls and pots was really the theirs, and the river in flood would ruin all of that.
“‘The river rises by my command,’ the man in buzzard feathers said, ‘and so it will lie down by it also! I have thrown my sabia, my magic crystal, into it and it danced on its surface!’ His words were quick. They cut through us. He looked out over us with eyes that narrowed in satisfaction. And as we spoke to him I could sense the water slowly pulling away at the bank, creeping higher, consuming more, just like him.
“I knew my traps were gone. Few things in the Long Person but the tie snake can keep its place in such current. In my journeys upon the river since, I have never been more afraid of it, or seen death on its face as clearly as I did then. And the cold winter rain of the Wind-Blowing Moon made its waters numbing to the touch.
“We had done nothing to offend the Long Person, we told him. We had not been irreverent. We had all bathed in it, offered unto it our prayers and took from it our visions. Yes, we had done all those things like our fathers had done. We had chewed the pasa and the auchenau, drunk the black drink, and sung our chants just as the warriors had done. It was his act that had stirred the river.
“‘Yes, and it will hear me again,’ the kithla said, with arms folded on his chest. ‘When the morning comes, this river will find a new humility in my command.’
“To the last one of us, we caught the fumes of his talk. It was a danger to let him speak so. Does Master of Breath permit one man to invert his order? Is the prophet’s word the last? And are we not the ones who fill the corn bins?
“It would not do. We were responsible to the elders. There was already rancor in the town from the kithla’s visit. So when we returned we told Hothliboi, the warrior leader in Attaugee, and he went to the miko’s lodge. The elders met and deliberated. By late afternoon, they decided. Hothliboi and his warriors seized the prophet—and I was with them—then took him down to the flood’s edge and tied him to a sycamore there. Save yourself and the corn by your great power, we told him. We built a fire for him to conjure by, then left him. We left him there to stop what he had brought on us.
“A hard wind came up that night. We came back the next morning. The tree was gone. The river was rushing over the spot where it had stood. So we went down the river to find him. The current was so strong and swift. It rolled us. We flew like hawks over its face. We didn’t paddle, just guided the canoes. That’s all you need to do when the current is so bold.
“Down by the mouth of a small creek we found him. Some strips of red cloth from his medicine bag hung from the branches of the tree. He was still bound at the base of the tree. His face was rigid in death. His eyes were tightly closed. His mouth was agape as if still gasping for the last breath. His tied hands tightly clutched the vines around his chest. Long Person had disposed of him quickly. It took the breath from him to make the drowning fast. No one could have survived long in that water.”
The Bear stopped speaking and gazed away to compose his thought. The twelve boys, young men almost, who had come down from the central fire of the village to receive their training, sat in the thrall of the master. They looked at his face drawn away into a distant, mystical reverence. Here was the knowledge of man and the nation embodied in one mind, one heart. He had pulled them into his vision so easily, so completely that they were held in place seeing by his eye, awaiting each lesson like the old hunting and battle tales of their fathers and grandfathers. They were his fearless young men in training.
“The river rose by his command,” Bear said in a low tone, “and he couldn’t control it. It swept him away, proud man. We cut him loose. He floated on down the stream a ways, then his body sank. We went back. No one sang for him. He alone had done it, claimed he had done it. But the Long Person doesn’t hear vain voices. It cowers to no man. The rains come every season and more so in the Wind-Blowing Moon. The Long Person knows no spirit but that of Esaugetu Emissee.”
Otci understood that Bear had finished. As leader of the initiates, his duty was to lead them away at the end of the lesson giving. He placed his hands down on the ground to push himself up and so signal the others. He knew their teacher looked to him to demonstrate authority. He had expected that command to be his since his father told him of the legends of his ancestors and the prowess of his clan totem. The Poskita, the green corn festival, hangs so brightly two moons hence for their entrance into the warriors’ council. It is the prize after the long test of their courage, strength of mind, and vision from their dreams. When the time comes, boys would end their playing games and go to Pitiless Bear to receive their instruction. So it had been in their earliest memory of the Poskita. He had always been there.
He
