Judith Berman: Lord Stink

“You act like a grizzly,” she said. “I’m not a grizzly.”

“You’re so beautiful,” he said. “I wish…” And then he fell silent again. A long while later he began to snore.

Thrush found she wanted to cry.

In the early morning, when she went out to relieve herself, the old woman spoke to her. “It’s time for you to go, if you’re going. This is when they sleep the soundest.”

“I don’t know how to get home,” Thrush said.

“Follow the stream down to the sea,” said the old woman. “That’s not the hard part, not while they’re sleeping. Take the things you got from Growl, your comb, the hatchet, your knife and the bottle of oil. Each time your husband catches up with you, throw one of these behind you.”

“Why are you helping me?” asked Thrush.

The old woman sighed, and looked across the snowy clearing. “Once I was like you,” she said. “No, that’s not true. You’re an ordinary girl. I had a trace of wizardry in me when I came here. I saw and understood far more about these people than you. I was of two minds about leaving. But I didn’t understand enough until it was too late, and I never gained enough power to free myself. Now, as for your children,” she went on, briskly, “I’d advise leaving them here. They’re almost grown enough to be weaned.”

Thrush started to panic at the mere thought. “I can’t leave them. Oh, no, I can’t leave them behind.”

“It’s up to you,” said the old woman. “Well, go on, then. Go and wake them up and get going.”

“Now?”

“While your husband and all his kin are asleep, you idiot girl! Get going!”

By early summer, Winter felt strong enough to travel to the fish camp at Oyster Bay. It was always strange returning to the beachside campsite, where every year the grass grew as luxuriantly as if no one had lived there for generations. It was stranger still returning with Rumble as their harsh and distant king. During the day Winter kept herself too busy to think or feel, cutting salmon into strips, feeding fires, moving ladders of half-dried salmon higher in the smokehouse to make room for the fresh strips. Every night, she sent out her spirit into the eastern mountains, searching for the bear house.

One day, as she carried a mat-load of fresh salmon to the smokehouse, a dog nosed her hand. She looked down, and saw a familiar black-spotted face. “Well, look at you, Dirty,” she said, her heart suddenly in her throat. “Where’s your master?”

“Right here,” said Otter.

Her wizard’s vision showed her the lonely power he had found in the high mountains, the power of the other world. Her eyes showed her a tall, lean and purposeful young man, dressed in plain clothing, who eyed her with uncertainty. She might almost have taken him for a stranger.

“You’re back,” she said, finally.

“I’ve been traveling.”

The familiar guilt rose in Winter. “Looking for Thrush,” she said. “I guess you haven’t found her.”

“I’m growing closer!”

“And has anyone informed you that your father died while you were gone?”

He glanced away. “Yes,” he said. “Rumble just told me.”

Winter’s hand reached toward his shoulder, as if she wanted to comfort him. She pulled the hand back sharply, and folded both arms tight against herself.

Then Otter looked at her again. “He said you almost died last winter, too. I’m glad you didn’t.” Those words robbed her spite of all its strength.

Otter spent only a week at the fish camp, and most of that he spent with Winter. On the evening of his departure, Winter walked with him and black-spotted Dirty to the end of the rocky point that guarded Oyster Bay. When they reached the very tip, and stood gazing toward the shadowed mountains of the east, he gave her an ivory carving, a petrel in flight, strung as a necklace on a fine white deerskin cord. He slipped it over her head, and as she looked down at it, admiring the line of the petrel’s wings, he touched her cheek and bent to kiss her. The kiss was a long one, and she melted into his arms, wanting to tug him down into the beachgrass and ride, skin against skin, sweat mingling with sweat, until they dissolved together into an ecstatic moment of heat and light.

But her wizard’s vision showed her that he had already turned from her, toward the mountains, toward the memory of his lost sister. There was nothing to be done about it.

She returned with him to his canoe. A snap of his fingers, and Dirty jumped aboard. He heaved the canoe down into the rising tide. One more shove and a leap, and he was waterborne. She watched him paddle into the dusk until canoe and wake were no more than a speck on the glassy seas. Storm clouds were moving in from the southeast, but he would reach camp before they broke.

She lay down that night in the bedroom she shared with her cousins, thinking of Otter, and suddenly, after all these years, scalding hatred for Thrush boiled over again. Thrush still dominated and twisted their lives: Rumble grim and unreachable, unable to marry or love; Otter an obsessed wanderer; and she, no less obsessed, but shut in by her guilt, only her petrel’s vision letting her fly high over sea and land. She and Otter might have had a chance to break away from Thrush, but that moment was already gone.

And then she realized how much she was angry at Otter, too, for his selfishness, for finding it so easy to leave everyone and everything. And Otter’s search was not even rightfully his. She was the one who had to atone.

The storm broke at midnight. Rain poured down on the roof of the camp house. Winter sent out her spirit as she did every night, but this time the petrel flew first along the shore, toward Otter’s solitary campsite, where she found him curled uncomfortably beneath his overturned canoe, and only then did the hurt and anger toss her eastward, into the storm, toward the high mountains. She flew past peak after peak, climbing toward the edge of the world. Never had she flown so far or so fast. Lightning forked from cloud to high summit, illuminating the eastern wall of the world, and there, at the edge of mountain and sky, she saw the spirit house at last. Its inhabitants were dark, wild beings whose souls welled up from the unknowable country beyond the world. In their house the bears kept the rage of the storm, the hurtfulness of love, the ecstatic heat of passion, the randomness of pain and death. They had taken Thrush because she had no respect for them or theirs, and they had hidden from Winter because she had wanted to believe they did not exist.

That night, Rumble had a dream. Winter did not hear about it until the very early morning, when she was awakened by a commotion outside the camp house. She crawled outside into chilly darkness. In the light of many torches she could see perhaps twenty of Sandspit Town’s most seasoned warriors, armed with spear and club and knife, performing the last few small tasks before departure: tightening straps, adjusting clothing, tying back their hair.

“What is this?” she asked Rumble, who stood at the edge of the group. Though it was still dark, she could see that he had painted his face black, the color of war and mourning. He looked cold, edgy, eager to be gone.

“I know where to go now,” said Rumble. “I had a dream last night that showed me the way.”

Rumble was not a full-fledged seer, as Winter might someday become, but he did sometimes have true dreams. They had helped him well during the war with Spruce Town. Dread filled Winter, though she could see nothing to suggest an immediate cause. “Don’t go,” she found herself saying.

Rumble looked at her with contempt. “And leave her there?” he said. “Is that what you’d like?”

“No,” Winter said, “that’s not it. I just…”