Ursula K. LeGuin - Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences

By moonrise Coyote was cold. Till then there had been so much warmth under the tawny coat that the child kept thinking maybe she was alive, maybe if she just kept holding her, keeping her warm, she would recover, she would be all right. She held her close, not looking at the black lips drawn back from the teeth, the white balls of the eyes. But when the cold came through the fur as the presence of death, the child

let the slight, stiff corpse lie down on the dirt

She went nearby and dug a hole in the stony sand of the draw, a shallow pit Coyote's people did not bury their dead, she knew that But her people did. She carried the small corpse to the pit, laid it down, and covered it with her blue and white bandanna. It was not large enough; the four stiff

50-abUFFALO GALS

paws stuck out The child heaped the body over with sand and rocks and a scurf of sagebrush and tumbleweed held down with more rocks. She also went to where the salmon had lain on the cedar mat, and finding the carcass of a lamb heaped dirt and rocks over the poisoned thing. Then she stood up and walked away without looking back.

At the top of the hill she stood and looked across the draw toward the misty glow of the lights of the town lying in the pass between the twin hills.

"I hope you all die in pain," she said aloud. She turned away and walked down into the desert

It was Chickadee who met her, on the second evening north of Horse Butte.

"I didn't cry," the child said.

"None of us do," said Chickadee. "Come with me this way now. Come into Grandmother's house."

It was underground, but very large, dark and large, and the Grandmother was there at the center, at her loom. She was making a rug or blanket of the hills and the black rain and the white rain, weaving in the lightning. As they spoke she wove.

"Hello, Chickadee. Hello, New Person."

"Grandmother," Chickadee greeted her.

The child said, "I'm not one of them."

Grandmother's eyes were small and dim. She smiled and wove. The shuttle thrummed through the warp.

"Old Person, then," said Grandmother. "You'd better go back there now, Granddaughter. That's where you live."

"I lived with Coyote. She's dead. They killed her."

"Oh, don't worry about Coyote!" Grandmother said, with a little huff of laughter. "She gets killed all the time."

Won't You Come Out Tonight A.51

The child stood still. She saw the endless weaving.

"Then I -- Could I go back home -- to her house -- ?"

"I don't think it would work," Grandmother said. "Do you, Chickadee?" Chickadee shook her head once, silent

"It would be dark there now, and empty, and fleas... You got outside your people's time, into our place; but I think that Coyote was taking you back, see. Her way. If you go back now, you can still live with them. Isn't your father there?"

The child nodded.

"They've been looking for you."

"They have?"

"Oh, yes, ever since you fell out of the sky. The man was dead, but you weren't there -- they kept looking."

"Serves him right Serves them all right," the child said. She put her hands up over her face and began to cry terribly, without tears.

"Go on, little one, Granddaughter," Spider said. "Don't be afraid. You can live well there. I'll be there too, you know. In your dreams, in your ideas, in dark comers in the basement. Don't kill me, or 111 make it rain... "

"I'll come around," Chickadee said. "Make gardens for me."

The child held her breath and clenched her hands until her sobs stopped and let her speak

"Will I ever see Coyote?"

"I don't know," the Grandmother replied.

The child accepted this. She said, after another silence, "Can I keep my eye?"

"Yes. You can keep your eye."

"Thank you, Grandmother," the child said. She turned away then and started up the night slope towards the next day. Ahead of her in the air of dawn for a long way a little bird flew, black-capped, lightwinged.

Three Rock Poems

The first thing about rocks is, they're old. What a geologist calls a "young1 rock may be older than the species of the individual who picks it up to look at or throw at something or build with; even a genuinely new bit of pumice, fresh from the mouth of Mt. St. Helens, which spat it out into the Columbia River in 1981 to drift down and be picked up on a beach south of the rivermouth, is potentially (if one may say so) old -- able to exist in its shapeless, chaotic thingness for time to come beyond human count of years. In the wonderful passage in T.H.

White's Sword in the Stone where young Arthur the Wart learns to understand what the rocks are saying what he hears them whisper is, "Cohere. Cohere." Rocks are in time in a different way than living things are, even the ancient trees. So I was thinking when I came to the last line of the poem "Flints." But then, the other thing about rocks is that they are place (hence the next-to-last line). Rocks are what a place is made of to start with and after all. They are under everything else in the world, din, water, street, house, air, launching pad. The stone is at the center.

The man and woman who survived the Greek Flood were told, "Cast your mother's bones behind you and don't look back." When they had figured out what their mother's bones were, they did so; and the rocks softened, and took form, and became flesh: our flesh. And this is indeed what happened, between the Pre-Cambrian Era and this week: the matter of Earth, rock, softened, took form, opened eyes, stood up, stooped down to pick up a rock in soft, warm, momentary fingers...

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56 JT BUFFALO GALS The Basalt

This rock land poured like milk.

Molten it flowed like honey.

Volcanoes told it,

their mouths told all the words of the story, continuous, tremendous, coherent, brimming over and flowing as easy as milk and as certain as darkness.

You can pick up a word and hold it,

opaque,

untranslated.

Flints

Color of sun on stone, what color, grey or gold?

In winter Oregon

on Wiltshire flints in the window the same sun. The same stones:

the standing woman,

the blind head,

the leaner, the turner, the stranger.

Bones of England, single stones

that mean the world,

that mean the world is old.

Wont You Come Out Tonight A57 (1982)

(1986)

Mount St Helens/ Omphalos

O mountain there is no other where you stand the center is

Seven stones in a circle Robert Spott the shaman set them the child watched him

There stands the Henge a child plays with toy cars on the Altar Stone

There stands the mountain alone and there is no other center nor circle's edge

0 stone among the stars the children on the moon saw you

and came home Earth, hearth, hill, altar, heart's home, the stone is at the center

(1972)

"The Wife's Story" and "Mazes"

"Mazes" is a quite old story, and "The Wife's Story" a more recent one; what they have in common, it seems to me, is that they are both betrayals. They are simple but drastic reversals of the conventional, the expected. So strong is the sway of the expected that I have learned to explain before I read them to an audience that "The Wife's Story" is not about werewolves, and that "Mazes" is not about rats. Perhaps what confuses people in "Mazes" is that the character called 'the alien'is from what we call 'the earth,'and the other one isn't. The source of the resistance to the reversal in "The Wife's Story" may lie somewhat deeper.

Mazes

1 have tried hard to use my wits and keep up my courage, but I know now that I will not be able to withstand the torture any longer. My perceptions of time are confused, but I think it has been several days since I realized I could no longer keep my emotions under aesthetic control, and now the physical breakdown is also nearly complete. I cannot accomplish any of the greater motions. I cannot speak. Breathing in this heavy foreign air, grows more difficult When the paralysis reaches my chest I shall die: probably tonight The alien's cruelly is refined, yet irrational. If it intended