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Authors: Kathleen O'Neal Gear,W. Michael Gear

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BOOK: People of the Owl: A Novel of Prehistoric North America (North America's Forgotten Past)
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J
aguar Hide had come to his name from the spotted yellow hide he continually wore. He had been but a spare youth, running for his life, when he’d fled to the south. In a leaky canoe he had traveled along the coast, avoiding the grease-smeared tribesmen who lurked in the salt marshes. After being plagued by mosquitoes and saltcracked skin for several moons he had found safety in the tropical forests. There, attached to a small band of tribesmen—refugees like himself—he had lived for four long turning of seasons, learning their various languages and living hand to mouth.
The day he had tracked the great spotted cat had changed his Power, changed his life. That morning he’d followed the cat’s tracks, seeing where the pugs pressed so delicately into the mud. The forest had swallowed him as though to digest him in a universe of green. Water had dripped from the palmetto and mahogany.
He and the jaguar had seen each other at the same moment. In that instant of locked eyes, he had seen his death—and refused to meet it. As he extended his arm to cast, the jaguar leaped. The dart nocked in his atlatl might have been an extension of his Dream Soul so straight did it fly. He was still staring into those hard yellow eyes as the fletched dart drove half of its length into the great cat.
The animal’s flying impact sent him rolling across the forest litter, but the cat’s attention had centered on the stinging length of wood protruding from the base of its throat. The first swipe of its paws had snapped the shaft. Thereafter, the frantic clawing did nothing
more than tear the splintered shaft sideways in the wound. Great gouts of blood pumped with each of the cat’s heartbeats.
When the jaguar finally flopped onto its side in the trail, their gazes remained joined. The cat’s strength drained with each bloody exhalation. To the end, the claws extended and retracted, as though in the cat’s brain, it was rending the man’s flesh. He watched the pupils enlarge as the cat’s raspy breathing slowed. He was still staring, partially panicked by fear, when the animal’s Dream Soul was exhaled through those blood-caked nostrils and, having nowhere else to go, entered his own body.
Later that night, in a rain-drenched camp, he had squatted under a palmetto lean-to and eaten the cat’s meat. He could remember the blue haze of rain-slashed smoke. He could still smell it, and taste the sweet meat in his mouth. Jaguar’s Power had penetrated his heart and wound its way around his souls.
The frightened youth he had been was eaten that night—consumed by the jaguar’s Power. The next morning he had stridden forth a different man, and begun the long journey north, alternately canoeing and portaging the sandbars that blocked the salt marshes. He had returned to his people, and with the Power of the jaguar in his blood, he had destroyed his old enemies, taken five wives, and closed his fingers around his people until they all fit within his callused grasp.
That had been tens of seasons ago. No longer young, he looked up at the soot-stained roof of the cramped house he now crouched in. Spiderwebs, like bits of moss, wavered in the heat waves rising from the low-banked fire. Before him on a cane mat lay his nephew, young Bowfin, wounded and dying as evil spirits ate his guts out. The boy’s sister, Anhinga, crouched beside him, and the mother, Jaguar Hide’s sister, Yellow Dye, balanced on her feet, her chin on her knees as she sobbed softy.
In his mind’s eye, Jaguar Hide could see himself: Gray hair had been pulled into a tight bun on the back of his head and pinned with a stingray spine. His old jaguar hide, once so bright yellow, now lay hairless over his shoulder, the smeared skin tattered in places, shiny from wear in others. The turning of seasons had treated the hide no better than they had him.
A fabric loincloth sported the design of a spotted cat on the front and rear flaps where they hung from the waist thong. His brown skin, weathered from sun, cold, and storm, was puckered here and there with scars. It had lost its supple elasticity and turned flaky, grainy with age and loose on his wiry muscles. He still had his bones, big and blocky, a frame that had once given him a rare strength
among men. The muscles, however, had faded with the turning of seasons until now he was but a gnarly shadow of himself.
He knotted his bony fist; if he were young again, he would show them. He would pay them back for this.
“Elder?” the young man on the mat croaked. Dried blood mottled his sweat-shiny skin. He raised a trembling hand. Jaguar Hide took it in his own, feeling how cold it was, how weak. He forced himself to ignore the rising stench that came from the wound and curled around his head.
“Save your breath, Bowfin. You need to regain your strength, then we will go back and teach that filth a thing or two about invading our territory.”
The young man swallowed hard, his eyes shining in the firelight. Jaguar Hide watched as the pupils expanded ever wider, knowing that gray darkness was flooding the warrior’s vision. Holding his dying nephew’s cold hand, Jaguar Hide could sense the life going out of him. He felt Bowfin’s heart slow, weaken, skip, and stop. With the shallow breathing at the end, the vile odor was no longer pumped from his punctured gut. Jaguar Hide’s skin prickled as the young man’s Life Soul slipped out through his open mouth and rose. He could imagine it as it drifted to the door, caressed Yellow Dye where she sat at the opening in the thatch, and slipped out into the darkness above the hut.
“He’s dead.” Jaguar Hide placed young Bowfin’s hand on his still chest. Yellow Dye bit off a sob as she fled through the low doorway into the night, where her son’s Life Soul now hovered like a bat.
“Uncle?” Anhinga knelt next to him, staring curiously at Bowfin’s vacant eyes. The boy lay naked, his body bathed in firelight. The wound in his belly gaped open under the rib cage. “Can’t the Serpent save him? Call his souls back to the body? He has already tried to suck out the evil the Sun People shot into him, but …” She pointed at the clotted blood on the boy’s side.
Jaguar Hide had watched as the Serpent, the old medicine Dreamer, had punctured the boy’s skin with a sharp chert flake. Then the white-haired elder had bent down, using a clay tube to suck at the blood in an effort to draw the evil from the body. No amount of piercing and sucking or smoking with medicine herbs had stilled the fever or the ever-stronger stench rising from the wound.
“Sometimes, Niece, nothing can be done.”
They had come here from the big settlement—a circular complex of clan houses and seven mounds called the Panther’s Bones—to
the western margins of their territory in response to reports that the Sun People were raiding again. They constantly tried to sneak into Swamp Panther territory and quarry the valuable deposits of sandstone in the western ridges. Jaguar Hide’s arrival at Raccoon Camp had coincided with young Bowfin being wounded by the skulking raiders.
“I don’t agree, Uncle.” She was glaring at him, eyes hard.
“I meant about Bowfin.” He leaned back on his haunches and studied her. Firelight shot gold through her long black hair and accented the hollows of her cheeks. She had a straight nose and perfect mouth. The past fifteen winters had shaped the little girl he had once known into a most attractive woman. She was fully budded now, with high breasts, a slim waist, and rounded hips leading into long sleek legs. He understood the fire in her eyes, felt it himself as he looked at the dead warrior.
“It is
our
land. He was
my
brother!” Anhinga whispered passionately, her fist clenched. “Why do they come here?”
“For the stone,” he answered simply. “Stealing it is far more exciting … and a great deal cheaper than dealing with us.”
Bowfin made a gurgling sound. As the dead man’s gut hissed, clots of black blood, white pus, and intestinal juice leaked out. Anhinga clamped her nose with her fingers. Jaguar Hide could see the crystal shine of tears as they crept past her eyelids. The shaking of her shoulders betrayed her an instant before the first sobs broke her lips.
Jaguar Hide ignored the stench. “He was just defending our territory. Remember that, girl. Remember what you see here.”
“Bowfin?” Anhinga cried as she turned away.
Jaguar Hide watched the girl’s muscles tense as she fought to control grief. She was twisting the knotted fringes of her short skirt, her beautiful face tortured.
He stood slowly, reached down, and pulled her to her feet. “We have tried to keep them away. It would seem as though their gods favor them, for they grow as numerous as the trees. Now they are building their huge earthworks, as if they are to become gods themselves.”
Through a grief-tightened throat, she choked out, “They are malignant spirits, Uncle. I would destroy them if I could.”
He studied her speculatively. The wound in her souls was raw and bleeding. Pain had mixed with anger, seething, burning, consuming.
My, such passion for a woman just coming into her own
.
“One day,” she continued, “I will become our leader, and when
I do I will take war to the Sun People and destroy them.”
This brought a crooked smile to Jaguar’s old lips. “Do you think I didn’t try just that?”
“But this time—”
“You will be defeated, just as I was.”
“He was my brother.” She pointed at Bowfin’s corpse, ignoring the fact that his Dream Soul was still watching her from those wide, glassy eyes. “Uncle, we cannot allow this to happen. Not anymore. This is a disgrace! To Bowfin, to our clan, to you and me. All of us!”
“Yes. It is. But the Sun People cannot be defeated by war.”
“Then how?” she demanded. “You tell me, and by the Panther’s blood, I will destroy them!”
“Will you, girl?” The amused smile remained on his lips. He fought the urge to laugh aloud as she ducked under the low doorway and stomped off into the night.
Your mother is going to have her hands full controlling you
. She was very different than her older brother, Striped Dart. She had never had the relationship with him that she’d had with the personable Bowfin. If any of Yellow Dye’s children had to die, too bad it couldn’t have been Striped Dart. When he heard about little Bowfin, he would posture, stomp, and curse, and do nothing. The fires of life hadn’t hardened him like it had others.
So, what are you going to do, old man? What will become of your people when you die and your nephew takes over?
In the darkness, he glimpsed the midnight-colored crow that circled on silent wings above him.
T
he clamor gave Mud Puppy his first hint that something was happening. He lay quietly on the cane mat, a small ceramic jar cupped upside down in his hand. The glow from the central hearth illuminated the inside of his house with a reddish hue, the light so dim that the cricket’s natural wariness should be lulled. The beast had been chirping under the split-cane floor matting. Rather than tear it up, it was much better to let the fire die down and coax the cricket into stepping out. Then he’d catch it.
Mud Puppy turned his head, listening to the calls on the still night. Excited, yes; panicked, no. Therefore, whatever it was, he would eventually hear about it. Everything came with time.
That attitude drove his mother to distraction. She was Wing
Heart, the Clan Elder, or leader—the most important woman in the world. It wasn’t that he wanted to disappoint her, he just didn’t act the way she wanted him to. He couldn’t. That simple reality made her half-frantic with frustration. He suspected that she loved him in spite of the way he was.
“Just once can’t you be like your brother? White Bird is the kind of man our clan needs! And you, boy, what will you be? Just a thorn in his side? He is going to be a great leader, the best our clan has ever had, and you, you will be like a net sinker tied around his throat. Forever dragging him down.”
He wouldn’t be, of course. White Bird had his way, that was all. And yes, if he returned alive from the journey upriver, he would be a great man, a born leader for their clan. Owl knew, Uncle Cloud Heron was just hanging to life, the pain in his bones debilitating no matter how many times he sweated or that the old Serpent and his acolyte, Bobcat, sucked bits of evil out of his body with their copper lancets and stone sucking tubes.
Mud Puppy hunched his fifteen-winters-old body. People said he was skinny, just bones wrapped around an insatiable curiosity. He was short for his age, too. Shaggy black hair tumbled over his eyes as he grasped the ceramic cup in his hand. The cricket began singing its shrill music. How could such a little creature make such a noise? It pierced the ears like a lancet, almost painful.
BOOK: People of the Owl: A Novel of Prehistoric North America (North America's Forgotten Past)
2.65Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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