Moondog yawned with anxiety, showing all her yellow teeth, and shut her mouth with a snap, looking at Monkeyflower.
“Come on, dog,” Monkeyflower said. He thought about telling his father that he was going to find his mother, but all the adults were talking inside the house, and he did not want to be in there among them. He liked the doctor and wanted to see her again, but was ashamed of having pissed on her floor. He did not go in, but went back down the stairs, looking over his shoulder at Moondog.
Moondog got up, whining a little, trying to do both what Duhe had told her to do and what Monkeyflower wanted her to do. She yawned again and then with her tail down and wagging a little, her head down, she followed him. At the foot of the stairs he stopped and stood waiting for her to show him the way to go. She waited a while too, to see what he wanted, and then set off towards the River. Monkeyflower came along walking beside her. When she stopped he patted her back and said, “Go on, dog.” So they went on out of town, northwestward, into the willow flats along the River, and along beside the water, going upstream.
Chapter Three
IF SHE WENT UP on Spring Mountain dressed in white, the dancers’ white, then it could be that she stayed behind when the others left, stayed up on Spring Mountain because she could not bear to go home that night. Her sister Fefinum talked and talked as the dancers went down the path to Telina and she did not want to hear the talk and the talk, so she dropped back, and farther back, and stayed to look up at some small birds that were flying quickly overhead in the sunset light, and then the group of dancers was out of sight down the path, and she stopped walking. After a while maybe she turned around and went back up to the dancing place.
If it was all quiet there and the twilight was coming into the hills and the shadows rising from the low places, from the creek-courses and the canyons, then it could be that she sat down in the quietness and let it come into her.
It could be that she went down with the other dancers, hearing their talking, but when they went to the heyimas she went to Hardcinder House, and there she left for her mother a plant of chicory, the root and stem, the leaf and flower. As soon as you pick it the chicory flower begins to draw its blue petals together. Before you have it home it has wilted. If she spoke with her mother in the evening of that day, before the household ate dinner, it could be that she left the house again and went back up the path to the place where the Blood Clowns had practiced the dances, having it in her mind to dance alone.
If a hunter came through that clearing that evening he would have seen her there.
Each would have been startled by the sight of the other, in that place, at that time. They might have greeted each other, saying so you are here, and then he went on towards the place he liked to spend the night when he was hunting deer. Or he stopped in the clearing and sat down and talked with her, even if she did not want to talk. If it was late dusk when he came to the clearing and he saw only the glimmer of her white clothing, who knows what he thought it was. Maybe it looked to him like the ghost of the woman in the play Tobbe, the ghost of Tobbe’s wife who was raped and murdered. Frightened by the ghost, he would be angry at having been frightened. He was a hunter, a man who would not allow himself to be afraid, who would be shamed by fear and angered by shame. He was a dangerous man.
If he frightened her by something he said or did, some movement he made, she might have run from him in panic. He was standing on the way between her and Telina, but there was another path out of the clearing, which met a branch path from Hot Creek and wound on down the foothills to come into Telina from the southwest. It was steep and seldom used, it would be hard to follow in the twilight. On that path she could lose her way and be bewildered. She could fall. If a hunter followed her she could not outrun him and he would certainly catch her on that path.
There would be no use crying out. Those foothills of Spring Mountain are thick-grown with scrub oak and wild lilac and thickets of manzanita, the digger pines stand and fall across the deer-trails, the paths where people may go are few and hard to follow, nobody lives there but trees and thickets, deer and rattlesnake, jay and owl, and all the people of the wilderness.
In Hardcinder House the next morning when they were washing the breakfast dishes Shamsha may have said to her daughter Hwette, “I think you’re tired and anxious, I think you’ve been dancing too much. Why don’t you go and visit your brother in Kastoha for a few days? Leave Torip here, it’s time you left him now and then. He needs to learn that he’s not the hinge of the universe.”
Hwette would make objections: “But they want me for the Clown dancing. And Kamedan won’t want to go, and he doesn’t like me to go away.”
“What difference does it make to him if you’re away four or five days? Or a month for that matter? He’s well looked after! And he’s got his Monkeyflower to dote on.”
“Maybe he’d go with me.”
“The reason to go is to be by yourself. With nobody to look after, and nobody asking you to do anything. Dubukouma and Kodsua are undemanding people, and very fond of you. You can dance with the Clowns in Kastoha if you like. They’d be glad to have you. Just go! You used to go rambling every summer, every fall. Half the year I didn’t know where my Swallow had flown to.”
“I was a child.”
“You’re that child grown.”
“Woman, not child.”
“Swallow-woman.”
“Scrub oak has roots.”
“Scrub oak is prickly tough-stemmed stuff that lives on the hard dirt in the wilderness. Nobody puts scrub oak in the garden and tends it and says Oh look, how lovely! Oh look, it has an acorn!—You need to go over on your wild side, daughter. You need to get out of this house, out of this town. Your roots don’t have room enough here!”
Hwette was silent for a while, drying the plates and putting them in the cupboard. Shamsha was about to speak again when her daughter said, “Maybe I should do as you say.”
If Shamsha was dissatisfied with herself because of the subdued, obedient tone in which Hwette spoke, she could show it only by saying, as she wiped the sink clean, “Oh, I don’t know! you should do as you like, only what is it you want, soubí?” and Hwette would not have been able to answer that question. So it may be that she left Telina walking upstream and came to Kastoha-na in the evening of that same day, to the household of her older brother’s wife.
The copy of Dangerous People Pandora sent from the Valley was damaged in transit, and the rest of the third chapter, the last ten or twenty pages of the novel, are lost to us, though not to readers in the Valley of the Na. We can only speculate which of the five places in which she was seen Hwette was actually in that night; and whether Modona killed her and her subsequent appearances were all ghosts, or her “divided spirit” separated into five, all partly but none fully real. The last possibility seems the likeliest, but we don’t know if her part-selves survived this dissolution and rejoined, and if so, whether her marriage with Kamedan was lost or saved. We don’t know whether Monkeyflower drowned in the river when he wandered off, or was guided and kept safe by Moondog. If the story has an end, we can only guess what it might be. Kesh stories tend to end with a homecoming, a rejoining; but it is not always a happy one.