The hunter said, “I heard people saying that a person who’d been in Ounmalin said they’d seen Hwette there. No doubt they were mistaken.”
“I don’t think they could be altogether correct,”[2] Kamedan said. “Maybe they saw a woman who looked like Hwette.”
The hunter said with a smile, “Are there women who look like Hwette?”
Kamedan was at a loss. He did not like Modona. He said, “I have to go home, the child is sick.” He went on, and the hunter went on his way, still grinning.
Torip lay hot and miserable in the bed when Kamedan came to him. Shamsha said it was a summer cold, there was nothing to worry about, and the other people in the household said the same, but Kamedan stayed around the house. Towards nightfall the fever cooled and the little boy began to talk and smile, and ate some food, and then slept. But in the night, when the moon one day from full shone in the northwest window, he cried out, “Mamou, mamou! come here! come!” Kamedan, sleeping next to him, woke up and reached out to him. He felt the child hot as a coal of fire. He soaked cloths in water and wrapped them around the child’s head and chest and wrists, and gave him sips of cold water in which willowbark extract was infused. The burning lessened a little and the child could sleep. In the morning he lay sleeping soundly, and Shamsha said, “Last night was the worst of it, he’s over the fever. Now all he needs is rest. You go on, you’re not needed here.”
Kamedan went to the lofts, but his mind would not turn fully to his work.
Sahelm was helping him that day. Usually he observed and followed Kamedan attentively, learning the art; this day he saw Kamedan making mistakes, and once he had to say, “I think that may not be altogether correct,” to prevent Kamedan from jamming the machine on a miswound bobbin. Kamedan threw the switch to stop the power, and then sat down on the floor with his head between his hands.
Sahelm sat down not far away from him, crosslegged.
The sun was at noon. The moon was opposite it, directly opposed, pulling down.[3]
Kamedan said, “Five days ago my wife Hwette left the Obsidian heyimas, where she’d been at Blood Clown practice. In the heyimas they say she said she was going to walk on Spring Mountain. But it was late to go there and get back before dark. In the Blood Lodge some women say she was going to meet some dancers in a clearing on Spring Mountain, but didn’t come. Her mother says she went to Kastoha-na to stay in her brother’s wife’s household for a few days. Her sister says probably she went down the Valley, the way she used to do before she married, walking alone to the seacoast and back. Modona says that people have seen her in Ounmalin.”
Sahelm listened.
Kamedan said, “The child wakes in fever under the moon and calls to her. The grandmother says nothing is the matter. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know where to look for Hwette. I don’t want to leave the child. I must do something and there’s nothing I can do. Thank you for listening to me, Sahelm.”
He got up and turned the power of the loom back on. Sahelm got up, and they worked together. The thread broke and broke again, a bobbin caught and caught again. Sahelm said, “This isn’t a good day for weavers.”
Kamedan went on working until the loom jammed and he had to stop. He said then, “Leave me to untangle this mess. Maybe I can do that.”
Sahelm said, “Let me do it. That kid[4] might be glad to see you.”
Kamedan would not go, and Sahelm thought it better to leave him. He went from the lofts to the herb gardens down by Moon Creek. He had seen Duhe there in the morning, and she was still there. She was sitting under the oak Nehaga[5] eating fresh lettuce. Sahelm came under the shade of the oak and said, “So you’re here, Doctor.” She said, “So you’re here, man of the Fourth House, sit down.” He sat down near her.
She squeezed lemon juice on lettuce leaves and gave them to him. They finished the lettuce she had washed, and she cut the sweet lemon in quarters and they ate it. They went down to Moon Creek to wash their hands, and returned to the large shade of Nehaga. Duhe had been watering, weeding, pruning, and harvesting herbs. The air was fragrant where she was, and where the baskets she had filled with cutting were in the shade covered with netting, and where she had laid rosemary and catnip and lemon balm and rue on linen cloth in the sunlight to dry. Some cats were hanging around, wanting to get at the catnip as the sun released its scent. She gave a sprig to each cat once, and if the cat came back she threw pebbles at it to keep it off. An old grey woman-cat kept coming back; she was so fat the pebbles did not sting her and so greedy nothing frightened her.
Duhe asked, “Where has the day taken you on the way here?”
Sahelm replied, “Into the broadloom lofts, where I’m learning the craft with Kamedan.”
“Hwette’s husband,” said Duhe. “Has she come back yet?”
“Where would she come back from?”
“Some people were saying that she went to the Springs of the River.”
“I wonder, did she tell them she was going there?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Did any of them see her going there, I wonder?”
“Nobody said so,” Duhe said, and laughed as if puzzled.
Sahelm said, “Here’s how it is: she went five different ways at the same time. People have told Kamedan that she went to walk alone on Spring Mountain, to meet to dance on Spring Mountain, to Kastoha, to Ounmalin, and to the Ocean. His mind keeps trying to follow her. It seems she said nothing to him about going anywhere before she went.”
Duhe threw an oakgall at the fat cat, who was coming at the catnip from the southeast. The cat went half a stone’s-throw away, sat down with her back turned to them, and began to wash her hind legs. Duhe watched the cat and said, “That’s strange, that story you tell. Everybody knows where Hwette is and nobody knows.”
“Kamedan says the child wakes and cries in the night, and the grandmother says nothing is the matter.”
“Shamsha has brought up three children. Very likely she’s right,” said Duhe, whose mind was not very much on Hwette, but mostly on the catnip and the cat, the hot sunlight and the shade, Sahelm and herself.
Duhe had lived about forty years in the Third House at that time.[6] She was a short woman with large breasts, heavy hips, sleek, fine arms and legs, a slow, calm manner, a secretive nature, an intelligent and well-disciplined mind. The Lodge name[7] she had given herself was Sleepwalker. A girl, now thirteen, had made her a mother,[8] but she had not married the father, an Obsidian man, nor any other man. She and her daughter lived in her sister’s household in After the Earthquake House, but she was mostly outdoors or in the Doctors Lodge.
She said, “You have a gift, Sahelm.”
He said, “I have a burden.”
“Bring it to the Doctors, not the Millers.”
Sahelm pointed: the old fat cat was approaching the catnip slowly from the southwest. Duhe threw a piece of bark at her, but she made a rush at the catnip nonetheless. Duhe got up and chased her down to the creek, and came back hot and sat down by Sahelm in the shaded grass again.
He said, “How could a person go five ways at once?”
“A person could go one way and four people could be mistaken.”
“Or lying.”
“What would they be lying for?”
“Some people are malicious.”
“Has Kamedan done something to bring malice against him?”
2
The formality of the phrase is rather unusual, and as it will soon be repeated, it may be drawing ironic attention to the fact that “correct” information is, at this point, unattainable.
3
With this sentence, the significance of the moon in Hwette’s story, or the identification of Hwette with the moon, is evident, though unexplained.
A full moon rises as the sun sets, and sets as it rises. At noon of the day of a full moon the sun is at zenith and the moon (as if on the other end of a rod) is at nadir, “under the world, in the dark.” Both the upward and the downward pull of the moon create the high and low tides of full moon. The Kesh, like most farming people, had many beliefs and theories about the effect of the moon’s phase and position on the growth of plants and the behavior of animals. The day and night of full moon is a particularly charged time.
It is at this moment of balance poised to change that Kamedan tells Sahelm, and the reader, that Hwette has been gone for five days, and that there are five different, plausible explanations of where she went.
6
This is a Kesh way of saying what we would say as “She was about forty and her ‘clan’ was the Serpentine.”
7
Membership in the Doctors Lodge involved years of training. At initiation new members gave themselves a Lodge name, not kept secret, but mostly used only by other Lodge members.