IV
Lovers’ Moon
I got an idea during those long sessions around the spectral fires. When the new moon came I went to Hanebagat, the chief, and told him that I was the same as a member of the tribe now, and that I would go out on the ceremony of the first quarter of the moon. He agreed.
The word got spread around, and Bigluk made a protest to the chief. It was easy to see how his mind worked. There weren’t more than five or six of them that came under the lovers’ moon, and Bigluk was afraid I’d get too thick with Auno. He’d always preempted her for the moon ceremonies before.
But Auno whispered to Hanebagat, and the chief stood pat.
When the moon came to the first quarter, Wailo got out the sacred drum, put on some ceremonial paint and chanted a song that was supposed to be the thrilling song of love. But he knew the race was dying, and sadness crept into his voice. The chant sounded more like a dirge, for all its swing and occasional burst of noise.
After the chant we went out onto the sacred mountain, walking hand in hand. On the mountain we separated, each going by himself.
That was the ceremony. The young men were supposed to meditate upon the hunt and upon warlike deeds. The girls were to think of the tanning of skins, the cooking of food, the rearing of a family when they should get married.
If one of the young men chanced upon one of the young women after they had separated, he could talk with her. If they stayed together until the moon set, then it was equivalent to a marriage ceremony.
Of course, all the young men in the tribe wanted to marry Auno. But Bigluk seemed to have the best chance. He was big and surly, and he sort of kept the others away. There wasn’t one of them, though, that hadn’t tried to find her on the mountain after they’d separated.
Custom decreed that the women should leave first. After a few minutes the young men walked apart.
There were only three young women. One was very fat. The other was homely. The third was Auno. There were only three men beside myself. One of them was rather ugly.
After the girls had gone, the men separated and I found myself out on the moonlit mountain. Below was the camp. One of the warriors started a chant that ran for a few bars, then wailed into silence. Here and there a shadow flitted.
Auno was an adept at keeping separate. They could find her, have a little chat, and she’d glide off like a shadow. But, for the most part, they couldn’t find her.
I sat in the shadow of a clump of juniper and watched Bigluk. He tried to trail her for a while, but that was too slow. She could make tracks faster than he could find them in the moonlight. So he got in the shadow of a pine trunk and searched the mountain.
Finally he was off like a deer.
I watched him. He ran fast and well. He jumped into a brush clump, and there was a sound of struggle, the low laugh of a woman, the exclamation of a man’s voice, and Bigluk came out, looking disgusted.
The fat girl was clinging to his arm, pouring words at him. Bigluk was shaking his head. He jerked his arm free and went down the mountainside, peering into brush clumps.
Far above him I heard a low laugh that sounded like the tinkle of a bell.
He turned and charged like a mad bull. But he might as well have been chasing a shadow. He became dignified then and walked about with slow steps, pacing in the moonlight, no doubt meditating upon his life. But I noticed that he had his eye peeled for every bit of motion.
When the moon went down we started for camp, coming in one at a time, in silence. Then we rolled into the blankets.
The next night it was the same, and the next.
I didn’t move around much. I kept up there on the mountainside, mostly in the shadows. The fat girl found me once on the second night, but I left her. She’d have been willing to stay until the moon went down, which, as I said, would have been the same as marriage.
On the fourth night the moon was pretty strong. It was about the last of the ceremonial phase given over to the younger people. Bigluk had charged around as usual. Once he had caught Auno, and they had talked for fifteen or twenty minutes. I couldn’t hear what they said, but he was doing most of the talking, and his voice was getting that note in it that comes to people when they’re desperate over something.
Auno left him. That was the custom; either could leave the other and the other must not follow.
Bigluk walked into the shadows and stayed there.
I went out into the moonlight, walking, thinking. I knew it was no use to look for Auno. She could hide from the keen eyes of the Indians, and it would be too simple for her to elude me with my civilization-dulled senses. She could hide from me so easily it would make me seem absurd. I could no more hope to find her than I could to elude the fat girl.
The fat girl talked a little English, and she put herself in my way, so I’d have to either talk to her or be rude.
I paused for a few minutes, talked.
“You no go ’way,” she said, and her eyes were bright.
I laughed.
“You too good-looking to waste yourself on white, Missa Flint. You get nice Indian.”
She parted her lips and the moon gleamed on her teeth.
“I make you good squaw... I show you plenty gold.”
She lowered her voice for the last few words, glanced quickly around her.
I knew the danger. If other ears overheard, the fat one had pronounced her death sentence. But she had the keen sense of an Indian, and there wasn’t much chance any one would have been in hearing.
I looked at her, hesitated.
She gently tilted one shoulder blade with a seductive motion.
I got a grip on myself.
“Gold no good,” I said sternly. “Gold only good to buy food. Out here plenty food. One needs not much gold.”
And I walked away.
It was a struggle, and I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t said “yes” to the girl. I could have married her, got her to show me where the gold was, and then sneaked back some night, got what I needed for a stake, and left.
Maybe they’d have trailed me, maybe not. A man can go far in a night when he has to, and a rifle in the mountains gives the one who is fleeing a lot of advantage over those who follow.
And I was pretty good at losing a trail myself. I was wearing moccasins, and there are a lot of little tricks of losing trail in that country — ledges of rock, boulder-strewn creek beds where cloud-bursts leave their trails, long drifts of ridge which are exposed to the winds which blow in the mornings, fallen logs — oh, there are lots of ways of making it difficult to follow tracks.
Of course, it was foolish, but I began to get inoculated with something of the philosophy of the tribe. Why work in the treadmill of civilization? Civilization taxes you almost a hundred per cent for the privilege of participating in it.
You have butchers to make your kills, machinery to carry you from place to place, do your work. And yet one really lives in caves. They’re made out of concrete instead of cut into the side of a precipice, but they’re caves just the same, steam-heated caves. Your liver gets sluggish, and you lose the capacity to enjoy life. Out here we were free. We weren’t mere cogs in a machine.
As I walked and looked at the moon, I inhaled great lungfuls of air and wondered if there mightn’t be something in the philosophy of Wailo, after all.
I rounded a bush and Auno got to her feet with a single bound, like a startled deer. Then she paused, poised on one lithe limb, half turned.
“Don’t run, Auno,” I said.
She settled back on her two feet, looked at me.
It was well done, but I knew that her ears had heard my steps long before I came to her. Perhaps they had heard the conversation between the fat girl and myself.