Always Coming Home Read online

  I was like a cat that scents a rattlesnake or a dog that sees a ghost. My legs got stiff, and I could feel the air on my head because my hair was trying to stand up. I stopped short and said in a whisper, “What are they?”

  My grandmother said, “Men of the Condor. Men of no House.”

  My mother was beside me. She went forward very suddenly and spoke to the four tall men. They turned to her, beaked and winged, looking down at her. My legs went weak then and I wanted to piss. I saw black vultures stooping on my mother, stretching out their red necks, their pointed beaks, staring with eyes ringed with white. They pulled things out of her mouth and belly.

  She came back to us and we walked on towards the hot springs. She said, “He’s been in the north, in the volcano country. Those men say the Condor are coming back. They knew his name when I said it, they said he is an important person. Did you see how they listened when I said his name?” My mother laughed. I had never heard her laugh that way.

  Valiant said, “Whose name?”

  Willow said, “My husband’s name.”

  They had stopped again, facing each other.

  My grandmother shrugged and turned away.

  “I tell you he’s coming back,” my mother said.

  I saw white sparkles crowding all around her face, like flies of light. I cried out, and then I began to vomit, and crouched down. “I don’t want it to eat you!” I kept saying.

  My mother carried me back to the lodging house in her arms. I slept awhile, and in the afternoon I went with Valiant to the hot springs. We lay a long time in the hot water. It was brownish-blue and full of mud and smelled of sulphur, very disagreeable at first, but once you were in it you began to feel like floating in it forever. The pool was shallow, wide, and long, lined with blue-green glazed tiles. There were no walls, but a high roof of timbers; screens could be set against the wind. It was a lovely place. All the people there had come there for healing, and talked only quietly, or lay alone in the water singing soft healing songs. The blue-brown water hid their bodies, so looking down the long pool you could only see heads resting on the water, leaning back against the tiles, some with eyes closed, some singing, in the mist that hung above the hot springs.

  I lie there, I lie there,

  I lie where I lay

  Floating in the shallow water.

  It floats there, it floats there,

  The mist above the water.

  The lodging house of the hot springs of Kastoha-na was our household for a month. Valiant bathed in the waters and went daily to the Doctors Lodge to learn the Copper Snake. My mother went alone up onto the Mountain, to the Springs of the River, to Wakwaha, and on to the summit in the tracks of the mountain lion.* A child could not spend all day in the hot pool and the Doctors Lodge, but I was afraid of the crowded common places of the big town, and we had no relatives in the houses, so I stayed mostly at the hot springs and helped with the work. When I learned where the Geyser was I went there often. An old man who lived there and guided visitors about the heya place and sang the story of the Rivers Underground used to talk to me and let me help him. He taught me a Mud Wakwa, the first song I received for myself. Not many people even then knew that song, which must be very old. It is in an old form, sung alone with a two-note wooden drum, and most of the words are matrix, so it is no good for writing. The old man said, “Maybe the people of the Sky Houses sing this one when they come to bathe at the mud-baths here.” Inside the matrix at one place in the song the other words come out and say:

  From the edges inward to the middle,

  Downward, upward to the middle,

  All these have come in here,

  They are all coming in here.

  I think the old man was right, and it is an Earth song. It was my first gift and I have given it to many.

  Keeping out of the town, I saw no more men of the Condor, and I forgot them. After a month we went home to Sinshan in time to dance the Summer dances; Valiant was feeling well, and we walked down the Valley to Telina-na in one morning and then on to Sinshan in the evening. When we got to the bridge across Sinshan Creek I was seeing everything backwards. The hills in the north were where the south hills should be, the houses on the right hand were where the houses on the left should be. Even inside our house it was like that. I went around all the places I knew finding everything turned around. It was strange, but I enjoyed the strangeness, though I hoped it would not remain. In the morning when I woke up with Sidi purring in my ear, everything was where it belonged, north in the north and left to the left, and I have never seen the world backwards again, or only for a moment.

  After the last of the Summer was danced we went up to our summerhouse, and there Valiant said to me, “North Owl, in a few years you will begin to be a woman, bleeding woman’s blood, and last year you were only a grasshopper, but here you are now in the middle, a good place, your clearwater years. What do you want to do in this place?”

  I thought about it for a day and told her, “I want to go up in the tracks of the lion.”

  She said, “Good.”

  My mother did not ask or answer. Since we came back from Kastoha-na she was always as if listening for a word, listening far away, holding still.

  So my grandmother made me ready to go. For nine days I ate no meat, and for the last four of the nine I ate only raw food, once a day at midday, and drank water four times a day in four drafts. Then I woke up early, before light, and got up, and took the pouch with gifts in it. Valiant was sleeping but I thought my mother was lying awake. I whispered heya to them and to the house and went out.

  Our summerhouse was in a meadow up in the hills over Hard Canyon Creek, a mile or so upstream from Sinshan. We had gone there for the summers of all my life with a family of Obsidian people of Chimbam House, mingling our sheep; there was good pasture for them up the hills, and the creek ran right through to the rains, most years. The name of the meadow was Gahheya, for the big blue serpentine heyiya rock in the northwest part of it. As I left I went past that rock Gahheya. I was going to stop and speak to it, but it was speaking to me; it said, “Don’t stop, go on, go high, before the sun.” So I went on up across the high hills, walking while it was still dark, running when it began to be light, and I was on the high ridge of Sinshan Mountain when the earth’s curve and the sun’s curve parted. I saw light fall on the southeast side of all things, and the darkness turn away across the sea.

  After singing heya there I walked along the ridge of the mountain from northwest to southeast, following deer paths through the chaparral and making my own way where the underbrush was thinner under the fir and pine forests, not going quickly but very slowly, stopping all the time and listening and looking for directions and signs. The whole day long I kept worrying about where I would sleep the night. I crossed and recrossed the ridges of the mountain, always thinking, “I must find a good place, I must come to a good place.” No place seemed to be good. I said to myself, “It should be a heya place. You’ll know it when you come to it.” But what I was really holding in my mind without thinking about it was the puma and the bear, wild dogs, men from the coast, strangers from the beach country What I was looking for was a hiding place. So I walked all day long, and every time I stopped anywhere, I was trembling.

  Having gone above the springs, I was thirsty when it got dark. I ate four seed-pollen balls from my gift pouch, but after eating I felt thirstier and a little sick. Dusk had come up onto the mountain before I had found the place I couldn’t find, so I had stayed where I was, in a hollow under some manzanita trees. The hollow seemed to shelter me, and manzanitas are pure heyiya. I sat a long time there. I tried to sing heya but did not like the sound of my voice alone there. I lay down at last. Whenever I moved at all, the dry manzanita leaves shouted, “Listen! She’s moving!” I tried to lie still, but the cold kept making me curl up; it was cold up there, with the wind bringing a sea fog in over the mountain. Fog and night did not allow me to see, though I kept staring into the dark. All I could s
ee was that I had wanted to come up on the mountain and had expected to do everything right, to walk in the tracks of the lion, but instead I had come to nothing and had spent all day running away from lions. That was because I had not come up here to be the lion but to show the children who called me a half-person that I was a better person than they were, that I was a brave and holy eight-year-old. I began to cry. I pushed my face into the dirt among the leaves and cried into the dirt, the mother of my mothers. So with my tears I made a small salt mud place up on that cold mountain. That made me think of the song that had come to me from the old man at the Geysers, the Mud Wakwa, and I sang it in my mind. It helped me some. So the night went on being. Thirst and cold did not let me sleep and weariness did not let me wake.

  As soon as light began to come, I went down from the ridge to find water, going down through thick brush in one of the canyonheads. It was a long way I went before a spring let me find it. I was in a maze of canyons, and got turned around, and when I came up onto the ridges again I was in between Sinshan Mountain and She Watches. I went on up till I came to a big bald foothill, from which I could look back and see Sinshan Mountain facing me from the wrong side, the outside. I was outside the Valley.

  I kept going all that day as I had the day before, walking slowly and stopping, but my mind was changed. It was not thinking, yet it was clear. All I said to myself was, “Try to be on a way that goes around this mountain She Watches without going down or up much, and so come back to this bald place on this hill.” There was a good feeling on that hill, where the wild oats were bright pale yellow in the sunlight. I thought I would find it again. So I went on. Everything that came to me I spoke to by name or by saying heya, the trees, fir and digger pine and buckeye and redwood and manzanita and madrone and oak, the birds, blue jay and bushtit and woodpecker and phoebe and hawk, the leaves of chamise and scrub oak and poison oak and flowering thorn, the grasses, a deer’s skull, a rabbit’s droppings, the wind blowing from the sea.

  Over there on the hunting side there were not many deer willing to come close to a human being. Deer came to my eyes five times, and once the coyote came. To the deer I said, “I give you what blessing I can, Silent Ones, give me what blessing you can!” The coyote I called Singer. I had seen the coyote skulking at lambing time, and stealing from the summerhouse, and dead, a bit of dirty fur, all my life, but I had not seen her in her House.

  She was standing between two digger pines about twenty feet from me, and she walked forward to see me better. She sat down, with her tail around her feet, and gazed. I think she could not figure out what I was. Maybe she had never seen a child. Maybe she was a young coyote and had never seen a human person. I liked the look of her, lean and neat, the color of wild oats in winter, with light eyes. I said, “Singer! I will go your way!” She sat there gazing and seeming to smile, because the coyote’s mouth goes in a smile; then she stood up, stretched a little, and was gone—like a shadow. I could not see her go, so I could not go her way. But that night she and her family sang coyote wakwa near me half the night. The fog did not come in that night; the darkness stayed mild and clear, and all the stars revealed themselves. I felt light, lying at the side of a small clearing under old bay laurel trees, looking up at the star patterns; I began to float, to belong to the sky. So Coyote let me come into her House.

  The next day I came back to the wild-oats hill that let me see the wrong side of Sinshan Mountain, and there emptied out my pouch and gave the place my gifts. Without crossing the hill to close the circle, I went back down into the canyons between the mountains, intending to go around Sinshan Mountain from the southeast, and so complete the heyiya-if. [n the canyons I got lost again. A creek led me on because the going was easy alongside it, and all the sides of its gully were steep and thick with poison oak. I kept going on down it, and I do not know where I came to. The name of those canyons is Old Fox Hollows, but nobody I asked later, hunters and Bay Lodge people, had ever seen the place I came to on that creek. It was a long, dark pool where the creek seemed to have stopped running. Around the pool grew trees I have not seen anywhere else, with smooth trunks and limbs and triangular, slightly yellow leaves. The water of the pool was speckled and drifted with those leaves. I put my hand into the water and asked it for direction. I felt power in it, and it frightened me. It was dark and still. It was not the water I knew, not the water I wanted. It was heavy, like blood, and black. I did not drink from it. I squatted there in the hot shade under those trees beside the water and looked for a sign or a word, trying to understand. On the water something came towards me: the waterskater. It was a big one, moving quickly on its shining hollows in the skin of the water. I said, “I give you what blessing I can, Silent One, give me what blessing you can!” The insect stayed still awhile there between air and water, where they meet, its place of being, and then it slid away into the shadow of the banks of the pool. That was all there. I got up, singing heya-na-no, and found a way up past the poison oak to the top of the gully, and then got through Old Fox Hollows to Back Canyon, and so onto my own mountain in the heat of the late afternoon of midsummer, the crickets yammering like a thousand bells and the blue jays and black-crested jays shouting and swearing at me all through the woods. That night I slept sound under live oaks on the side of my mountain. The next day, the fourth, I made feather wands with the feathers that had come to me while I walked and sticks of the live oaks, and at a little seeping spring among rocks and roots at a canyonhead I made as much of the Wakwa of the Springs as I knew. After that I started going home. I got to Gahheya about the time the sun set, and came to the three-walled summerhouse. Willow was not there; Valiant was spinning in front of the house, by the hearth. “Well!” she said. “You’d better go have a bath, maybe?”

  I knew she was very glad I was safe home, but she was laughing because I had forgotten to wash after making the wakwa, being in a hurry to get home and eat. I was all sweat and mud.

  Walking down to Hard Canyon Creek I felt old, as if I had been away longer than four days, longer than the month in Kastoha-na, longer than the eight years of my life. I washed in the creek, and came back up the meadow in the twilight. Gahheya Rock was there, and I went to it. It said, “Now touch me.” So I did, and so came home. I knew something had come to me that I did not understand, and maybe did not want, from that strange place, the pool and the waterskater; but the hinge of my walk had been the golden hill; the coyote had sung to me; and so long as my hand and the rock touched each other I knew that I had not gone wrong, even if I had come to nothing.

  Because I had only one grandmother and grandfather in the Valley, a Blue Clay man called Ninepoint had asked to be side-grandfather to me. As I was about to be nine years old, he came over from their summerhouse in Bear Creek Canyon to teach me the songs of the Fathers. Soon after that we went back with him to Sinshan to make ready to dance the Water, while the Obsidian family at Gahheya looked after the sheep. This was the first time I had gone back to town in summer. Hardly anybody was there except Blue Clay people. Singing and doing heyiya all day long in the town that was empty and open, I began to feel my soul opening out and spreading out with the other souls of the dancers to fill the emptiness. The water poured out from the bowl of blue clay, and the songs were streams and pools in the great heat of summer. The other Houses came in from the summering, and we danced the Water. At Tachas Touchas their creek had gone dry, so they came up from there to dance with us, those that had relatives going to them and the others camping in Sinshan Fields or sleeping on balconies. With so many people there, the dancing never stopped, and the Blue Clay heyimas was so full of singing and power that touching the roof of it was touching a lion. It was a great wakwa. By the third and fourth days of it people in Madidinou and Telina had heard about the Water in Sinshan and came up to join. On the last night the balconies were full of people, and the heyiya-if filled the whole dancing place, and in the sky the heat lightning danced in the southeast and the northwest, and you could not tell the drums from t
he thunder, and we danced the Rain down to the sea and up to the clouds again.

  A Five-Post Summerhouse

  Between the Water and the Wine one day I met my Red Adobe cousins from Madidinou to pick blackberries at Hatchquail Rock. The patches had all been picked over and not many berries were there for us, so Pelican and I were wild dogs and Hops was the hunter, and we hunted each other through those tight thorny paths between the blackberry brambles. I waited till Hops came past my hiding place, and leapt out at him from behind, barking loudly, and knocked him flat. It knocked the wind out of him and he was cross for a while, until I whined and licked his hand. Then we all three sat and talked a long time. He said, “There were some people with bird’s heads came through our town yesterday.”

  I said, “What do you mean, feather gatherers?”

  He said, “No, men with heads like birds—buzzards or vultures—black and red.”

  Pelican began shouting, “He didn’t see them, I saw them,” but I began to feel scared and sick. I said, “I have to go home now,” and went off. My cousins had to run after me with the basket of berries I had picked. They went back to Madidinou and I went through Sinshan Fields across Hechu Creek; I was near the wineries when I looked up and saw a bird in the sky in the southwest, gyring. I thought it was a buzzard, but saw that it was bigger than a buzzard, that it was the great one. Nine times it turned in the air above my town, and then completing the heyiya-if flew gliding slowly into the northeast, over me. Its wings, each one longer than a person is tall, never moved; only the long feather-fingers of the wing-ends tilted in the wind. When it was gone over Red Cow Hill I went hurrying on to Sinshan. There were a lot of people on the balconies, and in the common place some Obsidian people were drumming up their courage. I went to High Porch House, into our second room, and hid behind the rolled-up beds in the dark corner. I believed I was the one the condor was looking for.