Dangerous People Page 6
“She’s deaf, blind, and crazy,” Shamsha said. “She couldn’t find a dead deer if she fell over it. In any case, I don’t understand what you say about finding my daughter. Anybody who wants to talk with her can go up to Wakwaha, they don’t need a dog to show them the way upriver.”
While the women were talking, Monkeyflower and Kamedan came up the stairs onto the porch, hearing the women’s voices behind the open door. Kamedan looked at the dog and went in without speaking. Monkeyflower stopped and looked at the dog for some time. Her tail thumped on the porch floor quietly. Monkeyflower said in a low voice, “Moondog, do you know where she is?”
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.
* The first chapter was told from the point of view of one person, Shamsha. So we are given what Shamsha perceived, felt, thought: the truth according to Shamsha.
This second chapter offers a great many truths, or untruths, as it “hinges” or turns continually from the point of view of one character to another; from Kamedan to Sahelm to Duhe to Sahelm. Then as the night comes on we no longer are inside anyone’s mind for long, if at all, and perceptions are obscure. In the scene between Kamedan and Duhe we know only what they say, not what they are thinking. When three-year-old Torip, Monkeyflower, wakes up in the morning we see the world as he sees it for a while. Then we move without identification from Kamedan to Duhe to Sahelm to Isitut to Modona to Shamsha’s household, until the chapter ends in the point of view of Monkeyflower and Moondog.
† 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.
‡ 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.
§ The Kesh often called children ebbebí, kid, little goat.
¶ Many old trees in the Valley had been given names.
** This is a Kesh way of saying what we would say as “She was about forty and her ‘clan’ was the Serpentine.”
†† 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.
‡‡ The Kesh way of saying what we would say as “She had a daughter, now thirteen.”
§§ A couple famed in legend for their beauty.
¶¶ The First House, Obsidian, is the house of the Moon. Duhe’s mention of “going to the moon” disturbs Sahelm because he believes the moon has something to do with Hwette’s disappearance and Hwette’s child’s illness.
*** We would say “the Doctors Lodge storehouse.” The Kesh language tends to avoid indicating permanent possession.
††† The Arts and Lodges, the societies that taught and practiced arts and crafts, taught songs and chants as an integral part of professional activity.
‡‡‡ Sahelm is learning weaving, a craft taught by the Millers Art. Duhe is telling him that she thinks he has a gift for her craft, medicine.
§§§ This house stands rather isolated, being the last house of its “arm.” We know nothing about Kailikusha except that she had been married to Sahelm or living with him in her own household, evidently in Kastoha, from which he came to Telina to stay in his cousin’s house.
¶¶¶ Sahelm is evidently entering trance. From here on, after moonrise, the narration loses some of its matter-of-factness and begins to become more elusive.
**** Strangers are by definition “dangerous people.”
†††† “Five and five,” “four and four” are terms for familiar drum rhythms. The Continuing Tone is a single unceasing note serving as ground-bass, a feature of much Kesh music.
‡‡‡‡ This character remains elusive; she is apparently one of the actors, named Isitut, but she is more than once mistaken for or identified as, or with, Hwette.
§§§§ The child, like his mother, belongs to the First House or clan, the Obsidian, which is also the Moon’s House. Duhe is simply asking how old he is.
¶¶¶¶ “A bringing-in” is the general term for a Kesh healing ceremony, of which there were many varieties, many connected with curative procedures for bodily ailments, some directed principally to psychic healing.
***** A chant, learned or improvised, using a single word as its text.
††††† The Cloth Art, of which Kamedan is a member, was under the auspices of the Four Houses of the Sky. Its work is thereby defined as “dangerous”—morally or spiritually risky in one way or another (broadloom weaving because it involves the use of electricity and complex machinery). Marrying Hwette, Kamedan became part of a family whose work was under the auspices of the five Earth Houses, and so considered “safe.” He feels her household distrusts and even despises him.
‡‡‡‡‡ Kamedan’s rambling speech expresses his anxiety that Hwette has gone up into the wilderness, the uncultivated hills above the Valley, “the hunting side.”
Townsfolk often had traditional claim to small sites in the nearby wilderness where they put up a shelter, a “summerhouse,” and camped in the hot weather.
Wilderness extended, however, for very large areas outside the knowledge even of the Kesh hunters, and the possibility of a child getting lost was a real peril.
§§§§§ The “hinge” (íya) is a central concept and metaphor in Kesh thought. Duhe and Kamedan are connected, through the child, in this moment, in some permanent way.
¶¶¶¶¶ The ensuing dialogue is formalized; all the sentences are of four syllables. Such passages, called “Four-House speech,” are more characteristic of drama than fiction. They constitute a sudden, deliberate break from everyday speech. The line “Hwettez—Hwette?” is translatable only by paraphrase; literally it means “Hwette in the Four Houses or Hwette in the Five Houses?” Duhe is asking, “Did you see Hwette’s ghost or likeness, or in dream, or did you see her in the flesh?”
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.
CHRONOLOGY
NOTE ON THE TEXT
Chronology
1929
Born in Berkeley, California, on St. Ursula’s Day, October 21, to Alfred Louis Kroeber and Theodora Covel Kracaw Brown Kroeber. (Father, born in 1876 in Hoboken, New Jersey, completed a doctorate in anthropology at Columbia College under Franz Boas in 1901 and moved to Berkeley to create a museum and department of anthropology at the University of California. In 1911, Ishi, a Yahi Indian and the last survivor of the Yana band, came to work with Kroeber and others at the Museum of Anthropology, where he remained until his death, from tuberculosis, in 1916. Mother, born in 1897 in Denver, Colorado, completed a master’s degree in clinical psychology at the University of California in 1920 and married Clifton Spencer Brown in July 1920; they had two children: Clifton Jr., born September 7, 1921, and Theodore “Ted,” born in May 1923. Brown died in October 1923, and mother began taking anthropology courses from Alfred Kroeber. They married in March 1926, and Kroeber adopted both sons. They bought a house designed by Berkeley architect Bernard Maybeck at 1325 Arch Street on the north side of the university campus. Le Guin will later cite [in an essay in the journal Paradoxa] the beauty and “integrity” of its design as an early influence. Parents took a field trip to Peru for eight months, shortly after marriage, living in a tent. Brother Karl Kroeber born in Berkeley on November 26, 1926.)
1930
Parents buy a ranch in the Napa Valley, later named Kishamish from a myth invented by brother Karl. Family will spend summers there entertaining visiting scholars, including physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and both native and white storytellers.
1931
Juan Dolores, a Papago Indian friend and collaborator of A. L. Kroeber’s, spends the first of many summers with the Kroeber family at Kishamish.
1932–1939
Is taught to write by her brother Ted and goes on doing it. Ursula and Karl, along with Berkeley neighbor Ernst Landauer, invent a world of stuffed animals. Later discovers science fiction magazines, including Amazing Stories. Father tells her American Indian stories and myths; she also reads Norse myths. Mother later recalls, “The ch
ildren wrote and acted plays; they had the ‘Barn-top Players’ in the loft of the old barn. They put out a weekly newspaper.”
c. 1940
Submits first story to Astounding Science Fiction and collects her first rejection letter.
c. 1942
With her brothers in the armed services (Clifton joins in 1940, before the war starts for America, Ted in ’43, and Karl in ’44), Ursula is left without imaginative co-conspirators. In a later interview she recalls, “My older brothers had some beautiful little British figurines, a troop of nineteenth-century French cavalrymen and their horses. I inherited them, and played long stories with them in our big attic. They went on adventures, exploring, fighting off enemies, going on diplomatic missions, etc. The captain was particularly gallant and handsome, with his sabre drawn, and his white horse reared up nobly. Unfortunately, when you took one of them off his horse, he was extremely bow-legged, and had a little nail sticking downward from his bottom, which fit into the saddle. . . . So my brave adventurers lived entirely on horseback. Also unfortunately, there were no females at all for my stories; but when I wrote the stories down, I provided some.”
1944–46
In fall, begins attending Berkeley High School. Socially marginal, a good student, reads voraciously outside school, Tolstoy and other nineteenth-century writers, including Austen, the Brontës, Turgenev, Dickens, and Hardy, as well as the Taoist writings of Chinese writer Lao Tzu. Her mother introduces her to Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas, which she says she didn’t really get until much later. In spring 1946, father retires from Berkeley. Parents travel to England, where father receives the Huxley Medal from the Royal Anthropological Institute.