Read Centuries of June for Free Online Page B

whose arrow first pierced X’oots’s heart, gave S’ee the dress and moccasins sewn by her mother, and the customary shape and style of those clothes assuaged her grief. The thought of leaving her husband behind she could not endure, so she ordered her youngest brother to roll up the skin and carry it on his back for the journey. She dressed and combed her hair with her fingers, fed the children, then followed her brothers out of the valley of the bears.
    Whispers reached her ears before the family arrived in the village. Those children were not Tlingit but half bear, and S’ee herself had nearly become one from her long familiarity with the grizzly in the rain forest. Even her mother and sisters looked upon them with wonder and suspicion. S’ee overheard the eldest tell Shax’saani how their sister smelled like an old brown bear no matter how many times she bathed. At potlatch, the tribal leaders huddled together and murmured to one another as they watched S’ee’s children roll and tumble in their rough play. Rumors fell like rain: that they were wild at heart and when of age would run amok; that their teeth were sharper than a marten’s; that in one minute flat, they could dig a hole deep enough to hide in; that they preferred to shit on the pathways, their stools gleaming with jewels of undigested berries. By early summer, a few mothers advised their children to stay away from S’ee’s “cubs.” The snub spread from house to house, family to family, infecting the clan.
    “I am sorry, sister,” said the one who had ended up marrying D’is, the moon-faced boy, “but your boy and girl are wild things, ruining my sons.”
    Those children who did play with Yeikoo.shk’ often goaded him to pretend to be the bear. He had grown over the summer, big enough to crawl under his father’s skin and shuffle a few steps under its weight. Older boys, no longer children but not quite men, forced him to put onthe bear so that they might wait in the brush and pepper him with headless arrows. The ones that hit the hide fell harmless to the ground, but many missed the mark and struck him on his bare arms and feet.
    “What happened to you?” S’ee asked her son after one such hunting game. He refused to answer and did not cry when she rubbed balm into the welts and scrapes. Petulant, he slept by himself in a corner of their house, refusing his mother’s comfort and his sister’s entreaties, but after that night, he did not play with the village boys any longer and often wandered off to laze away the day on a tree limb or, when the salmon ran, to thrash about the water and the rocks. Three young boys spied him there waist-deep among the rapids, a salmon flapping in his jaws. His behavior and rapid growth did not go unnoticed among the adults. Shax’saani shared the gossip with her sister: “They say he is slow, your boy. A man’s body but a child’s mind.”
    Yaan.uwaháa, the daughter, fared no better. She rapidly outgrew all of the other infants in the clan, spurted past the toddlers and young girls, and by summer’s end resembled a ten-year-old version of her mother. She had a keen sense of smell and was forever hungry, and more than once, her aunties had to chase her from their kitchen door with a broom when she came looking for a second breakfast. While they shot no fake arrows at her, the girls in the village showed less mercy than the boys. Group by group shunned her. Most nights she curled beneath the bearskin, missing her father, crying herself to sleep as the rain beat on the roof.
    The two children ran away in early fall and were missing for one week. S’ee’s youngest brother, the one whose arrow found X’oots first, tracked them to a nearby hill where they had dug a fresh den. He found them asleep, curled beside each other, the bearskin their pillow, and he bound their hands to a long rope and led them back to camp like recalcitrant dogs. The tribal council’s fires burned late that night, and in the