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woodland, the child had said, lay in the direction of the rising sun, across a river and atop a fertile ridge.
    But Opaka said that the land she spoke of lay beyond their tribal boundaries. It was taboo for the people to go there. Yet the child insisted it wasn’t taboo. The spirit in the dream had told her so. Instructing the woman to speak of this to no one else, Opaka had quietly gone on a journey of her own and sure enough had found the forest with plentiful pine nuts. Returning to the camp, she had gone into the shaman’s god-hut to undergo a spiritual journey and had emerged to announce that the gods had led her in a vision to a place of bountiful pine nuts, a place where no other ancestors had lived.
    Four brave young men were chosen and given spears. They were instructed to run toward the sun, but if they entered taboo ground, they were not to return.
    While they were gone, the people danced and sustained themselves on bee larvae and honey and on such pine nuts as could be scavenged from the terrible waste. And when the hunters returned, they told of a bountiful woodland on the other side of the river where no people and no ancestors had lived.
    It had turned out to be a good season, the Season of No Pine Nuts, and was talked about at every gathering and around every campfire. The tribe had feasted well and had returned to their summer homes with baskets filled with nuts. The girl was not mentioned. The vision was credited to the shamans, who could speak to the gods, thus proving the power of the shamans, proving the power of Opaka.
    Opaka had kept her eye on the girl since, noting the occasions when Marimi was stricken with head pains and spoke of visions. When the girl entered womanhood and won the race at her puberty ritual two summers ago, a victory which awarded her a place of honor in the eyes of the tribe and which Opaka had hoped would go to her sister’s granddaughter, Opaka having no granddaughter of her own, Opaka had intensified her vigil. When the girls emerged from the final puberty rite, spent in a ceremonial hut where they had undergone vision quests, and each had declared that the rattlesnake was her spirit guide— the snake being a strong masculine symbol and good luck for virgins hoping to become fertile mothers— Marimi had announced that the raven was her spirit guide, defying tradition.
    But what alarmed Opaka most was that the girl was able to have visions without the benefit of jimsonweed, which the shamans required. What would happen to the social structure of the tribe if just anyone could commune with the gods? Chaos, savagery, lawlessness would result. Only those specially chosen and initiated into the secret shamanic rites might communicate with the Other World. In this way did the universe remain in balance, in this way was order kept. Opaka saw the girl as a threat to the future stability of the tribe. Especially now that she was pregnant and soon to have her status elevated to that of a mother.
    A privilege Opaka had never known.
    Chosen when she was only a baby, taken from her mother and sent to live in seclusion with the clan shaman, Opaka had been raised and instructed by the old woman in the ways of mysteries and secrets, medicine and healing, and how to talk to the gods. It had been an initiation of endurance and trial, with grueling months of loneliness and sacrifice as she was trained in hardship and without love, to think not of herself but of the tribe, to live a husbandless life, childless, a virgin even in her old age. Opaka was unable to recognize the emotion of envy, having been raised to become the richest and most powerful person in the clan, so what had she to be envious of? Jealousy was also a foreign concept to her and so she couldn’t recognize it when she felt it. Opaka would also not have believed, had anyone told her, that she could be afraid of a simple girl. People who spoke directly to the gods didn’t suffer from petty human frailties. And so, blind to